Minister Faust

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

“Yes, I see, Wally. However—”

  Mr. Piltdown: “Do you even listen to the pap that dribbles out of your mouth, Wally? You respect my opinion? My opinion just burned you down to a primary-colored cinder, and you respect it? Is there so much as the smell of a thought inside that high-density skull of yours?”

  For the first time, Wally smiled, opening his hands in concession.

  “Wellsir, Festus, you’ve got me there. I’m still an old-fashioned man. It’s how I was raised. I b’lieve you should be able to disagree without being disagreeable, and, wellsir, I admit, I’m a might taken aback when you start, well—”

  “No, Wally. You’re not taken aback. You’re weak. And stupid. You were a liability to this team since it formed, and in the years since then you’ve only deteriorated, and, QED, you’ve cast this country into jeopardy, including through your capricious crybaby resignation—”

  Suddenly Mr. Piltdown shuffled himself in his chair, reaching inside a utility pouch at the armpit of his left flap as if he were itching from ants.

  “Good goddamnit! How in the hell did that Congo coon—”

  “Whatcha got there, Festy?”

  “I take my cape off for two minutes at the Fortress to use the damned rest room and that sociopathic sleeping-car porter stuffs it with one of his mau-mauing election pamphlets! If that switchbladed Australopithecus gets on our F*L*A*C, I’m telling you, we’ll all be speared in our sleep!”

  “Mr. Piltdown,” I said, “let’s stay focused on—”

  “He’s got no respect for private property! This is my cape, for God’s sake! You don’t touch a hero’s cape! My life depends on this thing operating properly—”

  “Festy, calm down—it’s just a lil ol’ brochure—”

  “Wally, while illiterates such as yourself may not care about the power of the written word—”

  “Mr. Piltdown, let’s focus on what you were saying about Wally. The words you chose carried an intense…certainty, and by your own description, they defy common wisdom. Why do you feel that Wally hasn’t earned his fame? He was, after all, a founding member of the F*O*O*J, whereas you joined only after the original seven members had returned from Germany.”

  “Actually, ma’am, Festus tweren’t a member till the next year—’46.”

  “Thank you, Wally. Yes. So what is the nucleus of your concern?”

  Mr. Piltdown laughed, coldly. “Ah, Miss Brain. Further proof that initials after one’s name mean nothing insofar as intellectual credentials, or even a child’s capacity to peer through the viscous veneer of venerability. During the war, Earth’s champion, there—”

  “The war—you mean the Götterdämmerung?”

  “World War Two! Two seconds ago you were talking about Germany, so why would I be talking about the Götterdämmerung? I don’t expect you to keep up with me, but at least muster the cognition to keep up with yourself, if you don’t mind.”

  I paused, allowing him to continue.

  “—As I was saying, this man is celebrated for having somehow put the kibosh on that mustachioed Austrian misanthrope in ’45, when in reality, as a result of his staggering incompetence, before Wally even got to Berlin he’d already destroyed a dozen Allied refueling ships and actually protected a U-boat by mistake!”

  Omnipotent Man chuckled. “Well now, that there’s kind of a funny story—”

  “A funny story—helping the Nazis. Here’s a funnier story, Miss Brain. Wally’s entire origin is a sham. You’ve got yard-chimps from Bangor to Buckskin Falls collecting trading cards and memorizing statistics about this atomic-powered flatworm, and every last one of them knows the messianic story of his origin: baby Karojun-Ya, rocketed to Earth from the exploding planet Argon by his philosopher-king father Jobuseen-Ya and gaining powers over mortal men—half Hercules, half Jesus.

  “But has anyone ever actually seen this planet Argon?”

  He let the question smolder, his baleful eyes burning like heaps of garbage.

  “No, you see,” he resumed just before Wally could defend his origin story, “because it just happened to be destroyed before anyone on Earth could ever take a picture of it, even though his rocket got here faster than the speed of light. Nothing but snake-milt.

  “Wally, there—what’s the expression?—he’s ‘sexed up’ the truth. He’s no extraterrestrial. He’s nothing but white super-trash. Have you ever seen a picture of his real family, Miss Brain? They’re trailer-trolls from Fried Possum, Kentucky!”

  “Wellsir, if I’m not from the planet Argon, Festus, then where’d I get my omni-powers?”

