On the steps, we considered Rodin’s Thinker and watched the water cascade down the steps of the newly-installed fountain pouring down toward Woodward Avenue. After she answered my questions concerning how to distinguish between the Renaissance, Palladianism, Greek Revival, and neoclassicism—her answer in fact didn’t clear anything up for me and I doubt anyone’s ever would—she asked, “Is there anything else on your mind, Clarissa?”
I said, yes there was. “The Megaton and Meltdown universes apparently split about around 1940 and are fusing together all around us,” I said, matter-of-factly, as if one were discussing the invention of the automobile and the growth of modern Detroit. “And so far, I haven’t been able to get anyone who knows anything to explain to me what’s going on. Rex Rigid, Seymour Starlight, even my own grandmother, Dr. Mercedith Robeson Robeson-James—they were all scientists present at the split, but I’ve yet to be able to pin anyone down long enough to tell me what they know, let alone explain to me why is all congealing back together.”
I left out the fact that I’d seldom had the presence of mind to bring up the questions I had when I had the opportunity, assuming I could even formulate proper questions.
“I’ll be happy to tell you what I know, Ms. Megaton Man,” said Michele. “But you’ll have to walk with me back to my office.”
I readily agreed, since I had felt like skipping my afternoon class on American labor history anyway—I had done all the extra credit and was currently pulling over a hundred percent in the course, and the early spring breeze was giving me a faint whiff of senioritis.
Since we were heading up Woodward Avenue, I assumed Michele had meant the office she shared with Doctor Messiah in the Wardell, the once-lavish hotel-apartment building directly north of the museum, the top floor of which housed the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute. It was there I had visited Michel and Doctor Messiah before, and seen some very strange things, including a framed photograph hung on the wall showing a past and future Detroit megahero team. I had also witnessed Michele herself transfigure into an Egyptian deity of some sort and the good Doctor into some kind of Cosmic Christ-baby.
As we walked past the abstract monumental sculpture on the lawn of the museum, I began to enumerate all the strange facts I had either witnessed first-hand or had gathered from various sources since I’d first become embroiled in the world of megaheroes nearly four years before.
“From what I’ve been able to piece together, some twelve scientists gathered at the Doomsday Factory in New Jersey around 1940, on the eve of World War II, to create an Atomic Soldier. Half of them wanted to build a Megaton man, the other a Meltdown man—fission and fusion, roughly speaking. A thirteenth scientist, apparently bored as these deliberations dragged on, decided to kill some time splitting apart something called the Mutanium Particle, only he ended up splitting the universe apart instead.
“For the past forty-some-odd years, the two dimensions followed different historical trajectories, beginning with the most notable feature: Each had its own Nuclear-Powered Hero. In one, the Original Golden Age Megaton Man; in the other, Major Meltdown. Each had their respective lineages, which now numbers three generations. But the differences didn’t stop there. Each timeline developed different megahero teams, different megavillains, different slightly different political histories, even different newspapers of record. There were even different lines of comic books published in each universe that mirrored in to some extent the other universe, in each regarded as purely fictional entertainment, some examples of which I happen to have in my collection.”
Michele nodded intermittently.
“But for the past number of years, growing evidence suggests that the two dimensions—two realities, two timelines if you will—have begun merging, almost like there was some inevitable magnetic attraction drawing them back together. At least, that’s my inference.” I noted the phenomenon of two Dr. Joseph Levitches: one, the creator of the Silver Age Megaton Man, my father; the other, a villain named Doctor Software, who for the moment was seemingly reformed. “Then there’s the case of two Alice James—one who became a banker and also my own mother, the other who became the a costumed crime fighter called the Mod Puma.
“Then, there’s the case of Trent Phloog and Stella Starlight, the Bronze Age Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl—a Meltdown. Their union actually resulted in Simon, a Megaton-Meltdown and a child of two dimensions, and for all I know the only thing holding the two dimensions in tension.”
“I’m listening,” said Michele.
It was then that I noticed we were walking past the Wardell. I asked why we weren’t going up to the Inland Ocean office.
“Oh, no,” said Michele. “That’s not my personal office; that’s just where I tend to my teaching fellowship duties for Doc. I have my own place around the corner.”
