Crying without trying to hide it, she dragged her sleeve across her entire face except for her burn, smearing her already smeared black makeup across her white features until she became a blurred mime. Short of breath, Festus raced up to us and stopped, glancing toward Hnossi’s room and back to us, his eyes demanding an explanation.
Syndi offered him no comfort. “Even when she’s goddamn dying, Eva…the only person she calls out for is some super-powerful unavailable loser who won’t love her…and who walked away.” She singsonged bitterly, “Sur-fucking-pri-ise!”
For many second-or multigenerational hyperhominids, the ability to achieve self-actualization is hampered by the incapacity of their supposedly heroic and self-sacrificing parents to verbalize self-shame.
All too frequently in my practice, I’ve seen that the reason superheroes neurotically deny their own needs to the point of risking their lives originates in family of origin: the parents who modeled monkish asceticism while forever failing to indulge their children’s basic need to be the recipient of intimacy behaviors and the center of Mommy’s or Daddy’s affection and caretaking ideation. A parent who fails to recognize that a child’s needs are distinct from and supersede her or his own is demonstrating a classic psychesituational signature of narcissism.
Because of the relationship Syndi had had with her mother, Syndi’s relationship with Kareem was a paradox doomed to destruction. Far more than civilians, superheroes desire to change the past, some going so far as neurotically orbiting the planet at hyper-speeds under the delusion that they can reverse the Earth’s direction and thus the flow of time, giving them a second chance—the most hoped-for boon in history.
So when Syndi selected a man whose workaholism, religion, and racial paranoia guaranteed he would be emotionally unavailable, she was assembling in the present a re-creation/ rejection-cipher of her unavailable mother, thus giving her the opportunity to win his (and symbolically Hnossi’s) love and attention. If she failed, she could preemptively reject him, therefore exerting the present-day capacity to deny the love that was denied to her in the past. Even her hedonistic hyper-sexuality/anguished frigidity demonstrated her paradoxical needs to defy and reconnect with her mother, an anti/sexualism whose ironies she could only rationalize/integrate through her HEAT Ray experiment in “self-love.”
While Syndi probably did love Kareem as much as she was capable, her own narcissism amplified her need and destroyed her capacity for genuine self-love (the prerequisite for truly loving others), much as a burst of oxygen will engorge and accelerate the end of a fire.
Toward Resolving Paradoxes, and Paradoxical Solutions
For the first time since I’d met the man, Festus Piltdown III was beginning to look his seventy years.
Slumped against the wall, his cravat uncinched and asymmetrical, the wrinkles in his face suddenly as obvious as those of a suit that had been slept in, it was clear that no dosage of “GI Juice” could forestall his aging process permanently, especially when deeply personal agony was hastening the inevitable approach of his own death.
Inside the sealed suite, specialists tracked their bootprints of vocal mud all over the plush white rug of our silence, while Syndi and Festus waited in medical impotence with wan faces and tears.
The wall comm chimed.
“What is it, Mr. Savant?” said the old man, tabbing the wall.
“Lord Piltdown, I’m terribly sorry for the interruption, but a Mr. Fly is here to see you—terribly important news of some sort, he insists—”
“It’s okay. Send him up.”
Shortly we heard the familiar whine of André’s approach, and then the man himself was flapping down beside Festus, his bright yellow visitor E-tag hanging from his neck, having prevented his incineration by the Squirrel Tree’s DETHscan security system.
“What is it, Parker?” said Festus. “What’s so important you couldn’t simply use the comms?”
“Kareem’s been acting crazy, Festus,” said André, doing a double take at a Syndi Tycho he’d never seen before. And then, bizarrely enough for him, he employed standard American English and the first-person pronoun I. “First I caught him hacking into F*O*O*J personnel files. But then he started cross-referencing everything on Menton with everything on Sarah Bellum, and making the computer correlate all of that with the F*O*O*J’s records on Doctor Brain—”
“On me?” I blurted, stunned by a development I had not foreseen.
