“Hnossi, please! Inga—all these years desperately craving attention, pursuing show business, and reinventing yourself and even manufacturing scandals to guarantee the attention your mother denied you and that you equated with love. Always being the one to end relationships first. All of it to ensure you would never be rejected and that instead you would be the one doing the rejecting. What’s the ultimate way to ensure that?”
I looked at both women. Neither would look at me.
“Ladies, please,” I said. “The signs are all there, as giant and unavoidable as sky-writing. Will one of you please verbalize what happened to you and your family after you, Inga, at the tender age of twelve, attempted suicide?”
Discovering—and
Healing
—the Scared Little Goddess Inside You
D
espite the younger Icegaard’s propensity for blaming her problems on her mother, the suicide attempt was the sole damage zone even she had feared to retread, perhaps because once she began, there was no going back. If the “answers” her terminal mother gave her were insufficient, she would forever be denied her sole chance to heal, even the opportunity to wonder “what if?”
Recounting her years in and out of therapy, Inga/Syndi parabolically approached the issue of her preteen attempt at self-murder.
“For years, I thought I’d done it because maybe I’d been abused,” she said. “I had all these recovered memories from my other therapists…memories of Mother…beating me. Cutting me with her swords, cutting my limbs off and magically re-attaching them so the police wouldn’t suspect anything.
“But then I had this one therapist, and he said I should talk with Daddy and Baldur about it, and, and…well,
now
I know it was just the therapists screwing with my head, planting these ideas in my mind. But I’ve always had this problem with, you know, depression? And I used to cut myself, throw myself off of buildings and cliffs and things, burn myself, try to hurt myself…My therapist said it was Munchausen syndrome. Said I was trying to get Mother to rescue me.”
She smiled coldly, then reduced her expression to a corpse’s repose.
“It didn’t work,” she concluded.
Of all memories, “recovered” ones are the most unreliable. According to Dr. Steve N. Strainge, the psychiatrist whose testimony interred Dr. Napoleon Orator on Asteroid Zed, Menton’s career of manipulation began before even he realized he had such powers. For years during the therapy sessions he led, he had been implanting false memories of trauma in his patients, after which he was paid to supply expert testimony at trial for clients suing their former baby-sitters, coaches, pastors, teachers, siblings, parents, deliverymen, meter men, and aldermen.
But since Inga had successfully detached from her therapist-implanted pseudomemories, there was hope for her eventual recovery, even if we then had to descend deeper into the swamps of her dysfunctionally agonized adolescence.
I asked her to tell me what had precipitated her attempt.
“Mother,” said Inga, “was out. Again. Always on some mission. She and Daddy’d been fighting for what must’ve been two days straight, and this was after two years of a downhill shit-slide with them. I mean, it was both of them, yeah, but it was her fault.
“So Daddy, he couldn’t take it anymore, said he was going out and she was screaming at him and telling him that if he goes out now he shouldn’t even think about coming back and he just said, ‘Fine, maybe I won’t,’ and he rushed back in and packed a suitcase and I was trying to hold on to him and drag him back but he was almost as strong as Wally, and I was crying and begging him, ‘Don’t leave, Daddy, please don’t leave!’ and I was terrified,
terrified
that she’d finally driven him away and that I wouldn’t ever see him again—”
“Ziss is outrageous!” said Hnossi, her red-gray pockmarks glowing like campfire coals. “Zat’s not how it happent at all! She vuss a childt! She doesn’t remember how it happent—”
“Hnossi, please,” I said, forming my hands into a time-out
T.
“We all have our own truths—”
“
Ach,
vut sheisen you peddle!”
“Please don’t interrupt. You’ll have your turn. Inga, go on.”
“And so Daddy’s gone and I’m on the floor sobbing, and like, two seconds go by and then her comm goes off, for Ymir’s sake, and then she’s all, ‘I’ve gotta go fight the Gorgon Legion or some ice giants or whatever and you’re in charge of your little brother until I get back’ and
boom
—she’s gone, just like that!
“So she’s gone and Daddy’s gone and Baldur and I are alone all night and all the next day and for the next two fucking days and nights after that,” said Inga, plucking at her tight black long-sleeved shirt as if she were rehearsing ripping the skin and flesh from her skeleton. “I was twelve, Mother! Twelve!”
