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Kareem, Hnossi, and I were knocked over and bubbled inside a canvassy-aluminum sack hiss-filling with air and choking with the reek of gunpowder. Through the bubble’s porthole I saw Mr. Piltdown press a button on his belt, and then the Crystal Module’s outer wall disintegrated into flaming shards before belching out into space.

We were all sucked out into the void like Pinocchio into the belly of Monstro the whale.

Escape pods piloted by surviving staff fell into the darkness all around us, like jellyfish fleeing the moonlight at the roof of the ocean…

And then I saw it above us: a Squirrel Shuttle descending upon us, its robotic bushy tail scooping us up into its underbelly.

As soon as the airlock pressurized, Iron Lass ripped open our emergency bubble. Through the window and across the chasm of the vacuum, we witnessed the prison asteroid convulsing, sprouting tumors of blue and purple fire before finally cracking and spilling rubble and debris and wriggling bodies into space.

“So do you finally see what I was talking about?” yelled Kareem at his fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “You think I don’t know what you were saying about me? And now somebody blew up the whole kot-tam asteroid! Why? To stop my investigation, or wipe us all out, or both!

“Any of you freaks wanna call me paranoid now?”

Paranoia: When the Underworld Is So Dark You Can’t See Yourself in the Mirror

Paranoia is, ironically, a defense mechanism. Learning to deal with pain, disasters, and the loss of loved ones means accepting that we can control neither life nor death. Because they control us.

The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.

Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.

The F*O*O*Jsters’ journey to the archetypal Underworld, and the chance to employ their enemies’ faces as crystal balls to their own future, should have been enough to show all my patients how they could end up, unless they renounced their failed vision and bankrupt misconceptions about the meaning of their “heroism.” At the moment of our return to Earth, it still was not clear whether any of them had learned their lesson—and in the case of Kareem, it was clear that his condition was actually deteriorating.

So unless you too want to devolve emotionally to the deranged, desperate, degraded depths of a Gil Gamoid, an N-Kid, or an X-Man during their final days, you need to make peace with your finitude.

Visualization and trance-work can help. Try picturing yourself as a single grain of sand inside an hourglass. You are not the first grain of sand through the spout, nor the last, but the middlest. But once the hour is up and all the sand has fallen, the hourglass is smashed to pieces and left on the floor, and no one will ever clean it up. When you can trance-contemplate that image for an hour without sobbing, you’ll know you’ve successfully suffocated the influence of self-grandiosity and that you’re well on the journey toward psychemotionally integrative recovery.

Unfortunately, as I was about to discover, my F*O*O*Jsters, especially the X-Man, were going to eschew integration in favor of paranoia…which ultimately led to a terrifying tragedy for everyone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Who Are You, Really? Secret Origins and Secret Shames

TUESDAY, JULY 4, 3:59 P.M.

Fallout

Goddamned coach-class StarCase™ Corporation!” growled Mr. Piltdown while piloting us back to Earth.

“If man were meant to conquer space inside a goddamned dumbwaiter he’d’ve been born looking like a room service tray and laundry! If not for me, all you ninnies would be vacuum-roasted and gut-burst right now, you hear me?”

By that point, the tenth minute into our rescue, Mr. Piltdown had already explained to everyone several times the mortal debt owed to him for having a Squirrel Shuttle standing by on remote, and how the Space Elevator was not a dependable means of transit, whereas Pilt-Dyne Scramjet-Rockets held the proprietary “future of mankind” in their Pulsar-class engines.

But our brush with asteroidal immolation wasn’t my focus. I was worried about Kareem, who was sputtering in zero gravity through the labyrinthine warps of his conspiratorial delusion, raving that Menton had orchestrated everything from the “assassination” of Hawk King to the destruction of Asteroid Zed itself.

“What,” said André, “and get his own ass smoked?”

“Menton,” snapped Kareem, “wasn’t even on Asteroid Zed!”

Syndi exploded with the manic laugh-cry of having narrowly escaped death. “Really, Kareem? Like, who exactly were you interviewing, then, huh? Dracula?”

Kareem snorted haughtily. I’d noticed his tendency to delight in moments like these: hoarding what he considered critical facts, like a dragon leering from atop a mound of cubic zirconia. “Figure it out,” he sneered. “That wasn’t Menton.”

“Really. Like, who was it, then?”

“I don’t know—yet. I haven’t gotten all my medu-kem back,” he said, referring to the logoids he’d dispersed in his frantic mantra of Find! Find! Find! “Probably stuck on the outside of the shuttle. But when we’re on the ground and I open the hatch, I’ll know for sure.”

“Strap yourselves in and cut the chatter, scatterwits,” said Mr. Piltdown. “We’re entering the atmosphere.”

Everyone complied with the strapping-in, but none with the command for quiet.

“Kareem, uff course ze man I dispatched vuss ze Destroyer!” said Hnossi. Her face was flushed and puffy, the flesh under her eyes like raw steak. For a woman who’d seen combat on a global scale, she was taking these events much harder than I would have expected. “You yourself shriekt horribly in hiss cell unt collapsed ven he vuss usink his phagopsychosis on you!”

The lights shut off,