The spring semester began much as the fall semester had ended, for me at least; I saw little but the insides of libraries and classrooms and study carrels. Except that I now came home to housemates who also knew little but school work. Pammy had new students to grade and Stella had new teachers, and each of us had our respective college work cut out for us. There was little enough time for my housemates to dwell upon the world of Megaheroes they’d left behind in distant Megatropolis, let alone for me to give it much thought.
I convinced Daddy to stay at home in Detroit most weekends, at least for most of January and February, and Mama thought I was working at a diner or whatever—she had only visited my South Quad dorm room once in my freshman year and wasn’t in the habit of driving out to Ann Arbor—so the house on Ann Street remained an undisturbed, hermetically sealed study hall for the three of us amid the harsh Michigan winter.
As spring break approached, I asked Stella is she had any plans. To my great surprise, she announced she had a mind to go to New York and inform the father of the baby about the impending Blessed Event.
“Wait, what?!” I said. “I thought you decided…”
“It just occurred to me that the father has a right to know.”
Just occurred to her? It’s only what I had been telling her she should do since back before the holidays. For months she would bristle at any suggestion—and I am a champion suggester—that she should let Megaton Man know what their one-night stand above the skyline of Manhattan had wrought. Stella would also fume and sputter—not only at my suggestion that she tell him but at my description of their romantic rendezvous as a one-night stand. But for some people, I guess it just has to be their idea before they can embrace it, and this was especially so with Stella.
So, in the wee hours of Sunday, March first—the official beginning of our spring break that year—Pammy drove Stella to the airport in the Q-Wagon. With her baby being due almost exactly a month later, it was just about the last possible moment Stella would be able to safely fly—the See-Thru Girl never having had that particular Megapower herself. I was so dead to the world after a grueling week of mid-term exams I hadn’t even heard Pammy and Stella leave; I was just dragging my butt out of bed as I heard Pammy pulling the station wagon back up the driveway.
I was standing in my pajamas, rubbing my eyes, waiting for my waffles to toast, as Pammy came in the back door, along with a cold blast of air. “Stella’s gone to tell her baby-daddy?” I asked, shuddering. “What came over her?”
Pammy quickly shut the door, stomped her feet—there had been a bit of snow in the night—and shed her overcoat; it was still very much winter in Michigan. “I don’t know what changed her mind. But in a couple hours Trent Phloog will find out he’s going to be a father.”
This came as news to me—who was Trent Phloog? “Wait a minute,” I said, following Pammy down the hall. “I thought Megaton Man was the father.”
“Trent Phloog is Megaton Man’s secret identity,” Pammy explained, hanging up her coat in the closet by the front door. Ostensibly a cub reporter for The Manhattan Project, Megaton Man wore a ridiculous disguise—as Pammy described it, a 1950s oversize Robert Mitchum suit over his grotesquely muscular physique and a fedora over the cowl of his costume, a get-up that didn’t fool anybody. This was the Trent Phloog she had known. “Megaton Man had been so obviously planted there by the government, I threatened to write a column about, merely on the basis that it was such an insult to my intelligence. I guess the thinking was that if any important news story broke—like a national emergency or a crisis or something –Megaton Man would be best positioned to spring into action. But he was a clumsy springer, if you ask me—and as a reporter, he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.”
So, Pamela Jointly had actually worked alongside Megaton Man at the very same newspaper, even while she was writing the controversial columns harshly critical of Megaheroes in general and Megaton Man in particular.
That must have been awkward.
“Oh, he saved my life a couple of times,” Pammy admitted, who was now back in the kitchen spooning grounds of coffee into a paper filter. “Luckily, whenever I accidentally fell out of window or something, he was always there. I think he had a crush on me—I’m sure he did. I’m not saying Trent Phloog was a bad or malicious person, necessarily—I could just never go for all those muscles. I mean, what inadequacies was he hiding? Besides, there’s something dangerous about all that power—Megaton Man—coordinated by a mind so dumb.”
