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.
No one was ever there—not Michele Selket nor Doctor Messiah—when I arrived in the afternoons, and read fantastic popular literature well into the night. Michele had left me a reading list, as she’d promised, on her rich, mahogany desk, and I pulled down leather-bound volumes of Gnostic Tales, Planetary Demiurge, Astral Projection Stories, and Amazing Heresies, once-popular series known as the “pulps” because the cheap newsprint paper they were printed on that often seemed barely more processed and refined than raw wood pulp.
I already mentioned that the contents of the library was uncannily dust- and mold-free; it was probably the freshest-smelling and clean rare book collection or archive I’d ever been in. These bound volumes were particularly crisped. The issues, being sewn together, kept them miraculously supple and almost like-new; the old pulp magazines were in a lot better condition, at any rate, than the single deteriorating issues I would occasionally come across in comic book collector shops and used bookstores, even encased in Mylar.
I used Michel’s typewritten list as a springboard, reading select authors found throughout the series, which in some case spanned decades, each volume representing a year or half-year. The best stories were by names familiar to paperback readers, since most of the best stuff had been reprinted since the sixties: Emil Reardon Ryerson, Grover Edwin Honath, and Henry Potsdam Lipschitz. Emil Reardon Ryerson wrote about white men swinging from vines in African jungles and explorers of lost worlds hidden from the modern world beneath the Mariana Trench. Many of his concepts had long been adapted into simplified Hollywood staples, although the buffoonish athletes in loincloths who depicted his most famous heroes for kiddie matinees bore little resemblance to the more complex, savage, and sullen Lord Gloombridge and his exploits in the Hidden Necropolis of Nar.
Even more sensational was Ryerson’s swashbuckler hero Rhett Conried, an unabashed and unreconstructed frontier “Indian killer” in the Andrew Jackson mold, who’s pierced by a Native American medicine man’s lethal arrow and find his soul reincarnated on Saturn’s moon Titan, known to the locals as Whagool, in a perfect, ageless turquoise-skinned body—literally turquoise. There, he battles eight-armed slimy purple warriors and rides winged orange and magenta serpents to win the heart of the feral, perpetually half-nude maiden queen, the cadmium yellow-skinned and burnt orange-haired Letha Fahr.
More overtly erotic and sleazy were Grover Edwin Honath’s broadswordsman Herschel the Hibernian, a barely couth thug who never saw a flagon of ale or a large-bosomed hussy he could pass up, and probably never bothered to wash out his jock strap. Personally, I found his brutal exploits repugnant—I could almost smell his unbathed armpits and bad breath—although I had to admit Honath had a way with turgid, atmospheric imagery. Herschel easily could have been an inarticulate, tattooed biker in a more recent setting, although his prehistoric battles in kingdoms throughout the Levant and Asia—the racist depiction of “Orientals” even more crudely drawn than his uncouth, barely-civilized hero—were written in the 1920s.
Indeed, all of this material dated from the teens and twenties, including the occult nightmares of Henry Potsdam Lipschitz. Known as H.P. or Hank for short, Lipschitz was a somewhat spoiled Yankee who cracked up as a teenager, preventing him from pursuing college studies at one of the more prestigious boarding schools along the east coast, which he regarded as his birthright. His insane and repetitive stories obsessed on knowledge hidden from view by learned societies, that could only be ferreted out in locked attics and privately-funded excavations in north of the Hudson River. There, Lipschitz’s tortured protagonists, closet homosexuals and obsessive hypochondriacs compulsively self-medicating with near-lethal doses of absinthe, discovered esoteric knowledge—mostly that all of Demiurgical creation was dead set on annihilating all human life on earth—always had been and always will be—along with a taste for the finer things in life, like bad poetry and rancid caviar. What was most amazing about these stories, which were hardly scary at all although they certainly were creepy, was that billions of years of evolution had failed to wipe out frail, feckless jellyfish like H.P. Lipschitz.
Those were some of the bigger names of early American pulp fiction, although I sampled some short stories and novellas by authors now forgotten—mostly formulaic yarns about spaceship Noah’s Arks and planet-destroying rays and revived corpses flying off airless moons into outer space when mad scientist turn off the artificial gravity fields, and so on. Frankly, I don’t know what kept me reading this trash night after night, although it became addictive, and the frankly lesbian imagery of many of the Gnostic Tales covers got me more than a bit horny.
