Shadows Out of Time

Just the Weight of God BRYAN D. DIETRICH

I have examined Google Maps and Google Earth with greatest care, yet have never again found Angell Street. Even without GPS, it should be easy. Oklahoma City is laid out like a grid, like the tesserae mosaics my father used to design for those tight-asses out in Nichols Hills or the comic book panels he loved so much. Unlike Memphis or Seattle, Oke City isn’t some strange concatenation of tentacled roads flailing madly around rivers, changing names, leading nowhere. I’ve wandered one end of the city to the other, searched every impossible place from brick town to the Paseo, from the Fire Fighters’ Hall of Fame to the edge of Norman where they keep the nuthouse. I’ve looked everywhere but cannot find the neighborhood, the singular street, or that strange little store, where, during my final semester as director of the Rose theater, I read the first pages of the last book my father never wrote.

The night it happened, sleet and freezing rain had turned half of Oklahoma into a fairy wonderland, if said wonderland had been imagined by Edward Hopper. I awoke in my car in a haze of tequila and beer and bewilderment. All I knew for sure was the time, three a.m., because something, probably my face, had slammed into the dash clock, and now it stared back at me, as blinking and confused as I was. I couldn’t remember much else. Didn’t even recall driving away from the bar, let alone making it from Norman to downtown OKC, evidently on booze control.

The airbag on my two-decade-old Saturn didn’t deploy, but at least I’d remembered my seatbelt. Getting the damn thing unlatched was difficult. Finding the door handle was just as hard. Then, stumbling and sliding away from my heap that now appeared a full foot shorter than I remembered, I could see that I’d bounced off a Nissan Titan and run headlong into a streetlight. Old school, real metal, not that breakaway stuff. Doubt if I even dented the pole. But the huge concavity in my hood looked like Jaws had made an appearance, and my windshield was smashed to shit. The hole where the window used to be seemed to grin at me with shiny blue and green teeth. I stared at my once clear hope of shelter with a kind of confused certainty, desperate ennui, my thoughts strangely sober, my instincts decidedly drunk.

Sleet continued to shovel down out of the ether, and I understood all I had between me and the elements was my USC windbreaker. No hat, no gloves. The tips of my fingers felt like glass. Wind wailed past streetlights, around red brick corners, and the chains on a nearby post office flagpole chattered like rattling bones. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine those two poor boys King Richard murdered in their tower, maybe that song by Gordon Lightfoot, the one about reading minds and a castle dark and a ghost with chains upon its feet.

The survivor bound in filial obligation for some term…

I hadn’t been feeling myself for years. Not since Dad was diagnosed. How long had I been dragging those chains? Just how much of a ghost had I become? Some days it felt like Dad and I had traded places. Didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Right now I really didn’t know. I didn’t recognize anything. It had to be downtown. About the only place with brick buildings and the old-style streetlights, but something was offkilter. And it wasn’t just residual drunk. Didn’t they mothball the downtown post office back in the Eighties? Fuck, and that’s what you’re worried about? Your car is totaled. It’s three in the morning. It’s sleeting. And you don’t have a clue where you are.

I reached in my pocket for my phone, but it wasn’t there, only a handful of tiny tequila one-shots. Fuck, I must have stopped and shitface-shopped at some point. Bet I left my phone there too. I rummaged around the Saturn. Nothing. Just round-edged jewels of glass and blood. I was lucky to be alive. Of course lucky was a relative term at this point. No car, no phone, not a soul around, no shelter from the storm, pain in my forehead, in my back and ribs, lost…Well, when in doubt, start walking. At least that’s what my feet said, so I listened, hoping that actually moving might warm me a little. Alas, that’s when the sleet turned into heavy, blinding flurries, and the lights up and down the block began flickering, then went out entirely.

I trudged ahead, spelunking my way through snow, through the cavern labyrinth made of brick and steel, neon and chrome, wondering what sort of mammoth might roam this technotundra. I wondered what my ancient ancestors might have thought, lost between one multinational glacier and another. Ancestors, parents, father…With nothing tangible to hold onto — the street ahead of me was gone, the buildings themselves might as well have been cliff faces — all my mind had to cling to was a drunken sense of loss I didn’t want to think about, but couldn’t let go.

I’d been awakened this morning — no, yesterday morning by now — by the sound of wind howling its way under our longsuffering, rotting window casings. That, and a sad call from my sister. Later, after I’d hung up and headed in to work, lines from the upcoming production kept running through my head. They ripped back and forth like a wood file through particle board. Like building a set. Like tearing one down.

But, you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his…

It had been a short call. But right in the middle of rehearsals? Right in the thick of trying to recreate the ghosts that haunt us all? Most of Hamlet’s father’s speeches are short too…at least in the beginning. Revenge. Remember. Swear. Everything that makes us human. Some scholars believe Shakespeare invented the human. Maybe. But maybe he just had a dad. And his dad got old. And his dad got sick. And fate demanded action.

My situation right now demanded action. It demanded I do fucking something or freeze to death in the middle of downtown. Still woozy, entering a kind of extremis fugue, I imagined myself being found years from now by anthropologists. He must have been a slave of some sort. Look how he’s branded with letters. Not wealthy…or smart. The sediment between the macadam and the new graphene city substructure suggests there was snow, and all he’s wearing is flimsy polyurethane. Tattoo of tragedy and comedy on his left shoulder. Small notebook in left pocket. Scribbled notes regarding Shakes — Ah, theater guy. Actor or director. So, yes, slave.