I was content with that and continued my soliloquy. “There are also other intriguing bits of evidence. For example, around 1981, Megaton Man and Bad Guy reportedly leveled Manhattan Island. But then, according to various accounts, in an instant it was miraculously restored. Then there’s the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters, a skyscraper that was bombed out of existence in 1980. But when I visited Manhattan, I could see a phantom image of it through my Ms. Megaton Man visor. Then there are the Partyers from Mars, whose saucer also sometimes appears to me as a phantom image, as if they were cloaking it from human eyes by parking it in another dimension. They’ve been in this sector of the galaxy for God knows how many decades, tracking down the aforementioned Mutanium Particle, which Trent Phloog apparently swallowed in the form of the Cosmic Cue-Ball, that took away his Megaton Man megapowers. I could go on and on.”
I did go on and on about all the things that didn’t add up, including the multiple names for the same cities—Megatropolis and New York, for example, or Arbor Harbor, what my dad had called Ann Arbor, and so on. Or the weird discrepancies surrounding Megatonic University, the secret underground lab under Arbor State’s campus, and apparent redundancy of governmental agencies concerned with megaheroes, ICHHL and Pentagon Office 17a.
“Then there’s the Phantom Jungle Girl—what megahero universe is she supposed to be from? Or the Teen Idols—mythical heroes, as you know, currently lost in some other dimension. Then there’s you in your Egyptian outfit—don’t deny it.”
“I won’t.” Michele considered all of this as we continued walking and said finally, “You’ll do well in grad school, Clarissa. You have an instinct for research. You’ve compiled a good bit of evidence; most importantly, you’ve refused to let any of it go or accept mundane reasoning to explain it away. That instinct will serve you well as a scholar.”
“Yes, but what are the answers? What can possible explain all of this?”
“What do think?” she asked, then immediately apologized. “Sorry, I’m a Socratic educator; force of habit, turning the question around and making the student squirm.”
“I think the Megaton and Meltdown dimensions are clearly fusing back together, even though Stella Starlight insists it’s only the case of a few too many crossovers. And somehow it’s dragging in some other realities into the vortex, as well—some kind of pulp-jungle dimension, obviously, at least one other mythological dimension, and some mad science-horror dimension. And maybe some creepy spiritualist mumbo jumbo dimension, too, in the case of Doctor Messiah—with all due respect. Who is Joshua bar-Joseph, anyway?”
Michele laughed. “I will leave it to him to reveal his particular reality to you in due time,” she said. “As for myself, ‘Selket’ is an ageless minor deity, Egyptian as you surmise, concerned with the healing of lethal stings and bites of animals and insects. Originally, she was the deification of a scorpion, although she progressively came to be anthropomorphized—given human form, specifically as a hot little number in a gold lamé outfit.”
“You mean to tell me you’re the reincarnation of an Egyptian goddess?”
“Fuck if I know,” said Michele. “All I remember ever being is a Michigan girl, born and raised in Bay City, whose tits never grew to full maturity. But reincarnation would explain a lot. In any case, I chose the asp as my motif because I think if you want a lethal bite, go the Cleopatra route—go with the snake.
“As for your other conjectures, I have no first-hand knowledge. I agree that there is magic, mythology, mad science, and other elements afoot, none of which can be easily reconciled. Or reconciled at all.”
“I know, right?” I said this as we were about to turn the corner past the Wardell. “It’s like some badly-written fan fiction or parody comic book. But the fact remains, we are living out the consequences of this convoluted pastiche.”
I mentioned to Michele that we were in the neighborhood of an art project my friend Nancy—also one of the students in the art history class—had created out of a vacant house the previous fall. Michele was intrigued, so we walked past our turn a few blocks and came to a street that had not seen much love. A few houses in, we came to Nancy’s art project. Covered in graffiti and with sections removed in the manner of some seventies artist, it looked like it had been the victim of arson as well. It was well along the process of sinking into the ground.
“Wow,” said Michele. “This is why Doctor Messiah doesn’t think much of contemporary art practices. They only end up in more chaos and ruin than before, whereas art should be ordering experience into a cosmos.”
I couldn’t disagree with her. She asked me about the nature of my friendship with Nancy; I told her quite bluntly that it had been sexual early on, but was now rather platonic. We worked at the same restaurant, but both seemed to be over each other. Michele didn’t seem shocked by any of this.
