Minister Faust

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

  “But there’s something much deeper than this,” I told Syndi. “Something your mother won’t go near and something you’re only hinting at. Something truly awful happened between you two which made you distance yourself from your mother so greatly that you created two secret identities with which to obscure your connection to her. What is it?”

  Hnossi’s ancient, deathly eyes fixed on her daughter like leeches, whether to shut Inga down or finally to open her up, I was not sure.

  Inga/Syndi got up and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  The moment she returned, I said, “Tell me about Cassiopeia Rand.”

  “What?” said Inga, floored. She clutched her hands to her chest as if my question had denuded her. “How the hell did you know about her?”

  “Festus,” I said, showing her a folder from my briefcase. “He’s been very helpful with supplying additional background material from his extensive files.”

  “My God!” said Inga, shaking her head and looking with disgust toward the ceiling. “How long has that old fascist been spying on me? On all of us?”

  “Ach, Inga,” rasped her mother. “Stop beingk so dramatic. Ze man is ze vurlt’s greatest detectiff. Vut dit you expect him to do viss his information-gazzering apparatus? Answer crossvurt puzzles?”

  “Duh, I dunno, how about, catch criminals? And not invade the privacy of law-abiding citizens?”

  “Answer ze qvestion. Who is ziss Cassiopeia Rand?”

  “Inga,” I pressed, “tell me about Space Girl.”

  The Debut, Disappearance, and Downfall of Space Girl

  I had problems igniting my career, okay?” said Inga, glaring at me with all the toxic, self-indulgent angst of her Syndi Tycho persona, but without the incessant use of like and gawd.

  “It was 1981. I was nineteen. So I tried making my debut as Cassiopeia Rand, HKA Space Girl. I was singing Latin pop-lite tunes—this was years before Gloria Estefan blew up—and fighting a little crime on the side with my hypnovoice, just to get some press.

  “I was starting to move up, get noticed. I even had an HBO special with special appearances by Cher, Cheech Marin, and Tim Conway. But the day my special aired,” she said, jutting her lower lip toward the hospital bed, “Mother up and declared her global war. Every channel was glued on her and her crusade for the next month! Debuts are delicate, Eva! And mine, thanks to her, was a complete dud! And unlike in heroics, in showbiz, you don’t get second chances.”

  Believing her career was over, Inga-Ilsabetta exiled herself back east, eventually studying marketing, music production, and singing at the Alison Blair Institute for Advanced Disco Studies. Excelling in every course, by 1987 she created a brand-new persona through which to reinvent herself and forge her own second chance.

  Dyeing her hair, and with the almost perpetually youthful looks of a demigoddess, she emerged as Syndi Tycho, HKA Power Grrrl, who in 1991 capitalized upon the need of the post-Götterdämmerung F*O*O*J to reinvent itself, too, in the wake of the promised “peace dividend.” An angry, exhausted, and broke public needed happy, lively, pretty new faces if the F*O*O*J was to survive into its new postvillain era. Fast-tracked, the “seventeen-year-old” became a made member in 1991 after a mere six-month candidacy and, with her new legitimacy, immediately launched extensive marketing tie-ins.

  “The government loved me, the F*O*O*J’s corporate sponsors loved me,” said Syndi, “the public loved me, everyone loved me. Everyone was happy. It was great.”

  “How about your mother?” I asked without malice, regretting the crumpling of her features as soon as I saw it. “How about you? Did you love yourself? Have you ever been truly happy?”

  “Of course I loved myself! Of course I’m happy! What kind of question is that?”

  “I think you didn’t feel loved, Syndi. That you never felt you were getting enough love. That you had a hole in your soul. That you believed your mother’d never given you enough of what you needed. That you had to comfort your heart-shattered father and raise your little brother by yourself, depriving you of time just to be a girl. You feared Kareem would never put you first—”

  “Is that a crime, Eva? To be more in touch with my need for love than other people are?”

  “It’s not a question of crime, Inga, but dysfunction, and of causing damage to others. You seduced Kareem emotionally, not just sexually. And the ramifications for him have been gigantic. Scandal might help you sell more albums, but this could quite likely be the end of Kareem’s career.”

