Festus, Syndi/Inga, and I were sitting in silence in the Squirrel Tree Medical Hollow suite of Hnossi Icegaard.
The dying goddess was writhing in tortured sleep.
Once raven-haired, she now had a mane of oxidized hospital green; once creamy, her skin was now a minefield of festering red-gray craters. She was covered in sensor pads feeding biometrics to the machines counting out her final days on the planet, like a female Gulliver roped down by med-tech Lilliputians.
Festus, who’d never hidden his contempt for Syndi, had maintained an undeclared truce since we’d arrived at nine A.M. and she’d explained her genealogy. His face betrayed no surprise; perhaps the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Detective” had already known, or perhaps his affect had been steam-rollered into a parking lot by recent events. Either way, he’d accepted Power Grrrl’s “new” civilian name, dark hair, and altered clothes and speech without comment.
Syndi/Inga looked especially tragic that morning. She was clad in a tight black leotard shirt and skirt, and her white pancake makeup and black lipstick and eyeshadow were framed by her black hair, the “Neo-Orc” look she’d popularized on the cover of her first multiplatinum album, Jagged Little Pudenda.
The quiescence splintered when Festus suddenly whispered into his wrist comm while cupping his ear. “How long was he there?…Well, if he comes back…Yes—like a hawk. The second that recidivist reprobate—yes, exactly.”
“What’s going on?” asked Power Grrrl.
“It’s your boyfriend,” growled Festus.
“He’s not—What about him?”
“After he fled Miss Brain’s clinic last night he went to the Fortress. Spent all night on the computers.”
“So what, Festus? He’s a F*O*O*Jster. He’s got a right to be there. But now you’ve got someone spying on him?”
“Apparently your ex-lover was hacking into private F*O*O*J personnel files, ‘Inga,’ and focusing his search on the known weaknesses of his colleagues.”
He leaned forward, narrowing his eyes and scanning her frame as if deciding on which of her limbs he should barbecue first. “Any idea why?”
Indignantly, she said, “How would I know?”
“I expect you might know, you little—”
Wet hacking—a sound like the plungering of a soup kitchen sink—drowned the proto-fight. Festus rubbed Hnossi’s back with rough gentleness, holding an emesis bowl beneath her bowed face. Wiping the bright copper sputum from her lips, he asked her what she wanted him to do for her.
“Nussink, Festus,” she whispered. “You’ff been grandt.” Turning to Power Grrrl, she said, “Miss Tycho. How nice uff you. Sank you for comink—”
“I told them, Mother,” she said. “They know.”
Hnossi fell silent, her face a Mona Lisa of melancholy, a Klimt of verklempt.
“Come on, Miss Brain,” said Festus, standing. “These two need to be alone.”
“No, Festus,” snapped Hnossi, raising her hand in stop and dragging tubes, wires and sensors with it. “I tried asking Frau Doktor ze uzzer day…to help me…to help Inga unt me…put behindt us all our discordt. Before ze ent. Vhich now…is almost here.”
Shutting off the Current of the Past
If your family contains intergenerational hyperhominidism, then whatever dysfunctional tendencies exist inside your relationships are magnified by the proportional strength and agility of the powers you collectively manifest. In order to discharge the psychic voltage between mother and daughter, as in the case I had that morning, we first had to shut down the breakers whose power had been convulsing Hnossi’s consciousness into an id-confrontation loop for decades.
“To help both of you sort out this mother-daughter contra-dynamic, especially given the…shall we say, ‘time constraints’ involved,” I told them, “since we don’t have the option of years of therapy, we need to delve immediately into your relationship, Hnossi, with your own mother.”
Staring at me with her icy amethyst eyes, Hnossi reached weakly for her emesis basin, loosened her lower lip, and let drip a long, viscous purple-green cord which plopped into the pail, which she rested back on her side table.
That was her only response.
“Hnossi,” I tried again, “without examining your mother’s template, which you inherited and which formed you—the same one you used unconsciously to draw the contours of your relationship with Inga—we can’t reformat it so that you can redraw your relationship with her now.”
“Surely, Doktor,” she rasped, “you haff more to help us in our hour uff needt zan zese barkain-basement Freudian clichés about muzzer-blamink!”
