His grin grew colder every second I tried to persuade him; when I asked him why he was smiling, he said mysteriously, as if he hadn’t understood a word I’d said, “ ‘Integrate’? You people think integration’s the solution to everything.”
“Kareem, I’m talking about psychemotional integration—”
“I know what you meant,” he sneered. “And I don’t expect a damn shrink to understand a kot-tam thing about the real world. The only two ations I’m interested in are liberation and investigation. There are suspects we can’t even find—Warmaster Set, Cosmicus, the Einstein Baboons. But we’ve got three up in orbit I want some answers from, and I intend to talk to em as soon as I can arrange it.”
“You mean Gil Gamoid, the N-Kid, and…”
“Yeah,” he said, “and Menton.”
Kareem didn’t even flinch when he said the name. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy uttering those fearsome phonemes.
We were only a block from a subway entrance when Kareem stopped with his arm out, holding me back. He pointed along both sides of the street toward the boarded-up faces of half a dozen businesses, one after the other: Ruby’s Ribs, Deacon’s Gumbo, Junior’s Jerk Palace-an-Ting, Down Home Chicken, ’Bama-Ass Chicken, and Git-Yo-Chicken. Finally he pointed to the far end of the street, and the bustling business enjoyed by the Squirrel Burger franchise enthroned there.
Because of my access to F*O*O*J files, I wasn’t surprised that the X-Man would single out the burger business. Indeed, the battle between the young Philip Kareem Edgerton and the Squirrel Burger Corporation had nearly prevented Kareem’s membership in the F*O*O*J and had ensured a hatred between Kareem and the ultimate master of Squirrel Burger, a division of Piltdown Edible Products International—Festus Piltdown III.
The Black Quixotes Toward Windmills of Color
In 1986, when he was still operating under the hypernym Mac Rude, Kareem and several other proto-L*A*Bsters went to war with every Squirrel Burger outlet in Langston-Douglas. Arnold Drummond launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits against franchise owners, the Dark Fantastic used his shadow powers to make every restaurant so dark that the kitchens were unusable, and Kareem deployed his rudimentary logogenic ability to manifest 3-D graffiti above Squirrel Burger restaurants declaring such phrases as “Squirrel Burger Is Destroying Black Business.”
When that campaign had minimal effect, Kareem changed his slogans to urge ghetto residents to “Stick It to the Squirrel—Buy Black.” That campaign’s failure prompted Kareem to develop his power further, creating mobile “word swarms” or “tags” that followed Squirrel customers after they left the restaurants. Diners found themselves returning to school, home, and work with 3-D phrases such as “I Licked the Squirrel’s Nuts” and “I Drink Nut-Shakes” orbiting their heads. Squirrel Burger business plummeted, and local restaurateurs rejoiced.
But eventually Squirrel Burger Corporation regrouped with its franchise owners by offering free burgers, Squirrelly Fries™, and Chocolate Bushy Tails™. Exhausted and overstretched, Kareem and his comrades couldn’t maintain their crusade with its homophobic slogans against the sheer numbers of new Squirrel diners; eventually they surrendered completely.
“Makes me sick,” said Kareem, glaring at the giant scowling squirrel mascot as if he were Dante in the Pit staring up at the Beast, and then at the people waddling in and out of the fast-food outlet. “But it takes a nation of millions to keep us fat. And stupid. And that nation’s us.”
“Don’t you think people should have the free choice to eat where they want, Kareem? Do you think you should have the authority to tell everyone what to do, how to eat, what to think? To say nothing of depriving local people of jobs?”
“Shit, Doc, are you kidding? Don’t get me started on jobs—minimum wage, no benefits, swing shifts? How about down here in Stun-Glas we get some of that high-tech investment from the dimensional research contracts they do up there in the Tachyon Tower and all the spin-off jobs that go with that? That’d be some jobs!