I tried, I really tried to keep my mind on the danger at hand. I swiveled my head side to side, looking for someplace, anyplace that might show signs of life, but it was the weekend, in the middle of a town with no nightlife, precious little foot traffic on a busy day. They used to have a world class theater down here. Also shut down in the Eighties. I kept walking, barely able to see the street, let alone the looming cave walls…buildings. I feared I might be losing it. I’d heard about frostbite victims. I’d read that terrible little story by Hans Christian Anderson, another by Jack London. I didn’t have any matches to warm me. I didn’t have a dog to disdain me.

Finally, up ahead, I saw a faint light that seemed to come from between two of the larger office buildings. The warm glow lit the mirror cladding like fire plumes leading me to a box canyon cave, like offstage torches guiding me to the castle perilous. I thought of Bernardo and Marcellus and Horatio following the ghost light toward Elsinore’s horrible secret, the dead father that could kill them all. My mind was everywhere and nowhere. I didn’t know how long I’d walked or how much longer I could hold out. I wished I had some matches, or a dog, or a dead father to guide me.

I turned the corner into an alley labeled Angell, and there it was.

Some sort of shop lit up like Candlemas.

Stepping into the deep corridor between the two monoliths on either side, I noticed both the snow and sleet had stopped. Or perhaps it just didn’t fall here. The store had no name, no specific sign, but I could just make out comics gleaming their three-color glory from the plate glass storefront. Also, intricately blown-glass vials with long tubes flickering like jewels in the night, like genie bottles of every color. As I got closer, I saw that the storefront, the brick façade itself might not sport a name, but it showcased two large murals. On one side of the windows, airbrushed onto the brick, loomed an image of Force Commander from the Micronauts. He stood just behind his much cooler, more clearly rendered horse, Oberon. The halfbiological, half-mechanical steed reared up on its hind legs, its geometric curves and white eyes making it look like an art nouveau sculpture drawn by Michael Golden.

On the other side of the windows, facing the horse rampant like a lover, was an image I knew almost as well as the comic book characters. Oberon, I knew from all those days collecting comics beside my father. This image, I knew from all those days collecting unemployment after I left his house. Here, a perfect recreation of the woman from JOB rolling papers stared across both window and entryway, head tilted back, hair wild as a stallion’s mane, eyes half-closed, hand half-raised to lips awaiting either her equine lover or the approaching, smoldering joint. She reminded me of a noble nymph captured in tapestry, a fairy queen. This design was even more nouveau than the other.

Shivering and footsore, shaken and lost, all I could think of as I approached the door was: I am passing now between two gods, between two forces, Titania and Oberon. I am stepping into the conflux of their power. I fished one of the mini-bar tequila bottles from my pocket and hammered it whole.

My dad always wanted me to be a comic book artist. As a carpenter and plumber and would-be architect, what folks in his home town called a mule skinner, Dad himself once harbored dreams of the arts. He encouraged me from the start, but when my designs led to stage sets and costume design, when that gift led to the boards and eventually directing, he always seemed disappointed. He loved comics. Loved the idea that maybe, someday, his son could succeed where he had wavered. His own father always thought him a failure, tried to talk him into the military, but Dad held on to as much art as he could and fed that love with the designs he realized for other people’s dreams, if never his own.

Here, in this store that couldn’t exist on a night that couldn’t exist, I stood — a car wreck survivor who shouldn’t exist — in the middle of a store that reminded me of all the old shops Dad and I once haunted. Once upon a time, comic shops weren’t just about comics. They were about comics and pot. Before that, they were straight-on head shops, retailers in the realm of Reggae and righteous bush, but at some point, all the paraphernalia peddlers realized stoners liked looking at shit when they were baked out of their gourds. Soon, black light posters and lava lamps, kinetic toys and wave machines, all the wild mandalas of a ’70s culture steeped in mood alteration made their way into the stores. Then, eventually, underground comics.

Kind of like what I saw here, throughout the store, between the X-Men long boxes and oversized Treasury Editions of Superman vs. Shazam, Conan, Ghosts. One whole window of the store was dedicated to glass bongs, the genie bottles I’d spotted earlier, but the deadhead detritus didn’t end there. Next to posters of Killraven and the Identity Crisis saga hung several examples of Roger Dean cover album art. Yes, it said, breathe deep and follow us to a land of floating, fragmented islands, alien bonsai trees, mud-dobber castles where mosquito spacecraft explore the secret seas. A long glass counter along the far wall contained both classic Big Little Books and hand-crafted clay pipes. Another wall championed what looked like entire runs of various ’50s TV-tie-in series, interspersed with Fritz the Cat and Zapped comics. Black light lit the aisles of the store not already illuminated by strobes or disco or plasma balls. A few dark nooks glowed only with lava shadows, posters with slogans for Panama Red or Zig Zag rolling papers.

Back in the day, I didn’t develop my dad’s thoroughgoing zeal for the comics cavalcade, for saddle-stitch storytelling, but I did collect for a while. I still have a few of the rarer ones he bought me over the years mounted in my office. But Dad loved the medium from his first Action to his last Sandman. I may have moved on, but the love of my father, my desire to have some connection to him, particularly after the Alzheimer’s set in, demanded I keep one foot in the art of antiquity and one in the world of word balloons. Consequently, part of me both loves and hates what stage and screen have become. Comic book characters, comic book plots, comic book themes. All the great drama fleeing from Broadway to boob tube, cineplex to idiot box. But since I grew up with Kirby and Ditko, Doctor Strange and Adam Strange, all the new gods, I live in a kind of perpetual schizophrenic state.

