Minister Faust

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

  I was struck again by how weary and worn he looked, slumped in his chair, his thinning hair whiter than ever and matted to his forehead. Perhaps he’d been skipping his “GI Juice” injections, or perhaps the psychemotional stress had been diminishing their effectiveness. Even inside the center of his superheroic sanctum, his legendary yet no longer “undisclosed location,” Festus Piltdown III looked like an aged farmer gazing impotently at the hailstorm thrashing toward his fields.

  “This is a very hard time for you, isn’t it, Festus?”

  “I can see why,” said Festus, his eyes scanning his scanners without so much as blinking toward me, “you need the PhD after your name, Eva. You certainly wouldn’t drum up business with anemic banalities like that.” He snapped, “Of course it’s hard on me! It’s hard on all of us!”

  “But on you personally. Only Syndi is bearing Hnossi’s condition as heavily as you are.”

  “That’s because I’ve known her for five decades, twenty years longer than even her no-account daughter has. And now I’ve got to worry that these leads I was pursuing on Warmaster Set were all black herrings. Which means that even the destruction of Asteroid Zed—my God!—even that was the work of that Beelzebubian bastard Kareem—”

  “Let’s focus on your feelings, Festus—your worry for Hnossi. To see her in this state—”

  “ ‘This state’? Dying, you mean? In bed, the way no warrioress would ever want to go?”

  “And before she can resolve her family troubles, her distance from her children, not to mention any other…unresolved interpersonal issues—”

  He cut me off. “I was never married, so I can’t relate to that. But missing your children—that I understand. I have compassion for that pain. And as her comrade.”

  “I’m not seeing comradely loyalty alone here, Festus,” I said, touching his hand. I expected him to yank it away, even order me not to touch him. Instead, he was frozen, his eyes unfocused amid the flashing images from his surveillance honeycomb.

  “I’ve been reading up on your noncaped careers,” I said, anxious to maintain the opening. “You two not only worked together in the F*O*O*J, but elsewhere. For decades, Professor Icegaard was a paid consultant of your defense contracting corporation. Pilt-Dyne built the B9 bomber, which you christened the Iron Lass class; because of you, Pilt-Dyne’s nuclear submarine was named the Icegaard class.” I squeezed; his hand trembled. “For a hard-boiled industrial magnate like you, Festus, those were practically love poems.”

  He looked over at me, his eyes wet and glossy and twinkling from the honeycomb lights. Sitting there in his chair with his whitened hair, he was no longer the frightening, furry one-man war on crime, and no longer even the towering tycoon of technology.

  He was just an old, lonely man facing the truth of his own powerlessness.

  “And yet,” I said, probing this rare vulnerability to examine the psychemotional damage that was crushing the life out of him, “for all your devotion to this woman, now that she truly needs you and there’s no one else in your way, you still can’t do anything to protect her…or save her.”

  “What?” he whispered, too horrified to be furious.

  “Festus, you were up on Asteroid Zed with her, but when she was attacked by the Desiccator, where were you? Even now, with all your wealth and influence, and the awesome power of the surveillance you have at your fingertips right here, the woman you’ve loved for fifty years is dying, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

  His lower lip quivering, the spindly old teeth of his lower jaw exposed like a skeleton’s, Festus leaned back in his chair, clutching his chest as if to keep his heart from exploding.

  “Festus,” I whispered, leaning toward him, “how does all that make you feel?”

  His eyes were huge, his pupils swollen blackly, his face drained of all its color.

  Suddenly the high-pitched buzz-whine in the background noise climaxed to buzzsaw anxiety that ripped through Festus’s misery. I glanced up and spied an agitated Brotherfly crawling the Hollow’s ceiling in endless circles while fluttering his wings at just below take-off speed. Festus shook his head as if to wake from sleeping at the wheel, then shoved his chair back away from me and stood.

  “Get the fuck out of my crime lab!” he yelled, flipping back the sides of his dressing gown, his hands hovering at the holster level of his exposed utility belt. “And take that wall-crawling parasite with you!”

  At Festus’s behest, Mr. Savant, employing a crutch and with one arm in a cast, showed André and me to a drawing room. I offered André a tranquilizer, but he still wouldn’t sit down, leaving his hand-and footprints all over the walls, windows, and ceiling.

