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
Of 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
Entering 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.
All of them turned to stare at me silently.
The only sound was the blare of a clanging, bass-bursting reggae instrumental with electronic bleeps echoing as if into the depths of space. A man behind the counter glared at me. I found myself momentarily hypnotized by his handlebar mustache and the sculpture of his pectorals and biceps beneath his tight white T-shirt before I noticed him nodding to his right, directing me to sit.
Around the corner sat the X-Man, drinking tea with a smooth-skinned Asian man in a suit—Tran Chi Hanh, FKA Chip Monk and, briefly, as my patient.
Their cups emitted ghostly trails of steam into the dark air. Kareem looked up at me narrowly before rolling his eyes and whispering something to Tran. Both men stood, and Tran excused himself to walk past me with only minuscule acknowledgment before he was out the door.
I asked Kareem if I might sit with him. He grimaced, finally pointing to a chair for me and motioning toward the counterman before sitting himself.
“What’re you doing here, Doc?”
“Well, Kareem, in therapy yesterday, weren’t you
the one who told me I wasn’t making accurate observations because I was only seeing all of you in the clinic? That I had to get out of my comfort zone and see you in your natural habitat?”
“I don’t think I’d ever’ve used those words—”
“Regardless of the semantics, I’m here.”
“Doesn’t this violate confidentiality,” he hissed, leaning forward, “you coming here like this? And how’d you know I was here in the first place?”
“A good therapist always knows where to find her patients. And as to confidentiality, these people don’t know who I am—”
“Yeah, you’re only the most famous tunic-shrink on the planet—”
The man with the handlebar mustache brought me a cup of coffee. After he departed, I told Kareem how much the man resembled African American CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. Anger flashed across his face before Kareem stashed it behind the barrier of a cold smile.
“That’s quite the set of facial reactions, Kareem. Tell me what they mean.” He said nothing. “By any chance were you going to tell me that I think all African American men look alike?”
He almost smirked, then ripped the expression into the shreds of a scowl.
“You were, weren’t you?” I said. “Except I was right, and you think I’m right, too, don’t you?”
“Some people say he looks like the lead singer from Cameo. That’s a funk band.” He paused, smiled against himself. “I’ll give you this, Doc…you’ve got a real pair of meteors, coming here like this. Anyway, could we get to the point, here? What do you—”
“Kareem, I’m worried about you, how you’re handling the passing of Hawk King. First your claims that someone conspired to do away with him, then your claims that he was an Afro-American, and then getting into a brawl at the funeral—”
“Number one, I haven’t ‘claimed’ any conspiracy—I’m investigating the likelihood. Two, I didn’t ‘claim’ Hawk King was a brother—I asserted what I knew from direct experience. Third, I didn’t ‘get into’ a brawl. I was attacked! What, you think I should’ve just stood there and let him beat me like I was Rodney King?”
“Well, as I recall, Rodney King did fight back—”
“What? How can you—”
“—but that’s not the point, Kareem. Surely you have to know how all these things will affect your electoral ambitions with the public, not to mention your membership status, which the F*L*A*C could—”
“The public wants to know, Doc. They’re sick and tired of being lied to, and sick and tired of being sick and tired. People want somebody who isn’t afraid to speak the truth. And as far as the F*L*A*C, well, just let ’em try to throw me out now, after I revealed the truth about Hawk King. People’ll be in the kot-tam streets they try that foolishness now!”
Rather than engage Kareem’s delusions of popular support, I gestured to the decor: wicker chairs, a zebra-skin rug, what looked like a Masai shield, and finally a wall of framed pictures. The only face I recognized was that of dietitian Dick Gregory.
“That’s Marcus Garvey,” said Kareem, picking up on my curiosity. “That’s the Mighty Sparrow, Bob Marley, Son of Nat Turner, Paul Robeson, Rakim, Steve Biko, Redd Foxx, Fela, Sun Wosret, Richard Pryor, the Brother from the HOOD, Maximus Security, James Brown…and that’s Dr. Jackson Rogers—”
“The man you claim was Hawk King.”
“I don’t claim anything. I assert the truth.”
“Interesting that there’s not a single picture of a woman on the walls. And other than me, no women in here at all.”
Kareem appeared startled, as if he’d never thought of that before, and then startled further that he’d let slip his startlement. Finally he shrugged. “There should be pictures of strong sisters on the wall. I’ll mention that to Brother Larry.”
“These other men—they’re your old comrades from the League of Angry Blackmen, correct?”
He nodded, pointing them out where they stood or sat in front of murals of pyramids, primitive art, and African idols. “In the long black coat, almost see-through in the shadow, that’s the Grand High Exalted, Never Faulted, Rock of Gibralted, Atomic Sucker-Breaker, the Dark Fantastic.”
“That’s his name? All of that?”
“Yeah. We all had long titles in the L*A*B. Part of our mystique.”
“So what was yours?”
“The Kinetic Kemetic Magnetic Mystic Majestic.”
“Very colorful! And the rest of these gentlemen?”
