Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

world might be a whole lot safer if Iron Lass had a husband, end quote?”

Reporter #4: “Kareem, do you lust after all white women, or just Power Grrrl?”

Reporter #5: “X-Man, will you offer a complete and unqualified retraction and apology?”

“Listen, listen!” he said, and when he lifted his hands in a gesture of quiet, flashbulbs erupted like a prairie lightning storm, capturing his every gesticulation in images that would later be given meaning through captions.

“Let’s get this in perspective, all right? The F*O*O*J is under attack, do you understand that? Hawk King is dead, quite possibly murdered, Omnipotent Man has resigned under mysterious circumstances, somebody destroyed Asteroid Zed, someone tried to assassinate both the Flying Squirrel and the hero formerly known as Chip Monk, Iron Lass is dying—”

Kareem froze, wincing with the realization that he had not been authorized to release that information.

Every reporter screamed for verification and elucidation of his slip.

“—and, and, and meanwhile you people have derailed my investigation for five days because of something you ripped out of context that you don’t even understand that I wrote years ago, when meanwhile a murderer, possibly one of the worst supervillains in history, is systematically wiping out our most powerful champions! And by focusing your attack on me, you people are playing right into his hands, while the real enemy—”

Questions inevitably and correctly called for Kareem to address his own delusional paranoia. Angrily battling the questions, he tried to shift focus onto his Five-Point Platform, his proposed “Götterdämmerung against Corporate Crime and Ecological Evil,” and his slate’s whimsical schemes to use the F*O*O*J to promote their “Mission for Quality of Life.”

But as Kareem dodged weakly, reporters tossed stageward the literary bones they’d exhumed from Kareem’s corpus of writings, seeking his reactions if not retractions: his rage against white people who wore “dreadlocks” or who used the phrase “ghetto blaster,” his charges that “the Beatles had less talent in four voices than James Brown has in a single scream” and that “Elvis was a talentless chicken-fried steak–gnawing junkie thief who should’ve been charged with grand larceny for stealing black music and executed for the treason of taking the title ‘King of Rock and Roll,’ ” that Civil Rights–era pioneering hero the Spook was “a Driving-Miss-Daisied, ham hock–swallowing, yassuh-bossing, friendly-firing, stealth-flying, five-star general house negro,” and that Kareem had once said that “the only position for a woman in the F*O*O*J is sixty-nine.”

“Kot-tam it, how many times do I have to apologize for that ‘sixty-nine’ remark? I said that eleven years ago—when I was drunk—at a Stun-Glas wake for Maximus Security when the F*O*O*J was on the wrong side of the Atlantean war that killed him, and some pretty-boy reporter from the Sentinel-Spectator was there—”

A reporter: “Isn’t it against your black power religion to drink?”

“I wasn’t even in the L*A*B or the Forty-Two Chambers at that time—and it isn’t a ‘black power religion’—and I told the reporter right away I didn’t mean it, but he still up and printed it anyway—”

And on and on went the media melee, with André cackling beside me at every drop of Kareem’s blood.

Reporter #113: “—hate all white people, or just most white people?”

Reporter #98: “—and so how soon will you resign from the F*O*O*J?”

Reporter #141: “—initiated the relationship, you or Power Grrrl?”

Reporter #72: “—still in love with Syndi Tycho or just using her for sex?”

Reporter #122: “—did Hawk King know what you said about him and did that break his heart and if so do you think that may have killed him, Kareem?”

Reporter #37: “—true you repeatedly had sex inside the F*O*O*J Fortress’s Mission Simulator, leading some F*O*O*Jsters to nickname it the ‘Emission Stimulator’?”

Kareem rocketed to his feet, flipping the table and scattering the microphones. His slatemates backed up, stunned. The lashing of a hundred flashbulbs bleached him white. “All y’all can KISS MY MUTHAFUCKIN BLACK ASS!”

The Desperate Need for a Chum When the Sharks Are Finished Dining

By the time André and I squeezed through the crush of reporters to enter the greenroom, the then-anorexic-looking Kareem was still as haggard and harried as he’d been onstage. He didn’t even raise his head from cradling it in front of the vanity mirror.

His wrist buzzed, petitioning him hollowly: “X-Man, some reporters from Jet, AANT, and The Crisis are insisting you speak with them—”

He smacked his wrist, crushing the voice.

I pulled up a chair beside him, sat down, and asked him how he felt.

“That,” he muttered, not even looking up, “was a galactic fucking disaster.”

The sigh he let out was so heavy, deep, and cold, it merited its own frost warning.

“Whole kot-tam world’s falling apart, asteroids exploding, Squirrel’s a corrupt corporate-welfare bum, people of capes dead and dying, and the conspiracy to bring down the F*O*O*J is working on hero number four. You got Wally the junkie jonesing for glowing blue crystals—”

“Kareem,” I asked, “what makes you think that Wally—”

“Give it a rest, Doc! Half those kot-tam reporters out there’ve known the story for years, but do y’think they’d ever report it? You’re never gonna see Wally on the cover of the Urinal-Expectorator with his nostrils and fingertips dusted blue an looking like a kid fiending on powdered blueberry Tang! Wally coulda single-handedly stopped Asteroid Zed from being destroyed if he hadn’t quit his job while fucked up on argonium, and then Iron Lass wouldn’t be dying—”

During his diatribe various logogenic apparitions from his speech flashed into existence, including disembodied nostrils and fingertips. The black body parts rotated around his head, disintegrating randomly into black silt-shadows.

“—and damn in a can,” he railed on, “the man was caught flying under the influence how many times? And the argonium exacerbating his MPD? That’s a bigger kot-tam scandal than anything I supposedly wrote, said, or did! That’s a matter of kot-tam planetary security! Where’s the kot-tam press on that shit?”

In the corner of the greenroom, a large, steaming, malodorous pile of logogenic feces manifested itself, at which point André said, “Whatever you do now, Kareem, don’t say the word muthafucka. Bzzzt!”

Kareem