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

to Inga, “you determined you’d never be rejected again. By anyone. Every relationship you’ve ever had—familial, platonic, romantic—you ended before they could.”

“God!” she said, pacing the tiny room like a black rat in a white box. “This is completely wrong, Eva! We’re supposed to be talking about what my mother did wrong! She’s the reason I’m so messed up!”

“ ‘Messed up’? Earlier you claimed you were happy and felt loved. Syndi…Inga…anyone as desperate as you were, as you still are, to avoid rejection—I mean, your entire career has been about attracting the attention you equate with love so as to guarantee yourself a never-ending ‘fix.’ Anyone that terrified of rejection has unquestionably harmed or debased herself in ways she isn’t proud of. Ways she may never have told another living soul…”

Inga froze, focusing on me tapping the cover of my POWER GRRRL folder. Her blue eyes paled into water.

“Vut is it? Vut’s she talking about, Inka?” said Hnossi. “I don’t understandt…Vut are you getting at, Doktor?”

“You really should tell your mother, Inga.”

“This is so unethical of you, Eva!”

“Inka,” said Hnossi heavily, “tell me.”

Inga scrambled up into a chair as if afraid of floor mice, hugged her knees against her chest, her eyes looking like huge balls of wet ice.

“I did the capes,” she mumbled.

“Vut? Inka, you’re not—you’re not serious—”

Her daughter said nothing, saving her glare for me.

“Odin’s eye,” whispered the dying goddess.

The niche pornography industry called the capes, worth an estimated $2.5 billion annually in the United States alone, served those men and women who sexually fetishized superhero tunics and the people who wore them. On rare occasions a genuine superheroine or hero (always a fallen one) gained “employment” in the field, appearing in films, videos and holograms. Best known of these was the sole “success” story: Magna, the 1980s heroine and daughter of the Lodestone. At the height of the Götterdämmerung she’d left crimefighting to begin her own highly profitable pornographic production company in whose features she’d frequently “starred.”

And the file Festus supplied me contained photographic proof. As Cassiopeia Rand, HKA Space Girl, Inga had appeared in “supporting” roles of “adventure” films such as Magna: Pirate of Men’s Pants, “documentaries” such as The Theory of Magnajism, and “intellectual erotica” such as Magna Cums Laudly.

“But there’s more, Inga,” I said, “isn’t there?”

“Mein todt, how can it get any vurse zan ziss, Doktor?” moaned Hnossi, clutching at whatever frosted-green crabgrass remained attached to her skull. “My own dottir! A whore for ze cameras! Ziss is all her fazzer’s fault, ze filse of all his showbiz dreams—”

“Hnossi, please! Inga—all these years desperately craving attention, pursuing show business, and reinventing yourself and even manufacturing scandals to guarantee the attention your mother denied you and that you equated with love. Always being the one to end relationships first. All of it to ensure you would never be rejected and that instead you would be the one doing the rejecting. What’s the ultimate way to ensure that?”

I looked at both women. Neither would look at me.

“Ladies, please,” I said. “The signs are all there, as giant and unavoidable as sky-writing. Will one of you please verbalize what happened to you and your family after you, Inga, at the tender age of twelve, attempted suicide?”

Discovering—and Healing—the Scared Little Goddess Inside You

Despite the younger Icegaard’s propensity for blaming her problems on her mother, the suicide attempt was the sole damage zone even she had feared to retread, perhaps because once she began, there was no going back. If the “answers” her terminal mother gave her were insufficient, she would forever be denied her sole chance to heal, even the opportunity to wonder “what if?”

Recounting her years in and out of therapy, Inga/Syndi parabolically approached the issue of her preteen attempt at self-murder.

“For years, I thought I’d done it because maybe I’d been abused,” she said. “I had all these recovered memories from my other therapists…memories of Mother…beating me. Cutting me with her swords, cutting my limbs off and magically re-attaching them so the police wouldn’t suspect anything.

“But then I had this one therapist, and he said I should talk with Daddy and Baldur about it, and, and…well, now I know it was just the therapists screwing with my head, planting these ideas in my mind. But I’ve always had this problem with, you know, depression? And I used to cut myself, throw myself off of buildings and cliffs and things, burn myself, try to hurt myself…My therapist said it was Munchausen syndrome. Said I was trying to get Mother to rescue me.”

She smiled coldly, then reduced her expression to a corpse’s repose.

“It didn’t work,” she concluded.

Of all memories, “recovered” ones are the most unreliable. According to Dr. Steve N. Strainge, the psychiatrist whose testimony interred Dr. Napoleon Orator on Asteroid Zed, Menton’s career of manipulation began before even he realized he had such powers. For years during the therapy sessions he led, he had been implanting false memories of trauma in his patients, after which he was paid to supply expert testimony at trial for clients suing their former baby-sitters, coaches, pastors, teachers, siblings, parents, deliverymen, meter men, and aldermen.

But since Inga had successfully detached from her therapist-implanted pseudomemories, there was hope for her eventual recovery, even if we then had to descend deeper into the swamps of her dysfunctionally agonized adolescence.

I asked her to tell me what had precipitated her attempt.

“Mother,” said Inga, “was out. Again. Always on some mission. She and Daddy’d been fighting for what must’ve been two days straight, and this was after two years of a downhill shit-slide with them. I mean, it was both of them, yeah, but it was her fault.

“So Daddy, he couldn’t take it anymore, said he was going out and she was screaming at him and telling him that if he goes out now he shouldn’t even think about coming back and he just said, ‘Fine, maybe I won’t,’ and he rushed back in and packed a suitcase and I was trying to hold on