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into the back of his head heavily enough to elicit gongs. “But how, Doc? I feel like I’m dead already!”

Locking Wally into the Id-Smasher®’s psi-mulated environment for a continuous session stretching over a week, I induced in him the mental experience of having all his powers back. To restore his confidence in his own character, I created a psi-mulated Hawk King who walked with him, talked with him, and flew with him, who constantly reminded him to assert ownership of and become a stakeholder in the Hawkish qualities he so admired, to own the target of his own admiration.

It was a grave risk. Such an auto-belief in his career and his powers required Wally to activate vast mental energies into a delusion of his own competence and the fantasy that the future would unquestionably see the return of his powers to their original magnitude. My dangerous strategy was predicated on the psychestructure’s enormous capacity for denial, an evolutionary defense mechanism intended to preserve the sapient organism against overwhelming odds.

Given sufficient time, Wally might eventually have come safely to integrate full awareness of his failures and accept his imomnipotence. But that time had not yet arrived.

THURSDAY, JULY 13, 9:59 P.M.

Self-X-Amination

At last, on the third night following the press conference, while Wally was still contained inside the Id-Smasher® for his ongoing personality reintegration, Philip Kareem Edgerton showed up at the door of my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic.

He was unshaven, appeared to have lost even more weight, and looked and smelled as if he hadn’t changed his clothes since Monday.

“How’m I supposed to do my job when I’ve become the story?” he said by way of greeting. “That’s not a rhetorical question, Doc. I’m asking you.”

“Kareem,” I said, showing him into the Encounter Room and frothing him a whippaccino, “what these people are all expecting from you is a statement of accountability. All you have to do is accept responsibility. Then they’ll let you do your job.”

He sat, looking out the window into the distance toward the hundred and fifty stories of neon called the Tachyon Tower. Based on his sneer, I doubted he was pondering the cosmological-dimensional research being undertaken there.

“Re-spon-si-bil-ity…” he drawled. “You know, that’s the one word Hawk King used in his Instructions papyrus more than any other. For all the good the papyrus’ll do anybody now. Might’s well seal it back inside a canopic jar, let some brother try again with it in a thousand years…when the world’s ready to listen. To believe. No—scratch that. To think.”

Disconnecting, Kareem asked me if I’d seen the latest press on him. The stories had mutated into a public version of the childhood game of telephone, with various sources alternately claiming that Kareem’s brief article on Hawk King was in fact an essay, a thesis, a dissertation, or even a two-volume set called Ofays Aint Shit. Esquire’s apparently last-minute cover story, featuring a file photo of Kareem crossing his forearms into an X, was entitled X-Man Hates Your Cracker Ass.

“You see what that chai-sucking, subintellectual yuppy pinhead wrote?” asked Kareem in reference to Shauna Slyming’s column on him in the Sentinel-Spectator. “She ignored everything I explained, and then wrote that I ‘used words like bullets’—never mind who’s using actual bullets against black folks, which apparently doesn’t concern her—and then she denounced, quote, all black radicals, and accused me of being sexist!”

“Kareem, can you blame her for being upset with you? You must’ve hit her in the head with a microphone when you flipped the table. Did you see her photo? She’s got a huge lump on her face—”

“Naw, she always looks like that. You know she actually phoned me later that day before she wrote her ‘opinion piece’? Told me that when I’d written this one article a couple of years ago saying, quote, There should be more female superheroes, that—get this—that was somehow sexist! Slyming’s a crypto-conservative supramoron, Doc! And you know what else she said? She tells me…”

The hour wore on, with Kareem frantically spewing out his elaborate theory of self-justification, which, because of his severe RNPN, he could not recognize as proof of his subconscious acknowledgment of his own guilt and the fundamental irrationality of his black-panic paradigm.

“Kareem,” I finally interrupted, “what about when we were at the Squirrel Tree, and you called that policeman Detective ‘McDevil’? That’s a racial slur. That’s the kind of thing the public and the press expect you to take responsibility for. You claim you’re against racism, and yet you’re guilty of exactly what you accuse others of doing.”

“First of all, that isn’t racism—I can’t deny McDevil or his people their jobs, their homes, or their lives. Second, that punk deserves the name. Wanna know why I call him that? Back before I had my powers, he was a patrolman at a Stun-Glas demonstration after Maximus Security got killed in New Atlantis. Punk’s worse than a cracker—he’s a kot-tam saltine. He beat my legs, Doc, beat my legs like he was tenderizing rhino meat!”

“For someone whose very powers are based in words, Kareem, you’re employing a double standard on hurtful language. The children’s rhyme about ‘sticks and stones’ isn’t true—hurtful words hurt, Kareem, no matter who’s using them.”

“The cops have sticks! What do you think McDevil was beating my legs with?”

“Kareem, when life gives you lemons, make Lemon Pledge! And then take that Pledge and clean up your act! You’re losing an opportunity to see yourself for who you really are and therefore to self-actualize—”

“ ‘Losing an opportunity’? Have you opened your eyes once in the last week? Have you seen what’s happening? A conspiracy to murder one hero and neutralize three others, destroy an asteroid, get two supervillains disappeared without a trace—”

“Look inside yourself, Kareem! What opportunity for yourself are you missing?”

“This is not about me! Why can’t you shrinks ever get that, that the world is bigger than the kot-tam individual? The F*O*O*J is nothing but Lost Opportunities, Inc.—doesn’t do a damn thing to solve actual problems. Best it ever does is put out