Minister Faust by From (html) (librera reader txt) 📕

glass tabletop in front of me were droplets of metal, hissing steam and cooling.

Iron ingots.

Hnossi Icegaard dabbed her fingers beneath her veil. If what Jack Zenith wrote in Unsafe in Any Cape were still true, no one in history had ever seen Iron Lass cry.

Until that day.

“You’re—” I began, when suddenly something crystallized for me. “Those…aren’t just for Hawk King, are they?”

She stared back at me from behind her veil, motionless, silent.

“It’s a lot to take, isn’t it, Hnossi? To lose both your mentor and someone else so important to you in the same day?”

She waved her hand in dismissal. “Vy are you so surprised, Doktor? Becoss at a moment of dire crisis, when everyvun’s spirits are at stake, a husbandt valks out unt—I mean, a hero, Vally valks out unt simply abandons us at our time of greatest neet?”

“That’s an interesting slip, Hnossi.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ymir’s blutt, Frau Eva,” she sneered. “Surely you can access better clichés zan Freudian slips.”

I stared into her twin amethyst ices, waiting for her to own her admission.

And so we sat like that until she finally got up and walked out, leaving everyone else to their quiet elegy of cheesecake and beer.

What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Iron Lass: “The death of the father is the death of life.”

Trauma: the Enemies Within

Of course, Iron Lass was not the only hyperhominid grappling with the grieving process and ending up in a full nelson, facedown on the rank gym mat of denial upon the dingy floor of despair.

Trauma always reactivates the entire unexamined repository of unprocessed misery in the psychemotional cache, much in the way that the flatulence of a diseased colon is particularly fetid given the abundance of undigested organic material in its crevices.

When you engage the grieving process, you’re not sobbing simply for the sadness at hand, but for every sadness you’ve ever suffered, from dropping your ice cream cone when you were four to the humiliation of vomiting from anxiety at your senior prom to soiling your tunic during a particularly frightening melee with a superfoe.

While I’d been able to observe some of my sanity-supplicants firsthand to assess their postfuneral psychemotional degriefing, I also noticed that the grievers had split along the same lines as those in the funereal battle. Not a single active or former member of the L*A*B (or any other nonwhite crimefighters with the exceptions of Sanford Cowl, HKA the Spook, and Gustav Gorditas, HKA La Cucaracha) had assembled at Soup ’n’ Heroes.

After making a few inquiries I took the subway. Leaving behind me the mourning silence of downtown Bird Island, I crossed the Mantlo River over to mainland Los Ditkos and the borough of Langston-Douglas, cheekily known by its residents as “Stun-Glas.” From there, the only sign of the upscale Bird Island I’d left was the erect grandeur of the Tachyon Tower in the distance.

Negotiating the borough’s crumbling streets, graffiti-scarred buildings, and urine-soaked bus benches, I navigated along a depressing procession of gun stores, pawnshops, nail shops, beauty shops, barbershops, rib shacks, chicken shacks, martial arts schools, and Squirrel Burger franchises, until I eventually found the seedy red, black, and green soul food restaurant called the Dark Star.

Self-Delusion: Grief’s Superpowered Sidekick

Entering the dark and dust-choked interior, I beheld a myriad of black men dressed in colorfully elaborate native costumes and fezzes decorated with arcane symbols and icons.

All of them turned to stare at me silently.

The only sound was the blare of a clanging, bass-bursting reggae instrumental with electronic bleeps echoing as if into the depths of space. A man behind the counter glared at me. I found myself momentarily hypnotized by his handlebar mustache and the sculpture of his pectorals and biceps beneath his tight white T-shirt before I noticed him nodding to his right, directing me to sit.

Around the corner sat the X-Man, drinking tea with a smooth-skinned Asian man in a suit—Tran Chi Hanh, FKA Chip Monk and, briefly, as my patient.

Their cups emitted ghostly trails of steam into the dark air. Kareem looked up at me narrowly before rolling his eyes and whispering something to Tran. Both men stood, and Tran excused himself to walk past me with only minuscule acknowledgment before he was out the door.

I asked Kareem if I might sit with him. He grimaced, finally pointing to a chair for me and motioning toward the counterman before sitting himself.

“What’re you doing here, Doc?”

“Well, Kareem, in therapy yesterday, weren’t you the one who told me I wasn’t making accurate observations because I was only seeing all of you in the clinic? That I had to get out of my comfort zone and see you in your natural habitat?”

“I don’t think I’d ever’ve used those words—”

“Regardless of the semantics, I’m here.”

“Doesn’t this violate confidentiality,” he hissed, leaning forward, “you coming here like this? And how’d you know I was here in the first place?”

“A good therapist always knows where to find her patients. And as to confidentiality, these people don’t know who I am—”

“Yeah, you’re only the most famous tunic-shrink on the planet—”

The man with the handlebar mustache brought me a cup of coffee. After he departed, I told Kareem how much the man resembled African American CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. Anger flashed across his face before Kareem stashed it behind the barrier of a cold smile.

“That’s quite the set of facial reactions, Kareem. Tell me what they mean.” He said nothing. “By any chance were you going to tell me that I think all African American men look alike?”

He almost smirked, then ripped the expression into the shreds of a scowl.

“You were, weren’t you?” I said. “Except I was right, and you think I’m right, too, don’t you?”

“Some people say he looks like the lead singer from Cameo. That’s a funk band.” He paused, smiled against himself. “I’ll give you this, Doc…you’ve got a real pair of meteors, coming here like this. Anyway, could we get