Minister Faust (10 page)

“Tell me about that, Syndi. Why should ‘everybody be in counseling’?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Eva? These F*O*O*J-feebletons really need you, and one day I’m sure, like, they’ll thank you?” she said in her usual question-intonation, smiling sugar all over me. “But just look at the world, you know? Everyone’s, like, crazy—all this negative energy they’re beaming? These F*O*O*J-fogies need to fix them
selves
before they start invading everyone else’s proximity, you know? Gawd!”

“So you think they’re being hypocritical, Syndi?”

“Like, yeah!”

“Aren’t superheroes supposed to be involved? Helping others?”

“How’re you supposed to help people if you should really be under round-the-clock observation on a coupla hundred meds?”

“You seem to get along fine with the Brotherfly.”

“P-Fly? He’s cool,” she said, while behind her drifted an image of the Brotherfly gazing at her adoringly. “He knows how to have fun. He’s not afraid to live, y’know? The others, like, need to get over themselves. ‘Legendary heroes’? Right!”

“Not even Omnipotent Man?”

Brotherfly disappeared, replaced by an Omnipotent Man half his correct size, and old beyond his years. “Just a sad old man who’s, like, totally lost in his own rep.”

“The Flying Squirrel?”

Omnipotent Man disappeared, replaced by the image of an actual flying squirrel wearing a black top hat sitting atop a pile of virtual money and screeching. “Just an angry old tightass who can’t deal.”

“Deal with…?”

“My orien
ta
tion?”

“Yes. Let’s discuss that momentarily. And X-Man?”

She paused a moment with a look on her face that suggested she was chewing a uniquely dreadful species of sushi. The top-hatted squirrel was replaced, oddly, by an image of herself wearing a white shirt, black suit, and tie. The image appeared to be gasping for breath before it disintegrated.

“Gawd,” she said, “he’s, like, the most uptight of all of them. Everything’s about
race
for him. He
se
riously needs your help, Eva. Like, if he didn’t have his job and his politics and his religion, he wouldn’t even have an identity!”

“And how about Iron Lass?”

She stopped her sofa-swaying, looking at me for the first time, while above us towered a giant, rusting iron-fleshed Iron Lass like a Norse Statue of Liberty, glowering down from the clouds with such intense disappointment that the virtual ground beneath us split open.

Rolling her eyes, Syndi blew a bubble. Made it larger.

Larger still.

Popped it.

She sucked it back inside her mouth and chewed.

She rotated the twin volume knobs on each cup of her bustier. The
thump-bump
pumped louder, and only then did I recognize the song—one of her hits from the previous summer: “Thong Power.”

“She’s just a depressed, tired, worn-out, broken old woman, Eva,” said Syndi, getting up from the couch and amble-dancing around the discotheque that had sprung up around us to shield us from the iron giantess. Syndi glanced at numerous mirrors and portraits of herself, then examined objets d’art and bookshelves her memory had manifested here from my office. She pulled books halfway out of their slots on my shelves, glancing at them before leaving them.

“She’s always daggering me with her eyes, always making these, like, snide remarks about how I dress, about my relationships with, like, Cathode Girl and Billi Biceps and Beast Mistress…saying I don’t have any focus or purpose or direction…I mean, who does she think she is? My, like, mother?” She snorted. “I already have one of those, and she supports me every step of the way!”

Beside her, a full-size Bianca appeared, a woman in her late forties, overtanned and leather-skinned, wearing a bustier and white pants that would be called chic on a woman two decades younger.

“Yes, I remember after that openmouthed kiss with Media Medea on the Golden Tunic Awards on ABC. There was a lot of controversy. Your mother backed you completely.”

“Yeah. Bianca’s cool,” she beamed.

“You call your mother by her first name?”