The way she emphasized that word reminded me of a question I had had for some time, but never found the right moment to ask.
“Why do they call him that? What is a Megaton, exactly?”
“A million tons of TNT,” Pammy replied. “Or the equivalent explosive force. The typical hydrogen bomb has a twenty-megaton warhead—like dropping twenty million tons of dynamite. And the United State and the Soviet Union have tens of thousands of these things aimed at each other—pleasant thought, huh?”
Wow, the See-Thru Girl had some boyfriend.
I wondered how Stella knew for sure this Trent Phloog—Megaton Man—was even still in New York. After all, the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters had been blown up, not to mention his main squeeze had left town; after traumas like that, he might have moved to Seattle or the Tundra or something to start over. I know I’d want a change of scene.
But Pammy had been picking up intermittent issues of The Manhattan Project at Border Worlds Used and Slightly Used Bookstore—they had a great newsstand in those days and got all the national and international newspapers and periodicals. She showed me some of the clippings she’d squirreled away in a manila folder—Trent Phloog’s byline had started appearing on a controversial column that was clearly a pale imitation of her own. Pammy had her suspicions, given the columns’ pro-Megahero viewpoint and relatively high literary quality –Megaton Man’s intellectual capacity being in direct inverse proportion to his overly-developed he-man physique—that the pieces had likely been ghost-written by some propaganda office deep within the bowels of the Pentagon.
“If Trent Phloog still has a desk in the Project newsroom,” Pammy declared, “Megaton Man can’t be too far away.”
The real question was how the Man of Molecules would react upon seeing the See-Thru Girl—the woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand last summer—on his doorstep, just about ready to give birth right then and there. “What does she hope will happen?” I asked. “I mean, after she makes Trent Phloog wet his pants?”
“I honestly don’t know,” said Pammy, waiting for the coffee to percolate. “I think for Stella it’s an ethical issue; keeping secrets is an occupational hazard among costumed crime-fighters, beginning with their own tortured double-identities. I believe Stella just wants to have a clear conscience about raising her baby as a normal Civilian child, with everything above-board, with no dishonesty.”
This always struck me as a highly perceptive observation. But I also wondered whether the See-Thru Girl still wanted to get back with Megaton Man.
After I got home from church—yes, I was one of those clean-living college kids who never partied and had no life and always went to church, even away from home—Pammy had her work spread out all over the kitchen table. Only, for the first time in my awareness, it wasn’t the usual student papers she was grading, nor the usual glut of departmental paperwork. Instead, they were clippings and typescripts of her own controversial columns she had written over the six or seven years she had spent in New York. It seemed to me that Stella’s odyssey had prompted Pammy to get a little nostalgic about the career she had left behind in New York.
But Pammy explained that a literary agent had been in contact with her for some time about putting together a collection of her best writing, along with some new reflections, to form a sort of memoir. This agent seemed to think there was a good chance of landing a big contract with a major publishing house. Pammy had been too busy during the fall semester teaching and just getting reacclimated to Arbor State, her old alma mater; spring break was now the first real opportunity she’d had to think about putting together such an anthology.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Some of clippings spread out on the table were already beginning to yellow and become brittle with age. A few of the headlines read:
“Patriarchy’s Last, Desperate Hope: Megaton Man!”
“Megaheroes: Why the Tights? Sexual Hang-Ups, Say Experts!”
“Megaton Man: If Hitler Had Him, He’d Have Won the War!”
Pammy’s controversial columns linked Megahero machismo explicitly to the Cold War and ruinous nuclear arms race between America and the Soviet Union; speculated that secret military payloads NASA rockets carried into orbit were part of a surveillance system to monitor renegade Megapowered beings; and argued that vigilantes running around in primary-colored tights were a sure sign of a neurotic postmodernity run amok. Civilians, she argued, had misplaced their faith in flawed symbols—mythical illusions offering only false hopes of solving the world’s problems—instead of placing it in reason and the rule of law.
The recurring target for Pammy’s ire was the Megahero who had made our housemate Stella into a single, unwed mother.