“Returning to the topic of realities,” she said, as we resumed our walk, “I can say something that more or less parallels the subject matter of our course, art history. If we limit our thinking for the moment to one reality, and to history as linear, it is clear that human time has been dominated by a succession of ideas. As we have seen in our survey of art, Christendom for the longest time came to dominate the Western mind. That has been falling apart ever since the end of the Middle Ages, just as the classical world fell apart before it. That process has only accelerated during Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Industrial Revolution. Modern science has completely exploded any remnant of a Biblical world view, to say nothing of every traditional notion that came before it, including the worlds of indigenous myth and magic.
“A similar phenomenon has taken place in literature. For centuries, thinking of time and space outside the terms set forth by the Bible was inconceivable. But now look: archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, physics—all have opened up greater vistas of the past, the future, and worlds beyond our world than writers in the ancient Middle East could have ever imagined. Popular writers let loose by the printing press haven’t stopped filling those imaginative voids with tales of lost worlds, white ape men in Africa, monsters created by science, travel to distant planets, and occult worlds beyond our ken. To say nothing of the repurposing of ever pre-Christian fairy tale, legend, and superstition into a commodity to be consumed by workers forced to become literate as a byproduct of industrial society. None of the concepts underlying these diversion appear in the Bible, nor would they be condoned by any conventional sense of Judao-Christianity.”
“You’re talking about sci-fi, fantasy, horror? But such stories are all make-believe,” I said. “Aren’t they?”
“So are megaheroes and reincarnated Egyptian deities,” Michel replied. “All I’m saying is that now, post-Christendom, humanity is now free to think—indeed encouraged to think—in demonstrably anti-Biblical ways, and perhaps open to recognizing phenomena that couldn’t be discerned before now. As the architect Adolf Loos wrote, nobody could even see the color purple before the eighteenth century, even though it had been there all along.”
“You’re talking about cognition,” I said. “What I want to know is when this conglomeration started to happen, and where it’s going to end up.”
“You have to be cognizant of a phenomena before you can begin to ask when it began and where it will end,” said Michele. “I think what you’re really asking is where Clarissa James fits into all this, and what role Ms. Megaton Man expected to play.”
“Of course I am; that goes without saying. It feels like we’re rushing toward the Apocalypse and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with myself.”
“Now you’re talking eschatology,” said Michele. “The End of Days. Mankind has been awaiting the end of the world for all of recorded history. There are any number of narrative explanations. Will it be the fulfillment of some prophecy? Will it be according to some God or Demiurge’s will? Or will it simply be because leading industrialized nations drop the bomb on one another, or because Mother Earth is just too tired of the abuse we’ve heaped upon her?”
“Again, I’m not looking for a theological explanation,” I insisted. “Although I guess I am hoping to figure out what to expect, if only for my own peace of mind. Maybe I’m hoping to avoid the worst-case scenario, if I knew what all this was heading toward.”
“What should a hero being doing during the countdown to Armageddon,” said Michele. “That is the eternal problem. I think you’re right about one thing—there is more than one dimension fusing together. Myth, legend, religion, philosophy—not to mention pulp, horror, fantasy, space opera—every supernatural explanation an ecstatic mystic ever dreamt up, every half-baked phantasm some hack writer of planetary potboilers ever concocted—they all seem to be coalescing. Humanity in its desperation is grasping at every implausible heuristic straw it has available in hopes of explaining to itself what the rational, logical mind cannot. It’s far bigger than megaheroes versus megavillains, to be sure. Much bigger than even some Earth-shaking, melodramatic final confrontation between good and evil.”
Yes, and here I was over-intellectualizing it with my instructor.
Our walk came to a stop in front of a familiar mansion, as it turned out, right across from the Wardell. “Here we are,” said Michele.
“I know this place,” I said. “It’s the Charles Merrill Ferry House. He was an industrialist who collected Asian art, most of which ended up in Washington, D.C., with a few scatter leftovers finding their way into the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts. It houses some educational institute run by Warren Woodward University.”
“Technically, it houses the Helen Merrill Ferry Philological Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Warren Woodward University,” said Michele. “It was named in honor of Charles’ spinster daughter who lived here alone all her life, and died only in 1974. Since then, it has been converted into a study center of international repute.”
“Don’t tell me you work here as well as TF for Doc Messiah,” I said.
“Yep, it’s my day job,” said Michele. “And I live here, too. Come on in.”
