Minister Faust

by From the Notebooks of Dr Brain (v4. 0) (html)

  Festus was crossing the distance to X-Man’s workbay and reaching for the weapons in his utility pouches before I could intervene. X-Man barked the words “Arms and armor!” and with the snap and stench of gunpowder he faced the Flying Squirrel in a battle stance and wrapped in the gleaming black armor of a fifteenth-century Benin warrior, mace in one hand and lance in the other.

  “You filthy-mouthed carpetbagger!” said the Squirrel. “I’ll beat the black off you!”

  “I’m not your sidekick, Festy.” Kareem laughed. “You won’t be beating off anything around me!”

  Suddenly there was a deafening CRACK, and a ten-foot-high wall of blinding white ice crisped into existence between the two would-be combatants.

  “I vudn’t touch zat if I vere you, Frau Doktor,” said Iron Lass, her white shortsword Grendelsmuter pointing toward the barrier she’d just constructed. “Unt you needn’t vorry about melting or mess, since ze vall’s at least vun hundret dekrees below zero. When all ziss nonsense is done, I’ll turn it into steam unt be done viss it. Unt I suggest you get a new Mind Vistle as soon as possible, ja?”

  She turned back to her bickering fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “Now, shut up unt get back to vurk, you two, or I’ll put you bose in briefs I’ll make ze same vay I made zat vall.”

  Iconflict

  Tell you suh’m, Doc…gonna be some big changes when I get on that F*L*A*C,” said the X-Man, standing in his workbay behind the ice wall.

  After my warning to him and Mr. Piltdown that I’d immediately place a call to the F*L*A*C if there were ever again a hint of violence between them inside the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic, Kareem launched into a fifteen-minute lecture to me on why he should not be made to remain in therapy when he should have been investigating full-time the “suspicious” death of Hawk King.

  But finally both his eyes and his mouth were shut, his armor was gone, and his body was perfectly still, back in its uniform of white shirt and black suit and tie.

  I was very conscious how intensely dry my mouth was, probably because Iron Lass must have sucked all the moisture out of the room’s air to make so much ice. Licking my lips to keep them from cracking and wishing I had not only a psychemotional but an epidermal balm, I told him, “You sound very confident about your chances of winning, Kareem.”

  “It’s not a matter of confidence, Doc. It’s allies. It’s strategy. It’s having done the due diligence.” He breathed in deeply, let it out in a long rasp as if from the bottom of his soles. “Legs and feet.”

  Like a prairie sky coning into twin tornados, dust and shadow condensed in front of me into two columns. Supple muscles puffed up like Ball Park franks, feet arching and toes curling inside golden sandals whose straps wrapped themselves like snakes around the calves of the disembodied legs.

  Kareem opened his eyes, inspecting his work. “And it doesn’t hurt being up against a Ku Klux Klown like the Flying Fart. He really thinks he can get more than two percent of the electorate onside? That old allosaurus is probably the most hated member of the F*O*O*J—and not just by the public, I’m talking about F*O*O*J members themselves here.”

  “If he’s no threat to your candidacy, why are you even talking about him?”

  “Because even the idea of that filthy old fascist becoming the DOO is offensive to me. Nothing but a northern cracker. A caviar cracker. A canapé. He’s everything that’s wrong with the F*O*O*J. He’s—you know what this man is? The perfect metaphor for him is that ice wall right there. A cold, white barrier too tall to go over, and lethal to the touch.”

  He closed his eyes, tilted his head back slightly.

  “Now, what we should’ve been doing, especially after the end of the War, is using the power of the F*O*O*J to clean this country up for real—and not going after freaks in tights, either, not that there’re many of them on the outside of the F*O*O*J these days, anyway.”

  “But how do you think that—”

  “Hold on a minute.” He concentrated, closed his eyes. “Pelvis.”

  Condensing into existence atop the two legs in three-dimensional block letters was the word PELVIS. It wobbled, fell to the floor, shattered.

  The X-Man opened his eyes. “Damn it,” he growled. “Khaibtu kher.” The shards popped! into dust, and then even the dust disappeared. “Look, Doc, I’ve gotta concentrate on this—”

  “Sounds to me like you were just about to say something rather important about what you feel is wrong with your organization.”

