by Terri Favro
I keep my eyes on the screen, wincing inwardly at the barman’s use of the word “boy.”
The host is in the middle of asking a question that implies Kendal has first-hand knowledge of the immigrant experience. Kendal scratches his nose, a sign of annoyance. Far from being a newcomer, Kendal is descended from a family that escaped slavery to live in Shipman’s Corners half a century before my grandparents even got off the boat.
As Kendal’s beautiful face fades to a commercial for erectile dysfunction medication, I sip my martini and ponder the key question of Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past. The one that makes me sketch and discard and accidentally ruin her origin story, again and again and again. As Gooey said, how the hell did Sputnik Chick end up so alone?
“Okay if I change the channel, miss?”
The barman’s question drags me back to reality. “Go right ahead.”
As he switches to Ultimate Fighting, I ask if he has anything I can draw on. Lately, I come up with my best ideas on barstools. After rummaging under the bar, he hands me a thick stack of cocktail napkins. One side is printed with the purple and gold logo of Soaring Starling Estate Wines, its name a distant echo of Sparkling Sparrow, the sweet plonk of my youth. The other side of the napkin is as empty as a sketchbook.
I take out my Sharpie and start to storyboard, filling square after square with sketches. At first, I’m doing the usual stick ninjas, battling tiny Sputnik Chick figures — crash, bam, pow! I could draw her fight scenes in my sleep.
The tinkle of the slots and groans of the craps players fade away. Even that piped-in soft rock isn’t reaching me anymore. I’m doodling generic planets and stars — Saturn with its iconic rings, a lumpy cheese of a moon — until I find myself sketching a man-made celestial object, a cross between a star and a hedgehog, about the size of a basketball, floating in a black void. A dead satellite. Sputnik, Vanguard, Telstar — they’re all still out in deep space. On the next napkin, I sketch the triangular shape of a solar sail, the power source for the first generation of space stations Skylab I and II, way back in the early 1970s.
That’s where my story really begins. Not in an unknown world, as most origin stories do. Not on Krypton, or in the hidden Amazonian realm of Wonder Woman, or an earthquake-prone cartoon lab full of radioactive spiders able to endow superpowers with a single bite.
It wasn’t an unknown place that made Sputnik Chick who she was, true believer, but an unknown time. Before Sputnik Chick was Sputnik Chick. When she was still just Debbie.
one
A Tale of Two Timelines
Sputnik Chick was a child of Atomic Mean Time, different from the past you think you know. (FYI, you’re living in Earth Standard Time, which you snobbishly regard as “Real Time.”)
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, time was simply time: a single arrow flying through upheavals, bloodbaths, renaissances, revolutions and all the boring bits in between.
Then, in 1945, that self-described destroyer of worlds, Robert Oppenheimer, split the atom. Pow, crash, bam! Sub-atomic cracks and fissures appeared, shattering time’s arrow into a quiver of alternate realities. Atomic Mean Time was calved during the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico — the first parallel world, but far from the last. Every detonation since then has created a new timeline, peeling away from the one before it like a stock car burning rubber at the start line.
In this vast spectrum of histories, Atomic Mean Time and Earth Standard Time existed side by side — weakly coupled worlds, the pipe-smoking quantum physicists like to call them — separated by the thinnest imaginable membrane of dark matter.
(How do I know this? Patience, true believer. All will be revealed in due course.)
Despite quirky differences from Earth Standard Time — rogue viruses you’ve never caught, odd hem lengths, the sour-apple taste of Neutron Coke — if you were dropped into Atomic Mean Time, you would not feel totally out of place. You might even find it pleasantly nostalgic. All of the cultural touchstones of the pristine, pre-atomic age carried on undisturbed into Atomic Mean Time — Superman, Buster Keaton, Blondie & Dagwood, jazz, Casablanca, Mickey Mouse, the novels of Virginia Woolf, The Wizard of Oz and the Great American Songbook. Even after the split, many of the same cultural milestones popped up in both timelines: The Silver Surfer comics. