Minister Faust (17 page)

When Heaven Shrivels, Whither the Earth?

F
or Wally, the death of his icon was only at that moment becoming truly real. While nonpowered citizens live daily with the reality of their powerlessness and have no choice but to make their peace with it, for you as a hyperhominid, facing the fact of your own ultimate powerlessness can be devastating. I asked Wally to come see me to ensure that he, a savior suddenly bereft of his own savior figure, wouldn’t plunge perpetually into the jackbooted tentacles of the slavering mouth of the black hole of despair.

Others, however, were legendary for their capacity to slough off the slivery yoke of mourning to don the newly dry-cleaned uniform of self-actualization.

Mr. Piltdown was not one of them. Hampered by his own over-glorification of his mentor and pinned to the mat of political intrigue by his contempt for Kareem, Mr. Piltdown was haranguing anyone who would listen—in this case, Dow-Man, the Downsizer, and Smithing Wesson—with his diatribe about the day’s events. I took a seat within hearing distance, signaling S. Bruce Pippen for a piece of Original Leeby’s Cosmic Cheesecake.

“—nerve of that knot-muscled blunder-boor to come here, just for the sake of appearances. Watchtower hasn’t stepped foot inside this establishment in years. Yes, Soup ’n’ Heroes might be cramped, run-down, with passé blue-collar kitsch for cuisine and blue-haired biddies named Madge and Eunice serving low-end coffee, but for those of us who honor
tradition
—”

“I haven’t seen you here once in the last year, Squirrel,” deadpanned Original Fabulous Man, swiveling around on his counter stool.

“Maybe if you didn’t spend all your time here in a men’s room stall,” said Mr. Piltdown, his cohorts snickering viciously at his riposte, “you would have.”

“I still have my membership card, Squirrel. I’m still fully paid up. And I’ll remember what you said on ratification day.”

“You do that,” said Mr. Piltdown. “Assuming you can tell the difference between a voting box and what I believe you people refer to as a ‘glory hole.’ ”

“Right now, Squirrel!” said Original Fabulous Man, standing to his full six and a half feet and shoving his rainbow flag off of his immense biceps.

“Somebawdy here wanna get banned?”

It was S. Bruce Pippen speaking, his non-eye-patched eye alternating glowers with both men. “Cuz I am
itchin
to ban somebawdy! Snappin and fightin in here, on the day a Hawk King’s fun’ral, like a coupla dawgs out in the street. Samatta witchu guys?”

“Sorry, Bruce,” said Original Fabulous Man. “I’ll stop if he stops.”

“I’ve already stopped,” said Mr. Piltdown, turning back to his own group while Pippen monitored a moment for compliance before putting my cheesecake on my table. “Can’t you do sumthin about these mugs, Doc?”

“I’ll do my best, Bruce,” I reassured him. He winked, then glared at the would-be combatants before limping back to the kitchen.

“Anyway,” said Mr. Piltdown, “Watchtower’s a fraud and a liar. Always hinting about his pathetic secret identity as some unnamed intrepid metropolitan reporter—”

“You mean he aint?” asked Smithing Wesson.

“Hardly. He’s actually the ‘acclaimed’ advice columnist of ‘Ask Aunt Edna’ in
The Blandton Gazette-Dispatch.
”

“An advice columnist? You kiddin me? What a sham artist!”

“Indeed. It’s one thing to lie to the public, but to us? So what does this ‘resignation’ mean, anyway? Nothing but a failed publicity stunt.”

“From what I heard,” said the Downsizer, leaning forward and checking each man’s face in turn, “this is for real. I heard Wally’s so depressed he’s thinking about getting the ol’ snip-snip.”

“Naw, no way!” said Smithing Wesson.

“Yeah. Depoweration.”

“Hah!” sneered Mr. Piltdown. “Well, regardless, he may as well’ve done so decades ago for all the good he’s ever done. Certainly with his…mm…
problem
—”

“Oh, y’mean,” said Smithing Wesson, “with the…?” He crushed his fist repeatedly, a mysterious gesture.

