Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

this period of bereavement-processing, is to connect yourself with the power source of your emotional-intellectual nexus.

“While you’re working, I’ll ask you some questions about what you’re doing and why and how, and then at the end we’ll have some conclusion-and-contemplation work. So, go to it!”

Power Grrrl raised her hand.

“Yes, Syndi?”

“Is there any of André’s baking left from the other day?”

“No, Syndi.”

“Like, could you call him and ask him to bring—”

“Just focus on ze verdammt assignment, Fraulein ‘Grrrl’!”

“What-ever!”

Iconograffiti

Because actual icons—the type held in museums—represent our most esteemed virtues, we might assume they must be constructed exclusively from genuinely precious materials such as marble, gold, or achillium.

But during Europe’s Middle Ages, a thriving trade in faked icons saw horse molars sold as the teeth of Saint Paul, splinters sold as shards of the True Cross, and bear’s hair sold as clippings from the beard of Solomon. Clearly, the composition of an icon is irrelevant to its purpose—that being the focal point for our contemplation.

So if you’re prevented from confronting your own inadequacies because you’re prostrate in front of a golden calf that’s been thrust upon you, or if you’re stuck inside a narcissistic id-loop of worshiping yourself, then right now, put down Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, and take whatever random materials you have in your apartment, headquarters, cavern, or hideout and build an icon of your own.

When you’re done, resume reading the chapter and follow along with my heroes. Write down your own answers to the questions I ask them, and take part in our final exercise. What you discover may put you much closer to freeing yourself from the cold clutches of your own psychic supervillains.

Iconstruction

My team quickly surveyed the room, each seeker securing the materials necessary to build his or her own icon, or in Mr. Piltdown’s case, seizing the resources he thought others might require for their work.

I noticed that the dynamic detective was also depositing pamphlets around the room—red-white-and-blue glossies whose covers featured his own cowled scowl beneath the slogan RE-TURN TO HONOR, PRIDE, & GLORY and above the phrases ELECT FLYING SQUIRREL and DIRECTOR, F*O*O*J OPERATIONS. No one so much as glanced through one, not even Kareem, even though the tract was a direct challenge to him.

But while Mr. Piltdown tried to spark Hnossi’s interest, to his obvious disappointment she was much more concerned with the three-yard-wide broken slab of granite she was hefting from the industrial cast-offs section of the Aesthetics Lab and laying across the floor of her workbay. Syndi had dragged over a mannequin and gone back for armfuls of cloth scraps and cans of spray paint, while Mr. Piltdown began by flipping through a stack of magazines, constantly casting looks over his shoulders (whether from angry suspicion or embarrassment, I’m not sure).

X-Man, however, was standing at his workbay without tools, without materials, without scraps. His eyes were closed, and he remained motionless.

From behind me was a simultaneous rush of frost and heat—Iron Lass had manifested her white and black swords, alternately freezing and melting sections of her vast granite slab before shearing them away.

I noticed Mr. Piltdown had become completely still—not due to gazing at Iron Lass but because he was fixated on the inside of a 1979 issue of Time from which he’d been tearing out images and text.

He stood staring at a full-page photograph of a beautiful, slender-muscled young Asian man in tight green shorts, a tight red leather vest, a short yellow cape, and a shiny black mask with stubby, furry gopher-style ears. His legal name, which had not been revealed when the article was written, was Tran Chi Hanh.

Back then he was known to the world as martial-arts ingenue and Flying Squirrel sidekick Chip Monk, North America’s first Buddhist superhero. And its last.

“You were once his icon,” I said as quietly as I could to Mr. Piltdown. “Before…before he left you.”

He looked down at me, his eyes burning like piles of discarded hospital waste. “That was before he ended up in therapy,” he hissed, “with the likes of you.”

“Looking up to anyone as much as Tran did to you can be very destructive to one’s ego integrity—”

“The word therapist, Miss Brain,” snarled Mr. Piltdown. “You put a space after the third letter, and you get the rapist. Chip fell into therapy, like any street junkie falls into smoking maki. That’s what ruined him, not—”

“I can’t imagine the burden you carry, Mr. Piltdown, of having to be an icon, always having to be perfect, never being able to make a mistake. Because the distance to the pinnacle that people believe you’re perfect, it’s to the same depth they’ll be furious when they inevitably discover you’re not.”

“Tran’s betrayal, Miss Brain,” he said, “wasn’t because of any perceived imperfection on my part. You brain-shredders! Devoting your lives to splitting marriages, ruining families and organizations, digging up depravities that should be repressed and reanimating them in front of a crowd—”

“Perhaps the real problem, Mr. Piltdown, is being someone’s icon within a close relationship. It’s inevitable that worship decays into contempt, because worship is ultimately about being trapped, being a slave.”

“The only slavery I see here, Miss Brain, is your cultish, psychopathologizing claptrap!”

He returned to his Time, tearing the picture of Chip Monk down the middle and glancing at 1979 entertainment coverage of Ragnarok Now!, the Oscar-winning film about superheroes suffering from Post-Power Stress Disorder. “Tran Chi Hanh, the boy I raised as if he were my own son, betrayed me. Betrayed me because of a very sick and very evil little man.”

He turned his burning glare on me, then on everyone else, but no one was looking back. Had they heard him, they all would have instantly understood his reference—to the premier scandal of Reagan-era superheroics.

In 1980, after rumors of an ever-degenerating relationship between the senior hero and his sidekick, Chip Monk resigned at his first, brief, and final press conference.

And then he disappeared for more than four years.

Surfacing in 1985 under his legal name and fresh