“Like, why not? We’re not hung up with society’s ‘rules.’ Plus she’s like not only my best friend, she’s my agent. She got me
in
to the F*O*O*J, got me my Sony deal. If old Iron Ass wants to be someone’s mother, maybe she should start with her own kids?” My bookshelves disappeared, replaced by a floating array of gold and platinum records—Syndi’s, I assumed. “I hear neither of them even talk with her…I even heard one of her kids even tried to like kill herself or something? Some role model. Iron Gash could like learn something from Bianca. Gawd! I hope you
can
help her out…for her kids’ sake, if no one else’s.”

“I noticed, in the simulation against CycloTron, you and Iron Lass certainly seemed to clash. And you never speak to each other in front of me.”

“Like, I just told you? She hates me.”

“Well, Syndi, I’ve certainly never gotten the impression she—”

“No, she hates me, Eva, I’m telling you?”

“Don’t you think you might exag—”

“
She disapproves
of me intensely, then? Happy now?”

“What’s interesting to me is how much you two are alike.”

She spun back around to face me.

“You have
got
to be, like, riffing.”

“No, Syndi, I’m not ‘riffing.’ Look…you’re both icons to women. You’re both symbols of femininity and feminine power. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Hnossi inspired women superheroes and ordinary women to break into male-dominated professions and stand up for themselves, and now you’re inspiring a generation of young straight and nonhetero-sexual women and girls to believe in themselves, to be proud. Surely you can see the connection.”

“We’re like totally different! She’s all like ‘Do it zis vay’ and ‘Diknity! Honor! Sacrifice!’ It’s all about trying to get everyone to be just like her!”

“But Syndi, what about your HEAT Ray?”

She gaped indignantly. “That’s like
to
tally not the same!”

“You used it in the Id-Smasher
^®
simulation. You’ve used it in the small number of melees you’ve been in during your brief crimefighting career, and you even use it in your concerts. Your…what’s it called, now? Hyper-Emulation—”

“Acquisition Transmission Ray, yeah, yeah—”

“Syndi, you turn people into duplicates of yourself.
Literally.
And literally under your control. Not to mention your highly successful line of Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guides™…
Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Yoga, Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Diamond-Hard Abs, Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Buddhism,
the
Grrrl Guide™ to Yoga Writing the LSAT—
”

“So I know something about marketing. With all your books and videos, Eva, I’d think you of all people could appreciate that!” Suddenly the discotheque reformatted itself into what must have been a Barnes & Noble, to judge by the wafting smell of lattés.

Syndi wandered off, disappearing amid all the shelves of her own CDs, DVDs,
PG!
magazines, and books. Just before I located her again, I finally found copies of something other than her work: a battered hardcover of Professor Icegaard’s
Toward a Practical Götterdämmerung: A Logistical Analysis,
and a few copies of my own self-help series. They were on the remainders table.

“Well, despite what you think, Syndi,” I said, “I
am
impressed by how much you’ve accomplished—and not just for someone your age, but for anybody of any age. Your LSAT manual is apparently the most effective one on the market, and my own agent said your editor swears you wrote every word of it, even though you’re only nineteen and you’ve never been to law school—”

“Of course I wrote it! I wrote all my books!” she said, climbing onto a display case next to a standee of herself. “Why’s that so hard to believe? People are, like, always underestimating me just because I express myself on my own terms!”

“So you don’t see your manuals as an attempt to make other people live like you do?”

“I’m, like,
hel
ping them?” she said, vaulting from the display case onto the top of a decorative pillar. Miraculously, despite her heels she did not fall. She stood up straight. “That’s not controlling them!”

“Yes, but don’t you think Iron Lass sees her actions the same way?”

“I don’t care what she thinks, Eva! Whose side are you on, anyway? I don’t exactly feel supported here!”

“Syndi, my job isn’t to be on anybody’s side. It’s to be on
every
body’s side.”

“Gawd, what good are you then?”

“Syndi, did you ever think that using your HEAT Ray on others might be a violation of their rights?”

