“Up and down the stairs with your friends all the time,” he replied. “Men, women, all hours. You have some kind of twenty-four hour orgy going on in my attic!”
The lady on the first floor who listened to fire-and-brimstone radio preachers all the time, I figured, had blown the whistle. I resisted the urge to break my landlord’s jaw in three places, something I was pretty sure I was angry enough to do—even without my megapowers. His words were so completely shocking, it took me a moment to realize his breath was rank with booze.
“Phew. You’ve been celebrating the season, I gather,” I said. “Why don’t you go home and sleep it off, Mr.—”
“I want you out!” he kept screaming. He used all kinds of vile words I won’t repeat.
I could hear something scratching at the inside of my apartment door, which I had unlocked but hadn’t yet opened. Before the Christmas Eve church service, I had taken off my Ms. Megaton Man uniform and thrown it down on the bed—I hadn’t taken the time to put it in its garment bag and hang it up in the closet as I usually did—and hurriedly changed into my nice dress, grabbed my clarinet, and ran over to the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City to get in some warm-ups with the ensemble before the parishioners arrived.
Maybe I’d forgotten to deactivate my cape as well. But I wasn’t consciously thinking of this as my landlord screamed at me.
“I want you out by New Year’s,” said my landlord.
“You can’t do that,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “You have to give a tenant thirty days’ notice; I know the law…”
“I can do it and I am doing it,” he said. “You are out of here.”
If he said that one more time, I decided I was going to grab him by the throat and lift him, his fat, stumpy little body, and his God-awful toupee right off the floor and throw him off the back porch, three stories above the alley and into the dumpster below.
Instead, I only said, “Fine. I’ll be gone. But I expect my security deposit back.”
I turned my back on his ugly face to open my door.
“No security deposit,” he said.
I took my hand off the knob and clenched my fist so hard I nearly broke my own fingers.
Without turning around—because I knew if I did I would punch him—I said, “We’ll see about that.”
“Unless we can come to some understanding.” I could feel his eyes on my backside.
I spun around on my heel. “What, that old virgin downstairs reports to you I have a sex life, and that puts fantasies in your head…then you get your Christmas Eve drunk on, and that old bag you’re married to won’t put out—as if anyone could find her appealing—and you think that the black girl on the third floor is going to…to what? Sexually service you?”
His fat face looked even more hideous with his wan smile and beads of sweat trickling down his forehead and cheeks from his sad, synthetic hairpiece.
I couldn’t look at him anymore and I certainly couldn’t stand smelling any more of his breath. I turned and opened my door, and at the same moment he grabbed my ass. I screamed—and at the same moment, my cape flew out of my apartment and into the hall. It hung for a moment, suspended in space, before its brass buttons swiveled and focused on the fat man. The magenta lenses flashed on.
My landlord gasped. “What the hell is that?”
“The ghost of Christmas Past,” I said.
Laser beams shot from buttons of my cape, instantly incinerating my landlord’s toupee—the material was so highly combustible it immediately burst into flames. If there had been more of whatever plastic fibers it was made of, it might have set off the sprinklers.
He screamed and brushed the smoldering glob of plastic from his head before his scalp was too badly burned; I stepped on the goo with my nice shoe to put the flame out, which I needn’t have done, since it was already burning out. It was hot and squishy like fresh tar.
My cape’s buttons flickered again, ominously; my landlord turned on his heel and leapt down the stairs, missing several steps at a time. My cape flew after him; I could hear the fat man crashing hard onto every landing until he finally reached the front door three floors below, and escaping through the front door onto West Forest Avenue.
“Cape!” I called out. After a few moment, my cape fluttered back up the stairs and into the hallway. “You should not have done that, cape,” I scolded. My cape hovered in mid-air, undulating slightly, looking baffled. “But I’ll overlook it this time,” I said. “I hope he broke every bone in his body.”
Christmas morning I gave Avie a call. “Why didn’t you come out for a drink with us after church?” she said.
by stepping in some crap, and I wasn’t in the mood.”
