I got to the corner outside the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City and caught a glimpse of something unexpected—Pamela Jointly descending the steps of my former apartment house a couple doors down. She was wearing a camelhair overcoat, dark scarf, and heels showing off her slim, shapely calves—dressy for the workaday North Cass District. The morning rush-hour traffic along West Forest was heavy, or else I would have darted across the street. Pammy spotted me helplessly waiting for the light.
“Clarissa!” she called out over the roar as she strode toward me. “I was just looking for you.”
I thought about pretending she had the wrong person or to be deaf or ignoring her and lunging across the street as soon as the light changed, but I couldn’t do that—not even to the woman who had had an affair with my adoptive Daddy that broke up my parent’s marriage. I’m just too honest, polite, and considerate for my own good, sometimes. She did come all the way to Detroit to see, after all.
“Oh, hi, Pammy,” I said without enthusiasm as she caught up to me. “I didn’t see you there when I looked straight at you, half an uncomfortable minute ago.”
“I had your old address and phone number,” she said, waving a piece of paper, catching her breath, which steamed visibly in the chilly November air. “Boy, your old landlords are rude—you must have left a bad impression. They wouldn’t give me your current address.”
I had never told the old couple who owned the townhouse converted into shabby apartments, although I still lived in the same neighborhood. “Yeah,” I said, “We didn’t part ways under the best of circumstances. What brings you to Detroit, Pammy?” As if I hadn’t already figured it out.
“I don’t have to tell you there’s a manhunt for the mysterious flying girl with burgundy hair,” said Pammy, which was visible in the chilly November air. “You’re hair used to be burgundy, didn’t it?”
That’s why it was tucked up under my knit cap.
“What’s your point, Pammy?”
“My point is simply that the media is already crawling all over mid-town Detroit—they have been since before dawn—trying to locate the supposed daughter of America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero—since that story on Six Minutes Ago last night.”
“You mean the biracial offspring of the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma,” I said. “The big story of the presidential campaign. Half the media must be hunting for her.”
“Not half the media,” said Pammy. “All of it—even the TV weather people. On the other hand, if you were to agree to sit down for an interview with a friendly interlocutor, we could shape the narrative, you and I …”
“Et tu, Pammy?” I said. “Even my old housemate—controversial columnist-turned-journalism professor Pamela Jointly—is looking for a scoop. Is that how you plan to earn your second Pulitzer—and resume your career in the national spotlight in the bargain—following your brief sojourn in academia?”
“You can regard it as opportunism if you want to, Clarissa,” said Pammy. “But it’s not for my sake, believe it or not. I can tell you from experience, the media are sharks. You want to get ahead of this story before it eats you alive. You won’t have a moment’s peace—not with the election tomorrow, and maybe never again. Now, I can have a camera crew down here from KNN in twenty minutes. You can go on the record …”
“So this conversation so far is all off the record, right?”
“Of course,” said Pammy. “I wouldn’t ambush you like some cheap tabloid hack.”
“All right then,” I said. “For the record, let me ask you: What makes you think I have any connection to this mystery woman everybody’s looking for?”
“Certainly you’re not going to deny you’re Ms. Megaton Man,” said Pammy. “I met your biological father, Clyde Phloog—the Silver Age Megaton Man—at your graduation party, remember; I spoke to both Alices—your mother and the Mod Puma. Our former housemates, Trent and Stella, both used to be Megaheroes, for Christ’s sakes. My students all mentioned the flying girl over Ann Arbor … I can put two and two together …”
I scrutinized Pammy’s face. Quickly, I rummaged through my memories. Certainly, we had been housemates together, and technically, she was still living in the house on Ann Street that summer I became Ms. Megaton Man. Yet, for some reason, she seemed doubtful. I tried to remember if she’d ever seen me in my uniform, if we’d ever spoken of my transformation, or if anyone else had ever disclosed it to her …
“Why don’t you just go to your old media contacts with what you know?” I asked. “Why do you need a statement from me?”
“Because,” said Pammy, abashed. “Strictly speaking, I don’t know anything—for sure. Remember, I was busy teaching three classes at the time—and seeing a lot of Matt in Dearborn,” she recalled. “I suppose I was always aware that my Civilian housemate—the studious, mousy bookworm—had tried out being a Megahero for a while, but I never bothered taking notes, or confirming the story with eyewitnesses. Trent and Stella—all they ever talked about was their little baby Simon. I just wasn’t all that tuned in to what was going on domestically back on Ann Street.” Pammy looked genuinely embarrassed—a journalist caught with her journalistic pants down. “And despite what you may think of me, I wouldn’t betray my friends just for a headline.”
