I must have dozed off grading stacks of midterm exams for Intro to Urban Social Policy 101, the giant lecture course for which I served as a teaching assistant at Warren Woodward University. They were handwritten in those lined-paper exam booklets, and each one was like deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. My job was to assess each one fairly, and discern which students had studied for the exam but froze up under pressure, and which were just bullshitting with a lot of filler material. One student scrawled, “I think the planners of the modern cities did a really good job using modernity to plan modern cities”—What the hell did that even mean? And why would anyone taking a college course in city planning ever bother to write such a trite tautology? Another wrote, “Le Corbusier hated the cramped medieval city; he wanted to replace it with apartment blocks and green lawns. Except that people liked their traditions, so Corbu just built overpriced houses for rich people on the outskirts of Paris instead.” I honestly couldn’t tell if that was brilliant and insightful, or just gobbledygook. After three hours of this kind of rubbish I had to close my eyes to relieve my splitting headache.

When I woke up, my electric clock said two A.M. I was still in my Arbor State Abyssinian Wolves hoodie an sweatpants, and I still had massive gobs of exam booklets to grade by tomorrow—and I didn’t want to let down my advisor, Professor Dolores Bledsoe Finch, who had placed so much trust in me by making me one of her teaching assistants.

Groggy, I realized what had awakened me were strange voices talking quietly out in the living room. I got up, furtively crept to the door, and peeked out. There on the sofa was a man dressed as one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men, right out of Sherwood Forest, and standing next to him was a nice-looking redhead in a harlequin costume using the arm of the sofa as a ballet barre to stretch her long legs. The man I recognized as the gentleman who had introduced himself to me at the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute as Jacopo da Pontormo “Ponty” Polverizzo, but whose real name was the more prosaic Bryan Williams.

“Hi, Clarissa,” he said. “Sorry if we woke you. This is my wife, Rosemary Segal.”

“Hi,” said the harlequin, who was bent over, her rosy cheek nearly touching her kneecap. “Are you coming out with us?”

Avie entered the far side of the living room in the Wondrous Warhound costume our grandmother, Seedy James, created for her.

“What is this, Avie?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “One of your late-night theater rehearsals?” Their costumes, I noted, looked very professional, almost as good as Grandma Seedy’s handiwork, although they didn’t look like the costumes Chase Bradford had recently designed for Avie’s theater class assignment.

“No, Sissy,” she said. “It’s our turn for the neighborhood watch. Remember how the Y+Thems guarded the church down the street during Devil’s Night?” She was referring to when the Youthful Permutations served as live-in guardians for the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City and their hundred-year-old neo-Gothic building. “Well, there’ve been a few muggings of students in the area recently, so a community group of concerned citizens has set up a vigil.”

“You mean you’re doing costumed crimefighting?” I asked. “In the dead of night?”

“Don’t worry, we’re not the actual neighborhood watch,” said Avie. “We’ll just be shadowing the folks who are on citizen patrol. They have police walkie-talkies, but the squad cars never respond in time. Should anyone try to jump them, we jump out of the woodwork and bust ‘em.”

I frowned at my sister. “But Avie, the Y+Thems all had extraordinary Megapowers. You all have very nice costumes,” I said to Bryan and Rosemary, “but none of you are bulletproof. Crooks in Detroit use real knives and guns …”

“We’re not Megapowered, if that’s what you mean,” said Bryan, reaching into a knapsack at his feet. He pulled out a lethal-looking crossbow and some dangerous looking nunchucks, along with a rubber-tipped steel baton, a boomerang, a hook on a rope, and other gear. “But we’re not completely unarmed.”

“We’re highly acrobatic and resourceful,” said Rosemary, who had now worked herself into a split on the carpet. She used the baton to pull herself up to her feet in a graceful motion. “I’m called the Harrowing Harlequin,” she said, bowing and pointing the baton at the floor in a sweeping flourish, as if she’d just finished a top-hat dance routine.

“Rosemary does a great leg-lock,” said Avie, gesturing toward her throat.

“And I’m the Vagrant Vagabond,” said Bryan, rising to his feet. He pulled a hood over his head to complete the Robin Hood effect and cocked the crossbow with his foot.