“It snowed last night,” she said. “Put on your boots. Let’s go for a walk!”
We met in the parking lot outside the church residence and marched up to the university-cultural center, pausing occasionally to throw snowballs at one another. The Warren Woodward campus was serene in a blanket of snow, and the old neighborhoods surrounding it fit the holiday perfectly.
I told Avie what had happened the night before.
“They can’t evict you,” she said. “Mama knows lawyers. At the very least, Soren will show that guy his saber teeth, and he’ll cough up the security deposit for sure.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said. “I don’t want to live in that drafty old rat trap anymore anyways.” Sure, I’d had some great sex there, and done a ton of late-night studying and senior thesis writing. But it felt tiny and cramped, and Dana’s hurtful graffiti, even though she renounced it—which I half-suspected my landlord had read—made the place seem profane.
Avie said she was getting tired of living in the church commune as well. “It’s too crowded,” she said. “Four Youthful Permutations and a Megaton Baby, not to mention a fey feline and a Malleable.”
“Even without Dana there?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” replied Avie. “Kiddo and little Ben Franklin Phloog need their own Devastation Chamber, like the one the Y+Thems had back in Brooklyn. And Jasper has to stretch himself as thin as he can possibly make himself, just to get around the kitchen. And I’m tired of fighting over the bathroom with two ultra-hygienic gay guys—actually, one gay guy who can’t walk a block to his own hair salon before he looks absolutely gorgeous, and one gay prehistoric saber-tooth tiger that walks like a man.”
I could imagine the bunch of them bumping into one another, even without Dana. And my sister, in case I haven’t reminded you lately, is by not exactly a skinny girl.
“Maybe you and I should look for a place to rent together,” said Avie. “The James Girls—together again for the spring semester of 1984!”
We must have walked for two hours all around the neighborhoods past Third Avenue and out beyond the freeway. We saw several mansions that enterprising gentrifiers were renovating, and we stopped at a small neighborhood park and had an another impromptu snowball fight. We sat on the swings and talked about a great many things besides living arrangements, including the return of Grandma Seedy into our lives; the weirdness of having two Alice Jameses that were identical counterparts to one another from different dimensions, but not exactly having two mamas; and of course, the appearance of my biological father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, and the impact this had on Daddy, my adoptive father. We especially wondered what all of this meant for our mama—having the mother she thought was dead since she was a little girl back in her life, having the man who fathered me and subsequently disappeared to another dimension back in her life, and having herself from another dimension where she was a megahero called the Mod Puma showing her the life she could have had if she’d never had two daughters.
“In the short term, Mama and Daddy seem to be getting along,” Avie reported.
“Do you think they’ll get back together?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Avie. “Mama isn’t giving up her apartment, but they’ve put the selling of the house on hold for the time being. I guess we’ll have a better sense of where that’s all going when we have dinner with them tonight.”
We also wondered whether Dana would succeed in her ambition to turn the See-Thru Girl into her lesbian lover, since she was now out of the church residence for good and all moved to Ann Arbor to be housemates with Stella, Trent, and Simon. We agreed that Domina was scary and had a lot of work to do on her issues.
On our way back along West Forest Avenue to my apartment and the church, we passed an apartment building just east of Third Avenue, in the six-hundred block.
“Look,” said Avie. “That apartment’s for rent.”
We stepped onto the porch and tried looking in the front window. “I knew the girls who lived here last semester,” I said. “It used to be a duplex, but they boarded up the stairs to the second floor and made them two apartments. They’re pretty nice. We’d each have our own bedroom to ourselves, a bigger kitchen, a full bathroom, and a big living room, not to mention the basement, Avie. It would be a ton of space, and plenty of privacy—you could keep seeing your sexually-confused boyfriends, and I could keep sleeping with whomever I pleased.”
After Avie punched me in the shoulder, she said, “It would be an easy move, too. It’s less than two blocks from where we live right now, and we’re going to need to move fast if we want to get squared away before the semester starts.”