I also skimmed through a good many of the earlier, classic British and European works of the gaslight era—George Welton Flood, Niles Verdigris, Ogden Boyle Homer. Runaway hot-air balloons that end up on the moon, caverns bypassing the molten core of the earth to crystalline cities of ice, and exercise bicycles that warp time into doughnuts have all become classic themes of science fiction ever since. The protagonists of these stories, unfortunately, were more cardboard and bloodless than your average tax analyst, and really didn’t offer much to fantasize about sexually.
Maybe it was the THC that still lingered in my blood from a few days before, or just my brain turning to mush—or just the release of taking my mind off gearing up to graduate from college—but there was something trippy and other-worldly about all these stories.
Michele was right about another thing. Popular fantastic fiction amounted to a much more psychological robust, Master of Fine Arts in Literature experience than the campy coverless comic books I’d amassed of costumed crimefighters. Megaheroes weren’t a genre so much as a watered-down flea circus of genre concepts derived from this material, which was infinitely more subtle and nuanced by comparison. But only by comparison.
Compulsively, I did make copious notes, and found some recurring themes. Just as Michele had pointed out, very few of the storylines would be thinkable within the context of a Medieval Judao-Christian worldview. Rather, humans were savage, oversexed, filled with hubris and the zeal to discover new knowledge, reveling in primordial if perilous paradises, or otherwise getting to heaven under their own steam. There was no mechanism for salvation, grace, or divine intervention, unless it was a cruel daemonic spirit world hell-bent on torturing humanity.
We never had much of this stuff around when I was growing up. Avie was more likely to be the one who’d bring home a second-hand Ryerson paperback with a lurid Pedro Pistoletti cover featuring a semi-naked primitive wench, kneeling before some axe-wielding Viking like she was about to blow him while he’s trying to slaying an army of spear-hurling skeleton men, all rendered in oil paints like one of Cezanne’s rotting skulls. These books always seemed to disappear before Avie could finish them; presumably Mama, the avid church-goer, whisked them away. But this, I assumed, was to preserve our minds from rubbish.
Maybe it was to save our souls, too, although wading through these stories in the academic surroundings of the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute, they only seemed juvenile and silly.
***
I’d burned through another afternoon and night in the stacks and dozed off some time during the night, flopped on an oriental carpet and leaning against a leather-upholstered side chair, surrounded by stacks of volumes I’d pulled down from the shelves. As dawn seeped in through the windows, I thought about masturbating to some of the rocket-ship covers of Amazing Heresies, which always featured men with fishbowls over their heads and being humiliated and rendered impotent as tentacled aliens ravished knock-out looking babes whose boobs were strapped under what appeared to be bras made of metallic toilet plungers.
I was about to slip my hand down my pants to take the edge off before putting the tomes back on the shelves, grabbing my book bag, and heading home to show before class. But I was stopped when I heard a voice say, “Shouldn’t you be studying for your finals?”
I looked up and saw Doctor Messiah, standing before me like some Symbolist painting of some bearded, esoteric wise man with eyes that stare into your soul.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “I’m at over a hundred and six percent in all my classes so far this semester,” I said, with the pride of the over-achieving Dean’s List nerd. “Except for art history,” I gulped. “There, I’ve probably fallen to a B+.”
“It would probably save you time just to read these,” he said.
He extended his hand toward me; it held a couple of smaller, hardbound books—not newly published, but with pristine dustjackets, and unread. I hadn’t noticed him reaching for anything off the shelves; it had seemed that he had made the volumes materialize out of thin air.
“What are they?” I said, as I reached for them and took them.
I could read the answer for myself. One was Jock London: His Revelatory Adventures by Juan Philippí Sheppard; the other was Modernity, Utopia, and Imagining the Anti-Christ by Ernst Ian Fogelyn. Sheppard, a current writer of popular paperback science fiction, treated the fictional career of adventurer Dr. Edwin Edward “Jacques” Londres—who sported an incredible tan, a perpetually torn shirt, and a soiled pith helmet—as if they were historical and biographical. The stacks of the institute no doubt contained all 317 of his “esoteri-sagas,” as Sheppard dubbed them, although I hadn’t gotten to those. Part of Sheppard’s schtick was to restore some sense of “advent,” as a kind of religious coming-out party, the word “adventure,” which, thanks to hack writers like those I’d been reading, was term that had been reduced to a rather routine, escapist thrill-ride bled of all sense of the revelatory or transcendent.
