The only visible vestige that remained were the burgundy tresses I had not time to maintain.
I phoned Tempy first thing in the morning. “Can you come down to my apartment right away? It’s an emergency.”
She was there in two minutes, at my door on West Forest Avenue in Detroit, from Troy, a forty-five minute drive away.
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked. “And, what took you so long?”
“Are you kidding? I’m Tempy—I manipulate temporal reality. That’s my Permutation, Buttercup. Here, I brought my bag of goodies.” Tempy sauntered in and dropped his leather satchel on the couch. He examined my hair. “Looks like your burgundy locks need a touch-up; your roots are showing.”
Kavanaugh “Tempy” Kleinfelter had identified as a woman for nearly a year but actually hadn’t changed a thing about herself except making the declaration—she had always worn makeup and dressed androgynously, skewing toward the feminine. The masculine voice she was born with was unchanged; her body, too, remained unaltered. Although she looked very feminine that morning with just a purple-with-white floral blouse over tight blue jeans and hot, calf-high go-go boots. Kav wasn’t hung up on pronouns, at least among her friends. But I still tried to remember to call her a she.
“No touch-up—just the opposite,” I said. “I want you to cut off all the burgundy, down to where my roots that are showing. I want a short-natural, like Alice Too. Almost a ’Fro, except my hair is naturally more wavy than frizzy.”
“That’s going to be quite a change,” said Tempy. “Burgundy has always been Ms. Megaton Man’s trademark. What are you going to do when you go out, girl? Wear a wig? I can save your tresses and have one made, you know. I know people.”
“I haven’t been Ms. Megaton Man since last spring,” I said. “And now that she’s a hot presidential campaign topic, she needs to disappear entirely. The hair identifies me too easily—it’s all got to go.”
“Oh, right—the news coverage,” said Kav. “Everyone’s looking for the Burgundy Blip. I’m glad I’m on a Megahero team that isn’t hung up on secret identities; I can just be out. I have too many other deep, dark secrets to keep track of.”
Tempy fondled one of my bedraggled strands. He asked, “Can I still keep a lock for my personal collection?”
“Sure—and burn the rest,” I said. “Let’s just get started, shall we?”
It took me a moment to spread a white bedsheet on the floor and move a chair in from the kitchen, wrap myself in another sheet, and take a seat. In the meantime, Tempy plugged in her clippers using an extension cord she brought.
“We could have done this at your old storefront beauty shop,” I said. “I just walked by there the other day. You know what it is now? A comic book collector shop with three pool tables.”
“A pool-room funnybook emporium,” said Tempy. “Interesting. I hope they serve cappuccino. It’s too bad, but I had to give it up. Even though the commute wasn’t the problem—since I manipulate temporal reality, like I said. It’s that slow summer season when the campus and all of midtown Detroit is just dead. Instead, I found a lovely place on Big Beaver Road, so I’m going to start a new one. I’m calling it ‘Big Hair on Big Beaver’—what do you think? I’m going to sell vintage consignments, too—like this blouse I have on.”
“I thought you were too busy with all those high-tech gadgets the Teen Idols left you with, aren’t you?”
“I just make design suggestions to Andrea,” said Kav. “He does all the real technical labor. Gadgets don’t have to be so gadget-y, you know? They should be sleek and user-friendly. Jasper in New York and Andrea here in Troy work out all the wiring by teleconference. They appreciate my input. Guess I’m a better mad scientist than I thought.”
I asked Kav how she was getting along with Andrea, formerly Andre Revell, in the romance department.
Tempy sighed. “It’s a tough sell, I’m afraid. Andrea has remained staunchly hetero, even though his trip through the Dimensional Doorway turned him from a man into a woman. Which means he now likes men, whereas before he liked women. But my own conversion from a man to a woman has her completely perplexed; he still thinks of me as male.”
“That should work then, right?” I pointed out. “I mean, you haven’t changed physically. You haven’t gotten sex-reassignment surgery or anything.”
“Strictly speaking, you’re right, of course,” said Kav. “But I want a lover who will be attracted to me as a woman—for the real me.”
“But are you still attracted to her, since she turned from a man into a woman?”
“That’s just it—I still remember her as the man I fell in love with,” said Kav. “Even though she’s now this gorgeous, Amazonian woman—which isn’t my thing at all. But my thinking is, if I can still picture her as a man, she should be able to picture me as a woman, don’t you think?”
Frankly, I just didn’t think Andrea was ever going to be Tempy’s type, or vice-versa. Maybe they were just good working partners when it came to developing the team’s patented inventions, like the Heteroreality Helmet.
I don’t know what it was about the Youthful Permutations. Each of them—Kav, Dana, and Kiddo, at least—seemed hung up on somebody or something they couldn’t have. Kiddo was still pining for the father of her child, the Golden Age Megaton Man, who seduced her before disappearing into another reality. Dana, of course, was hung up on me, and Kav was hung up the former Negative Man, now Negative Woman. That left Soren, a saber-toothed tiger who walked like a man. I’m not sure what he was hung up on, but I’m certain he was hung up on something.
In no time, all my burgundy locks had fallen to the floor. My head felt lighter, cooler. Tempy got every last bit of faded color out; all that was left was dark brown, almost black, with some grey starting to pepper the half-inch or so that was left.
I didn’t need to explain why I wanted to have my hair shorn. As Tempy already knew, the media would be looking for the daughter of the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma—even though the Mod Puma was my Mama’s Counterpart from another reality, not my actual Mama. Luckily, only blurry photographs of Ms. Megaton Man, apparently captured of me in mid-flight, had thus far surfaced—this despite my own very casual approach to keeping my identity a secret. Now, there was one less black girl with burgundy-tinted hair in southeastern Michigan.
“Now, the media can hassle them,” said Kav.