“Do you think we can afford it?”
“Can’t hurt to ask,” said Avie. There was a phone number on the sign in the window, which Avie copied into her notebook. “Besides, Preston Percy owes you a stipend for handing over control of Megatonic University over to him.”
That reminded me of the experience I’d had in the laboratory deep under Ann Arbor: A legion of robots, built by Grady Grinnell, had mowed down my sister Avie as we tried to escape. I had held Avie’s dying body in my arms…then she disappeared. It was only later, once I had returned to the street level, that I realized it had been a phantom illusion of something that had taken place in another reality, shown to me by my weird Ms. Megaton Man visor. It was like the vision I’d had in New York of the Megatropolis Quartet skyscraper that wasn’t there anymore, since it had been blown up by megavillains, of the Partyers from Mars flying saucer—the George Has a Gun—that sat cloaked behind Trent and Stella garage on Ann Street, secretly keeping watch over them and Simon. Why my Ms. Megaton Man visor showed me these things that were imperceptible to everyone else, I wasn’t sure. But just because they weren’t real in this reality didn’t mean they weren’t real in some other reality.
I gave my sister and long, tearful hug right there on the porch, and she had no idea why.
“I guess you like the place,” she said, as soon as I let go of her and allowed her to breathe again.
That night, we had Christmas dinner with Mama, Daddy, and Grandma Seedy at our old house—originally, Seedy had planned to invite Alice2, the Mod Puma, and Clyde Phloog, my biological father, who currently staying in the Megatonic University labs, but had thought better of it. Up in Avie’s bedroom before dinner, Grandma Seedy counseled us that not only would Mama have to get used to the idea that in another reality she had led the exciting, daughter-free life of a crime fighter, but also that this alternate Alice had stolen the man who’d fathered me—in essence that Mama had stolen the Silver Age Megaton Man from herself. Grandma Seedy said she’d work on our parents in Detroit and my alternate parents in Ann Arbor and get everyone used to the idea they were now all in the same reality, and maybe that we’d all get together by my birthday in February.
Avie and I told Seedy of our desire to rent the apartment further west on West Forest, but that the rent would be pretty high. “Don’t you worry about that,” said Seedy. “My granddaughters are going to finish their education without any interruption.” She told us to go ahead with our plans, so Avie and I signed the lease the following day. The day after that, I received a check in my mailbox from the Investment Commerce Handshake Honor Lending Corporation, or ICHHL. The amount easily covered the first month’s rent, security deposit, and then some. I was hand-signed by someone named Glenn Stephens, treasurer.
“One of Grandma Seedy’s colleagues,” I remarked to Avie. “I recognize it from the list of thirteen Atomic Soldier scientists I came across some time ago.”
“Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James must do more than make megahero uniforms,” said Avie, “to cut government checks for that kind of dough. Make sure you send them our new mailing address.”
“Something tells my I won’t have to.”
Our new landlord gave us the keys early, but we still had only a few days left in 1983 to move all our stuff. The Y+Thems and Rubber Brother were sad to see Avie go, but eager to help us move, and my friends Nancy, Hadleigh, and Audrey—civilian student friends of mine—pitched in too. Kozmik Kat and Tempy even swept the basement with a shop vacuum. We were completely moved by Saturday night, which was New Year’s Eve, and it turned into an impromptu housewarming party. Nancy and Hadleigh fixed hors d’oeuvres, and Tempy and swept the basement. Secret Agent Preston Percy showed up and personally supervised a couple of deliverymen from the In-Home Cathartic Hygiene and Healthful Living company, who installed a new washer and dryer.
Later, Soren showed up, waving a check. “I got your landlord to cough up double your security deposit, Clarissa,” he announced. “I guess he’d seen me around the neighborhood before, but at a distance, and assumed my fangs were just a costume. Up close and in his face, he realized otherwise.”
