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.

     Weeks before, Avie had told me that Mama and Daddy were on the rocks since we’d both moved out of the house and were going to college in Midtown Detroit because my daddy—Avie’s real father and my stepfather—was seeing some other woman. And it wasn’t long after that that I was flying home from Ann Arbor back to Detroit as Ms. Megaton Man when, sure enough, I spotted my daddy’s pickup parked at a roadside motel in Dearborn. I landed on the roof and watched for a long while, unsure of what I to do, when the car of Pamela Jointly, my old housemate from Ann Arbor, pulled up and got out and went inside the motel room where I knew my daddy was, like nobody’s business.

     Well, I hadn’t planned to do an all-night stakeout, and besides I probably had homework due the next morning, so—heartbroken—I flew home. I hadn’t confronted Daddy, let alone Pammy, or gone to Mama to find out what was wrong, because I just couldn’t deal with it. Besides, I was still angry with Mama for not telling me who my real father was—the megahero from whom I must have inherited my megapowers, since Dr. Levitch had ruled out sexual transmission from Yarn Man—and I was also still angry at Mama for not telling me my grandmother was alive, which Avie and I had found out on our visit to New York and New Jersey over the last winter break, when we met the Youthful Mutants—the Unwieldy Y+Thems—and the Devengers.

     So, I hadn’t seen Mama or Daddy or Pammy since, but one afternoon I finally worked up the nerve to fly up to our old Boswick-Addison neighborhood and visit Mama, whom I knew would be home, under the pretext of doing my laundry, which I badly needed to do, since there weren’t any laundry facilities in my lousy apartment building, even though I had tons of quarters for a laundromat from waitressing tips. Anyway, I flew the three miles up Woodward Avenue—it was too far to walk, and I didn’t have a car, nor did I feel like schlepping my laundry in a duffle bag like a civilian on the bus—in broad daylight, once again using my awesome megapowers not for crimefighting or anything important, and landed in the back yard.

     I walked in the back door and through the kitchen and found Mama in the dining room, solemnly packing boxes with books and other belongings, preparing to move out.

     “What’s going on, Mama?” I asked, setting down my duffel.

    “What does it look like, Sissy?” Mama replied. “I’m moving out.”

     “But, why?” I asked.

     “You know perfectly well why,” she said. “Your stepfather and I are splitting up.”

     Of course I knew, indirectly from Avie, although Mama had never before discussed it with me. “But where will you live?” I asked.

     “I already found a nice efficiency apartment near where I work,” she said, meaning as branch manager of a Civix Savings and Loan on Woodward Avenue. “It’s almost at Eight Mile Road, close to the State Fair Grounds.”

     “You signed a lease and everything?” I said. “But what’s going to happen to our house?”

     “I don’t know,” said Mama. “Cray can live here”—Cray was Daddy’s name—“or maybe we’ll sell it. Or he can live here with his little whore, whoever she is, for all I care.”

     I didn’t tell her that I knew for a fact who Daddy’s little whore was—none other than my old housemate, controversial columnist-turned-college professor-turned author Pamela Jointly.

     “But you can’t sell our house,” I said. “This is where me and Avie grew up…we still have Sunday dinners here, and celebrate holidays and stuff. Avie has all that artwork and theater stuff in the basement, and I have my clarinet, which I haven’t played since high school, somewhere. We’re going to still going to that, aren’t we? Meet here for Christmas and stuff?” I was crying now and felt myself getting hysterical

     “You don’t live here anymore,” said Mama. “Neither does Avie. You don’t drop by anymore—you’re angry at me, I suppose—and I hardly see Avie, either, since she’s started college. Besides, even if your father and I stayed together, this place is too big for us to take care of, anyway.”

     “But you’re going to work it out, aren’t you, with Daddy?” I pleaded. “Sure, you are.”

     “You tell me,” said Mama. “I thought it was just a passing phase, like—” She looked at me uncertainly. “—like the others over the years, that I never told you girls about.”

