#149: Hypothetically Speaking

The day before the Hypothetics conference, I got a small package in the mail. It was from Gene. The note read, “Consider this a belated birthday gift”—he’d missed it back in February—“and a congratulations on your presentation, which I’m afraid I’m also going to have to miss. About the gift: Whatever you do, don’t point it at your eye. Good luck.” Inside the padded envelope was a small, silvery, pen-shaped cylinder.
        “It’s too small to be a vibrator,” I said.
        “Get your mind out of the gutter, Sissy,” said Avie, who was reading a textbook for school. “It’s obviously some kind of writing instrument.”

#147: Deep Throat

“You’ve composed a fine paper,” said my thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, smiling amiably behind her desk stacked with books and various research projects in progress. “You’ll certainly give those Hypothetics people something to chew on.” She handed back my paper, with several Post-It notes covered in red pen attached. “I’ve made a comment or two for you to consider, but they’re neither here nor there; they’re mostly cosmetic. I think you’re good to go.”

#145: Fusion Jazz

Clarissa’s first-person narrative resumes …
        “You expect me to believe the Quantum Quest Quartet became the Megatropolis Quartet simply because all four people temporarily forgot their team name on the Fourth of July, 1976?” I said. “I assume they later recovered their memories. Why didn’t they go back to the original team name? Had they already filed paperwork that prevented them from changing it back or something?”

#138: The Dreaded Conference Paper

Rather than think about the upcoming spring semester and the courses I’d be taking or teaching, I spent the evening pondering the conference paper I promised myself I’d write, the abstract for which had to be submitted by the end of January if I wanted to be included in the program at the end of March. My thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, had recommended the opportunity to me back in August, but I had procrastinated on the extracurricular project all semester, though it lingered in the back of my mind like a sword of Damocles over my head. Now with the semester and my foray in the Civilian Reality over, I finally had some free head space; it was now or never.

#125: Re-Election Day

When I got up the following morning, my first priority was to set my Ms. Megaton Man visor and buttons on the windowsill so they could recharge for several hours in the sunlight; after that, to find my polling place, the spooky St. Oriel Byzantine Church. It was a short walk from our West Forest apartment down Third Avenue almost to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I made it a point to get my ass out of bed early and cast my ballot for the challenger to President Harry Foster Lime, whoever that might be. I couldn’t start my day unless I knew I’d done at least that much to defeat him, as had been accomplished in my own reality.

#123: Flying Blind

“They think I’m a Megavillain in this reality?” I cried, stunned. “But look, I’m busting some jewelry thieves or something, right here on the front page.”
        It was true; Clarissa Too was shown in a halftoned photograph busting some crooks with handkerchiefs around their mouths, although the caption read, Who is this mysterious “Megahero,” and what is her agenda?
        “They’re afraid of the color of your skin—and the fact that you have ovaries,” said Avie.

#122: Real Time

“Nuts!” I cried. “Clarissa Too’s the Civilian; she belongs in the Civilian Reality—not me!”
        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.

# 121: Mistaken Identity

The December morning I had to turn in my final grades to the Urban Policy and Social Planning office was frosty and overcast, but as yet saw no snow. Clarissa Too and I bundled up in scarves and mittens. Underneath our street clothes, we wore our respective Ms. Megaton Man uniforms, she out of habit, me in case of an emergency, but also because that Quarantinium-Quelluminum stuff made for great thermal underwear. Still, because of the cold weather, Clarissa Too could really feel her thigh and was hobbling worse than usual.

#120: Will the Real Ms. Megaton Man Please Stand Up?

Introduction to Volume V: Real Time

Now is perhaps a good as time as any to consider where we are in this little epic saga I’ve been relating to you over several wordy volumes.

