Minister Faust (20 page)

Its architecture vaguely suggesting the Grand Temple of Luxor, the QRIB boasted wraparound murals crawling with hierograffiti and giant native black African figures dressed like Ramses gripping sundry white characters by the hair while smiting them (including caricatures of select U.S. presidents and members of the F*O*O*J itself). The display was nothing if not a vast, three-dimensional incarnation of the Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis which undoubtedly helped cost the L*A*B its HUD security contract to protect Langston-Douglas.

Kareem paused to look up at the images, and even with his eyes masked by his black “G-man” sunglasses, his face was darkened by the unmistakable soot of melancholy. I proceeded gently, asking him what André meant by saying that Kareem was hardly more welcome than he was at the Dark Star.

He cut me off, pretending he hadn’t heard my question, listing instead a myriad of L*A*B miscellanea such as how an artist named Emory Douglas helped design the QRIB’s murals; how the QRIB was built on the border with Cripton (the most dangerous part of Langston-Douglas) as a warning to the gangs that infest it; how independent crimefighters had been shattered by the death of Maximus Security in 1984 and finally formed the L*A*B in 1987 to continue his work; how those same L*A*Bsters only later realized that each of them had gained his powers from being exposed to the contents of mysterious hieroglyphic-inscribed containers called canopic jars, which, said Kareem, they “found in obscure corners of places like libraries and the Special Collections Rooms of the Schombro Museum.”

Eventually Kareem and his comrades came to believe that the jars were the divine gifts of Hawk King.

“He interceded in the affairs of Stun-Glas to raise up among us a generation of heroes,” said Kareem, his sentence creaking beneath its own obese grandeur, “so that his people—our people—could save themselves. Now maybe we didn’t have the deputized supra-legal exceptionalism of the F*O*O*J, but we gave a damn about Stun-Glas. Protected it. Against gangstas, racist cops, and supervillains alike.”

As soon as we resumed walking, Kareem pedantically listed and explained the L*A*B’s Forty-Two-Point Platform (subdivided into “What We Want” and “What We Believe”). And once again I tried to steer Kareem toward examining what must be for him an unbearable truth, that his awesome rage against white society, contained in his words and his racially fixated delusion about a supposed secret identity for Hawk King as a black, were contributing to a buildup of his paranoia, and that this paranoia could have only dreadful results for him if he refused to resolve it and integrate true reality into his awareness.

His grin grew colder every second I tried to persuade him; when I asked him why he was smiling, he said mysteriously, as if he hadn’t understood a word I’d said, “ ‘Integrate’? You people think integration’s the solution to everything.”

“Kareem, I’m talking about
psychemotional
integration—”

“I know what you meant,” he sneered. “And I don’t expect a damn shrink to understand a kot-tam thing about the real world. The only two
ation
s I’m interested in are
lib
eration and
invest
igation. There are suspects we can’t even find—Warmaster Set, Cosmicus, the Einstein Baboons. But we’ve got three up in orbit I want some answers from, and I intend to talk to em as soon as I can arrange it.”

“You mean Gil Gamoid, the N-Kid, and…”

“Yeah,” he said, “and Menton.”

Kareem didn’t even flinch when he said the name. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy uttering those fearsome phonemes.

We were only a block from a subway entrance when Kareem stopped with his arm out, holding me back. He pointed along both sides of the street toward the boarded-up faces of half a dozen businesses, one after the other: Ruby’s Ribs, Deacon’s Gumbo, Junior’s Jerk Palace-an-Ting, Down Home Chicken, ’Bama-Ass Chicken, and Git-Yo-Chicken. Finally he pointed to the far end of the street, and the bustling business enjoyed by the Squirrel Burger franchise enthroned there.

Because of my access to F*O*O*J files, I wasn’t surprised that the X-Man would single out the burger business. Indeed, the battle between the young Philip Kareem Edgerton and the Squirrel Burger Corporation had nearly prevented Kareem’s membership in the F*O*O*J and had ensured a hatred between Kareem and the ultimate master of Squirrel Burger, a division of Piltdown Edible Products International—Festus Piltdown III.

