Next thing I knew, I was back in Detroit, in my folks’ home, still in my accursed wheelchair. I was in the middle of the dining room off of the kitchen. Mama and Daddy were making a big fuss over me, about rearranging the first floor guest room, which they had been using as a TV den, but were converting into a temporary bedroom for me so I wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs while I convalesced.

Avie was helping them, bringing down pillows and bedding from upstairs, after Mama and Daddy brought down the mattress and box spring.

I called Avie aside.

“Avie, I’m not supposed to be here,” I whispered.

“I know,” she said. “But you can’t very well attend school in Ann Arbor until you’re back on your feet.”

“You mean, the semester’s already started?”

“Of course not,” said Avie. “Not yet. There’s still another two weeks. But your cast’s not coming off until a couple weeks after that, and you still have a lot more rehab, so you can plan on getting a late start to your senior year.” She pointed to the stack of comic books that were sitting on the dining room table. “Why don’t you relax and catch up on your reading? You hardly touched them in the hospital. We’ll have your room all fixed up nice in a few minutes.”

Needless to say, none of this was making any sense to my muddled head. “What are you talking about? I need to repeat my junior year…I spent all last winter in the basement rec room on Ann Street with Yarn Man, don’t you remember?”

Avie set the bedding down on a dining room chair and put her hands on my face and turned my head from side to side as if she were looking for damage. “They gave you I-don’t-know-how-many brain scans,” she said. “You’re supposed to be all right; not even a concussion.”

Avie let go of my face, brushed my hair with her hand, and smiled wanly at me. “The nurses said you were rambling in your delirium—about how you hooked up with Yarn Man and fell into a veritable Slough of Despond. There was even some talking cat you kept raving on about. Hate to break it to you, Sissy, but there ain’t no Yarn Man except in the comic books. In fact, you’d probably still be a virgin if it weren’t for that nasty hick, Trent Phloog. And I doubt if you got past blowjobs with that pervert—that’s all he ever propositioned me for, the creep, and that was before I turned eighteen.”

“Do you mean to tell me I got through my junior year without a delayed freshman crisis?”

“For Goodness sake, Clarissa, snap out of it!” Avie whispered harshly. “You have Mama and Daddy worried enough…. You know darn well you’re on the dean’s list and always will be. The only reason you won’t be graduating from Arbor State a semester early is because you’ll only be able to take about half your usual course load this fall. Otherwise, you’d have been done by Christmas.”

“Then, that means…”

“What?” asked Avie.

“…there are no such things as megaheroes in this reality.”

Avie threw up her arms. “I give up. This has to be a put on.”

“What about my father?” I asked.

“You just saw Daddy and Mama take your bed into the guest room,” said Avie. “You can hear them arguing in there right now.”

“I don’t mean Daddy, your father, Avie. I mean my father, the Silver Age Megaton Man.”

Avie laughed. “Wait ‘til Mama hears that one! Clyde Pflug, a comic book megahero! That broken-down…well, I suppose he is still your dad. No wonder Trent turned out the way he did. What is he, Trent’s uncle or cousin or something?”

“Much older cousin,” I said. “He was a colonel in the Air Force, an astronaut…”

“Clarissa, you know your biological father’s been collecting disability since he crashed some prototype fighter jet back in the Space Age. He never made the astronaut program. He took over his family’s farm out in Milford, if you can call it that…. Actually, he just drinks his government pension and lets the farm go to seed, the way Mama tells it. No wonder Trent grew up without any guidance, after he lost his own parents.”

“You mean Trent Phloog was never Megaton Man, either?”

Avie pulled a Megaton Man comic from the stack. “They’re both just as stupid, that’s for sure,” said Avie. “I’m not sure the hillbilly’s ever read a book without pictures. I admit, it’s quite a coincidence, that Trent Pflug happens to share the same name as the secret identity of America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero. Only they spell the last name differently in the comic book: P-f-l-u-g and P-h-l-o-o-g.”

