Minister Faust (21 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside

TUESDAY, JULY 4, 5:27 A.M.

Mirror, Mirror, Above Them All

T
o know one’s enemy,” wrote Iron Lass many years ago
in
Toward a Practical Götterdammerung,
“is to know oneself.”

To test that theorem, I gathered my patients together to voyage into that inferno of foes, Asteroid Zed. And indeed, since in space as in psychotherapy, there is no true up or down (only centeredness and dissociation), it is just as legitimate to say that we
descended
that morning into orbit, because in a relative universe, any place on our planet can be the bottom of the Earth.

Rising (or falling) inside the StarCase™ Space Elevator at sunrise, we slipped the surly bonds of Earth to dance the skies on laughter-silvered carbon nanotube Herculon™ filaments. I was struck how at that altitude even the titanic Tachyon Tower was shrunken into little more than a pepper shaker and how the gridwork of Los Ditkos’s streets was reduced to an Eggo waffle. From there in that high, untrespassed sanctity of near-space, it seemed impossible that down inside the city’s golden pockets, the cholesterol-laden butter of dysfunction and the sweetly seductive syrup of neurosis were drowning citizens in a chaos of psychemotional condiments.

But in leaving behind our big blue marble of childhood, we were venturing toward a far more dangerous zone wherein we all were to put out our hands to touch the face of madness.

Everyone in the group was upset about our trip and its timing. Two hours before dawn I illuminated the Psych Signal above my Mount Palomax laboratory to draw forth my team. Each member complained bitterly upon arrival—Iron Lass argued that our mythopoeic journey was not to a psychic Underworld but to a technological overworld; Power Grrrl repeated
ad nauseam
(and with many expletives) that she didn’t appreciate being ripped away from a warm and triply occupied bed; the Brotherfly, apparently under the influence of some substance(s), issued a slang-soaked diatribe against mornings in general (“André don’t do
A
.
M
.s, knawm sayn?”); and the Flying Squirrel railed against using a vehicle from the rival StarCase™ Corporation to achieve orbit when either his Squirrel Shuttle or an Allosaurus-Class rocket from Piltdown Dynamics would have been faster (if more ecocidal).

The team’s verbal complaints camouflaged the true animal of their anxiety. Obviously nothing upset each teammate so much as the prospect of facing the sociopathic sadists—including former friends—who had hunted, haunted, and attempted to slaughter them.

But sanity is a demanding master, and it insists we seize our traumatic experiences so as to integrate them into our daily consciousness, where their psychic “charge” can be grounded and thus neutralized.

Of course, one doesn’t have to be a therapist to deduce from my patients’ repetitive gestures, scowls, and agitated body language that morale inside the Space Elevator had become a quicksand of terror swallowing them whole, especially at the thought of standing in a room to breathe the air exhaled by Menton the Destroyer.

Strapped in next to the only F*O*O*Jster who wasn’t complaining, I observed Kareem preparing for his imminent encounter with former F*O*O*J friends and foes. He was
literally
absorbing the text from hundreds of hard-copy pages, holding his right hand over an open book and “scanning.” The letters flew off the page in a black stream, only to replant themselves in place. According to his file, he called this process
medu gi-orema,
or “word-eating.” He was absorbing one page approximately every ten seconds.

Interrupting his studies, I gently warned Kareem that if he were still intent on interviewing the Destroyer, he’d have to save that villain for last and keep his interrogation as brief as possible to minimize Menton’s ability to unleash his mental horror-hold.

“It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure that out, Doc,” whispered Kareem. He flashed me a smile, but it was a warning. “Howzabout this: You don’t tell me how to conduct an investigation, and I won’t tell you how to head-shrink?”

I reminded Kareem that he had, in fact, told me numerous times how to “head-shrink.”

He smiled brittlely, but I sensed it was less from anger than from anxiety. “I guess I hafta write you a check made out to ‘touché’.”

He folded up his papers and flicked on a satellite monitor, flipping feeds until he found a Pacifica station running a program called
Democracy Now!
It was the tail end of an archived interview with a black, wheelchair-bound cosmologist and archeologist named Dr. Jackson Rogers, discussing the relevance of ancient Egyptian astronomy to recent telescopic discoveries in the galaxy. He looked like an old, withered version of calypso singer Harry Belafonte or TV’s Sherman Hemsley.

