True, I did have a lot on my mind, and men can have such rotten timing. And he was being awfully presumptuous, making plans without keeping me posted. I suppose he also thought he’d been loyal to me all this time, just to still be thinking of me, and then finally, after long indecision, acting upon it. Still, it wasn’t like he’d been trapped in another dimension all this time; he could have called, or borrowed a car to see me, or written me letters.
Maybe he honestly did still think we were on the same wavelength, that we were still in love. I had seen him several times in Ann Arbor, and while we hadn’t spoken deeply, our eyes met…maybe he thought he saw something that told him we were just dying to be together, but couldn’t vocalize this in front of Stella, or Simon, or Avie, or at the bookstore. Or maybe it was all in his head. Or maybe he was thinking of something else at the moment and only thought of me when I wasn’t there. I certainly thought of him when I wasn’t in Ann Arbor, and then, when I was, I didn’t think of him at all, even when he was right in front of me. What was I thinking about? School, Chuck, Simon, Avie, Nancy. Flying home. Working at the restaurant that night.
I was open to reconnecting. But the abruptness…
I guess what set me off was Trent’s suggestion that he’d be willing to move away from his only child to be closer to some woman—me, in this case—but even so. It reminded me of my own abandonment. Even though my father was now back in this dimension, my wounds still hadn’t healed; they were more open than ever. All the scar tissue from a lifetime of growing up, knowing my real dad had left my mama, never even knew about me, never once inquired…. And now he was back. And that was supposed to all be erased, filled in, started over. The human brain just wasn’t designed to immediately accept new realities like that, at the drop of a hat.
Maybe what was going on in the Multimensions was a cosmic transgression; it certainly was an assault on the rational mind. If realities can only multiply exponentially and are never meant to fuse back together, perhaps there is a certain wisdom to that. Or, maybe if alternate realities coalesced all the time, or more often, humans would have evolved in such a way as to expect it, and not be so shocked by it. As it is, it could only drive one insane.
Maybe there was some Divine Providence running the Multimensions, and maybe Sin had disrupted that. Or maybe subdividing realities was just a sort of automatic chemical reaction, but now the chemistry was no longer working. Maybe it was the universe that was out of order, the Multimensions that had gone insane. I didn’t know if there was some law of physics being broken, as Stella might put it, or some impersonal mechanism that had gone haywire. You could explain it in any number of ways. It was that search for an explanation that makes us all human, even if in the end we have to invent our own explanation, tell ourselves a story, a lie, that isn’t true. Anything to satisfy the rational mind. Or to trick, to fool, if not satisfy.
Perhaps there had been some Designer who’d set Creation in motion, then went out for a cigarette. Perhaps there was benevolent Father Figure who was concerned with whether you took His name in vain or only fucked after you were legally married, and then only expressly to have offspring. Or maybe human suffering existed only because there was willfulness and resistance to the Natural Order of Things—whatever that was and however one could discern it.
My father didn’t mean to go missing in another dimension an entire lifetime—my entire lifetime—while I grew up. Trent didn’t mean to meet me only after he’d fathered Simon with Stella. I didn’t expect to let him pity-fuck me up the bunghole in the shower then retroactively hope it meant more to him because I wished it had wanted it to mean more to me. None of us meant to be flung into this world, a world already formed or malformed with whatever built-in obstacles and preconditions and obstacles that were already set in place long before we got here.
Or, maybe it was all a part of God’s plan, and I was too stupid or lost to see that. Maybe nobody can see it, and you have to go on faith, like the lady who lived downstairs in my old apartment building, the one who listened to radio preachers all the time and sent them all the money she made from her job at the lunch counter of the five-and-ten down on Woodward, the one that was only open for lunch anyway because downtown Detroit was only open for business during daylight, when white people felt safe to commute into the city and do business before receding back into their safe suburbs at night. The same good Christian lady who hated the black girl upstairs for having an unsatisfying sex life that the good Christian lady couldn’t even hear over her fire-and-brimstone radio preachers in the black girl’s attic garret apartment two floors above.
You can only deal with the reality that’s in front of you—that’s what my mama always said. Did she know all along that in another reality she was a cool crime fighter named the Mod Puma, who raced along the rooftops of the city and stopped crime in its tracks? That in that reality she was never encumbered with daughters? That her tits never sagged, that her body remained taut and tight and fit well into middle age? That as the second Alice James she was still with my father, the first man the first Alice James had ever loved? Would it have made any difference to my mama if she had known all this was going on to another her, just an alternate reality away? Would she have traded me and Avie and Daddy in a heartbeat for the reality Alice2 took for granted, and never looked back?