“You vere a bik girl, you vere oldt enough—people were goingk to be killt unless—”
“Unless
you personally
went and did your heroine-thing because it’s not like you ever said no even though there were a hundred other F*O*O*Jsters who could’ve—”
“None viss my powers, experience, knowletch—”
“Sure, right, because it’s all about proving how you’re the toughest bitch who ever lived, that you don’t need anyone and no one’s better than you and that you have no weaknesses, not even a husband who couldn’t take your shit anymore so he left you or two scared little kids you abandoned at home that you could never wait to escape at the very first buzz on your wrist—”
“People neetet me! How can you not unterstant zat?”
“We needed you, Mother!”
screamed Inga, sobbing. “
I
needed you!”
I cut in: “So what did you do, Inga?”
“I was so tired…of being scared. And lonely. And then all of a sudden I just felt this, this
surge
of power, of bravery, like nothing I’d ever felt before. Totally, one hundred percent determined—the ‘will to power,’ Mother always called it—like I was drunk or stoned or on fire. I knew where Mother kept all her magical implements, the stuff we were never supposed to go near, and I knew the spell to open the lock. I took
Jörmungandrstooth,
this
seidr
blade she had at the bottom…and I invoked the name of Ymir…and then I, I just—”
Her lips shut. Her eyes shut. She mimed a fast motion over her wrist, eight times in total.
Her eyes opened, ablaze from reliving her truth. “And then my soul was ripped out of me,” she said, “and sucked right down into the depths of Niflheim and into the hands of Hel.”
And Hnossi, despite her reputation for never crying, who only two weeks before had sat across from me at Soup ’n’ Heroes crying iron-ingot tears, sat upright in her hospital bed, seeping not liquid metal, but tears of pale, ordinary water.
“I came home,” said Hnossi in a weakened voice, then, shattering, “as soon as Odin’s ravens fount me, tolt me vut you’t done to yourself. I fought my vay srough ze ice hordes of Niflheim unt zen against Hel herself to get you beck! Do you not remember ziss? I risked my life to safe you—”
“And what did you do the very next morning after you brought me back,
Mother
?” said Inga with sufficient acid to burn her mother’s swords.
Silenced, Hnossi simply stared at her daughter with perfect vulnerability, that of the accused who’d just surrendered checkmate evidence to the tribunal, and who’d glimpsed the approach of the executioner.
“You went back to work,” said Inga, her smile awful and vicious with irony. “You spent nine days in the netherworlds slicing the icicles off frost giants, but for your weak, stupid daughter who tried to kill herself out of loneliness, you could not sit for one lousy fucking day.
“After almost losing me forever,
you went back to work.
”
Inga waited for her mother to speak.
Finally: “Nothing to say, woman?”
Everything was charged with emotion—even Inga’s darkened mane and Hnossi’s pale green tufts were puffed up, hairs splitting at their ends and vibrating in the tingling air.
“Inka,” rasped Hnossi, “I’m…I—”
“Don’t say it!” yelled Inga. “Whatever you’re gonna say, it’ll be all fucking wrong anyway, so just don’t!” She stepped across to Hnossi’s bedside, leaned down, and yelled some more, and the highly vincible goddess shriveled like a weed sprayed with herbicide.
“And don’t call me ‘Inga’ anymore! Inga died that day in 1974 because your neglect killed her! So you can stop wondering—assuming you ever did—why my official bio and F*O*O*J file say I was born that day, the day I left you and Daddy left you and Baldur left you! All you have to know,
Hnossi,
is that on that day I gave birth to myself!”
SNAP!
—It was a sound like a whip cracking, and Syndi reared back and slammed against the wall, clutching her cheek. White smoke leaked between her fingers. I reached for her but stopped at the sight of electrical firecrackers exploding all over Hnossi’s face and arms and above the white blanket covering her torso.
“Stand back, Syndi!” I shouted, just as all the medical equipment shorted out in sparking mechanical death cries. My nostrils clogged with a burning stench. The air tasted like metal. “Doctor! Nurse!” I yelled out into the hall. “Code blue!”
The goddess who’d almost never cried, cried out her agony.
“Mummy!” said Syndi, releasing the burn wound and rushing forward to clutch her agonized mother. I tackled her before she could electrocute herself, knocking her against the wall beside the headboard and bouncing the two of us to the floor.
Her mother continued keening like an animal in a leg-hold trap. The only word we could make out, screamed over and over before the nurses dragged us out, was
“Vally!”
Iron Fatigue, or Rust in Pieces?
T
he 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
!”
F
or 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
F
or 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.
