I didn’t know how to express my concerns to Trent: that we were all in grave danger, civilian and megahero alike; that malevolent scientists had split the universe apart, then recombined it, and might be trying to split it apart yet again; or that the only thing holding this crazy Everything-but-the-Kitchen Sinkverse together at the moment might be the three-year old offspring of Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl, who at that very moment was busy chasing squirrels with a squirt gun in Broadway Park in Ann Arbor.
“I have a suspicion the Time Turntable’s to blame,” I explained to Trent, as we walked through the leaf-strewn lawn several paces behind Simon. I had seen that throbbing, pulsating platter spinning in the back yard at Ann Street a couple Halloweens ago; it had brought Kozmik Kat, who was searching for a missing Yarn Man, who was lost on a bender. “You said yourself it could be used to cross dimensions as easily as travel through time. Maybe megaheroes weren’t meant to crossover between dimensions so much. It only leads to complications.”
“There certainly was a lot of random table-hopping back when I was Megaton Man,” said Trent. “Perhaps it corrupted the space-time continuum—polluted the two dimensions—brought them into collision…”
“And maybe dragged a few other realities into the mix,” I said. “Like ones where UFOs and flying saucers from Mars are real, and where funny animals talk, and heroes like Roman Man step out classical mythology…”
“I was being facetious,” said Trent. “That’s all a bunch of gobbledygook, if you ask me. Existence is absurd any way you slice it. Get over it. Deal with the here and now.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “There’s a lot of weird shit that’s been happening lately, and there’s no other explanation. More importantly, my grandma seems to think reality could split apart again—she suddenly had to return to Washington, D.C. or somewhere to convene some urgent meeting about it.” We both watched Simon rolling around in the leaves ahead of us. “I wonder if Rex Rigid built the Time Turntable with the express purpose of reuniting the split universe, and now he regrets it, and is trying to reverse it. He was one of the thirteen scientists, you know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Clarissa,” said Trent, exasperated. “But if you’re asking me if I think Rex Rigid is a megavillain, I have to say you’re just nuts. Look, I have a lot of reasons to dislike him—he’s Stella’s jealous ex-husband, for one thing—but I doubt he has any kind of diabolical scheme on that level. If anything, he’s driven by an overzealous curiosity to explore the unknown. If he did somehow mash up two realities, it had to have been an accident, an unintended consequence. A lot of Rex’s theorizing may have gone over my head, but at least he built crazy gizmos that really worked, at least half the time, and that’s more than I can say for a charlatan like Stella’s future advisor. I don’t think that fellow’s ever even set foot in a working laboratory; he’s just full of a lot of hot air and big words, pronounced with a fancy foreign accent.” Trent was now back to that sore subject. “I guess Stella’s not as interested in the practical aspect of science, which is understandable, after the experience she had with Rex and the Megatropolis Quartet. She’s more attracted to what she calls the poetics of science—the purely speculative, almost theological side. But I think she’s traded down in terms of mad scientists, if you ask me.”
I recalled the backstory Stella told me when I met her four years earlier, when she had first arrived in Ann Arbor. She told she had become Rex Rigid’s—Liquid Man’s—intern as a junior at some other college back east, which had disrupted her college education years before. She had always had the ability to turn naked with but a thought, and as the See-Thru Girl, she became a part of Rex’s megahero team, the Quantum Quest Quartet, along with Yarn Man and Stella’s half-brother, Chuck Roast—the Human Meltdown. Stella eventually wed Rex, but living in their laboratory-headquarters atop a skyscraper in New York became a stifling, confining prison. Besides, Rex Rigid was actually flaccid—irony of ironies—so they never could consummate. Seeking to escape her loveless marriage, Stella took refuge in the overly-muscled arms of Megaton Man—Trent Phloog. But the Man of Molecules balked when Stella announced she was leaving Rex and wanted to shack up with the Man of Molecules. Rebuffed and heartbroken, Stella eventually up and left Megatropolis entirely, tagging along with Pamela Jointly, a controversial columnist who happened to burned out on megaheroics too and was headed for Ann Arbor on a teaching fellowship. At the time, Stella was still unaware she had conceived Megaton Man’s love child; later, when Trent lost his megapowers by swallowing the Cosmic Cue-Ball in Central Park, he followed Stella to Ann Arbor, hoping to be a part of his son’s life as an everyday civilian.