  “People acquire powers for any number of reasons, Wally! Genetics, childhood trauma, cell phones…Maybe you got yours in one of those Mexican clinics—I really don’t know. Some of us don’t depend on powers to do our damned jobs—which you don’t manage to do anyway—we actually have to work, understand? Be productive? Actually possess our own working testicles?”

  “I’m a—now, you see, Doctor Brain, sir, ma’am, this is where Festy has a tendency to take his horsing around a bit too far outta the barn—”

  “You know what this keen little patriot did during the OPEC crisis?”

  “—I’m a very hard worker, always have been, been working hard since I was nothing but Omni-Lad—”

  “—eating omni-grits, no doubt. During the OPEC crisis—”

  “—been savin folks in this here country since I was old enough to—”

  “During the goddamned OPEC crisis Wally promised Carter he’d use his ‘omni-power’ to create a new energy source to free us from the tyranny of those tablecloth-headed hand-choppers. You know where Wally tested his brainchild? You recall a little gem of real estate called Three Mile Island? To this day the entire country still believes that was a nuclear power plant, instead of the argonium processor it actually was. Now that’s PR, when the president himself covers up for you. Covers up for you being a filthy junkie!”

  “Now Festus, you wait just a gollyshocking minute! I aint never had no problem with argonium—”

  “What she ever saw in you, I’ll never understand—”

  “ ‘What she’—? Who ya talkin bout, Festy? Princess Astra?”

  Mr. Piltdown shut his mouth, his eyes flashing at me and then away as if he was afraid he’d said too much. Then he regrouped and regained my gaze, thumbing his accusations toward his colleague.

  “Those same hero card–collecting urchins who believe his rat-excrement nonsense about being from the planet Argon are true believers in his idiocy about argonium. That meteor fragments of his ‘exploded homeworld’ are the only substance that can kill ‘Omnipotent’ Man. Brilliant bit of logic, there, by the way, being allergic to his entire home planet. Just how does a species like that evolve, hm? Gloves? When the truth is, he’s as addicted to argonium as a common coolie is to opium!”

  “Festus, now dontchu be, be spreading any a your, your…exaggerations again,” said Wally, as if the word were the foulest curse he’d said in years.

  “Look at him, Miss Brain,” continued the Squirrel. “We’ve been trapped in your therapeutic clutches for more than a week now. Could even you be so dim as to’ve failed to notice how often he excused himself to go to the little cretin’s room, and how when he came back, his nostrils were dusted with a fine blue powder?”

  I glanced at Wally nipping at the nail of his right index finger. Given the omni-density of his nails, his chewing sounded like a boxcar locking into place in a train.

  “This man,” said the Squirrel, thumbing again, “so successfully hoodwinked that peanut-harvesting huckleberry of a president that he managed to turn the entire Department of Energy into his dealer! Three plum-sized glowing blue crystals per day back then. I haven’t a clue where he’s getting his supply now. Perhaps from somewhere out in the asteroid belt, which would explain all those ‘exploratory missions’ he’s been on of late, and probably explains his resignation itself! Instead of being up on Asteroid Zed today making himself useful, he was probably ou
t getting his fix—”

  “Doggoneit, Squirrel, y’all better hush now—”

  “Did you know, Miss Brain, that this apple-gnawing rum-donkey doesn’t even restrict himself to one secret identity? He has at least five that I know of, presumably so he can be an utter failure in as many places as possible. How about it, Wally? Did you know I knew? Junkies tend not to hide things very well, but neither do they often realize what nakedly strolling emperors they actually are.”

  Wally’s eyes became twin sunny-side-up eggs on the plate of his face, his lips an O of two crispy-curled slices of bacon.

  “Wally,” I asked, “what does Mr. Piltdown mean when he says you have more than one secret identity?”

  “Festy, you nuthin but a lyin, steamin heapa goat shit, j’know that?”

  “Oh ho! The monkey finally finds his mouth. But which of the three monkeys? Nothing but a disgrace to Hawk King’s entire legacy—”

  Suddenly the Flying Squirrel was flailing backward across the room because of a whipping, screeching tentacle of blue-white brilliance extending from Omnipotent Man’s mouth to the center of the Squirrel’s chest. Smashing into the opposite wall and crashing to the floor, Festus clutched the blackened, flaming hole in the tunic above his armor, gasping awfully.