I didn’t know what I thought about a young woman living in the who in which a lonely old lady had died, but then death was no big deal to those Ancient Egyptians. Inside was about what you’d expect from a perfectly preserved house museum that only a few academics even knew existed. The main floor of the 1892 mansion still housed a few pieces from the old Ferry collection—not surprisingly, since Michele was connected to the institute, a few Egyptian relics in plexiglass gallery displays. Upstairs was a lavish residence that apparently Michele had all to herself, which doubled as her personal office.
“If I had to be around Doc all the time, I’d go insane,” she said. “He got me this gig running this place, which really doesn’t involve more than some monthly paperwork and keeping watch on things. The actual security of the place is managed by a private firm.”
“Not Allan Jordan and Gene Griffin, by any chance?” I said.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I saw a photograph of you, me, and those two in a future megahero group hanging in Doctor Messiah’s library,” I said.
“Really? A photograph? I never noticed. There’s so much stuff up there.”
Upstairs, the residence was basically one large studio space that included a stationary bike and a large waterbed, along with a desk and half-shelf bookcase for her own graduate studies. There was a small kitchenette behind a counter. On the counter was a a bowl of fresh fruit and a carton of Yarrowstalk™ Light Thins, which is apparently what she smoked—although I had never seen her smoke—and a couple of inexpensive disposable butane lighters of various bright colors. She went to the fridge and set out cold cuts and other fixings on the counter as I ate a banana. We sat on stools and fixed sandwiches, which we ate and drank tall glasses of orange juice.
After we had a bite, I washed the few dishes and set them in the strainer by the sink. I said, “This has to be the coolest apartment in midtown Detroit.”
Michele, meanwhile, had pulled a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a jolly Buddha from her bookshelf, and took of its head. From in its fat belly she pulled some Mucha™ brand cigarette papers and a plastic bag of Marijuana. “You wanna get high?” she asked.
Through all this we continued our dialogue on fantastic popular literature, sprawled out on the waterbed. We shared a doob and rolled another, careful not to drop them and burn a hole in her waterbed mattress. But we needn’t have worried; we were both old hands. Our fingers kept touching as we passed the roach back and forth.
Getting high the few times I tried it in high school used to make me paranoid. But as I gained more experience, I found tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the main psychoactive ingredient—only served to make me more analytical and talkative—such that I could use vocabulary like tetrahydrocannabinol in a sentence and still make sense. I don’t know if my deliberations with Michele made any sense, but they seemed to at the time.
Here, I think, is a fair representation of our conversation:
“History, in literary narrative as in anything else, can be broken into three parts. In this case, pre-Christendom, Christendom, and post-Christendom. The main one is Christendom, because it was the last one before now, and had such a long hold on western civilization. It effectively wiped out everything that came before—hence the grouping of way too many disparate traditions and impulses into the unsatisfying general category pre-Christendom, and all that came after it into post-Christendom. Christendom’s overthrow has been a struggle, let me tell you, because it hasn’t chosen to go quietly.
“But don’t make the mistake of thinking post-Christendom is as wild and unruly as pre-Christendom,” Michele continued. “There is a particular character to much of post-Christendom that unifies it, most notably its hostility to Christendom.”
“Then, what unifies post-Christendom, other than it be ‘everything that follows Christendom’?” I asked.
“Simply that everything that follows Christendom is an attack on Christendom; being anti-Christendom is what unites it.”
“Does this mean that if I read science fiction, I’m going to hell?”
Michele sighed. “You’re still thinking in Christian terms; there is no heaven or hell outside of Christian thinking, strictly speaking.”
“All those narratives you speak of, popular fantastic fiction. That’s all made-up stories by hack writers, isn’t it?”
“Sacred texts were also written by hacks,” Michele pointed out. “And they had even worse editors. The point is, that trashy, popular fiction filled the voids open up by modern science—the literary quality is immaterial. The point it, the modern imagination was allowed to go places—and times—where and when the Christian mind was never permitted.”
“But what does that matter, if it was all make-believe?”
“Strictly speaking, it doesn’t,” said Michele. “The popular imagination of modernity is pure rubbish. It’s just as nonsensical as Biblical narrative. But it proves the point—if made up stories can fulfill the same emotional—or merely entertainment—need that the Bible had, who needed the Bible? If works of pure imagination, made up of whole cloth, could have beginnings, middles, ends, and convey just as much truth about morality, nobility, heroism as sacred scripture, who needed sacred scripture? The result was only a further decline in faith.”