I wonder how many people, if they knew there might be a better reality for themselves than this, would be willing to trade this life for what was behind door number two. The grass on the other side of the street only looks greener, Daddy always said, but once you cross it, it’s just as brown and filled with crabgrass and dandelions. And when you walk through it in your bare feet, as I found out the hard way, it’s just as pebbly and filled with pickers from the picker bushes and sharp things and bugs and stuff.
I suppose reality is just reality wherever you go, just like time is always time and space is always space. Switching realities would only be switching one set of mundane circumstances for another. Pastor Enoch pointed out that combining two or more realities wouldn’t be combining the best with the best, or the worst with the worst; it wouldn’t even make reality any bigger than it already is. It would just even out and end up a compromise of whatever realities one started with, which is what any reality is in the first place. That was probably true if the realities in question had megaheroes or monsters or UFOS. Or white jungle girls.
Knowing that there were realities you could actually cross over into, through the Time Turntable or the Dimensional Portal, or could only see through using your Ms. Megaton Man visor if you had one, wouldn’t seem to make all that much difference. Maybe you could actually go someplace else, but there you’d still be; it would still be reality, only different. If you happened to be bored with your life, it might serve to shake things up, and that might not be a bad thing; one supposes an urge like that was what drove Rex Rigid to build his Time Turntable, or Winnie Wertz her Dimensional Portal. Maybe they wanted to get to the other side of the street to verify the grass was just the same, or just to prove they could get to the other side of the street.
Maybe it was worth crossing the dimensions if it meant Trent could meet Stella and have a darling little boy like Simon. Maybe it was worth it for Clyde to meet Alice2 after he realized what he’d lost with Alice1. Or maybe they gave up something as good or better in the reality they left behind, and they’ll never know what experiences they missed out on. Or maybe they know or suspect, but they are fine with the choices they made. Maybe being fine with the choices you make, taking ownership of the reality you have made for yourself, is the lesson to be learned.
The worst thing, it seems to me, would be to go through life regretting. What good is that? If I hadn’t taken a tumble with Trent, I’d regret it. If Daddy hadn’t taken a tumble with Pammy…well, maybe he regrets that. He should regret it. Or, just going through life resenting the fact that there’s some hypothetical, better reality somewhere—that would be no way to live. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t; what is “better,” anyway, if all realities are about the same?
I tried calling Trent to apologize, several times. I left a few messages on their answering machine; I cried for half an hour after the last one before giving up. I bought a toy for Simon, but when his birthday approached—wrapped it and everything. But then I called and left another message claiming I had a cold and couldn’t come to the party I knew was taking place but that neither Stella nor Trent had invited me to, but that I’d make it up to Simon. I sent a birthday card with some money, like my paternal grandmother used to do—the one who lived in New Orleans and never visited Detroit, and died when I was seven. In the note I told Simon I’d see him at the end of April, when Stella and I graduated. Did they play my message or read my card to him? Does an almost three-year-old have any conception of how long a month is? Would I even bother now to go back to Ann Arbor to celebrate my college graduation with friends from whom I had already grown apart?
My new friends seemed to be in Detroit or gravitating toward Troy, not Ann Arbor. I seemed to spending more time there, even as my days as an undergraduate dwindled down to a precious few. That, or I’d escape into a book—one of the two Doctor Messiah handed me, or one of the cheap paperbacks by Ryerson, Honath, or Lipschitz I picked up in a used books store—the one over on Cass Avenue, or down on Woodward next door to the porn shop, or up Woodward by Revolution Books. Or out at Jerry’s New and Used Books at Farmington and Grand River.
Escapism—that’s what English lit professors called popular fantastic literature. Sci-fi, fantasy, planetary romance, horror, hardboiled noir. Genre literature. But escape from what? Reality—that from which there is no escape. What if I could but on an iron bikini and swashbuckle along with Rhett Conried on Whagool? He’d probably be a racist anyway, and scorn my black body—as he scorned the green, red, purple, and orange bodies he dispensed with his blade page after bloody page. Or maybe he just hated himself, and after I sat on his face good and proper, he’d realize…
Fogelyn dubbed escapism on the political level a “substitute” or “edited” reality, his term for any simplistic political theory that sought to replace mundane reality with a social Utopia. In his view, something always had to be left out of the human equation in order for an Immanent Millennium to seem possible—an Edited Reality, since something was always had to be left out of the account of human nature, usually some imperfection as incipient criminality or a penchant for sin. Political theorists who offered their Utopias with such willful omissions Fogelyn labeled intellectual swindlers, since they knew they were taking shortcuts but still persisted in hatching their follies with a straight face. Such travesties, if implemented as practical programs, could only end in misery on a mass scale, as various twentieth-century experiments in totalitarianism had amply demonstrated.
