She nodded at my statement.
“And not a lesbian, either. So what else isn’t real? The bubblehead act, obviously. So you really did write all those books, then.”
“She’s a marketing genius, Doc,” said Kareem. “And one of the smartest women I ever met. That’s why…why I started liking her.”
Syndi glowed like an aromatherapeutic candle.
“So who was driving the bus?”
Kareem scrunched his face disgustedly. “What?”
“She’s asking who wore the pants in our relationship, Kareem. I’d say…it was pretty fifty-fifty in the driver’s seat, Eva,” she said, nodding to encourage him to agree with her.
He laughed bitterly at her nonverbal request. “I’da been happy if it’d just slowed down long enough for me to get on the bus! I spent the whole time running after it with my coat caught in the kot-tam door!” Syndi wince-smiled abashedly. “She came on so strong, Doc. Wouldn’t leave me alone, kept following me, until I couldn’t get her out of my head. I knew I shouldn’t’ve, but…kot-tam it, I was lonely. I’ve always been lonely. Wasn’t like I’d ever had women chasing me. I’m not made of stone. She wore me down. So finally I agreed to meet her—incognito.”
He sighed, deeply.
“I told her to drive out and meet me in San Sebastiano at the only Ethiopian restaurant in town, a little place called the Emerald Lion. She wasn’t all tarted up that night. She was elegant. Wore a long black skirt. Her hair…it smelled like saltwater and hot sand. And we just…talked. For hours. About music, food, books, comedy, art…
“I’d been angry so long, serious so long…and suddenly there I was laughing, reminiscing about cartoons, toys, games, things I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid. And feeling…totally free. In my life, I always had to set a conscious example, come correct, what we used to call in the L*A*B, be blackified.
“But with…Syndi,” he said, visibly forcing himself to say her name again, “I didn’t have to do that. Or need to do it. It was like, suddenly, all I had to do was just one thing: be happy. When I was with her, suddenly it was like there was no world, no politics, no mission, no duty. It was just us.”
“And you so fell in love with her.”
His mouth opened angrily, as if he were about to spit denial. But then he softened, looking at Syndi, then at me, and finally granted a single nod in defiance of himself.
A sigh almost broke into a sob in Syndi’s throat. But she was smiling enough to crinkle her eyes.
“But then the L*A*B found out,” I pushed. “What’d they do?”
Kareem glared out the window.
Syndi leapt in: “They told him to stop seeing me! What the hell business is it of theirs?”
“Why’s this gotta be the big bad fetish—black man, white woman—like it’s the end of the kot-tam world?” said Kareem. “You see these newspapers? These punks’d happily be printing headlines like ‘Nigger B&E’s into Whitey’s harem’ even if the planet were plunging into the sun!”
“But didn’t you used to feel the exact same way, Kareem? Isn’t that what you said in one of your articles?” He said nothing. “And you were denounced by whites for your hypocrisy, not your transracial eroticism. Those denunciations were almost all by blacks.” He wouldn’t answer. “So the L*A*B kicked you out. How did that make you feel?”
“I talked with Dr. Rogers,” he said, “asked him what to do. The L*A*B was already under fire—we were about to lose our HUD contract, and now I was in the middle of a relationship I shouldn’t’ve been having at all, for several reasons…He said that everything was unfolding as it was meant to, that my destiny was ultimately to lead the F*O*O*J.
“I laughed. I mean, I figured he was yanking my spear, trying to cheer me up. But he wasn’t kidding. So before the L*A*B could force me out I quit. Syndi’d already been in the F*O*O*J a year by then, done her probation, was already a made member, so she sponsored me. No one made the connection. But I’d already shocked the hell out of everyone just by asking to join.”
“So what happened? Clearly you were both passionately in love. What went so wrong between you two that you even stopped saying Syndi’s name?”
This time, instead of their eyes sending faxes to each other, the two turned toward opposite walls, my question rebuffed by their receivers being taken off their hooks.
