Minister Faust (7 page)

He irradiated everyone with his glare.

“The F*O*O*J Fortress. Scanning for threats. Doing my duty to our country. Our planet. When a champion of such magnitude falls, criminals become an opportunistic infection poised to contaminate us all.”

“Festus vuzn’t simply vaatching ze monitors in ze Situation Room, Frau Doktor,” said Hnossi Icegaard, smoothing her raven mane. While speaking to all of us, she looked only at Mr. Piltdown, who stared at a part of the ceiling where the Brotherfly wasn’t then crawling. André was removed from our sight-line; the only indication he remained in the room came from a soft, high-pitched buzzing near the lamp.

“Festus spent last evenink unt all last night comfortink ze heroes unt heroines who’d assembult at ze Fortress, like a vize unt gentle faazer or feutal lordt, offerink his shoulder or knee for zeir tears. Unt vile shelterink our soldiers viss his…his
moral
leadership, he spoke viss everyone, softly. Uff honor, unt diknity, unt true heroism, from a life devotedt not to self, not to glory, not to personal revardt…but to
justice.
” She sighed lengthily. “Unt sroughout all ziss, vhere vere you, Kareem?”

Kareem stiffened in his chair, goggling at her.

“Where was I, Hnossi? I was in Stun-Glas! Walking the streets, talking to my people!
My
people, the ones
you
people always seem to forget about, the ones you were gonna let CycloTron crush. I was down with the people praying in the AME Church on the corner of Cowan and McDuffie, down with the folks stuffing fried mock-chicken and corn bread down their mouths at Dark Star, down at the QRIB with the League and patrolling Stun-Glas to keep people cooled out and safe! What I
wasn’t
doing was pulling any fake Churchill act, covertly campaigning for DOO on the grave of a
real
hero!”

Mr. Piltdown: “Why you invidious, usurping, cork-faced hypocrite, accusing
me
of exploiting the death of our leader!”

“Nothing stabs like truth, does it, Goebbels?”

“You are out uff line, Kareem!”

I held up my whistle until the combatants stood down emotionally, and then asked Festus to explain his claim that Kareem was being hypocritical.

“Miss Brain, I’ll tell you this just once: Whatever your mawkish, liberal, multicultural self-delusions, you cannot trust this individual. He’s already launched his plot to exploit Hawk King’s death by seeking the post of Director of Operations for the F*O*O*J.”

All eyes fell on the X-Man.

His mouth opened silently.

Stages of Grief: Reckless Adventurism

W
ell, deny it, Edgerton,” said Festus, “if you can!”

“Kareem, is ziss true?” asked Iron Lass. “You’re standink for election after beingk a F*O*O*J member for only two years? You don’t sink zat’s presumptuous?”

“Hnossi—” Festus chuckled “—this fraud couldn’t get himself elected head of a chain gang.”

“You shoulda told that to Hawk King, Fester,” said Kareem. “Because I’m submitting nomination papers signed by him!”

Silence settled on the room like fog.

And then came the lightning.

“You’re a goddamned liar, Edgerton!” yelled the Flying Squirrel. “How dare you, you
blaspheme
the holy name of our departed mentor like that!”

The X-Man closed his eyes and whispered the word
pamphlets.
Instantly, rectangles of darkness congealed in each of our laps.

I had difficulty reading what Kareem had given us; the logogenic tracts were black only, with empty space where the letters went. I spread his literature out over the thighs of my pantsuit so the pamphlet’s holes could be read in contrast (fortunately I’d worn beige that day).

