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

that everything was unfolding as it was meant to, that my destiny was ultimately to lead the F*O*O*J.

“I laughed. I mean, I figured he was yanking my spear, trying to cheer me up. But he wasn’t kidding. So before the L*A*B could force me out I quit. Syndi’d already been in the F*O*O*J a year by then, done her probation, was already a made member, so she sponsored me. No one made the connection. But I’d already shocked the hell out of everyone just by asking to join.”

“So what happened? Clearly you were both passionately in love. What went so wrong between you two that you even stopped saying Syndi’s name?”

This time, instead of their eyes sending faxes to each other, the two turned toward opposite walls, my question rebuffed by their receivers being taken off their hooks.

Little White Lies and Big Black Secrets

Unraveling the bandages covering Kareem’s and Syndi’s psychemotional wounds was exhaustive work, since their bloodied psychic linens were so crusted together they’d congealed into experiential gore. As the night deepened, we baby-stepped our way through the basic facts toward what I’d sensed was a devastatingly destructive betrayal.

We established the basics: that the relationship was passionate but rocky, its secrecy deemed necessary by both but frustrating to each; that over time, Kareem saw Syndi as selfish, shallow, vain, and narcissistic, whereas Syndi came to see Kareem as obsessive, deluded, impersonal, and emotionally retarded.

And as was generally the case, the sexual problems that erupted during such a contrapersonal disconnect were mis-diagnosed by the couple as cause rather than as effect.

From Kareem’s perspective, Syndi had grown sexually unresponsive in the second year of their secret trysts, “after the kink wore off,” he sneered, and also, according to him, because she was terrified that he was finally seeing through her multiple layers of deception and self-deception to gaze upon the real Syndi. The more she shut down verbally, psychemotionally, and sexually, the more frantically Kareem inverted their preset roles of hunter and prey, driving her farther from him and him deeper and deeper into chasing after connection with her and drowning himself in self-loathing.

And then, one night, in a desperate attempt to restart their physical passion and emotional intimacy, Syndi made a snap decision that shattered something in Kareem which apparently had not healed one iota in the two years that had followed. And the closer we moved toward gazing into that smoldering crater, the more Kareem’s body stiffened and his face splintered.

“It’d been two months, Eva,” said Syndi. “Since we’d. You know. Made love. I mean, we’d sleep in the same bed, but we wouldn’t even hold each other.

“I was desperate, just…terrified it was over. I mean, I loved him…but all we did anymore was go through all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit just to see each other and spend the night together without any witnesses connecting us, and then we’d just argue! All night! Or sit in silence! Or sleep together without even touching each other. I just…I wanted to feel close to him, for the sex to be good again, for everything to be like it was in the beginning.”

“So what did you do?”

Kareem’s eyes flared. “So, great, not enough I’m humiliated in front of the kot-tam world, now I get humiliated here, too?”

“Kareem—” she said, reaching out for his knee or arm or shoulder or cheek, but he shoved himself off the chaise longue and walked to the farthest point in the room from her, pretending to read a book he’d pulled from my shelf.

I forced her to look at me. “What did you do, Syndi?”

“I…” she said, trying to decide whether to confess, and finally: “I used my HEAT Ray on him.”

“Your…your hyper-emulation beam? You…turned him into a copy of you? Which you controlled?”

She nodded. Kareem looked angry enough to bite through the wall.

“And it was amazing,” she said. “I’d never felt anything like that in my life. Ever. It was so good…the best—”

“Kot-TAM!” snapped Kareem. “Can you hear yourself?”

“Kareem, please. Let Syndi process this. Continue, Syndi.”

“That’s it. I mean…what else can I say? It was really that good—mind-blowingly, Richter scale fantastic. But after I relea—…when we were done…Kareem, he was shaking. And he…he cried. For an hour. And he wouldn’t let me touch him. I’d never seen anyone react to the HEAT Ray like that before, but—”

“Had you ever used it in sex before?”

“No, but…no.”

“Syndi, don’t you think it’s odd that although you’ve told me you’re not a lesbian, you’ve presented yourself to the public as one for years, and that after finding yourself sexually unsatisfied with a man” (even without looking at Kareem I could hear him react) “turning him into a woman reignited your erotic energy?”

“No, Eva, you, you don’t get it—that wasn’t it at all. It’s not that I turned…I mean, that Kareem became a…look, it’s not that I was making love to a woman—”

“It’s that you were making love to you.”

She swallowed, looked away from me, then down at the floor. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

“Kareem…you obviously had a strong psychemotional response to this sexual engagement—”

“ ‘Engagement’!” he hollered at the roof.

“You’re verbalizing a great deal of antihappiness. Could it be that you’re actually manifesting this antihappiness toward yourself?”

He turned to me. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Are you ‘angry’ at yourself because you liked the experience so much? Of becoming a woman?”

Kareem’s arms and legs slackened, and he slumped against the wall, his jaw seemingly unhinged. He was literally panting with speechless rage.

“Gender confusion is a common experience, Kareem, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I don’t have ‘gender confusion’!”

“Not to mention the psychic clash with your pronounced homophobia of being suddenly transformed into a lesbian—”

“I am not homophobic and I didn’t ‘transform’ into a lesbian—”

“Well, a clash of your becoming a woman against your deeply held sexism—”

“For fucking out loud, I AM NOT SEXIST!”

“Well, whatever label you choose to affix, you were frightened by this experimentation—”

“It wasn’t ‘experimentation,’ Eva! It was exploitation! Complete kot-tam humiliation! So I got angry—to