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fragile psyches of my group that unless they engaged in a mythopoeic descent to an Underworld, my sanity-supplicants would find themselves lost in the sewers of self-delusion until finally drowning in the downspouts of depression.

Perhaps it would take the horror of staring into the face of the villain who had murdered so many heroes—or into the faces of two founding F*O*O*Jsters who went mad and came close to murdering them all—for my team to pull back from the brink of self-destruction and be reborn from the psychotherapeutic womb of self-redemption.

CHAPTER SIX

Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside

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

Mirror, Mirror, Above Them All

To 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