If Trent Phloog was Megaton Man, or used to be, he’d clearly undergone a radical change of heart. Instead of the cavalier Megahero who had spurned Stella’s pursuit of a relationship back in Megatropolis, he was now a normal, mild-mannered Civilian—and an underemployed autodidact—in Ann Arbor who now wanted desperately to play a part in his baby-mama’s life—any part at all.
And to prove it, Trent waited on Stella hand and foot—fetching her pillows so she could lay on the sofa in the living room; giving her a foot massage after a long day at school; and setting out her textbooks, writing instruments, and lined paper on the dining room table so she could get right to her homework—and this was all within the first fifteen minutes of having shown up in our Ann Street living room. He even offered to type up Stella’s class notes; Stella was delighted at first—until he turned out to be a terrible typist. How Trent Phloog had ever faked it all those years as a reporter for The Manhattan Project, I’ll never know.
Later, I asked Stella how Trent had managed to find her. She said Trent had just run into her that afternoon on the Diag. He practically begged her to give him a second—or was it a third?—chance. “That is so romantic!” I exclaimed. I literally teared up.
Stella, however, had mixed feelings. “If my feet hadn’t been completely killing me, and if my book bag hadn’t felt like it weighed a ton, I’d have told him to get back into his VW and drive into the Huron River.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You must still have some feelings for him. What he’s doing is so sweet…”
But Stella saw things differently. Not only was his about-face on the idea of a relationship a bit much to take in; he was also physically so completely different. Broad-shouldered, grotesquely over-muscled (in my view), Megaton Man had swept the sheltered wallflower See-Thru Girl off her feet; but skinny, blond, and unimposing, Civilian Trent Phloog did not get Stella’s motor running.
“I thought I was being put on at first, like some kind of college prank,” said Stella. “If he hadn’t kept saying ‘Woo!’ all the time, I might never have recognized him.”
I had to agree. Based on her descriptions of Megaton Man and their night of passionate love on the rooftops of New York, I thought maybe Trent was her brother.
“Oh, God!” said Stella at that suggestion. “Please—he’s nothing like my brother.”
“What do you suppose happened to him—to Megaton Man—after you left Central Park?” I wondered. “What could have turned him into a normal Civilian again? Or was he always able to change from one identity to the other—like with some magic word?”
Stella said he did have a magic word—“Overkill!”—but that it didn’t do much but cause a loud boom and leave soot everywhere. Megaton Man was always Megaton Man—in other words, he was always a musclebound Megahero—even when he put on a suit and fedora and pretended to be a mild-mannered cub reporter for The Manhattan Project.
“isn’t it better this way?” I said. “You want a relationship with a person, not a body—and Trent the way he is now fits better into your plan of living a normal life, doesn’t he?”
She couldn’t argue with my logic. But I got the sense that she was still stuck on the grotesquely over-muscled Megahero who had swept her off her feet.
Stella may not have gotten back together with Trent—after all, she was preoccupied with her delivery a few weeks away—but Trent was definitely back in her life once more. Pammy reasoned that even if Trent only served as Stella’s lapdog these last few weeks of her pregnancy, he’d still be making himself infinitely invaluable around the household. Stella was making every effort to get ahead in all her classes, and by the time she would be back on her feet it would practically be finals. Even after the semester ended, taking care of a newborn baby was going to be a full-time job, and Stella was going to need all the help she could get.
I have to admit it was nice having a man around the house, even if Trent wasn’t nearly as handy as Daddy. Frankly, Trent was a klutz—Once he washed a red shirt in a load of Stella’s white underwear; another time he ran the dryer just for a single pair of socks—which almost gave Pammy a conniption. But the three of us gals never had to wash another dish after a meal or clean the bathrooms for the rest of the semester, and the kitchen floor even got mopped and the dining room rug vacuumed once in a while—which probably hadn’t happened since Pammy and Stella had moved in. He did land a part-time job—two of them: one at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore, selling books during the day—he got to wear a lanyard with a nametag—and the other delivering pizzas in the evenings for Bimbo’s Roadhouse Pizza Shack with his VW.
After a week of sleeping on the floor, Trent used his first paychecks from Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore and Bimbo’s Roadhouse Pizza Shack to buy himself a new bed. Daddy came out with the pickup to help him bring it home from the store to save on delivery. I think Daddy liked Trent well enough; but after they got the mattress and box spring upstairs, I overheard Daddy give Trent a little talk.
“You do whatever you like on this bed with the other two; that’s your business,” he said. “But you touch my Sissy, you’ll be sorry.” His Cajun accent always came out when he was serious, and he was deadly serious.