  Finally, following my special instructions, Mr. Savant left and hobbled back pushing a cart with a bowl of luxurious, exotic fruits, placing it on the grand marble coffee table at the center of the room.

  Lured down by the sweet scents and tropical colors, André perched on the coffee table to ingest the fruit, doing so by expectorating rancid yellow digestive juices all over the oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and grapes which dissolved the produce—peels, stalks, seeds, stones, and all—into a steaming, stinking pool that spilled all over the marble table. Opening his mouth, André unfurled his well-endowed proboscis and began sucking up the bubbling soda-pap he’d created.

  Suppressing my gorge with an act of supreme will, I sat, taking out my ANDRÉ PARKER, HKA THE BROTHERFLY F*O*O*J file as well as the MORRIS ANDREW PARK, ALIAS BROTHERFLY file that Mr. Savant had brought me.

  “You’re twenty-six, André, correct?” He slurped and nodded, still sucking up the revolting stinking slime on the table. “And you’ve been in the F*O*O*J how long?” He held up three fingers.

  André was a fascinating set of contradictions. As the hip, laid-back, fun-loving Brotherfly, he could not be a more profound counterpoint to the militant anal-retention of the thirty-four-year old X-Man. In one session, Kareem had described André as a “hyper-womanizing, antiintellectual, willing slave…enough of a collaborator with every racist stereotype about young black males that he should be a PR man for the Klan,” and he’d denounced André to his face at the Dark Star soul food restaurant as “a slack, slick, loose-dicked, willingly-no-self-control…senseless, thoughtless, shiftless, aimless, brainless, oversized pants–wearing, forty-ounce-loving, penis-fixated, self-underrated supreme champeen of galactic niggativity.”

  But as the real man beneath the André Parker construct, Morris Andrew Park had so much in common with Philip Kareem Edgerton that the toxic enmity they shared became all the more shocking.

  Glancing through the file’s photos, I was struck by how severely André deviated from Andrew: tiny four-year-old Andrew in glasses on the back of a huge, shaggy dog; petite eight-year-old Andrew as chess wizard; puny sixteen-year-old Andrew in thick eyeglasses singing the role of Fortunato in his school’s musical production The Cask of Amontillado… contrasted with several photos of muscular, tall, sexually turbocharged twenty-two-year-old André “boogeying” in Bird Island nightclubs the Meet Market, Bone Dancers and Peacocks.

  Undoubtedly Kareem would have approved of Andrew having attended the so-called “historically black college” Nat Turner U. It was there that the frail, awkward genetics student, the victim of a fraternity “prank,” found himself forcibly gene-spliced with the dynamically altered DNA of a bluebottle fly.

  After an astounding array of mutations, which saw Park autonomically spin a cocoon and retreat into it for the entirety of a spring break, Andrew had emerged with an enhanced genetic matrix that had imbued the brainy recluse voted “Most likely to Urkel” (whatever that meant) with the proportionate speed, strength, agility, and “flyness” of a fly.

  After first gaining his powers, the shy young undergrad who’d never shone anywhere but onstage or on the dean’s list looked for some way to employ his neotalents to help pay the bills of the elderly aunt and uncle who’d raised him. But as his acne dried up, his vision improved, hi
s chest rippled, and his coordination soared, Andrew found himself winning stage roles as a leading man and attracting romantic attention of which he had never dreamed. After a fateful confidence-supercharging, career-advising meeting with Dennis Rodman, “André” began earning more money than he’d ever seen—as an exotic dancer. Although crimefighting as such had never been André’s intention, the post-Götterdämmerung F*O*O*J was recruiting fresh faces for its own face-lift, and as André said in his job interview, “The benefits are good.”

  Perhaps beneath the André-bravado and underlying the anti-Kareem rage was the awkwardness of young Andrew, the tiny boy lacking in confidence everywhere but in the theater. This frightened inner-child Andrew likely confused the hyper-verbal, hyper-confident, hyper-aggressive Kareem on a psychemotional level with all those who had ever bullied him—from the children who shoved his face in the urinal until he ate the cake to the “frat boys” who so cruelly spliced his genes.

  Yet there was more driving the Brotherfly’s overcompensating humor, erotic aggression, and anger—another deeper node of sadness, pain, and, I suspected, guilt. Ordinarily André would have been far too attention-deficited for me to probe into his deeper psychemotional workings, but as Mr. Savant had followed my instructions to inject the liquid tranquilizers I’d given him into the fruit, André was opening up like a can of soup.