“No, you just betray them in other ways,” I snapped back, coldly. “You sleep with their adoptive fathers …”
“Well, there’s that,” said Pammy. “Maybe I wanted to pretend you didn’t exist altogether, out of guilt …”
“What about Trent, Stella, Bing, Koz?” I demanded. “Last I checked, you were compiling an exposé book on them …”
“That’s a grey area,” said Pammy. “They’d all had past careers as professional Megaheroes in Megatropolis—they were already public figures, so to speak. Ethics concerning privacy are a little different in their cases—matters I would have to clear with my publisher, to be sure, before anything I may have witnessed could be disclosed. But even then, I’d have the courtesy of presenting them with my findings first and obtaining their authorization.” Pammy looked at me sympathetically. “But in your case, Clarissa, forgive me—you’re an amateur—and a private citizen …”
“Look, I have to get to class,” I said. “I’m supposed to be in an auditorium taking lecture notes right now.”
“Good luck making it to that lecture,” said Pammy. “The whole campus has become an obstacle course of reporters and camera crews, all looking for the daughter of the Silver Age Megaton Man.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out her Arbor State Journalism Department business card and handed it to me. “I have to get to Dearborn myself,” she said. “If you change your mind, give me a call. But there isn’t much time; the election’s tomorrow. There’s blood in the water.”
Pammy was telling the truth. Even as I walked past Old Main and before I got to Warren Avenue, I spotted no less than three TV-station satellite trucks prowling the area, and they weren’t looking for geese flying south for the winter. Reporters were already set up on the campus mall across the street, interviewing students. Maybe these were just man-on-the-street interviews to take the temperature of the electorate on the pending election. But somehow, I knew better. The media was looking for any eyewitnesses who could say they’d seen the primary-color clad black girl with burgundy hair, and possibly identify her as current grad student at Warren Woodward University.
I imagined much the same thing was going on at the main Arbor State campus, since for the past couple of years I was most likely to have been spotted in both places—midtown Detroit and Ann Arbor—where I most often took off and touched down. I could have kicked myself for being so cavalier—I often flew back and forth, in broad daylight, for no other reason than to save myself time commuting, and because I was stuck for a ride because I didn’t drive. I had taken my Megapowers for granted; I should have only used them in emergencies. I should have taken greater precautions in safeguarding my secret identity. But I never took being a Megahero all that seriously, and taking my cue from Bing Gloom, Yarn Man—who made no effort to hide his true identity, I never regarded keeping my identity as a very big deal. A lack of foresight.
But I had one thing going for me: I hadn’t used my Ms. Megaton Man Megapowers since the previous spring, when I graduated in Ann Arbor. That meant I couldn’t have been spotted in the skies over Detroit or Ann Arbor in almost exactly half a year. In the meantime, the turnover of students at both campuses—the graduation of seniors and the influx of new freshmen—meant there were likely to be fewer current students who could recall seeing a burgundy-haired primary-colored blip flying high overhead.
Still, getting to the Dr. Finch’s Intro to Urban Policy lecture, where I was supposed to be taking notes as a Teaching Assistant, looked like an impossibility this morning. Pammy was right—the Warren Woodward campus mall had become an obstacle course of reporters and camera trucks.
Instead, I circled around the block to the Warren Woodward Scene Shop, where I knew I’d find Avie working on backdrops for an upcoming theater production. She’d left the apartment before dawn, and when I found her, dressed in old jeans and sweatshirt, she was already covered in paint, her face and hair a mess. She’d been working steadily all morning and took a break when I showed up.
I explained how I had run into Pammy a block away. “I can’t get to class,” I said. “They’re all looking for me.”
Avie thought for a moment. “Does Pammy know for a fact that you’re Ms. Megaton Man?” she asked.
“Of course she does,” I said. “How could she not know? We were housemates in Ann Arbor. But that’s just it—she seemed doubtful. I just assumed she was trying to kid me …”
“Not necessarily,” said Avie. “Was Pammy at the Ann Street house the day you broke out?”
I tried recalling the day, but it was hard, having been written over in memory recently thanks my sojourn to the Civilian reality. But as best I could remember, it was late summer, 1982, just me and Trent and Preston in the back yard. I was hanging laundry when the stack of firewood tumbled over; I saved both their lives.
“No,” I said. It was true; Pammy had been spending a lot of time with her boyfriend Matt in Dearborn at the time. “She was hardly ever around, although she still had her bedroom …”
“Did she ever see you in your Ms. Megaton Man uniform?” Avie asked. I was already fairly certain of that. “No, I don’t think Pammy ever saw me dressed up as Megahero.”
“Did you ever tell her you had gained Megapowers? That you’d become Ms. Megaton Man?”