  He sighed. “First of all, it’s not ‘my’ organization. The organization is nothing but a bunch of mercenaries in rainbow lingerie. Decades of taxpayer money funneled into DOD contracts for overseas ultraviolet ops or HUD contracts to ‘stabilize’ inner cities? Which it has always failed to do? What is that?

  “F*O*O*J headquarters are right here on the West Coast, but where was the F*O*O*J during the maki epidemic when the DIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence were shipping in coelacanth-weed to sell to Southern California gang-bangers to finance their terrorist army to overthrow the government of New Atlantis? Suddenly every black or Hispanic neighborhood on the West Coast had a maki house on every block and enough automatic weapons to fight a war!” he railed in a single, indignation-powered breath. “Where was the kot-tam leadership of the F*O*O*J during all that? I’ll tell you where—Lying Squirrel was lunching with Kissinger and Reagan on how to destroy New Atlantis and Wally Watchtower was posing with Nancy on his lap on a CBS Christmas Special telling kids to just say no. Meanwhile, you know what old Wally was doing on the sly?”

  I waited for an answer, finally having to prompt Kareem with a “No, what?”

  Kareem looked furtively around the room, his head hunkered turtlelike into his collar.

  “Never mind,” he said, snarling.

  This was the first time I’d seen Kareem censor himself. Whatever he was hiding, he obviously had no plans to discuss it around these colleagues whose ratification votes he’d need to ascend to the F*L*A*C.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a, a fascinating theory, Kareem, but in terms of your feelings—”

  “Jeez, Doc, you don’t even try to hide when you’re patronizing me, do you? You ever talk like that to Festering Squirrel? ‘Fascinating theory’?”

  “Kareem, I assure you, I treat all my—”

  “—all your colored hero patients the same, yeah, I know. Look, don’t you get it? It’s not about ‘theories’ or ‘feelings,’ it’s about what we can do. The F*O*O*J has patents on all kinds of technology, tech it licenses out to the government, to corporations. If all we did was take a cut of that and create some jobs, we could rebuild these inner cities we’re being paid to protect—and failing to protect—from the maki gang wars our own government’s actions created!

  “Instead,” he said, gesturing to the space between his cupped hands as if he were holding donkey dung, “the F*O*O*J hands over its returns on licensing fees to a bunch of kot-tam parasitic investors! That’s what the f in F*O*O*J stands for, Doc. Financial. And failure! And fascist! And completely fu—”

  “Brilliant campaign slogan, Rochester,” said Mr. Piltdown from across the ice wall.

  “As opposed to yours, Facedown? ‘F*O*O*J über alles?’ ”

  “You’re a disgrace to this entire organization!”

  “That’s not what Hawk King thought,” said X-Man across the ice wall.

  I could see it in Kareem’s body language: He was making a decision. He made it, then stepped forward. “I’m gonna wait one week after the funeral—out of respect—and then I’m holding a press conference to announce the contents of a papyrus Hawk King wrote and gave to me.”

  Mr. Piltdown: “Hawk King never gave any papyrus to the likes of you!”

  “I’m announcing,” continued Kareem, “that what Hawk King wanted all along wasn’t for the F*O*O*J to be some kind of kot-tam enforcer, the police-mafia in spandex, but to break down walls and build up halls, to shake the powerful and remake the powerless. And when he got roadbl
ocked, steam-rollered, and presidentially knackered, he couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s why he went into exile!

  “But he was ready to start all over again, smash the jail they built around him and be reborn with a new mission. And I’m going to reveal what else he said in his papyrus…which included endorsing me as Director of Operations. And I’ll hold up that papyrus for the world to read!”

  All work in the room ceased.

  “Edgerton, good goddamnit, you’re nothing but a ghastly, ghoulish little phony who’s prostituting the corpse of our finest hero to foist your inadequacies upon Hawk King’s finest creation! There’s no papyrus—you’re a fraud!”

  “I’m a fraud? If that aint the fridge calling the stove white. If Americans knew even ten percent of the truth about you, you’d be on multiple death rows right now, Fespus—”

  “Well, Kareem,” I cut in, “congratulations. You must be very happy.”

