In the corner of the greenroom, a large, steaming, malodorous pile of logogenic feces manifested itself, at which point André said, “Whatever you do now, Kareem,
don’t
say the word
muthafucka. Bzzzt!
”
Kareem looked up in exasperation, his black irises like two Rolos dotting twin scoops of vanilla ice cream.
“Can you be serious for one stinking minute, André? What if…look…Wally, right? He’s cracked, MPDed, strung out on argonium…What if—I mean, Menton’s powers were always strongest on people hiding secrets—maybe he puppet-mastered Wally into killing Hawk King! Wally’s one of the only beings with enough power to do it, and then, even if Menton suppressed his memories, guilt from that could be seeping into his conscious mind, which motivated his resignation—”
“Tha fuck you talkin bout, Kreem? That got to be the stankiest heap a Tyranno
saur
us shit André ever took a whiff of!” The Brotherfly affected his trademarked hiss-laughter despite his obvious rage. “Evrabody,
ev
rabody in the whole world guilty a suh’m but
you.
Reporters didn’quote you right, Festus is a corrupt rich man, Wally killed Hawk King, an Hawk King worked f’the white man!
But what about Ka-REEM?
” said André, grabbing X-Man by his face and shoving it back like a tetherball.
Kareem snapped back and leapt up out of his chair, staggering to stay upright, swinging back at André who danced out of the way, causing Kareem to pitch forward and nearly hit the floor.
“Don’t you get it?” spat Kareem. “You’ve gotta put all that you-me shit aside,
Andrew,
long enough to see this attack’s bigger than me! This’s about my investigation! I
should
be pursuing this Sarah Bellum angle, tracking her connections to Menton! Maybe they’ve been working together all along…or maybe
she’s
Menton! Brother, the timing of that smear-job on me was no kot-tam coincidence!”
“Don’t ‘brother’ me, punk-ass nigga! You de
serve
this shit. Biggest accuser who ever shit on somebody he don’like now gettin the shit he dumped, dumped back on him. Where I come from, that’s called justice, dawg.
Natural
justice.”
He stepped forward to lean down his six-three frame and shove his face in front of Kareem’s, close enough for each man to smell the other’s breath, to see the sleep (or lack of it) in the other’s eyes.
“I hope they rip your ass in two, Kareem,” he said, “which’s maybe the only way t’finally clear all the shit outta you!”
“André!” I said, shocked for a moment from my professional detachment. “Why do you hate Kareem so much?”
He didn’t shake his gaze from Kareem for a moment. “I don’t hate
anybody,
Doctor,” he said crisply. “Unlike
this
person.”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
Brotherfly:
“Glory’s a hole. Gimme that mo-nay!
Bzzzt!
”
X-Man:
“I don’t give a fuck about glory. Give me truth.”
Denial and Delusion: Always Unhelpful?
K
areem demanded I leave him to his greenroom solitude. I spent the next two days at the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic anxiously awaiting his call. Beyond the fright-show skullishness of his looks, it was the crumbling desperation in his voice, so striking in a man ordinarily so strident, that worried me. Polls showed him crashing through the basement of his previous disapproval ratings. I hoped that wherever he was, there were neither pills nor rope.
And there was no word from Syndi either, the target of her own backlash after having been “inned” by Billi Biceps. There had been a public tearing-up of her membership papers for GLAAD, and the weekly
SuperherOUT
had denounced her for “pimping queerness to advance her shallow career through poseuristic lesbian chic.”
Iron Lass had been too sick to see me, and neither Festus nor André had anything to say outside of anti-Kareem gloating. And so the only person left attending therapy was Wally.
As Argon’s only son on Earth continued to integrate the experiences of his many personalities (or
alters
) into his central persona, his powers continued to malfunction and fade. It was as if his hyper-capacities depended on his own lack of self-awareness to function. And the picture that had emerged of Wally’s alters wasn’t pretty.