Walking the length of the store, checking the center aisle boxes occasionally for titles I might recognize, I was glad of the warmth, I was glad for safe haven, but I wondered how a store so brazenly counter-culture still existed in a state like Oklahoma. After my BA, before I moved to Southern Cal for grad school, I holed up in Kansas for a while. Further north, less inbred, but not so different. There, in Wichita, for almost two years, the police regularly raided a woman’s house who lived just down the block from me. She sold pot paraphernalia, yes, but it was advertised otherwise. Bongs were “decorative bowls.” Roach stones were “beads.” Clay pipes were “native American art.” They busted her anyway.

Okay, it ain’t Kansas, but how the hell does this store stay afloat? How do they keep the Securitate at bay?

Sure, I’d smoked dope in my day. Still did if the company was right, but it wasn’t any more a major part of my life than the comics I abandoned when I moved out. I left both forms of escape behind. Or so I thought. Trying to encourage attendance at plays, the literate drama so few care about these days, I feel like I’m re-labeling theater the way my neighborhood pot lady did her wares. Oh, Death of a Salesman is really The Dark Knight Returns. Angels in America is just a grittier version of X-Men II. How often have I sold my soul? How horribly have I co-opted both myself and my father?

To thine own self be true.

No. I have to love the world I hate…for my father’s sake. When he introduced me to my first comic shop in Norman, it was as if he were preparing me for baptism or the priesthood. “This reminds me of when I bought that original Submariner story,” he said, “‘Motion Picture Funnies Weekly’.” He went on to show me around, introducing heroes and villains, legendary leagues and shady subcultures which seemed to bleed into much of what else the store sold. Doing his best to shield me from all the head shop shit, all the underground udders on display, he revealed to me at least an inkling of the real reverence he felt.

I still hadn’t seen any sign of life in the shop. My feet had stopped burning from the cold, my hands had stopped tingling, but my spider sense was going off like a goddamn carillon as I finally felt warm enough to start seriously rifling through the store’s wares. I still had two tequila tinies. One more might make things make sense. So, yeah, then there was one.

The first title I came across was a 1972 DC Treasury Edition of The Adventures of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I always loved the oversized comics. They made me feel bigger somehow. This one in particular. I remembered reading it on the way back from Christmas Eve with my relatives in Carnegie when I was eight or nine. My folks had been fighting a lot and the simple stories and games calmed me, took me away.

Most comics in a store are bagged, but often the larger sizes are left to the careful discretion of the customer. I gently opened the pages and saw the blocky, funny-animal style I remembered. The grid lines of the sequential art. The word balloons. My mother’s hand in dot-matrix color and basic black outline reaching under the Christmas tree to retrieve a small box labeled “wife.” The next panel zoomed out to show the tree itself, a sad, silver little thing made of tin. The kind of tree that would’ve made Linus cry. Another panel clearly illuminated the halfmelted fairy perched atop, its wand drooping, the bulb inside flickering. Two more panels down, next to an ad for art classes, the adults exchanged gifts while my sisters and I waited with feigned patience, enraptured by the moving fan-light which bathed the silver tree in amber and emerald, blue and scarlet as the color wheel turned.

For minutes I simply turned pages and read the story of that Christmas as a normal continuation of memories I’d been channeling since I walked in. The small box opening. My mother’s reaction. “But Julian, I didn’t think we were…not this year.” The words, sad as our tree, fragile as that melted fairy, appeared in a word balloon above her head. But the moment I read my father’s response in his parallel balloon—“Just three little words, that’s all I want”—I snapped out of my fugue and realized something was happening. Something surreal. Frightening even.

This wasn’t Rudolph. This wasn’t a comic book story. It was my story. My dad’s story. How the fuck…

I flipped pages, skipped to the end, rolodexed back to the beginning. Not one image of the rhinophymic reindeer. Not one caricature of the obese, capitalist God who kept his sentient pets in bondage. Just my family, that whole Christmas. The words my folks spoke. The presents we received. The complete confusion on my father’s face as my mother shut the box with her new wedding ring guard, set it aside, and focused on me and my sisters. The slump in his spine, in his whole soul, as he shrank into the bedroom and let us finish our consumer orgy. In a sequence of final panels, after a crossword puzzle full of terms related specifically to our family (mule skinner, Oklahoma, adultery, art school, drama teacher, disappointment), the comic zeroed in on my father’s hands pressed against his face as he sat on the bed. Slightly different, scalloped balloons showed his inner thoughts.

“I should have explained. Really. But what are we gonna tell them? I keep thinking, Regan’s getting hitched in June, maybe the whole wedding thing, daughter leaving, new lives twining will bring back…But what if it doesn’t? She fucked around, probably still…”

I couldn’t read it all. Didn’t want to. It was like the Twilight Zone, like reading a Borges story. Maybe meeting your dead father on the battlements of a castle you never wanted to inherit. It was impossible.

It was true.

Nobody had come to greet me in the store since I arrived. Regardless of the lights and heaters all running full blast, the muffled strains of music coming from a back room somewhere, I began to wonder if the store was even open. A sane person would’ve checked, would’ve looked for the proprietors. A sane person would’ve seen what I saw in that old, stupid, children’s comic and run like hell. But I wasn’t really sane at the moment. More than half-plastered, I was still less than fully thawed, I was freaked by my wreck and the storm and the store itself, and I was more curious than I should’ve been.

Only a handful of rational options could explain it. I’m dead. I’m in a coma. I’m concussed. I’m dreaming.

Only a handful of irrational options provided an alternative. I’m being tested by aliens. I’m living a computer program. I’ve crossed over to another dimension where the rules are different. I’m stuck in someone’s story.