  “Unt you hat no right to treat Fraulein Biceps like zat,” said Hnossi. “She vuss a gut varrior. She deservt better. Regartless of her uzzer…you know. Her…liebenschtyle.”

  “After you felt your mother’d rejected you,” I said to Inga, “you determined you’d never be rejected again. By anyone. Every relationship you’ve ever had—familial, platonic, romantic—you ended before they could.”

  “God!” she said, pacing the tiny room like a black rat in a white box. “This is completely wrong, Eva! We’re supposed to be talking about what my mother did wrong! She’s the reason I’m so messed up!”

  “ ‘Messed up’? Earlier you claimed you were happy and felt loved. Syndi…Inga…anyone as desperate as you were, as you still are, to avoid rejection—I mean, your entire career has been about attracting the attention you equate with love so as to guarantee yourself a never-ending ‘fix.’ Anyone that terrified of rejection has unquestionably harmed or debased herself in ways she isn’t proud of. Ways she may never have told another living soul…”

  Inga froze, focusing on me tapping the cover of my POWER GRRRL folder. Her blue eyes paled into water.

  “Vut is it? Vut’s she talking about, Inka?” said Hnossi. “I don’t understandt…Vut are you getting at, Doktor?”

  “You really should tell your mother, Inga.”

  “This is so unethical of you, Eva!”

  “Inka,” said Hnossi heavily, “tell me.”

  Inga scrambled up into a chair as if afraid of floor mice, hugged her knees against her chest, her eyes looking like huge balls of wet ice.

  “I did the capes,” she mumbled.

  “Vut? Inka, you’re not—you’re not serious—”

  Her daughter said nothing, saving her glare for me.

  “Odin’s eye,” whispered the dying goddess.

  The niche pornography industry called the capes, worth an estimated $2.5 billion annually in the United States alone, served those men and women who sexually fetishized superhero tunics and the people who wore them. On rare occasions a genuine superheroine or hero (always a fallen one) gained “employment” in the field, appearing in films, videos and holograms. Best known of these was the sole “success” story: Magna, the 1980s heroine and daughter of the Lodestone. At the height of the Götterdämmerung she’d left crimefighting to begin her own highly profitable pornographic production company in whose features she’d frequently “starred.”

  And the file Festus supplied me contained photographic proof. As Cassiopeia Rand, HKA Space Girl, Inga had appeared in “supporting” roles of “adventure” films such as Magna: Pirate of Men’s Pants, “documentaries” such as The Theory of Magnajism, and “intellectual erotica” such as Magna Cums Laudly.

  “But there’s more, Inga,” I said, “isn’t there?”

  “Mein todt, how can it get any vurse zan ziss, Doktor?” moaned Hnossi, clutching at whatever frosted-green crabgrass remained attached to her skull. “My own dottir! A whore for ze cameras! Ziss is all her fazzer’s fault, ze filse of all his showbiz dreams—”

  “Hnossi, please! Inga—all these years desperately craving attention, pursuing show business, and reinventing yourself and even manufacturing scandals to guarantee the attention your mother denied you and that you equated with love. Always being the one to end relationships first. All of it to ensure you would never be rejected and that instead you would be the one doing the rejecting. What’s the ultimate way to ensure that?”

  I looked a
t both women. Neither would look at me.

  “Ladies, please,” I said. “The signs are all there, as giant and unavoidable as sky-writing. Will one of you please verbalize what happened to you and your family after you, Inga, at the tender age of twelve, attempted suicide?”

  Discovering—and Healing—the Scared Little Goddess Inside You

  Despite the younger Icegaard’s propensity for blaming her problems on her mother, the suicide attempt was the sole damage zone even she had feared to retread, perhaps because once she began, there was no going back. If the “answers” her terminal mother gave her were insufficient, she would forever be denied her sole chance to heal, even the opportunity to wonder “what if?”

  Recounting her years in and out of therapy, Inga/Syndi parabolically approached the issue of her preteen attempt at self-murder.