***

The gravity of my predicament was beginning to sink in. Doctor Messiah and I had only been visiting this reality as astral projections of ourselves, the goal being for me to see what my life would have been like had I never become Ms. Megaton Man. As spectral forms, we couldn’t interact physically with this material world or influence it in any way. We had watched my recent past unfold as completely detached observers, until that stack of firewood came crashing down on the other me, Clarissa Too…

Now, somehow, I had become the other me I’d been watching—I was Clarissa Too. And she wasn’t—I wasn’t—Ms. Megaton Man. I had never been Ms. Megaton Man. I was never going to be Ms. Megaton Man.

And it was all because my father, Clyde Phloog, had never become the Silver Age Megaton. If there were no such things and Megaton Men, it meant that Farley Phloog, Trent’s uncle, had never been the Original Golden Age Megaton Man, either. Perhaps there were no costumed crime fighters of any sort in this reality at all.

Avie was about to grab the bedding and proceed to the guest room. “Wait, Avie,” I said. “What about the Meltdowns? What about Stella? She’s the See-Thru Girl; you know that, Avie. Her half-brother is the Human Meltdown…”

“Your housemate Stella Sternlicht is not Stella Starlight, you goof,” said Avie. She picked up the stack of comic books from the and thrust them in my lap. “Here, do your own research.” She picked up the bedding and went into the guest room. “We’ll have your bed all made up in a minute…then we’re going to confine you there, for your own good, you mental case.”

I could hear Daddy banging away in there, fixing up bookshelves.

I wheeled myself into the living room to get away from the noise; the three of them were arguing about how to arrange the bed and other furniture. By the light of the front window, I thumbed through the comics. Sure enough, one of them was entitled The Quantum Quest Quartet, featuring Liquid Man, Yarn Man, the Human Meltdown, and Stella Starlight—the See-Thru Girl.

There were all kinds of other comic books, but the characters never seemed to cross over. At least, Megaton Man never seemed to meet the See-Thru Girl. Perhaps this was because their respective titles were published by different companies: Megaton Man and his team book The Capitol Syndicate was put out by Cardinal Comics, an imprint of Federal District Periodicals, according to the indicia. The Quantum Quest Quartet and The Devengers—which did seem to cross over with each other a lot—was published by Marginal Comics, a subdivision of the Timeless-Marketable Magazine Group.

I don’t know how or where Trent had picked these comic books up, but most were well-read copies at least ten or twenty years old. bearing cover prices of twelve or fifteen cents. At least they still had covers, unlike the coverless comics Avie and I had accumulated when we were kids.

I found The Devengers issues particularly interesting. Most issues featured a villain called Dr. Braindead, whose lust for the Cosmic Cue-Ball led him into constant conflict with the Lens, Colonel Turtle, and the Angel of Death, the core membership of the team. I recalled the real Doomsday Revengers—the Devengers was just a shortened nickname—talking about their many encounters with Dr. Braindead over the years, although I’d never run across him as Ms. Megaton Man myself.

I despaired at the cast on my leg, the wheelchair I was stuck in, the stack of comic books that was sole distraction.

“Maybe I did get conked on the head,” I said. “Maybe this has been my real reality all along, and I’m just coming out of it.”

It was difficult to accept, but I was no longer Ms. Megaton Man. I was just little, old, scholarly Clarissa James, who never led an exciting life because she never met any real-life megaheroes, because there were no such thing as real-life megaheroes. I never came out of my introverted shell because I never met Yarn Man or Kozmik Kat, because they didn’t exist outside of the pages of comic books, either. I’d no sexual experience at all, except probably in the back of a dinged-up green VW with a farm boy from Milford who was my good-for-nothing father’s cousin, who had knocked up my college roommate and happened to share a similar name with a famous comic book character. And my roommate was never a glamourous megahero, either, because the Meltdown line of megaheroes also never existed outside of a competing line of comic books…

“How are you holding up?” asked a familiar voice.