Above a shadow cutout image of the white-shirted, black-tied and -suited X-Man exhorting an implied, adoring crowd beyond the picture frame, were the block letters

ELECT
X-MAN
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
A BETTER F*O*O*J
FOR A
BETTER WORLD

On the next panels of the material was Kareem’s “Five-Point Platform for a New F*O*O*J”:

1. Shift the F*O*O*J’s investigative focus to corporate crime, now that the Götterdämmerung is over

2. Rewrite the Concord of Heroic Duty to prevent the
F*O*O*J from intervening in the affairs of sovereign states

3. Defend and extend quality-of-life security for ordinary citizens—security from predatory corporations, landlords, polluters, etc., not only in disaster relief but in prevention

4. Deploy F*O*O*J technology toward public service and job creation

5. Liaise with schools, community organizations, and other nonsupergroups to promote safety, freedom, and public responsibility

“Damn, Kreem!” said the Brotherfly, fluttering down to snatch the pamphlet from Power Grrrl’s lap, then laughing once he was stuck back on the ceiling. “You gots to be insane in the hindbrain if you think you gon win gainst Squirrelly-Man! He gots the money, the experience, the money, the money—”

“I’m more concerned,” I said to Kareem, “by your campaign literature’s lack of attention to the very problems that brought you and your colleagues here in the first place. Nowhere in here do you acknowledge the importance of confronting the
internal
supervillains, such as the Crisis of Infinite Dearths, id escalation, depression—”

Kareem rolled his eyes.

“Your delusion is truly tragic, Edgerton,” said the Flying Squirrel, “even beyond this nonsense about Hawk King having ‘endorsed’ you. Even if, due to some thermodynamic miracle combined with an unforeseen alignment of the voodoo chicken bone stars, you actually somehow got elected as DOO, you’d be nothing but a legless mule. Piloting the F*L*A*C means navigating the interpolitical high seas relationships of six highly willful—”

“Six positions, plus Chair,” said Kareem, counting them off on his fingers. “Chair, Merry Mac, AKA Mitchell Morgan McDonald, age sixty-three.
Retiring.
Director of Personnel, the Manipulator, AKA Emory Dogstale, age fifty-nine.
Retiring.
Director of Finance, the Downsizer, AKA P. Martin Klein, age fifty-eight.
Retiring.
Director of Operations, Colonel Strom Flintlock, age one hundred seventy-three.
Retiring.

“That’s the old guard. They’re gone.

“But there’s a new crew up in this election, Festus. Gagarina Girl’s vying for D-Personnel against your girl, Major Ursa, I believe—”

Festus spluttered. Kareem breezed on.

“—and she’s got a better chance than does Earnest Beaver. Dynamiss is going to take on your boy Dow-Man for D-Finance—”

“Neither of those nattering neophytes stands a chance against Team Squirrel!”

“Be that as it may,” said Kareem, smirking, “three positions aren’t up for election this round. The Spectacle’s D-Investigation, age forty-three. Periodic Man’s D-R&D. He’s forty. Shockra’s D-External Affairs. She’s thirty-six. That’s a young bunch, Festy. Digital Age heroes looking for change, looking to deal a better hand than they were dealt. And even if neither Gagarina Girl nor Dynamiss wins, the three incumbents plus me’d make a majority on the F*L*A*C. Wouldn’t even need the Chair to break ties. You and the rest of the old mother F*L*A*Ccers’re history, Squirrel!”

Iron Lass: “Kareem!
Langvicht!
”

Everyone quivered in their chairs anxiously, clasping their hands about their ears in anticipation of my blowing the Mind Whistle™ either at Kareem’s epithet or to circumvent the inevitable Flying Squirrel retaliation.

But apparently retaliation was not inevitable. Festus simply sat silently staring at Kareem, hurling neither invective nor his chair. Instead, he methodically bent and tore the logogenic
Elect X-Man
pamphlet into a primitive origami squirrel.

F
estus,” I probed, seizing the moment, “shredding that tract isn’t helping you to focus your psychemotional microscope upon the slide of your pain. What, precisely, do you feel—you personally—right now?”

“What do I ‘feel’?” he sneered. He tore at the remains again, erecting two snubby ears on the paper squirrel’s head. “Did you actually ask me what I ‘feel’? I ‘feel’ I’m surrounded by morons!”

“Festus,” I said, tapping my whistle. He grimaced and shoved his palms against his eyes, rubbing hard enough to make me wince. “I’m asking not for your assessment of the rest of the group, but of your psychemotional state. Try using an ‘I-statement.’ ”

“An ‘I-statement’?” he snorted. “If I use an ‘I-statement’ you’re just going to sic that goddamned dominatrix whistle of yours on me!”

