Minister Faust by From (html) (librera reader txt) 📕

believing in his supposed inability to feel pain, and because of his lack of compassion, never grew to understand his own or others’ emotional pain, which imprisoned him inside an inescapable confinement of existential solitude. When the poisoned, flaming Trojan arrow struck him, Achilles as likely died from heartbreaking loneliness (the narcissistic fantasy that he alone could feel such pain) as from toxins, infection, third-degree burns, and massive blood loss.

Unless Wally could rise to the challenge of confronting the reality of his own essential fragility, particularly during a time of such instability for the organization that gave his life meaning, he would never be able to achieve true strength and would instead die a broken, embittered, delusional man.

Secret Origins and Secret Shames

Without exception, every family keeps a veritable mausoleum of skeletons in its closets. Innumerable patients of mine have discovered only in adulthood that they’re in fact adopted, that they’re abuse survivors, that they’re human-alien hybrids, or even that they’re shaven, cerebro-boosted globus monkeys.

So when Mr. Piltdown attacked Wally about his origins, I couldn’t help but ask myself some questions: Were Wally’s parents extraterrestrial quasi-gods of powers surpassing our “awe capacity” and of intellect impenetrable to mortal men? Or were they salt-of-the-earth country folk from America’s deep-fried gristle belt? Did Wally invent a myth of grandiose origins to overcompensate for his personal mediocrity? Or is it something else entirely? Or not?

In order to help Wally feel truly comfortable exposing himself, I dismissed Mr. Piltdown to seek medical care and resume his “independent investigation” into Hawk King’s death. To aid in getting to Wally’s inner truth, I brought out my DynaScan Reflective Spectroscope Junior®, and, while giving Wally a few hours to compose himself, I pored over the “Omnipotent Mess” chapter from Jack Zenith’s Two Masks of a “Hero,” and contacted Mr. Piltdown to have him courier me his own Squirrel Intelligence files on Wally. And, as a precaution, I arranged two lightning rods on either side of my desk.

If Mr. Piltdown’s claim about multiple secret identities had any truth to it, Wallace W. Watchtower was in far greater pain than I could ever have guessed.

Excavating the Ice Age of Jobuseen-Ya

So, Wally,” I asked, while sunset sweetened the room into a glowing ketchup smear, “how does it feel to be out of the F*O*O*J? Sitting on the sidelines, watching the accidental destruction of Asteroid Zed and the by-election for the F*L*A*C?”

He gazed at me glumly, slumping in his chair like a mound of mashed potatoes.

“Wellsir, asteroids are always blowin up somewhere, y’know?” he mumbled. “An’s far as th’lection, well…never really cared for thet administrative guff. I like doin thangs. Actin. Not fussin over forms an such.”

I flipped through my file and the file Mr. Piltdown had sent me. “Hm. But…yes, you did serve on the F*L*A*C for a few years in the late forties and early fifties when the F*O*O*J was still new. There were some…problems…?”

“Tweren’t really my thang, like I said, ma’am. Gil Gamoid stepped in for me, an Hawk King—may God rest both their souls—suggested I retire from the F*L*A*C so he could hep me keep refinin m’powers. The King hepped me find m’real callin: rescuin, savin, inspirin. I’m a ‘big pitcher’ sorta feller, not a dottin ts an crossin is man, y’know. Hnossi, Festus, they’re better with thet sorta stuff.”

“I see. Would you say then, Wally, you’ve taken seriously, or not seriously enough, your history of failure?”

“Wellsir, ma’am, I’d like to say that I always never don’t fail to take serious things seriously. I mean…wait a minute. Uh…yes?”

“So you agree then, that—”

“Now hang on, ma’am…You kinda rattled me there a minute with that question. So no, I don’think that I haven’t taken…I mean, I have taken—look, I never said I was a failure. That’s just not true. You know it, I know it, th’entire ’Merican people know it. They call me a hero. Now, I don’call m’seff a hero, but that’s what they call me. And two hunnerd and fifty million people can’t be wrong, no sir, ma’am.”

“Now Wally, it’s interesting to me that you phrased your response the way you did. Because I didn’t say you were a failure.”

“What? I coulda sworn you jess—”

“No, I asked you to characterize, or reify—measure, if you will—how seriously you’ve taken your failures.”

Wally looked back at me with his eyebrows knitted into a muffler of confusion, until finally scratching beneath his right armpit. “Now maybe you didn’hear me right, ma’am, but I jess said I’m not a failure, I’m a hero. Herofyin is what I do. It’s what I’m good at. Always have been.”

“Wally, how realistic, really, is it to think that you’re perfect?”

“I never said I was perfect, ma’am-doctor. Nobody’s perfect. Even Hawk King, and I adored the man, so don’get me wrong, but even he wunt perfect, though you might think so, listenin to Festus. Okay, no one ’cept maybe my daddy’s perfect. An he’s passed on.”

“So how did that make you feel, when Festus referred to your parents as—and I’m quoting from my notes here—as ‘nothing but white super-trash…trailer-trolls from Fried Possum, Kentucky’?”

“Wellsir, twasn’t nice, ’course, but I’m a big boy. But I was talkin bout m’real daddy, not m’step-pa.”

“You mean…Jobuseen-Ya, from the planet Argon.”

“Yessir, ma’am.”

“Now, we had a bit of an incident here, when Mr. Piltdown started questioning whether Jobuseen-Ya and Argon actually existed.”

Wally wrinkled his nose, turned to his side, sucked in a deep breath, then let it out over the course of a full half-minute. Frost formed a huge white circle on the window in the path of his breath, and even the Spectroscope next to me scummed over milkily. I couldn’t stop myself from shuddering.

“Sorry bout that,” he said.

“That’s fine, Wally.” I crossed my arms for warmth, noticing how my skin had pimpled like a plucked chicken’s. The air temperature had to have dropped twenty degrees.

Omnipotent Man leaned forward, pushed himself up and out of his chair, and ambled over to the window he’d just made opaque. He put a