“You’ve composed a fine paper,” said my thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, smiling amiably behind her desk stacked with books and various research projects in progress. “You’ll certainly give those Hypothetics people something to chew on.” She handed back my paper, with several Post-It notes covered in red pen attached. “I’ve made a comment or two for you to consider, but they’re neither here nor there; they’re mostly cosmetic. I think you’re good to go.”

“Thank you so much, Dr. Finch,” I replied. I was sitting on the edge of the green-upholstered grey metal chair in front of her desk. “I just want to make a good showing for the Urban Policy and Social Planning program here at Warren Woodward.”

“Please, Clarissa, I’ve told you a million times: call me Dolores; we’re colleagues now.”

I left her office enthused, but mulling over her Post-Its at the counter of the Schnelli Deli, I saw that her so-called “cosmetic” comments were far more substantive and far-reaching questions that would require still another rewrite. Luckily, I still had a week before the conference.

My paper was for extra credit, as it were, for the Third Annual Hypothetical Multimensions Studies Conference hosted by my school and not for one of my courses or seminars. Still, I was heartened to have Dolores Finch’s general approval, since she had urged me to submit something for the conference. My paper had been through so many drafts by now I could probably rewrite it from scratch, incorporating her final suggestions without having to consult earlier drafts at this point—good for a conference paper delivered verbally anyway. Still, being the obsessive-compulsive nerd that I am, I still wanted to check one or two points against earlier incarnations.

The first draft, for example, was written in too much of a personal tone—I discussed my own experiences with the Multimensions as Ms. Megaton Man, traveling to the Forbidden Future and my two astral trips to the Civilian Reality. In those versions, I also mentioned the Time Turntable, the Dimensional Doorway, and the Heteroreality Helmet—three artificial technologies enabling of the crossing of the dimensional threshold, comparing those to the more traditional astral means preferred by Doctor Messiah and the Asp. Necessarily, I discussed the Megatropolis Quartet and the Troy+Thems, the two teams safeguarding those technologies, along with Rex Rigid, Winnie Wertz, Jasper Johnson, and Kavanaugh Kleinfelter, the respective inventors. I also threw in the sudden appearances of my father, Clyde Phloog, the Silver-Age Megaton Man and my grandmother, Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James, who’d spent most of my lifetime in another dimension. I threw in everything but the kitchen sink, making the rough draft a sprawling, unreadable mess.

Through successive drafts, I progressively winnowed it down from something like fifty pages, double-spaced, to twenty-five, then down to twelve. I routed out most of the first-person and left out more and more of the names and inserted a more objective tone, along with the toney overeducated Hypothetics jargon so fashionable in academia at the moment. Although this was an act of erasure, strictly speaking, I was pretty proud of myself; I had converted what was basically a diary of unprocessed personal experiences into an objective-sounding highbrow paper presentable to a conference of over-educated intellectuals.

As I typed up the final draft, I went through my files in my bedroom to make sure I still had all the previous incarnations in order, in case they may later prove useful. The stack of drafts for this little project alone was some three inches thick, considerably more than a lot of rush-job last-minute term papers. The version with all the names of megaheroes I knew personally, for example, could almost be converted into a story for a science-fiction anthology magazine.

I also had a small stack of leftover photocopies of various versions. I’d been over to Ye Olde Photocopies on Cass Avenue countless times making copies of drafts to foist upon everyone from my advisor to the conference organizer Berke Kornbluth to the driver of the Woodward Avenue bus for any useful feedback. I had even taken a copy with me to Ann Arbor to show Chase Bradford. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen that copy since; maybe I lost it.

“Hey, Avie, have you seen the copy of my paper I took with me to Ann Arbor a couple Saturdays ago? You know, the one I showed to Chase at the Li’l Drowned Mug Café? I thought I put it back into my bookbag with all the comics we bought before we went to see the Chaplin flick, but I can’t find it anywhere.”