  “My uncle,” he said when I inquired about the pain I knew he held in his psychemotional reservoir. “Poor ol Uncle Benteen.”

  “What about your uncle, André?”

  “ ’s dead,” he slurred sleepily. “My fault.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I’d…y’know…changed… a lot. When I. Went offta school. ’Slot ferimmta handle. Went away a liddle boy. Came backaman. Never toldimmabout my, my, my mutation. Shun. That I wuzza supereero, that I joinda F*O*O*J. N one day, I, I, I didn’know hewuzzome. An I’s getting into it…an he—”

  “Getting into what, Andrew?”

  His eyes telescoped on me as if I were a million miles away. But as he picked up speed, his hands and wings fluttered with ever-greater agitation, his face and voice rending themselves with ever-greater tragedy.

  “…gettin inta my uniform,” he said. “An Uncle Benteen, he juss walks right into my damn bejjroom an sees me there with my armzanlegs half innannouttuvvit…an he grabs his heart, an he, he, he juss drops over! An therewuzzn’t fuckall I couldoabouddit! Dead’s dead. Dead,” he said, cupping his face in his hands, snorting and shuddering and wailing.

  There was more, I sensed—something even more painful that André had yet to disclose. But before I could probe further, Mr. Savant appeared next to me.

  “Madame,” said the ancient manservant, “Ms. Icegaard is awake and is requesting your presence.”

  Stroking André’s hair and straightening out his antennae, I assured him I’d be back as soon as I could. I hurried off for what in all likelihood would be Hnossi’s final session.

  When Good-bye Is the Only Time to Say “I Love You”

  Does Hnossi know, Festus, how you’ve felt about her all these years?”

  He fixed his furious eyes back on me, already enraged that Hnossi had insisted on my presence during his last remaining hours with her. After he refused to acknowledge my question with anything other than rage, she spoke for him.

  “Ja, Frau Doktor,” she whispered.

  By then her skin was almost entirely racked with seeping red craters and brittle white plates. Even her scalp was a tortured moonscape, with what had remained of her hair burned off during her electrical discharges.

  Yet when Festus turned to look at her while she struggled to talk, there wasn’t a hint of horror or disgust in his eyes.

  Only love and pain.

  “Of course…I knew,” she said.

  “Was there ever anything between you? Sexually?”

  Festus’s back stiffened, but neither of them answered.

  Finally Hnossi said, “It vuss 1961. Five munse before I vuss to marry Hector. Unt Festus unt I vere vurking longk hours, heading up ze anti-Treemason task force…unt, vell, zere hadt alvays been ziss…ziss potency betveen us, betveen me unt Festus. Unt vun night after a battle, ve came back to ze Fortress, unt ve’d bose been drinking…”

  She sighed so heavily I feared the onslaught of another hacking fit—possibly her final one. But then she resumed.

  “I felt so guilty…I couldn’t even look at Festus, unt our friendship…vell, it never vent back to vut it hadt been. Never. Unt me…my self-respect…after all zose centuries uff svearing I vud never be like my own muzzer. But it vuss like a curse. I vuss no better zan zat whore.”

  She gnarled her fingers together, gazed toward the ceiling with eyes almost entirely scummed white. “All my talk. About honor! Nussing but vurmvoodt.”

  “And so,” I asked as delicately as I could, “you said this was five months before you married Hector. And five months after your wedding…”

  “Ja. Inka vuss born.”

  “And is she—?”

  “She’s Hector’s,” said Hnossi. “Sank Odin for zat. I put ze man srough enough pain. But Festus…venever ve hadt FOOCH family picnics, I’d catch him staring at Inka ven he sought I vuzn’t lookink…”

  Festus’s eyes went wide. He’d apparently never known that the watchman had been watched.

  “Staring how, Hnossi?” I asked. “At what?”

  “Like…he vuss tryingk to see if somehow ze test hadt been wrong…or if I’d lied to him about ze test, maybe? I don’t know. And zen after she got to a certain age, he stopped lookink at her altogezzer, I sink, because…she remindtet him.”

  “Of what?”

  She looked at me, twin tears glistening in the shock of her frosted eyes, apparently stunned that I could not figure it out for myself. “Of vut couldt never be!”

