Clarissa’s first-person narrative resumes …

“You expect me to believe the Quantum Quest Quartet became the Megatropolis Quartet simply because all four people temporarily forgot their team name on the Fourth of July, 1976?” I said. “I assume they later recovered their memories. Why didn’t they go back to the original team name? Had they already filed paperwork that prevented them from changing it back or something?”

“I have no idea,” said Trent, wiping Simon’s mouth which was covered in milkshake. “Anyway, that was my first team-up with them. But it wasn’t to be my last.”

“Obviously not,” I said. “You subsequently went on patrol with Stella—and the result was this little boy.”

“An arrested history!” said Simon, who then let out a burp.

“You mean, ‘And the rest is history,’ Simon,” said Trent. “All I know, Clarissa, is that Rex always blamed Megaton Man for ruining his alliterative team name … among other things.”

“Like his marriage,” I said.

We finished our meal and packed Simon into Trent’s brown Chevette. While passing through Dearborn, I opined, “Don’t you realize? Yours wasn’t a simple crossover with the Megatropolis Quartet; when you crossed under at Manhattan Transfer, you must have dragged the entire Federal Universe behind you into the Timeless Universe, turning each universe inside-out. That’s how come you and the Human Meltdown and all of these myriad other megaheroes like the Phantom Jungle Girl and Cowboy Gorilla and the Asp and the Troy+Thems and Roman Man and everybody else are now all in the same universe.”

“That may well be,” said Trent. “Stella’s the theoretical quantum physicist, not me. I just work in a used bookstore, remember?”

“And this little boy on the front seat between us is the lynchpin holding that fused universe together,” I said.

“A restive history,” said Simon, playing with the toy from his Fun Burger meal.

“Now you’re starting to scare me,” said Trent. “Stella wouldn’t appreciate talk like that. It’s bad enough with our megaheroic pasts, which she’d rather forget, and ICHHL and the Partyers from Mars hovering around all the time …”

“Don’t you see why?” I said. “Because Simon is so important. They’re protecting him. Without him, the two megahero universes might well split off again, never to rejoin again …”

“Definitely don’t mention that little theory to Stella,” said Trent. “She’s overprotective of Simon enough already; if it were up to her, she’d never let the poor kid out for outdoor recess at his preschool. I don’t need the mother of my son absolutely paranoid—it would make life with Stella Starlight even more unbearable than it already is.”

***

Trent dropped me off at my apartment in Detroit before driving Simon back to Ann Arbor; I promptly hid the second-hand guitar I bought for Avie under my bed. I nearly forgot about it until Christmas Eve, and had a heck of a time getting it up to Mama’s apartment without Avie finding out so it would be a surprise for her—I had to take the bus and nearly smashed it to pieces when I slipped on some ice crossing Woodward Avenue. After dinner, when I sprang it on her, she seemed mildly puzzled.

“A guitar?” she said. “But you’re the musical one, Clarissa, not me. I can barely carry a tune.”

“Not in the Civilian Reality,” I said. “You call yourself Melody Chrysanthemum and write your own folk songs and play coffee houses. You have a pretty nice voice, too.”

“Maybe with some practice, you can learn to sing,” said Mama. “I always thought you had a nice voice when you tried. Maybe you’ll get the lead in some uplifting musical productions, instead of all those depressing avant-garde theater pieces you favor. At least you could sing in the church choir from time to time.”

Avie seemed none too convinced, and although I could hear her in her room picking away at the instrument a bit over the New Year’s break, she mostly left it to gather dust on its stand in her room. Funny how the same person may take to something in one reality but not the other.

Finally, I confiscated it and began plucking away at it myself. I found I could play it more quietly at home than my clarinet, which required going over to the church if I wanted to practice with any volume. With the snow and freezing weather, it was too much trouble trudging over to the sanctuary of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City two blocks away anyway.

So, as the spring semester began in January of 1985, I could be found holed up in my room in the evenings teaching myself scales and fumbling through Bach pieces like Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring—badly—on Avie’s second-hand guitar. I started getting the hang of it pretty quickly, if I do say so myself.

One day I ran into Reverend Enoch on my way home from campus. “We miss your unique voice in our worship,” he said. “I personally miss hearing your clear sound from my office, filling the sanctuary on a random afternoon, even if it’s only practicing.”