Well, okay. Maybe one other option. This is really happening. This is the real world.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…

So I opened the sleeve on another comic, this one bagged, tagged, overpriced.

The 300th issue of Superman. I knew this comic well, as well as the Rudolph fluff I read when I was too young to understand market tie-ins, trademark vertical stacking. This issue was supposed to retell the story of Superman as if he landed on Earth in 1976. I paused for a second, fearing, knowing what I would find. Sure enough, Curt Swan’s iconic art greeted me with the image of a young boy with great gifts trapped in a Kansas upbringing, but it wasn’t the youth I remembered. It looked a lot like my father.

His mother — a woman who’d been married at fifteen, three children in hand, one on the way — looks out one day on her family’s cotton field to see a storm moving in. She notices rotation in the clouds, then recognizes her youngest out in the field, oblivious to the threat. She drops her dishes, slams her way through the screen door, and runs pell-mell for the three-yearold playing among the cotton rows. She has to save him, get him back to the house, grab the others and head for the cellar. But the boy is almost a mile away. By the time she gets back to safety, the boy in her arms riding the curve of her large belly, her other chicks squawking before her into the dank must of their dark cellar, it is too dark to see the blood pouring out of her sex. She can feel it though. She knows what it means. The boy won’t know till years later, not until after he takes a job at the church and has to mow the grass that grows on her grave.

Hers and his stillborn sister’s.

I located another long box, closed my eyes, picked an issue from the middle at random. I opened my eyes. Here, in a Deadman comic, I found my father was taking me to our first R-rated film together. Galaxy of Terror. My father squirmed as one of the actresses was stripped nude and raped by a giant slug creature.

I turned to another row of boxes, grabbed one from the front and one from the very back. I opened them, one after the other. Richie Rich and Sandman. The Rich story showed me and my father as bachelors in Phoenix. The short time we lived there, he developed an extravagant ritual for my allowance. Rows of pennies, turning to nickels, then dimes, then quarters led me once each month from my bedroom to the kitchen where I found cups set up on the Formica table as if for a magic trick. Tupperware bowls. Several boxes. All in sets of three. “Keep the money, or try for what’s under one of these cups,” he said.

“I’ll take cup number one.” It was a Twinkie.

“Okay, you can keep the Twinkie or go for what’s under the bowls.”

“Bowl number three.” A paperclip.

“Okay, keep the paperclip, or…”

He could keep this going forever. And it meant so much to me. But, according to the comic, it meant even more to him. We were so poor back then we had to entertain ourselves. No cable. Nothing but board games and cards. No new shoes. Shitty Sears shirts. Not a lot of theater movies, not a lot of comic book shopping. Even less Sirloin Stockade.

I opened the other comic. This one, The Sandman, came from the second series of that name, not the original Fox and Christman stuff, not the later, better Gaiman. Instead, Kirby’s garish, grandiose, wide-eyed style stared back. It showed my father and me biking from our apartment in Phoenix to a Rexall Drugstore, way out on the edge of town. We biked a lot together then. In the story, we rode toward a specific goal, my dad trying to help me find the latest issue of a comic I’d actually begun collecting. This one was supposed to have Man-Bat fighting the Dark Knight. On our way home, we pedaled our way through a park and arrived at a creek where my dad tried to jump the lip of a concrete bridge. He flew over the handlebars and landed smack-damn on the middle of his belly. It winded him so much he couldn’t talk. I stood over him, fanning him with World’s Finest.

She-Hulk told the tale of our family trip to Disneyland, when we stopped on the way at the Painted Desert, at the Grand Canyon, and, penultimately, at Bedrock, mock-up of an already outdated cartoon, and the saddest place on earth. All the stone-age homes, carved ostensibly from granite, showed signs of serious degradation. Chicken wire, crumbling stucco, the horrors of time and inattention. A short feature in the back highlighted my dad slapping Delia in front of an Allosaurus. A flash-forward showed him feeling ashamed for years after.

One issue of Heavy Metal contained a series of interconnected tales involving his grade school years, his growing interest in art and shop. His first failure in any class ever, Driver’s Ed. Evidently he had to take his driving test in a school bus. These were stories I’d never known before.

Neal Adams’ Batman told tales of our late nights playing poker with Monopoly money, struggling through the 221B Baker Street boardgame. An extra story, nestled toward the end of the comic, showed my father leaning over his ledgers, crying, trying to deduce the name of a villain, any villain, touching each red number, real money spent on my mom.

Jack Kirby’s Machine Man illustrated the work my dad did in Nichols Hills for years. The beautiful inlays and woodwork he created. All the terrible people who didn’t appreciate it.

Ms. Marvel explored the night he tried to get my mother back, offering to return her diamond property. The epilogue made it clear he failed to read the fine print.

The last comic I released from its polyurethane prison was a first issue of Epic Illustrated. I remembered this one from the Eighties. Full color, fine art, an attempt to steal the market from Heavy Metal.

The cover by Frank Frazetta didn’t connect in any way to the story of an Oklahoma boy who grew up poor and bright and talented, a boy who gave up his dreams for family, who collected comics and tried to pass that love on to his only son, who came to his son’s plays but wanted more for his legacy’s legacy, who, before the marriage and kids and eventual divorce, before the exile to Arizona and a rocky return, before the disillusionment and despair, before years of living alone and the seemingly arbitrary death sentence of Alzheimer’s, one Christmas morning, when he was five, got the one thing he had asked for from his dad…an eraser.

