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

use a word you fear so much—angry because someone who said she loved me could make me her puppet, her toy, her kot-tam slave, and then have the gall to expect me to like it! To expect me to willingly throw up my wrists for her to lock the cuffs on again! And because she couldn’t muster up a gram of shame or face a milligram of my righteous rage at her betrayal, she, can you get this, she dumped me!”

“But look at your every word and gesticulation, Kareem,” I said, gesturing gently to reassure him of the liberating truth of my diagnosis. “It’s not her you’re angry at. It’s yourself.”

He howled at the ceiling. “Do you ever listen to anyone but yourself, Eva? Ever think an original thought that hasn’t dripped like toxic sewage out of one of your head-shrinking, misanthropic pseudoscience textbooks? Man, Stalin could’ve paid you to write copy for him!”

“So you’re telling me you’re not angry at yourself? Not even a little?”

“If I’m angry at myself, it’s not because I ‘liked’ what she did to me, but because I put up with her as long as I did. I’m angry because she had the means and motive and I still gave her the opportunity to fuck me over like she did, literally! And because I didn’t dump her ass before she could dump me!”

“Kareem, anger isn’t the opposite of joy any more than hate is the opposite of love. Both are manifestations of intense attention, focus, preoccupation: your anger and hatred toward Syndi are proof of your joy in her and your love of her.”

“So you’re telling me that if a woman is raped, her obsessive anger and hatred prove she loves her rapist?”

“Kareem, the effort you devote to dodging obvious realizations proves my point. The very intensity of how much you deny having enjoyed your experience as a woman—”

“I didn’t! How many times do I have to say that?”

“—case in point—are simply denial. Obviously you loved being dominated by Syndi, and your enjoyment in becoming a woman is directly proportional to the effort you expend bearing the awesome psychic yoke of rigid African American machodeterministic phallarchical gender roles. It’s been amply documented in studies of heterosexual African American drag queen subculture that many black men harbor psyche-fragmentary ‘lesbians’ inside themselves—alternate sexual personalities or ‘sex alters,’ if you will—a condition referred to on the street as being ‘on the down-low, sideways.’ Do you deny that?”

“Deny what?” guffawed Kareem. “That you’re psychotic?”

I waited. When he refused to say anything else, I shifted angles.

“Kareem, Syndi…do you hate each other…or do you still love each other?”

Again, each one turned to the other, glaring in agonized aggravation, anticipation. Desperation.

“Well?”

Suddenly Syndi was sobbing.

I offered her the box of tissues.

Kareem, against his will, staggered toward her, finally sitting on the end of the chaise opposite her.

I asked about her tears.

“Because, because,” she wailed, “because everything’s falling apart, because he hates me, because everyone’s leaving me…”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that, Syndi,” I said, gesturing for her to take another tissue. Her cheeks were channeled with black lines, a white porcelain sink dirtied by a child’s playground mud. “What do you mean, ‘everyone’s leaving me’?”

She shook her head again and again while blowing her nose. “My mother,” she said at last.

“Yes? What about her, Syndi?”

“My mother…my whole life, she always, always put me last. I was like a dog, you know? Waiting on the couch by the window the whole day for its master to come home, but the master never does, and so the dog practically breaks its fucking tail off wagging and whimpering and whining alone…That’s why…when Kareem was always so obsessed with his job instead of bothering to spend time with me, focus on me, take care of me, I just couldn’t take it. I got scared, and I pushed him away. Because he was already pushing me away, don’t you get it?” She hiccuped her sobs. And while the exhaustion on Kareem’s face suggested he’d heard her story before, the pain in his expression was as real as hers.

“I’m surprised, Syndi,” I said, “because from everything you’ve ever told me, you and Bianca have an excellent, close bond, not to mention the most famously successful—and lucrative—mother-manager/daughter-talent relationship in either showbiz or in superheroics—”

“No!” she choked, looking up and moaning. “No! Bianca’s…she’s not…she’s not my mother, Eva, she’s just my agent. That was just a cover story. I’m crying…because my real mother’s dying.”

“What?” said Kareem. “Syndi, then who’s…kot-tam, Syndi, are you saying—”

“Yes,” she said, choking back a sob and visibly making a decision. “My real name is Inga Icegaard. My mother is Iron Lass.”

And suddenly there it was.

With her hair now raven-feather black and her eyes bright sapphires on the black felt of smeared mascara, the ax-blade of her cheekbones and the taper of her chin—it had been hidden right in front of us all along.

Looking into Kareem’s pinballing eyes, I could see he was as stunned as I was. His face was a sorting machine, visibly reevaluating his every experience and conversation and fight and sorrow with Syndi, not to mention his workplace relationship with Iron Lass and her witness of the last two years of his behavior toward her daughter.

And then something else suddenly stormed into his eyes, like a vision of thundering horses and a chaos of lightning.

The X-Man bolted out of the room without so much as a glance good-bye.

“Kareem!” shrieked Syndi, crying again. “Kareem…”

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

Syndi: “I never asked for glory. Just unconditional love.”

Does Your Heart Come Wrapped in Your Cape?

Now that the age of heroism is drawing to a close—and even when it was at its peak—if you’ve found yourself spinning from one frantic come here/go away relationship to another, it’s time to start owning your role in creating your own misery, loneliness, and feelings of worthlessness.

As a superhero, you may have told yourself