“Six positions, plus Chair,” said Kareem, counting them off on his fingers. “Chair, Merry Mac, AKA Mitchell Morgan McDonald, age sixty-three. Retiring. Director of Personnel, the Manipulator, AKA Emory Dogstale, age fifty-nine. Retiring. Director of Finance, the Downsizer, AKA P. Martin Klein, age fifty-eight. Retiring. Director of Operations, Colonel Strom Flintlock, age one hundred seventy-three. Retiring.
“That’s the old guard. They’re gone.
“But there’s a new crew up in this election, Festus. Gagarina Girl’s vying for D-Personnel against your girl, Major Ursa, I believe—”
Festus spluttered. Kareem breezed on.
“—and she’s got a better chance than does Earnest Beaver. Dynamiss is going to take on your boy Dow-Man for D-Finance—”
“Neither of those nattering neophytes stands a chance against Team Squirrel!”
“Be that as it may,” said Kareem, smirking, “three positions aren’t up for election this round. The Spectacle’s D-Investigation, age forty-three. Periodic Man’s D-R&D. He’s forty. Shockra’s D-External Affairs. She’s thirty-six. That’s a young bunch, Festy. Digital Age heroes looking for change, looking to deal a better hand than they were dealt. And even if neither Gagarina Girl nor Dynamiss wins, the three incumbents plus me’d make a majority on the F*L*A*C. Wouldn’t even need the Chair to break ties. You and the rest of the old mother F*L*A*Ccers’re history, Squirrel!”
Iron Lass: “Kareem! Langvicht!”
Everyone quivered in their chairs anxiously, clasping their hands about their ears in anticipation of my blowing the Mind Whistle™ either at Kareem’s epithet or to circumvent the inevitable Flying Squirrel retaliation.
But apparently retaliation was not inevitable. Festus simply sat silently staring at Kareem, hurling neither invective nor his chair. Instead, he methodically bent and tore the logogenic Elect X-Man pamphlet into a primitive origami squirrel.
Dissecting the Flying Squirrel
Festus,” I probed, seizing the moment, “shredding that tract isn’t helping you to focus your psychemotional microscope upon the slide of your pain. What, precisely, do you feel—you personally—right now?”
“What do I ‘feel’?” he sneered. He tore at the remains again, erecting two snubby ears on the paper squirrel’s head. “Did you actually ask me what I ‘feel’? I ‘feel’ I’m surrounded by morons!”
“Festus,” I said, tapping my whistle. He grimaced and shoved his palms against his eyes, rubbing hard enough to make me wince. “I’m asking not for your assessment of the rest of the group, but of your psychemotional state. Try using an ‘I-statement.’ ”
“An ‘I-statement’?” he snorted. “If I use an ‘I-statement’ you’re just going to sic that goddamned dominatrix whistle of yours on me!”
“No, I’m giving you permission, because right now we’re not in a free-for-all. You have the floor.”
Festus glared. Grunted. Glowered.
Finally: “I feel frustrated. There. Have I satiated you?”
“That’s good, Festus. Talk about that.”
“It’s good I’m frustrated?” he said. I raised an eyebrow at his playing dumb.
“I feel frustrated,” he begrudged, “because I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this organization, tending to it like a Shinto priest to a desktop grove of bonsai, cherishing it, protecting it…and now that I’ve arrived at the correct time, the appointed time, the right time for me to lead it…a—a goddamned dilettante lindy-hops his way in here with lies about a Hawk King endorsement and a sense of entitlement bigger than his Afro and acts as if he has a right to lead. I feel nobody has the ‘right’ to lead. You earn that goddamned right by investing decades of service—not milliseconds of presumption—earning interest and building capital of public confidence, collegial respect, and heroic loyalty, which I was intending to reinvest right now, in the traditions of our noble fraternity originally enacted by Hawk King.”
Wally returned from the rest room. Perhaps because of the anxiety level in the Verbalarium, the air seemed almost to tingle. “Excellent, Festus,” I reinforced. “You’ve done a fine job of—”
“I’m not done, Miss Brain. Bad enough to have our election turned into a midway freak show, but since the end of the Götterdämmerung to have to bear witness every day to what the slugs in the slime-trailing liberal media are saying about us—”
“Bor-ing,” said Syndi. She got out of her chair, turned on her hip-speakers to the thump-whumping tune of her spring Top 40 hit “Boom! I Hit It Again,” and, activating her Power Pumps, began high-speed rocket-skating/dancing around the room.
Festus: “Turn that goddamned jungle music off and sit down!”
Wagging my whistle, I warned Syndi to return to her chair, but I was reluctant to risk the whistle’s overuse because my patients might habituate to its stimulus. Wally, snapping his fingers, conceded that he found the tune “kinda ketchy, though a mite Jezebellish.” I asked Festus to continue, but more loudly.
“—I feel humiliated!” he seethed above the bass line and drum snares, “violated because the papa-goddamn-razzi are trailing around a bunch of teenybopping costumed incompetents who’re here because our F*L*A*C insists we have to change our image ‘to suit the times,’ forcing us to incorporate mattress-back pop tarts who’re here because they want to be famous, not because they know or care one whit about protecting people or national security or what it means to have fought a war every day for the last forty-five goddamned years of your career while they’re flitting away their mayfly existences preening and prancing around and having their highly publicized perverted little ‘sexcapades’ and publicly dragging the name of this organization through a urinal, making a mockery out of what real heroes—men like Hawk King, women like Iron Lass—have sacrificed!
“I,” he shouted, gripping his chair by the arms so hard his glide-flaps and whiskers shook, “feel furious!”
Stages of Grief: Lust for Vengeance
Festus Piltdown III panted, grimaced, blinked—I couldn’t tell whether from exhaustion or embarrassment. Finally, after regaining his breath, he said simply, “That’s it.”
“Don’t hold back, Squirrelly,” yelled a voice from the ceiling. “You might still have some spleen or pancreas left up in there to spit up—”
“André, please. Let’s positively reinforce Festus’s commendable first foray into self-revelation.”
“And that’s another thing, Miss Brain,” said the Flying Squirrel. “In my day, people