“No,” I confessed. “But technically she continued to live in the house through that fall semester. She didn’t move out until the following spring.”
“Did she ever ask you about Ms. Megaton Man?”
I thought about the time Pammy and I met at the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts the following summer after I had moved back to Detroit. We had met in Medieval Court Café to discuss her book, Megamusings: Collected Controversial Columns, 1975-1980, a copy of which I had marked up profusely to correct her errors. I had made a set of photocopies of my marginalia, but none of my comments referred to me. I tried to remember what we had talked about.
“No,” I told Avie. “When we got together that one time, she was only interested in discussing Trent and Stella, and confirming stories about their past lives as Megaton Man and the See-Through Girl, and visits from Yarn Man and Kozmik Kat …”
“She was working on an exposé about her old friends who used to be Megaheroes back in New York,” she said, pointing her finger at me. “She wasn’t interested in the dorky minority roommate who studied all the time, as far as she knew. She didn’t know anything about your other life, and probably could have cared less …”
“But surely Trent and Stella would have mentioned something about it to Pammy …”
“Why would they?” said Avie. “What would they have told her? ‘By the way, Pammy, while you’ve been busy screwing your boyfriend in Dearborn, Clarissa’s gone and learned to fly. She’s slept with half the athletes on campus; she’s become a real party girl.’ Why mention that?”
Avie had a point. If anything, Trent and Stell would have covered for me, too ashamed to mention the youthful indiscretions of my delayed freshman crisis. “Pammy couldn’t have been any more interested in what her black housemate was up to,” said Avie, “than how often baby Simon’s diapers got changed. She’s was already half-way out the door in that living arrangement anyway.”
“That’s essentially what she said,” I noted. “But Avie, she knows I’m Clyde Phloog’s daughter; she met my biological father at the graduation party, remember?”
“When he was in his Civilian form,” Avie pointed out. “Dressed in his Air Force uniform, not in the uniform of the Silver Age Megaton Man.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Dr. Joe gave him those pills that give him a normal physique. But everybody knows he’s America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero.”
“Not for a fact,” said Avie. “You saw how Six Minutes Ago had to phrase it; it’s unsubstantiated speculation.”
“But Pammy’s affair with Daddy,” I said. “She was only pumping him for information …”
“Maybe about Trent and Stella, but maybe not about you,” said Avie. “For that matter, maybe she was just pumping him—maybe it really was just meaningless sex. My biological father is an attractive man, you know. What did Daddy tell you?”
I recalled my interrogation of my adoptive father sometime after the affair; he had denied ever discussing me with Pammy. “Daddy said Ms. Megaton Man hadn’t come up in their conversations,” I confessed. “He said he would never have told her anything about me anyway.”
“There you have it,” said Avie. “Pammy doesn’t know for a fact that you’re Ms. Megaton Man. That’s why she needs to get you on record before she can report it.”
“But, she has to know,” I protested. “There was that whole Megasoldier Serum outbreak on the Arbor State campus …” “Which came and went,” Avie pointed out. “Along with disparate sightings of a flying girl around that time—which could easily be written off as a momentary phenomenon that passed with the epidemic.”
“Okay, so she might not exactly know for a fact that I’m Ms. Megaton Man—that I was Ms. Megaton Man,” I said. “But she still knows. She has to know.”
“Did you confirm that you had been Ms. Megaton Man when you spoke to her just now?”
“No, but I didn’t exactly deny it,” I said. “It was off the record.”
Avie thought for a moment. “Face it, Clarissa,” she said. “Your identity as Ms. Megaton Man was such an open secret, and hiding in plain sight all along, that nobody paid any attention to it. Paradoxically, it was probably the most brilliant strategy you could have devised. Since you didn’t make a big deal of it, nobody bothered to document it—not even the Pulitzer-prize-winning controversial columnist you had living under the same roof as you at the time.”
“But what good is that going to do me, Avie?”
“Maybe you can convince Pammy that you’re not Ms. Megaton Man, and she can vouch to the whole world that you’re just ordinary, Civilian grad student Clarissa James.”
“I don’t see how I can make that happen,” I said. “Besides, I can just lie, not even to the homewrecker who destroyed our family.”
“You have plausible deniability, Clarissa, and you’re going to have to learn to use that if you want to resume a normal life. I know you’d rather live your life honestly, but you’re going to have to learn to keep secrets—live a double life. It’s time for Ms. Megaton Man to go underground.”
Next: The Burgundy Blip [Link available Friday, May 7, 2021, 10:00 AM, EDT]
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Archival Images
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| Pamela Jointly (in hues of brown, courtesy of colorist Ray Fehrenbach) from Megaton Man #3 (Kitchen Sink Press, April 1985). |
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