  “Happy? Happy that the King wanted me—me—to guide this group? Happy ’cause he left me an endorsement, which is the closest thing to God writing me a reference letter? Happy that I’m gonna lead this sad group into the twenty-first century and remake it into a hammer for justice?” he said in his rhetorical crescendo. “Kot-tam right I’m happy. I’m slap-a-cracker happy!”

  “The King would never’ve endorsed you!” yelled Mr. Piltdown from over on his side of Hnossi’s ice wall. “Not in ten million years! Not if you were the last biped on this planet! And you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your watermelon-hole when I put a voting-day thrashing on you that’ll make Hiroshima look like a campfire!”

  I expected Kareem to materialize armor and weapons despite my warning, but instead he grinned triumphantly. “Alzheimer’s,” he stage-whispered to me, “has robbed America of its richest moron reactionary.”

  “I heard that!”

  Icondescension

  Anyway,” said Kareem, “what we need is more than just sweeping out the old guard fascists. We also need to clean out the new generation fashionists.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Have a look,” he said, thumb-pointing toward Power Grrrl and the mannequin she was working on, to which she’d affixed cloth scraps and wiring in a rough approximation of tassels, G-string, garters, and stockings.

  Tension between these two had been obvious since the beginning of our sessions together. The X-Man did anything he could to avoid sitting next to Power Grrrl, and most of the time he wouldn’t even look at her or acknowledge her remarks. Given the comments he’d aimed at the Flying Squirrel about Chip Monk and made about Power Grrrl’s iconic status as the lesbian “it” girl, homophobia clearly informed at least part of Kareem’s antipathy. A common cultural trait in the inner city, homophobic neurosis was obviously as strong a component of the X-Man’s id-crisis as his racial neurosis.

  Such racial antagonism had publicly marked the X-Man’s career from its inception. Prior to developing his full logogenic powers, Kareem had employed rudimentary pictogenesis in his burgeoning crimefighting career, noteworthy for his corruption-crackdown on the moguls of African American Network Television and the hip-hop/rap industry. Several years earlier the prestigious Los Ditkos Inspector magazine carried a four-page feature on a younger Philip Kareem Edgerton, shortly after he’d switched his alias from “Mac Rude” to “X-Man.” As a rising star in the League of Angry Blackmen, which had drastically reduced crime in the Los Ditkos inner-city neighborhood of Langston-Douglas, Kareem had been invited to speak before a $500 per plate dinner for the liberal West Coast philanthropic group the Dream Foundation.

  After disparaging the AANT executives in the crowd as well as hip-hop/rap artist-producers P. Bowels and the Nefarious N.I.G., Kareem, according to the Inspector, proceeded to tease, taunt, and ultimately terrorize the elite dinner audience with a self-righteous, condescending harangue that allegedly included him grabbing his crotch and inviting the crowd to sample “these nuts” after their soup. The Inspector concluded that such behavior ultimately cost the L*A*B its HUD security contract for Langston-Douglas.

  Knowing his F*O*O*J political ambitions, I asked Kareem how he expected to advance his career when his reputation was so rife with racialized rage.

  “I’ve got a right to be hostile, Doc,” he said after a long pause in which he finally managed to logosynthesize an actual pelvis above the two legs he’d formed earlier. “My people are being persecuted.”

  “Kareem, I’ve read that Inspector article about the dinner you attended—”

  “The Inspector’s a piece of crap, and ninety percent of what that punk wrote never even happened—”

  “—and based on your behavior at that dinner, it’s clear that you wanted those people to dislike you. As if you were afraid of them.”

  “Afraid? What are you talking about, Doctor?”

  “Afraid of their acceptance.”

  Dropping his jaw with faux-shock, he said, “Let me tell you about these people ‘accepting’ me, Doctor. That dinner, it was about half Day-Glo long-john types, a quarter media mucketymucks, and the rest wealthy superhero groupies. Some of that meringue mafia like to pretend to like people like me. It spit-shines their white liberal credentials. The rest don’t even bother pretending.