Little White Lies and Big Black Secrets
Unraveling the bandages covering Kareem’s and Syndi’s psychemotional wounds was exhaustive work, since their bloodied psychic linens were so crusted together they’d congealed into experiential gore. As the night deepened, we baby-stepped our way through the basic facts toward what I’d sensed was a devastatingly destructive betrayal.
We established the basics: that the relationship was passionate but rocky, its secrecy deemed necessary by both but frustrating to each; that over time, Kareem saw Syndi as selfish, shallow, vain, and narcissistic, whereas Syndi came to see Kareem as obsessive, deluded, impersonal, and emotionally retarded.
And as was generally the case, the sexual problems that erupted during such a contrapersonal disconnect were mis-diagnosed by the couple as cause rather than as effect.
From Kareem’s perspective, Syndi had grown sexually unresponsive in the second year of their secret trysts, “after the kink wore off,” he sneered, and also, according to him, because she was terrified that he was finally seeing through her multiple layers of deception and self-deception to gaze upon the real Syndi. The more she shut down verbally, psychemotionally, and sexually, the more frantically Kareem inverted their preset roles of hunter and prey, driving her farther from him and him deeper and deeper into chasing after connection with her and drowning himself in self-loathing.
And then, one night, in a desperate attempt to restart their physical passion and emotional intimacy, Syndi made a snap decision that shattered something in Kareem which apparently had not healed one iota in the two years that had followed. And the closer we moved toward gazing into that smoldering crater, the more Kareem’s body stiffened and his face splintered.
“It’d been two months, Eva,” said Syndi. “Since we’d. You know. Made love. I mean, we’d sleep in the same bed, but we wouldn’t even hold each other.
“I was desperate, just…terrified it was over. I mean, I loved him…but all we did anymore was go through all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit just to see each other and spend the night together without any witnesses connecting us, and then we’d just argue! All night! Or sit in silence! Or sleep together without even touching each other. I just…I wanted to feel close to him, for the sex to be good again, for everything to be like it was in the beginning.”
“So what did you do?”
Kareem’s eyes flared. “So, great, not enough I’m humiliated in front of the kot-tam world, now I get humiliated here, too?”
“Kareem—” she said, reaching out for his knee or arm or shoulder or cheek, but he shoved himself off the chaise longue and walked to the farthest point in the room from her, pretending to read a book he’d pulled from my shelf.
I forced her to look at me. “What did you do, Syndi?”
“I…” she said, trying to decide whether to confess, and finally: “I used my HEAT Ray on him.”
“Your…your hyper-emulation beam? You…turned him into a copy of you? Which you controlled?”
She nodded. Kareem looked angry enough to bite through the wall.
“And it was amazing,” she said. “I’d never felt anything like that in my life. Ever. It was so good…the best—”
“Kot-TAM!” snapped Kareem. “Can you hear yourself?”
“Kareem, please. Let Syndi process this. Continue, Syndi.”
“That’s it. I mean…what else can I say? It was really that good—mind-blowingly, Richter scale fantastic. But after I relea—…when we were done…Kareem, he was shaking. And he…he cried. For an hour. And he wouldn’t let me touch him. I’d never seen anyone react to the HEAT Ray like that before, but—”
>
“Had you ever used it in sex before?”
“No, but…no.”
“Syndi, don’t you think it’s odd that although you’ve told me you’re not a lesbian, you’ve presented yourself to the public as one for years, and that after finding yourself sexually unsatisfied with a man” (even without looking at Kareem I could hear him react) “turning him into a woman reignited your erotic energy?”
“No, Eva, you, you don’t get it—that wasn’t it at all. It’s not that I turned…I mean, that Kareem became a…look, it’s not that I was making love to a woman—”
“It’s that you were making love to you.”
She swallowed, looked away from me, then down at the floor. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
“Kareem…you obviously had a strong psychemotional response to this sexual engagement—”
“ ‘Engagement’!” he hollered at the roof.