I didn’t want to tell him that I’d had it with that goofy music ensemble. The married couple who played fifteen instruments between them—how about playing just one, well?—were more than I could take. She was a manic-depressive and he was her flustered, codependent enabler, catering to her every whim. The self-taught saxophonist who was really just a piano tuner was beyond hope. The only decent musician in the group has half-deaf brass player who doubled on electric bass who could no longer even find the beat. And the organist—a snobby flautist who read a couple papers on French chamber music back in the sixties before dropping out of college and was convinced he was God’s gift to Western music—was a hack who never practiced keyboards, and drowned everybody else out on Sunday morning anyway. So, it was pointless.

Reverend Enoch listened to my critique, nodding. “I can’t argue with you, Clarissa,” he said. “But what are you going to do? In the North Cass District, that’s what we have to work with. We need to be forgiving of human frailties. The purpose, after all, is to commune and make a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

“I know,” I said. “But Holistic-Humanists don’t even believe in the Lord, strictly speaking, do they? It’s more or less a secular philosophy … with all due respect.”

Reverend Enoch chuckled softly. “We believe in the divine spark to be innate within all of God’s creatures. Many in our communion hold differing views on the status of Jesus Christ—some regard him as a divinity, some as a great teacher, some as a model dissident and social activist. Many don’t know what to believe; that’s the beauty of our faith. We uphold the right to question and search for truth above all. In any case, I don’t use the term Lord as necessarily a particular personification. Making a joyful noise to Creation implies no particular doctrine.”

These were the kinds of conversations one could engage in on the streets around Warren Woodward University.

“Did Jesus eat French fries and vanilla shakes?” I asked. “Could divinity be innate, for example, in a white boy raised by former megahero parenting partners in Ann Arbor?”

“We could all be the Messiah, Clarissa. Did you have a particular child in mind?”

“Oh, it’s just part of a paper I’m writing,” I said. “I’ve had a number of experiences recently in alternate realities, and I’m trying to make sense of it all.”

“Ah, yes, the Multimensions,” he said. “Its ways are vast and unknowable—what have you found out?”

“A thing or two,” I said. “But there’s still a lot I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us,” said Reverend Enoch.

“What I want to know is: What good is it being a megahero—or even just a social activist trying to do the right thing—when some other reality is just going to go to hell instead, assuming you even succeed in making the world a better place? Do you know, Reverend, that a megavillain named Bad Guy actually is the president of the United States in the Civilian Reality? Of course, you know—you’re Multimensional.”

“You attribute powers to me I do not possess, Clarissa,” Reverend Enoch replied. “But I agree, it is always sad to contemplate the oppression under which others must live. Our task is to make the best of whichever reality we find ourselves in; to fail to do so is to give up and surrender to evil. By the way, how are your friends in Troy? The ones who were caretakers in my church? I haven’t heard from them in a while. I assume they’re doing well.”

“Frankly, I haven’t had time to be Ms. Megaton Man in my home dimension,” I said. “I suppose the Youthful Permutations are making the world a better place—I didn’t even see them over the holidays. I’m due for a visit.”

“When you mentioned a white boy, I first thought of Kiddo’s child, Biff,” said Reverend Enoch. “The one who nearly destroyed my Social Hall. And doesn’t the Human Meltdown have a daughter now, a little girl in France? If you’re looking for a Messiah, Clarissa, there may be more than one candidate. In any case, I’d like to read your paper, when you have a draft.”

***

I did a lot of writing in my journal in those early winter months of 1985, along with a lot of contemplative plucking on Avie’s guitar. I also cobbled together a rough draft of my conference paper, along with keeping up with my own grad courses and seminars, and serving as teaching assistant to another of Dr. Dolores Finch’s giant lecture-hall courses on urban policy and social planning. I never got out to Troy of much outside of my North Cass neighborhood a block from campus.

I dropped off a photocopy of my draft at Reverend Enoch’s office. I also contacted Berkeley Kornbluth, the nominal administrative assistant and de facto director of the Acculturational Studies Program at Warren Woodward University, who agreed to read my draft and offer me feedback—a bit too eagerly, I thought. I knew I was taking a chance with Berke; he was always on the make, trying to get into my pants—trying to get into the pants of every female student he encountered—but he knew Hypothetics inside and out. Since his program was hosting the conference at Warren Woodward, he would know what they were looking for. I figured a confab with him was the shortest, quickest way to get a sense of whether I was on the right track with my paper or not.

