Minister Faust (13 page)

“Yet you won’t even acknowledge Syndi’s presence, Kareem,” I said. “And every time she speaks, you either roll your eyes, cross your arms in judgment, or get a look on your face like you’re sipping from a bucket of something turgid.”

“That,” he said, immediately jabbing a finger toward me before catching himself, “that’s an entirely different…which’s got nothing to do with gender, Doc.”

“Is it because of her orientation?”

He rolled his eyes, crossed his arms, and got a look on his face as if he were sipping from a bucket of something turgid. “Trust me,” he said, “it’s got nothing to do with her ‘orientation.’ ”

“Then tell me what it
is
about.”

“This is all a joke!”

“What’s all a joke?”

“This!” he said, sweeping the room with his chin. “Being in this laboratory, completely cut off from the real world…How’s this high-tech chicken coop supposed to reveal anything about how we actually function out there? The real reason we’re here isn’t because of
our
fears, Doctor, it’s because of
yours.
In here, you’re safe. You’re boss. You’re in control. The way you like it.

“You claim you want to understand us, to understand
me
? I’ll believe that the day I see you walking the streets of Stun-Glas. And
I
should be out there investigating the murder—
assassination
—of the greatest hero of our times, instead of facing expulsion from the F*O*O*J for failing to attend this psycho-sycophantic suckfest you’ve got us starched into!”

“Well-played, Kareem.” I smiled, nodding at my young patient. “Very skillful.”

“Meaning what?”

“Turning the conversation to someone else’s supposed shortcomings and away from your antagonism toward Syndi.”

“Look, Doctor. You want me to finish your assignment or not?”

Being one of the country’s most insightfully attuned psychoanalysts, I recognized when it was time to reel in a patient, and when it was time to release him. There would always be time later for the net.

A
fter calling in my secretary for some lip balm, I found Hnossi Icegaard at the next workbay listening to music on her Q-bot player. “I trust zere’s no rule against ziss?” she said, gesturing to her small silver cube.

“Not at all, Hnossi—this is art therapy, after all. Ella Fitzgerald, right?”

“Ja. She won ze Grammy for ziss. ‘Mack ze Knife.’ Even zough she forgot the vords, her improvisation vuss genius…a true warrior of song.” She gestured with her shortsword to the granite slab she’d transformed into a stunningly elaborate scale-model replica of a walled fortress, complete with towers, armories, mead halls, stables, and bridges—the mountain-peak home of the Norse war gods. Aesgard. I asked her to tell me about her icon.

Offering a description that differed somewhat from my recollection of the legends, she focused on the Hall of Valkyries, the fortress of the sisterhood to which she used to belong. Yet none of what she said was in the least personally revealing.

“You know, Frau Doktor,” she said confidentially, changing tone and direction, “alzough youngk Kareem can be undisciplinedt, you are too qvick to dismiss his legitimate concerns about Master Hawk Kink. I’ve spoken wiss him at length about ze prima facie case he’s been developingk—”

Recognizing her diversion for what it was, I realized it was time to reel Iron Lass in.

“I’ll take that into consideration, Hnossi. But right now, I’m curious about something that came up in our dual session with Syndi. After that conversation, I did some further reading about your life…and your mother’s.”

She turned to me, and I was suddenly acutely aware of the power in the unsheathed swords clutched in her armored hands.

“Unt vut,” she said quietly, “haff you discoverdt, Doktor Brain?”

“Well…I…uh…I discovered that there is indeed quite a difference between Frigg, wife of Odin—the goddess-queen most people assume is your mother—and Frigg/Freyja, your
ac
tual mother.” I cleared my throat, choosing my next words as carefully as I would the steps on a rickety bridge across a gorge. “Whereas Frigg, wife of Odin, had an, an ill
us
trious career as an Aesir warmaster and symbol of virtue…the
other
Frigg, your mother, was…she was…”

“A whore,” she stated. “Is zat ze vurt you vere lookink for, Eva?”

“It’s, uh, the word
you’ve
chosen,” I said, swallowing. “Tell me why.”