  “For years, I thought I’d done it because maybe I’d been abused,” she said. “I had all these recovered memories from my other therapists…memories of Mother…beating me. Cutting me with her swords, cutting my limbs off and magically re-attaching them so the police wouldn’t suspect anything.

  “But then I had this one therapist, and he said I should talk with Daddy and Baldur about it, and, and…well, now I know it was just the therapists screwing with my head, planting these ideas in my mind. But I’ve always had this problem with, you know, depression? And I used to cut myself, throw myself off of buildings and cliffs and things, burn myself, try to hurt myself…My therapist said it was Munchausen syndrome. Said I was trying to get Mother to rescue me.”

  She smiled coldly, then reduced her expression to a corpse’s repose.

  “It didn’t work,” she concluded.

  Of all memories, “recovered” ones are the most unreliable. According to Dr. Steve N. Strainge, the psychiatrist whose testimony interred Dr. Napoleon Orator on Asteroid Zed, Menton’s career of manipulation began before even he realized he had such powers. For years during the therapy sessions he led, he had been implanting false memories of trauma in his patients, after which he was paid to supply expert testimony at trial for clients suing their former baby-sitters, coaches, pastors, teachers, siblings, parents, deliverymen, meter men, and aldermen.

  But since Inga had successfully detached from her therapist-implanted pseudomemories, there was hope for her eventual recovery, even if we then had to descend deeper into the swamps of her dysfunctionally agonized adolescence.

  I asked her to tell me what had precipitated her attempt.

  “Mother,” said Inga, “was out. Again. Always on some mission. She and Daddy’d been fighting for what must’ve been two days straight, and this was after two years of a downhill shit-slide with them. I mean, it was both of them, yeah, but it was her fault.

  “So Daddy, he couldn’t take it anymore, said he was going out and she was screaming at him and telling him that if he goes out now he shouldn’t even think about coming back and he just said, ‘Fine, maybe I won’t,’ and he rushed back in and packed a suitcase and I was trying to hold on to him and drag him back but he was almost as strong as Wally, and I was crying and begging him, ‘Don’t leave, Daddy, please don’t leave!’ and I was terrified, terrified that she’d finally driven him away and that I wouldn’t ever see him again—”

  “Ziss is outrageous!” said Hnossi, her red-gray pockmarks glowing like campfire coals. “Zat’s not how it happent at all! She vuss a childt! She doesn’t remember how it happent—”

  “Hnossi, please,” I said, forming my hands into a time-out T. “We all have our own truths—”

  “Ach, vut sheisen you peddle!”

  “Please don’t interrupt. You’ll have your turn. Inga, go on.”

  “And so Daddy’s gone and I’m on the floor sobbing, and like, two seconds go by and then her comm goes off, for Ymir’s sake, and then she’s all, ‘I’ve gotta go fight the Gorgon Legion or some ice giants or whatever and you’re in charge of your little brother until I get back’ and boom—she’s gone, just like that!

  “So she’s gone and Daddy’s gone and Baldur and I are alone all night and all the next day and for the next two fucking days and nights after that,” said Inga, plucking at her tight black long-sleeved shirt as if she were rehearsing ripping the skin and flesh from her skeleton. “I was twelve, Mother! Twelve!”

  “You vere a bik girl, you vere oldt enough—people were goingk to be killt unless—”

  “Unless you personally went and did your heroine-thing because it’s not like you ever said no even though there were a hundred other F*O*O*Jsters who could’ve—”

  “None viss my powers, experience, knowletch—”

  “Sure, right, because it’s all about proving how you’re the toughest bitch who ever lived, that you don’t need anyone and no one’s better than you and that you have no weaknesses, not even a husband who couldn’t take your shit anymore so he left you or two scared little kids you abandoned at home that you could never wait to escape at the very first buzz on your wrist—”

  “People neetet me! How can you not unterstant zat?”

  “We needed you, Mother!” screamed Inga, sobbing. “I needed you!”

  I cut in: “So what did you do, Inga?”