My first mistake was agreeing to meet with him at Ty’s First Base, a North Cass neighborhood bar where people always met with the intent of getting past first base and all the way to home plate as quickly as possible. Whereas I had no interest in giving Berke an at-bat at all, as it were. After a semester of grad school, I was beginning to think anyone offering advice to grad students seldom read the work submitted, and I’m sure Berke had little more than glanced at the photocopies I’d left for him in his Acculturational Studies mailbox beforehand.

He spent more time trying to make out my flat chest under the heavy layers of sweaters I wore in the twenty-degree weather, I’m sure, than reading my draft.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he said. “Boy, it must be cold out—you’re nipples are hard.” This was his opening line.

“Rum and Coke,” I said curtly. “Did you read my …?”

“I have it right here,” he said, lifting his padded elbow resting on the bar to reveal a sheaf of papers now rumpled and marked up. “Jeez, you’re all business. Lighten up.”

He ordered drinks; he really must have wanted to get into my pants because he’d actually gone through the motions of reading my paper. Still, his remarks were generally condescending and patronizing. “Of course, with Dolores Finch as you advisor, and coming from a utilitarian discipline as you do”—this was a dig at urban policy and social planning, a disciplinary backwater compare to more abstract, purely intellectual pursuits like Cultural Hypothetics—“you can’t be expected to have mastered the vocabulary of Hypothetics in just a few weeks. Those folks will eat you alive if you try to present this.”

“That’s what I want to know,” I said. “How do I revise this thing so I don’t make a complete fool of myself?”

“First off, I drop all this megahero crap,” he said. “You don’t want to sound like some comic book fanboy. And this jazz about Time Turntables and Dimensional Doorways and Astral Projection—science fiction and mysticism. You’ll be committing academic suicide. You want to be an adjunct the rest of your life? But not to worry—Dr. Kornbluth is here to help.”

Our drinks arrived but I didn’t even touch my rum and Coke.

Berke sipped his Glenlivet with an “Aah,” and launched into his spiel. He made it sound as though doctoring up my paper was merely a matter of judiciously inserting a few “always-alreadys” into my manuscript—like on that Del Close record, How to Speak Hip, where it was merely a matter of adding a few “likes” and “mans” to your phrasing to pass as a Beatnik. At the same, Berke was sure to intimate, only he knew exactly where to place those always-alreadys. “The last thing you want is to be found out as an imposter, and they can smell one a mile away. A few evening at my place and we ought to be able to whip this thing into shape, no problem.”

I recalled the time I had to drag Berke, dead drunk, back home to his gentrified second-story rental in a house in the Canfield Historic District. As romantic and well-appointed as it was, I don’t recall a typewriter anywhere on the premises, and I didn’t relish the thought of having to drag my portable three blocks in the snow just to have a horny postdoc chase me around the apartment, knocking over priceless furniture and antiques, while ostensibly improving my manuscript with the insertions of a few always-alreadys and the deletion of everything important I wanted to say.

“I’m sure your notes will be a great help,” I said. “Let me go over them and I’ll contact you if I have any questions.”

I reached for the annotated draft, but Berke set his elbow back down on top of the sheaf. “I thought we could start tonight; my roommate’s off at some conference in Dallas.” He was already popping a boner inside his corduroy slacks.

“Do you ever interact with your colleagues on any level other than your crotch?” I asked. “Has it ever occurred to you not only that the school’s non-fraternization policy was worth observing for its own sake, but that it might actually possible to advise and educate while keeping it zipped up? Have you ever given that a try?”

“I’m all about sharing what I’ve learned,” said Berke, mock-offended. “I share my knowledge all the time. I have deeply intellectual conversations—with my male students, that is. But if I’m at all attracted to a female student, the form of communication is … different. It’s what Nature intended; I don’t try to fight it.”

“You are unbelievable,” I said. “You don’t think a female mind is worthy of equal treatment.”

“I think equality and all that jazz is fine, in theory,” Berke replied. “But in practice, one can’t ignore biology. Men and women are essentially different.”

“You are a major creep,” I said, getting up.

“That’s what my wife says,” Berke replied.

“You’re married?!” I was stunned.

“We’re doing the distance thing,” said Berke. “She has her life, I have mine.”

Turns out Berke had a wife and two kids. She was going to school at another university and her parents did most of the raising. Apparently she came from money; among her class, divorce was considered too inconvenient or messy or scandalous to contemplate. Celibate separation, at least while in grad school and raising a couple brats, was the status quo.

“Maybe you ought to try getting into your male students’ pants too, while you’re at it,” I suggested. “I have a hunch you’d really be into it.”

“I’ve tried it,” Berke replied. “It doesn’t do much for me.”

