The two men were now so close that they were stumbling and tripping to stay just out of grasping range, each one trying to fake out the other—or attack.
“So what did Hawk King order you to do?” said Kareem. “Shut down the portal in forty-eight hours or he’d shut it down himself? But hey! The F*O*O*J was collapsing, right? Letting in darkies, letting in gays, just before its most important election ever…Plus, you couldn’t just stand by and let a little thing like global peace threaten the multibillion-dollar Pilt-Dyne defense contracts supplying the F*O*O*J, could you?
“So you needed something, something big, an interdimensional Pearl Harbor, to justify a new Götterdämmerung. A permanent one! With sweeping new powers for the F*O*O*J and for yourself, with you as Director of Operations! That’s what Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid were trying to warn me about, only they were so fuckin cracked they could hardly string a coherent sentence together! And so what if a few thousand people’d die? I mean, they’d die anyway someday, right? And it’s a small price to pay for Piltdown!
“But I’m gonna shut down this portal, Festus, if I have to use your skull like a fucking hammer to do it!”
Finally finding the right combination of buttons, I patched through on the speakerphone of the Brotherfly’s belt.
“Kareem—please! You need help! Let me help you!”
“Doc? What the hell are you—”
The Squirrel leapt on him, and the two men smashed each other against the walls, the machinery, the floor. The large man rolled on top of Kareem, punching him and ramming his head into the floor. And then the collar snapped open and fell off the younger man’s neck.
Kareem yelled, “GIANT FIST!”
A black fist the size of a tank arced down from the ceiling, smashing through the portal and destroying it, shearing through the floor and ripping open a huge hole in the wall extending to the level below and revealing the dark emptiness beyond. Ruptured by the impact, the metal floor buckled into an impromptu slide, and the two men, locked in each other’s arms, shot outside into a 150-story plunge.
Exterior cameras caught strobing images of their descent:
145th floor: two bodies—
130th floor: tumbling feet-over-head in darkness—
105th floor: X-Man punching Festus—
70th floor: Festus doing nothing but gripping Kareem’s mouth shut—
25th floor: And a streak of light and one body still falling—
And a sonic boom that erased the impact.
Reintegration
An hour later I was at the base of the Tachyon Tower in the hot darkness and the glare of emergency vehicle flashers and television cameras, watching three injured but still-standing members of the F*O*O*J issue their statement to soothe a concerned country and a worried world.
“…and thanks to the superior strategic and defensive capacity of this organization,” said Festus Piltdown III, scratched and scarred but no longer bleeding, “once again, the F*O*O*J has saved America from the threat of supervillainy…a sleeper agent who was among us for years, part of a diabolical plot to infiltrate the highest levels of F*O*O*J authority. A sleeper working for a previously unknown network of new supervillains, stretching across the planet…and right here in the homes of America—”
Festus broke off in midinspiration, visibly angry at the sight of a swaying Omnipotent Man (his face still tinted blue) who was alternating between flashing “thumbs up” and “double guns” toward the cameras. Covering the microphones, he leaned away from the podium and growled something to Hnossi, who steadied Wally.
Leaning back to the microphone, Festus said, “Understandably, we’re all exhausted. But our exhaustion, our injuries, even the sacrifice of our fellow F*O*O*Jsters and other brothers-in-capes who perished tonight…this is a small price to pay for preserving the liberty of our great nation, the greatest nation on this planet. Thank you.
“No questions.”
EPILOGUE
Be a Phoenix, Not a Dodo
The Prize of Victory
As you have seen throughout Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, the struggle to achieve psychemotional wellness is far from hopeless. If you can muster all the members of your internal superteam and rally under the strategic command of the methods outlined in these pages, victory can indeed be yours.
You have learned that the vulnerability you experience in the face of the greatest threats in your life originates in your own self-defeating behaviors. You have seen how your worst suffering originates inside your refusal to accept inevitable defeats. But when you choose to embrace such defeats, you will achieve prizes that no villain, external or internal, can ever wrench from your gloved and mighty hands: the shield of clarity and the sword of acceptance.
Avoiding Extinction When the Food Supply Ends
As a superhero, you dared to devote your life to saving others. As a reader of this book who has borne witness to the case studies within it, you have come to see that the reward for superheroic public service is usually nothing more than public adulation.
So when, as all things must, that adulation disappears, you come to see that the far greater daring is in the effort to save yourself. However, if the world has changed around you, you may find yourself without an environment that can support you. If so, and if you fail to examine your psychemotional circumstances, you may go the way of the dodo.
Buy mythology teaches that even if you face total burnout, you can still be a phoenix.
Since the end of the Götterdämmerung, the heroes who have been entrusted into my care have come to me in two types, as distinguished by their attitudes: dodos and phoenixes. The dodos could not adapt to the new, exterior demands of a dynamically changing world and the intrinsic reorientation required to exist in that world, and therefore their own refusal to change led them to their ends.
But even those who were terrified by change, who nonetheless found the courage to seek psychic safety