#115: The Burgundy Blip

I hadn’t even been Ms. Megaton Man for the longest time. Some days I was so busy with schoolwork for my own seminars and courses, not to mention my responsibilities as a TA, that I rarely even thought of being a Megahero. I felt more and more like the ordinary Civilian I had been most of my life—I hardly identified with Ms. Megaton Man at all. She had, in a sense, already gone underground—submerged in the background of studious grad student Clarissa James.
        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.”

#114: Hiding in Plain Sight

When I woke up Monday morning, my only thought was to get to school without incident. I tucked my hair up under my old Arbor State Abyssinian Wolves knit cap, pulled up the hood of my Warren Woodward Warhounds hoodie for good measure—nothing like mixing and matching collegiate licensed apparel from my two schools—and marched out the back door with my book bag. I thought I would be clever and instead of taking Second Avenue directly up to the Warren Woodward campus I took a roundabout way along Prentis to Cass Avenue.

#111: I Was a Graduate-School Sex Addict!

“Where were you all night?” asked Avie, as I bounded into the kitchen. She was already cooking scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. “Want some? You hungry?”
        “No thanks,” I said. “I just gave Gene a knob-job.”
        “Ew, please! Not before I’ve eaten!” said Avie, making a sour expression and grabbing her midsection while still stirring the eggs. “Not on an empty stomach.”

#109: My Dinner With André

I met Chase, Peggy, and Marge at Union Stripe just as Happy Hour was in full swing and turning into the dinner pre-symphony and theater rush. Because Marge and I used to work there, the hostess treated to the front table in the window facing Woodward Avenue.

#107: Ms. Megatronica and Ponty Polverizzo

Of all the Hypothetic jargon and fantastic visionary concepts swirling around in my head, not to mention the actually disorienting experiences I’d experienced over the preceding several months, something about the comic book story Chase Bradford had created stuck in my head. It was his name for the villains in the title of his story: “Ms. Megatronica vs. the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott.” It reminded me of something I had read somewhere, but I couldn’t exactly place it at first.

#106: Drawing Board Booty Call

On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

#103: Call for Papers

The week before school started, I attended an afternoon orientation for grad students in the urban theory and social planning program, after which I got a buttload more textbooks and readings for the recitations I’d be teaching. A recitation, in case you don’t know, is a class connected to one of those big lecture classes taught by a professor for hundreds of students in big lecture hall a couple times a week. Then the teaching assistants, grad students like me, go over or “recite” the material in smaller breakout sessions in regular classrooms on another day for about twenty students at a time.

#102: The Multimensional Pinpointer

It was going to take a while for it to sink in that my eighteen-month-old distant cousin had singlehandedly fended off a battalion of robotic invaders at the Youthful Permutations headquarters in Troy while I had been reading my Introduction to Hypothetics textbook for an upcoming seminar in my off-campus apartment in Detroit ten miles away.

#91: On the Down-Low

When I returned to Detroit, I had the apartment on West Forest Avenue all to myself. Avie, following in the James sisters tradition I had inadvertently initiated, had gone up to Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca for a two-week stint as a camp counselor, just as I had done for three summers between my freshman, sophomore, and two junior years of college. But whereas my first summer camp had introduced me to a variety of sexual experiences courtesy of the older, more wizened college-age counselors, my younger and more extroverted half-sister already had years of experience of her own and a wealth of hard-won sexual knowledge; I could only imagine what her fellow counselors would be learning from her.

#85: Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’d been haranguing Avie for twenty minutes with my theory about the Multimensions, and my suspicions concerning Reverend Enoch, while she went through her workout in the basement of our apartment.

#79: A Little Pseudo-Martian Told Me

I found that as March ended and April—my last official month of undergraduate college—began, I was spending a lot more time in the stacks of the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute than I was at the other available libraries to study for classes. Just as Michele had told me, I had ready access to the institute any time I wanted, at all hours; I merely walked into the elevator in the lobby of the Wardell Building and it whisked me right up to the thirteenth floor, express, without being buzzed up, or having a special turnkey. Somehow, the lighted buttons recognized my touch.