The archived segment ended, and the screen then switched to a female anchor and a bespectacled, gap-toothed African American guest in a too-tight suit and a long, untamed, graying Afro.

Host:
So what do you think, Professor West? Could Dr. Rogers actually have been a secret identity for Hawk King?

Guest:
I think, Amy…the
possiBIL-i-ty
that he could have.
Been.
The incredi-ble Hawk.
King.
And the-resultingdichotomous- reactions-of-the-American-people-and-the-backlash- against-Brother-X-Man- raises-some-important
QUES
-tio-o-ons… Amy…Questions. About the fundamental re-FU-sal of certain segments in our soc-
I
-e-ty…to ac-KNOW-ledge…the-inherent-capacity-of- African-American- people-living-under-white-supr—

The feed clicked to another channel on its own. When Kareem spied Mr. Piltdown clicking the controls on his glove, an argument erupted that only intensified when X-Man and the Squirrel overheard the panelists on the next news station. Those panelists were discussing how, following the loss of two F*O*O*J icons, X-Man had become the vanguard of the new hero generation, deriving legitimacy from his Hawk King connection and credibility from his forward vision; these same panelists dismissed Festus Piltdown III as “yesterday’s man.”

At that point Mr. Piltdown shut off the satellite feed completely and launched an invective against affirmative action in general and the L*A*B in particular (citing its lost HUD security contract), finally referring to the L*A*B as the Lout-house of Australopithecene Bastards. Only seconds into Kareem’s rebuttal, Iron Lass threatened to depressurize the compartment and kill everyone unless the bickering stopped. Mr. Piltdown dropped his voice, muttering about my alleged breach of professional ethics by “coercing” them into an imminent reunion with their murderous ex-nemeses.

For me, Mr. Piltdown remained a fascinating figure, an omelet of a man, rife with the green onions of bitterness yet held together by the tangy Velveeta of integrity. Despite the Squirrel’s cantankerous persona, in the wake of Hawk King’s death and Wally’s resignation, much of the F*O*O*J had coalesced around Mr. Piltdown’s inspirational words (if not presence). In general Mr. Piltdown seemed fearless. Yet he, perhaps more than any of the group, appeared horrified at the prospect of setting foot on the prison planetoid.

Then we all saw it through the window, a few dozen miles away, little more than a black space blotting out stars. As we rotated slowly around it, we beheld its sunlit face, and it seemed to me that the silvery steel facility planted upon the dark rock resembled a Zippo lighter stuck into a soot-encrusted skull.

Asteroid Zed.

Our elevator
thunk
ed into the “top floor” Space Elevator terminal, and we unstrapped ourselves, cycled through the airlock, and floated through the station to board the Space Bee transport over to Asteroid Zed.

As I gazed back, the StarCase™ glinted in the darkness like a child’s tin can telephone, taut on its string. If anything were to go wrong, if the Destroyer were still the menace Kareem feared him to be, if he were indeed free of his mental restraints only to have assumed dictatorship over the asylum, then that tin can telephone would have transmitted our final conversation to our lost home and life itself.

The Legacy of Mental DisEase

A
steroid Zed had hardly changed since I first visited it in the early 1980s: a cold, gleaming, white-walled and steel-barred environment, sickly with the stench of boiled cabbage and baking soda. Walking its tiers, one had the impression of being entombed inside a giant refrigerator.

The prison’s very existence was a layer cake of irony, iced with the stale frosting of our society’s failures. An emblem of the triumph of superheroism in the Götterdämmerung, the Asteroid was originally conceived, designed, and constructed in 1971 by none other than Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid. Fourteen years later, those two champions would find themselves interred in their own creation after the F*O*O*J foiled their conspiracy to blow up the Fortress of Freedom and murder all the heroes inside it. Asteroid Zed, refitted in 1985 by Piltdown Dynamics to prevent an escape by its own designers, would soon house countless villains who’d once fought against Gamoid and the Kid.

