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 out of law school, Tran began his new public identity as an intern at Human Citizen, the premier antisuperhero public-interest law firm headed by the archnemesis of the Flying Squirrel—Jack Zenith, author of Unsafe in Any Cape and Two Masks of a “Hero.”
“ ‘Betrayed’ you?” said X-Man from his workbay, his eyes still closed. Apparently someone had been listening to Mr. Piltdown after all.
“Interesting wording, Festus.” He chuckled. “You sound like a lover scorned. Of course…that’s exactly what everyone said actually happened, now isn’t it?”
Festus was crossing the distance to X-Man’s workbay and reaching for the weapons in his utility pouches before I could intervene. X-Man barked the words “Arms and armor!” and with the snap and stench of gunpowder he faced the Flying Squirrel in a battle stance and wrapped in the gleaming black armor of a fifteenth-century Benin warrior, mace in one hand and lance in the other.
“You filthy-mouthed carpetbagger!” said the Squirrel. “I’ll beat the black off you!”
“I’m not your sidekick, Festy.” Kareem laughed. “You won’t be beating off anything around me!”
Suddenly there was a deafening CRACK, and a ten-foot-high wall of blinding white ice crisped into existence between the two would-be combatants.
“I vudn’t touch zat if I vere you, Frau Doktor,” said Iron Lass, her white shortsword Grendelsmuter pointing toward the barrier she’d just constructed. “Unt you needn’t vorry about melting or mess, since ze vall’s at least vun hundret dekrees below zero. When all ziss nonsense is done, I’ll turn it into steam unt be done viss it. Unt I suggest you get a new Mind Vistle as soon as possible, ja ?”
She turned back to her bickering fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “Now, shut up unt get back to vurk, you two, or I’ll put you bose in briefs I’ll make ze same vay I made zat vall.”
Iconflict
T ell you suh’m, Doc…gonna be some big changes when I get on that F*L*A*C,” said the X-Man, standing in his workbay behind the ice wall.
After my warning to him and Mr. Piltdown that I’d immediately place a call to the F*L*A*C if there were ever again a hint of violence between them inside the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic, Kareem launched into a fifteen-minute lecture to me on why he should not be made to remain in therapy when he should have been investigating full-time the
“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 out of law school, Tran began his new public identity as an intern at Human Citizen, the premier antisuperhero public-interest law firm headed by the archnemesis of the Flying Squirrel—Jack Zenith, author of Unsafe in Any Cape and Two Masks of a “Hero.”
“ ‘Betrayed’ you?” said X-Man from his workbay, his eyes still closed. Apparently someone had been listening to Mr. Piltdown after all.
“Interesting wording, Festus.” He chuckled. “You sound like a lover scorned. Of course…that’s exactly what everyone said actually happened, now isn’t it?”
Festus was crossing the distance to X-Man’s workbay and reaching for the weapons in his utility pouches before I could intervene. X-Man barked the words “Arms and armor!” and with the snap and stench of gunpowder he faced the Flying Squirrel in a battle stance and wrapped in the gleaming black armor of a fifteenth-century Benin warrior, mace in one hand and lance in the other.
“You filthy-mouthed carpetbagger!” said the Squirrel. “I’ll beat the black off you!”
“I’m not your sidekick, Festy.” Kareem laughed. “You won’t be beating off anything around me!”
Suddenly there was a deafening CRACK, and a ten-foot-high wall of blinding white ice crisped into existence between the two would-be combatants.
“I vudn’t touch zat if I vere you, Frau Doktor,” said Iron Lass, her white shortsword Grendelsmuter pointing toward the barrier she’d just constructed. “Unt you needn’t vorry about melting or mess, since ze vall’s at least vun hundret dekrees below zero. When all ziss nonsense is done, I’ll turn it into steam unt be done viss it. Unt I suggest you get a new Mind Vistle as soon as possible, ja ?”
She turned back to her bickering fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “Now, shut up unt get back to vurk, you two, or I’ll put you bose in briefs I’ll make ze same vay I made zat vall.”
Iconflict
T ell you suh’m, Doc…gonna be some big changes when I get on that F*L*A*C,” said the X-Man, standing in his workbay behind the ice wall.
After my warning to him and Mr. Piltdown that I’d immediately place a call to the F*L*A*C if there were ever again a hint of violence between them inside the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic, Kareem launched into a fifteen-minute lecture to me on why he should not be made to remain in therapy when he should have been investigating full-time the
Similar Books