     “Mama, why did you put up with it?” I demanded.

     “You’re father is good to you girls,” she said. “And, he’s a very attractive man. He put up with a lot from me…but don’t you tell Avril any of this. She idolizes that man.”

     I didn’t tell Mama I’d seen Daddy’s pickup at the motel, or my old housemate Pammy’s car pulling up, and her getting out and going inside. But I suspected Mama had her own corroborating evidence. I looked around at the dining room, felt the two-story house I grew up in under my feet, that my parents had slowly fixed up over the years, felt the warmth of its walls surrounding me, and felt sick to my stomach to think it was all about to dematerialize around me, leaving me naked and cold.

     “Here, let me help you pack, at least,” I said. “First let me change.” I grabbed my duffel and went upstairs to my old bedroom out of habit—it had since become a TV den—and quickly slipped out of my Ms. Megaton Man uniform and put on some funky old jeans and a T-shirt that had needed washing three weeks ago—I didn’t even think about doing the rest of my laundry—and came back downstairs with my duffel bag, my uniform folded over my arm.

     “There’s an empty box over there,” Mama instructed. “I’m only taking enough to decorate a small place. The rest is headed for a garage sale.”

     “Mama, why did you always tell Avie and me our grandmother was dead?” I asked.

     “What a question to ask,” she said, folding the flaps closed on a full box. “I told you a million times, she left to work for the government before World War II broke out, and never came back.”

     I knew that story all too well; I’d heard Grandma Seedy stories all my life growing up, even though she had disappeared long before I was born. But now I knew it wasn’t the full story.

     “She’s alive,” I said. “Look, she sewed my Ms. Megaton Man uniform.” I showed her the tag sewn into the back of the collar:

C.D. Design Originals

Doomsday Factory—Bayonne, New Jersey

100% Quarantinium-Quelluminum

U.S. Patent Pending

     “What are you talking about?” said Mama.

     “C.D.,” I said. “That stands for Seedy—Mercedith Robeson-James. My grandmother made my megahero uniform.”

     “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mama. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

     “Avie and I saw her workshop. It’s in an old textile mill in New Jersey.”

     “You’re grandmother was a scientist,” said Mama. “She wasn’t a seamstress.” She took the costume from my hands and inspected the lining. “Although she did love to sew and make things with her hands; it was a hobby of hers. She sewed tags into clothing she made for me and Rodney, when we were little kids. Not because we were poor, because she made a good living as a college professor. But…that’s all coincidence.” She handed me back my uniform and reached for some framed photographs on the sideboard. “You had to start wearing that uniform, didn’t you?” she said stiffly. “That’s when all this recent trouble started—your daddy, who raised you as his own—you couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to show him he wasn’t your daddy.”

     “That’s not fair,” I said. “I can’t help it that I’m a megahero—not when my real father was a megahero himself. He was a megahero, wasn’t he? I didn’t get my megapowers from some Megasoldier Serum Yarn Man took—I’m Ms. Megaton Man because my father was a Megaton Man. And maybe it’s a coincidence that some lady in New Jersey is named Mercedith Robeson-James, a nuclear physicist who sews megahero costumes on the side. But it isn’t a coincidence, is it? Avie took a framed photograph from her workshop—it’s the same woman as those old photographs you’re packing away.”

     “I saw the photograph Avie brought back,” said Mama, looking off into the distance. “She put it side by side with these, argued with me that Seedy was still alive. I told her it couldn’t be true.”

     “But it was your mother, wasn’t it?”

     “Yes, it was,” said Mama. “But that doesn’t prove anything. Avie said you never actually saw this woman.”

     “That’s true,” I said. “She wasn’t around the Doomsday Factory that day. But the Devengers—the Lens, Colonel Turtle, and the Angel of Death—all affirmed that Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James teaches college somewhere on the East Coast, or at least used to. I guess she’s retired now. They hadn’t seen her for a while, because I guess no megaheroes have needed a new costume lately. But I saw the bolts of cloth, and her workshop, and her tools. And that picture is of her as a young woman.”