“Eva,” said Inga, holding up a warning finger, “don’t listen to her. She’s trying to knock your arm away because you’ve got your arrow aimed right at the bull’s-eye.”
Hnossi glowered at her daughter, a look cold enough to freeze sunshine and shatter it on the pavement.
“Ze real proplem for me, Doktor, is ze pain of realizing zat my daughter hass vasted her talents unt her career gallivanting arount in front of ze cameras for nussing uzzer zan fame, fortune, unt scandal, like a golt-luffing little slut—”
Jutting her head forward, Inga scalded out the words: “You mean. Just. Like. Gramma?”
I waited for Hnossi to deny the charge. Instead she maintained the killer frost of her glare.
“My mother, Hnossi Icegaard,” said Inga at last, “is the accidental feminist icon who secretly spent her career trying to keep women out of the F*O*O*J or from climbing the ranks and is maybe the most sexually repressed woman I’ve ever known.”
“Inka! You shut your mouse! You don’t know vut you’re talkink about!”
“And all of it,” said Inga, “because she’s disgusted by her own mother! Did you know her own father left them? She’s spent her whole life looking for a powerful man to pull her wagon. Why do you think she was so devastated when Hawk King died? But then, when whatever man she’d finally tricked into falling in love with her eventually, inevitably turned out not to be strong enough to reach her stratospheric standards—because, I mean, who could ever be as strong as the strongest woman in the world?—she’d crush him like a monk stomping grapes and then go on a bender with the wine. And that’s,” said Inga, “what she did to my dad!”
And so with Hnossi’s eyes spraying liquid nitrogen all over her daughter, Inga-Ilsabetta Icegaard revealed the neurotically distorted prunings of her family tree and hinted at how her mother’s problems with love resulted in a failed marriage, damaged children, and a terrible fate for her daughter that Hnossi did nothing to prevent.
Curdling the Milk of Human Kindness
From the contents of Hnossi’s F*O*O*J personnel file, and from my own observations of her and her daughter’s interaction, a three-dimensional image had begun to emerge: the Hnossi who stood beyond—or lies behind—the iconic warrior-goddess and the type A professor of Military History, Political Economy, and German and Scandinavian Literature.
Clearly, Hnossi Icegaard was a woman who’d been upset about many things for many centuries and was, no doubt, sexually repressed, quite likely in reaction to the extensive coitalambulation of her own mother, for as Inga/Syndi put it, “Gramma Freyja was a major ho.”
Content for millennia to be mistaken as the daughter of the Aesir goddess Frigg, wife of Odin and queen of Aesgard, Hnossi hid her shame at her true genealogy as the daughter to the Vanir goddess Freyja, who was commonly mistaken either for the regal Frigg, or for Idun, keeper of the Apple of Youth. History recorded Hnossi as having only one sister, Gersimi. But according to Inga, “Gramma” Freyja actually had nine hundred and ninety-nine daughters, all of whom she raised on Mount Snafulnir near the “party halls” of Folkvangar and Sessrumnir.
By all accounts, Hnossi’s mother, Freyja, was exceedingly beautiful; but her marriage to the god Odur ended when he “disappeared.” Distraught to the core, Freyja wandered Midgard in despair for him while crying tears of purest gold. Intensely vulnerable, Freyja engaged in tens
of thousands of dalliances with gods, humans, elves, dwarves, giants, and sundry other magickal beings, all the while sinking into the disreputable practice of seidr magic.
Eternal scalawag and Ragnarokian rogue Loki went so far as to accuse Freyja of sleeping with every god in Aesgard, every elf in Alfheim, and even her own brother Freyr; although the trickster deity and storm giant was forced into a retraction and a sealed settlement in Aesgard’s Hall of Judgment, the victory was purely Pyrrhic for Freyja (“her only purity,” quipped Loki famously) since her own actions had already ruined her reputation.
But Freyja was also a goddess of combat and death whose lust for men was equaled only by her lust for war and gold. Possessing a feathered cloak that she used to transform herself into a falcon, and a chariot drawn by two iron cats, Freyja sometimes wandered the Earth at night disguised as a goat, and, when not transporting the souls of the slain to Valhalla, she was adding to her jewelry collection, as when she famously acquired the necklace Brisingamen as payment for sleeping with the four Brising dwarves.