I heard Trent say “Woo!” from my room across the hall, with the door closed. I wanted to tell Daddy: Do you realize you’re talking to America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero? Do you realize he could incinerate you with just a dirty look?
But even if Trent had been in his Megaton Man form, Daddy would have had no problem saying the same thing right to his face.
By the third week of March, the weather had already become considerably warmer, so much so that we were able to pull down the weather stripping my daddy had put up in early December to let in some fresh air—but not yet so warm as to need to call for the window screens to be brought down from the attic.
In other ways, Trent tried to make himself as useful around the Ann Street house as possible. One afternoon, Trent brought back a load of firewood. He had gone somewhere and loaded up the back seat of his tiny VW Beetle—he had a heck of a time sweeping it clean after. I don’t know why he didn’t ask Daddy to borrow the pickup—I suppose he was a little intimidated by Daddy. Besides, we already had a stockpile of wood; even if we had been able to use the fireplace, it would have lasted us for years. I watched him from the kitchen window; the way Trent handled an ax was a caution. I thought for sure he’d lose some fingers or toes, the way he was out there swinging in the back yard. Frustrated, he slipped on Megaton Man’s laser-beam goggles to finish the job in record time.
While he was stacking up the wood he’d cut, I went out to hang up my wet laundry on a line slung from the garage to the. “So, who is Megaton Man trying to forget—Pammy or Stella?” I teased him “It’s going to be a little difficult, isn’t it—considering you live with them both.”
I must have startled him, because he tried to hide his laser-goggles behind his back. “I told you,” he said. “That thing about me being Megaton Man—it was just a rumor.” But as he went through his routine denials, his laser-goggles somehow went off; a high-powered particle-beam drilled into the ground, leaving a good-size hole in the middle of the yard. I found it kind of amusing, until he fell in and nearly broke his neck. I was also lucky to have escaped with my life.
Later, my daddy had a heck of a time plugging that hole with a truckload of busted up concrete, fill, and some sod; he said Trent had drilled so far down, he’d struck some sort of hitherto unknown cavern under Ann Street. I could tell the way he said it, Daddy was definitely beginning to dislike my male housemate.
Despite such occasional mishaps, Trent was sure industrious. I asked Pammy one day, “When does he find the time to be Megaton Man?” I imagined that he was still on call in case the government ever needed him for some national emergency.
“I don’t think he is Megaton Man anymore,” said Pammy. “Something must have happened in Central Park”—she had no idea what it was—“that permanently changed Trent Phloog into a normal Civilian forever.”
One thing that was definitely different about having a man crash at our little commune was that modesty dictated we gals wear a little bit more than our usual shorts and T-shirts around the house, to which we had become accustomed. Still, with the warmer weather, it wasn’t like we were going to be wearing layers of long-johns or parkas anyhow. Whenever I did show some skin, I could sense Trent surreptitious, appraising glances. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome feeling.
Another odd thing about the spring semester—and for some reason I want to associate this with the unseasonably warm early spring—is I seemed to have inexplicably grown since the past summer. I noticed this because when I tried on my skinny jeans—I had worn them most of my freshman year but had ditched them for sweatpants the next fall—they fit again. My seat and thighs had slimmed down; the only problem was the legs were short over my ankles. I marked my height against the doorjamb—I was only about five-two when I had last measured myself, which was ages ago back home in Detroit—and when I found a yardstick to measure the mark, I was three-quarters of an inch taller.
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Late growth spurts were not an uncommon thing in my family. But I was already twenty, and my body still wasn’t through. I would go on to grow at least another two full inches before the following Christmas. As I say, my legs got longer and my butt felt slimmer—although my chest was still virtually as flat as a board—but I guess you can’t have everything. I was never going to be as shapely as Stella, who—my God, by the time she was ready to deliver had bigger boobs than any baby was ever going to need. I did experience some short-lived skin breakouts and stuff, but for the most part I was starting to feel a little more attractive and confident about myself.
As for my newest roommate: If this skinny white dude had once been the Man of Molecules, he certainly didn’t seem like the type to me. Megaton Man reputedly had enough muscles for ten men, and was supposedly as dumb as mud. But Civilian Trent Phloog didn’t strike me as stupid at all. He may not exactly have been an intellectual, but as far as autodidacts go, he seemed earnest and sincere enough. In any spare moment he had, he was always reading some used book or other he’d brought home with him—usually some egg-headed tome on history or philosophy or whatnot. His lips moved while he read, which was kind of endearing. He was forever talking excitedly about the latest public lecture he’d attended somewhere on campus, and he was always interested to hear about the classes in sociology and politics I was taking. Stella wouldn’t bother telling Trent anything about the classes she was taking; he couldn’t follow all the math and science that was her bread and butter.