“But what does this drama in the world of narrative have to do with what is really going on in the Multimensions—with real realities clashing?”
“Well, in order for stories to be true, they have to be possible,” said Michele. “And if there are truly an infinite number of alternate realities in existence, they must cover every possibility.”
“You’re saying that if I make up a story right now, out of thin air, even if it was a total lie, and it contained the slightest possibility of being possible, then it must be true in some other reality?”
“That goes without saying,” said Michele.
“No, it doesn’t go without saying,” I said. “You have to say it. And even having said it, I’m not sure I understand. If every possible truth must exist for real in some alternate reality, and realities are now fusing together, we’re looking at the possibility that everything possible could become possible.”
“And also a few impossibilities,” said Michele. “Maybe all impossibilities.”
I had to stop and think about this. “Right now, it’s just a couple realities fusing together, at most, maybe four or five…”
“But that could just be the beginning,” said Michele.
“But can we stop it? Do we want to stop it? Seems to me this sort of thing could get out of control.”
“I don’t know if it matters whether we remain passive or active,” Michele conceded.
“But there was a point Stella raised,” I said. “How could two realities hope to find themselves across the distance of infinite Multimensions?”
“Easy,” answered Michele. “All possible alternate realities are always right next to one another. There is no distance—no possibility is ever closer or further from realization than any other.”
Could this be possible? Constrained to this timeline, could it be equally possible that I could become a porn starlet or a brain surgeon? Nonsense. The two alternate realities in which those possibilities could be equal could be adjacent to one another, in fact all realities being adjacent to one another…
Boy, this was some really good pot.
“Students of scripture posited the creation of heaven and earth at precisely nine o’clock a.m., October 23, 4004 bc,” said Michele. “Modern science—archeology, geology, paleontology—all proved the earth was trillions of years old; the dinosaurs had roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years ago; humans, as a species, was at least a hundred thousand years old. To say nothing of biology—Darwin and evolution, specifically.
“Modern navigation and exploration had proven incontrovertibly that the Earth was round; astronomy had proven the heavens immeasurably more vast than classical or Christendom man had understood,” Michele continued. Even at the speed of light, it would take tens of thousands of years to escape the Milky Way; 2.5 million years to reach the nearest galaxy, Andromeda. Even voyaging to the next star, Alpha Centauri, would take centuries for an Earth ship traveling at currently achievable velocities. The vastness of space alone required mankind to conceive of a future extending centuries, millennia beyond any Judgement Day predicted in the book of Revelations.
“Mix in with the occult, magic, myth, and legend of past ages—creatures born of genetic mutations, monsters made of medically-revived tissue, astral projection, telepathy, extra-human powers, immortality, reincarnation, ghosts, life after death—and you have the popular fantastic literature of the last two centuries: science fiction, planetary romance, Gothic horror, sword and sorcery, weird and supernatural stories, and questing adventure. To say nothing of the eroticism and lawlessness of everything from potboiler romance to hardboiled crime fiction. Elements not found within Biblical literature, forming a world view, if taken seriously, that is anti-Christendom.”
“Yes, but those are all…make believe stories, aren’t they?” I said. “No one takes them seriously.”
“And no one takes Biblical stories seriously, either,” said Michele. “The Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, Jonah and the Whale.”
“Those are all allegories, right?” I said.
“But they were once believed to be literally true. If cheap fiction writers could offer tales approximating the Biblical that no less preposterous, imbued with extra-Biblical elements, wouldn’t that tend to erode faith in the Biblical versions?”
“But how does fantastic fiction ‘approximate’ Biblical literature?” I asked.
“The Garden of Eden set in some prehistoric past, with dinosaurs and cave men, or in Africa with white jungle men; starships as arks to distant worlds; resurrection of the body without the Final Judgment; the soul reaching Heaven without forgiveness of sins; I could go on and on.”
“You’re saying that all these imaginative works somehow were written with an anti-religious intent,” I said. “I don’t see how anyone’s faith could really be at risk.”
“Perhaps not,” said Michele. “But it certainly is evidence that the Judao-Christian worldview was losing its grip on the human imagination. And it coincided with a great many political experiments that would have been inconceivable during the Middle Ages: democracy, socialism, progressivism—all made possible by the very separations of Church and State.”