No, the cover, a grey-scale tableau of Roman soldiers bestriding a cliff, didn’t seem to signify that tiny, povertyplagued man who was — is — my father. But the story inside moved me to tears, dredging up the previous morning’s memory, a memory decidedly not comic, the memory I’d tried to avoid all day, all night. The memory of a phone call in whose service I wrecked my car.

“Daniel, we have to move him to a dedicated memory facility.”

“Why? I thought Delia was able to manage him.”

“It’s gotten…difficult. We’re running out of clothes. He isn’t able to…”

“Oh. Okay. But you said…”

“I know. We said a lot of things, Danny. It’s hard.”

“Sorry. Sorry. So what’s the plan?”

“They told us we should take him to the facility for dinner.”

“Um…That’s it?”

“No. We take him to dinner there…” She paused. A long pause. “…and leave him.”

“Leave him?”

“Yeah.” I could hear the horror in her voice. Horror, resignation. “And no contact from any of us for three weeks.”

I felt my heart beating in my brain, my scrotum ballooning into my throat. “Jesus, Regan! Traumatic much?”

“Yes.”

A single saline drop fell on the Epic.

And, finally, the proprietors appeared.

Actually, I wasn’t sure if they were the proprietors, though clearly they worked here. They looked like so many other fine young Hannibals I see piloting the ships of commerce into the rocks these days. Ratty jeans, t-shirts, bed-head. But these three were women, something I hadn’t often come across at a comic book shop. GameStop maybe, or Spencer’s, but uber-geek heaven? Not often at all.

I wasn’t sure where they’d come from either, maybe from behind the large Vampire tapestry at the back of the store, a gaudy, Goth arras I’d imagined as merely decorative. It was creepy, like they’d just manifested or beamed in. Even stranger, as I watched them navigate the clutter of the store, I realized their eyes were closed. They didn’t carry canes, but gently and knowingly touched each object along their path, clearly feeling their way to the cash register. I know you’re not supposed to stare at the unsighted, but I couldn’t help myself. Three blind workers running a place that caters to the graphic arts? Almost odder than what I’d found in the comics themselves. Then again, maybe my whole idea of normal had to go out the window. Tonight wasn’t going to get any more mundane.

All wore jeans and nametags. All had different hair, different neon topknots, but they seemed like siblings, triplets maybe. The first wore a faded t-shirt from the Eighties with poster art for Eddie and the Cruisers on the front. Her name also read Eddie, perhaps ironically, perhaps not. The second sported Bruce Lee on her top, huge and hyper-realistic, as if inked by Drew Friedman. According to her tag, she was Melody. The last was the only one of the three with a comic theme. Over her small breasts the image of Oracle presided, the hero formerly known as Batgirl sitting in her wheelchair and running Gotham from behind the scenes, from behind the screen of her computer. Like any one of the thousands of comics in the place, she too was marked with a little white square. Hers said Mimi.

“Can we help?” she asked.

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?” said Melody.

“Our rates are not unreasonable,” offered Eddie.

“I…um…what is this place?” I couldn’t imagine another question.

“Please,” Melody said. “Ask again. Something real. Something smart.”

“Is this…heaven?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Eddie said. “For this we stayed open?”

By now I’d moved to the front of the store, toward the cash register, still clinging to a couple of comics, a couple of my father’s memories.

The women stood behind the counter, eyes closed. For some reason I wondered if they even had eyes. Yet it felt like they were seeing me, watching my face and hands, sizing me up. One of them, Mimi, fidgeted with a cheap plastic figurine, like something you’d find in a Happy Meal. As it moved back and forth in her hands, I recognized it. Mike, the green-eyed monster from that silly Pixar film.

“Give me that,” Eddie said and took it from her. “So, you stumbled across our little store. It’s not easy to find.” A moment ago, she’d sounded disgusted. Now she seemed impressed.

Melody reached over and stole Mike from her co-worker. She, too, began to worry it like a stress doll. “Were you looking for us?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you…” I stopped before I finished the thought, seeing all three blind brows wrinkle toward disdain. This wasn’t the normal banter one has at a comic shop, even a head shop. And no, I’m not an idiot. I knew there had to be some connection between what had happened yesterday and this store, between the phone call and what was happening now. But none of it seemed real. Everything was like a dream.

I tried again. “I’m not sure who you…” More wrinkles. Even my own. I knew better.

I’d taught drama for more than two decades. I knew the stories, the character types, the tropes. I’d followed the trajectory of all that happened before and behind the curtain from contemporary, minimalist mummery back to when writers first realized the stage was a stand-in for our brains. I’d written a number of plays myself. New stuff, adaptations of Dante. I knew the mystery and the mythology. So the moment these three appeared, I made every connection you could imagine. They were women, but they weren’t. They were expected, but they weren’t. They spoke to my knowledge of the history of theater, but they didn’t. I’ve read Camus. I’ve directed Sartre. I’ve seen every Twilight Zone ever made.

Of course I knew who they were.

“I assume you only find this place if you need it,” I said.

“Well played.” Melody languidly opened and closed Mike’s one big eye with her thumb.

“Do I get to ask for my father back?”

“Your father is beyond us,” Mimi said.

“So you can’t fix sickness. What do you do? Why do you have my dad’s memories if you can’t return them?”

“This isn’t a pawn shop,” Eddie said.

“Helluva head shop then.”

“It is a head shop, though not as you mean.” Mimi grabbed the little monster back from her sister.

“Okay…”

“Did you want to die?” She handed Mike to Eddie.

“No, I…Okay, am I dead?”

“You know the answer to that. Why would you need this…us…if you were?”

“So, fine. Not dead. Can’t get my father back, not like he was. What possible thing could you offer me? You could’ve just let me freeze to death.”

