Minister Faust

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

  Brotherfly: “Glory’s a hole. Gimme that mo-nay! Bzzzt!”

  X-Man: “I don’t give a fuck about glory. Give me truth.”

  Denial and Delusion: Always Unhelpful?

  Kareem demanded I leave him to his greenroom solitude. I spent the next two days at the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic anxiously awaiting his call. Beyond the fright-show skullishness of his looks, it was the crumbling desperation in his voice, so striking in a man ordinarily so strident, that worried me. Polls showed him crashing through the basement of his previous disapproval ratings. I hoped that wherever he was, there were neither pills nor rope.

  And there was no word from Syndi either, the target of her own backlash after having been “inned” by Billi Biceps. There had been a public tearing-up of her membership papers for GLAAD, and the weekly SuperherOUT had denounced her for “pimping queerness to advance her shallow career through poseuristic lesbian chic.”

  Iron Lass had been too sick to see me, and neither Festus nor André had anything to say outside of anti-Kareem gloating. And so the only person left attending therapy was Wally.

  As Argon’s only son on Earth continued to integrate the experiences of his many personalities (or alters) into his central persona, his powers continued to malfunction and fade. It was as if his hyper-capacities depended on his own lack of self-awareness to function. And the picture that had emerged of Wally’s alters wasn’t pretty.

  As playboy Ricky R. Bustow, Wally had left a trail of businesses he’d plundered, insider-traded, or plunged into the ground; as fight promoter Francis “the Musk Ox” Miller, he’d built his Vegas sports book and his fortunes entirely on Omnipotent Man’s battles—not whether he’d win, but how long it would take to defeat his foes, which powers he would use, and which buildings he would destroy; as Reverend “Crawdad” Crocket, he’d built a televangelism empire exploiting his congregation’s fears that the Götterdämmerung was Armageddon, but behind the scenes he’d left collection baskets full of broken hearts and at least one very reluctant abortion.

  Fascinatingly, the alters possessed qualities of shrewdness, discernment, and intellect that Wally had not yet manifested in his own life. Perhaps a rural upbringing had wilted such capacities in the young Wally, and the overbearing influence of Festus Piltdown III had stifled them afterward. But argonium had stimulated them and set them free. If Wally, free from his destabilizing argonium addiction, were able to harness the alters’ mental faculties and awaken them inside a unified Wally-prime personality, he might be able to save his sanity and himself.

  But we were nowhere near such a dynamic integration.

  Even the existence of Wally’s retreat, his Stronghold of Standing-on-My-Own-Two-Feetitude, had come into question, when satellite telemetry in Flying Squirrel’s Omnipotent Man file challenged the Stronghold’s Antarctic location by showing no such edifice had ever existed there. In fact, the real Stronghold was in the Andes. Faced with such photographic proof, Wally confessed, “I never was no good at d’rections.”

  Every session, Wally’s powers failed further, his panic escalating the closer he got to realizing that his extraterrestrial hyper-abilities might be at their end. I encouraged the desperate Wally to use visualization and the serenity affirmation to picture himself without his powers, but completely at peace. But my request only drove Wally into such deep despair that he began regularly articulating suicidal ideation.

  Desperate for a solution, I asked Wally if he would be willing to go along with a last-ditch gambit for his survival.

  “Yes!” he wailed, rocking and sobbing in front of me, cradling his head between his knees, pounding his fists into the back of his head heavily enough to elicit gongs. “But how, Doc? I feel like I’m dead already!”

  Locking Wally into the Id-Smasher®’s psi-mulated environment for a continuous session stretching over a week, I induced in him the mental experience of having all his powers back. To restore his confidence in his own character, I created a psi-mulated Hawk King who walked with him, talked with him, and flew with him, who constantly reminded him to assert ownership of and become a stakeholder in the Hawkish qualities he so admired, to own the target of his own admiration.

  It was a grave risk. Such an auto-belief in his career and his powers required Wally to activate vast mental energies into a delusion of his own competence and the fantasy that the future would unquestionably see the return of his powers to their original magnitude. My dangerous strategy was predicated on the psychestructure’s enormous capacity for denial, an evolutionary defense mechanism intended to preserve the sapient organism against overwhelming odds.