“Whew—you sure were rough on this guy,” I said. I hope he didn’t find out where Pammy now lived—mostly because I lived there, too.
“He deserves it,” said Pammy. “Anyone who puts himself above Civilian authority better be able to withstand withering scrutiny. Besides,” she assured me, “Trent Phloog is a cream puff; all those hyper-macho guys are.”
What about the self-appointed critics who provided such withering scrutiny, I wondered?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—Who watches the watchmen?
As we fixed ourselves some lunch, I realized this was just about the first time I had spent any meaningful time alone with Pammy without Stella around. Over a luncheon of tomato soup and toast in the dining room, we fell into a conversation about what kind of men she preferred, if not inflated he-man muscle boys like Megaton Man. Turns out she went for the skinny, androgynous type. She revealed she’d had a long relationship with a guy from Arbor State who followed her to New York to become the copy boy at The Manhattan Project; over time, they each independently came to realize that he was more into guys. This hadn’t come as a complete surprise to Pammy, since toward the end it had become nearly impossible to induce Mr. Copyboy to perform any kind of sex act involving her vagina. Still, it must have been something of a heartbreak for her—at any rate, it was one more thing she was glad to leave behind in New York.
I asked Pammy if she had met anybody since she arrived in Ann Arbor. She kind of blushed, which surprised me, then she dropped a bombshell: She was currently sleeping with one of her former students—a music major who had taken her History of Muckraking course last fall as an elective. I hadn’t had any idea this had been going on, and I was sure Stella hadn’t, either. Even though the course was long over, Pammy still wanted to keep the relationship on the down-low, since her department tended to frown on such liaisons even after the grades were turned in—and even though male professors pulled the same sort of thing, and far more flagrantly, all the time.
Still, I had to ask why Pammy hadn’t brought her lover round to her own house. As my daddy pointed out, the sturdy plaster walls were virtually soundproof—ensuring a high degree of privacy, if you know what I mean. And Stella and I certainly weren’t going to rat her out—for one thing, her stipend covered more than her fair share of the rent—we just made up the difference. But Pammy insisted she hadn’t wanted to implicate us—me and Stella—in her crimes and misdemeanors. Also, Mr. Music Major was living with another woman—it was complicated, as all such things are—and he likely even had friends on Ann Street. Pammy didn’t want to risk the two of them being seen walking together in the neighborhood—Ann Arbor is an awfully small town—so they worked it out to meet at some quiet little no-tell motel past the Medical Center. What she must have spent on cabs.
Was it worth it?
“He’s a performance major—saxophone,” said Pammy, almost misty-eyed. “Some of those reed players can triple-tongue—it’s quite amazing.”
Not only did such juicy tidbits like this satisfy my endlessly nosy curiosity and need to live vicariously; I also noticed I didn’t blush as much at this kind of raunchy talk anymore. But the reality was I had little to offer of my own romantic experiences in exchange, since I didn’t have any. So, our conversation sort of trailed off.
After clearing the dishes, Pammy went back to work editing her project. I decided to jump-start my spring break as I had the year before, with something exciting: a 1500-piece picture puzzle. Last year it had been a depiction of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the middle of floor in my South Quad dorm while my roommate was back in Wisconsin; this year it would be Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on my very own dining room table in the house on Ann Street. My mama had sent it to me for my birthday in February, just to make me feel guilty.
By late afternoon, I had completed the rectangular outlines of the puzzle and begun sketching in the ranks of the French Imperial Guard, as rendered by the nineteenth-century romantic painter Meissonier. Meanwhile, Pammy divided her time between reading her old stuff at the kitchen table and clacking away at her typewriter in the study nook in the living room, shuttling back and forth every so often—she just needed to move about as part of her writing process. About the time we were starting to get hungry for dinner, the phone in the hallway rang. Pammy picked it up; it was Stella. She was already back at Detroit Metro Airport.
I checked my watch. “That has to be the shortest round trip for a spring break on record.” I said this to no one in particular.