Avie was in the living room of our apartment watching Orson Welles’s Othello on videotape for one of her drama classes, and beyond tired of hearing my incessant prattle concerning “the conference paper.”

“I thought you gave it to him,” she replied after hitting pause, annoyed at having her cinematic viewing experience interrupted. “He was so busy talking about his signing at the comic book shop, and the release of Megatron Man #1, and living with his publisher, and the fabulous lifestyle as a jet-setting professional cartoonist, and the intriguing comic book work, that he hardly looked at it. Don’t you remember? He told you it looked interesting and he thanked you and he would get back to you on it; I saw him tuck it into his portfolio.”

I was sure Avie was right. “Oh, crap,” I said. I hadn’t been thinking when I took that particular photocopy with me; I had just wanted Chase’s feedback as a friend and someone who knew the Y+Thems and a few others personally. I didn’t realize until I saw a printed copy of Megatron Man #1 how extensively, albeit in a distorted fashion, the cartoonist had freely adapted actual events from my life and the people we both knew. “That was a version with all the names it,” I said to myself. “He’s probably going to use it all for a future issue.”

“Can I get back to Orson, please?” said Avie, as she hit unpause.

I forgot about it until later in the week, as I was coming home from school. Dropped through our mail slot was a Manila envelope from Chase, sent from his publisher’s address. I contained a newly-published copy of Megatron Man #2, which hadn’t come out in time for the Ann Arbor appearance, and a quick thank-you note. “Thanks so much to you and Avie for coming to my signing,” he said, “and thanks for all the great new material. The publisher loves the new story arc I’m writing—I’ll change all the names, of course. My nickname for you is ‘Deep Throat’—for more than one reason, as you know!”

“The pig,” I said to myself. “He thinks he’s Woodward and Bernstein all rolled into one, reporting on the world of megaheroes from a secret source, while I’m the one with cum all over my chin.”

It’s true that I never signed a confidentiality agreement with anyone, but there was an unwritten rule that certain things were kept in-house amongst folks in the trade. I wasn’t so much concerned about keeping my own civilian identity or those of my friends, but I was a bit uneasy to think that over people might assume control of my narrative without my approval. Maybe instead of sharing my story with everyone as a means of processing it for myself, like some friend who’s had a bad break-up and has to tell the world, I needed to become a bit more taciturn.

***

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Clarissa,” Trent told me when I spoke with him a few days later over the phone. The Eye of Horus comic shop was right across the street from Border Worlds Used and Slight New Bookstore, where he worked, and a coworker, Gary, a comic book fan and aspiring writer, had brought a copy of Megatron Man #1 into the store. “A parody satirizing my former career is nothing after having been ravaged by Pamela Jointly in her controversial columns for the Manhattan Project.”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

I recalled an uncle of mine who fancied himself an inventor; he knew Avie liked to draw and wanted her to document his perpetual motion machine based on ancient Aztec drawings in a comic strip. My Mama, knowing her brother was crazy, nixed the project because Avie was only in seventh grade and had her own homework to do. I’m not sure the scientific community would considered a cartoon strip appropriate documentation for an unworkable idea in any case.

“Still, Megatron Man is a series,” I pointed out. “It may get worse.”

“Why? What have you told him?”

“About Megaton Man and the See-Through Girl? Nothing,” I lied. “But Chase Bradford’s got quite an imagination.”

“I could care less,” said Trent. “As long as it’s some alternative comic book cartoonist and not Pammy writing about Ms. Megaton Man or the Troy+Thems, you’ll be fine.”

When Trent mentioned Pammy, I realized I had shared with her my personal annotations on her nonfiction book, Megamusings, a collection of her columns, to set the record straight on a few things about the private lives of megaheroes. It had been a couple years since I had supplied that unsolicited information, and I hadn’t heard from Pammy in the meantime; she probably had ignored my scrawls and moved on to other journalistic projects—or so I hoped. But there were a few indiscretions I shared with her that I probably would excise now.