“I think you’re hyperventilating,” I said. “You’re saying that if I read a story or watch a TV show about an alien race on another planet, or a lost world underneath the Earth’s surface, I’m going to Hell.”
“Not at all,” said Michele. “I don’t believe in Hell, or Heaven. And neither do you.”
“But what does all this discussion of ‘popular fantastic literature’ have to do with our present circumstances? Of alternate realities among the Multimensions spontaneously fusing together—which isn’t supposed to be possible?”
“What I’m saying is, perhaps anything is possible—in physical reality as well as in the human imagination—once the world view of Christendom is dethroned.”
“Wait, you’re saying because we no longer believe in God, the laws of physics has suddenly gone haywire?”
“Why not?” said Michele. “Few barely even recognized, let alone codified, the laws of physics before Newton, only to be overthrown by Einstein two centuries later. And that was before the discovery of black holes and dark matter. What new truth will be discovered next that was presumably there all along? There are more things in heaven and Earth, my dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I had no idea why she was calling me Hornblower, or what stories of the Royal Navy had to do with “popular fantastic fiction.” But it was kind of turning me on. Come to think of it, I was kind of horny and in the mood for oral sex.
She must have been using telepathy on me, too, because then she said, “So, you wanna get laid?”
To tell the truth, I had hoping for this. “You wanna get laid?” is the almost-inevitable follow-up to “You wanna get high?” And, given my particular cast of mind, I always found intellectual conversations, especially involving esoteric speculations, the most delicious form of foreplay. I was ready for it; I was primed. Moreover, I hadn’t been laid since the start of the year, and I’d been admiring her body in the museum for weeks, and especially during our walk.
“But won’t you be violating university non-fraternization policies?” I wondered.
“Oh, like that’s unheard of,” she said, putting her finger to my mouth.
We took a shower together and I brushed my teeth and flossed—like a geek, I carry that stuff in my book bag, I’m such a hygiene freak. We spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns performing cunnilingus on each other on her vast waterbed, with some patchouli burning in a small dish on the book case. With the gauzy light coming in from her venetian-blinded windows, it was like one of those cheesy, arty, soft-focus girl-on-girl spreads you’d find in a newsstand skin magazine for men—not too explicit and photographed using petroleum-jelly-smeared lenses. But it sure hit the spot.
Afterwards, we lay there languidly. “I certainly blew off my American labor history class,” I said. “It ended forty-five minutes ago. Really, Michele, I hope I haven’t put you in any problematic ethical position with your department.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” said Michele. “Technically, university policy states that I have to inform my superior whenever I fuck a student, and someone else has to grade them. In this case, that would mean telling Doc, and I know from experience he’ll just give me the work back to grade myself anyway. In case you’re wondering, you’re earning a A- in the course, and I don’t plan to change it.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Even though you give A+ head.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “I fully intend to earn an A+ on my academic merits, even in art history. I’m not going to finish my undergraduate career sloughing off.” Famous last words.
Michele had given me a lot to think about, along with about five fully satisfying orgasms that served to take my mind off the conglomerating Multimensions that were coalescing all around me.
“Horror, sci-fi, ape men,” I said as I got dressed. “Do you happen to have a recommended reading list? For the summer, you know, after I graduate.”
“Just the usual underpaid racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-Semites you’d expect, who cranked out prose for pulp magazine and paperback publishers in the early twentieth century by the metric ton,” said Michele. “We’ve got shelves full of that shit, for some reason, up at the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute, including bound volumes of long-running periodicals like Gnostic Tales and Amazing Heresies. Come up some time and help yourself. Doc has no taste in literature. In fact, he loves all that crap, indiscriminately and without critical reflection…along with The Nag Hammadi Library and Theosophy. I’ll draw up a list and leave it for you on my desk.”
“Leave it? But I don’t have a key,” I pointed out.
“You already have access whenever you want,” she said, lighting a Yarrowstalk Light.
I gave Michele a long, affectionate kiss goodbye, grabbed my bookbag, and hit the road. I wondered if the future Detroit megahero team would also have a non-fraternization policy.
Next: A Little Pseudo-Martian Told Me
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Archival Images:
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| The Asp and Doctor Messiah, 1995. See chapter #69, chapter #70, and chapter #78. |
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| Clarissa in an unpublished commission drawing. |
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