She chewed her gum furiously for several seconds, as if hoping her mastication might provide clarification. “Their rights?” she said finally. “What are you talking about? Because I included them in my
me
ness?”

“People have a right to freedom, to individuality—”

“Eva,” she said from atop her pedestal, “why wouldn’t anybody want to be
me
?”

Iconquest: Id-dentity Crisis and the Power of Narcissism

P
art of the id’s purpose is to assert its host personality onto the world to ensure its host’s continued existence.
If I get enough,
says the id,
I will exist another day.

But unlike the narrator from the classic disco song “I Will Survive,” the id isn’t satisfied with “enough,” because enough is never enough. The id always needs more, or specifically,
more than anybody else.
So “enough” becomes “more than” which becomes “all.” And even then, the id fears that all can be taken away; therefore crushing the capacity of others to resist becomes paramount.

Narcissism is the id’s assertion of itself, not just over its host but over others as well. It is the illusion that one’s own needs are not only more important than other people’s needs, but that one’s own needs
are
other people’s needs.

Because Power Grrrl was a highly narcissistic personality, she could not understand that my role as therapist was to aid everyone from her team and not to be her own personal ally or avenger. Nor could she understand that her paranormally overdeveloped id was the true power source of her HEAT Ray and that her use of it fundamentally abused the people whom she dominated.

Most of all, perhaps, narcissism blinded Syndi to her true reason for disliking Iron Lass: their similarity. Both iconic heroines sought to control others, believing such control was a boon rather than a bane.

But while Iron Lass was overbearing, her attempts at control were manifested through blame, guilting, and manipulation, all of which still provided some chance for resistance. Power Grrrl’s HEAT Ray provided no such chance for escape…a reality that led, indirectly but inescapably, to the July 16 massacres.

Y
ou come from a large family, isn’t that correct, Hnossi?

And royalty, too?”

Iron Lass’s gaze flickered over to Power Grrrl before she looked back to answer me. She’d done that several times since we’d reconvened inside a neutral Id-Smasher
^®
mindscape both their brains had selected, a badlands grove of buttes at sunrise.

“Ja-a-a-a…?”
she said slowly.

Power Grrrl coughed into her hand, except it wasn’t a cough—she’d barked the word
phony,
eliciting a glare from Hnossi.

“Syndi? Is there something you think we need to attend to?”

“Like, aren’t we supposed to be
hon
est here, Eva? Because I happen to know one or two things about this ‘icon’ over here. And they don’t square with what she’s been saying?”

Staring back at the young woman, Hnossi’s face looked as coldly cutting and metallic as the grille of a 1955 Pontiac. I asked the elder woman to respond, but when she said nothing, I pushed further. “Hnossi, am I missing something? You’re Hnossi, daughter of Odin and Frigg, the royal family of—”

“Oh, Eva,” sighed Syndi, “I thought you had a better builtin BS detector—I can’t believe you fell for Hnossi’s ‘royalty’ shit.”

“Vatch your langvidge!”

“Watch
this,
” said Syndi, cupping her pudenda.

“Ach, Kvasir’s bowl! Vhere’s your vhistle now, Frau Doktor? I shouldn’t haff to stand here unt take ziss—”

“Please, ladies—let’s deal with this properly. Syndi? You said I fell for an untruth. So what is the truth?”

“Like, there’s more than one Frigg in the Norse pantheon, Eva? People always think that the other Frigg, also known as
Freyja,
is Frigg, the wife of Odin. And Iron Lassy there just lets ’em think that. Like, isn’t that deceit or something? Doesn’t that violate some sort of Aesir honor code-thingy or something?”

“So, Hnossi, you’re not related to Frigg, wife of Odin?”

Iron Lass:
“…Nein.”

“So why have you let people believe—”

“If people make ziss mistake on zeir own, am I suppost to take all my time to correct zeir misconzeptions? I have a life, Doktor, of teachink claasses, gradink papers, providink guidance in ze F*O*O*J—”