The Black Quixotes Toward Windmills of Color

I
n 1986, when he was still operating under the hypernym Mac Rude, Kareem and several other proto-L*A*Bsters went to war with every Squirrel Burger outlet in Langston-Douglas. Arnold Drummond launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits against franchise owners, the Dark Fantastic used his shadow powers to make every restaurant so dark that the kitchens were unusable, and Kareem deployed his rudimentary logogenic ability to manifest 3-D graffiti above Squirrel Burger restaurants declaring such phrases as “Squirrel Burger Is Destroying Black Business.”

When that campaign had minimal effect, Kareem changed his slogans to urge ghetto residents to “Stick It to the Squirrel—Buy Black.” That campaign’s failure prompted Kareem to develop his power further, creating mobile “word swarms” or “tags” that followed Squirrel customers after they left the restaurants. Diners found themselves returning to school, home, and work with 3-D phrases such as “I Licked the Squirrel’s Nuts” and “I Drink Nut-Shakes” orbiting their heads. Squirrel Burger business plummeted, and local restaurateurs rejoiced.

But eventually Squirrel Burger Corporation regrouped with its franchise owners by offering free burgers, Squirrelly Fries™, and Chocolate Bushy Tails™. Exhausted and overstretched, Kareem and his comrades couldn’t maintain their crusade with its homophobic slogans against the sheer numbers of new Squirrel diners; eventually they surrendered completely.

“Makes me sick,” said Kareem, glaring at the giant scowling squirrel mascot as if he were Dante in the Pit staring up at the Beast, and then at the people waddling in and out of the fast-food outlet. “But it takes a nation of millions to keep us fat. And stupid. And that nation’s us.”

“Don’t you think people should have the free choice to eat where they want, Kareem? Do you think you should have the authority to tell everyone what to do, how to eat, what to think? To say nothing of depriving local people of jobs?”

“Shit, Doc, are you kidding? Don’t get me started on jobs—minimum wage, no benefits, swing shifts? How about down here in Stun-Glas we get some of that high-tech investment from the dimensional research contracts they do up there in the Tachyon Tower and all the spin-off jobs that go with that? That’d be some jobs!

“Can you even see what’s in front of your eyes? Look across the street! Fools weighing three hundred and fifty pounds ordering a mega-meal Kilo-Burger, a gross of Squirrelly Fries™, and a Half-and-Half Shake thickened with Crisco? You see that man right there—that one! Can barely walk, but he’s walrusing around like an NBA star in his Adidas sneakers and Nike track pants—I mean, they
must
be knockoffs cuz Nike doesn’t make size infinity—but this mad-ass madness of tryin to look athletic when you’re lethally stuffing yourself with the filthiest foods on the planet? Diabetes, heart attacks…used to be poor people starved to death. Now we overeat to death! Killing us off with low-quality, high-fat food, obesing us all into the grave. And Squirrel Burger isn’t just a name, Doc. That shit-shack
serves actual squirrels
!”

“Now, Kareem…we both know that’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You’re telling me the FDA has approved the sale of wild rodent meat to the general public?”

“You think the multibillion-dollar Piltdown Group doesn’t get whatever it wants, whenever it wants it? FDA’s a three-dollar-an-forty-two-cent ho, Doc! Wake up! And the squirrels aren’t wild…Piltdown’s got huge factory farms down in Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, everywhere Piltdown pulled out his high-tech manufacturing and moved it to Mexico or New Atlantis. Got all those downsized crackers working his squirrel ranches, billions of squirrels in teeny-tiny cages force-fed ground-up rats that were fed ground-up roaches that were fed ground-up brains of all the mentally retarded prisoners they execute down in Dixieland! You heard of the China Syndrome? A nuclear reactor burning all the way down to China? This is Piltdown’s Syndrome—burning us all down to nothing. To
nothing.
”

He threw up his arms, aiming his tirade like a wrecking ball at all the empty buildings.

“But people are deaf, dumb, and blind. You can scream the truth in letters ten miles tall, and still the only thing they’ll notice is
nothing.
Whole reason Brother Larry opened the Dark Star was so people’d have suh’m tasty and healthy to eat after Squirrel Burger drove everybody else outta business. You know you can buy and get stoned from a whole bag of
maki
in this neighborhood easier and cheaper than you can buy a kot-tam
salad
? But if it weren’t for the L*A*B and a few others, Larry wouldn’t even be able to keep his doors open.”