“Can you even see what’s in front of your eyes? Look across the street! Fools weighing three hundred and fifty pounds ordering a mega-meal Kilo-Burger, a gross of Squirrelly Fries™, and a Half-and-Half Shake thickened with Crisco? You see that man right there—that one! Can barely walk, but he’s walrusing around like an NBA star in his Adidas sneakers and Nike track pants—I mean, they must be knockoffs cuz Nike doesn’t make size infinity—but this mad-ass madness of tryin to look athletic when you’re lethally stuffing yourself with the filthiest foods on the planet? Diabetes, heart attacks…used to be poor people starved to death. Now we overeat to death! Killing us off with low-quality, high-fat food, obesing us all into the grave. And Squirrel Burger isn’t just a name, Doc. That shit-shack serves actual squirrels!”
“Now, Kareem…we both know that’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re telling me the FDA has approved the sale of wild rodent meat to the general public?”
“You think the multibillion-dollar Piltdown Group doesn’t get whatever it wants, whenever it wants it? FDA’s a three-dollar-an-forty-two-cent ho, Doc! Wake up! And the squirrels aren’t wild…Piltdown’s got huge factory farms down in Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, everywhere Piltdown pulled out his high-tech manufacturing and moved it to Mexico or New Atlantis. Got all those downsized crackers working his squirrel ranches, billions of squirrels in teeny-tiny cages force-fed ground-up rats that were fed ground-up roaches that were fed ground-up brains of all the mentally retarded prisoners they execute down in Dixieland! You heard of the China Syndrome? A nuclear reactor burning all the way down to China? This is Piltdown’s Syndrome—burning us all down to nothing. To nothing.”
He threw up his arms, aiming his tirade like a wrecking ball at all the empty buildings.
“But people are deaf, dumb, and blind. You can scream the truth in letters ten miles tall, and still the only thing they’ll notice is nothing. Whole reason Brother Larry opened the Dark Star was so people’d have suh’m tasty and healthy to eat after Squirrel Burger drove everybody else outta business. You know you can buy and get stoned from a whole bag of maki in this neighborhood easier and cheaper than you can buy a kot-tam salad? But if it weren’t for the L*A*B and a few others, Larry wouldn’t even be able to keep his doors open.”
Slicing Through the Gordian Knot
Kareem’s rant veered wildly, even into how the L*A*B operated its own “social programs to counter white influence,” including “Free Breakfast for Shorties,” “Africa Medallions for Homies,” and “Free Fades, Flat-Tops, and Afro-Picks for Soul Brothers,” the last of which was undermined by something Kareem called “the Jheri curl plague,” which left what he claimed was “Jheri bags and activator empties lying in the gutters of the MLK Boulevard of dreams deferred.”
Suddenly Kareem turned on me with accusation burning in his eyes like lit cigarettes.
“I sure hope you aren’t planning to turn this conversation or any of our sessions into one of your books, Doc!”
“Well, Kareem, I’m sure if you actually were to read any of my—”
“I checked out your stuff after we got sentenced to your therapy. All of it. I pity the poor mopes you psychocatalyzed. I read what those suckers said—although I had to read between the lines to deduce what you’d cut out since the way you edited everything was so self-serving—and then I’d read your diagnoses and speculations and bizarre psychosuperstitious slop. Damn. The least insightful, most outrageous conclusions, like you couldn’t see cute on a puppy—”
“Be that as it may, Kareem—”
“I mean, in the dictionary, next to the definition of ‘unreliable narrator,’ there’s gotta be a picture of your degree. I hate to think how you’d be framing anything I’ve ever said. You take one little word of what people say, then psychopontificate the hell out of it until you’ve got readers thinking the afflicted are the afflictors, and the afflictors are the afflicted! No different than the F*O*O*J helping destroy Ne
w Atlantis while protecting the people bringing maki into our neighborhoods—”
It was time to cut through the Gordian Knot of Kareem’s white-persecution complex. “If everything you’re saying is true, Kareem, why did you even join the F*O*O*J? Why not remain in Stun-Glas full time, fighting alongside the L*A*B?”
“What, remain ghettoized, cut off from the reach that only the F*O*O*J has, unable to effect change past my own neighborhood, prevented from joining a wider cause? Then you’d accuse me of—”
“Did the L*A*B expel you?”
He stopped, his jaw half-open.
He closed it, then opened it again only long enough to say “No.” He shook his head. “No.”
“André said you weren’t welcome at the Dark Star. You didn’t rebut him. What did he mean?”