  “I was so tired…of being scared. And lonely. And then all of a sudden I just felt this, this surge of power, of bravery, like nothing I’d ever felt before. Totally, one hundred percent determined—the ‘will to power,’ Mother always called it—like I was drunk or stoned or on fire. I knew where Mother kept all her magical implements, the stuff we were never supposed to go near, and I knew the spell to open the lock. I took Jörmungandrstooth, this seidr blade she had at the bottom…and I invoked the name of Ymir…and then I, I just—”

  Her lips shut. Her eyes shut. She mimed a fast motion over her wrist, eight times in total.

  Her eyes opened, ablaze from reliving her truth. “And then my soul was ripped out of me,” she said, “and sucked right down into the depths of Niflheim and into the hands of Hel.”

  And Hnossi, despite her reputation for never crying, who only two weeks before had sat across from me at Soup ’n’ Heroes crying iron-ingot tears, sat upright in her hospital bed, seeping not liquid metal, but tears of pale, ordinary water.

  “I came home,” said Hnossi in a weakened voice, then, shattering, “as soon as Odin’s ravens fount me, tolt me vut you’t done to yourself. I fought my vay srough ze ice hordes of Niflheim unt zen against Hel herself to get you beck! Do you not remember ziss? I risked my life to safe you—”

  “And what did you do the very next morning after you brought me back, Mother?” said Inga with sufficient acid to burn her mother’s swords.

  Silenced, Hnossi simply stared at her daughter with perfect vulnerability, that of the accused who’d just surrendered checkmate evidence to the tribunal, and who’d glimpsed the approach of the executioner.

  “You went back to work,” said Inga, her smile awful and vicious with irony. “You spent nine days in the netherworlds slicing the icicles off frost giants, but for your weak, stupid daughter who tried to kill herself out of loneliness, you could not sit for one lousy fucking day.

  “After almost losing me forever, you went back to work.”

  Inga waited for her mother to speak.

  Finally: “Nothing to say, woman?”

  Everything was charged with emotion—even Inga’s darkened mane and Hnossi’s pale green tufts were puffed up, hairs splitting at their ends and vibrating in the tingling air.

  “Inka,” rasped Hnossi, “I’m…I—”

  “Don’t say it!” yelled Inga. “Whatever you’re gonna say, it’ll be all fucking wrong anyway, so just don’t!” She stepped across to Hnossi’s bedside, leaned down, and yelled some more, and the highly vincible goddess shriveled like a weed sprayed with herbicide.

  “And don’t call me ‘Inga’ anymore! Inga died that day in 1974 because your neglect killed her! So you can stop wondering—assuming you ever did—why my official bio and F*O*O*J file say I was b
orn that day, the day I left you and Daddy left you and Baldur left you! All you have to know, Hnossi, is that on that day I gave birth to myself!”

  SNAP!—It was a sound like a whip cracking, and Syndi reared back and slammed against the wall, clutching her cheek. White smoke leaked between her fingers. I reached for her but stopped at the sight of electrical firecrackers exploding all over Hnossi’s face and arms and above the white blanket covering her torso.

  “Stand back, Syndi!” I shouted, just as all the medical equipment shorted out in sparking mechanical death cries. My nostrils clogged with a burning stench. The air tasted like metal. “Doctor! Nurse!” I yelled out into the hall. “Code blue!”

  The goddess who’d almost never cried, cried out her agony.

  “Mummy!” said Syndi, releasing the burn wound and rushing forward to clutch her agonized mother. I tackled her before she could electrocute herself, knocking her against the wall beside the headboard and bouncing the two of us to the floor.

  Her mother continued keening like an animal in a leg-hold trap. The only word we could make out, screamed over and over before the nurses dragged us out, was “Vally!”

  Iron Fatigue, or Rust in Pieces?

  The finest specialists money could buy scrambled past us in their rubber scrubs, ready for the final stage of the disease. But while the metals of Hnossi’s body were breaking down, deteriorating even faster was the hope for psychemotional reconnection between goddess mother and demigoddess daughter.

  “Did you hear that? Did you goddamned hear that?” spat Syndi, again clutching the arc-gash on her face. “Ymir’s sake! Even now, even when she’s dying…I mean, who’s here with her? Not Gramma, not Daddy, not even Baldur—me. I am.”