I rose from my seat; it was no longer a leather-upholstered side chair I had sat down in. Now, it was just a battered, metal folding chair. Gone was the luxuriant Oriental carpet and oaken desk. It was still obviously the same space I had entered with Clarissa Too and Michele Selket, because I could see the distant horizon of Detroit through the windows, but they were no longer there. The top floor of the Wardell Building no longer housed Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute and its rare manuscripts and first editions in tall, elegant wooden bookcases. Instead, it was just a massive storage room, dusty and full of cobwebs, filled with utilitarian metal shelves stuffed with old cardboard boxes and rusty filing cabinets nobody ever visited.
“Michele, you sent the wrong Clarissa!” I called out. “I had plans for Christmas break—she had plans of Christmas break. We all have plans for Christmas break! You gotta switch us around!”
I was somehow expecting a reply, that Michele had realized her mistake and would have all fixed in a minute. Bute there was no reply, not even an echo. The soundwaves of my voices fell dead, smothered by cardboard and paper.
A glance through one drawer revealed records and receipts of the university of some sort and paperwork from the Economics Department or something dating back to the sixties. “At least the Warren Woodward University has the same name in this dimension,” I remarked to myself as I closed the drawer and clapped the dust from my hands. “But this isn’t my home dimension, that’s for sure.”
I could only think that I must have been so intent on helping the Civilian Clarissa Too make the astral leap across the Dimensional Divide that I had actually transported myself, or maybe Michele was pranking me. But I don’t think that was her sense of humor. Perhaps something deep in my subconscious made me want to visit this reality again, or escape my own. In any case, it appeared for the moment that I was marooned in the Civilian Reality with no way home and not even a communication link to those I love.
There was no point hanging around a musty storage room, so I grabbed my book bag and found the elevator. Soon, I was back down on Woodward Avenue. Geographically and architecturally, it appeared much the same as I’d seen it a short time before. The main branch of the public library across the street still looked like the work of Cass Gilbert; the Detroit Fine Arts Museum still sat regally on this side of the avenue, although the stoic Tony Smith sculpture sitting out on the lawn looked like someone had rearranged the tetrahedrons. A few of the storefronts of the Wardell Building itself also appeared different.
To be honest, I had never paid all that close attention to my surroundings, so I couldn’t be sure which exact details had changed. I just knew it felt different.
My first impulse was to locate Michele Selket in this reality—if she existed in this reality—and hope she could rectify her mistake. I walked the few blocks and around the corner to Ferry Street, to the Charles Merrill Ferry house, where I knew Michele worked and lived. From a distance, the modest mansion of the late Detroit industrialist looked the same, but instead of housing a fraction of his collection of Egyptian antiquities in something called the Merrill Ferry Philological Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies, the sign on the front lawn announced it was some center for childhood and family development.
I doubted that Michele worked there, let alone lived in its residential quarters, as she’d done in my home reality. I found the front doors locked, anyway.
Having struck out, I walked back toward Woodward Avenue. That’s when I noticed I was dressed too warmly for the mild weather; judging from the leaves still falling from the trees, it appeared to be only mid-fall in the Civilian Reality, whereas the jacket over my hoodie and Ms. Megaton Man uniform was for a frosty December morning. I must have jumped back in time as well as crossed dimensions, to about when Clarissa Too had left the Civilian Reality in early November. I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my bookbag.
When I got to Woodward Avenue, I thought next of trying my parents’ house in the Boswick-Addison neighborhood, a bus ride two miles north. I felt around in my jeans pockets for money, but only felt my house key—as usual, I was broke, meaning I would have to hoof it. Since I was closer to campus, I thought I’d try something else first.
I wondered if Clarissa Too lived in the same apartment on as I on West Forest Avenue. When she had come to live with Avie and me, she had seemed immediately at home in her surroundings, but she never remarked on it—maybe because she was preoccupied with losing her powers and was hobbling around on her cane. I didn’t know for sure, but I decided to try there first while I was in the vicinity.
The campus mall was still crowded with commuter students enjoying the lovely afternoon, since the semester was still in mid-swing. For the most part, the familiar architecture of Minoru Yamasaki and Suren Pilafian appeared the same, at least to my eye, although the landscape in this reality had grown in somewhat different ways. Some of the paving, benches, and lampposts seemed configured differently, producing a feeling that things were just a bit off. Some of this may have been my imagination, but it only takes a few things out of place to create an unsettled feeling.
It was mind-boggling to think of an alternate reality so similar to my own that had veered off only in a few very subtle, almost imperceptible ways. They would have to have shared almost identical histories until very, very recently before branching off from one another. What could have caused it? Certainly there was one big difference: before Clarissa Too touched the Cosmic Cue-Ball and become Ms. Megaton Man, this was a world that had never known a Megahero, whereas mine had had costumed crime fighters for decades.
What seemed most different about this visit to the Civilian Reality was my experience of time itself. When I had visited before, my astral self was a kind of detached presence observing from the outside, as it were. On that occasion, Doctor Messiah had been my Sherpa, so to speak, guiding me on my tour. Then, I became trapped in Clarissa Too’s body, for lack of a better term; from that point on, I saw only a circumscribed view of her world through her senses. Throughout my sojourn, scenes kept flashing before my eyes, as if on a kind of continuous, fast-forwarding highlight reel. What my life might have been had I grown up in a world without Megaheroes kept jump-cutting from present to present; I found the experience highly disorienting.