  I glimpsed myself reflected in the glass of a framed Munch print—my hair static-charged, upright, and stiffened into the shape of an upside-down daddy longlegs.

  The entire room reeked of ozone.

  “Festus,” said Omnipotent Man, electric sparks spraying out between his clenched teeth like neon spittle, “you’d better tuck-tail on outta here ’fore I lose my temper…suh’m fierce.”

  Achilles’ Real Heel Was His Whole Body

  If you’re like Omnipotent Man, you may have spent much of your career, if not your life, hiding behind the fig leaf of your physical indestructibility. But having a diamond-hard body doesn’t guarantee you freedom from having a costume-jewelry soul, or that the gold of your mental health won’t oxidize into an unsightly green.

  Achilles, the “invulnerable” hero of the Trojan War, was vulnerable supposedly because of his very mortal heel. But a cursory reading of The Iliad shows that Achilles maintained very weak interpersonal relationships and was frozen at a child’s stage of ego development, sulking in his tent even while war raged around him. Clearly, Achilles’ true vulnerability was actually his invulnerability, or what I call the Achilles Threefold Folly of Superior Ability.

  The Achilles Threefold Folly of Superior Ability

  1. Achilles believed in the myth of his own invulnerability, so he never attempted to understand the meaning or ramifications of others’ vulnerability.

  2. Achilles’ inexperience with physical pain meant that he never developed a common lexicon of misery, the key ingredient necessary for human connection.

  3. Achilles, believing in his supposed inability to feel pain, and because of his lack of compassion, never grew to understand his own or others’ emotional pain, which imprisoned him inside an inescapable confinement of existential solitude. When the poisoned, flaming Trojan arrow struck him, Achilles as likely died from heartbreaking loneliness (the narcissistic fantasy that he alone could feel such pain) as from toxins, infection, third-degree burns, and massive blood loss.

  Unless Wally could rise to the challenge of confronting the reality of his own essential fragility, particularly during a time of such instability for the organization that gave his life meaning, he would never be able to achieve true strength and would instead die a broken, embittered, delusional man.

  Secret Origins and Secret Shames

  Without exception, every family keeps a veritable mausoleum of skeletons in its closets. Innumerable patients of mine have discovered only in adulthood that they’re in fact adopted, that they’re abuse survivors, that they’re human-alien hybrids, or even that they’re shaven, cerebro-boosted globus monkeys.

  So when Mr. Piltdown attacked Wally about his origins, I couldn’t help but ask myself some questions: Were Wally’s parents extraterrestrial quasi-gods of powers surpassing our “awe capacity” and of intellect impenetrable to mortal men? Or were they salt-of-the-earth country folk from America’s deep-fried gristle belt? Did Wally invent a myth of grandiose origins to overcompensate for his personal mediocrity? Or is it something else entirely? Or not?

  In order to help Wally feel truly comfortable exposing himself, I dismissed Mr. Piltdown to seek medical care and resume his “independent investigation” into Hawk King’s death. To aid in getting to Wally’s inner truth, I brought out my DynaScan Reflective Spectroscope Junior®, and, while giving Wally a few hours to compose himself, I pored over the “Omnipotent Mess” chapter from Jack Zenith’s Two Masks of a “Hero,” and contacted Mr. Piltdown to have him courier me his own Squirrel Intelligence files on Wally. And, as a precaution, I arranged two lightning rods on either side of my desk.

  If Mr. Piltdown’s claim about multiple secret identities had any truth to it, Wallace W. Watchtower was in far greater pain than I could ever have guessed.

  Excavating the Ice Age of Jobuseen-Ya

  So, Wally,” I asked, while sunset sweetened the room into a glowing ketchup smear, “how does it feel to be out of the F*O*O*J? Sitting on the sidelines, watching the accidental destruction of Asteroid Zed and the by-election for the F*L*A*C?”

  He gazed at me glumly, slumping in his chair like a mound of mashed potatoes.

  “Wellsir, asteroids are always blowin up somewhere, y’know?” he mumbled. “An’s far as th’lection, well…never really cared for thet administrative guff. I like doin thangs. Actin. Not fussin over forms an such.”