She stared at me with her cold eyes of hot fury, a look that made me feel like a mouse crisping in a child’s Easy-Bake oven. The song on her Q-bot, meanwhile, changed to Patsy Cline’s pathetically innocent rendition of “Tennessee Waltz.” The juxta-position only intensified my anxiety.

She continued staring at me, unblinking, unmoving, until the second verse in which Patsy lilted,
“Only you know how much…I have lost…”

I finally broke our gaze, flipping through my file until I found another angle to pursue.

“You’re, um, highly lauded, not only among, uh, the public, but, ah, among F*O*O*J members. As a symbol of the very best in superheroism. Since the F*O*O*J’s founding, you’ve enjoyed the highest consistent approval rating among civilians and heroes of anyone except for Hawk King and Omnipotent Man. Ball Buster said in a 1989 issue of
People
that if it weren’t for you, she’d’ve committed suicide, and that she knew of at least two other heroines you’d gotten through similarly traumatic times.”

“Ja?”

“You have enormous public regard, endless testimonials in your favour…yet, in 1974, after your daughter is hospitalized under mysterious circumstances, you separate from your husband, and your daughter and son choose to live with him.”

I lowered my voice, kept my eyes on the contents of my file folder, forcing myself to take a step toward this sword-wielding woman with eyes of death.

“You’ve given of yourself to hundreds of thousands of people across the centuries, but the two people in the universe whom you would most logically want to regard you as
their
icon…they rejected you. And your own icon…it isn’t a person of flesh and blood or even divine ichor…but a group of cold stone buildings atop a mountain.”

Her eyes were ominously huge, like twin amethyst bowling balls full of dynamite, threatening to drop and crush my skull and explode in my brainpan.

“My
children,
Doktor—”

“Sorry I’m late, ma’am-doctor,” said Omnipotent Man too loudly, stumbling in and scanning the room to deduce what we were doing and why. The arctic fury in Iron Lass’s face melted into something softer but far sadder. Wally tripped over his teammates’ work materials while finding a workbay of his own, laughing at himself self-consciously and whistling the theme to
Bonanza.

“C’n I work over here, Doc? Sorry I’m late—rough night’n all. I’m sure y’all unnerstan—I aint th’o’ny one what’s ever had one a them. Hey, Syndi, that’s quite the…Now, whatcha puttin on her—now, I ain’t sure that’s an appropriate kinda…Say, Doc, juss what’re we doin, anyhow?”

I went over to Wally, explaining to him the task while observing his dishevelment: his hair was all a-shag, the bags beneath his eyes were big enough to shop with, and his body reeked of ozone. Reexamining earlier remarks about Wally by Mr. Piltdown and Kareem, I began to suspect a looming scandal which, during this time of crisis, the F*O*O*J and the country might not be able to withstand.

“So I can use anything in the room, ma’am?” he asked before I could inquire about his stench and his shabbiness, not to mention his tremendous tardiness.

“That’s right, Wally, but first, I think we need to—”

“Wellsir, ma’am, gotta get started. Time is money, penny saved, early worm gets two in the bush,” he said, gripping the sides of the ice wall and ripping it up from the floor, hauling it off to his workbay and immediately carving it with his superfast digits. And with the protective wall between Mr. Piltdown and Kareem gone, their conflict inflamed immediately to the verge of vengeance.

They’d both constructed images of the incredible Hawk King.

I
expected a volley of insults, but each man was silent, stupefied with rage, each hero’s contempt for the other intensified by a jealous, proprietary fury.

With both heroes motionless in their contest of wills, as if the one who moved first would prove himself the lesser worshiper, I was free to inspect their work, which the other F*O*O*Jsters did as well.

Kareem had employed his logogenic powers to sculpt a masterpiece, a six-and-a-half foot tall gleaming black hawk-headed man, adorned with pharaonic double crown and kilt, arms stretched forth, hands clutching crook and flail, and wings spread wide as if to encompass the world. One might easily imagine Egyptian peasants and priests prostrate before this statue. Everyone—except Mr. Piltdown, of course—was impressed.

