#116: Live, Coast-to-Coast

By the time Preston drove us to the TV station, Mama was already in makeup. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
        “I’m here to tell America you’re my love child,” said Mama. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Black folk and white folk have been getting it on since before they discovered America. Hasn’t anybody read Othello?”
        “I think Othello takes place after Columbus discovered America,” I said, “although Avie would know for sure. Besides, it’s far from the ideal love story.”
        “Othello was president of Spain,” said Mama. “If the Spaniards can do without racism in 1492, why can’t America today, in 1984?”

#97: Secret Identity

Daddy backed his red pickup into the driveway of the Ann Street house. I opened the passenger door, careful to unload my crutches first, then let myself out gently. My balance seemed much improved and my leg felt better, although something told me that if I tried to walk I’d still be rather lame.
        It was clear my perceptions had skipped forward in time once again. Judging from how the leaves on the trees and shrubs were turning, we were in the latter half of September now, at least.

#96: How We Lost the Farm

Let’s just say I half-convinced my grandmother, Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James, I was telling the truth. Of course, I couldn’t prove I was Ms. Megaton Man in some other reality, because in this one, I was only civilian Clarissa James. As such, I couldn’t fly or do anything megaheroic to demonstrate I once possessed megapowers. In fact, with a rod in my thigh bone, I couldn’t do much more than spin around in my wheelchair with my one good leg. But my knowledge of her own past as one of the thirteen Doomsday Factory scientists that had worked on the Atomic Soldier seemed to convince Grandma Seedy the alternate reality I described was at least theoretically plausible.
        She didn’t think I was completely crazy, in other words.

#89: Crown Heights

When they joined the Reconstituted Megatropolis Quartet, the Phantom Jungle and Rubber Brother thought they’d be doing glamorous things alongside Liquid Man, Yarn Man, and Kozmik Kat, like battling intergalactic menaces that threatened to invade earth.
        In truth, so did I.
        Instead, our alter-egos—Donna Blank, social worker, Jasper Johnson, philanthropic volunteer, and myself—had to spend all our time coordinating with the City of Megatropolis Social Services to find housing, financial assistance, and food stamps for all the civilians who had lucrative careers in the Quantum Tower in the other reality, but had found themselves completely dislocated, socially and financially, by the sudden move to this dimension.

#87: Those Chosen Few

In the parking lot outside the Big Yard, I spotted my father, Clyde Phloog; although he was in his civilian form and not his default Silver Age Megaton Man stature, he still seemed a head taller than everyone in the crowd. He was dressed in a sharp business suit and was snapping away with a self-developing film camera as Stella and I approached, triumphant, in our caps and gowns, clutching the scrolled mock-sheepskins we’d received on the stage.

#77: Schroedinger’s Cat

The Wilbert Dunlevy Himmelfarb Presentation Festival of Undergraduate Research is held every year in mid-to late March, depending on when spring break ends and Easter occurrs, on the main campus of Arbor State University. This year, it landed on March 21 through 23, 1984. Sponsored by the Albert Kahn School of Arts and Sciences, the festival took over almost an entire floor of the Modern Language Building, with programming running concurrently in more than two dozen classrooms. Drawing from all the satellite campuses including my own extension in midtown Detroit, the programming featured mostly seniors giving brief synopses of the senior theses they had completed during the fall semester, but ambitious underclassmen could also enter to showcase their research projects.

#69: Art History with Doctor Messiah

“Are you sure you’ll be able to get back to Ann Arbor okay, uh, Dad?” I asked, as Avie’s Pacer neared our mama’s apartment.
     My biological father—Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man, only now dressed as Lt. Colonel Clyde Pflug, USAF—smiled broadly. “I’ve got those capsules Dr. Joe gave me,” he said, patting his medal-encrusted breast pocket. “After the blue one I took wears off, I’ll be able to fly back as the Silver Age Megaton Man. And if it doesn’t wear off, I can take a red one to speed up the conversion.” He looked dimly at Kozmik Kat, who shared the back seat with him. “I only wish I had a lint roller for all this cat hair.”
     “Sorry,” said Koz. “I shed whenever I’m around radiation.”

#68: Will the Real Dr. Joe Please Stand Up?

We all looked in horror at my father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, to see what effect, if any, the blue gelatin capsule would have on him. Would it really neutralize his megapowers? Was the man who gave it to him really Dr. Joe, or was he Doctor Software, and the man who just entered the gymnasium the real Dr. Joe? And was the capsule a lethal dose of some kind of poison the arch-nemesis of all Megaton Men had prepared especially for him?
     “This Megaton Man is just as dumb as any of them,” said Kozmik Kat. “Silver Age or otherwise.”
     “Clyde? Are you all right?” asked Alice² with concern. “You look a little peaked.”
     Clyde began to swoon, and let out his trademark “Woo!” He stood outside the boxing ring now, but grabbed up at the ropes to keep his balance. “I feel dizzy, all of a sudden.”

#64: Edge of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Volume III: Troy

The fall semester of my senior year had ended strongly, and it looked as though the year itself would end on an upbeat note. Moving back to Detroit had been a good move; I had successfully completed my senior thesis on urban cultural theory, and nearly all of the credits in my social planning major had been completed. I was looking forward to a spring semester much like the fall had been. My schedule—mostly electives—would be entirely in the University-Cultural Center, with classes held either at the Arbor State Extension across from the museum or at Warren Woodward University, where I had already taken several cross-listed courses and where I had applied and planned to go to grad school. Except for paperwork, I would have little need to visit Ann Arbor regularly until graduation—which I really looked forward to, because it meant walking in the ceremony with Stella Starlight, my old roommate and almost the first friend I had made there, who would be graduating at the same time.

#63: The Snows of State Fair Avenue

“Wait a minute!” cried Yarn Man. “How do we know it’s really the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma the Time Turntable has brought back from another dimension—and not just a couple o’ crummy imposters?”
     The Mod Puma turned and glared at him. “Bing, how would you like the polka dots on your boxers to migrate up to your eyeballs?” Feline-like, she lunged off the turntable and into the snow, executed a few practice karate kicks with her taloned feet, and held her clawed hands stiffly in front of her face, ready to chop.
     Yarn Man grimaced and covered his groin with his red mittens. “That’s the real Mod Puma, all right,” he conceded.
     The psychedelic cat relaxed her stance. “I thought so,” she said.

#41: The Thirteenth Scientist

So, there I was, standing in the studio space of my garret apartment while my Asian friend, Audrey—who had a body virtually identical to mine, except with slightly bigger boobs—wore my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, while the woman who had sewn it—my long-lost grandmother, Mercedith Robeson-James—inspected her handiwork like it was hanging on a department-store mannequin. I had just phoned my half-sister, Avie, that Seedy James, whom our mother had always died working for the government during World War II, was alive and well, and Avie said she was on her way over…
     But before I tell you what happened next, there’s a part I skipped over. So let me back up.