This time, however, I was definitely experiencing the world with my own body, in real time flowing continuously, moment by moment, at a mundane pace.
The only problem was my uneasy sense that I just didn’t belong here. This was a world I never made, a reality I’d never contributed to.
I got to the address and marched up onto the wooden porch in front of my apartment. There was no sign of anyone home; I knocked and rang the bell. No answer. I looked around furtively to see if any onlookers were watching me. Then I reached into my pants pocket and tried my key.
It fit the lock but wouldn’t turn.
“Rats!” I said. Then I thought, if this was Clarissa Too’s abode, maybe she stashed a spare key in the same hiding place as Avie and I did in our home reality.
I cut through the narrow gap between the duplex and the next building to the alley behind the building. Under the back wooden stairs, I felt under the platform for a nail; sure enough, there was a key hanging there. When I compared it to my own, I found it very similar except for a few teeth.
I unlocked the back door and entered the apartment. If this wasn’t where Clarissa Too lived, I was guilty of breaking and entering. Worse, since this was Detroit, if the occupant was home they’d be liable to shoot first and ask questions later. That, I felt sure, would be a constant in any reality.
However, the kitchen seemed very familiar—same cabinet, same refrigerator, same stove, same old battered kitchen table. The flyers and notes affixed to the refrigerator by magnets looked like the kinds of things me and my sister Avie would post, and the scribbled handwriting resembled ours.
“Avie, are you home?” I called out.
There was no answer.
I entered what I expected to be my bedroom, and found it very much like my own, except for a very conspicuous boom box with a set of headphones and stacks of classical and jazz cassette tapes by the bed. There was a desk similar to my own covered with textbooks and schoolwork; the class notes were definitely my writing, except that Clarissa Too gave a peculiar, distinctive flourish to all her small letter “g”s. The bedspread and posters on the walls looked like things I would own too, if not an exact copies of those I had back home. My Counterpart was so organized she even had her class schedule neatly pinned to a small cork bulletin board on the wall.
“What in the hell is this girl majoring in?” I said to myself as I examined these material. It certainly wasn’t Urban Policy and Social Planning, as was my field of study. The courses and seminars she was taking all seemed to be philosophical and literary subjects. “Self-Abnegation and Contemporary Western Alienation” was the name of one; “Capitalist Commodification in Post-Contemporaneity” was another. The books on the desk and on a short book case, I noticed, were all by European authors and thinkers, novelists and theorist, some of whom I’d never even heard of.
On the bulletin board next to her schedule, conveniently, was her acceptance letter to grad school, much like the one I had received from Warren Woodward University a year earlier. It was even addressed to Clarissa James on Ann Street in Ann Arbor. It welcomed my Counterpart into something called the Gnostic Exegesis in Modern Philology Program in the Leonard Crafton School of Arts and Sciences.
“Oowee, that is a mouthful,” I said.
I suddenly realized that if I was stuck in the Civilian Reality for any length of time, I’d have to cover for her; I wouldn’t want Clarissa Too to fall behind in her coursework. Apparently, she’d been such a diligent, studious scholar, and had avoided the delayed freshman crisis that sank my grades and cost me a year of school, that she had apparently won a full scholarship to grad school. This meant at least she didn’t have responsibilities as a teaching assistant. Still, I was going to have my work cut out for me.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said to myself. At the same time, I thought, “Boy, a full ride to the MA and PhD; wouldn’t that have nice?”
I tossed my bookbag on my bed, sat down at the desk, and began pawing through some of Clarissa Too’s readings.
“At least I won’t have to grade papers,” I said.
Before long, I was mired in the heavy, super-intellectual Hypothetical terminology that is the stock-in-trade of grad school. I imagined this garbled mumbo-jumbo had become standard in all humanities departments across all realities in the Multimensions these days. The stuff Clarissa Too was into—a potpourri of lit crit, political economy, esoteric religious history, and garden-variety cultural resistance—was not any more bewildering than the material I was encountering in my own studies back in my reality, except that in her field there was nothing but.
Before long, I had made a cup of tea for myself in the kitchen, kicked off my shoes, and lay on Clarissa Too’s bed absorbed in a book. I was making myself quite at home when I heard someone clamber in through the front door.
I got up and peeked out the bedroom door, which gave a view through the living room to the front foyer; Avie was wrestling with a guitar case and a small amplifier, not to mention a hefty shoulder bag, trying to get them through the doorway and into her bedroom.
“What’s all that stuff for?” I said, walking through the living room, the book still in my hand. In my reality, Avie hadn’t played music since junior high school, when she discovered boys; I assumed this equipment belonged to a friend of hers who was performing in some musical play or something, and she was just holding it for safe keeping.