  She beckoned in Festus’s direction. He was at her side instantly, holding her crumbling hand with the delicacy of cradling a newborn.

  “Festus…I vant to tell you sum sings…”

  “What, Hnossi?” he croaked, his throat a tuba of mud.

  “I’m sorry…zat I made you suffer srough all of my, my—”

  “This isn’t the time for sorrys, Hnossi—”

  “Let me finish!” she snapped, then instantly softened. “I’m sorry for hurtink you, rejectink you…for all my…vut does Frau Doktor call it? Ze ‘crazy-makink’ behavior, ja.”

  “It’s okay, Hnossi,” he said, clearing his throat and swallowing heavily, twice. “It’s okay.”

  “Nein,” she whispered. “It vuss never okay. But at least now, at ze ent, I can say to you vut I shudt haff said back zen, back in 1962…”

  He waited, stooping, clutching her hand to his cheek. When she said nothing, he begged, “Yes, Hnossi?”

  He looked down into her eyes.

  They were pale gray, motionless.

  Her chest fell as softly as snow.

  Red, rust-scented smoke was drifting from her mouth.

  The medical monitors screamed as one.

  “Hnossi!” shouted Festus. “Dr. Singh! Nurse! DR. SINGH—”

  The door swung open, and a suited and caped Omnipotent Man strode in.

  “Wally, you idiot! What the hell are you doing here? Get Dr. Singh!”

  “Step aside, Festus,” he said. He clutched Festus’s shoulder and plucked him out of the way like a mother dog retrieving a puppy by the neck.

  Wally reached into the bed, sifted out Hnossi, and clutched the red-ravaged body in his arms.

  And then he kissed her.

  Electricity crackled from Wally’s mouth into Hnossi’s, streamers of it whipping frenetically around the room and overloading the machines and exploding the lightbulbs, plunging the room into flare-strobing darkness. Festus screamed at Wally to stop while Hnossi’s limbs danced and jerked and her chest sucked closed and inflated outward violently again and again, and still Wally welded his kiss onto her, and when the scorching blue luminescence br
ightened to the point of blindingness, Festus and I scrambled from the room in fear for our lives.

  “HNOSSI!” screamed Festus from the hall, while light seared our eyes even from around the rim of the door for what seemed like forever.

  And then there was silence.

  The door swung open.

  Standing beside the steely, confident Omnipotent Man was Hnossi Icegaard.

  Reborn.

  Her skin was gleaming copper, her hair was returned miraculously to its full thick blackness and luster, and her eyes were shining like halogen amethysts. Wrapped only in a white bedsheet, she looked more Greek goddess than Norse, glowing before us and smiling with secret, joyful knowledge, as if listening to celestial music only she and the divine could hear.

  “Wally,” gasped Festus, relief and horror fighting for control of his face, “what did you—”

  “All th’little gal needed, Festy, was a little galvanizin. Course,” smirked Wally, “not every man knows how t’perform that.”

  Back in therapy after the excursion to Asteroid Zed, after Hnossi had already developed rust poisoning, Wally had fallen to pieces and electro-welded his own fingers and limbs back on. But none of us—not I, not Festus (whom Wally’d electro-blasted across the room), and not Wally himself—had realized how that power might be applied to transforming others.

  I complimented Wally on his apparently successful transformation of Hnossi and, of course, of himself. He turned a sunrise smile on me, saying, “I couldna done it without ya, ma’am-doctor.”

  “And your alters? Ricky R. Bustow, Reverend Crocket, Musk Ox Miller? Are they—”

  He tapped the side of his skull, eliciting a soft bell tone. “Wellsir, they’s still all up here—but now, they’s together. Uni-mah-fied.” Even Wally’s voice had been transmuted, expanded, as if the multiple “voices” inside him had harmonized sonically into a melodious choir, powerful and hypnotic.

  “I did like you told me, ma’am,” said Omnipotent Man. “I cogitated suh’m fierce upon who I wannid t’be, steada all the thangs I weren’t an that I was a failure at. I put all m’shortcomins in th’closet an put on m’best Sunday-go-t’meetin suit, an fixed m’self to bein like m’mentor. An th’more I did, the more I realized the truth.” His eyes shifted toward the ceiling, as if gazing past drywall and plaster and up into the majesty of the revolving, evolving galaxy.