“Oh, no!” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Serves ‘em right,” said Kav. “Maybe it will put an end to the whole burgundy-tint craze in one fell swoop.”
After Tempy brushed off my neck, she unwrapped the sheet from me and shook the clippings to the sheet on the floor. I removed the chair and took it back to the kitchen, stopping to look at myself in the bathroom mirror.
“Oowee!” I cried. I was going to like this new androgynous look. It somehow showed off more of the subtle curves of my body.
When I came back, Tempy was folding up the sheets; we didn’t have to run a vacuum.
I clicked on the television.
“… still trying to locate the mysterious woman who is alleged to be the daughter of America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero …”
“I thought you were America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero,” said Tempy. “I was,” I said. “I had my big chance but I blew it.”
I thanked Tempy, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone—before I had time to thank her or even offer to pay her for her time. I suppose that was the one thing of which she had an infinite supply—she had all the time in the world—although paradoxically she was always in a hurry. I turned off the TV and hopped in the shower. Afterwards, I put on my usual jeans and Warren Woodward Warhound hoodie, and marched again up to campus.
This time I made it to the auditorium hall unmolested by the numerous reporters with camera crews that stalked the mall of the campus. Apparently, my ruse worked—they were busy looking for a burgundy-haired woman in a primary-colored leotard, not a frumpy, short-haired grad student in jeans and a grey hoodie, and they were stopping every burgundy-haired black girl who wandered by. I hadn’t noticed how many there were. I don’t know what the news people were expecting—maybe that the real Ms. Megaton Man would shed her Civilian clothing and stand revealed in her primary-colored uniform right there in broad daylight.
In any case, Dr. Finch’s lecture was long over, but I was still hoping to find one of my Teaching Assistant colleagues to borrow their notes. Unfortunately, none was to be found.
As I exited the building, I squeaky voice called out to me.
“Ms. James? Ms. James? Do you have a minute?”
I turned to see a tiny, dark-skinned girl with a Cass City Tech sweatshirt and a note pad. Over her shoulder was a book bag almost as big as her.
“I’m Virginia Vega—I’m in your Urban Policy recitation on Fridays.”
“Oh, right, Virginia,” I said. I recalled her name from the papers I graded, at least. How terrible of me—the semester was more than half over and I still hadn’t connected all my student’s faces with their names. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m a reporter for The North Cass-End News, the official Warren Woodward student newspaper—we call it the Cass-End for short,” she said. “Ms. James, I’m going to be blunt: Are you the Ms. Megaton Man everyone’s looking for or not?”
I had to laugh. “Virginia, you’re the first journalist to ask me a straight yew-or-no question all day,” I said. “I will tell you the truth—I can neither confirm nor deny.” I winked at her. “But off the record—of course I am.”
Virginia jotted this down in her notes, delighted. “Thanks, Ms. Megaton Man! I have to run to my next class—African-American lit.”
“Any time,” I said.
After my afternoon seminar in Postcontemporary Hypothetics—a two-hour marathon in which I was locked in a small, stuffy conference room with a dozen grad students all trying to outdo one another using the most complicated, tongue-twisting, academic jargon imaginable in front of a frosty professor with a German accent—my brain was shot. Outside in the open air, I could breathe again. Squinting in the afternoon daylight, I noticed at least that the hordes of journalists shoving microphones into students’ faces and their mobile video trucks had retreated—I suppose to get back to their stations in time for the six o’clock news.
By the time I got back to my apartment, I was in the mood for a mindless night of previously-recorded Guygoyle Shows on Betamax.
Instead, as soon as I walked in the front door, I smelled cigarette smoke.
“What did you do to you hair?” said Preston Percy, who was reclining on the leather sofa.
“I had Tempy cut it all off,” I said. “I thought it would be a good disguise, since everyone’s looking for a burgundy-haired Megaheroine. It seems to have done the trick.”
“Good idea,” said Preston, “although it really butches you up, if that’s what you were going for.” He looked at his wristwatch. “You better wash your face and change—we’ve got to be at the television studio in forty minutes.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’m not going anywhere. This evening, I plan to veg out on the sofa with a bowl of ice cream and prerecorded monster movies.”
“If you want to solve your secret identity crisis once and for all, you’ll do this interview,” he said. “Your conversation with Pammy is going live, coast-to-coast, in primetime. After this, no one will ever connect Ms. Megaton Man with Clarissa James, grad student. It’ll be perfect. We’ll discuss the official talking points in the car.”
“I told Pammy to take a hike,” I said. “Besides, I’m not going to lie, Preston. I already told a kid from the student newspaper I’m really Ms. Megaton Man.”
“Ha! That story was easy to kill,” said Preston. “Student reporters aren’t allowed to cover their teachers.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “Poor Virginia—she’ll be crushed.”
“The Cass-End only has a circulation of a few thousand,” noted Preston, “but we can’t afford to take any chances. This is presidential politics. We can’t throw the entire government into disarray just because America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero couldn’t keep it in his pants back in 1961.”
“You’re talking about how my white father and my black mother conceived me,” I said. “That wasn’t a policy decision; presumably, it was a matter of the heart. Besides, I don’t want to live in a country where Republicans can’t sleep with Democrats and have little Independent children. Why is there still a color line in Megaheroics, anyway? It’s 1984, for crying out loud.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Preston. “But the personal is political—and the revolution will be broadcast.” He snuffed out his cigarette on the ashtray on the coffee table and stood up. “C’mon, don’t be difficult. You’re reminding me of when I had to stage-manage the Bronze Age Megaton Man.”
Next: Live, Coast-to-Coast [Link available Friday, May 14, 2021, 10:00 AM, EDT]
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| Clarissa gets the Emerald City treatment from agents from ICHHL (unpublished pencil drawing). |
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