Mimi smiled. “Oh, please, are you really that dense?”

“I’m still a little drunk, if that counts. And I just had to tell my sister it was okay to fuck over my dad, well, fuck over the body my dad used to inhabit. Because there wasn’t any other choice. And my Dean wants to read me the riot act since I decided to take liberties with our upcoming production of…”

“Do you really think we give a shit about Denmark?” Eddie picked up a bong made out of a plaster skull. A long tube depended from the back of the head like something out of an H.R. Giger nightmare. A metal tray gleamed in its rictal mouth, waiting for burnt offerings.

“No,” I said. “No, but what the hell? You’ve got my father’s memories bagged and tagged and filed in long boxes and…” I looked slowly around the store. I thought about the implications. I looked back at the three women. “Aw, fuck.”

“Yes,” Mimi said, her face grown solemn.

“This is my father. Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And his memories are actually for sale.”

“Yes.” She thought for a minute. “Sort of. More like a wager.”

“And though he can’t have them back, someone else might. I could walk away with a really sweet deal.”

“Or a really bad one.”

“Because there’s a catch.”

Eddie smiled. “A lovely, lovely catch.”

“Which would be…”

“Your memories for his,” Mimi said.

“Win, and take away what he’s lost,” Melody said.

“Lose, and let go of your own,” Eddie said.

“All of them?” I thought about chasing girls on the playground with my “love inducer” made from a Cracker Jack box and an old TV antenna. I thought about the first sex I ever had, back seat of a Ford Futura. That time in fifth grade, sneezing while giving an oral report, unspooling snot, snorting it back up. Sixth grade, wrestling, shitting my shorts. The look on my father’s face that one Christmas.

“All? No, of course not. The game has limits. But I’m sure there are memories you don’t want anyway.” Eddie’s smile became carnivorous.

She was right. There were some memories I wouldn’t miss, but others? Others I’d sell my soul to keep. “Ah,” I said. “What are the odds?”

They led me to the back of the store, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew playing in the background. Once we passed behind the curtain, there was almost no light. Just a glowing, cluttered table around which had been arranged four chairs. The three workers, owners, sisters, whatever, gestured to the extra seat and found their way to their own. I could see them in the near dark, reflecting the light of the strange table that looked like a giant, glowing toadstool, but — like seeing the light of the store itself through snow, like seeing modern drama through the lens of comics — not really. I couldn’t see them at all. As I took the offered seat, suddenly I felt like a student again. First day of class. What would I learn?

I’d been teaching for a long time. I knew a lot of shit. Once upon a time, that knowledge was useful. I could riff off the Greeks and the Akkadians and the Medieval Mystery Plays for hours. But nowadays where I taught…not so much. Rose State used to be a community college, a kind of votech for not-ready-for-prime-time scholars. No, probably not fair, but after they renamed it — same way so many small colleges did in the ’90s, suddenly deciding they were universities — most of my students still came there to make up for deficiencies, to tread water while waiting for a raise at work. Yes, I had some good students, even some stellar ones, but most saw the school as a clearing house to buy Associates Degree insurance. That, or a way to tiptoe around core requirements that might be harder at a “real” university.

Still, regardless of what I was able to impart to others anymore, I recognized those figures who were supposed to be the source of all I’d ever imparted. Like the witches in the Scottish play, the grey hags Perseus consulted, the Norns, the knitting women Marlowe encounters in Heart of Darkness, these figures…Jesus, I thought, am I really saying this to myself? After all the comics, after all the memories held captive in not-so-funny books, after all that had happened since this morning…Somehow, somehow I knew. These three had to be them. I knew it in my hind-brain. I felt it in the movement of my mitochondria. They characterized, represented, actually were the power of chance and choice and knowing. The original muses, the Titanides. Song, Practice, Memory. I could feel them in my lungs, in my DNA, in the dark, confused, clattering places of whatever I had left of a soul.

“Have a seat,” Melody said.

Eddie sat directly to my right. She handed me a small leather pouch. “Choose your die.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, she likes to do that. Dice. Choose one of the dice,” Mimi said.

Her face, all of their faces, glowed in the light coming from the table I still didn’t understand. The gaming table was short and squatty, fluted, a goblet-shaped stump, but it glowed from within, eldritch colors swirling inside. I couldn’t look directly into it, given the hexagonal maps and pewter figures, the character sheets and snacks and random dice that covered the top, but something active, something almost alive was happening beneath. Lava lamps use wax and water, I thought, different densities to create the fluid flow. Wave motion machines use oil and water, different affinities, to create the tranquil rise and collapse we love to watch. Humans use…Fuck. Something about this room kept pushing me off-track, making me wander.

I hefted the little bag in my hand. Just the weight of God, I thought. Then, like before, Where the hell did that phrase come from? I’d been channeling Shakespeare references all night. But Dickinson? Maybe some graduate course back in—

“Daniel,” Mimi said, loud, terse, breaking me loose from my woolgathering. “Choose.”

They know my name.

Of course they know your nam.

The knowing scared me.

Gently, I pulled the strings on the pouch and looked inside. Seven dice, everything one needed for an RPG, from twentysided to four. But these were no more plastic than the bag was Naugahyde. I’d never felt leather like this. Too soft. I’d never seen dice like this. Too organic. I poured the seven polyhedral shapes out into my hand. Old they were, yellowed and worn. Like teeth.

I stared for a moment at the maps and other clutter which rested on the strange table. Someone, maybe the three sisters, maybe something else, had recently been playing Villains and Vigilantes. Whomever, they liked superhero stories, role playing, and pork rinds.