He scowled, as if he mistook my delight in the L*A*B’s poetical (if juvenile) fixation for condescension. But he continued anyway. “In the pyramid hat over there, that’s the Pyramidic Gikuyu Mau-Mau Hip-Hop Master Blaster, Ahmed Q. Wearing the suit with the badge over his breast pocket, that’s the Universal Stimulator and General Overseer, the Black Lieutenant. Loves to yell—he was always saying how we’d ‘gone too far this time’—kind of our coordinator.
“In the cape, carrying the double-headed axe? That’s the Cosmic Soul Controller and Planetary Roller, Shango. Guy with the glowing knife is the Hyper-Gravitic Invincible Convincer, Eldritch Cleaver. Obviously the brother in the locks is the Political, Poetical, Polemical Dreadnaught, the Dreadlocker.”
“His hairdo is alive? Like Medusa’s snakes?”
“Yeah, but they don’t turn you into stone. They’re like tentacles. Over there with the ankh-staff, ankh-fez, and the black ankh turtleneck is the Star-Breathing, Hyksos-Crushing, Sucker-MC-Smiting Mystical Militant, Professor Grim, HKA Grimhotep, the Living Ka. In the bowler hat and the Edwardian coat, that’s the Righteous, Tonighteous, Fool-Smackin, Punk-Attackin, Preachifyin and Testifyin Upbraider, the Player Hater. And finally, the tiny dude next to him in the suit is the Litigious, Pernicious, Troublemaking, Shit-Shaking Arnold Drummond, HKA Mofo Jones. Brother clerked with Johnnie Cochran. He was the one who got us our HUD contract to protect Stun-Glas—”
“—before you lost it.”
“Before somebody ‘lost’ it for us.”
“And who ‘lost’ it for you?”
“It’s a Black Thing”: RNPN (Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis)
The X-Man snorted. “That is the question, isn’t it?”
“So you don’t think it had anything to do with the L*A*B’s antiwhite rhetoric?”
“Being accused,” he sneered, “is not the same thing as being guilty. But in your line of work, I suppose that’s difficult to understand—what with Freud blaming mothers, sexual perversion, and everything else for causing the planet’s problems except for the white power system and the people who own it—”
“And you don’t regard that as antiwhite rhetoric?”
“Hey, if the hood fits…”
“It’s exactly that kind of language, Kareem—”
He held up an index finger, yelled toward the counterman. “Brother Larry, can you turn that up?”
I looked behind me at the television that had caught Kareem’s eye. According to the news report, now that word of Omnipotent Man’s resignation had become widespread, tributes were piling up for him outside the fence of the F*O*O*J’s Fortress of Freedom—thousands of bouquets, drawings, cards, and action figures, and tied to the fence, red-white-and-blue ribbons and capelike flags with the letters OM on them.
The images were followed by a shot of dozens of tiny Egyptian statuettes in tiny cardboard boats set adrift by citizens across Eaton’s Bay toward Sunhawk Island.
“Disgusting,” growled Kareem. “Hawk King’s death is world news, right? So why is it when that steroid-popping bozo up and quits for reasons I wouldn’t buy on an expense account, suddenly everybody forgets the King and starts celebrating the kot-tam jester?”
“How does that make you feel, Kareem?”
“That the best you can do, Doc? ‘How does that make you feel?’ Maybe it’s time to buy a new CD, y’know?”
“Why are you afraid to discuss your feelings?”
“Afraid’s got nothing to do with it. But didja ever consider that maybe
what people think is more important than what they feel?”
“Don’t overthink, Kareem—that’s where you’ll get blocked—”
“What I think is that the day I announce that Hawk King was a brother, grieving for him dries up from millions to dozens. But when some brain-canned putt-nuts submits his decades-overdue resignation, he suddenly gets the honors due a genuine hero!”
“So all of this is about race for you? Omnipotent Man has been a celebrated hero for decades, cofounding the F*O*O*J back in the forties—”
“Man’s a fraud—even the fascist Squirrel said so. You ever read Zenith’s Unsafe in Any Cape? If Wally’d been named Kwame, Ali, Juan, or Sanjit, you think the press would’ve overlooked his Peter Sellers routine all these years and crowned him ‘world’s greatest hero’?”
“What makes you think the public even accepts your claims about Hawk King’s secret identity? Enough that they would actually reject him posthumously?”
“What’ve I just been saying about the tributes drying up?”
“The resignation of Omnipotent Man matters to the public, Kareem, whether you respected him or not. And if you think others believe your racial claims about Hawk King, I’d suggest that’s more a matter of projection that observation.”
Kareem snorted. “In all his papyri and public statements of the last ten years, Hawk King called the ancient Egyptians ‘Brothers on the Nile.’ You think that was an accident? You think it was coincidence that after he went into exile in the Blue Pyramid, the only domestic Hawk King sightings were in black neighborhoods? That he—”
“There are also sightings of Elvis, the Gold Glider, and Poe-Bot around the country every year. Surely those aren’t evidence of anything other than wish-fulfillment and self-delusion?”
“What about breaking exile to destroy Hutu militias in Rwanda after the F*L*A*C refused to intervene? Think that’s nothing?”
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