“Good Lord,” I said. “I am Deep Throat.”

“Come again?” asked Trent over the phone.

“Exactly,” I said. “I’m a leaky sieve of megahero gossip. I better knock it off.”

The final form of my conference paper, at least, was stripped of any reference to my own personal experiences in the first person; the Multimensions and all its ramifications were discussed in the abstract. Further, my presentation was going out to an audience of indifferent academics and intellectuals concerned only with the replication of realities as a hypothetical possibility, not with the actual misadventures of goofy costumed megaheroes who’d stumbled upon means of transgressing those dimensional boundaries, either by mad science or weird head trips.

I knew Stella was also delivering a paper at the conference on part of her own hypothetical research. I asked Trent how it was coming.

“It’s something on religion, the afterlife, and alternative spiritualities,” Trent told me. “I think it’s called ‘Utopia and Paradise: Gestures Toward a Subaltern Reading of Western Wisdom Traditions’ or something egg-headed like that. Her grad advisor has been pushing her in a Hypothetics direction for some time now; that’s all she reads these days. I can’t even hold a conversation with her at the breakfast table anymore; it goes completely over my head. At any rate, she doesn’t mention her experience on the Megatropolis Quartet at all; it’s pure Hypothetics mumbo-jumbo. Anyway, I guess we’ll see you there.”

“Do you know when her presentation’s scheduled?” I asked. “I’d like to sit in on it.”

Trent told me; it was in different classroom but the same day and time as mine.

“Darn,” I said. “I won’t be able to see hers, and you won’t be able to see mine.”

I suspected Berke Kornbluth had intentionally scheduled us on opposite tracks because I wouldn’t go back to his Canfield apartment and blow him, the bastard.

“Me and Simon will probably sit in on yours,” said Trent. “I’ve already heard Stella’s a million times, and we’d just make her nervous. Besides, I don’t get along with her snooty grad advisor.”

***

I finalized my paper with a few days to spare—a record for me, since I was usually rewriting into the wee hours the night before any school deadline. There was nothing left but to run it up the flagpole and see if anyone saluted. At least I could relax and tend to a few other things over the weekend before the conference and get my mind off it.

I reread Megatron Man #1 before reading the second issue. The first issue was funnier the second time—at least I didn’t take it so personally that Chase had made Ms. Megatronica, my doppelganger, look more Jewish-Puerto Rican rather than black-white biracial like me. But whatever; although I thought the constant references to oral sex made by Stuffed Cushion Man, which were supposedly intended to be humorous, were a bit tasteless even for an alternative comic book.

But the second issue was a different matter. Although Ms. Megatron had a scene punching out a robot, which at least was in character, she hardly appeared again. Instead, the story focused mainly on Megatron Man joining the Quirky Quarantined Quadruplets, after Naked Woman made her exit from the team. The team leader, “Professor Why,” starts a school for “Probably Underaged Unconventional Aberrants”; although nameless, the first recruits include a mangy toothless lion, a leather-clad Lesbian dominatrix, a gay hairdresser, and a teen mother impregnated by character referred to as “Uncle Farnsworth, the Senior-Aged Megatron Man.”

Good Lord, I thought to myself. Chase is already going after our mutual friends, the Y+Thems, even before incorporating material from my draft. “I’m going to catch hell from Troy about this.”

Sure enough, the next phone call was from Soren. “I’m wondering if auxiliary member Ms. Megaton Man can spare some time tomorrow to meet with us at our headquarters,” he asked.

“Friday?” I replied. “That’s going to be horrible—three buses up to Troy on a Friday. Is this about the comic book, by any chance?”

“Comic book? What comic book?” said Soren. “No, it’s just our regular quarterly business meeting.”

It would take my mind off the pending conference, at least. And if I was to be called on the carpet about Megatron Man #2, I deserved to take my medicine.

“I’ll see you in Troy tomorrow.” I said goodbye and hung up.