Fogelyn, a twentieth-century German philosopher, was of that postwar school of quasi-fascist philosophers who still mourned the Protestant Reformation—which had failed to reform anything and only brought about endless schism, secularization, and ultimately atheism—and the dissolution of theocratic rule over Europe by a Church Militant and Triumphant. Fogelyn regarded every modern political movement from the Zionist kibbutz to City Beautiful urban planning as the dangerous resurgence of Demiurgical speculation after its millennia-long remission under Christendom. Presumably, he would have regarded a schlock fabulist like Hank Lipschitz an “intellectual swindler” like the anarchists, socialists, and psychoanalysts, that is if he paid any notice to popular fantastic fiction at all. As Michele suggested, such genre writing was the entertainment-opiate corollary to the modern radical political theories that Fogelyn blamed for causing untold strife, not to mention consigning how many millions of souls to hell, designed as it to subtly undermine the faith of the unwary, uncritical, semi-literate, and anti-intellectual working classes.
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“Each author in his own way is more than a bit fanatical,” explained Doctor Messiah. “But they’re useful in that you’ll get the main contours of what Michele was trying to convey to you in outline more quickly. Sheppard’s notion of a ‘Topham-Shipley Meteoric Family Tree’ is of special interest, in light of the fusion of Multimensions. And I’m sure you’ve already noted how clever planetary romancers subvert Biblical imagery with their own Edenic ape men and naked alien princesses—pure Gnosticism.”
“You’re blowing my mind, Doc,” I said. “Thanks.” I struggled to my feet with the books in his hands. “Sorry for making such a mess…guess I’ll set all these bound pulp volumes back on the shelves and get out of your hair.”
“What volumes?” he asked.
I looked around at my feet; there was nothing but oriental carpet. The material I’d pulled down from various shelves must have found their way back in proper order, of their own volition.
I looked around for Doc. He was gone.
I was alone again among the stacks.
***
Morning light was strengthening as I cut across the Warren Woodward campus back to my apartment. The Sheppard and Fogelyn books, which I would thereafter inextricably think of as a piece, were still in my hand. Outside, however, when I looked down at them, they appeared tattered and worn, whereas inside the institute they had seemed pristine and unread.
“Weird,” I said, and stuffed them into my book bag. “Hope I don’t get fined for degrading school property.”
I was past the main Pilafian and Yamasaki-designed campus buildings and cutting across the lawn of the expansive athletic fields when I heard footsteps of someone running alongside or me to catch up. By the sound, it seemed like a child or little person.
“How’s it hangin,’ babe?” a high-pitched by male voice said. “Long time, no see.”
“Anton Parsec, Partyer from Mars,” I said, looking down at the Jheri-curled elf who’d stolen his vibe from an MTV music video. “I was just reading about you. Did you know you were derived from motifs prevalent in early-twentieth-century American popular fantastic fiction?”
“I thought I was born of star-stuff in the quadrant on the opposite side of the galaxy,” he replied.
“Impossible. At the speed of light, it would take you centuries to reach Earth. You’d barely be to the nearest star to your own by now, if assuming you’d started in 1940.”
“You’re forgetting quarks, black-holes, and warp speed,” said Anton. “Plus, we aliens don’t experience time in any way you humans could recognize as linear.”
“Make-believe,” I said. “All pseudo-science fantasy, made up by starving typists hacking out drivel for schlock newsstand publishers at pennies per word. Did you know you were the product of the post-Christendom modern imagination designed to distract the unwary from the sacred teachings of the Bible? You’re a blasphemy with pointy ears.”
“I know I have my kinks,” said Anton. “But I’ve never had any complaints from Earth girls.”
“Never any boys?” I asked, wryly.
“Nah,” Anton replied. “I’ve always been more than man enough for myself.” He kissed the back of his own hand.
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Spoken like a true white boy trying to sound ghetto.”
“Why are you putting me down, Clarissa? I’m just trying to be friendly. Besides, I bring glad tidings of great joy from Ann Arbor.”
“Come to think of it, why wasn’t your saucer behind the garage on Ann Street, last time I checked?” I said. “Your elfin girlfriend, what’s ’er name—Polly—told me you were on a stakeout to retrieve the errant Mutanium Particle. What you do, go back to Mars and bug your parents?”