“Look!” he yelled. “We are in serious danger, Doc—can you get that through your head? Omnipotent Man’s resigned! Hawk King’s dead by causes unknown! The F*O*O*J is a kot-tam disaster! This morning, at the funeral, the appearance of the Netjeru—that was a warning to us all, a harbinger that if we don’t—”
“The what? Natcheroo?”
“Netjeru, Doc! Don’t you know anything? The so-called gods who took Hawk King’s sarcophagus away! They haven’t appeared on Earth in five or six thousand years. You think they don’t want his killer caught? What do you think they’ll do if we don’t avenge his death?”
“Are you saying that these gods are inferior as detectives to you?”
“I’m saying that…Look, even if they don’t, I dunno—whatever—what do you think’s gonna happen if we don’t bring his killer to justice? Who’s next, and how many after that? Because if you can kill someone of Hawk King’s power, then nobody’s safe! How can you not see that?”
“All right, Kareem.”
“All right, what?”
“You believe that Gil Gamoid, the N-Kid, and/or the Destroyer could be behind this alleged crime, correct?”
“Yes, for the ninth time!”
“Then let’s go ask them.”
“What’re you talking about? Thanks to you jailing me in therapy, my investigation’s barely started! And a detective doesn’t tip his hand to a suspect until he’s—”
“I’m worried that you’re manifesting a vast, disabling paranoid fantasy, Kareem, and that’s what’s jailing you. I’ll go to Asteroid Zed tomorrow to interview them myself, if you won’t, so we can rule out Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid as suspects—”
“You do that and you’re gonna destroy the element of surprise and blow the one chance I’ve got with them!”
“So I’m going to Asteroid Zed, Kareem, to speak with your triumvirate of terror myself. Unless you want to go with me to rule them out yourself.”
He flailed his arms, yelled at me, explained his case a dozen times, pleaded with me not to go. I wouldn’t budge.
Finally, after haranguing me for a full ten minutes, he fell silent, his shoulders drooping while his gaze scoured the weeds creeping out of the cracks in the concrete.
He shook his head, chewed his lip. “When?”
“First Space Elevator up. Five A.M., if memory serves.”
“Kot-tam. Fine. Five A.M. lift to the kingdom of the damned.”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
X-Man: “Catching this superassassin is all the glory I need.”
The Face of the Foe Is a Crystal Ball
Whether I chose to combat the RNPN of the X-Man and his comrades or the end-of-epoch ennui of the mainstream F*O*O*Jsters, an ascent to the orbital penitentiary where the worst supercriminals in history were entombed alive seemed at that moment to be the only path toward mental clarity. The death of Hawk King had so damaged the already fragile psyches of my group that unless they engaged in a mythopoeic descent to an Underworld, my sanity-supplicants would find themselves lost in the sewers of self-delusion until finally drowning in the downspouts of depression.
Perhaps it would take the horror of staring into the face of the villain who had murdered so many heroes—or into the faces of two founding F*O*O*Jsters who went mad and came close to murdering them all—for my team to pull back from the brink of self-destruction and be reborn from the psychotherapeutic womb of self-redemption.
CHAPTER SIX
Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside
TUESDAY, JULY 4, 5:27 A.M.
Mirror, Mirror, Above Them All
To know one’s enemy,” wrote Iron Lass many years ago in Toward a Practical Götterdammerung, “is to know oneself.”
To test that theorem, I gathered my patients together to voyage into that inferno of foes, Asteroid Zed. And indeed, since in space as in psychotherapy, there is no true up or down (only centeredness and dissociation), it is just as legitimate to say that we descended that morning into orbit, because in a relative universe, any place on our planet can be the bottom of the Earth.
Rising (or falling) inside the StarCase™ Space Elevator at sunrise, we slipped the surly bonds of Earth to dance the skies on laughter-silvered carbon nanotube Herculon™ filaments. I was struck how at that altitude even the titanic Tachyon Tower was shrunken into little more than a pepper shaker and how the gridwork of Los Ditkos’s streets was reduced to an Eggo waffle. From there in that high, untrespassed sanctity of near-space, it seemed impossible that down inside the city’s golden pockets, the cholesterol-laden butter of dysfunction and the sweetly seductive syrup of neurosis were drowning citizens in a chaos of psychemotional condiments.