It was then I realized I had seen both characters before in a weird, changing photograph on the wall of the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute.

“You were members of the Detroit Crime Busters in the seventies, weren’t you?” I said, suddenly in awe.

“We’ve had many careers,” said Bryan. “Unfortunately, you can’t really make a living as a full-time nocturnal vigilante in the Midwest.”

“Rosemary works in the costuming department for the theater program at WWU,” explained Avie. “She’s almost as good as Grandma Seedy. And Bryan is very talented at devising stage props, as you can see.”

“Although this isn’t exactly a stage prop,” said Bryan, looking through the sight of the bow. He pulled the trigger and it sprung with a startling twang—it wasn’t loaded with an arrow, thank God.

“That’s all very impressive,” I agreed. “But Avie, I don’t like the thought of my Civilian little sister taking unnecessary risks.” Unconsciously, I rubbed the small of my back where once as Ms. Megaton Man I had taken an exploding missile. “You’re not Megaheroes. You don’t know what you’re liable to run into out on these mean street after midnight …”

“Ms. Megaton Man can come along if she wants to,” said Avie, putting on her Warhound cowl. “I just didn’t want to bother you, Clarissa, with all your schoolwork.”

“We don’t need Ms. Megaton Man,” came a voice of someone marching down the hall from the back door of the apartment. “The West Forest Knight Rangers can keep an eye on things.”

It was Alice2, dressed in her Mod Puma uniform. I had to admit, for a middle-aged woman who was my mama’s identical counterpart from another reality, she cut a very impressive figure.

***

“Alice, I don’t think it’s a good idea …” I started.

“We’ll be fine, Sissy,” said Alice2, patting my arm with the clawed glove. “I was sidekick to your father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, remember? And I don’t have no more Megapowers than the Man on the Moon. You know how he is, always jumping into the fray, with bad guys ganging up on him like it’s going out of style. There I am, dancing out of the way of projectiles while he’s deflecting laser beams and bomb blasts off his pectorals. And I still lived to tell the tale, didn’t I?”

Just then, from the front foyer, Dr. Sax—our resident black cat—strode into the living room. She paused only long enough to give me an indifferent look with her emerald eyes. Somehow, it was reassuring.

“See? Dr. Sax is coming with us,” said Avie. “We’ll be fine.”

The cat strode down the hallway from which the Mod Puma had come disappeared.

“That’s our cue,” said Alice2. “I guess we’re going out the back door.” The group followed Dr. Sax to the back alley.

“It was very nice meeting you, Clarissa,” said Rosemary, as she and Bryan filed out of the living room. She turned to Bryan and asked, “Is that the one that talks?”

“No, you’re thinking of Kozmik Kat,” said Bryan, hoisting the sack of gear over his shoulder. “He’s orange and wears a cape, I understand.”

Avie kissed me on the cheek, tickling my nose with the rubbery whiskers of her Wondrous Warhound cowl. “Don’t wait up for us, Clarissa,” she said.

I heard the back door close and the screen door slam.

***

I finished grading exams about four-thirty in the morning, still an hour before daylight. I wish I could say it was my stick-to-itiveness or caffeine that kept me at it, but the fact was I just couldn’t get to sleep. Living in Ann Arbor though most of my undergraduate years, and being used to the relative quiet of Ann Street, it took me a while to get used to the nighttime sounds of Detroit: police and ambulance sirens, trucks rumbling down West Forest without mufflers, shouts from neighboring apartment buildings, and the occasional bang in the distance, which could be a gun going off or just a car backfiring. After a year, I had learned to tune them out.

But knowing Avie was prowling around in nothing more than a dog costume, even in the company of her more experienced friends, had me on edge. Every sound of a siren, or a shout or bang in the distance, made me jump up, wide awake. More than once, I ran to the closet and grabbed the garment bag containing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform. But each time I thought, “No, Avie’s a big girl. If she wants to go crimefighting alongside her mama from another dimensions, and two Crime Busters from the nineteen-seventies …” and I put the garment bag back.

