I didn’t have much studying to do; I’d done so much extra credit, as usual, I could have skipped the exams and still passed every class. Even as I brushed up on my urban studies, art history, and other classes, I had plenty of headspace to ponder what Winnie Wertz had imparted to me: that every time one traveled through time, one was creating an alternate reality. It followed then, that when one visited an alternate reality, one was creating a further alternate reality. It was truly endless; hence, the infinite Multimensions.
Winnie and Rex Rigid had invented devices to navigate this vast terrain. Was it the artificiality of their scientific breakthrough that had somehow corrupted the Multimensions, had caused the Megaton Universe and the Meltdown Universe to fuse back together, and drawn in a few other dimensions in the process, where pulp adventure, science fiction, mythological gods, funny animals, and a few other genres of reality were the norm?
And if the mad science that had spawned temporal and dimensional travel were the problem, did there exist more natural was to travel through time, cross over between the dimensions? Was Doctor Messiah able to do it, as I imagined, through astral projection? Could others be Multimensional travelers by means of psychedelics, meditation, flying saucers?
Perhaps the solution to the riddle had something to do with the word travel. Travel implied space, and while the Time Turntable could be used simply to travel from New York to Ann Arbor—Kozmik Kat himself had done, and so had Rex and Bing—and the Dimensional Portal had not only taken me and Koz two centuries into the future but also a thousand miles away, to Canada, moving across space alone didn’t seem to spawn alternate realities. The idea that the infinite Multimensions occupied space was erroneous.
When Michele Selket had described the nature of the Multimensions to me, she used different language—what was it? For her, it wasn’t about the distance between realities, or space between—it was rather the lack thereof. How did she put it? What word had she used? That all realities are right next to each other? No, that wasn’t it.
That all realities are adjacent to one another.
Adjacent. Why was this term so important?
I kept thinking of the Multimensions and alternate realities in spatial terms: realities that were more similar to one another would be closer together; those that were more different would be further apart. For example, in one reality, I would just be a college student, but in another reality I would be a megahero. But since that would be the only difference between those two realities, they’d be right next to each other. But in the case of two realities that were completely different from one another—for example, where Nazi German and Japan won World War II in one and the Allies had won in another—those realities might be further apart. Consequently, I tended to think of the Multimensions as spreading out like lines on a sheet of graph paper. And the further any line got from the line you were on, the more different that reality was from your own.
But Michele had said all realities were adjacent to one another. This meant that even realities that could be the most wildly different from your own was still just right next door; not even next door, but already right on top of you, only a vibration away. There was no such thing as space separating them; hence no greater or lesser distance to travel. I thought of the Multimensions as vast; but they could all fit on the head of a pin. Finding the doorway to any given alternate reality wasn’t a matter of traveling a greater of lesser distance; it was more or less a matter of finding the right beat, the right pulse, the right wavelength.
If this was true, bulky machinery like the Time Turntable and the Dimensional Portal were incredibly inefficient. Perhaps one could learn to crossover between these alternate realities at will.
Crossing over was another troublesome word. That suggested crossing over a river, like on a bridge, or over an ocean on a boat. To cross over something implied distance, separation, from where you began and where you ended up. But that was also clearly an erroneous idea. Whether one was using the Time Turntable or the Dimensional Portal, or simply astral projecting as Michele and Doctor Messiah could seem to do, one wasn’t traveling any distance at all. One was staying in the same place, as it were; it was reality that was moving and changing around one, doing the heavy lifting.
My own experiments with my visor had shown me I could adjust it in various ways and get glimpses into other realities. One sunny afternoon, I climbed up onto the flat, tenement-style roof of our apartment building; I brought along a folding chair. From there, I had a view of the downtown Detroit skyline or uptown in the New Center area. I sat there for hours, moving my chair in different directions and toggling the controls of my visor at random, and it showed me all kinds of different visions. The skyline of the city changed, seemingly moving forward and backward in time. I saw different flying vehicles flying over the Federal Motors building, like I’d seen flying over Core City; I also saw the modern city completely vanish and revert a wilderness, then a wasteland.
Conversely, I could go backwards in time. I saw Detroit before its English or French settlers, when it was known in Algonquin as “Yon-do-ti-ga” or “Great Village,” when it was a largest settlement of Ottawan and Huron Native American tribes on the Great Lakes.
I saw further back in time: the glaciers, the inland ocean.
The Wooly Mammoths were one thing, but when I saw dinosaurs, I pissed my pants.
It was clear that my visor was a more advanced version of the primitive Multimensional Transceiver the Winnie and Rex had devised to communicate from different realities. It was how I’d been able to see the cloaked Partyers from Mars saucer, the George Has a Gun, parked behind the garage of the house on Ann Street; it was still there, just in a different dimension, a vibration away. It’s also how I’d been able to see the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters, the skyscraper that had been bombed to smithereens by enemies of the Quartet and Megaton Man four years earlier, but still existed—completely intact—in an alternate reality only a heartbeat away.