“It’s really very simple,” Mimi said.

“Okay, but I’ve never played this. Superhero 2044 and Champions, yes. But not…”

Eddie reached forward and swept everything on the table to the floor. Super saviors and dire dreadnaughts hit Formica. Caped crusaders bounced bravely beneath slowly floating spreadsheets of predetermined abilities. The latter eventually came to rest on top of the former. Polyhedral patterns of movement, evidence of a finely finessed fate behind everything, slid toward the curtain, coming to rest just behind several unstoppable dice that continued to dance, like they didn’t have anything else to do.

“This isn’t the game,” she said, indicating the clutter she’d just tossed to the floor. “The game is Tali.”

“Do you know the Eleusinian mysteries?” Mimi asked.

I couldn’t answer. I was too fascinated by what uncovering the tabletop had revealed. Was it indeed a toadstool? A grail? The stump of Yggdrasil? I would never know, but inside the base, right beneath the surface — perhaps deeper than any single soul could imagine — spun a perfect representation of the galaxy. One hundred billion stars stared back at me, lighting the three sisters, lighting me, lighting the room whose corners I could not see. All I was sure of was this table and these women, these dice and me. But the stars? They swarmed like swamp gas around a sunken corpse, like lightning bugs orbiting secret shallows, like neurons blinking on and off around an idea.

I couldn’t help but wonder…was this a retro toy, some sort of head shop simulacra they’d found on eBay, or was it something else? Might it be real? Was the galaxy actually in there, under the tabletop, beneath bones my Muses must be rolling every day?

“Choose,” Mimi said again.

“I…I don’t know the rules,” I said.

“High score. Subtract the difference. Three against one of course.” She shrugged, as if to say, sorry, that’s the way the quarks collide.

“Similar to Knucklebones or Fivestones. Not as confusing as Craps,” Melody said, her grin like Eddie’s earlier.

“So, I just pick one? Or several?”

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake,” Eddie said, “you have seven possibilities. Pick one and—”

“Unless he picks a d10,” Mimi said. “Then he has to roll two.”

“Yeah, right, but that’s…Daniel, tell me, you’ve played D&D, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve rolled against a Dungeon Master, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing. Except now you have three masters. So fucking choose.”

Suddenly, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality replaced Miles, and all the plasma balls around the room went crazy. Little, bubbled boils of lightning. I didn’t know if it was the game commencing or Melody’s anger. Regardless, the room grew brighter, in a UV-sort-of-way. Purple highlights hit everything, including my Muses. For just a few seconds, I could see their skeletons through their skin. It was like watching the entire room bathed in X-Rays. Everything except me. I looked at my own hands. I stared at the dice and the galaxy spinning inside its grail. Nothing else glowed from the inside, save the sisters. For a few seconds, I couldn’t even make out their faces. Skulls, three of them, stared back at me. Grinning, eternally grinning.

I looked at the seven die — teeth? — lying on the surface of the Milky Way.

Not a math major.

What are my odds?

If we all roll d20s, and if they top out as I crap out, I lose fiftynine memories.

What kind of memories do I have? What am I willing to lose?

If I roll two d10s, same scenario. Except I lobotomize 299 elements of who I am.

Is this what my dad went through? Is this what the past six years have meant? Losing a life, memory by memory? Offloading stuff one doesn’t give a shit about? Losing everything that ever mattered? Those memories back in the store, trapped inside innocence and ink…Are they as important to him as they are to me? How many are out there, beyond the curtain? How many have blundered into the dark recesses of some strange shoppe where only the most discriminating connoisseur might recognize their importance?

The first appearance of Gambit or the Uncanny X-Men themselves. The original run of Warlock? The first Infinity Gauntlet storyline? Shit, all those Scrooge McDuck tales that no one — and I mean no one — cares about, yet sell for insane dollars? How are they any different from what my father may have lost? Could he even know?

Can I?

If I dice against these devils?

“Our knowledge may be infinite,” Melody said, “but our patience…”

“Okay, d4,” I said, pulling out my last mini-bottle and downing it. At this point in my life, in his, what difference did it make? My memories, his memories? They were almost the same. He was losing memory. I was selling mine for tenure and tequila and temerity.

“Really?” Mimi, the tiny form of Mike-the-mono-eyed in her hands, stared at me. Blind, she stared at me. In the harrowing glimmer of galaxy glamour and Tesla tentacles, she stared at me. Half human, half Red Skull.

“d4,” I said again, thinking, if they all roll fours, the worst that can happen is I roll one, lose eleven memories. Best case? I win one. Anything else, I run higher and higher risks.

“Don’t you want to venture…more?” Eddie’s cranium pulsed with the plasma strikes illuminating balls around the room, a room whose boundaries escaped me. The walls didn’t seem to exist. Limits seemed extraneous.

“No,” I said. I wasn’t really clear on why I’d chosen the path of least resistance, why I didn’t want to bet the farm — young child, field, tornado — but then a memory, one I hadn’t found in the comics in the other room, one of my own, presented itself.

Two years ago I took my father to see Man of Steel. By then, he’d lost almost everything, his sense of balance, his knowledge of most people’s names. He barely remembered, from moment to moment, who I was. After we had a couple of Black Angus hot dogs at the upstairs Deli, we wandered down to the theater itself and I helped him into a seat. It wasn’t a great film, full of plot problems and the same sort of character carelessness I hated. In fact, it was precisely the kind of film I felt was killing the field I’d long found myself a part of. But…

But my father, a man who once spent years designing intricate inlay intaglios for rich people, who knew the name of every member of the Legion of Superheroes, who knew how to carve a spiral banister by hand, who could make a makebelieve wooden rubber-band gun in under a minute, who could name every artist who ever drew Spider-Man or Doctor Strange…My father sat in that seat and watched for two and a half hours and didn’t lose focus. He didn’t have to get up for the bathroom. He didn’t become confused. He watched the film with me as I watched him, and he seemed to glory in it, to find something special that the real world didn’t offer. Alien loses his past, his planet, his parents, and he moves on. Something there seemed to touch him.