I think Trent would have most liked discussing ideas and culture and stuff with Pammy, whom he considered worldly—but she could be more than a little intimidating intellectually, and not just because she was a professor. I think what Pammy had said was right—back in New York, Megaton Man had had a crush on her, and Trent seemed more than a little stuck on her still. But I suppose he was too nervous, or maybe ashamed of his lack of a formal education, to try to engage with Pammy on that level at all.
Poor Trent. Here he was, living in the same house with the woman he’d gotten pregnant but no longer wanted his body and the woman he placed on some intellectual pedestal who would forever out of his league. Maybe that’s why he felt so comfortable talking with me.
At least he wasn’t given to extremes, like a lot of goofball hipsters who hung around college towns tended to be: Old hippies who grew their hair long, studied the Bermuda Triangle, and raised marijuana out in the woods by some lake or whatever. For Ann Arbor, Trent was square; he was the oldest of us, about thirty. Stella was younger by a couple years; but despite her initial naiveté, she was even older than Pammy, who acted the most mature. I was the baby of the house, so to speak—although I was soon to be displaced in that regard. Trent may not have been able to keep up with a lot of the high-flown discussions one could get into in a college town—and he sure said “Woo!” an awful lot—but at least he wasn’t a jerk or know-it-all or anything. He just seemed like a fairly square, down to earth, middle-class Civilian.
One pleasant spring day, I was coming home to Ann Street. I spotted Trent on the front-porch swing, which he must have hooked back up to enjoy the fine weather; he was sound asleep, with an open used book lying face-down across his chest. I tried slipping in the front door without disturbing him—I should have gone around back—but the creaky planks of the porch woke him. “Oh, hi, Clarissa,” he said sleepily. “I must have dozed off.”
“You’ve been running yourself ragged,” I said. “Maybe you do have the strength of ten men. I’ll bet you didn’t work as hard when you were Megaton Man as you have since you’ve been in Ann Arbor.”
“No, I didn’t, that’s for sure,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch. “I mean…Woo! Look at the time!” He suddenly bolted upright; the book went flying. He was late picking up Stella from school or going to work at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore (I knew it had to be one of those two things because he sprinted off on foot down Ann Street, toward downtown. If it had been Bimbo’s Roadhouse Pizza Shack, he’d have hopped into his Volkswagen).
I said to myself, “I wonder if he’ll remain as industrious if Stella’s kid turns out to have pointy ears.”
Although Trent tried to keep up the pretense that he had never been Megaton Man as far as Pammy and I were concerned, Stella obviously knew. And he filled her in as best he could on what had transpired in Central Park after her departure, and she in turn told me and Pammy the story, as best as she could understand it.
Apparently, Megaton Man had indeed lost his Megapowers indirectly because of the ensuing mêlée. From what Stella could piece together, everybody was wrestling and fisticuffing and whatnot, and the first casualty after Uncle Farley’s—the Original Golden Age Megaton Man’s—heart attack was some big, bulky robot called the Contraptoid, who apparently had a jaw of glass and folded like a piece of tin foil.
What had been powering this Contraptoid was this object I mentioned before—the Cosmic Cue-Ball—an orb of tremendous power that all the Mega-beings in New York had been coveting. When the crumpled Contraptoid started leaking weirdly colored geometric particles of radiation, Yarn Man—who had just returned from the Forbidden Future on the Time Turntable—got curious and opened up the robot’s battery compartment. Why anybody would pull something that stupid, I don’t know.
So that’s how the Cosmic Cue-Ball got loose. And Megaton Man, who was still in shock because his Uncle Farley had keeled over, and his pregnant ex-girlfriend had just paid him a visit, and who was distracted by a million other things—like all the Megavillains who were ganging up on him and beating his head it—somehow managed to swallow the Cosmic Cue-Ball. That’s right—it flew right down his gullet.
Now, when you are already the most overwhelmingly strong Megahero who quite possibly had ever lived, it can be somewhat risky to eat the most powerful object in the universe. And, accordingly, Megaton Man supposedly swelled up several sizes after ingesting the Cosmic Cue-Ball, becoming Gigaton Man. And then he and his arch-nemesis Bad Guy—who, as you recall, was calling himself Good Guy—got souped up, courtesy of Mars—the God of War, not one of the partyers in the saucer. Again, don’t ask me to explain any of this, because I could barely follow what Stella told, based on what Trent had revealed to her.