Witnessing this sad, pathetic carnal crusade for love, and embittered by the booty of shame and humiliation she’d amassed as a result, young Hnossi sought recruitment into the sorority of battle-maiden Valkyries, clutching at the hope that by joining an organization she equated with purity, she could escape one aspect of her family history while embracing another.
Historical accounts list Hnossi as an unflinchingly brave warrioress who personally dispatched untold thousands of elves, dwarves, giants, and monsters back to the Niflheim damnation of the nethergoddess Hel; in the modern era, Iron Lass masterminded the Götterdämmerung, conceived its strategy, issued its battle cry, and even wrote its manifesto.
Having broken from what she saw as her own mother’s lack of control, Hnossi Icegaard became the quintessential controller, a strategist supreme of global affairs. But lacking a model for wife-and-motherhood, the control she so desperately wielded could not but cause chaos inside the family she was about to create.
As Inga/Syndi said, Hnossi—perhaps to replace the father whom she never knew and to repair the psychemotional damage caused by the mother she did—pursued extremely strong men. In the twentieth-century she fell in love with and married the human mortal Hector “Qetzalcoatl” El Santo, HKA Strong Man. Five months later, Inga-Ilsabetta El Santo y Icegaard was born, followed two years later in 1964 by younger brother “Lil Boulder” Baldur.
Strong Man was indeed a strong man. Having risen to prominence in the Mexican wrestling circuit, Strong Man claimed to have derived his powers by ingesting the miraculous “Maize of Chac Mol”; his strength increased with every year of his life until he could pick up entire oil tankers with his gloved hands.
But Strong Man’s powers weren’t limited to physical deeds; he invested his profits from wrestling and crimefighting back into Mexico’s wrestling and film industries. Capitalizing upon his own reputation and the putative source of his powers, he invented Corna Cola (which despite its Anglo name became Latin America’s third most popular soft drink), created the Yucataxi Cab Company, bought out the entire Volkswagen manufacturing base in Mexico, and founded the popular fast-food “Milk Chac” chain in the USA.
The union of two such attractive, dashingly heroic figures led to a decade of magazine covers and idolization; the storybook couple of the hyperhominid world was considered the marriage to emulate.
But it was all a sham. Despite the passion of the relationship, by 1974 the milk of loving-kindness had curdled under the heat of acrimony whose causes neither spouse ever revealed. Separating from his wife, Hector El Santo returned to Mexico to raise both his children in a remote Mayan fortress in the Yucatán. From that familial stronghold he rebuffed her ever-increasing attempts at reconciliation and rejected her ever-greater declarations of devotion, devotion that burned far more hotly during separation than it ever had during their togetherness.
Finally, in 1981, after seven years of separation, El Santo filed for divorce.
One month later to the day, Iron Lass declared the Götterdämmerung.
“I always wanted more for myself,” said Syndi, concluding her matriography, “than the barren, angry, cruel life my mother’d hacked out for herself. All she knows, Eva, is how to keep people away, keep people on the wrong end of her swords, how to keep herself cold and hard. Like iron.”
I turned to Hnossi, expecting rage. Instead I saw exhaustion: rust craters dimmed her appearance as if she were fading into a red dusk, the medical webs strewn across her seemingly weighing her down like steel cables.
“Inka,” said Iron Lass, releasing a sigh over thirty full seconds, as if the effort to form the words was a mountain-sized yoke, “grow up.”
Inga glared at the ceiling.
“Alvays it is ze same viss you. Vut do you sink zis vurlt is made uff, hmm? Nussing but canties unt sugar cakes unt parties unt dencing unt booze-soaked sex?”
“Oh, right! Because there certainly were never any parties or drinking or sex in Aesgard!”
“Joy unt luff…zese are illusions, my daughter. If you luff a men he vill alvays hurt you—if you trust a friend she vill stab you in ze guts. Life is hard vurk, drutchery, boredom, exhaustion. At its finest it’s honor unt devotion to higher ideals zan oneself, unt ja, higher even zan one’s family, vhich you could never see! You’re a demigoddess, Inka…You must rise to assume your true status. Beingk in an organization such as ze FOOCH means protecting mortal civilians, but not beingk like zem, not vallovink in zeir veakness unt self-pity unt ridiculous neet for ‘luff’—”
“Like you did?” said Inga. “So why bother devoting your life to protecting people you despise, Mother? Why not just abandon them, like you abandont Daddy and us?”