  I flipped through my file and the file Mr. Piltdown had sent me. “Hm. But…yes, you did serve on the F*L*A*C for a few years in the late forties and early fifties when the F*O*O*J was still new. There were some…problems…?”

  “Tweren’t really my thang, like I said, ma’am. Gil Gamoid stepped in for me, an Hawk King—may God rest both their souls—suggested I retire from the F*L*A*C so he could hep me keep refinin m’powers. The King hepped me find m’real callin: rescuin, savin, inspirin. I’m a ‘big pitcher’ sorta feller, not a dottin ts an crossin is man, y’know. Hnossi, Festus, they’re better with thet sorta stuff.”

  “I see. Would you say then, Wally, you’ve taken seriously, or not seriously enough, your history of failure?”

  “Wellsir, ma’am, I’d like to say that I always never don’t fail to take serious things seriously. I mean…wait a minute. Uh…yes?”

  “So you agree then, that—”

  “Now hang on, ma’am…You kinda rattled me there a minute with that question. So no, I don’think that I haven’t taken…I mean, I have taken—look, I never said I was a failure. That’s just not true. You know it, I know it, th’entire ’Merican people know it. They call me a hero. Now, I don’call m’seff a hero, but that’s what they call me. And two hunnerd and fifty million people can’t be wrong, no sir, ma’am.”

  “Now Wally, it’s interesting to me that you phrased your response the way you did. Because I didn’t say you were a failure.”

  “What? I coulda sworn you jess—”

  “No, I asked you to characterize, or reify—measure, if you will—how seriously you’ve taken your failures.”

  Wally looked back at me with his eyebrows knitted into a muffler of confusion, until finally scratching beneath his right armpit. “Now maybe you didn’hear me right, ma’am, but I jess said I’m not a failure, I’m a hero. Herofyin is what I do. It’s what I’m good at. Always have been.”

  “Wally, how realistic, really, is it to think that you’re perfect?”

  “I never said I was perfect, ma’am-doctor. Nobody’s perfect. Even Hawk King, and I adored the man, so don’get me wrong, but even he wunt perfect, though you might think so, listenin to Festus. Okay, no one ’cept maybe my daddy’s perfect. An he’s passed on.”

  “So how did that make you feel, when Festus referred to your pare
nts as—and I’m quoting from my notes here—as ‘nothing but white super-trash…trailer-trolls from Fried Possum, Kentucky’?”

  “Wellsir, twasn’t nice, ’course, but I’m a big boy. But I was talkin bout m’real daddy, not m’step-pa.”

  “You mean…Jobuseen-Ya, from the planet Argon.”

  “Yessir, ma’am.”

  “Now, we had a bit of an incident here, when Mr. Piltdown started questioning whether Jobuseen-Ya and Argon actually existed.”

  Wally wrinkled his nose, turned to his side, sucked in a deep breath, then let it out over the course of a full half-minute. Frost formed a huge white circle on the window in the path of his breath, and even the Spectroscope next to me scummed over milkily. I couldn’t stop myself from shuddering.

  “Sorry bout that,” he said.

  “That’s fine, Wally.” I crossed my arms for warmth, noticing how my skin had pimpled like a plucked chicken’s. The air temperature had to have dropped twenty degrees.

  Omnipotent Man leaned forward, pushed himself up and out of his chair, and ambled over to the window he’d just made opaque. He put a fingernail into the frost, which I could see then was at least half an inch thick.

  “Don’much care for people suggestin, Doc,” rumbled Omnipotent Man, “that I ain’t tellin th’truth.”

  Cold Reality

  You listen to Festus long enough,” he whispered, maybe more to himself than to me, “y’start not even knowin what’s true about y’seff. He c’n tear a strip off ya long enough to make a runway. On’y three or four people in th’world he don’never talk like that about. One’s Hawk King, who he thought was doggone infalalal…infabbubull…inflabbubble—”

  “—infallible?”

  “Right. Then there’s Ir’n Lass. An I spose…yeah, Chip Monk, his ol sidekick, even though they had a powerful fallin out, but he still don’never say s’much as a bad burp about him.

  “But me, he’s always ridin me like a fat jockey on a poor man’s pony. Sayin Argon don’exist, that I done wrong by ’Merica, that I’m, ha-ha, that I’m addicted t’argonium. I mean, don’t that jess take jake-all?”