#96: How We Lost the Farm

Let’s just say I half-convinced my grandmother, Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James, I was telling the truth. Of course, I couldn’t prove I was Ms. Megaton Man in some other reality, because in this one, I was only civilian Clarissa James. As such, I couldn’t fly or do anything megaheroic to demonstrate I once possessed megapowers. In fact, with a rod in my thigh bone, I couldn’t do much more than spin around in my wheelchair with my one good leg. But my knowledge of her own past as one of the thirteen Doomsday Factory scientists that had worked on the Atomic Soldier seemed to convince Grandma Seedy the alternate reality I described was at least theoretically plausible.
        She didn’t think I was completely crazy, in other words.

#95: Civilian Clarissa

Next thing I knew, I was back in Detroit, in my folks’ home, still in my accursed wheelchair. I was in the middle of the dining room off of the kitchen. Mama and Daddy were making a big fuss over me, about rearranging the first floor guest room, which they had been using as a TV den, but were converting into a temporary bedroom for me so I wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs while I convalesced.
        Avie was helping them, bringing down pillows and bedding from upstairs, after Mama and Daddy brought down the mattress and box spring.
        I called Avie aside.
        “Avie, I’m not supposed to be here,” I whispered.

#94: The Parallax View

In this alternate reality, certain events were unfolding differently from the way I remembered. Trent and Stella weren’t on speaking terms, even with Stella about to give birth to their baby. This made no sense—what could explain it? Doctor Messiah suggested it could be that in this reality, Clarissa James wasn’t Ms. Megaton Man. But I didn’t see what difference that could have made, since in the early spring of 1981—when Simon Phloog was born—I hadn’t yet become Ms. Megaton Man anyway.

#93: Tripping With Doctor Messiah

The next moment we were standing in front of my old house on Ann Street in Ann Arbor. I could feel the hard, scruffy cement of the driveway beneath my bare feet. It wasn’t as disorienting as I’d expected, although for a moment I was slightly dizzy.
        “At least astral-projection across space is possible,” I said, as if I were informing Doctor Messiah. “But, am I really here?”
        Doctor Messiah stood on the sidewalk next to me in his bare feet, arms folded, a faint smile on his lips. “Why don’t you find out?”

#92: Magic Carpet Ride

That afternoon, I went up to the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute. Given the time of year, I expected Doctor Messiah to be off on a mystical summer sabbatical in some exotic, foreign place like Tibet or Transylvania. But to my surprise, I found him in. As usual, he wasn’t busy studying any of the arcane materials stored on the endless shelves which took up nearly the entire top floor of the Wardell Hotel. Instead, he was just silently sitting cross-legged on his oriental carpet, barefoot in worn flared jeans, the yin-yang symbol on the chest of his black turtleneck oddly glowing, meditating.

#91: On the Down-Low

When I returned to Detroit, I had the apartment on West Forest Avenue all to myself. Avie, following in the James sisters tradition I had inadvertently initiated, had gone up to Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca for a two-week stint as a camp counselor, just as I had done for three summers between my freshman, sophomore, and two junior years of college. But whereas my first summer camp had introduced me to a variety of sexual experiences courtesy of the older, more wizened college-age counselors, my younger and more extroverted half-sister already had years of experience of her own and a wealth of hard-won sexual knowledge; I could only imagine what her fellow counselors would be learning from her.

#90: Profusion and Proliferation

Introduction to Volume IV: Civilian

I graduated from Arbor State University in the spring of 1984—a year late, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere and at the time was still trying to live down. Briefly, I attribute the delay in part to what I call my delayed freshman crisis. Being a studious student, it took me a couple years of college before I came out of my shell socially and sexually, aided by more extroverted friends and various psychoactive substances, not to mention a serendipitous, protracted hookup with Yarn Man.
        Another impediment was my discovery, in the summer of 1982, that I was a natural-born megahero, which earned me a costume and some quirky new colleagues. As Ms. Megaton Man, as I called myself, the few adventures I’d had, if you could call them that, were a distraction at best, only making my return to the dean’s list that much more challenging.