As it got closer to midnight, Chas trudged in from the snowy cold, carrying a black leatherette portfolio, which he spread out on the coffee table in front of the sofa—furniture courtesy of Daddy the day before—in our living room. “Wait ‘til I show you what I’ve been working on,” said Chas. “It’s an all-new graphic narrative, Clarissa, based on your recent experiences.”
Avie beamed. “I gave him the plotline.”
Chas pulled out a sheath of Bristol board pages, cut to eleven by seventeen inches, upon which he had ruled panels and drew a comic book story. Many of the panels were still sketchy, barely stick figures, but some had finished drawings in pencil and some were even inked. A few panels included hand-lettered word balloons and captions explaining the story.
Megahero and civilian alike gathered around as we passed around the pages.
Sure enough, the opening panels showed me and Dana, dressed in our Ms. Megaton Man and Domina uniforms respectively, bursting into the Civix Savings and Loan and breaking up the armed robbery that had threatened our mama and her employees and customers, with bullets and shattered glass flying everywhere. I was depicted as immediately incinerating a gunman—not with the magenta lenses in my cape buttons, but with laser-vision shooting from my visor, which was completely made-up. As I knocked the teeth out of one gunman, I crushed another robber’s neck vertebrae between my thumb and forefinger. Dana—whose physique was drawn in painstaking detail and with even less clothing than she actually wears, if that were possible—was shown driving the spike of her stiletto into the eye socket and out the back of the skull of a third criminal while whipping yet another robber into submission.
“But that’s not the way it hap—”
Avie gave me a “shh” sign, putting her index finger to her lips.
“This is even more dramatic than reality,” I said. “Although there were only two robbers.”
“I’m taking some dramatic license,” said Chas proudly. “Art has an obligation to heighten the experience in order to communicate.”
On the next page, Mama—who appeared to be about twenty years old and looked like she could bench-press two hundred pounds—was shown bashing the brains out of a fourth robber with the butt of a fire extinguisher which she swung like a truncheon. Then, for no reason, a fifth robber died in a hail of bullets, courtesy of the Detroit police outside on Woodward Avenue.
“This is very…graphic,” I said.
Everybody oohed and awed and complimented Chas on his talent. “I’m still getting the hang of inking with a brush,” he said, whatever that meant.
The storytelling was a little garbled, but the next few pages showed me and Domina battling over the Michigan State Fairgrounds in some fairly spectacular aerial views during what appeared to be the height of summer, with large crowds and carnival rides going full blast below us.
“You realize this took place in December, Chas,” I said. “There were only vacant fields and a few Christmas light displays we could have knocked over.” In fact, I had been freezing my butt off.
“Why are they fighting?” asked Hadleigh. “What’s their motivation? I’m taking an acting class this semester.”
“Over Yarn Man, of course,” said Audrey. “See, he’s just shown up with Liquid Man in a rocket ship from outer space.”
Soren was particularly pleased to see himself—as Sabersnag—with claws flailing and spit flying as families with children in shorts and tank tops are seen running for their lives from the midway. Apparently, a gunmen from the savings and loan had gotten away, and shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, until Sabersnag tore him to pieces in explicit anatomical detail. “A figurative artist like Chas has to set the story in summer, Clarissa,” Soren explained. “Otherwise, all the anatomy he’s studied so hard to learn would be obscured under winter clothing. Am I right?”
On another page, the Time Turntable showed up—Chas got that right; apparently a record player is relatively easy to draw accurately—and the Silver Age Megaton Man and Mod Puma appeared.
“Where’d the second Megaton Man come from?” asked Nancy. “And why are they fighting each other? There are no words on this page, other than ‘Woo!’”
Chas had drawn the Trent Phloog as Megaton Man and his cousin Clyde, the Silver Age Megaton Men, throwing blue-ribbon pumpkins and other farm produce at one another.