“I dit not abandon any of you! You all abandoned me, remember?”
“Even when you were with us,” said Inga, “you weren’t!”
The Battle of All Mothers, or, Not F*O*O*J but FOOI: Family of Origin Issues
Throughout their argument, both goddess and demigoddess walked the brink of discussing what I suspected was the trauma that had caused the greatest tragedy between them. For a daughter to side with a father following a parental separation, and then to develop two nested secret identities to sever her connection with her mother, indicated a profoundly violent amputation in the body of mother-daughter connection.
Despite Inga/Syndi’s paradigmatic divergence from her mother, Hnossi raised no objections to the biographical facts recounted by Inga. Nor did she say anything to rebut the charge that she both admired and despised the powerful males she pursued, squeezing from them whatever professionally nutritive juices she could before shoving them into the relationship composter, as her own mother Freyja had done before her and as Syndi would do after.
The sole counterpoint in Hnossi’s behavioral script was her adulation of Hawk King. Because Hnossi’s contempt for men had always become directly proportional to their desire for her, the Egyptian strong man’s unavailability to any woman only magnified Hnossi’s adulation of him, guaranteeing that the elder god’s death would crack valleys into the lowlands of Hnossi’s flattened affect. Arguably, the disruption of her immortal immune system that had led to her terminal condition could have been assigned in part to the psychemotional devastation caused by her true icon’s death.
But Hawk King’s allure for Hnossi went beyond his now permanent unattainability. Hnossi had inherited her mother’s magical feather cloak; while she could not transform herself into a falcon, in her possession the cloak transmuted into giant hawk wings. Hawk King had been famous for his impartiality, wisdom, and strict but compassionate leadership and guidance. His epithet among the supercommunity as simply “the King” spoke to the esteem in which he was held by all.
Unfortunately for Hnossi and her family, even while she’d admired Hawk King’s character, Hnossi had failed to manifest his kindly demeanor. She didn’t deny Inga’s charges that on their rare family “adventure” camping trips to Jotunhei
m and Pacari, Hnossi would become so enraged at her family’s refusal to follow her strict camping protocols (for instance, prohibitions against sleeping late or intrameal snacking) that she would go so far as to throw things at her husband—things such as boulders. Once when Hector failed to have the morning coffee ready at the instant of sunrise, she ripped down a butte and struck him over the head with it, terrifying the children, destroying their chariot and badly denting their iron cats with the resulting rubble.
Mothering had come no easier to Hnossi than had wifing; despite his nickname “Lil Boulder,” her son Baldur possessed neither superstrength nor invulnerability. Instead, much to his father’s delight, he was a brilliant painter and muralist who emitted scented paints from his fingertips as a spider would secrete webbing.
Considered by many to be a prodigy of Diego Riveran proportions, the eight-year-old took it upon himself to paint the entirety of Spectre Valley with a mural depicting the Mayan story of creation and doomsday. Art critics from around the planet flew at once to California to examine “the Work,” as it was called, some hailing it as the greatest single gigantic artwork in human history, not to mention the best smelling. Hnossi disagreed, ordering the boy to scrub off the entire work by hand since he’d painted it without state permission and was facing charges of vandalism, mischief and destruction of a state park. Hector and Hnossi clashed bitterly over the incident, with Hnossi ultimately denouncing “ze undiknified life of an artist” to her former-actor husband before freezing and burning off the mural with her twin swords. The wedge between them crept deeper.
Hnossi’s opinion of her elder child had been even less encouraging. While Inga’s early powers didn’t include hyper-emulation, her singing was hypnotic—literally. But since Iron Lass disliked rival F*O*O*Jster the Siren (the heroine whose 1968 lawsuit forced the Fraternal Order of Justice to change its name to the non-gender-specific “Fantastic”), Hnossi was entirely unsupportive of her daughter having any similar power. Desperate and lacking her mother’s positive reinforcement, young Inga soon began taking advantage of her hypnovocalism, singing to children and adults—especially males—to bend them to her bidding. The only people immune to Inga’s powers were her kin. But her father and brother adored her because of their familial bond, not requiring any sonic manipulation for their experience of love.
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