“—and he’s been accessing all available Hubble imagery, cosmological records, everything on the Nistan dark matter nebula, downloading everything he could on the molecular physics and pharmacology of argonium,” he said in articulate, almost broadcastable English. “He’s up to something, Festus. Something I don’t like one bit!”
Syndi’s raccoon eyes snapped up onto him. Festus put his massive hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Slow down. What’re you talking about?”
“I think he’s planning some type of terrorist attack,” said André, his eyes wild, his posture bowed as if to confide a state secret. “And he didn’t have time to completely wipe the computer of his work files before he figured out I was on to him. I unerased his notes—he thinks Doctor Brain is actually Menton.”
The words hummed in the air. The three F*O*O*Jsters locked gazes.
Then all their eyes turned on me.
“Well, come on, everyone,” I reminded them, “obviously he’s paranoid. You know that. Right? Remember the whole scandal? Let’s stay focused here—”
At that exact moment Dr. Singh, the specialist team leader, exited Hnossi’s room. “What is it?” demanded Festus.
Remarkably, this middle-aged woman working for one of the most powerful magnates in the world ignored him and spoke directly to Syndi.
“Miss Tycho?” said the specialist.
“Yuh-yes, Doctor?” choked Syndi. “How’s she doing?”
“Not well, I’m afraid. Your mother has perhaps two days to live.”
The Mother of All Battles
Lacking external foes, one F*O*O*Jster was psychosomatically destroying herself, and collectively the remaining F*O*O*Jsters were turning on themselves in a psychotic downspiral of workplace-superpowered civil war. Most disturbingly, in their collective breakdown, the F*O*O*J’s paranoia had plummeted even to the point of questioning the identity and integrity of their therapist.
Unless I were able to help my sanity-supplicants integrate the disparate lessons they’d gained from therapy into a new paradigm of postheroic psychemotional equilibrium, they would soon destroy themselves…and countless innocent people along with them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Self-Distraction is Self-Destruction
SUNDAY, JULY 16, 4:33 P.M.
Countdown to Armageddon
Perhaps I should leave,” I suggested, “and let you all work during this obvious crisis.”
“You’re not going anywhere, Miss Brain!” said Festus.
“Surely you don’t believe Kareem’s delusion about me being…I mean, that I could be—”
“It’s not whether I believe it. It’s that he does. Which means you’re his target. So you’re not only in danger and needing our protection,” he said, stepping toward me and clamping his gigantic hands on my shoulders in a gesture I imagined was intended to be reassuring, “you’re our bait.”
After forcing me to offer multiple reassurances that I was not Menton the Destroyer, the three F*O*O*Jsters focused on the aforementioned frightening fracas soon to unfold. Not since the breakdown of Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid had there been the threat of terrorism by a member of the F*O*O*J.
After a moment of silence, Festus said, “How do we know Edgerton didn’t kill Hawk King?”
Syndi’s lips parted, curled into disgust accentuated by the electrical burn on her cheek. “Oh, shut up, Festus! Why not just accuse him of killing Kennedy while you’re at it? Oh no, I forgot—Kareem was only a baby, but you were in Dallas that day—”
“Naw, look here, gir
ly,” said André, regaining his trademarked urban drawl and swagger. “What if Squirrel-dawg be right? Check it: Major Ursa and the Spectacle said there were no signs of forced entry or teleportation at the Blue Pyramid. Whoever, y’know…did it, like, Hawk King had to’ve known im, right? So what if Kreem’s tellin the truth about a special relationship with Hawk King? The King coulda let him in—”
“How, André? How would Kareem have enough power to kill Hawk King?” she said. “And more important, why would he want to kill his idol?”
“Look, girl, who knows how powerful Kreem really is? Think about what he could do with all his logo-magicalisms. He could send words down somebody’s throat and clog their lungs or stop their heart, or inside their veins and explode their brains! F’all we know he could make poison gas or a nuclear bomb—”
“Why, André? You haven’t said anything about why!”