As playboy Ricky R. Bustow, Wally had left a trail of businesses he’d plundered, insider-traded, or plunged into the ground; as fight promoter Francis “the Musk Ox” Miller, he’d built his Vegas sports book and his fortunes entirely on Omnipotent Man’s battles—not whether he’d win, but how long it would take to defeat his foes, which powers he would use, and which buildings he would destroy; as Reverend “Crawdad” Crocket, he’d built a televangelism empire exploiting his congregation’s fears that the Götterdämmerung was Armageddon, but behind the scenes he’d left collection baskets full of broken hearts and at least one very reluctant abortion.
Fascinatingly, the alters possessed qualities of shrewdness, discernment, and intellect that Wally had not yet manifested in his own life. Perhaps a rural upbringing had wilted such capacities in the young Wally, and the overbearing influence of Festus Piltdown III had stifled them afterward. But argonium had stimulated them and set them free. If Wally, free from his destabilizing argonium addiction, were able to harness the alters’ mental faculties and awaken them inside a unified Wally-prime personality, he might be able to save his sanity and himself.
But we were nowhere near such a dynamic integration.
Even the existence of Wally’s retreat, his Stronghold of Standing-on-My-Own-Two-Feetitude, had come into question, when satellite telemetry in Flying Squirrel’s Omnipotent Man file challenged the Stronghold’s Antarctic location by showing no such edifice had ever existed there. In fact, the real Stronghold was in the Andes. Faced with such photographic proof, Wally confessed, “I never was no good at d’rections.”
Every session, Wally’s powers failed further, his panic escalating the closer he got to realizing that his extraterrestrial hyper-abilities might be at their end. I encouraged the desperate Wally to use visualization and the serenity affirmation to picture himself without his powers, but completely at peace. But my request only drove Wally into such deep despair that he began regularly articulating suicidal ideation.
Desperate for a solution, I asked Wally if he would be willing to go along with a last-ditch gambit for his survival.
“Yes!” he wailed, rocking and sobbing in front of me, cradling his head between his knees, pounding his fists into the back of his head heavily enough to elicit gongs. “But how, Doc? I feel like I’m dead already!”
Locking Wally into the Id-Smasher
®
’s psi-mulated environment for a continuous session stretching over a week, I induced in him the mental experience of having all his powers back. To restore his confidence in his own character, I created a psi-mulated Hawk King who walked with him, talked with him, and flew with him, who constantly reminded him to assert ownership of and become a stakeholder in the Hawkish qualities he so admired, to own the target of his own admiration.
It was a grave risk. Such an auto-belief in his career and his powers required Wally to activate vast mental energies into a delusion of his own competence and the fantasy that the future would unquestionably see the return of his powers to their original magnitude. My dangerous strategy was predicated on the psychestructure’s enormous capacity for denial, an evolutionary defense mechanism intended to preserve the sapient organism against overwhelming odds.
Given sufficient time, Wally might eventually have come safely to integrate full awareness of his failures and accept his imomnipotence. But that time had not yet arrived.
THURSDAY, JULY 13, 9:59 P.M.
Self-X-Amination
A
t last, on the third night following the press conference, while Wally was still contained inside the Id-Smasher
®
for his ongoing personality reintegration, Philip Kareem Edgerton showed up at the door of my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic.
He was unshaven, appeared to have lost even more weight, and looked and smelled as if he hadn’t changed his clothes since Monday.
“How’m I supposed to do my job when
I’ve
become the story?” he said by way of greeting. “That’s not a rhetorical question, Doc. I’m
asking
you.”
“Kareem,” I said, showing him into the Encounter Room and frothing him a whippaccino, “what these people are all expecting from you is a statement of accountability. All you have to do is accept responsibility. Then they’ll let you do your job.”
He sat, looking out the window into the distance toward the hundred and fifty stories of neon called the Tachyon Tower. Based on his sneer, I doubted he was pondering the cosmological-dimensional research being undertaken there.
“Re-spon-si-
bil
-ity…” he drawled. “You know, that’s the one word Hawk King used in his
Instructions
papyrus more than any other. For all the good the papyrus’ll do anybody now. Might’s well seal it back inside a canopic jar, let some brother try again with it in a thousand years…when the world’s ready to listen. To believe. No—scratch that.