I looked up; standing in the bay window of my family’s Detroit house was Doctor Messiah, arms folded, his familiar yin-yang chest symbol glowing.

***

“Where the Hell have you been?” I cried. “I thought I was losing my mind!” I turned my wheelchair to face Doc directly. “I’m stuck in this scrawny little body and this confounded contraption. I gotta get out of here!”

“I can’t interact with you, Clarissa,” Doc reminded me. To demonstrate, he took a comic book from the stack on my lap. “See?” It slowly disappeared from his hands; I looked down, and the same issue was still there, staring up at me.

“But Doc, you’ve got to get me out of this,” I said. “Why did you put me into this position? It’s a pretty cruel way of teaching, if you ask me…”

“I didn’t do anything,” said Doctor Messiah. “As I told you before, I’m here only as a kind of advisor, or Sherpa, if you will. It is you who is doing the mountain climbing, Clarissa.”

“But I don’t have the power to jump into this body,” I protested. “We were just onlookers, you and I, watching Trent, Preston, and Clarissa Too, before that firewood fell…”

“Don’t forget Simon,” Doc pointed out. “It was he you were most concerned about, even more that your other self.”

“…and the next thing I remember was the agonizing pain…”

Doc considered this for a moment. “There are different levels of astral projection,” Doc explained. “The simplest is the kind you were experiencing, which I believe you referred to as a ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’ kind of tour. There are other, more complicated levels, of course, such as the one in which the astral sojourner materially interacts with the given reality. This is what you are experiencing now. Just because I haven’t taught you more advanced techniques doesn’t mean you don’t have the power to move to these higher levels.”

“But you didn’t warn me I might suddenly jump from one level to the other,” I snapped. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

“There are many variables in any journey such as this,” said Doc. “Even the most practiced masters can fail to predict the unforeseen, now and then. Your own concern for the innocent and empathy for the pain of others may have caused you to leap into this reality. In any case, you became so involved in the scene…”

“Doc, I gotta get back to grad school!” I cried. “I can’t be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life with a dumb, stupid family that doesn’t even believe in megaheroes…”

“I wish there was something I could do to help you, Clarissa,” said Doc. “But I’m afraid you’re being shown all of this for a reason.”

As he said this, Doctor Messiah seemed to fade from view.

That’s when I turned and saw Mama, Daddy, and Avie standing in the threshold of the living room, apparently talking to myself.

I turned back; Doctor Messiah had disappeared.

I wheeled my chair around to face my family. I cleared my throat.

“You didn’t, um, happen to see me talking to a long-haired hippie in a black turtleneck with a yin-yang symbol on his chest, did you?” I asked.

Avie was shaking her head; tears were streaming down her cheeks. Daddy didn’t look much happier.

“I have some good news,” Mama said brightly. “I just got off the phone. Grandma Seedy will be coming over for dinner.”

***

For my homecoming, Daddy cooked up a Cajun meal with all my favorites: jambalaya, gumbo, boudin—enough to feed the proverbial army. We got through dinner without much controversy, my parents and Grandma Seedy telling stories told a million times, only with slight twists. For example, in this reality, my grandma hadn’t been stranded in a different dimension my entire life and thought dead; and of course my biological father was alive and well and also living in this dimension, although estranged.

After dinner, I called Grandma into my new, makeshift bedroom off of the dining room.

“They fixed things up nice for you, I see,” she said, looking over the bookshelves and desk with all my school materials. “Guess this visit I’ll have to sleep upstairs in your old room. But at least you’re in one piece, more or less.” She stroked my hair.

I wheeled around and closed the door. “Grandma, you’re my last hope. I know my folks have told you they think I’m nuts…”

“They mentioned you’re going through an adjustment,” said Seedy, walking over to my window. “You’ve been through quite a trauma. Your friends thought you were dead, crushed under that pile of logs.”

“Grandma, didn’t you used to be a scientist?”

