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Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, above all other psychic threats, paranoia holds more destructive potential than even Cosmicus, the Digester of Worlds. As the old saying goes, paranoia can indeed “destroy ya.”
 
CHAPTER TWO

Facing the Ultimate ArchEnemy
    SATURDAY, JULY 1, 9:30 A.M.

Stages of Grief
    A lthough as a hyperhominid you’ve spent your entire career risking your life, there’s only one task as difficult as facing the unresolved scandals and unsightly scars of your secret origin. And that is facing the deaths of others, especially that of a fellow hero.
    After all, you’ve spent your professional career beating the odds, continually cheating the grim reaper at his own card table. But Death plays the ultimate trump card and is the only archenemy guaranteed to cash in everyone else’s chips.
    The morning after such an epoch-shattering event as the death of Hawk King, it would have been predictable for my team of sanity-seekers to skip out on therapy at my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic. That’s because they, like everyone else, were falling up and down the escalator of the nine stages of the Brain-Silverman Grief Scale™ (Revised):

1. Confusion
    2. Obsession
    3. Lust for vengeance
    4. Self-pity
    5. Boundless contempt
    6. Reckless adventurism
    7. Depression
    8. Paranoia and
    9. Hollow acceptance
    Regardless of each hero’s sadness, the F*L*A*C’s orders were emphatic: even at this moment of global mourning, any of my F*O*O*Jsters who failed to attend therapy and achieve measurable improvement would be summarily removed from the ranks of Earth’s most celebrated superteam.
    And thus, in the bright sunlit Saturday morning of the Anger Room, my heroes sat in a circle of morbid moroseness.
    In their fumbling individual attempts to bear the psychemotional weight of their legendary mentor’s death, each F*O*O*Jster shared something with the group to ease individual and collective sorrow, and offered a few halting remarks met by sodden silence. In doing so, each one evoked aspects of his or her personality which had until that point remained hidden—tenderness, nostalgia, melancholy, compassion, and more—a stunning departure from the factionalizing and fractious fracas factory of the previous day.
    Wally W. Watchtower brought with him a pharaonic crown given to him by Hawk King, an interroyal gift from an ancient Egyptian king to the surviving prince of the doomed planet Argon; Wally explained how that gesture, in late 1944, had helped him rise from confusion as a wandering, superpowered Jehovah’s Witness farmboy from Kentucky to his grand destiny as Omnipotent Man. The Flying Squirrel distributed free advance copies of two books from PiltdownPerennial: a coffee-table book of the most famous photographs of the Egyptian deity, plus a small, black, clothbound volume of wisdom-quotations called The Utterances of Hawk King; even Festus Piltdown’s perpetual gadfly, the X-Man, seemed impressed and moved by the gift.
    André supplied a sumptuous collection of delicate confections he’d baked personally, from flans to mille-feuille, and while serving them to everyone uttered not a single bzzzt! ; Syndi distributed advance CD singles of the dancebeat eulogy she’d rushed into production the previous night called “Hawk On (Long Live the King).” And during a moment of intense quiet, Iron Lass produced a gleaming silver ram’s horn she’d brought from Aesgard more than a millennium before, from which she elicited a sound like Louis Armstrong on a muted trumpet, rendering in tear-trickling agony what she later informed me was Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.”
    Only one of my sanity-supplicants came empty-handed: the X-Man. But even he would nonetheless later share something—a situationally inappropriate but entirely predictable paranoid rant.

    Stages of Grief: Confusion

    H ow do you all feel,” I said, looking for anything to get our discussion started at last, “about…oh, the media coverage of