“You’re verbalizing a great deal of antihappiness. Could it be that you’re actually manifesting this antihappiness toward yourself?”
He turned to me. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Are you ‘angry’ at yourself because you liked the experience so much? Of becoming a woman?”
Kareem’s arms and legs slackened, and he slumped against the wall, his jaw seemingly unhinged. He was literally panting with speechless rage.
“Gender confusion is a common experience, Kareem, and nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I don’t have ‘gender confusion’!”
“Not to mention the psychic clash with your pronounced homophobia of being suddenly transformed into a lesbian—”
“I am not homophobic and I didn’t ‘transform’ into a lesbian—”
“Well, a clash of your becoming a woman against your deeply held sexism—”
“For fucking out loud, I AM NOT SEXIST!”
“Well, whatever label you choose to affix, you were frightened by this experimentation—”
“It wasn’t ‘experimentation,’ Eva! It was exploitation! Complete kot-tam humiliation! So I got angry—to use a word you fear so much—angry because someone who said she loved me could make me her puppet, her toy, her kot-tam slave, and then have the gall to expect me to like it! To expect me to willingly throw up my wrists for her to lock the cuffs on again! And because she couldn’t muster up a gram of shame or face a milligram of my righteous rage at her betrayal, she, can you get this, she dumped me!”
“But look at your every word and gesticulation, Kareem,” I said, gesturing gently to reassure him of the liberating truth of my diagnosis. “It’s not her you’re angry at. It’s yourself.”
He howled at the ceiling. “Do you ever listen to anyone but yourself, Eva? Ever think an original thought that hasn’t dripped like toxic sewage out of one of your head-shrinking, misanthropic pseudoscience textbooks? Man, Stalin could’ve paid you to write copy for him!”
“So you’re telling me you’re not angry at yourself? Not even a little?”
“If I’m angry at myself, it’s not because I ‘liked’ what she did to me, but because I put up with her as long as I did. I’m angry because she had the means and motive and I still gave her the opportunity to fuck me over like she did, literally! And because I didn’t dump her ass before she could dump me!”
“Kareem, anger isn’t the opposite of joy any more than hate is the opposite of love. Both are manifestations of intense attention, focus, preoccupation: your anger and hatred toward Syndi are proof of your joy in her and your love of her.”
“So you’re telling me that if a woman is raped, her obsessive anger and hatred prove she loves her rapist?”
“Kareem, the effort you devote to dodging obvious realizations proves my point. The very intensity of how much you deny having enjoyed your experience as a woman—”
“I didn’t! How many times do I have to say that?”
“—case in point—are simply denial. Obviously you loved being dominated by Syndi, and your enjoyment in becoming a woman is directly proportional to the effort you expend bearing the awesome psychic yoke of rigid African American machodeterministic phallarchical gender roles. It’s been amply documented in studies of heterosexual African American drag queen subculture that many black men harbor psyche-fragmentary ‘lesbians’ inside themselves—alternate sexual personalities or ‘sex alters,’ if you will—a condition referred to on the street as being ‘on the down-low, sideways.’ Do you deny that?”
“Deny what?” guffawed Kareem. “That you’re psychotic?”
I waited. When he refused to say anything else, I shifted angles.
“Kareem, Syndi…do you hate each other…or do you still love each other?”
Again, each one turned to the other, glaring in agonized aggravation, anticipation. Desperation.
“Well?”
Suddenly Syndi was sobbing.
I offered her the box of tissues.
Kareem, against his will, staggered toward her, finally sitting on the end of the chaise opposite her.
I asked about her tears.
“Because, because,” she wailed, “because everything’s falling apart, because he hates me, because everyone’s leaving me…”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that, Syndi,” I said, gesturing for her to take another tissue. Her cheeks were channeled with black lines, a white porcelain sink dirtied by a child’s playground mud. “What do you mean, ‘everyone’s leaving me’?”