“What do you mean, what’s it for?” she said. “I’ll be rehearsing tonight with my acid-jazz-funk-Ska girl band—we have a gig coming up at Carlton’s this Friday. The new drummer’s a bit of a dyke, if you ask me, but I think she’ll work out. Oh, and we’ve got a new name for the group: Brutal Repression—how’s that for a moniker?!”
I helped her with her guitar case, following her into her bedroom and setting it on her bed for her.
“You play this?” I asked. Then I noticed an acoustic already next to the front window, set on a music stand.
“I can’t very well play the acoustic in an acid-jazz-funk-Ska girl band, now, can I?” said Avie. “You haven’t seen it before now since I mostly keep it in a locker at school; they have soundproof practice rooms there where I can jam without disturbing anybody. Also, I wanted to keep it a secret from Mama and Daddy—they’ll kill me when they find out I sold that oboe for it. But whittling those damn reeds all the time was driving me nuts.”
Oboe? I could have sworn Avie had played the flute. I had to remind myself this was Avie Too, not the sister I was more familiar with.
“Don’t worry, I’m still a performance major,” said Avie, setting her book bag on a chair. “Dr. Maynard let me drop orchestra in favor of the afternoon jazz ensemble. But you probably can’t tell what I’m playing half the time with your headphones on and your nose in your books. But the secret will soon be out. I hope you’ll take a break from your studies this weekend and finally come and see a show; we’re getting pretty good. We do some Police songs by way of the Clash, and Kendall does this rockin’ solo on ‘My Sharona’ on a stand-up bass—it’s the wildest thing you’ve ever seen!”
“Interesting,” I said. “You know, you’re a theater major in my reality.”
Avie gave me a confused look as shed her jacket and hung it on the back of her bedroom door. “We’re not back to that, are we?” she said, dismayed. “The whole ‘I’m-really-from-another-dimension-and-just-stuck-in-this-one-for-the-time-being’ routine? I swear to God, Sissy, you’re schizophrenic.”
I recalled my alternate sister’s skepticism from my previous visit, when I told her that in another reality I was a Megahero, not her Civilian sister with a broken leg.
Avie took her electric guitar from its case and set it on an empty stand next to her acoustic. “Then again, all your talk about Megapowers certainly turned out to be prophetic,” she said. “Ms. Megaton is Public Enemy Number One, now.”
“Public enemy? What do you mean?”
That’s when Avie took a good, long look at me and noticed there was something different. Quite a lot, actually.
“Say, what did you do to your hair?” she said, running her fingers over my short-cropped cut. “And look at you—you’ve gained ten pounds …”
Suddenly, she grabbed me by my shoulders, her eyes wide in horror. “Who are you? What have you done with my sister?”
I explained to Avie how her sister had come to my reality to help me out with a little secret identity problem I was having—to help persuade the public, with the help of controversial columnist Pamela Jointly, that Ms. Megaton Man and I were not one and the same. However, in trying to send Clarissa Two home, we had somehow goofed, and I had crossed over instead. Avie wasn’t buying any of this until I remembered I was wearing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform under my street clothes, and pulled off my hoodie to show her.
“Here, touch the material,” I said. She could see it was an entirely different fabric from what her actual sister wore.
“What is that stuff?” she asked, rubbing my shoulder. “That’s not the Ms. Megaton outfit Grandma Seedy sewed for you.”
“Not the Grandma Seedy of this reality,” I said. “It’s Quarantinium-Quelluminum, a special impervious fiber invented by Rex Rigid.” I spoke as if I an authority on the subject, although I really had no idea what I was talking about. In any case, Avie only gave me a blank look. “I guess you don’t have a Liquid Man in this universe,” I said, “or a Megatropolis Quartet for that matter.”
“We don’t even have a Megaton Man,” said Avie. “Just a Ms. Megaton.” “Why do you keep saying Ms. Megaton?” I said. “It’s Ms. Megaton Man.”
“Oh, she dropped the ‘man,’” said Avie. “Why would the newspapers call you ‘Man’ anyway? That would be stupid. It’d be a waste of headline space, for one thing.” Avie had a point: in a world in which Clarissa James was the only Megahero, no one would get that my name for myself as an inside joke—a feminist riff on Megaton Man. (Imagine, an entire reality that doesn’t get my sense of humor!)
“Which reminds me,” said Avie, searching through her shoulder bag. “I thought you’d like to see your latest headline.”
She pulled out a folded copy of this morning’s newspaper from among her musicology textbooks and sheet music; she unfolded it and handed it to me.
With so many Megaheroes in my own world, and my mostly less-than-sensational career to date, I had seldom made it into print back in my reality, and then only as an unverified rumor or the occasional stray UFO sighting. These mentions were usually relegated to the back pages. photo. But there I was, on top of the front page, right under the Detroit Day banner, with a big photo and the following headline:
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES CLASH OVER BLACK “MEGABEING”
Mysterious “Ms. Megaton” Provokes Racial Fears
Anxious White Electorate May Determine Outcome
FINAL DAY OF CAMPAIGNING MARKED BY RANCOR
“The incumbent wants to send the entire Pentagon after you,” said Avie, “while his challenger wants to declare you America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero!”“Holy crap,” I said, looking at the date of the paper. “The election’s tomorrow—again!”
Next: Flying Blind
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