It followed that Utopianism was the political form of escapism, just as escapism was the diversionary form of Utopianism. To Fogelyn, it all amounted to the same thing: “The Soul’s cry after being flung into a world not of its own making, a cry as old as the despondent nihilists of the Alexandrian world.” What made such thought especially pernicious, from Fogelyn’s peculiarly medievalist perspective, was its immanentism, the notion that Man could transform fallen nature and himself and reach Heaven on his own, in this life, without the supernatural intervention, that one could achieve godhood simply by gnosis or self-discovered knowledge or divine revelation.
Twentieth-century Utopianism, fueled by the hubris of science, had resulted in untold and untolled human suffering—mass genocides, starvation, war. Even urban planning, with its redlining, blight reduction, freeways, civic and cultural centers, and beautification projects had only resulted in dislocation, gentrification, white flight, ghettoization, disinvestment, mass destruction on a level not seen outside of Europe after World War II. That clearly described Detroit and most other rustbelt cities.
Compared to this, was mere popular literary escapism so bad? Who cared if Emil Reardon Ryerson’s Whagool was a white supremacist Utopian fantasy, so long as no one took it seriously? What harm were the Daemonic Ravines of H.P. Lipschitz’s New Hampshire, if only his fictional, wimpy protagonists—introverted milquetoasts who beat off to occult manuscripts in their Aunt Gertrude’s attic before spelunking though pre-Columbian ruins, never to be seen again—were the only ones who ever knew about them? And who could be upset by the turgid writings of Grover E. Honath, other than they had resulted in some very bad airbrushed van art? Clearly, the poor guy was a repressed homosexual; the psycho-macho adventures of his Herschel the Hibernian—whose phallic sword did all his talking because his own little weenie was scared to death of a real woman’s pussy—a barely disguised gay fantasy.
At worst, as Michele suggested, such narratives could only serve as a distraction—an ephemeral, disposable dime-novel narcotic, like some diluted opiate of the masses. Many of the stories I’d read certainly had overtly religious overtones—future totalitarian societies run by God-like computers from soaring Towers of Babel, Apocalyptic atomic wars sparked by alien invasions, and countless Edenic scenarios set in jungle paradises, traveling space stations, or moons in distant star systems. In these latter, the part of Adam was usually played by some lost, white Earth explorer, the last of his race, with the role of Eve played either by an android, an anthropoid reptile, or a hologram shaped like Sarah Bernhardt. Invariably, the snake—symbiotic host of some scientist’s transplanted brain—turned out to be entity running the show.
Neither scientific fact nor sacred text, such phantasmagorical yarns only killed time, seemed to me. Although I could see how a true believer like my mama might conclude such ephemeral prose rubbish, distributed to America’s Depression-era newsstands, was the work of the Devil himself, devised to cloud the minds of those whose scriptural faith in the Lord was none too strong to begin with, with quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific nonsense. And many of the cover illustrations, when they weren’t simply lurid and overtly sexual, seemed to draw on imagery at the level of a child’s Sunday school storybook. Only, the Bible they were culled from included cave men and dinosaurs battling cybernetic Aztecs, a serpentine Salomé dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils for Plutonian despot, and New Jerusalem in the guise of and domed city orbiting the rings of Saturn or recast as an undersea Atlantis. Sure, the material was socially regressive in every conceivable way, feeding the fantasy lives of thousands of white boys who would never measure up to their culture’s perverse notions of masculinity, and would probably do nothing more adventurous in their adult lives than sell insurance and visit the occasional massage parlor.
What would be the harm of such fantasies, if they could never hope to be made real?
But Michele seemed to suggest that even the wildest fantasies could be real, somewhere and somehow, given that the number of realities in the Multimensions was inconceivably infinite. I wasn’t so sure this made logical sense. Even if the number of possible realities was truly infinite, it didn’t follow that the impossible could somehow become possible. Even if reality could be reconfigured inexhaustibly, it still had be real. Every alternate reality could be different, but it still essentially had to be just another reality. Impossibility would always remain relegated to the realm of the unreal, like popular fantastic fiction. Or would it?
Herder, the wry seventies science fiction author, took the opposite view, but I got the sense he was being tongue-in-cheek. His schtick was to take all the heroes of pulp adventure, science fiction, planetary romance, detective (both drawing room and hardboiled noir), proto-espionage, aviation, westerns, mythology, Arthurian romances, and a whole lot else, and posit them as real—with only a few details changed to protect the privacy of the adventurers in question. By this view, your typical cloaked vigilante, a sinewy scientist living atop some skyscraper, the captain of an incredible steampunk submarine, an ace biplane pilot, a vampire hunter, a Scotland Yard inspector best by the Yellow Peril, and dozens of other protagonists of popular fantastic fiction were all supposed to be people who had lived or were still living. Not only that, but in Herder’s imagination, they were also all interrelated, forming one giant, inbred, incestuous family tree, His cockamamy explanation was that a small group of people on a sight-seeing tour witnessed a meteor strike in 1795, and as a result, all these people and their descendants were not only radiated—imbuing them with astonishing gifts—but they also all found literary agents who landed publishing deals with the lowest-paying schlock publishers on the planet, all of whom were rivals, so that none of the hack authors who transcribed their exploits could never mention these characters even knew each other, let alone were related. That is, until Juan Philippí Herder came along.