Then I thought of the time I’d watched Avie die in the underground complex of Megatonic University, deep under Ann Arbor, at the hands of killer robots. It was an optical illusion, of course; she hadn’t really died, at least not in this reality. My visor had shown me a glimpse of what had taken place in another dimension. I guess you couldn’t call it an optical illusion if it really had happened somewhere; it was more a vision, and I’d never been able to shake it, especially when Avie insisted adopting her own costumed crime fighter identity, the Wondrous Warhound.

I had dozed off again when a siren startled me awake—it sounded like it raced just in front of the house. I jumped up, still in my hoodie and sweats; I hadn’t even crawled under the covers. I had gone to sleep propped against my pillows, and my neck was stiff; as I leapt to my feet, I pulled my back. “Christ, am I out of shape,” I said, leaning against a wall until my back relaxed. “What good would I do in my costume, anyway?”

***

It was now nearly dawn, so I brewed a pot of coffee. From the kitchen, I heard Avie come in through the front door and go into her bedroom. Dr. Sax strode down the hall into the kitchen and went straight for the food I set out for her in her dish.

“How’d it go?” I asked, expecting an answer from the cat. Dr. Sax gave me another indifferent look. “All in a night’s work, I take it.”

I fixed two mugs of coffee and hobbled down the hall, my back still stiff. I was lucky not to spill any. I looked into Avie’s bedroom. She was slipping out of her uniform and hanging it behind her door. “It was fantastic,” she said, beaming. “So exhilarating. After all that training, to get some real action.”

I was just relieved to see her alive, and with only a bruise on her thigh. For all I knew, she might have gotten that from one of her theater stunts. “You did all right?” I asked, handing Avie her favorite mug.

“Thanks. Yeah, it went great,” said Avie, taking a sip. “We busted three white guys, turned out to ex-cons from Monroe County. They formed a ring operating in the neighborhood. Busted ‘em up real good, too.” Avie gave a blow-by-blow account of the inaugural West Forest Knight Rangers mission, replete with batons and boomerangs flying, claws scratching, bolts fired from a crossbow. The citizens’ patrol was scared shitless, and the three muggers didn’t know what hit ‘em. “A broken kneecap, a sprained wrist, and some cracked ribs. Oh, and a crossbow bolt through one guy’s coat, tacking him to a telephone pole.”

“Yikes,” I said. I already thought North Cass Night Storm sounded vaguely fascist. “What about the steep social costs, Avie?” I was thinking of the emergency rooms of Detroit’s Medical Center, always overburdened with the casualties of the city’s high crime rate. “The taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for their recuperation, you know. And Detroit doesn’t have much of a tax base left, with most of the automotive industry having left town.” I enjoyed needling my sister whenever I could over inconsistencies in her politics.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Avie. “After we subdued them and tied them all up, Gene Griffin and Allan Jordan swung by in their white van and whisked them off to London. I guess Bryan and Rosemary are old associates of theirs.”

“London?” I asked. “You mean London, Ontario?” The city was not far from Windsor, right across the Ambassador Bridge in Canada. “Gene and Allan? That can’t be right. What on earth for?”

Avie shrugged. “Gene said they were taking them off to some clinic that would patch them up, free of charge. He said London had some experimental medical procedure that reformed even the most hardened crooks.”

Avie’s vague description reminded me of a passage I had read recently in a paperback book:

Big bronze Jock, lightyears away from corruptibility himself, and having earned medical degrees from at least three universities in American and Europe, took the crooks he captured to a place he called the Criminality Clinic somewhere in Canada. Once there, the evildoers would be subjected to a secret procedure involving electromagnets that permanently altered their brainwaves, such that an illegal or anti-social impulse never even occurred to the individual again. Thus rehabilitated, the former evildoers and sometimes criminal masterminds became mild-mannered, law-abiding, productive members of society; some even found gainful employment in one of the many capitalistic enterprises Jock owned and operated from his observation-tower aerie in the tallest skyscraper in New York.

The book, of course, was Jock London: His Revelatory Adventures by Juan Philippí Herder.

“Good Lord,” I said. “You don’t mean London, Ontario; You mean Jock London, the pulp adventurer from the nineteen-thirties. Don’t tell me Jock London is actually a real person—and still alive!?”