But in leaving behind our big blue marble of childhood, we were venturing toward a far more dangerous zone wherein we all were to put out our hands to touch the face of madness.
Everyone in the group was upset about our trip and its timing. Two hours before dawn I illuminated the Psych Signal above my Mount Palomax laboratory to draw forth my team. Each member complained bitterly upon arrival—Iron Lass argued that our mythopoeic journey was not to a psychic Underworld but to a technological overworld; Power Grrrl repeated ad nauseam (and with many expletives) that she didn’t appreciate being ripped away from a warm and triply occupied bed; the Brotherfly, apparently under the influence of some substance(s), issued a slang-soaked diatribe against mornings in general (“André don’t do A.M.s, knawm sayn?”); and the Flying Squirrel railed against using a vehicle from the rival StarCase™ Corporation to achieve orbit when either his Squirrel Shuttle or an Allosaurus-Class rocket from Piltdown Dynamics would have been faster (if more ecocidal).
The team’s verbal complaints camouflaged the true animal of their anxiety. Obviously nothing upset each teammate so much as the prospect of facing the sociopathic sadists—including former friends—who had hunted, haunted, and attempted to slaughter them.
But sanity is a demanding master, and it insists we seize our traumatic experiences so as to integrate them into our daily consciousness, where their psychic “charge” can be grounded and thus neutralized.
Of course, one doesn’t have to be a therapist to deduce from my patients’ repetitive gestures, scowls, and agitated body language that morale inside the Space Elevator had become a quicksand of terror swallowing them whole, especially at the thought of standing in a room to breathe the air exhaled by Menton the Destroyer.
Strapped in next to the only F*O*O*Jster who wasn’t complaining, I observed Kareem preparing for his imminent encounter with former F*O*O*J friends and foes. He was literally absorbing the text from hundreds of hard-copy pages, holding his right hand over an open book and “scanning.” The letters flew off the page in a black stream, only to replant themselves in place. According to his file, he called this process medu gi-orema, or “word-eating.” He was absorbing one page approximately every ten seconds.
Interrupting his studies, I gently warned Kareem that if he were still intent on interviewing the Destroyer, he’d have to save that villain for last and keep his interrogation as brief as possible to minimize Menton’s a
bility to unleash his mental horror-hold.
“It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure that out, Doc,” whispered Kareem. He flashed me a smile, but it was a warning. “Howzabout this: You don’t tell me how to conduct an investigation, and I won’t tell you how to head-shrink?”
I reminded Kareem that he had, in fact, told me numerous times how to “head-shrink.”
He smiled brittlely, but I sensed it was less from anger than from anxiety. “I guess I hafta write you a check made out to ‘touché’.”
He folded up his papers and flicked on a satellite monitor, flipping feeds until he found a Pacifica station running a program called Democracy Now! It was the tail end of an archived interview with a black, wheelchair-bound cosmologist and archeologist named Dr. Jackson Rogers, discussing the relevance of ancient Egyptian astronomy to recent telescopic discoveries in the galaxy. He looked like an old, withered version of calypso singer Harry Belafonte or TV’s Sherman Hemsley.
The archived segment ended, and the screen then switched to a female anchor and a bespectacled, gap-toothed African American guest in a too-tight suit and a long, untamed, graying Afro.
Host: So what do you think, Professor West? Could Dr. Rogers actually have been a secret identity for Hawk King?
Guest: I think, Amy…the possiBIL-i-ty that he could have. Been. The incredi-ble Hawk. King. And the-resultingdichotomous- reactions-of-the-American-people-and-the-backlash- against-Brother-X-Man- raises-some-important QUES-tio-o-ons… Amy…Questions. About the fundamental re-FU-sal of certain segments in our soc-I -e-ty…to ac-KNOW-ledge…the-inherent-capacity-of- African-American- people-living-under-white-supr—
The feed clicked to another channel on its own. When Kareem spied Mr. Piltdown clicking the controls on his glove, an argument erupted that only intensified when X-Man and the Squirrel overheard the panelists on the next news station. Those panelists were discussing how, following the loss of two F*O*O*J icons, X-Man had become the vanguard of the new hero generation, deriving legitimacy from his Hawk King connection and credibility from his forward vision; these same panelists dismissed Festus Piltdown III as “yesterday’s man.”
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