“Why are you choosing to think I was trying to shame you?”
“You, you just—you vere just tryink to somehow make me feel ashamedt uff my ferric powers! Vich I’ve been using for centuries in your vurlt, savink people like you, people who caun’t take care of zemselfs!”
“So you admit that you did try to shame me as retaliation for what you perceived as me shaming you, and you just attempted to shame me again by saying people like me can’t take care of themselves.”
The firestorm emitted what can only described as a confused light, diminishing into vast, belching fields of smoke which I waved away with my hands. Hnossi removed her mandarin-collared powder blue cardigan, and from her back her wings emerged in a burst of snow and black ash. Standing, she flapped her vast black falcon wings to clear our air.
“So in which ways, do you think,” I said, coughing, “has this belief of yours that two wrongs make a right led to professional or personal problems for you?”
She sat agape, finally squeaking out, “I caun’t belief your shoddy, scattershot, disjointed—you’re not even listeningk to me! I don’t haff any professional or pursonal proplems!”
“Not even denial?”
“So if I defendt myself against untrue accusations, I’m in denial?”
“You’re divorced—”
An image of her ex-husband, the Mexican superhero Strong Man, in his cape, mask, and wrestling tunic, glimmered behind her. He smiled broadly. “Yes I am, as are about a hundred million uzzer vimmen viss soughtless husbands in ziss country—”
“You’ve been sent to therapy with me—”
An array of caricatures—dwarfish versions of the F*L*A*C officers—sprouted from the “floor” like toadstools. “Because an assembly of scaredt, jealous, foolish, myopic untermenschen on ze F*L*A*C is afraid of vut I represent unt how tiny zey feel ven zey’re forced to evaluate zeir own lifes in comparison to—”
“You’re estranged from your children, Hnossi.”
Her mouth stopped. Shut.
A wall of hewn stone appeared behind her, soaring back left, right, and upward, and with a thunder-smack concluded its construction as an impenetrable fortress.
From behind narrowed eyes, she said, “You don’t know ennysing about my children.”
“Tell me.”
“I come from a culture, a generation, zat said private matters are private. Unt ve do not discuss our problems viss just vutever professional gossip-junkie happens to troll ze back alleys looking to…to score.”
“But you just said you didn’t have any personal problems.”
Her eyes snapped open, her lips opening for a breath. But if she had a sentence waiting to fly, she never surrendered its passport. By then, Hnossi Icegaard was beginning to see that neither my office nor the Id-Smasher® permitted the use of denial as an avoidance technique.
“Prove me wrong,” I said. “If you don’t have any personal problems, then tell me about your children, why your emotional-memory center has metaphored a psychic fortress around any image of them, and why your not seeing them doesn’t indicate or constitute a problem.”
“Ve’re not estrangedt! Ve see each uzzer all ze time!”
“When was the last time you had a meal together? Actual family time, sitting around the table for roasted wild boar, tankards of Jotun ale, recitations from the Poetic Edda?”
“Please spare me your painfully passetic attempts at cultural sensitivity, Doktor.”
“So. When was it? The last time?”
She looked to her left, looking “east,” and the glittering Bifrost rainbow bridge raced up toward the mountain rising from the black plains of memory. At its peak glittered into existence the silver and golden meadhalls of Aesgard.
I ignored her attempt to hide in her “happy place.”
“Married to, let’s see,” I said, clicking a projection of my IRON LASS file after Hnossi’s prolonged refusal to speak, “married May 1962 to Hector ‘Qetzalcoatl’ El Santo, HKA Strong Man.” The life-size smiling image of the caped-and-tunicked hero and Mexican screen idol reappeared beside Hnossi. She moved closer to it as if automatically, then forced herself to step back and look away.
“Two children: Inga-Ilsabetta, born October 1962, and Baldur, nicknamed Lil Boulder, born June 1964.”
A tall girl and a shorter boy, both dark-haired, appeared at Strong Man’s hips. Both looked up toward their father with the power of the sun in their smiles.
“Separated from El Santo, 1974; children chose to live with their father. El Santo eventually filed for divorce in 1981.”
The family triad diminished into blackness and disappeared. I paused, looking at the woman staring at the fading footprints of shadows.
“Later that year, you drafted a paper entitled Toward a Practical Götterdämmerung: A Logistical Analysis, ghost-rewritten and repackaged to the public as the paperback bestseller Time to Ragnarok! It became the clarion call that initiated the War.”
I glanced away from my file projection to see Iron Lass’s eyes attempting to carve me into individual slices of luncheon meat.
“The same year your husband tells you that your marriage is truly finished, you, essentially single-handedly, declare a global war that changes the planet. A war whose logistics you chart. A war you lead to victory.”
“Ziss is absurdt,” she said, her left hand glowing white, her right hand shadowing into black. “Vut ridiculous, patronizing, reductionist nonsense, to claim an entire geopolitical hyperhominid conflict can be explainedt avay as merely a vuman scornt?”
“To go from leading your fellow Valkyries into battle for centuries, being literally worshiped as a deity of iron—to opening yourself up to simple, mortal love, meaning you’d’ve had to’ve made yourself soft and pliant and vulnerable to humans, bearing children for a mortal man, even…and then after all of that, to be rejected? That’s iconoclasm, Hnossi! The shattering of an icon…you!
“So rather than being ‘patronizing’ or ‘reductionist,’ I’m trying to get you to integrate everything you’ve gone through into a postwar logistical analysis of yourself.”
Her eyes, aflame, dimmed; her body, rigid, melted by a degree. Her hands resumed their normal state, no swords having appeared in them.
“My muzzer,” she finally muttered, “alvays saidt to me, she saidt, ‘Brünhilde, you’re too smart by half.’ ” She lowered her voice further. “She never remembert my name.”
What will