To think.
”
Disconnecting, Kareem asked me if I’d seen the latest press on him. The stories had mutated into a public version of the childhood game of telephone, with various sources alternately claiming that Kareem’s brief article on Hawk King was in fact an essay, a thesis, a dissertation, or even a two-volume set called
Ofays Aint Shit. Esquire
’s apparently last-minute cover story, featuring a file photo of Kareem crossing his forearms into an
X,
was entitled
X-Man Hates Your Cracker Ass.
“You see what that chai-sucking, subintellectual yuppy pinhead wrote?” asked Kareem in reference to Shauna Slyming’s column on him in the
Sentinel-Spectator.
“She ignored everything I explained, and then wrote that I ‘used words like bullets’—never mind who’s using actual bullets against black folks, which apparently doesn’t concern her—and then she denounced, quote,
all black radicals,
and accused me of being sexist!”
“Kareem, can you blame her for being upset with you? You must’ve hit her in the head with a microphone when you flipped the table. Did you see her photo? She’s got a huge lump on her face—”
“Naw, she always looks like that. You know she actually phoned me later that day before she wrote her ‘opinion piece’? Told me that when I’d written this one article a couple of years ago saying, quote, There should be more female superheroes, that—get this—
that
was somehow
sexist
! Slyming’s a crypto-conservative supramoron, Doc! And you know what else she said? She tells me…”
The hour wore on, with Kareem frantically spewing out his elaborate theory of self-justification, which, because of his severe RNPN, he could not recognize as proof of his subconscious acknowledgment of his own guilt and the fundamental irrationality of his black-panic paradigm.
“Kareem,” I finally interrupted, “what about when we were at the Squirrel Tree, and you called that policeman Detective ‘McDevil’? That’s a racial slur. That’s the kind of thing the public and the press expect you to take responsibility for. You claim you’re against racism, and yet you’re guilty of exactly what you accuse others of doing.”
“First of all, that isn’t racism—I can’t deny McDevil or his people their jobs, their homes, or their lives. Second, that punk deserves the name. Wanna know why I call him that? Back before I had my powers, he was a patrolman at a Stun-Glas demonstration after Maximus Security got killed in New Atlantis. Punk’s worse than a cracker—he’s a kot-tam saltine. He
beat my legs,
Doc, beat my legs like he was tenderizing rhino meat!”
“For someone whose very powers are based in words, Kareem, you’re employing a double standard on hurtful language. The children’s rhyme about ‘sticks and stones’ isn’t true—hurtful words hurt, Kareem, no matter who’s using them.”
“The cops
have
sticks! What do you think McDevil was beating my legs with?”
“Kareem, when life gives you lemons, make Lemon Pledge! And then take that Pledge and clean up your act! You’re losing an opportunity to see yourself for who you really are and therefore to self-actualize—”
“ ‘Losing an opportunity’? Have you opened your eyes once in the last week? Have you seen what’s happening? A conspiracy to murder one hero and neutralize three others, destroy an asteroid, get two supervillains disappeared without a trace—”
“Look inside yourself, Kareem! What opportunity for your
self
are
you
missing?”
“This is not about
me
! Why can’t you shrinks ever get that, that the world is bigger than the kot-tam individual? The F*O*O*J is nothing but Lost Opportunities, Inc.—doesn’t do a damn thing to solve actual problems. Best it ever does is put out fires, but it’s spent way more time settin em.
“You know what Colonel Strom Flintlock spent his whole career as Director of Operations doing? Trying to keep black, female and gay heroes out of the F*O*O*J, stick the Ten Commandments inside every hero’s oath, and overthrow the government of New Atlantis. That paleoconservative’s a hundred and seventy-three years old, did you know that? The only dead soldier the GI Juice experiments successfully revived from—as he loved to call it—the War between the States. He wasn’t fit enough to fight in World War Two, and he didn’t join the F*O*O*J until 1946, but he’s occupied the DOO chair ever since. A kot-tam joke! That swasti-fossil’s so right-wing even a supersellout like the Spook was too black for him! That’s what I’m up against!”