But after Gigaton Man and Good Guy kicked the crap out of each other for several hours—and there were some unconfirmed reports that they flattened Manhattan Island in the process, they were kind of spent. This Mars, God of War guy took Good Guy-Bad Guy off to heaven or wherever, and Gigaton Man deflated back to being Megaton Man. Then Megaton Man deflated back to ordinary Civilian Trent Phloog. And that’s how Megaton Man lost his Megapowers.
And Trent Phloog, suddenly without all his Megapowers and whatnot, suddenly realized, “Good Lord! The See-Thru Girl is going to have my baby!” Only she wasn’t the See-Thru Girl anymore; she was just Stella Starlight, college student at Arbor State University. And so Civilian Trent borrowed the gay Manhattan Project copyboy’s green Volkswagen Beetle, and drove here to Ann Arbor. And somewhere along the line, while nobody was looking, Manhattan reverted back to normal, as if no cataclysmic fight scene had ever taken place.
None of this made any more sense to me than the algebra three class that was threatening to sink my untarnished grade point average that semester, so I tried not to scrutinize it too carefully. My headspace was much too limited. But I did gather that while Trent had made this effort to come to Michigan to be with the mother-to-be of his as-yet unborn child, she was cool to him. He had twice snubbed her when he was big, buff Megahero, and now that he was a skinny white dude who seemed more like a brother, she didn’t seem to feel much of a spark at all.
A few days later, Pammy and I sat out on the front porch swing, sipping some coffee or something. She had just picked up some new cushions, and Stella was off at some library and Trent was at the bookstore. I asked Pammy what she made of Stella’s account of Trent’s account of what had transpired in Central Park and losing his powers and all. Pammy said she hadn’t been able to secure a copy of The Manhattan Project on the day of the mêlée, but there had been conflicting media reports of mass hallucinations and panic, somewhat akin to what occurred after the Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. But there had been no significant damage reported in New York City on that day.
“What do you think about this whole Cosmic Cue-Ball business?” I asked her. “Do you think that’s what caused Megaton Man to lose his powers?”
“I can’t speak to the veracity of that,” said Pammy. “But whatever extinguished his powers, it certainly hasn’t extinguished his libido. And it’s too bad, too—because Trent sure isn’t getting any from Stella.” Pammy was convinced that Trent still had a crush on her. “All those muscles were a complete turn-off for me,” she said, “even though I think that’s exactly the kind of thing Stella was into.”
I had to side with Pammy on taste. I had seen pictures of Megaton Man; he looked like a giant walnut on steroids. “I prefer the soft, puffy type myself,” I said.
“The funny thing is,” said Pammy, “I could almost go for Trent, the way he is now.”
“Really?” I said. That would come as welcome news to Trent. “Why don’t you?”
“Oh, he’s still hoping for some kind of relationship with the mother of his child,” said Pammy. “I have no desire to interfere with that, no matter how remote the possibility. Then, of course, there’s Matt.” That was the first time Pammy ever named the saxophonist with the highly articulate embouchure. “God knows where that thing is going,” she said, with a certain resignation. Matt was also seeing an older woman who was raising a child from a previous marriage.
For crying out loud, did anybody have a traditional, above-board relationship anymore?
“But you should take a shot at him, Clarissa.”
This was such a non sequitur; I didn’t know who she was referring to at first.
“Me? Trent?” I said. “Good Lord!” I had only brought up the subject because I’m a snoop who has no life of her own.
“That’s why you were asking, wasn’t it?” Pammy replied. “I see the way Trent looks at you; I think you stand a good chance.” Oh, great. So Pammy would never dream of interfering in the possibility of Trent and Stella getting back together, but thinks it’s just fine for little ol’ virgin Clarissa James to go stepping into the middle of it. “I don’t think you’d be betraying anybody, at any rate,” said Pammy confidently. Apparently, Stella and Trent had tried cuddling or taking a nap or fooling around or something, and the results had been negative.
“Ew, gross—” I said. “Don’t tell me that!” Such information wasn’t making the prospect of hitting on Trent any more enticing. “Besides, Stella’s attitude might change,” I reasoned. “The baby comes along; they start getting sentimental all over again….” I had plenty of aunts and uncles, with on-again, off-again romantic entanglements.
“Babies can also do the opposite, you know,” said Pammy. “A couple can go hot and heavy for a while, then cool off, never to rekindle the spark. Personally, I don’t think Trent and Stella will ever have more of relationship than a platonic parenting partnership to raise their child. And I hope them the best. But, suit yourself. Only, you’re lucky he doesn’t wear those laser-goggles of his all the time; he’d burn a hole clean through the seat of your pants.”