A lot else had happened in the three and a half years since, including me becoming friends and housemates with Stella and Pammy; me losing my virginity with Yarn Man; and me eventually becoming the irrepressible Ms. Megaton Man. And, last but not least—after months of long, simmering sexual tensions—finally banging Trent myself, but without those big, muscly Megaton Man arms.
Now, here we were, Trent and I, watching the love child he’d made with Stella, who was still tireless running around like a madman through the leaves of Broadway Park.
I reached and pulled Trent’s hand out of his pocket and held it; he didn’t pull away. We strolled across the lawn slowly, silently, through the leaves, following Simon who was yards ahead. The sun was beginning to drop behind the hills above the park; the breeze was becoming noticeably colder down by the river. I drew up my own denim jacket, clutching the strap of my handbag holding the cape, buttons, and visor of my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, which I wore under my street clothes, and was glad was keeping me warm.
There were a fewer people jogging and biking around the park at this hour, and a few more people fishing, but no one seemed to notice a black girl holding a white man’s hand. Or if they did, they didn’t seem to care.
“I chatted with Stella this afternoon, when I got here,” I said. “She doesn’t seem all that possessive of you.” This was something of an understatement.
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” said Trent.
I pulled my hand out of his and turned toward him. “What do mean? Do you want her to be?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, no, of course not. I don’t love her in that way—I told you that; we just don’t connect on that level. I love her in a lot of other ways; she’s the mother of Simon; I respect her. But we’re too much alike in certain ways; we think too much alike. We’re more like brother and sister, sometimes. It’s not a passionate thing.”
He reached for my hand but I stuffed it in my denim jacket pocket.
“That’s not what you told me in Detroit,” I reminded him. “You said you were doing it three times a week, in every room in the house.”
“But you know how she is,” said Trent. “She’s almost a split personality. It’s sudden, mechanical with her—and when it’s over, there’s no discussion of it. She goes back to her theory homework and her intellectualizing or whatever, or she’s tending to Simon as the warmest mother you’ve even seen. But when she’s done with me, she’s done—sexually, I’m like an appliance that’s stored away in the closet. She’s so compartmentalized; it’s scary. Sometimes it’s like I’m not even living with a wholly-integrated woman, but a tessellation of disparate fragments.”
Strangely, this comported with what Stella had told me. I knew only too well how she could be stubborn in her way of viewing things: There were clear boundaries between sex, motherhood, and school, in her mind. She had to keep all these things separate, because of whatever traumas, heartbreaks, and setbacks she’d endured. They formed a constellation, not an organic whole.
Trent put his hands back in his pockets, and we resumed strolling through the leaves.
“I just mean, it’s not like with you,” he said.
I felt a tear forming in the corner of my eye. “You’ve got a great kid.”
“Yeah,” said Trent. “That’s one thing to show for my non-descript career as a megahero.”
“What are you talking about? You were America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero at one time—the most powerful being in the world.”
“Ms. Megaton Man is much better suited for that role than Megaton Man ever was,” said Trent. “You are America, Clarissa. You’re black—and white—and red, yellow, and blue all over.”
I laughed. “You mean, because I happen to be of mixed-race, that’s supposed to make me a better megahero?” I said. “All I use this costume for is to fly back and forth from Detroit to Ann Arbor.”
“You beat the Human Meltdown,” said Trent, “and even Megaton Man had a tough time with Chuck.” He rubbed his chin as if still recalling a sock in the jaw he once received from Chuck Roast, the way Avie frequently rubbed her shoulder where I had angrily hit her. “You saved your sister, Clarissa. And you liberated a whole team of Youthful Permutations from imprisonment—or at least exploitation—in Megatropolis. That’s not doing too badly so far.”
I took Trent’s hand again; we followed Simon down to the river’s edge, where some Canadian geese on their way up north had momentarily flocked.