“Wait, you mean with the—?” added the Downsizer, flicking his fingers at the side of his eyes with equal mystery.

“I thought those was just rumors,” said Smithing Wesson.

“Far from it, gentlemen,” said the Squirrel. “And while I hate to give credit to any lunatic utterance of that refugee from the Laboratory of Apoplectic Baboons, we are now in a dire security situation. Much as I’m loath to concede the point, brain-power aside, Wally was our ultimate line of defense. Combine that with Hawk King’s intellect, and our planet was safe. But now…”

“So whaddaya sayin, Fess?” said Wesson. “You sayin the King really was murdered?”

“If he was, my friend, then I suspect the mastermind behind it will attempt to bury several more hatchets in the livers of our individual brothers…before he drives a combine over us all.”

“You think it’s Warmaster Set? Or,” whispered the Downsizer before he gulped,
“Menton?”

The name, uttered even in a hush, chilled the already quiet room, drawing icy glares.

“I think I’d rather not say,” said Festus, “just yet.”

“Now wait a second, Squirrel—back up to Wally,” said Wesson. “What’s with this Wally stuff you guys were hinting about? Are you talking about those rumors a him bein like Fabulous Man and them?”

“No, not specifically,” said Mr. Piltdown, “though it wouldn’t surprise me. Wally’s never been married, never had a girlfriend to anyone’s knowledge despite that sham of a high-profile relationship with Ticker-Tape Girl in 1947 and then Princess Astra in the early eighties. The nickname
Impotent Man
didn’t get whispered for nothing—”

“Festus!”

Mr. Piltdown looked up into the eyes of the ravenish woman standing in front of him, draped in black. All whispering around the deli died.

“Our King iss
dett,
Festus,” said Iron Lass, glaring at him from behind her veil. “Iss zis respect? Unt Vally, however flawt he might be, vuss vun of us. Unt now…now our two mightiest are gone…unt neizer vun even set goodtbye…to me.”

A metallic tinkle splintered the silence, a sound like dimes dropped on a tile floor. And for the first time since I’d seen him in Soup ’n’ Heroes that day, Festus closed his mouth, his jaw muscles powered by an emotion almost certainly new to him: shame.

Iron Lass strode through the sclerosis of the crowd without pushing, since a path opened before her. Once she was at the dimmed jukebox on the wall, S. Bruce Pippen limped quickly toward her, kneeling to plug in the music player before putting a quarter in it for her.

“Danke schoen,”
she whispered, touching his shoulder like a queen bestowing a knighthood on a commoner. She pressed keys for her selection, then walked back through the crowd. No one met her gaze except me.

Perhaps that’s why she sat with me, her face smeared between outrage and relief at what she no doubt regarded as hubris on my part. It was the first time she’d volunteered to speak with me about anything.

But she didn’t speak, not immediately; we sat silently listening as a jukeboxed Patsy Cline twangingly explained the single greatest mistake of her life.

“Ah ha!” whispered Mr. Piltdown over at his table, scanning his Squirrel Screen, which blazed with graphs, numbers, and two images: a swelling face shot of the Flying Squirrel and a diminishing one of the X-Man.

Gloating over his requested poll, Mr. Piltdown watched while the PNN anchor explained that X-Man’s racial allegations about Hawk King had driven support for the X-candidacy down to 50 percent. Support for the Squirrel had rocketed up to 25 percent, strongest among white male churchgoing Republican NRA members.

“Mr. Piltdown,” I called to him softly, “clearly you’re heartened by the PNN poll results. Nevertheless, surely you must be concerned about how the F*L*A*C will respond to your bout of fisticuffs with Kareem at this morning’s funeral.”

He walked over to our table, stood in front of me like a barricade of squirrelly muscle.

“Are you
threatening
me, Miss Brain?”

“Mr. Piltdown, I’m asking you a legitimate question about your feelings—”

“—because I’ll remind you not to exceed your mandate, which is limited to what transpires inside that brain-beautician’s salon you call a clinic. You are here, just as you were at this morning’s sacred commemoration, solely at the sufferance of the men and women of the F—”

“Mr. Piltdown, the F*L*A*C has given me broad authority to conduct my analysis wherever I choose, and base my report and recommendations on
all
observable behavior. So I repeat my question: How do you think the F*L*A*C will respond to your actions this morning?”