     “It’s all some kind of mistake,” said Mama. “It has to be. I can’t believe she’s still alive—that she could still be alive after all this time and never tried to contact me. It’s got to be a mistake.”

     Mama had stopped packing and just said this over and over. I put my hand on her arm. “Mama, I can’t explain it—I don’t know how or why—but Grandma Seedy never died. Maybe she was working on some top secret government project, and…got detained. Maybe she suffered amnesia…” I was grasping at straws. Even as I tried to explain to myself what I knew to be true, it all sounded like make-believe.

     “Nonsense,” said Mama, pulling away from me and wrapping the frames in old newspaper pages from The Detroit Day. “Your grandmother was an intelligent, educated woman, and devoted to her children above all else. She wouldn’t have let a lifetime go by without letting us know she was still alive—even if she’d been captured behind enemy lines. Somehow, she’d have gotten a message to me. The government mailed me an official death certificate; they officially declared her dead as of April 2, 1939.

     I knew Mama was reciting a document that she had shown us several times, that was now stowed away in the attic. “But they never offered a reason, did they? It was labeled ‘Classified’ and buried in some archive.”

     But Mama was right. Avie and I had never laid eyes on the woman who had sewn my costume when we were in New Jersey, although we’d seen her workshop in the Doomsday Factory. The Devengers—the megaheroes originally known as the Doomsday Revengers—all talked about her. Perhaps I didn’t understand how it could be possible, but I knew Mercedith Robeson-James was alive and well.

Stolen novel; please report.

     I also knew she has some kind of connection to who my real father was.

     “Who was he?” I asked my Mama. “Who was my real father?”

     “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mama. “Now you’re going to start on that again.” I thought she was going to throw one of the knickknack she was packing at me. “First, you bring up your grandmother, who passed away before you were born…”

     “I have a right to know,” I said. “For medical reasons if nothing else. I might inherit Leukemia or some other radiation disease or something.” I grabbed an empty cardboard box and set it on the table, and began wrapping stuff. “Is that where I get my split dexterity—why I eat with my left hand and use scissors and throw a baseball with my right? And none of my other relatives are even left-handed. You know who else has split dexterity? Trent Phloog, my former housemate. And he used to be Megaton Man. Do you know how rare that is? How’s that for a coincidence?”

     “He did have split dexterity,” said Mama. “Your father, that is.”

     This was the first detail my Mama had ever revealed to me about my real father in my whole life.

     “You told me a million stories about my supposedly dead grandma,” I said. “But you’ve never told me anything about my father, who might still be alive. I get my megapowers from him, don’t I? He was one of the earlier Megaton Men, wasn’t he?”

     “He was a colonel in the army,” said Mama, misty-eyed. “I was a young bohemian. We met at one of those ‘Happenings’ that was going on at the time—jazz musicians and abstract painters and beatnik poets, convening for an impromptu avant-garde performance in an underground space like they did back in the late nineteen-fifties. He was wearing his dress uniform—he looked so out of place. I wore black dance tights. Opposites attract, I suppose.”

     “He wore his Megaton Man uniform to an art Happening?” I asked.

     “Heavens, no,” Mama replied. “He wore his colonel’s army uniform. I don’t know how he ended up in the East Village, but there he was, bigger than life—he must have been on weekend leave or something. He was with some of his buddies. He said he was up from Washington, D.C., and was about to go on some important mission, and wanted some culture.”

     “Another top secret mission,” I said. “What was his name? You told me before, you never knew anyone named Farley—Farley Phloog was the Original Golden Age Megaton Man. Were you lying to me?”

     “Clyde,” Mama whispered. “His name was Clyde.”

     “Clyde Phloog,” I said. “The Silver Age Megaton Man. Why didn’t you say something when you met Trent?”