It was now nearly dark, and freezing. We corralled Simon and started heading up the slope to State Street. With the downtown and main campus of the college town to the south of us, in the direction we were walking, the differences between Ann Arbor and Detroit struck me in a way they never quite had before when I had lived here. For one thing, it was safe here in the park at twilight, and it would be safe to walk around the Arbor State main campus until well after midnight, or at least it felt so; whereas near the Warren Woodward University in the highly urban North Cass District of Detroit, the feeling would be growing tense at this hour. White suburbanites would be packing into their cars and on their way home; the hardened denizens who remained in the city for the most part would retreat indoors.
If Trent and I were to continue holding hands all over downtown Ann Arbor, I was reasonably certainly hardly anyone in this liberal enclave would look askance at an interracial couple, whereas I know we would have drawn dirty looks—even scowls—in Detroit. I recalled the looks my parents always got, a white man and a black woman with mixed-race daughters, and the looks I and my daddy got, a white father with his black daughter, while I was growing up in Detroit.
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Maybe I wanted to tempt fate when I suggested to Trent, “Let’s walk through downtown.” From where we were in the park, it was just a few blocks away, and I didn’t feel like returning to the Ann Street house so early before Stella got home. “I’d like to stop at the bookstore and look up a thing or two on Multimensional Theory,” I said, “even though I know you’ve been working there all day.”
“Sure, we can kill time there,” said Trent. “If we time it right, we can be by the Modern Language Building about the time Stella comes out from her lecture. We can all walk back home together.”
By now we had crossed the lawn and nearly had come to the roadway.
That’s when I first sensed the first vibration on the short hairs on the back of my neck. It was an unsettling rumble, rising up from the ground through my feet and echoing from surrounding buildings before my eardrums had consciously perceived it.
It wasn’t just the normal traffic on the roadway. Something was wrong.
If I had been experienced, I would have noticed my shoulder bag vibrating; my cape, buttons, and visor were vibrating, trying to warn me of some danger.
“Trent, stop,” I said.
We froze in our tracks. “What is it?” he asked. Now he could feel it, too.
Instinctively, I scanned the horizon. Past the traffic of the road, over the trees and houses on the hill, the Alberti Memorial tower was visible, towering over Ann Arbor’s small downtown and campus, darkly silhouetted against the darkening, clear-blue sky. Lanterns were lit in the tower’s topmost, tall-arched windows. A puff of white smoke was venting out from one of these apertures, obscuring the light. A red-hot dot broke through the cloud, turning dark against the white smoke. The sound of a boom, delayed only by a fraction of a second, reached my ears.
“Trent, Simon—get behind me!” I shouted.
It may have been half a mile away, and dusk, but I could see it clearly—someone had fired a projectile from atop the tower, and it was racing directly toward us.
Trent’s attention had been on Simon; I had to grab them both and yank them backwards, something I could only have done with my Ms. Megaton Man strength. They tumbled behind me onto the grass while I faced front, never taking my eyes off the approaching missile.
“Run!” I shouted. “Find some rocks, bushes, trees, something.” I turned quickly and looked about the park; there was nothing but exposed lawn for hundreds of feet in every direction, all the way the edge of the river. We were sitting ducks.
Trent was picking himself up off the ground, setting his glasses back on his nose. By then, the piercing whistle of a rocket had reached our ears. Trent looked up; now he clearly saw it. The whistle grew louder.
“Woo!” he said, reaching for Simon, who was sitting up only a few feet away. I whirled quickly toward the rocket, whatever it was. We were in the middle of the grassy lawn, and there was nothing to hide behind for many yards in any direction.
Trent picked up Simon and started running toward the river. I ran after them, but it was clear we wouldn’t reach any useful protective barrier on the periphery of the park in time.
I kept looking over my shoulder; the dot was only becoming bigger. The few joggers, bikers, skate boarders, and others who remained in the park at that hour had also heard the sound; they fled in a panic in every direction. This made our path even more unclear; we were likely to collide with someone else trying to flee.