“Polly Parsec is my sister,” Anton corrected me. “And I told you, we’re not really from Mars—we just thought it sounded cool. We’re from across the galaxy. Boy, you Earthlings have minds like steel traps. And, for your information, the Mutanium Particle isn’t going to reappear”—he looked as some device strapped to his wrist that looked like a chronometer—“a date certain in another two years. Do you want the exact time and date? I’ll take a moment to calculate…you might want to write it down.”
“I can’t think past graduation in a few weeks, and I’m not making any more notes until I get to class,” I said. “Besides, no one can predict the future with any certainty except Karl Marx—and we’ll still be awaiting the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state long after the sun has burned to a cinder.”
“You’re starting to sound like Avie,” said Anton. “College is seeping into your mind.”
“Hey, you keep your hands off my little sister, you perv,” I scolded, pointing at him. “You haven’t been sleeping with her, have you?”
“A gentleman never tells,” said Anton.
“So, what did you want to tell me?”
“Only that you’re right, we are on a stakeout for the Mutanium Particle, and we want to keep an eye on our investment. But you’re also right, we did skip town for a little sightseeing, figuring that Dana chick and then the Human Meltdown could keep an eye on things on Ann Street. But we’re back now—as you know, Dana moved out. But Chuck Roast has split, too—he’s moving back to New York, even as we speak.”
“The Human Meltdown is no longer in Michigan?” I said, sniffing the air. “I wondered by the wind from the west smelled fresher this morning. What’s he doing in New York?”
“Joining the newly reformulated Megatropolis Quartet, of course,” said Anton.
“Who’ll be the fourth?” I asked. “Not Dana; Domina can’t stand the Human Meltdown.”
“No, I can’t say that I know Dana’s plans, not that I partied with her as much as I’d have liked. She seemed impervious to my particularly hyper-hetero charms. It seems Big, Blue, Bulky Guy showed up, from what I understand, and Rex gave him some electroshock or a lobotomy or something, and got him under control. Irony is, he’s brainy chemist Mervyn Goldfarb now—he wears spectacles and a lab coat even when he’s Big, Blue, Bulky Guy.”
“You can’t give a frontal lobotomy to a mindless behemoth, the result being an intellectual,” I said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
“How am I supposed to know how Earthling physiology works? I’m not a healthcare professional. Destroying our brains cells seems to work for us Partyers from Mars. All I know is that Liquid Man, Yarn Man, the Human Meltdown, and Smart, Big, Blue, Bulky Guy are a team now—we can only see how long that lasts. The rest you can read about in the funny papers.”
“Thanks for that news,” I said. “I wonder if that means a change of plans for Rubber Brother. He was talking about going to New York, but with my dad, the Silver Age Megaton Man, on the Doomsday Revengers, and Chuck and Mervyn on the Quartet, I don’t see how there’s any room.”
Anton just shrugged his shoulders. “Never met the guy.”
As I got to Third Avenue, I thought I spotted a familiar figure walking toward me on the sidewalk. “That isn’t Trent Phloog, is it?” I said to Anton. But when I looked around, the Partyer from Mars was gone. “Damn, all these people keep disappearing on me this morning.”
“Talking to yourself?” Trent called out from half a block away.
“Long story,” I said. As we neared one another, I asked, “What bring you to Detroit?”
He waved back to a long row of parked cars along the side of the street. “I got a new car,” he said, although it wasn’t clear which one he meant.
“You said you were going to, some time ago,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I finally got one,” he said, now within a few steps from. “I thought I’d come and see you.”
“Oh, well…that’s nice.”
“So, can I buy you breakfast?”
It wasn’t even yet eight a.m., and I knew when I got home Avie would still be in shower, using up all the hot water. So, I said, “Sure.”
***
Turned out to be perfect timing to get a table in the Irony Skillet. There wasn’t the usual long line outside, owing to the fact that it was Tuesday, but the place was soon crowded and noisy enough. We ordered from greasy menus and were served steaming hot cups of coffee. As I stirred in some sugar, I said, “Aren’t I going to be seeing you in a few days anyway? Simon’s birthday is April first. By the way, I meant to ask you for ideas about what to get him for a present…”
“I’m thinking of moving to Detroit,” said Trent.
This was startling news. “Wow. You mean like you, Stella, and Simon after Stella graduates?” I was confused.
“No, I mean like just me. Trent Phloog, in his own apartment.”
“Wow. You have a job lined up?”
“Not yet. But I’ll find something.”
“But you’re boy is in Ann Arbor,” I reminded him. “That’s the whole reason you came to the Midwest, after you lost your Megaton Man powers. And now that Chuck’s left, you should have a lot more domestic tranquility…”
“How’d you know Chuck was gone?” asked Trent.