The Flying Squirrel’s work, while lacking the artistry, sophistication, and three-dimensional grandeur of Kareem’s, was nonetheless fascinating. Since Mr. Piltdown could neither draw nor sculpt, he’d hewn a primitive collage from pictures, logos, and other text he’d torn from his stack of magazines. On a large sheet of Bristol board, a Frankenstein’s monster of a Hawk King had been cobbled together from the body parts of various subjects; the figure stood in front of an undersize Blue Pyramid made from blue stretches of automobile, cleaning products, and perfume ads. Radiating from Hawk King’s crown like the sun’s rays were corporate logos clipped into words and phrases such as “HeRo” and “GETting the JOB doNE Right” and “Master your WORK place” and “MISSion acCOMPlished.”

“Fascinating presentations, gentlemen,” I said. “Who’d like to tell me about his work first?”

The X-Man, without breaking his stare at his adversary, reached up and behind himself to his icon’s face, which moved slightly. I noted with fascination that Kareem’s icon featured limited articulation.

He rasped, “Care to look under the mask, Festy? Or you afraid what you’d find?”

“Well, I’ll be a pigeon’s whiskers, Kreem, but that’s a goshdurn fine piece a work!
Fine
piece!”

The X-Man, eyes still chained to Flying Squirrel’s, said, “Thanks, Wally. Glad you like it.”

“Kareem,” I said, “tell me about this detail here.”

He didn’t budge. “Which one?”

“This one where I’m pointing, right here.”

Reluctantly breaking his glare, he scowled at me when he found me pointing at nothing and realized he’d been had.

“I just wanted you and Mr. Piltdown to break out of your testosterone-enflamed id-escalation. And now that you have, please take a few minutes to reflect on your icon so I can ask you about it.”

“Hey, Doctor Brain, ma’am, look at mine! Look at what I done!”

Despite his late arrival, Wally had already transmuted Iron Lass’s ice wall into an admirable ice sculpture, a ten-foot-tall man with star emblems across his jacket and DNA brocade trimming his cape. The figure stood gazing toward the ceiling as if reading the mysteries enshrouding the ends of the universe.

“That’s m’daddy, Jobuseen-Ya,” said Wally, “th’late an greatest defender of th’late an greatest planet.” He looked around for support, then offered, “
Argon.
Y’all knew I meant Argon, right?”

“Beautiful craftsmanship, Vally,” said Hnossi. “Impressive vurk viss my ice. But, mm, perhaps you should freshen up, ja? Haff a coffee or sumsing? You’re looking a tad…overvurked.”

Iron Lass fooled no one. To the extent that Wally’s icon was masterful, Wally himself was a sluice-floor hackwork: unshaven, straggle-haired, mud on his suit, rips in his cape, and the even worse reek of ozone since his last trip to the rest room. “Tell me about your icon, Wally—”

“Eva, like, you haven’t even looked at
my
icon yet?”

I was about to ask Syndi to wait her turn, but when I beheld what she’d built, I was both shocked and shocked at myself for being shocked.

Syndi’s mannequin-based icon, with its dominatrix-inspired attire, was an image of herself.

Having anticipated someone’s possible failure to notice her icon’s identity, Syndi had glued gold glitter into the forms of the letters
P
and
G
around the nipple spikes of the black breast cups of her monument to herself, and
AUTOGRAPHS HERE
in the same gold glitter across the mannequin’s buttocks and
GRRRLS DO IT BEST
upon its crotch.

“And, like, I gave myself dreads,” she said, pointing to the sections of rope festooned from the mannequin’s skull, “cuz, like, I’ve been thinking about getting some?” She tilted her head with her trademarked coquettishness. “What do you think, Eva? They look good, don’t they?”

The X-Man swore.

Syndi tilted her head the other direction. “Kareem, if you, like, use the word ‘appropriation’ even once, you can talk to my, like, autograph dispenser?”

With everyone’s work complete, I moved them out of their workbays to their datapads on the table and had them type out why they’d made their icons, what these images meant to them, and what they’d learned from what they’d made. But as important as their answers were, my real purpose was to prime the pump for phase two.