  Given sufficient time, Wally might eventually have come safely to integrate full awareness of his failures and accept his imomnipotence. But that time had not yet arrived.

  THURSDAY, JULY 13, 9:59 P.M.

  Self-X-Amination

  At last, on the third night following the press conference, while Wally was still contained inside the Id-Smasher® for his ongoing personality reintegration, Philip Kareem Edgerton showed up at the door of my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic.

  He was unshaven, appeared to have lost even more weight, and looked and smelled as if he hadn’t changed his clothes since Monday.

  “How’m I supposed to do my job when I’ve become the story?” he said by way of greeting. “That’s not a rhetorical question, Doc. I’m asking you.”

  “Kareem,” I said, showing him into the Encounter Room and frothing him a whippaccino, “what these people are all expecting from you is a statement of accountability. All you have to do is accept responsibility. Then they’ll let you do your job.”

  He sat, looking out the window into the distance toward the hundred and fifty stories of neon called the Tachyon Tower. Based on his sneer, I doubted he was pondering the cosmological-dimensional research being undertaken there.

  “Re-spon-si-bil-ity…” he drawled. “You know, that’s the one word Hawk King used in his Instructions papyrus more than any other. For all the good the papyrus’ll do anybody now. Might’s well seal it back inside a canopic jar, let some brother try again with it in a thousand years…when the world’s ready to listen. To believe. No—scratch that. To think.”

  Disconnecting, Kareem asked me if I’d seen the latest press on him. The stories had mutated into a public version of the childhood game of telephone, with various sources alternately claiming that Kareem’s brief article on Hawk King was in fact an essay, a thesis, a dissertation, or even a two-volume set called Ofays Aint Shit. Esquire’s apparently last-minute cover story, featuring a file photo of Kareem crossing his forearms into an X, was entitled X-Man Hates Your Cracker Ass.

  “You see what that chai-sucking, subintellectual yuppy pinhead wrote?” asked Kareem in reference to Shauna Slyming’s column on him in the Sentinel-Spectator. “She ignored everything I explained, and then wrote that I ‘used words like bullets’—never mind who’s using actual bullets against black folks, which apparently doesn’t concern her—and then she denounced, quote, all black radicals, and accused me of being sexist!”

  “Kareem, can you blame her for being upset with you? You must’ve hit her in the head with a microphone when you flipped the table. Did you see her photo? She’s got a huge lump on her face—”

  “Naw, she always looks like that. You know she actually phoned me later that day before she wrote her ‘opinion piece’? Told me that when I’d written this one article a couple of years ago saying, quote, There should be more female superheroes, that—get this—that was somehow sexist! Slyming’s a crypto-conservative supramoron, Doc! And you know what else she said? She tells me…”

  The hour wore on, with Kareem frantically spewing out his elaborate theory of self-justification, which, because of his severe RNPN, he could not recognize as proof of his subconscious acknowledgment of his own guilt and the fundamental irrationality of his black-panic paradigm.

  “Kareem,” I finally interrupted, “what about when we were at the Squirrel Tree, and you cal
led that policeman Detective ‘McDevil’? That’s a racial slur. That’s the kind of thing the public and the press expect you to take responsibility for. You claim you’re against racism, and yet you’re guilty of exactly what you accuse others of doing.”

  “First of all, that isn’t racism—I can’t deny McDevil or his people their jobs, their homes, or their lives. Second, that punk deserves the name. Wanna know why I call him that? Back before I had my powers, he was a patrolman at a Stun-Glas demonstration after Maximus Security got killed in New Atlantis. Punk’s worse than a cracker—he’s a kot-tam saltine. He beat my legs, Doc, beat my legs like he was tenderizing rhino meat!”

  “For someone whose very powers are based in words, Kareem, you’re employing a double standard on hurtful language. The children’s rhyme about ‘sticks and stones’ isn’t true—hurtful words hurt, Kareem, no matter who’s using them.”