“Why? Shit, P-girl, man’s a Afro-paranoid! He prawly blieves Hawk King really was black, so maybe he went to im, said, ‘Help me knock off whitey,’ an when the King said hell, no! and got ready to lock im up, BAM!, Kreem up an words im to death—”
“—and then leads an investigation not only to boost his electoral delusions,” nodded Festus, “but as a diversionary tactic away from himself and onto an absurd conspiracy theory about Menton.”
“Absurd?” spat Syndi. “You yourself said that—”
“And worse,” said Festus, “his goddamned plan worked! That diabolical deviant is smarter than he smells. He wanted power on the F*L*A*C, power now denied to him—oh, you wouldn’t believe how many transcripts I’ve read of his speeches to antiwhite agitators and melanin-maddened malcontents over the years—”
“Damn, Peej, Kreem be usin his word-things to do his spyin inside computers? He could track anybody, maybe evrabody? Think about it! Combine that with what he could do inside people’s cells, they brains…snap, he on his way to becoming the most powerful man in the world, you knawm sayn?”
“The man hates the F*O*O*J,” said Festus. “And he never hid it. Hates the F*L*A*C, hates the membership, hates our history, our traditions, our values, our mission—the only thing he didn’t hate—”
He stopped a second to rake Syndi’s pelvis with his gaze.
“Fuck you, Festus!”
André: “People, people, eyes on the prize, here!”
“Obviously, Edgerton’s aim,” said Festus, “was to seize control of the F*O*O*J, by election if possible—remember, Hitler came to power by election—or by nefarious means if necessary…and eventually make the F*L*A*C all-black, contract all outsourcing services to black companies—”
“Do you have an atom of proof for any of this, Festus?”
“When you’ve been the World’s Greatest Detective for fifty years, little girl, your instincts lead you far more than the evidence ever does. And you…weren’t you the one who sponsored him to join the F*O*O*J in the first place?”
She rocked back. “Suh-so what?”
“How do we know you aren’t spying for him right now and that your perfectly timed public ‘outing’ wasn’t intended to distract attention from your continued collusion with him?”
“Now who’s paranoid, detective?” she yelled at the exact moment something smacked her in the face and hovered above her head.
It was a black rectangle no larger than an ordinary envelope.
“It’s from Edgerton!” said Festus, reaching for it, but Syndi got it first.
“It’s got my name on it,” she scolded, turning it over to show us. Opening what was not an envelope but merely a folded sheet, she flashed its contents at us: letter-shaped holes in the black substance formed text. Placing the logogram against the wall for easier reading, she shielded it with her body for privacy.
“How’d that get in here?” said André.
“Perhaps it followed you,” I suggested.
“But if it’s for her,” said Festus, “how would he’ve known André’d be meeting up with her?”
“Brotherfly’s more concerned,” said André, “that Kreem can be trackin anybody, anywhere. An next time he might not be sendin no letter, knawm sayn?”
“What’s it say?” demanded Festus.
Syndi paused. “He…he wants me to meet him.”
Festus glared an A-ha! at her.
“I’m not working with him!” she said. “He said he just wants to see me to tell me what he’s figured out. He said,” she choked, “that he’s…he’s worried about me. That he wants to protect me.”
“Go to him,” said Festus. “And we’ll be right behind you with a hammer the size of his skull!”
“You think I’m gonna help you kill him, Festus?”
“For someone who said she’s not working with him—”
“I’m not, but I’m still not gonna lead you to him like a Judas-goat—”
They shouted at each other for minutes, Syndi refusing even to take a holographic imager, tracking device, or microphone along. “And I’m not going anyway! Unless you forgot, my mother’s sick and dying in there!”
“Oh, and you’ve always been such an attentive, devoted daughter!”
After she’d drenched Festus in a steaming spew of profanity, he reminded her that saving others was what her mother would want her to do.
“If you’re going to live with yourself after…after,” he stage-whispered, even touching her forearm with a gentleness of which I hadn’t thought him capable (and even more shockingly, she didn’t flinch at his touch), “then you know that having carried out what would’ve been your mother’s final request will be what you’ll need…so you won’t spend the rest of your life with that regret crushing you like a fallen building.”