     “It was spelled differently than your housemate’s last name,” said Mama. “I remember it on his uniform: P-f-l-u-g—Pflug. Colonel Clyde Ralston Pflug, U.S. Army Air Corps.”

     As I would find out later, the Army Air Corps had ceased to exist by the late nineteen-fifties; it had become it’s own thing: The United States Air Force. But that was the least of the things that didn’t add up at the moment.

     “You were wearing a catsuit when you met Clyde Phloog?” I said. “The Mod Puma met the Silver Age Megaton Man at some bohemian Happening?”

     “The Mod Puma?” said Mama. “Sissy, what on earth are you talking about?”

     I explained that I had come across an old, coverless comic book featuring a story about the Simpler-Era Mugging Strong-Man, who traveled to another dimension to visit the Quibbling Quarrelsome Quorum—and ended up running off with their shapely girl member, the Tie-Dyed Tabby, a black chick in a psychedelic catsuit. Although this was a farcical story, I had taken it as some kind of parody or satire of an actual event—the meeting of my parents, the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma. The Devengers even confirmed the existence of the Mod Puma, and Yarn Man recognized my Mama—just before she kicked him in the balls for shacking up with me and ruining my junior year at Arbor State—as the megahero known as the Mod Puma.

     “Girl, I may have worn a leotard in my day, but I was never a costumed crime fighter named the Mod Puma,” exclaimed Mama. “Or Two-Bit Tabby or anybody else. You know I’ve always had a bad hip and knee from too much modern dance.”

     “But you hooked up with the Silver Age Megaton Man,” I said.

     “I never saw him in his megahero uniform,” said Mama. “But yes, I saw photographs of the Man of Molecules—in the newspaper—afterwards, when he disappeared.” Mama began to cry. “When he went missing, they thought it was the Russians—it was the height of the Cold War.” She sighed. “Or maybe he just left. Everyone close to me in my life ends up disappearing. But I never got any official notice from the government—not this time. I just had you.”

     She turned to me and stroked my hair tenderly. I stroked her face in return. “I won’t disappear, Mama,” I said. I took her in my arms and hugged her for about twenty minutes as we both cried ourselves silly.

To make a long story short, I helped my Mama finish packing and then helped her move her stuff to her new apartment. We packed Avie’s Pacer, which Avie kept at the house, and took three carloads up Woodward Avenue. Mama already had a brand-new bed delivered—she said she couldn’t sleep in the one she’d shared with Cray, my daddy, all those years. I didn’t use my megapowers—just good, old-fashioned civilian elbow grease—so needless to say, I was pretty pooped my second major moving job of the year.

     Flash forward to later, when my grandma knocked on my garret apartment door and strolled in, at first mistaking Audrey Tomita for Ms. Megaton Man. I explained to Seedy Robeson-James that I was Ms. Megaton Man—Audrey was only trying on my costume—then frantically phoning my sister, who lived just two doors down at the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, that our grandma had unexpectedly dropped in.

     Before long, there was a knock on the door. I opened it. In walked Avie with Charles Bradford right behind her.

     “Hello, Chuck—I mean, Charles,” I said. I hadn’t expected Charlie to come along.

     “I told you I was right in the middle of something,” said Avie, making an obscene stroking gesture with her hand. Charlie blushed.

     The woman who made my costume didn’t catch any of this. She only remarked, “This is like Grand Central Station, for such a tiny apartment.”

     “Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James, I’d like you to meet my half-sister, Avril James,” I said. “And Charlie Bradford, who until recently was a virgin.”

     “Gosh, Audrey,” said Charles, getting a load of her wearing my uniform, her boobs almost popping out of my V-neck. “You’re Ms. Megaton Man! Wait ‘til I tell my brother John!”

     “I’m sorry you had to find out like this,” said Audrey, suddenly self-conscious of her cleavage and covering herself with her gloved hands. “But yes, I’m a costumed crime fighter.”