We raced toward a stand of trees, perpendicular to the missile’s path, but not fast enough to evade its heat-seeking targeting system. At least there were no innocent bystanders in the vicinity. I shoved Trent down onto the grass—he and Simon along with him—and turned toward the quickly approaching missile, now less than a block away; I leaped into the air, fully clothed, and flew straight toward it.
A dozen feet over the clearing, I turned my back toward the projectile in midair. I didn’t think to ask my shoulder blades what they thought—they might have told me this was a dumb move.
If I felt the sharp nose of the missile jabbing into my back, it was only a microsecond before I felt the concussive shockwave of the explosion—the two events occurring so close together as to feel simultaneous. The only thing I knew for sure was the shell hadn’t penetrated my uniform, or my body.
In the aftermath all time, space, and gravity lost their meaning. Stunned, I picked myself up off the turf a few moments later, and several yards away from Trent and Simon—how long I had blacked out I had no idea. Smoking red and white shrapnel lay scattered over the park lawn for several yards in every direction, and a serious patch of earth had also been scorched. Trent, some distance away, was moving—the grey Abyssinian Wolves T-shirt he wore under his jacket was torn and speckled with blood; a stray piece or two of shrapnel had nicked him. But he and little Simon—who was understandably crying—seemed otherwise unharmed.
My civilian clothing was completely shredded, as were my shoes and backpack; little more than burnt scraps of fabric still clung to my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, which I quickly shook off. Dusting off my blue body suit, I realized I was barefoot; the yellow gloves and boots that had been inside by backpack along with my cape, buttons, and visor were scattered in four directions. At first, I couldn’t even spot my cape; freed from the bag, it had already taken flight. My visor, however, was within arm’s reach.
I snapped to attention when I realized the same vibration that served as the prelude to the first volley was happening again, this time rising directly through my toes. My ears were cloudy, ringing; no sound could penetrate them, but the vibrations were palpable Whoever was on the tower had just fired a second shot.
Brushing granules of glass—all that remained of my spectacles—from my cheeks and eyebrows, I snapped on my visor; I tapped the stems and instinctively shouted “Cape!” as if I expected my costume to regroup by itself. The visor spotted it for me, already racing to intercept the missile. “What are you doing?” I shouted. “You’re just a cape! You can’t stop a missile.” I had to admire the little red flapper’s courage.
I ran and took off after my cape, not even trying to focus my eyes. I knew I was zooming toward downtown—my visor had already done the work of locking onto the cloud of smoke and the second missile for me. As I caught up to my cap, the red cloth and brass buttons swooped down and clasped onto my body suit at my collar bones automatically. Fists in front of me, I raced toward the tower, but this motion made my back ache. Boy, could I feel my trapezius—this was where the first missile had detonated, right between my shoulder blades.
The second missile was already halfway toward to the park as I flew over the steep, tree-covered hillside. I was moving at such blinding speed, impulsively, that everything seemed in slow motion. I knew without thinking I would have to intercept this projectile in midair if I wanted to keep it from reaching Trent and Simon, except that now, instead of a sparsely-populated section of the park, a neighborhood of apartments, houses, churches, and a few remote academic facilities lay spread below me.
That meant catching this one hot, in mid-air, and redirecting it into the sky. I could only hope it would explode high enough so that any shards would burn out before reaching the ground—to minimize the possibility of starting any fires.
There were so many calculations going on in my mind in that moment it would be impossible for me to recreate an exact sequence of events. Suffice it to say I somehow managed to duck before intercepting the missile; I punch the underside of the rocket, deflecting it up into the sky—without immediately triggering its nose cone, which would have detonated it. I was sent downward by the same blow, but being dozens of feet above the rooftops, I was able to recover my footing, so to speak, and hover a hundred or so feet in the air.
The projectile climbed for several seconds—confusedly, it seemed to me—into the evening sky. I wondered for a moment if it might change directions, in which case I’d have to chase after it before it got to the park. Instead, it kind of climbed, then slowed, then fizzled—finally exploding out of sheer exasperation, I thought—creating a huge fireball above me, but affording the flaming metal fragments ample time to burn out and cool off, just as I hoped, before raining all over the off-campus neighborhood below.