It was impossible to insult someone of Berkeley Kornbluth’s towering ego. He came from a class of over-educated, over-monied privilege for whom noblesse oblige toward those he regarded as his social inferiors was a loathsome chore. Not only was he blatantly sexist, but I suspected he was also racist—his inference being that Hypothetics was beyond the ability of African-American women like me and the eminently practical Dr. Dolores Finch to fully comprehend.

When I asserted this, he replied he didn’t know about racism; it’s just that he had no respect for urban policy and social planning or any other pursuit that didn’t use big words from the Zane Hancock Guide to Linguistic Criticism and Hypothetical Terminology, fifth edition, as a bona fide academic discipline. In fact, as far as Berkeley Kornbluth was concerned, the French monarchy had been the most advanced from of political administration ever devised by humans and could hardly be improved upon; the French Revolution, in his view, and all the failed attempts at representational democracy and socialism that followed in its wake, was the greatest travesty in history.

“You’re a royalist, too,” I said, flabbergasted. “Do your leftist-intellectual friends know this about you?”

“I’m Canadian,” he replied. “All American colonist loyal to King George fled north of the border after the colonies fell to those Philadelphia radicals. Don’t you know your own U.S. history? Those dumb democratic bastards.”

Such were the kinds of conversations one could have in bars around Warren Woodward University.

“You can keep your notes,” I said. “If I need any more encouragement, I’ll give you call.” I hadn’t even touched my rum and Coke.

“No, wait,” he said. “Here, you can have them. For whatever good they’ll do you.”

I snatched the sheaf from Berke’s grubby paw, leaving him to pay for the drinks. He was already eying some other young coed from the Social Economy department who’d wandered in as I walked out into the cold.

***

I ran into Nancy waiting tables at the Union Stripe Tavern that same evening as I pored over Berke’s notes at the bar. “I’m graduating from the East Kirby Center for Visual Studies, finally,” she announced.

“You mean the Self-Important Art School?” I said. “Will wonders never cease? That’s great, Nancy. What are your plans after that?”

“I’m engaged,” she said, showing me her ring.

This nearly knocked me off my barstool. “You mean, to a man? I hope the other separatist lesbians in town don’t find out—this makes you an official traitor to the cause. Do you really think you can go straight—exclusively?”

“I’m giving away my vibrators and dildos to all my friends,” said Nancy, as if this answered my question unequivocally. “In fact, I have a couple set aside for you, Clarissa.”

“Oowee,” I said, somewhat taken aback. “That’s kind of a personal item, don’t you think?” I was never much one for sex toys, at least to the extent Nancy was; I never even like to think about a guy’s cock having been inside another woman when I screwed them, let alone an inanimate object. “I mean, I’ve never really been into …”

But she insisted I come over to her apartment to have a look. After her shift ended, we walked the ten or so blocks through the freezing cold to her apartment, laughing about old times. With Audrey moved out long ago and Hadleigh in a relationship with a dermatologist at the medical center, Nancy had the place all to herself, and it was warm and cozy. As I shed my coat, she said, “Your nipples sure are hard.” This got me wet, too. I felt like I was in an alternate reality.

She put on some Joan Armatrading and lit up some pot, and we ended up scissoring on the sofa until the wee hours of the morning for old time’s sake. I forgot to mention her life as Aggie in the Civilian Reality.

She laid out the sex toys she had left and persuaded me to take a small silver vibrator—her favorite, she said—and a dildo supposedly molded from Terry Kath’s actual penis. I accepted these simulacra only because each in their own ways reminded me of Trent’s rather average-sized real one.

“You’re just going to end up replacing these later, mark my words,” I warned. “Just because you’ll be married doesn’t mean you won’t still have your own private fantasy world.”

“I’m already pregnant,” said Nancy, as if this somehow foreclosed on another same-sex attraction ever again in her life.

I didn’t know what to say.

Before I could respond, she changed the subject.

“You remember Chuck?” she asked.

“Chuck Bradford, the cartoonist?” I replied. “As in Chas, Chase?”

“Whatever he’s calling himself these days.”

Remember him? He and I binge-screwed on the downlow for an intense couple of weeks, although I’m not particularly proud of it; it had been some of the sleaziest sex I’d ever had.

“Good Lord—that’s not who you’re marrying, is it?” I said with horror. “Please tell me that’s not who you’re marrying.”

“Heavens, no,” said Nancy. “It’s just that his comic book is finally coming out. And guess what, Clarissa—you’re going to be in it!”