She shook her head again and again while blowing her nose. “My mother,” she said at last.
“Yes? What about her, Syndi?”
“My mother…my whole life, she always, always put me last. I was like a dog, you know? Waiting on the couch by the window the whole day for its master to come home, but the master never does, and so the dog practically breaks its fucking tail off wagging and whimpering and whining alone…That’s why…when Kareem was always so obsessed with his job instead of bothering to spend time with me, focus on me, take care of me, I just couldn’t take it. I got scared, and I pushed him away. Because he was already pushing me away, don’t you get it?” She hiccuped her sobs. And while the exhaustion on Kareem’s face suggested he’d heard her story before, the pain in his expression was as real as hers.
“I’m surprised, Syndi,” I said, “because from everything you’ve ever told me, you and Bianca have an excellent, close bond, not to mention the most famously successful—and lucrative—mother-manager/daughter-talent relationship in either showbiz or in superheroics—”
“No!” she choked, looking up and moaning. “No! Bianca’s…she’s not…she’s not my mother, Eva, she’s just my agent. That was just a cover story. I’m crying…because my real mother’s dying.”
“What?” said Kareem. “Syndi, then who’s…kot-tam, Syndi, are you saying—”
“Yes,” she said, choking back a sob and visibly making a decision. “My real name is Inga Icegaard. My mother is Iron Lass.”
And suddenly there it was.
With her hair now raven-feather black and her eyes bright sapphires on the black felt of smeared mascara, the ax-blade of her cheekbones and the taper of her chin—it had been hidden right in front of us all along.
Looking into Kareem’s pinballing eyes, I could see he was as stunned as I was. His face was a sorting machine, visibly reevaluating his every experience and conversation and fight and sorrow with Syndi, not to mention his workplace relationship with Iron Lass and her witness of the last two years of his behavior toward her daughter.
And then something else suddenly stormed into his eyes, like a vision of thundering horses and a chaos of lightning.
The X-Man bolted out of the room without so much as a glance good-bye.
“Kareem!” shrieked Syndi, crying again. “Kareem…”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed or even equal the accomplishments of your predecessors?
Syndi: “I never asked for glory. Just unconditional love.”
&n
bsp; Does Your Heart Come Wrapped in Your Cape?
Now that the age of heroism is drawing to a close—and even when it was at its peak—if you’ve found yourself spinning from one frantic come here/go away relationship to another, it’s time to start owning your role in creating your own misery, loneliness, and feelings of worthlessness.
As a superhero, you may have told yourself that your central purpose was saving lives and protecting the public peace. But now that your apartment is empty, your bed is cold, and your freezer contains nothing but Lean Cuisine Single Heart Entrees™, it’s time you took ruthlessly courageous action.
Ask yourself: while donning the cape and tights may have seemed to you to have been about helping others, was it really all along about helping yourself? Were you actually connecting in your heart and mind the applause of the crowd with Daddy throwing you in the air and saying “Attaboy!” and Mommy nuzzling you to her chest and telling you that you’ll always be her “bestest widdle girl”?
Now that the world has gone quiet around you, you have the time to face the ultrafoe who’s been stalking you all along: your fear of being forgotten, unloved, and alone.
Don’t back off from the challenge. Don’t surrender. In the jungle of your unfolding developmental path, don’t let yourself sink beneath the psychemotional quicksand of alcohol, drugs, cybendorphins, serial sexual conquests (or surrenders), or cryptosuicidal reckless adventurism. You need to capture the destructive nemesis known as Dr. Despair, because he’s holding in his cold cobalt claws the two powers you’ve always truly needed but never known how to attain: self-awareness and, through it, self-actualization.
CHAPTER TEN
The Battle of All Mothers, the Mother of All Battles
SUNDAY, JULY 16, 10:00 A.M.
Yearning for Détente on the Eve of War
It was a Sunday morning. And quiet. A family reunion in the hospital.
Minister Faust Page 27