I should mention the “Topham-Shipley Meteoric Family Tree” was merely something of a hobby for Herder, who wrote prolifically in almost every of the above-named genres. His own Ryerson-inspired sci-fi was imbued with a pornographic, omnisexual imagination that was still a bit shocking and cutting-edge; his good guys, even if they were distantly related, were just as likely tear off one another’s erect penises as to shake hands.
Whether such extraordinary gentlemen and ladies ever existed in real life, or in some alternate reality that defied physical laws with magic, divine intervention, and faster-than-light warp speed, I certainly wasn’t in any position to judge. But I suspected that some authors with over-active imaginations simply had too much time on their hands and too sneaky a sense of humor for their own good.
I was just about sick of immersing myself popular fantastic fiction and its attendant critical theories after about a week of it. It had served its purpose, I suppose, in taking my mind off my studies for a spell. But it was early April now, and I had to set aside such childish things and get ready for my last few weeks of college—and finish strong. I dropped Herder and Fogelyn off at the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute, sold my cardboard box of well-read paperbacks back to a used bookstore for pennies on the dollar, and dusted off my textbooks one last time before the home stretch.
It’s amazing how often and how quickly I could revert to the default person I used to be—the studious student from my freshman year of college and before that, in high school—immersed in my homework, devouring any available extra credit, even going so far as to ask teachers to assign additional homework just for me, just to keep me busy so that I wouldn’t have to deal with real life. That was a form of escapism, too, I suppose. Not surprisingly, this reversion most often came upon me, even as my undergraduate college experience wound down to a mere few weeks, when I was alone in the Warren Woodward undergraduate library reading a book, or in the student center wrestling with a term paper, or even in the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute reading popular fantastic literature. “People can’t fly,” I would say. “They’re not immortal; they can’t shoot laser beams from their eyeballs or have magic swords or fly in ships past the speed of light to distant galaxies where aliens ambulate on unicycle rollerballs, or cast magic spells from wands made of gnarled tree branches and unicorn hair.”
But then I remember I could fly and knew a girl who could swing from a vine that wasn’t attached to anything in the sky and palled around with a talking cat and saw a platter appear and disappear with people on it from another dimension. And I’d remember I was wearing under my Arbor State University Abyssinian Wolves hoody and worn blue jeans the uniform the See-Thru Girl designed for me and that my grandmother whom I had always been told was dead and gone remade with Quarantinium-Quelluminum fabric, that I had a visor that showed me saucers parked in other dimensions and skyscrapers that weren’t there anymore, and that I had a cape that flew and probably stared at my butt when I wasn’t looking, because everyone knows all capes with brass buttons for eyes are probably male.
It was so easy to forget I had megapowers and throw my back out because I’d been lying on my bed reading all day, and had gotten up too quickly and had bent over to put on my slippers. Whenever I’d hear a siren racing down Forest Avenue outside my apartment, I’d tense up—just like I used to when I was a little girl, during the riots, when we’d hear gunshots after dark only be a block or two away, even though we lived on one of the supposedly nicer and safer streets left in Detroit. And after the siren passing, looking at my sister Avie in astonishment, in her bathrobe and bare feet, with her toothbrush in her hand, standing at my bedroom door, yelling, “Come on, Sissy! What are you waiting for? You can do your homework later! Get your costume on! We’ve got to investigate!”
At such times, I was usually able to calm the Wondrous Warhound down by reminding her that by the time we had changed and arrived on the scene, the Detroit police would have already cleared the case, or the crooks would be long gone. My concern at times like these was to make sure my little sister didn’t go and get her ass shot off, although I would then have to endure Avie’s jibes for the next several days that America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero was just a big ol’ scaredy-cat, which was equally true.
Then, there were other times when the phone rang, and it would be something serious—a job only Ms. Megaton Man could handle. At such times, I’d remembered my own life was one, big Topham-Shipley Meteoric Family Tree, and that I always had a sense that a great, big Newtonian apple was about to drop on my head.
With a great, big Newtonian apple just about to drop on my head.
Next: Views from Olympus
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| The Asp and Doctor Messiah, 1995. See chapter #69, chapter #70, and chapter #78. |
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