“Clarissa’s old roommate and his wife and child are in the crowd,” Chas pointed out. “I guess he popped a pill or something to become Megaton Man again—I’ll explain all that in the text after I buy myself a couple new technical pens. Each one instinctively thinks the other is an imposter, and as you can see, after they throw a few punches, they realize they should team up to subdue Big, Blue Bulky Guy, who’s tearing down the Ferris wheel.”
I didn’t try to explain that Trent and Stella weren’t really married; rather, that they were simply raising Simon out of wedlock; although for some reason I could imagine Trent regaining his megapowers and duking it out with his cousin Clyde. Now was Big, Blue Bulky Guy anywhere near the fairgrounds that day; our run-in with him was a conflation with a completely different incident.
Another sequence depicted Rubber Brother battling Liquid Man, although Rex Rigid looked more like a burly college athlete rather than an aging, sloshy scientist.
“Why would they get into it?” asked Kiddo. “Aren’t they both Malleables, sort of?”
“Malleables don’t need a reason to tangle,” said Tempy. “Besides, you know Professor Rex. He’s racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. Jasper should have kicked his ass on principle.”
“I’m not sure Stella’s going to like you drawing the See-Thru Girl running around naked for three pages,” said Preston. “Especially in front of her toddler.”
“My ambition is to get it published in Hurling Scream,” said Chas. “That’s the magazine of adult graphic fantasy that reprints all of Arturo’s European science-fiction stories. If they turn it down, maybe I’ll send it to an underground comix or alternative publisher; they don’t pay as much, but at least they let you keep your rights. It’s important for me to maintain my artistic integrity. If that doesn’t work, I’ll sell out and draw a bikini on her.”
&nsp; We all agreed that Chas’s drawing was getting really good, and that he was almost a professional. “Although you have to cut way down on the boobs,” I said. “Mine, especially.”
Chas blushed. He gathered the pages and proceeded to put them back in his portfolio.
“Wait!” said Avie. “You missed the most important part.” She spread out the pages again and pointed to the figure of a shapely girl that appeared in the background of the savings and loan scene and later throughout the fairground scenes. These figures were only sketched out for the most part, but they were clearly modeled on Avie’s body type.
“What are you wearing, Avie?” asked Hadleigh. “Are you supposed to be a dog?”
“It’s a Warhound costume,” said Chas. “As in the Warren Woodward University Warhounds.”
“I’m the Wondrous Warhound!” said Avie. “Isn’t that great?”
“You drew my sister as a megahero?” I asked. “But why a dog?”
“Well, your mom’s a cat,” said Chas. “And there are too many feline characters in the storyline already.”
“You can never have too many feline characters,” said Soren. “Cats always sell.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” said Koz. “But I’m conspicuously absent from the story altogether. I’m always being left out of the narrative. Yet I’m the only one who ever knows what’s really going on at any given time. And I’m by far the most colorful character in the bunch.”
“I could make a costume for the Wondrous Warhound for real,” said Avie. “Grandma Seedy said she’d help me, too.”
“Don’t be giving my sister ideas,” I said to Chuck. “Crime fighting isn’t an athletic ballet; it’s a dangerous business.”
Just then, Jasper and Reverend Enoch marched in the front door; they had scored the biggest used color television set I had ever seen up to that time. They set it down in the corner of our living room, across from the coffee table. “Whew,” said Reverend Enoch. “I’m getting too old for this.”
Preston looked at his watch. “Just in time for the ball drop,” he said. “It’s nearly midnight.”
Jasper reached behind the set with one rubbery arm and plugged it in. With the other, he handed Avie the remote. She switched it on. The network was in the middle of a news flash.
“…report that Julius Levitch, the megavillain known as Doctor Software, escaped from his high-security federal penitentiary outside of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania this afternoon. Authorities believe he is heading east…”
“Dr. Joe’s evil twin,” said Preston. “And Megaton Man’s arch-enemy.”
“Welcome to nineteen eighty-four,” said Tempy.
Next: Plenty of Free Parking [Link available 5/29/2020 10:00 am EDT]
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