It was how I’d been able to watch my sister Avie die. And yet she’s safe and sound.
She yelled up to me from the apartment. “Sissy! Where the hell are you?”
“I’m up here!” I yelled back. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering where you were. What the hell are you doing? You should be studying for your finals.”
What a pain in the ass.
Using my visor in this way was very trippy, so I didn’t want to overdo it. It was something like a narcotic—even after I turned it off, I was still sort of dizzy. Climbing down from the roof, wet pants and all, I was worried I might lose my balance and fall—it had that kind of disorienting effect. It was a powerful technology, but limited if one still needed the Time Turntable or the Dimensional Portal to physically access the alternate realities it revealed.
Even though it was now finals week, I found myself back in the used bookstore on Woodward between exams, gravitating to the same fantastic popular fiction paperbacks I had bought, read, and sold back. Emil Reardon Ryerson, Grover Edwin Honath, and Henry Potsdam Lipschitz—I bought them all again, and grabbed a few more titles as well. An introduction to the one of the Honath books quoted a letter from the author to a fellow writer:
I wouldn’t claim that my stories were actually inspired by spirits from another world, but when I write the adventures of my Hybridian swordsman, the imagery comes so vividly to me that it seemed I was transcribing the history of some other time and place that was appearing in front of my eyes. I don’t claim esoteric or occult abilities, least of all any that I can control. But when I’m under the spell of inspiration, it’s like Herschel is there, relating his adventures to me. Then, he’s not there, and I have no more story ideas until he returns from his adventures. One of these days, I suppose he’ll never return, and I’ll have to write about something else.
When I read these words, I thought of poor Anna Clarabelle Bartlett, the Depression-era Dust Bowl farmer’s wife from Missouri who saw a vision of Ariel or Arielle, the genderless archangel, who took ol’ Anna Clarabelle by the hand, and walked her out to a wheat field, where they stepped into a circle of light. And Arielle revealed to Anna Clarabelle the true God Nere, and showed Anna Clarabelle all kinds of wonderful realities beyond the mundane, drought-stricken Missouri Dust Bowl, where she was rich, and beautiful, and not married to a broken down old farmer or doing chores on a drought-stricken farm, but was famous, and glorified. And after this visionary tour was over, Anna Clarabelle wrote down all these revelations, and founded an international church, the Nerenes…
What was the difference between Grover E. Honath and Anna Clarabelle Bartlett? Honath saw his visions as creative inspiration, and wrote them as riveting fictional adventure stories; Bartlett wrote her visions as an ecstatic religious revelations. Both had accessed alternate realities in their imaginations; maybe they were even transported physically and brought back. And what was the difference between them and a fourth grader daydreaming during a rainy day indoor recess, or a little girl reading a book and was transported to a different world? Maybe there were people who could access these alternate realities without technologies like my visor, or the Time Turntable or Dimensional Portal…
I sat in the dark sanctuary of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, the colors of the stained glass windows the only afternoon light.
A voice echoed from down the aisle between the pews. “Have you figured it out yet?”
I was startled. It was Reverend Enoch.
“Um, I don’t know. Figured out what?”
“Whatever you’re meditating on.”
I had been reading all about Anna Clarabelle and her archangel, Arielle, in one of the Nerene pamphlets I knew the church kept in its free literature racks in the narthex. Reverend Enoch saw that I was reading, surrounded by stacks of used Ryersons, Honaths, and Lipschitzes.
“Ah, the sacred texts, I see,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“Reverend, I wanted to ask you. Do you suppose there are people who can actually travel to alternate realities simply though an act of will? Especially since they’re not traveling very far at all, I mean, since all alternate realities are really right next door to one another? I mean, more than that—they’re actually all on top of one another, and…what’s that word I’m looking for? Adjacent—they’re all adjacent. After all, time and space are mere Kantian illusions of the mind, if one were to take and idealistic view…”
Reverend Enoch had sat down in the pew in front of me and turned toward me. He listened intently to what I was saying. His frown showed he was trying to follow my train of thought.
“…like, in one reality, let’s say I was a college student. But in another reality, I was a megahero…”
“But Clarissa, you’re already both, in this reality,” said Reverend Enoch. “Some of your friends know you as a college student, others know you as Ms. Megaton Man.”
“Okay, that’s not a good example,” I said.