He breathed in, leaned down, spoke to me inches from my face.

“Given the current instability caused by the death of our king and the resignation of our atomic-powered jester,” he whispered, “regardless of this farce you call therapy, the F*L*A*C wouldn’t dare take action against me right now. Not when the alternative would be to hand over the election and Operations to that racialist rabble-rousing Reichstag-torching Rwandan.”

He straightened up, turned around, and returned to his seat while Patsy Cline sung lamentations to the lover who deserted her during a performance of the Tennessee Waltz.

I remember that night

And the Tennessee Waltz

Suddenly I heard more metallic clanging. Shining on the glass tabletop in front of me were droplets of metal, hissing steam and cooling.

Iron ingots.

Hnossi Icegaard dabbed her fingers beneath her veil. If what Jack Zenith wrote in
Unsafe in Any Cape
were still true, no one in history had ever seen Iron Lass cry.

Until that day.

“You’re—” I began, when suddenly something crystallized for me. “Those…aren’t just for Hawk King, are they?”

She stared back at me from behind her veil, motionless, silent.

“It’s a lot to take, isn’t it, Hnossi? To lose both your mentor and someone else so important to you in the same day?”

She waved her hand in dismissal. “Vy are you so surprised, Doktor? Becoss at a moment of dire crisis, when everyvun’s spirits are at stake, a husbandt valks out unt—I mean, a hero,
Vally
valks out unt simply abandons us at our time of greatest neet?”

“That’s an interesting slip, Hnossi.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ymir’s blutt, Frau Eva,” she sneered. “Surely you can access better clichés zan Freudian slips.”

I stared into her twin amethyst ices, waiting for her to own her admission.

And so we sat like that until she finally got up and walked out, leaving everyone else to their quiet elegy of cheesecake and beer.

What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Iron Lass:
“The death of the father is the death of life.”

Trauma: the Enemies Within

O
f course, Iron Lass was not the only hyperhominid grappling with the grieving process and ending up in a full nelson, facedown on the rank gym mat of denial upon the dingy floor of despair.

Trauma always reactivates the entire unexamined repository of unprocessed misery in the psychemotional cache, much in the way that the flatulence of a diseased colon is particularly fetid given the abundance of undigested organic material in its crevices.

When you engage the grieving process, you’re not sobbing simply for the sadness at hand, but for every sadness you’ve ever suffered, from dropping your ice cream cone when you were four to the humiliation of vomiting from anxiety at your senior prom to soiling your tunic during a particularly frightening melee with a superfoe.

While I’d been able to observe some of my sanity-supplicants firsthand to assess their postfuneral psychemotional degriefing, I also noticed that the grievers had split along the same lines as those in the funereal battle. Not a single active or former member of the L*A*B (or any other nonwhite crimefighters with the exceptions of Sanford Cowl, HKA the Spook, and Gustav Gorditas, HKA La Cucaracha) had assembled at Soup ’n’ Heroes.

After making a few inquiries I took the subway. Leaving behind me the mourning silence of downtown Bird Island, I crossed the Mantlo River over to mainland Los Ditkos and the borough of Langston-Douglas, cheekily known by its residents as “Stun-Glas.” From there, the only sign of the upscale Bird Island I’d left was the erect grandeur of the Tachyon Tower in the distance.

Negotiating the borough’s crumbling streets, graffiti-scarred buildings, and urine-soaked bus benches, I navigated along a depressing procession of gun stores, pawnshops, nail shops, beauty shops, barbershops, rib shacks, chicken shacks, martial arts schools, and Squirrel Burger franchises, until I eventually found the seedy red, black, and green soul food restaurant called the Dark Star.

Self-Delusion: Grief’s Superpowered Sidekick

E
ntering the dark and dust-choked interior, I beheld a myriad of black men dressed in colorfully elaborate native costumes and fezzes decorated with arcane symbols and icons.