     Avie had brought the framed photograph she had taken from the Doomsday Factory and held it up, comparing it to the woman who was inspecting the uniform Audrey wore. The photograph showed our grandmother Seedy as a much younger woman, standing alongside Major Meltdown—America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero—and Magma, his kid sidekick, for whom she had also created uniforms, back in the day. Also pictured was a very young Rex Rigid—before the accident that turned him into Liquid Man, and long before he married my former housemate, Stella Starlight.

     “Yep, you’re our grandmother, all right,” said Avie.

     “What are you talking about?” said Seedy. “And where did you get that?” she said, referring to the framed picture. “I wondered where that had gotten to. Angela said you girls had visited my workshop while I was out of town. I want that back—I consider that stolen property.”

     “We’re you’re granddaughters,” I said. “We’re Clarissa and Avril James. Don’t you know us?”

     “Of course she doesn’t know us,” said Avie, somewhat crossly. “She hasn’t had any contact with our mother for decades. What I want to know is, why?”

     At this point, Seedy stopped examining the uniform Audrey wore and instead began looking at me and Avie long and hard. “That’s what Angela—the Angel of Death—told me,” said Seedy. “But I don’t have any granddaughters. I don’t have any living relatives…not anymore.”

     Audrey took a seat on the stool at my drawing board, forgetting about her plunging neckline for the moment, and Charlie flopped down on my bed. Both were in rapt attention. Avie and I stood side by side in front our grandmother.

     “Our Mama is Alice James,” said Avie. “Your daughter.”

     “My daughter died, childless, not more than a decade ago,” said Seedy. I could tell she was trying hard to figure out the puzzle we represented. “The boy in that photograph”—she pointed to Rex Rigid—“sent her to her death.”

     “She was the Mod Puma, wasn’t she?” I asked. “She was a member of the Megatropolis Quartet—Liquid Man sent her on some mission on the Time Turntable…”

     “The Quantum Quest Quartet,” Seedy corrected me. “They updated their name later. But yes, she went on that Time Turntable thing, and never came back. I never forgave Rex.”

     Avie turned to me. “Our mother was never a megahero,” she said.

     “Not in this dimension, maybe,” I said. I turned to our grandmother. “But she was in another dimension, wasn’t she?” I asked Seedy.

     “Are you following this?” Charlie asked Audrey.

     “Not at all,” said Audrey. She got up from the stool in order to let Seedy sit down, then sat next to Charlie on my bed. I could tell my grandmother was deep in thought.

     “In this dimension, my mother hooked up with the Silver Age Megaton Man,” I recounted for her. “The Silver Age Megaton Man was my father.”

     “Wait a minute,” said Charlie. “Clarissa’s Ms. Megaton Man?”

     “Shh,” said Audrey.

     “And the Silver Age Megaton Man disappeared on the Time Turntable, too, didn’t he?” I demanded.

     “I don’t know about any of that,” said Seedy. “I never knew any Silver Age Megaton Man, or any Megaton Men at all, until just a few years ago. Of course I knew of them, that they existed—in theory, that is.”

     “But they were in another dimension from you, weren’t they?” I said. “The Original Golden Age and Silver Age Megaton Men were America’s Nuclear-Powered Heroes in one dimension, while Major Meltdown and Magma were America’s Nuclear-Powered Heroes in another dimension. In your dimension.”

     “I don’t do Multimensional theory,” said Seedy. “You’d have to get Rex Rigid to explain all that stuff. My research interest was in atomic power, and its application to the human organism—the Atomic Soldier. Project Meltdown, to be exact.”

     “You created Stella Starlight, the See-Thru Girl?” I asked.

     “And Chuck Roast—the Human Meltdown?” asked Avie. “The guy who almost…”

     “Let her answer the question,” I interrupted her.

