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

looked up in exasperation, his black irises like two Rolos dotting twin scoops of vanilla ice cream.

“Can you be serious for one stinking minute, André? What if…look…Wally, right? He’s cracked, MPDed, strung out on argonium…What if—I mean, Menton’s powers were always strongest on people hiding secrets—maybe he puppet-mastered Wally into killing Hawk King! Wally’s one of the only beings with enough power to do it, and then, even if Menton suppressed his memories, guilt from that could be seeping into his conscious mind, which motivated his resignation—”

“Tha fuck you talkin bout, Kreem? That got to be the stankiest heap a Tyrannosaurus shit André ever took a whiff of!” The Brotherfly affected his trademarked hiss-laughter despite his obvious rage. “Evrabody, evrabody in the whole world guilty a suh’m but you. Reporters didn’quote you right, Festus is a corrupt rich man, Wally killed Hawk King, an Hawk King worked f’the white man! But what about Ka-REEM?” said André, grabbing X-Man by his face and shoving it back like a tetherball.

Kareem snapped back and leapt up out of his chair, staggering to stay upright, swinging back at André who danced out of the way, causing Kareem to pitch forward and nearly hit the floor.

“Don’t you get it?” spat Kareem. “You’ve gotta put all that you-me shit aside, Andrew, long enough to see this attack’s bigger than me! This’s about my investigation! I should be pursuing this Sarah Bellum angle, tracking her connections to Menton! Maybe they’ve been working together all along…or maybe she’s Menton! Brother, the timing of that smear-job on me was no kot-tam coincidence!”

“Don’t ‘brother’ me, punk-ass nigga! You deserve this shit. Biggest accuser who ever shit on somebody he don’like now gettin the shit he dumped, dumped back on him. Where I come from, that’s called justice, dawg. Natural justice.”

He stepped forward to lean down his six-three frame and shove his face in front of Kareem’s, close enough for each man to smell the other’s breath, to see the sleep (or lack of it) in the other’s eyes.

“I hope they rip your ass in two, Kareem,” he said, “which’s maybe the only way t’finally clear all the shit outta you!”

“André!” I said, shocked for a moment from my professional detachment. “Why do you hate Kareem so much?”

He didn’t shake his gaze from Kareem for a moment. “I don’t hate anybody, Doctor,” he said crisply. “Unlike this person.”

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

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