Ask yourself: while donning the cape and tights may have seemed to you to have been about helping others, was it really all along about helping yourself? Were you actually connecting in your heart and mind the applause of the crowd with Daddy throwing you in the air and saying “Attaboy!” and Mommy nuzzling you to her chest and telling you that you’ll always be her “bestest widdle girl”?
Now that the world has gone quiet around you, you have the time to face the ultrafoe who’s been stalking you all along: your fear of being forgotten, unloved, and alone.
Don’t back off from the challenge. Don’t surrender. In the jungle of your unfolding developmental path, don’t let yourself sink beneath the psychemotional quicksand of alcohol, drugs, cybendorphins, serial sexual conquests (or surrenders), or cryptosuicidal reckless adventurism. You need to capture the destructive nemesis known as Dr. Despair, because he’s holding in his cold cobalt claws the two powers you’ve always truly needed but never known how to attain: self-awareness and, through it, self-actualization.
CHAPTER TEN
The Battle of All Mothers, the Mother of All Battles
SUNDAY, JULY 16, 10:00 A.M.
Yearning for Détente on the Eve of War
It was a Sunday morning. And quiet. A family reunion in the hospital.
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