Still in mid-air, I swiveled again, reorienting myself toward the tower. I was much closer now and didn’t hear the rumbling of preparations for another launch. Instead, I had the distinct sense I had the upper hand.
I zoomed toward the large, arched openings of the Alberti Memorial. Its topmost floor was a bell tower for a medieval keyboard instrument called a carillon that sounded regularly on the hour. These openings were blocked off by mesh screens to keep birds from flying in and leaving droppings on the bells, but the mesh screen had been pierced to allow a portable rocket launcher to fire through it. I slammed into the screen above this opening with the side of my body, bringing two stories of what was essentially black chain link fencing crashed down inside the tower.
Underneath the fallen screen, which now formed a crumpled netting, two red-clad figures with a large bazooka-like shoulder launcher scrambled to escape. A third was heading for an exit. There body suits were not exactly those of megaheroes, although they wore cowls and visors over their heads.
“Henchmen!” I said. I knew the type from TV shows and comic books.
Flying after them, I almost caught up to the last guy—the torso of his red body suit was emblazoned with a green octopus on a white disk; he had matching green eyewear over his red-hooded cowl. “The attempt has failed!” he shouted frantically into some kind of handheld walkie-talkie. “The target had a bodyguard!”
I wasn’t all that good at flying yet and was still a bit stunned from the earlier explosion. When he saw me lunge for him, all the henchman had to do to avoid my grasp was duck, and I went crashing into the far wall of the bell tower interior. While I was picking myself off the floor, he climbed up to the ledge of another arched opening; the screen has already been pushed back, leaving a gaping opening nine stories over the Arbor State campus. His partner in crime had already jumped to his death.
The henchman turned and shouted at me, “All hail immortal Krupp! Cut off one limb, and yet another will spite the nose on thy face!” He leapt—fell backwards, actually—through the opening behind him. He plunged to his death, screaming, “Aiieee!”
There was no way I could have caught him. By the time I leaned over the parapet to look down, all I saw were two splotches on the ground, a night-time crowd of students gathering around already. I looked around and spotted the missile launcher; it had the same green octopus etched on its barrel, along with the words, “The Arms of Krupp.” There was a crate of unfired missiles with the lid off, with two empty slots. I checked to make sure nothing was booby-trapped to explode. Satisfied the campus wasn’t facing a major terrorist event on top of an assassination attempt, I returned to the window. Below, where the two henchmen’s broken bodies lay, the crowd had already grown quite large. Within moments, a white van pulled up. I had a sneaking suspicion it would be an ICHHL vehicle—Preston Percy’s Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning—the quasi-espionage organization. Guys in white jumpsuits hopped out and were moving the bodies onto gurneys, no doubt to be quickly whisked away.
Wobbly, I stepped up onto the opening’s ledge, and dived from the window, swooping around the tower as I glided toward the ground. As I passed over the van, I could make out the markings:
Interred Cadavers—Humation, Hearse & Livery, Inc.
Free 24-Hour Service!
There was even a 1-800 number.
“Tasteless,” I said to myself.
I didn’t land at the scene. Instead, I flew back to Broadway Park to check on Trent and Simon. There, another white van had driven onto the lawn. This one read:
Incombustible Containment—High Hazard Liability, LLC.
ICHHL personnel—for some reason, the ones on the ground were always male, unlike the babes in outer space—in white suits were vacuuming up shard of metal with shop vacuum hoses. Secret Agent Preston Percy himself, in a dress shirt, tie, and slacks, and jacketless despite the chill in the air, calmly smoked a cigarette as Trent wiped tears from Simon’s eyes.
“What in the heck are the Arms of Krupp?” I asked.
“A bunch of evildoers,” said Preston casually. “Obviously, they want to off Megaton Man while he’s in civilian mode.”
Or maybe the Thirteenth Scientist was trying to split the universe apart again by killing the one, frail thing that held it all together: three-year old Simon Phloog, the Megaton-Meltdown.