  “The cops have sticks! What do you think McDevil was beating my legs with?”

  “Kareem, when life gives you lemons, make Lemon Pledge! And then take that Pledge and clean up your act! You’re losing an opportunity to see yourself for who you really are and therefore to self-actualize—”

  “ ‘Losing an opportunity’? Have you opened your eyes once in the last week? Have you seen what’s happening? A conspiracy to murder one hero and neutralize three others, destroy an asteroid, get two supervillains disappeared without a trace—”

  “Look inside yourself, Kareem! What opportunity for yourself are you missing?”

  “This is not about me! Why can’t you shrinks ever get that, that the world is bigger than the kot-tam individual? The F*O*O*J is nothing but Lost Opportunities, Inc.—doesn’t do a damn thing to solve actual problems. Best it ever does is put out fires, but it’s spent way more time settin em.

  “You know what Colonel Strom Flintlock spent his whole career as Director of Operations doing? Trying to keep black, female and gay heroes out of the F*O*O*J, stick the Ten Commandments inside every hero’s oath, and overthrow the government of New Atlantis. That paleoconservative’s a hundred and seventy-three years old, did you know that? The only dead soldier the GI Juice experiments successfully revived from—as he loved to call it—the War between the States. He wasn’t fit enough to fight in World War Two, and he didn’t join the F*O*O*J until 1946, but he’s occupied the DOO chair ever since. A kot-tam joke! That swasti-fossil’s so right-wing even a supersellout like the Spook was too black for him! That’s what I’m up against!”

  “Kareem!” I snapped, standing up. “Listen to yourself ranting about and casting blame on everybody but you! Here’s a question to which you have still not given a straight answer to anyone yet, which is at the heart of your current calamity! Did you or did you not have an affair with Syndi Tycho?”

  He shoved himself out of his chair and raged out of the room like a zephyr in a rumpled black suit and tie.

  The X-Files

  According to the F*O*O*J’s psychological profile, Philip Kareem Edgerton was, to say the least, a complicated young man. At thirty-four years old, highly intelligent and with a corrosive personality, the X-Man had gained (and had just lost) enormous public standing, an ironic indicator of his interpersonal isolation. In a survey, not a single member of the F*O*O*J had described him as “a very close friend” or even “a good friend.” And despite Kareem’s “good old days” affirmations about the L*A*B, I had seen little indication of those halcyon times when I’d visited the Dark Star restaurant and he’d appeared only marginally more welcome than André.

  Facing black racist accusations of “lily-diddling,” Kareem found himself denounced by almost every member of the L*A*B and the Supa Soul Sistas. A would-be leader without followers, a lonely man alone inside a mob of his making, the secretive Kareem was a fascinating contradiction: for one who’d railed so long against white society, he’d immersed himself in the nearly all-white F*O*O*J, and apparently conducted a secret affair with a scandal-magnet white heroine. Although he screamed that he was drowning in it, Kareem apparently loved the tub.

  Unlike his fellow L*A*Bsters, Kareem had never been a street tough, but a quiet, bookish political science student at Langston-Douglas’s Robeson College. Finding a voice through his writing, Kareem had grown in confidence enough that his development of superpowers had led him almost instantly into crimefighting and a subsequent recruitment into the L*A*B, providing him what he’d never had before: comrades, a base, training, and technology.

  But despite the enormous destructive capacity his logogenesis afforded him, the X-Man rarely got into melees; he’d preferred to devote himself to becoming, in his words, “a thinking man’s hero, and the world’s greatest detective, but for real.”

  Yet his own awesome anger had continued to plague him, causing fractures between him and his editors, within his first superteam, and later within the F*O*O*J itself. If Kareem failed to destroy his own anger, that anger would finish destroying him.

  In the days that followed, despite uninterrupted therapy being a condition of maintaining active member status, most of my F*O*O*Jster patients stayed away. I did receive updates on two of my sanity-supplicants: Hnossi had declined further, while Festus kept vigil at her side, leaving only to pursue leads in his investigation of Warmaster Set.