K
areem’s rant veered wildly, even into how the L*A*B operated its own “social programs to counter white influence,” including “Free Breakfast for Shorties,” “Africa Medallions for Homies,” and “Free Fades, Flat-Tops, and Afro-Picks for Soul Brothers,” the last of which was undermined by something Kareem called “the Jheri curl plague,” which left what he claimed was “Jheri bags and activator empties lying in the gutters of the MLK Boulevard of dreams deferred.”

Suddenly Kareem turned on me with accusation burning in his eyes like lit cigarettes.

“I sure hope you aren’t planning to turn this conversation or any of our sessions into one of your books, Doc!”

“Well, Kareem, I’m sure if you actually were to read any of my—”

“I checked out your stuff after we got sentenced to your therapy. All of it. I pity the poor mopes you psychocatalyzed. I read what those suckers said—although I had to read between the lines to deduce what you’d cut out since the way you edited everything was so self-serving—and then I’d read your diagnoses and speculations and bizarre psychosuperstitious slop.
Damn.
The least insightful, most outrageous conclusions, like you couldn’t see cute on a puppy—”

“Be that as it may, Kareem—”

“I mean, in the dictionary, next to the definition of ‘unreliable narrator,’ there’s gotta be a picture of your degree. I hate to think how you’d be framing anything I’ve ever said. You take one little word of what people say, then psychopontificate the hell out of it until you’ve got readers thinking the afflicted are the afflictors, and the afflictors are the afflicted! No different than the F*O*O*J helping destroy New Atlantis while protecting the people bringing
maki
into our neighborhoods—”

It was time to cut through the Gordian Knot of Kareem’s white-persecution complex. “If everything you’re saying is true, Kareem, why did you even join the F*O*O*J? Why not remain in Stun-Glas full time, fighting alongside the L*A*B?”

“What, remain ghettoized, cut off from the reach that only the F*O*O*J has, unable to effect change past my own neighborhood, prevented from joining a wider cause?
Then
you’d accuse me of—”

“Did the L*A*B expel you?”

He stopped, his jaw half-open.

He closed it, then opened it again only long enough to say “No.” He shook his head.
“No.”

“André said you weren’t welcome at the Dark Star. You didn’t rebut him. What did he mean?”

“Look!” he yelled. “We are in serious danger, Doc—can you get that through your head? Omnipotent Man’s resigned! Hawk King’s dead by causes unknown! The F*O*O*J is a kot-tam disaster! This morning, at the funeral, the appearance of the Netjeru—that was a warning to us all, a harbinger that if we don’t—”

“The what? Natcheroo?”

“
Netjeru,
Doc! Don’t you know anything? The so-called gods who took Hawk King’s sarcophagus away! They haven’t appeared on Earth in five or six thousand years. You think they don’t want his killer caught? What do you think they’ll do if we don’t avenge his death?”

“Are you saying that these gods are inferior as detectives to you?”

“I’m
saying
that…Look, even if they don’t, I dunno—whatever—what do you think’s gonna happen if we don’t bring his killer to justice? Who’s next, and how many after that? Because if you can kill someone of Hawk King’s power, then nobody’s safe! How can you not see that?”

“All right, Kareem.”

“All right, what?”

“You believe that Gil Gamoid, the N-Kid, and/or the Destroyer could be behind this alleged crime, correct?”

“Yes, for the ninth time!”

“Then let’s go ask them.”

“What’re you talking about? Thanks to you jailing me in therapy, my investigation’s barely started! And a detective doesn’t tip his hand to a suspect until he’s—”

“I’m worried that you’re manifesting a vast, disabling paranoid fantasy, Kareem, and
that’s
what’s jailing you. I’ll go to Asteroid Zed tomorrow to interview them myself, if you won’t, so we can rule out Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid as suspects—”

“You do that and you’re gonna destroy the element of surprise and blow the one chance I’ve got with them!”

“So I’m going to Asteroid Zed, Kareem, to speak with your triumvirate of terror myself. Unless you want to go with me to rule them out yourself.”