     “No,” said Seedy. “But I guess you could say I created their father, Magma, who later become the Mortal Meltdown, and his father, Major Meltdown. I was one of a team of six distinguished scientists on Project Meltdown. There were six other scientists on Project Megaton. Rex Rigid, an adolescent wunderkind at the time, would have preferred to have been assigned to Project Megaton, but wound up with us—you’ll notice he’s none too happy in that photograph. The government had gathered the top nuclear physicists in the Doomsday Factory in the early months of 1939, twelve of us. But we couldn’t agree one single theory for the Atomic Soldier—half our group favored the Meltdown Theorem, the other half the Megaton Theorem.”

     “Both Megaton Man and the Human Meltdown were born in the Doomsday Factory?” said Avie. “Cool—I visited there.”

     “Not them, but their ancestors, three generations ago,” I corrected her. “But Grandma, how did the Megatons and the Meltdowns end up in different dimensions?”

     “There was a thirteenth scientist,” said Seedy. “He wasn’t interested in either theorem—he had his own peculiar obsessions. Instead of taking sides, he spent all his time fiddling around with some strange atomic particle he’d isolated, and was intent on splitting. But instead of splitting that particular atom, he split the universe instead.”

     “That makes sense,” said Chuck.

     “How so?” asked Audrey.

     “You either split an atom, or you split everything else around it,” said Chuck. “Same difference. I may have been drawing comics on the back of my homework, but I gleaned at least that much from high school science class.”

     “That must have been some atom,” said Audrey.

     “You’re right, young man,” said Seedy. “That’s more or less what happened. And when it did, half of us twelve scientist were thrown into one dimension, and half into the other. That’s why Rex eventually built the Time Turntable—he was so pissed off that he wasn’t in the universe where they were building Megaton Man.”

     “That’s how America ended up with two different Nuclear-Powered Heroes,” said Avie. “Two different Americas—two different dimensions.”

     Avie and I looked at one another. “And two different Alices,” we both said at the same time.

     “Again, you’ll have to get Rex Rigid to explain all that,” said Seedy. “That’s what happens in Multimensional theory—universes keep multiplying all the time. Only, they’re not supposed to recombine, as I understand it. But evidently, in the last few years, they have—I’m sure all that crossing over is what did it.” Then, Seedy looked intently at Avie and me. “What did you say, just a moment ago? About Alice?”

     I said, “When this Thirteenth Scientist split the universe in two, your team—the Meltdown team—was thrown into one dimension, and the Megaton team into another. But each dimension was identical, at least at first. Identical Americas, identical Doomsday Factories…”

     “And identical Alice Jameses,” said Avie. “Our Mama—your daughter,” she said to Seedy.

     “She’s still convinced you’re dead,” I said.

     The old woman rose up from the stool. “Oh, dear Lord,” she said. She was obviously making an effort to grasp a fact she’d somehow long suppressed. “It never occurred to me—I never allowed myself to think—that in each dimension, I had children. When I went home that night, after the split, there was Alice and Rodney, safe and sound. I still had them—that’s all that mattered to me. But I blocked out an uglier truth from my mind…”

     “That in the other dimension, Alice and Rodney’s mother never came home,” said Avie. “Our mother and uncle never saw you again, Grandma.”

     Tears welled up in Seedy’s eyes as she looked at us. “You’re my granddaughters!” she exclaimed. She hugged the both of us so tightly I thought she was going to break my back—even with my megapowered strength. She was strong for an old lady.

     “Is Avie a megahero, too?” I heard Charlie ask Audrey.

     “I don’t think so,” said Audrey. “Just a theater major. You’re fly’s still open, by the way.”

     Charlie zipped up his pants, smirking. “Could have fooled me.”

     “Does this mean my Alice and Rodney are still alive?” asked Seedy, letting us go, tears streaming down her face.

     “We’ve got some good news, and we’ve got some bad news, Grandma Seedy,” said Avie. “The bad news is Uncle Rodney died before we were born—but the good news is you’ve got one Alice left.”

     The both of us were crying now, too.

     “Mama’s going to have a heart attack,” I said.