Iron Fatigue, or Rust in Pieces?
The finest specialists money could buy scrambled past us in their rubber scrubs, ready for the final stage of the disease. But while the metals of Hnossi’s body were breaking down, deteriorating even faster was the hope for psychemotional reconnection between goddess mother and demigoddess daughter.
“Did you hear that? Did you goddamned hear that?” spat Syndi, again clutching the arc-gash on her face. “Ymir’s sake! Even now, even when she’s dying…I mean, who’s here with her? Not Gramma, not Daddy, not even Baldur—me. I am.”
Crying without trying to hide it, she dragged her sleeve across her entire face except for her burn, smearing her already smeared black makeup across her white features until she became a blurred mime. Short of breath, Festus raced up to us and stopped, glancing toward Hnossi’s room and back to us, his eyes demanding an explanation.
Syndi offered him no comfort. “Even when she’s goddamn dying, Eva…the only person she calls out for is some super-powerful unavailable loser who won’t love her…and who walked away.” She singsonged bitterly, “Sur-fucking-pri-ise!”
For many second-or multigenerational hyperhominids, the ability to achieve self-actualization is hampered by the incapacity of their supposedly heroic and self-sacrificing parents to verbalize self-shame.
All too frequently in my practice, I’ve seen that the reason superheroes neurotically deny their own needs to the point of risking their lives originates in family of origin: the parents who modeled monkish asceticism while forever failing to indulge their children’s basic need to be the recipient of intimacy behaviors and the center of Mommy’s or Daddy’s affection and caretaking ideation. A parent who fails to recognize that a child’s needs are distinct from and supersede her or his own is demonstrating a classic psychesituational signature of narcissism.
Because of the relationship Syndi had had with her mother, Syndi’s relationship with Kareem was a paradox doomed to destruction. Far more than civilians, superheroes desire to change the past, some going so far as neurotically orbiting the planet at hyper-speeds under the delusion that they can reverse the Earth’s direction and thus the flow of time, giving them a second chance—the most hoped-for boon in history.
So when Syndi selected a man whose workaholism, religion, and racial paranoia guaranteed he would be emotionally unavailable, she was assembling in the present a re-creation/ rejection-cipher of her unavailable mother, thus giving her the opportunity to win his (and symbolically Hnossi’s) love and attention. If she failed, she could preemptively reject him, therefore exerting the present-day capacity to deny the love that was denied to her in the past. Even her hedonistic hyper-sexuality/anguished frigidity demonstrated her paradoxical needs to defy and reconnect with her mother, an anti/sexualism whose ironies she could only rationalize/integrate through her HEAT Ray experiment in “self-love.”
While Syndi probably did love Kareem as much as she was capable, her own narcissism amplified her need and destroyed her capacity for genuine self-love (the prerequisite for truly loving others), much as a burst of oxygen will engorge and accelerate the end of a fire.
Toward Resolving Paradoxes, and Paradoxical Solutions
For the first time since I’d met the man, Festus Piltdown III was beginning to look his seventy years.
Slumped against the wall, his cravat uncinched and asymmetrical, the wrinkles in his face suddenly as obvious as those of a suit that had been slept in, it was clear that no dosage of “GI Juice” could forestall his aging process permanently, especially when deeply personal agony was hastening the inevitable approach of his own death.
Inside the sealed suite, specialists tracked their bootprints of vocal mud all over the plush white rug of our silence, while Syndi and Festus waited in medical impotence with wan faces and tears.
The wall comm chimed.
“What is it, Mr. Savant?” said the old man, tabbing the wall.
“Lord Piltdown, I’m terribly sorry for the interruption, but a Mr. Fly is here to see you—terribly important news of some sort, he insists—”
“It’s okay. Send him up.”
Shortly we heard the familiar whine of André’s approach, and then the man himself was flapping down beside Festus, his bright yellow visitor E-tag hanging from his neck, having prevented his incineration by the Squirrel Tree’s DETHscan security system.
“What is it, Parker?” said Festus. “What’s so important you couldn’t simply use the comms?”
“Kareem’s been acting crazy, Festus,” said André, doing a double take at a Syndi Tycho he’d never seen before. And then, bizarrely enough for him, he employed standard American English and the first-person pronoun I. “First I caught him hacking into F*O*O*J personnel files. But then he started cross-referencing everything on Menton with everything on Sarah Bellum, and making the computer correlate all of that with the F*O*O*J’s records on Doctor Brain—”
“On me?” I blurted, stunned by a development I had not foreseen.
“—and he’s been accessing all available Hubble imagery, cosmological records, everything on the Nistan dark matter nebula, downloading everything he could on the molecular physics and pharmacology of argonium,” he said in articulate, almost broadcastable English. “He’s up to something, Festus. Something I don’t like one bit!”
Syndi’s raccoon eyes snapped up onto him. Festus put his massive hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Slow down. What’re you talking about?”
“I think he’s planning some type of terrorist attack,” said André, his eyes wild, his posture bowed as if to confide a state secret. “And he didn’t have time to completely wipe the computer of his work files before he figured out I was on to him. I unerased his notes—he thinks Doctor Brain is actually Menton.”
The words hummed in the air. The three F*O*O*Jsters locked gazes.
Then all their eyes turned on me.
“Well, come on, everyone,” I reminded them, “obviously he’s paranoid. You know that. Right? Remember the whole scandal? Let’s stay focused here—”
At that exact moment Dr. Singh, the specialist team leader, exited Hnossi’s room. “What is it?” demanded Festus.
Remarkably, this middle-aged woman working for one of the most powerful