“No, I’m giving you permission, because right now we’re not in a free-for-all. You have the floor.”

Festus glared. Grunted. Glowered.

Finally: “I
feel
frustrated. There. Have I satiated you?”

“That’s good, Festus. Talk about that.”

“It’s good I’m frustrated?” he said. I raised an eyebrow at his playing dumb.

“I
feel
frustrated,” he begrudged, “because I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this organization, tending to it like a Shinto priest to a desktop grove of bonsai, cherishing it, protecting it…and now that I’ve arrived at the correct time, the appointed time, the right time for me to lead it…a—a goddamned dilettante lindy-hops his way in here with lies about a Hawk King endorsement and a sense of entitlement bigger than his Afro and acts as if he has a right to lead. I
feel
nobody has the ‘right’ to lead. You earn that goddamned right by investing decades of service—not milliseconds of presumption—earning interest and building capital of public confidence, collegial respect, and heroic loyalty, which I was intending to reinvest right now, in the traditions of our noble fraternity originally enacted by Hawk King.”

Wally returned from the rest room. Perhaps because of the anxiety level in the Verbalarium, the air seemed almost to tingle. “Excellent, Festus,” I reinforced. “You’ve done a fine job of—”

“I’m not done, Miss Brain. Bad enough to have our election turned into a midway freak show, but since the end of the Götterdämmerung to have to bear witness every day to what the slugs in the slime-trailing liberal media are saying about us—”

“
Bor
-ing,” said Syndi. She got out of her chair, turned on her hip-speakers to the
thump-whump
ing tune of her spring Top 40 hit “Boom! I Hit It Again,” and, activating her Power Pumps, began high-speed rocket-skating/dancing around the room.

Festus: “Turn that goddamned jungle music off and sit down!”

Wagging my whistle, I warned Syndi to return to her chair, but I was reluctant to risk the whistle’s overuse because my patients might habituate to its stimulus. Wally, snapping his fingers, conceded that he found the tune “kinda ketchy, though a mite Jezebellish.” I asked Festus to continue, but more loudly.

“—I
feel
humiliated!” he seethed above the bass line and drum snares, “
vi
olated because the papa-goddamn-razzi are trailing around a bunch of teenybopping costumed incompetents who’re here because our F*L*A*C insists we have to change our image ‘to suit the times,’ forcing us to incorporate mattress-back pop tarts who’re here because they want to be famous, not because they know or care one whit about protecting people or national security or what it means to have fought a war every day for the last forty-five goddamned years of your career while they’re flitting away their mayfly existences preening and prancing around and having their highly publicized perverted little ‘sexcapades’ and publicly dragging the name of this organization through a urinal, making a mockery out of what real heroes—men like Hawk King, women like Iron Lass—have sacrificed!

“I,”
he shouted, gripping his chair by the arms so hard his glide-flaps and whiskers shook,
“feel furious!”

Stages of Grief: Lust for Vengeance

F
estus Piltdown III panted, grimaced, blinked—I couldn’t tell whether from exhaustion or embarrassment. Finally, after regaining his breath, he said simply, “That’s it.”

“Don’t hold back, Squirrelly,” yelled a voice from the ceiling. “You might still have some spleen or pancreas left up in there to spit up—”

“André, please. Let’s positively reinforce Festus’s commendable first foray into self-revelation.”

“And that’s another thing, Miss Brain,” said the Flying Squirrel. “In my day, people didn’t call their elders or their superiors by their first names. One said Mister So-and-so and Miss Such-and-such. Would you go around calling Hawk King ‘Hawk’? No. It’s called respect. Propriety. And maybe if we had a little more of that, our Fraternal Order wouldn’t be swirling down the toilet right now.”

“Can I say something, Eva?” Power Grrrl reverse-rocketed to a stop and raised her hand as if she were a schoolgirl.

“Only if you turn that music down, Syndi.”

She wagged her hips, and the music ceased. “Why is it okay for
Mister
Piltdown to be sitting there judging us and insulting me? If he wants to be respected, doesn’t he have to, like, treat the rest of us with some respect?”