  “But you know who else was there? F*O*O*J punks like the Beaver Brothers, who were the number one source for that rat-gut reporter. And just two weeks ago I found out that Carrol Beaver’s been spreading rumors about me. That I’m a sexist! Me! What kind of fecal fungus is that? You see how I treat Iron Lass. Is that sexist? And I never had anything but complete respect for the Supa Soul Sistas—”

  “Yet you won’t even acknowledge Syndi’s presence, Kareem,” I said. “And every time she speaks, you either roll your eyes, cross your arms in judgment, or get a look on your face like you’re sipping from a bucket of something turgid.”

  “That,” he said, immediately jabbing a finger toward me before catching himself, “that’s an entirely different…which’s got nothing to do with gender, Doc.”

  “Is it because of her orientation?”

  He rolled his eyes, crossed his arms, and got a look on his face as if he were sipping from a bucket of something turgid. “Trust me,” he said, “it’s got nothing to do with her ‘orientation.’ ”

  “Then tell me what it is about.”

  “This is all a joke!”

  “What’s all a joke?”

  “This!” he said, sweeping the room with his chin. “Being in this laboratory, completely cut off from the real world…How’s this high-tech chicken coop supposed to reveal anything about how we actually function out there? The real reason we’re here isn’t because of our fears, Doctor, it’s because of yours. In here, you’re safe. You’re boss. You’re in control. The way you like it.

  “You claim you want to understand us, to understand me? I’ll believe that the day I see you walking the streets of Stun-Glas. And I should be out there investigating the murder—assassination—of the greatest hero of our times, instead of facing expulsion from the F*O*O*J for failing to attend this psycho-sycophantic suckfest you’ve got us starched into!”

  “Well-played, Kareem.” I smiled, nodding at my young patient. “Very skillful.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Turning the conversation to someone else’s supposed shortcomings and away from your antagonism toward Syndi.”

  “Look, Doctor. You want me to finish your assignment or not?”

  Being one of the country’s most insightfully attuned psychoanalysts, I recognized when it was time to reel in a patient, and when it was time to release him. There would always be time later for the net.

  Iconfusion

  After calling in my secretary for some lip balm, I found Hnossi Icegaard at the next workbay listening to music on her Q-bot player. “I trust zere’s no rule against ziss?” she said, gesturing to her small silver cube.

  “Not at all, Hnossi—this is art therapy, after all. Ella Fitzgerald, right?”

>   “Ja. She won ze Grammy for ziss. ‘Mack ze Knife.’ Even zough she forgot the vords, her improvisation vuss genius…a true warrior of song.” She gestured with her shortsword to the granite slab she’d transformed into a stunningly elaborate scale-model replica of a walled fortress, complete with towers, armories, mead halls, stables, and bridges—the mountain-peak home of the Norse war gods. Aesgard. I asked her to tell me about her icon.

  Offering a description that differed somewhat from my recollection of the legends, she focused on the Hall of Valkyries, the fortress of the sisterhood to which she used to belong. Yet none of what she said was in the least personally revealing.

  “You know, Frau Doktor,” she said confidentially, changing tone and direction, “alzough youngk Kareem can be undisciplinedt, you are too qvick to dismiss his legitimate concerns about Master Hawk Kink. I’ve spoken wiss him at length about ze prima facie case he’s been developingk—”

  Recognizing her diversion for what it was, I realized it was time to reel Iron Lass in.

  “I’ll take that into consideration, Hnossi. But right now, I’m curious about something that came up in our dual session with Syndi. After that conversation, I did some further reading about your life…and your mother’s.”

  She turned to me, and I was suddenly acutely aware of the power in the unsheathed swords clutched in her armored hands.

  “Unt vut,” she said quietly, “haff you discoverdt, Doktor Brain?”

  “Well…I…uh…I discovered that there is indeed quite a difference between Frigg, wife of Odin—the goddess-queen most people assume is your mother—and Frigg/Freyja, your actual mother.” I cleared my throat, choosing my next words as carefully as I would the steps on a rickety bridge across a gorge. “Whereas Frigg, wife of Odin, had an, an illustrious career as an Aesir warmaster and symbol of virtue…the other Frigg, your mother, was…she was…”

  “A whore,” she stated. “Is zat ze vurt you vere lookink for, Eva?”