“But it is,” insisted Reverend Enoch. “We have many realities, many identities, right inside this one life that we experience. But not everyone who knows you as a college student knows you as Ms. Megaton Man, and not everyone of your megahero friends knows you are a college student, or knows what that world of study and learning is like for you. Each or your two selves lives in a separate world. And then there’s the person you are to your family, to your coworkers in the restaurant…”
“Yes, but…”
“We all have separate lives, worlds we keep apart. All those realities intersect in us; we’re the cynosure between alternate dimensions, are we not? I’m the pastor of this church, for example, but I also go fishing up north. And when I do, I’m a different person entirely, I have different acquaintances. Some people up there don’t even know I’m a pastor down here in Detroit.”
“I suppose that’s all true,” I said. “But I mean more like my mother, Alice James, who in one reality is the mother of me and my sister Avie, but in another never has children at all, but becomes the costumed crime fighter the Mod Puma…”
“Well, there you’re talking about life choices,” said Reverend Enoch. “We all have decisions to make. We choose, and we live with the consequences. We can’t jump between realities just because we’re unhappy. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Not really. I’m talking more about realities that are entirely foreign to one’s own experience, that one could suddenly thrust into. Like one of these fantasy writers who imagines a fully realized, fictional world, or Anna Clarabelle Bartlett here, who thinks she’s seeing an actual vision. Or St. John the Divine. Or the Old Testament Enoch, who was shown his revelation from his perch in heaven. But I mean even more than seeing such visions; I mean actually stepping into such places, and physically experiencing them, and living your life—like my father did, when he was lost in another dimension for decades. Or my grandmother…”
I was getting a little bit frustrated, because I wasn’t explaining myself well. But Reverend Enoch seemed to understand what I was getting at.
“Clarissa, you’ve known all kinds of people who’ve experienced such alternate realities as concrete facts, as it were. You yourself have been to the Forbidden Future; you would know better than I what was possible or not.”
“Yes, but that’s with the assistance of technology,” I said. “What I’m wondering if it’s possible…wait. How do you know I visited the Forbidden Future?”
“You just mentioned it.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Well, um, Jasper must have been talking about it when he was here a few days ago, or Fanny…”
“They haven’t visited the neighborhood for weeks.”
“Or Soren, or Kav, or Beatrice…”
“You’re lying. The Y+Thems haven’t left Troy. I talk to them every day.”
“The church has a phone, Clarissa. What does it matter how I know?”
“It matters if I can trust you,” I said. “Who are you? What are you?”
Reverend Enoch grew suddenly stern. “It doesn’t matter who I am. You’re asking me if travel between alternate realities is possible with only you mind. I’m answering your question. Of course it is. It makes no difference how you explain it—scientifically, theologically, magically, creatively. Travel is travel, isn’t it? Visiting alternate realities is visiting alternate realities. The difference is what you do there, what your purpose is, what you learn. It’s what you bring back from your travels that’s important.”
Reverend Enoch gave me the eerie feeling that he’d actually done just what I was talking about. Many times.
“Of course, there are always risks,” he continued. “As you well know, some of these travelers, as you call them, become entangled in the other reality, are interminably delayed. Some never come back. They leave behind loved ones who miss them terribly, who will never see them again. Sometimes the worlds these tourists visit are altered beyond recognition. That’s why there are restrictions, rules. Laws. Without order, there is chaos.”
There was something sinister about the look in Reverend Enoch’s eyes.
“We’ve seen the price of transgression,” he continued, quietly. “Rex Rigid and Winnie Wertz and their willy-nilly crossing over. The Mutanium Particle, and the Thirteenth Scientist…”
I had never discussed any of these matters with Reverend Enoch, and I somehow doubted any of the Y+Thems or Avie had, either, while they lived in the church residence or since. But Reverend Enoch spoke as if he were well-versed in the splitting and reintegration of the Megaton and Meltdown Universes, and the ethical dilemmas Winnie Wertz had alluded to in the Forbidden Future.
“Is that why you’re here?” I asked. “To stop the transgression? To perform some kind of damage control? Are you some kind of Multimensional cop?”
Reverend Enoch laughed. “Now, you flatter me,” he said. “I don’t have any such powers. You’re talking of beings who would have to be truly otherworldly, supernatural. I’m here just to…keep an eye on things.”
I gathered up my books and shoved them into my backpack.
“Well, I’ll get out of your hair,” I said. “I suppose you have things to do.”
“Nothing more important than a discussion like this, my dear,” replied Reverend Enoch. “It’s always nice to visit with you.”
I clumsily made my way out of the pew and up the aisle, knocking into everything with my bookbag. “It’s been nice visiting with you, too, Reverend,” I said.
“Any time, Clarissa.” His voice echoed behind me in the dark sanctuary as I made my way out the side doors into the bright daylight on Cass Avenue. I had run a block up to Old Main to get to my Urban Issues final on time.
Next: Who Watches the Watchmen?
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| Clarissa in action, from the unpublished Megaton Man graphic novel. |
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