Our guide through the tiers of the technological Tartarus was Warden Dr. Rudy Wells. On our way through the various holding units, Warden Wells pointed out to us the many prisoners put there by my own patients. In the Fish & Reptile Villains Unit were Codzilla, Monitor Lizard, Black Mamba, and Nemesaur, all captured by Iron Lass; in the Technovillains Unit were MicroCrip and his Nanogangstas and Robot-Stalin, defeated by the Flying Squirrel, as were incarcerees of the Crime Lord Villains Unit such as Pauli the Living Mafia and Tong Triad and the Iron Eunuch. Biovillains such as the Desiccator, the Devolver, and Zee-Roks the Imitator required special containment, Wells explained, which was why they were kept in Unit X on the other side of the asteroid, so as to minimize contamination of the orbital biocosm.

The only unit no one ever saw, of course, was the one that was invisible to the eye, the Metaphysical Villains Unit. The MVU was an upper-string-dimensional confinement zone at a right angle to our reality, specially designed by Hawk King himself for nemeses such as the Infinity Farmer and his Time Tractor. Technically, we were walking through it at the very moment its existence was being explained to us—but then again, we were always walking through it, and we never were, as it was everywhere and nowhere.

I had no idea if the F*O*O*Jsters were pondering that intersection of physics, philosophy, and psychopathology, but it was clear that walking the ultra-bright corridors between cell rows of such monsters was exacting a psychic toll on my team. Iron Lass projected a gaze even colder than usual, surrounded as she was by the prisoners of the war she’d declared and led; Power Grrrl had resisted turning on the speakers of the most somber bustier I’d ever seen her wear; glowering at every cell door we passed; the Brotherfly flicked his gaze flylike from cell to cell, seemingly scanning everywhere for either spiderwebs or Venus flytraps (understandable, given that Spiderbyte and Venus the FlyTrap were both incarcerated there), as if he feared he’d be dragged inside a cell and ripped apart, antenna from antenna; X-Man’s jaw was clamped tightly enough that I could see his mandibular muscles bulging up along the height of his skull and disappearing into his short hair. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were rendered beige.

But no one looked more agitated than the Flying Squirrel, who was gunfighter-flexing his fingers beside his utility pouches, as if expecting to unleash any of his numerous high-tech weapons at a moment’s notice. Combined with the sweat glistening on his upper lip, he resembled no one so much as Humphrey Bogart’s immortal Captain Queeg, quivering with increasing paranoia at every second.

“Should’ve just put down the lot of them,” snapped Mr. Piltdown, cutting off Warden Wells in midlecture. “Would’ve, too, if not for the goddamned shyster queers in the ACLU. At any rate, Wells, other than by using the Psionic Impotence Helmets, how’re you keeping these hyper-freaks from staging a coup on this hell-rock?”

“Well, Mr. Squirrel, sir,” said Wells, anxiously huffing steam onto his spectacles and cleaning them with his tie, “the Psionic Inhibition Helmets do their job on all the most, well, dis
turbed
cases, especially the psychics. But intensive use of psychoceuticals, mostly from Piltdown-Sorus-RX, keeps the bulk of our patients from hurting others. Or themselves.”

“Mighty nice racket for Pilty, Wells,” said Kareem, just as we entered the Political Villains Unit and glimpsed the Leninoids and the Eiffel Terrorists through the door monitors. “Piltdown-Sorus-RX created half this villain epidemic in the first place when it invented Nouitol—like we
needed
a cross between LSD and thalidomide—”

“Shut your crack-hole, Edgerton, when you don’t know the first thing about what you’re braying about—”

“Your company made the damn drug that got half these fruit bats addicted, mutated, and mind-smacked in the first place, Fasces—”

“So blame the goddamned FDA, not my company! If that gaggle of pink-eyed Poindexters can’t conduct a simple double-blind study—”

“—not when you’ve got a thousand lawyers and lobbyists hammering them and the kot-tam administration to fast-track all your junk into the veins of old folks and babies—”

“Mr. X-Man,” attempted Dr. Wells, “while it’s true that Nouitol can induce intense feelings of entitlement, superiority, megalomania, and homicidal rage, it can also push the very limits of mental acuity in otherwise limited intellects—”