  Only two F*O*O*Jsters continued their therapy: Wally maintained his feelings-work, sealed inside my Id-Smasher® for uninterrupted reprogramming. And André continued seeing me, splitting his session time between bragging about his sexual conquests and condemning Kareem. Once, for variety, he informed me that he’d visited Syndi in her undisclosed location, and that “she be doin all right.”

  The only subject that slowed down André’s leering litany of lust or his cantankerous anti-Kareem catechism was the death of Hawk King. At any mention of the fallen mentor’s name, André’s smile turned inward; he chewed his lips, nodding and staring at the floor, saying only, “Ain’t no justice in this world, Doc. No justice for nobody.”

  SATURDAY, JULY 15, 8:30 P.M.

  Lame by Blame

  When Kareem finally returned to the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic on Saturday evening, he was calm but sullen. He opened our session complaining that his investigation had been all but destroyed since he couldn’t gain access to the “crime scene” of the Blue Pyramid (sealed by the Ka-Sentinels ever since the funeral), and because wherever he went he was mobbed by reporters, yelled at by angry citizens, and stonewalled by uncommunicative witnesses. But that tirade soon gave way to his obsessive attempts to convince me that his recent reversal of fortunes was the result of a “white power structure” bent on destroying him.

  “Is that really true, Kareem? I mean, take that editorial cartoon in the Sentinel-Spectator that made you so upset. That was by Melvin Moal, and he’s black, I believe.”

  I pulled the cartoon from my file, but he refused even to look at it. I glanced at the image of the Klan-hooded Kareem in a “pimp suit” prostituting Power Grrrl on the streets of Stun-Glas, with its embittering caption X-CONTENDER.

  “Melvin Moal,” sneered Kareem. “The kot-tam Moal-man. Never even stepped foot in Stun-Glas. That Tobytron belongs to the Cartoonist Council of White-Gloved, ‘Yowza’-Howling, Tomosexual House Negroes. It isn’t just me he sold out—you should see the racist shit this guy drew about the Crimson Kafeeyah, the Palestinian crimefighter. Drew him like a mad dog, actually used the words Arab, animal, savage, and killer in the background—I mean, no wonder he’s fucking with me like this! This sellout punk Moal, I swear, he got named Tom of the Year by Tom Magazine three years running—”

  “Now, Kareem, we both know there’s no such thing as Tom Magazine—”

  “Well there should be!”

  “You can’t heal yourself of your toxic, boundless rage if you don’t admit some culpability, Kareem. Are you really saying that everyone is to blame but you? That this is all the result of some vast white conspiracy to, how did you put it, ‘keep the black man down’?”

  “I never
said that!”

  “I think you did, Kareem.”

  “Wouldn’t I know what I said?”

  “So I’m wrong, the media is wrong, the F*O*O*J is wrong, Hawk King was wrong, the L*A*B and the Supa Soul Sistas who denounced you are wrong, everyone is in on this vast white conspiracy and they’re all wrong except you, the very person who wrote the words that are now coming back to destroy you?”

  “This is bullshit! You’re setting up a freaking battalion of straw men! I can hear the quotation marks you put around every political term you spit back at me! And whatever book you plan on writing about all this, I hope you announce yourself in the foreword as being the most unreliable narrator since Jonah went deep throat!”

  Feeling the frustration of battering the impenetrable wall of Kareem’s X-rhetoric, I decided it was time to allow him a break.

  How will you face knowing that you will never exceed or even equal the accomplishments of your predecessors?

  X-Man: “I don’t give a fuck about glory. Give me revenge.”

  The Parable of the Two Dogs

  After Kareem had discharged some of his anger through a journaling session, I shared with him a Native American parable. It was my hope he’d be able to use the story in visualization to help him contain his raging self-destructive tendencies.

  “There once was a tribal elder who found an anxious young brave,” I told him, “who was perched atop a butte beneath a moonless night sky. It was the night before the young brave was to begin the trials of his manhood initiation, his ‘vision quest.’ The brave told the elder, ‘Medicine Man, every night I dream that there are two wolves fighting inside me. In the morning when I wake up, I feel as if I’ve been ripped apart during the night. What does it mean?’