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

“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,