When it was over, my dad reached for me and I had to guide him far more carefully back up the theater’s center aisle.

Up, for someone with Alzheimer’s, is ever so much harder than down.

I took his hand and guided him up the small incline back to the lobby. He could barely walk. His balance was fucked. I wasn’t sure if he even remembered one third of the film we’d just watched. Halfway there, he slowed, turned to me and said, “So…we’re going to save the world?”

I rolled the dice.

My father drives like a madman from the IHOP to someplace else. He doesn’t know what the someplace else is, but he knows he has to be there. It calls to him from the dark places of the world, the places his own son would call the underworld. He doesn’t really understand his son, all the glitter and glam, the gargantuan egos. He doesn’t understand ego. He just wants to do what his body tells him. And his body says drive.

It will be a year before the diagnosis, but he knows something is off.

Eventually, after morning turns to afternoon and afternoon becomes dusk, after two tanks of gas and so many, many wrong turns, he arrives at Altus, the town where his mother was buried. But this isn’t where his body says he’s supposed to go. He grew up a few miles away, closer to Carnegie. It’s there his father found a final resting place, near a ramshackle sharecropper shack where he and his family lived, where his father never forgave him for living at the expense of his mom.

When he arrives at the ruin, he doesn’t get out of the car. Instead he drives on past, out into the stubble of the cotton field. Somewhere near the creek, near stones he remembers sleeping on when he was little, somewhere as alien as it is familiar, he stops the car, gets out and, letting his body drive, finds a side path, a little road that leads to a glade between the tree-line berm and the lowering gulley that runs from here to Lawton. Just this side of the culvert, chalky teeth of gravestones rise from Oklahoma’s red-dirt gums.

After touching stone, saying sad words, forgetting everything he’s come here for, he remembers the IHOP, remembers he was supposed to be headed home after eating sausage and hash browns, and stumbles back to his car. Alas, the land is unforgiving. The dirt beneath his wheels is pure mud. For hours he tries to drive back out. For hours he is rebuffed.

While he presses his foot to the foot feed, while he regrets everything he’s done — now, before, later — he thinks about his father, about his father’s scorn. He thinks about his own son. Wondering how he’s going to explain all this if he ever gets to a phone, revving his engine ever higher and higher, he wishes three wishes.

May Dan understand I was never disappointed, only sad when he seemed to compromise.

May he know how proud…

The car finally jumps and clears the mud. He cheers, briefly confused about why. Now where was I? Oh.

May he be sad when I’m gone.

My father’s story appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! number twenty-five. I held the small digest-sized comic in my hand as I walked toward the door of the store.

Beyond all imagining, buggering all odds, the sisters each rolled ones.

Drunk and doomed and somehow dear, I rolled four.

The rest was simple math. Whether the game was new or ancient, the die polymer or pumice or bone, I won the day by the margin of a single digit. It might not be much, but it meant the world to me.

Holding the book like I had my father’s hand, I approached the door of the comic book shop and looked back one last time. I saw the Vampire tapestry being sucked inward, swept aside like a theater curtain at a premier. It allowed a clear view of the glowing table and the galaxy it held beyond. In that moment, playing the role of Orpheus, of Lot’s wife, I saw the wave motion table, like a Tesla coil without boundaries, expand beyond the framework built to keep its stars inside. The black hole at the center of those lost suns began sucking in all the light I’d seen, every part and particle of a store that couldn’t exist, all the images I couldn’t unsee.

Sister, sister, mother, father, tiny tinsel tree…

Everything swept its way into the nothing at the center of that impossible game.

Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?

I held onto my comic and ran. I ran for the front door, I ran for the alley outside, for the street, Angell street where I’d found the store in the first place. I ran for the car, back toward the post office, the place where I’d begun the evening. I ran for my father and the memory he would never keep, the one final piece of him I could hold onto. I ran and ran and felt like a woman running before the storm, toward her child, running to keep him alive. I ran like a man who couldn’t remember his father, not for real, who knew one thing, just one. I ran like a man who wanted to keep any, single, solitary memory, glad or sad, of his father alive. I ran like a son who would give anything—any universe, Saturn, Titan, all the stars aflame between— anything to have his father back.

I survived of course. This isn’t American Beauty or Our Town or that song by Gordon Lightfoot. I’m not a ghost. I finally mounted a successful if dull production of Hamlet, one my Dean could live with. It wasn’t what I wanted — no female lead, no go-go boots, no guns — but it helped fill the coffers of the capital campaign. And after that night things did change. I moved, for one. New town. New job. New directing gig. I keep that issue of Believe It or Not!in a shadow box on the wall of my new office. This school may not have the Rose, but the politics smell sweeter. They let me do more innovative stuff, spread my wings like I couldn’t before, like my dad couldn’t. I think he’d be happy for me. He’s still in the facility, still losing ground, still doomed to walk the earth. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t remember anything anymore.

I shall not look upon his like again.

So, no, things aren’t perfect. They never are. This isn’t a comic book. No mythic figures in t-shirts or capes. And no, despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never been able to find Angell again, though I did find a hero.