“Of course,” said Seedy amiably. “I taught high school science in the public schools for years and years. Retired now, though. Why? Do you have a science class coming up?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so. I’ll have to check my schedule,” I said. “But that’s not what I mean. I don’t need help with my homework.”

“Then, what do you mean, child?”

“I mean that you, Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James—my grandmother—were a scientist for the government, right? You were a physicist, before World War II…”

Grandma Seedy suddenly looked very grave. “How do you know that?” she demanded. “I never told anyone that. I never even told my own children, Rodney or Alice…”

“Just before the war, you went to a place called the Doomsday Factory in Bayonne, New Jersey…it was around 1940,” I said. “Thirteen scientists were gathered there; your job was to build an Atomic Soldier for the War Effort. Six of your colleagues favored the Megaton theorem, you and five others favored the Meltdown…”

“Fusion and fission,” said my grandma, sitting down on my bed. “But how do you…?”

“A Thirteenth Scientist conducted experiments on something called the Mutanium Particle,” I continued. “He tried to split it, but failed. Instead, he split reality in two, sending the Megaton scientists headlong into one dimension, the Meltdown scientists to another…”

“Helveticus Brainard,” said my grandmother.

“Who?!” I asked.

“The thirteenth scientist was Dr. Helveticus Willard Brainard,” said Seedy. “He was the youngest of us, only sixteen, a true wunderkind…except for a couple who were even younger, barely children…”

“Rex Rigid and Winnie Wertz,” I said.

“Yes. They were only twelve and thirteen, I believe. Anyway, Willard had some weird particle he’d captured…he had no interest whatsoever in our collegial disputes over which Atomic Soldier—Megaton or Meltdown—might prove practical. He wasn’t exactly a pacifist; he just didn’t care for the practical applications of physics. Here we were, trying to weaponize human beings…. He subjected that particle to every experiment he could think of: acid, electricity…I think he took a ballpeen hammer to it at one point. But he didn’t split anything apart. He just…disappeared.”

“The Thirteenth Scientist just…disappeared?”

“That’s how it happened,” said Seedy. “He was banging away at the thing, then, all of a sudden, the banging stopped. We all turned to look, scattered as we were about the room, writing formulas on chalk boards and so, to where he had been just a moment before. He was hard to miss because he insisted on working at his bench in the middle of the room. But sure enough, he was gone. Particle, hammer, and all.”

“You mean, you didn’t split off into two divergent realities? The Megaton Universe and the Meltdown Universe?”

“No, of course not, although I suppose anything is theoretically possible. If that particle was powerful enough to take Willard away…”

“What happened then? Did you and your colleagues create Megaton Man and Major Meltdown?”

“We certainly tried,” said Seedy. “Elias Levitch’s group was Project Megaton; they built a laboratory full of equipment, subjected some poor volunteer to unbelievable amounts of radiation…”

“Farley Phloog,” I said. “Or maybe Pflug,” I added, emphasizing the “P.”

“I believe that was his name,” said Seedy. “Unfortunately, he didn’t live; he died of radiation poisoning. Our Meltdown experiment fared no better. The young man, Burston Coltrane, had been a dive-bomber trainee. He was facing some sort of Court Martial, so he volunteered for us. We succeeded only in turning him into oozing, pulsating mass of pyroclastic protoplasm. A shame, too; he had a young boy…”

“Trigger Flintlock,” I said. “He was my roommate Stella’s illegitimate father.”

Seedy reached out and took my hand. “How do you know these things?” she asked. “After Burly Boy and Girly Man—those were their Topmost Secret Priority names—failed, the government just proceeded with Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of us twelve ever spoke of the Atomic Soldier project or the Doomsday Factory ever again, not to another living soul.”

“Grandma, I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said. “But in the reality I come from, the Megaton and Meltdown experiments were a success. I’m a third-generation Atomic Soldier…I call myself Ms. Megaton Man.”

All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2020, all rights reserved.