This time I insisted on tagging along with Pammy to the airport; Waterloo could wait, and I had the feeling Stella had cut her trip short because it had not gone well and might need all the emotional support she could get. I bundled up as Pammy grabbed her coat. It would be the first time I ever rode in the Megatropolis Quartet station wagon—the Q-Wagon, as Stella had called it—and almost the first time other than that morning it had been taken out for a spin since Pammy and Stella had moved from South University to Ann Street. This was the first time I had set foot inside our garage, which aside from being dark and freezing had an oily smell. The tarpaulin my daddy had thrown over the vehicle had been folded up and put to one side that morning, and Pammy hadn’t bothered replacing it.
This was the first time I had gotten a good look at the vehicle that had brought Pammy and Stella from New York. On the outside, it was a standard, less-than-impressive suburban family station wagon, of the type that was quickly going out of style. I was a bit rusty around the edges and dinged up, and the decals and insignia of the Megatropolis Quartet —the only visible customization—had cracked and peeled mostly off.
But when I got in, the Q-Wagon was an entirely different experience. For one thing, it had an unexpected new-car smell. When Pammy started it up—she had done most of the driving from New York and was quite comfortable behind the wheel—the engine instantly purred evenly. It was surprising how quickly the air warmed up, and it wasn’t dusty like I had expected. Even more remarkable were the lights of the dashboard—just the typical speedometer and radio and such—but they somehow glowed more like the control panel of a starship. As we backed out of the garage, I half-expected the Q-Wagon to turn into a space shuttle, and wondered why Stella hadn’t simply flown back to Megatropolis, saving the cost of a round-trip ticket. But the wheels, for now, remained emphatically on the ground.
“Don’t touch anything,” cautioned Pammy. “I have no idea what this thing can do besides forward and backward—and I don’t want to find out.”
She needn’t have warned me. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine with no radio.” But as soon as I said the word radio, it came on by itself at an intuitively comfortable volume—oldies, if you consider early Electric Light Orchestra in that category.
Forty minutes later we picked up Stella at the curb of the terminal—she had taken only an overnight shoulder bag she hadn’t needed, since she hadn’t stayed in New York overnight. Her eyes were red and her face was stoic, with an expression that said: I’m cried out; don’t ask. I moved into the backseat in case Stella felt more comfortable talking to Pammy—they had known each other longer and better—but I needn’t have bothered. Stella was in no mood to share. Hardly a word was spoken by any of until we were almost to Ann Arbor.
By then, my stomach was growling. “Let’s stop at Bimbo’s Roadhouse for dinner!” To my delight, my suggestion met with general approval, I think mostly because it broke the ice. Pammy pulled the Q-Wagon into the parking lot, and we marched into the restaurant. Seated, we ordered an extra-large pizza pie—ham and mushroom—and the first of a couple pitchers of iced tea.
“I’m such a fool,” said Stella dejectedly. “I should have known better. But I had to try.”
Apparently, when she arrived at La Guardia, she took a taxi clear into town—again, the way these people spend money—ordering the cabbie to swing past the old Megatropolis Headquarters in mid-town Manhattan for good measure. “The MQHQ is gone,” Stella confirmed; there was nothing there now but a big, square hole in the middle of a vacant plaza on Fifth Avenue, collecting rainwater. “A wall of wooden planks had been thrown up around it—I made the cabbie stop while I pried my way inside to get a look—but there was no sign as yet of any new construction. I got back into the cab and ordered the driver to circle around the block for one last look before heading north on Madison.” Stella needed a spin around Central Park just to digested the demise of her former team before trying to track down her former beau at The Manhattan Project—why she expected Trent Phloog to be at the office on a Sunday was beyond me.
But she never got that far. Some commotion was snarling traffic before the cab had even got to 59th Street. The cabbie radioed in to his dispatcher. Some unidentified flying object had landed on the green adjacent to the softball fields. “Every freakin’ Megahero in the city is at the scene, expecting the world to end,” reported the dispatcher.
“It almost was the end of the world,” said Stella.