“A little pseudo-Martian told me,” I said. “You know, he’s not really from Mars.”
“Doesn’t matter about Chuck, and I’ll still be within driving distance to see Simon. I’m just through with Stella. I just…want to be closer to you.”
“Is Dana moving back in? With Stella?”
“What? I don’t know. No, I mean…no. I don’t think so. You know Stella would never be that way.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You were the one who told me they were showering together.”
“Oh, that may have happened, once,” said Trent. “I think Stella was just checking the ‘bi-curious’ box off her list of undergraduate experiences before her halcyon college days were over, even though she’ll be continuing at the same old Arbor State University for grad school; you know how her mind works. She always denied it was anything sexual between her and Dana. But she denied that she and I were ever lovers, and look, we had offspring. We actually reproduced the old fashioned way. But to hear her tell it, it was invitro fertilization or something.”
I looked around for the waitress and wondered how long my corned beef hash would take.
After a long silence, Trent said, “Didn’t you hear what I said before? I’m thinking about moving to Detroit…to be closer to you.”
I’d heard it but I didn’t catch it, or didn’t want to. “What’s the matter, did you break up with Ingrid at the Arbor Harbor Daycare and Nursery School?”
“I…” Trent stopped short. “I’ve just been thinking about you a lot lately, Clarissa.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. “She was a cutie-pie.”
“God damn it, Clarissa, I’m trying to talk sense to you. I still have feelings for you.”
“My God, Trent, it’s been nearly a year. Both you and I have seen how many other people?”
“It hasn’t been that many, in my case…”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’ve moved on.”
Our breakfasts came but neither of us reached for our utensils.
“All I’m saying is, don’t move to Detroit on account of me. Frankly, I don’t see why you’d want to. Arbor State is a white university town; Warren Woodward is…urban.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m not your cheap little black slut,” I said.
“You never were that,” said Trent. “Doesn’t…what happened between us mean anything to you?”
“You fucked me up the ass and I licked your balls,” I said, a little too loudly, because people at nearby tables turned to look at us. “That and the handjobs you got from Imelda, and God knows what you got off of your little bitch Ingrid,” I said, in more of a restrained whisper. “Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been more than fooling around, knowing you. Besides the one time Megaton Man knocked up the See-Through Girl, have you ever really made love to a woman?”
“I…I’m a little overly cautious about reproductive sex,” Trent said, sheepishly.
“Oh, that’s just beautiful,” I said. “That’s just what I want to hear.”
“Simon is the child or two megaheroes,” Trent protested. “He’s dormant now, but you yourself keep going on about the risk he represents, should his Megaton or Meltdown—or, God forbid both—ever manifest. You want to risk you and I having a baby—two Megatons—on top of that?”
“I don’t want to risk anything,” I said. “I told you, we’re over.” I jabbed my fork into my corned beef hash.
“It’s meeting your father, isn’t it?” said Trent. “I don’t measure up to the Silver Age Megaton Man. I was afraid that was going to happen.”
“Well, we are cousins, you and I,” I said. “There is the incest angle.”
“We’re second cousins,” said Trent. “But you’re right; lucky we just fooled around.”
I set my fork down. “What do you expect, a medal? You come to me a month before graduation because you’re bored with your parental partnering life in Ann Arbor. Am I supposed to be so flattered that I give you a blowjob?”
“Jesus Christ, Stella…I mean, Clarissa. I just thought you’d be happy. I just thought that moving here would…open up some possibilities for us.”
“You have more opportunity in Ann Arbor,” I said. “It’s the idyllic, bucolic ivy-covered hall of higher learning built for the privileged. Detroit’s only good for what I’ll be studying in grad school, which happens to be the theory of the deindustrialized, disinvested urban wasteland you white people left behind.”
“Us white people,” said Trent. “We’re white people, now. I thought you were biracial. You’re dad…”
“Anything less than one hundred percent white is colored,” I said. “Avie’s right. You just want to be nearer some black pussy.”
“I wasn’t expecting this reaction,” said Trent.
“I’m glad you got a car,” I said. “Next time, phone ahead, maybe see how my life is going before you just show up and expect me to kneel down in front of you.”
Trent quietly left some money with the check and got up from the table, and walked toward the door.
“Hey, what does Simon want for his birthday?” I called out. But Trent was already gone.