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

“Tell me,” I said, “about your relationship with Kareem.”

At that, the two former lovers finally looked at each other, their faces crawling with the crabs of conflicting emotions.

When neither broke from their eye war, I finally asked, “Which one of you initiated the relationship?”

Kareem raised a black eyebrow with all the menace of a Jolly Roger, but Syndi didn’t flinch.

“I did, Eva,” she whispered, her voice puckering with melancholy. “I first saw Kareem in the press, like, five years ago. I thought he was hot. And dangerous. And hearing him speak…it was like watching a panther run after a gazelle. I’d catch stories on PBS’s Langston-Douglas Black Journal about him and his L*A*B patrolling Stun-Glas—”

“You watch PBS?” I asked. “You watch Langston-Douglas Black Journal?”

“Yeah,” she said, flitting her head in an unspoken no duh. “So then they got their HUD contract, and Kareem was this up-and-comer, sexy, angry, successful, going places. So, like, this was four years ago and I was still an up-and-coming singer/ heroine myself, and I was the opening act for Salt-N-Pepa’s Let’s Talk About Sex tour at the Hermes Theater in Stun-Glas, and the L*A*B was doing security that night—”

“Four years ago…so Kareem, you would’ve been thirty, and Syndi, you would’ve…been only fifteen?”

Kareem’s and Syndi’s eyes faxed multipage documents to each other in text too small for me to read.

“Uh…yeah,” she said. “Anyway, I arranged to meet him backstage after the concert. And I thought we, like, had this chemistry, but he was all, like, ‘Aren’t you a lesbian?’ and I was, like, ‘Don’t try to put me in your little box, baby. So are you down or what?’ and he was, like, ‘No, I’m a black nationalist, I’m chaste, and even if I weren’t I don’t do white girls, and plus you’re just a kid,’ and I was, like, ‘Whatever! You’re a man! You really think you can resist me?’ And so I started tracking him down, and he was, like, ‘Stop following me,’ and I was, like, ‘Nuh-uh, you stop following me—’ ”

“Damn, Syndi,” groaned Kareem. “Would you please give it a rest with all this ‘like, like, like’ shit? We’re here, all right? Doctor-patient privilege? And after everything I’ve been through…”

She looked at him, suddenly even softer.

“I think that’s the first time you’ve called me by name since…” She sighed. “All right, Kareem.”

I said, “You’re not nineteen, are you, Syndi? You’re older.”

She nodded at my statement.

“And not a lesbian, either. So what else isn’t real? The bubblehead act, obviously. So you really did write all those books, then.”

“She’s a marketing genius, Doc,” said Kareem. “And one of the smartest women I ever met. That’s why…why I started liking her.”

Syndi glowed like an aromatherapeutic candle.

“So who was driving the bus?”

Kareem scrunched his face disgustedly. “What?”

“She’s asking who wore the pants in our relationship, Kareem. I’d say…it was pretty fifty-fifty in the driver’s seat, Eva,” she said, nodding to encourage him to agree with her.

He laughed bitterly at her nonverbal request. “I’da been happy if it’d just slowed down long enough for me to get on the bus! I spent the whole time running after it with my coat caught in the kot-tam door!” Syndi wince-smiled abashedly. “She came on so strong, Doc. Wouldn’t leave me alone, kept following me, until I couldn’t get her out of my head. I knew I shouldn’t’ve, but…kot-tam it, I was lonely. I’ve always been lonely. Wasn’t like I’d ever had women chasing me. I’m not made of stone. She wore me down. So finally I agreed to meet her—incognito.”

He sighed, deeply.

“I told her to drive out and meet me in San Sebastiano at the only Ethiopian restaurant in town, a little place called the Emerald Lion. She wasn’t all tarted up that night. She was elegant. Wore a long black skirt. Her hair…it smelled like saltwater and hot sand. And we just…talked. For hours. About music, food, books, comedy, art…

“I’d been angry so long, serious so long…and suddenly there I was laughing, reminiscing about cartoons, toys, games, things I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid. And feeling…totally free. In my life, I always had to set a conscious example, come correct, what we used to call in the L*A*B, be blackified.

“But with…Syndi,” he said, visibly forcing himself to say her name again, “I didn’t have to do that. Or need to do it. It was like, suddenly, all I had to do was just one thing: be happy. When I was with her, suddenly it was like there was no world, no politics, no mission, no duty. It was just us.”

“And you so fell in love with her.”

His mouth opened angrily, as if he were about to spit denial. But then he softened, looking at Syndi, then at me, and finally granted a single nod in defiance of himself.

A sigh almost broke into a sob in Syndi’s throat. But she was smiling enough to crinkle her eyes.

“But then the L*A*B found out,” I pushed. “What’d they do?”

Kareem glared out the window.

Syndi leapt in: “They told him to stop seeing me! What the hell business is it of theirs?”

“Why’s this gotta be the big bad fetish—black man, white woman—like it’s the end of the kot-tam world?” said Kareem. “You see these newspapers? These punks’d happily be printing headlines like ‘Nigger B&E’s into Whitey’s harem’ even if the planet were plunging into the sun!”

“But didn’t you used to feel the exact same way, Kareem? Isn’t that what you said in one of your articles?” He said nothing. “And you were denounced by whites for your hypocrisy, not your transracial eroticism. Those denunciations were almost all by blacks.” He wouldn’t answer. “So the L*A*B kicked you out. How did that make you feel?”

“I talked with Dr. Rogers,” he said, “asked him what to do. The L*A*B was already under fire—we were about to lose our HUD contract, and now I was in the middle of a relationship I shouldn’t’ve been having at all, for several reasons…He said