André and I were as shocked by Festus’s reasoned delicacy as Syndi seemed entranced by it.
Quietly denying a final request to bring Festus along to the rendezvous location, Syndi said she’d reveal any plans Kareem had on the condition they posed a threat. After Festus made one last effort to divine the location of the meeting, Syndi conceded only one piece of information: that Kareem had asked her to meet at a place only the two of them would know.
“Where I first kissed him,” she said, choking up, covering her face and dropping the letter.
Just before she could leave I grabbed her arm.
“Be careful, Syndi. The Kareem you fell in love with…he’s suffering. And when people are suffering, they usually hurt the people closest to them, because those are the only ones left around.”
She showed me her white-and-black smear of a face, her eyes cold and deathly. “Kareem…my mother dying,” she said. “This is all a wake-up call for me.”
The Intoxicating Ambrosia of Old Hatred (and Older Love)
The moment Syndi exited the Medical Hollow, Festus stooped to retrieve the letter but reared back when it broke up at his touch and its pieces scrambled away like cockroaches. “Disgusting!” he said.
“That’s Kreem fuh ya,” said André. “Just like a cockroach: a low-down, dirty scavenger who runs when the light’s on im.”
I hung back a few steps with the Brotherfly while Festus led us to his crime lab. “André,” I said softly, “I asked you once before, but your answer was clearly hiding more than it was revealing. So tell me at last, why do you hate Kareem so much?”
“Damn, Doc, fool be threatenin mad havoc an you aksin me why I hate him?”
“Yes, but André, you felt this way about him long before today, which is partly why you ended up being ordered into therapy in the first place.”
“André’s whole life,” he said, fussing, fidgeting, even fluttering his fly wings, “fools like him be all up in André’s face, hatin, hatin, tryinna put they cleats all up in my ass—”
“Are you sure you have an accurate picture of your relationship with Kareem? At one point you even suggested you were jealous of him for, as you claimed, having fairer skin, when you’re both obviously black. Truly, André, you seem far more antagonistic to him than the reverse.�
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“Only cuz he be reservin his best behavior f’when he know he bein watched by you. Him an all his L*A*B-holes—nuthin but muhfuckin haters, fuh real!”
I tried probing further, but André was as agitated then as he had been the day in therapy he’d thundered at Kareem to cease investigating Hawk King’s death for evidence of a conspiracy. “Naw, Doc! Don’t be defendin him! Punk aint nuthin but a bigot, knawm sayn? He a hatin muthafuck who gone crackhead on his own pipe fulla hate, an he deserve whatever he gon get when we put a superstomp on his ass tonight!”
“But Syndi said she wouldn’t—”
“Trust me, Doc. You cross Festus, you gots to pay, an he always got a way. Thass how it is. André get hisself some side action for free, he aint complainin, knawm sayn?”
In the center of the Surveillance Hollow, Festus sat like a king bee in his hive, surrounded by an encompassing honeycomb of hundreds of hexagonal monitors beaming images of city streets, boardrooms, industrial facilities, public parks, elevators, libraries, mosques, bedrooms, and more. He was tracking Syndi’s path using a far more extensive network of cameras than I think anyone realized the Flying Squirrel possessed or could access, one even greater than the F*O*O*J’s own intelligence-gathering techweb.
“Damn it!” said Festus, pounding his console. “That tricky little tramp’s smarter than she lets on.”
On several hexagonal screens focused on the nearest Ditko-Train station, a knot of people suddenly melted into a contingent of shapely, black-skirted, black-haired, white-pancaked young women, each of whom headed off in separate directions for various trains heading everywhere.
“That little bitch,” growled Festus. “Doesn’t have a trusting bone in her body.”
I pulled up the only other chair in the lab (a dusty one, its back monogrammed CM) and sat beside Festus. He glared at me as if I’d used a piece of the True Cross for kindling.
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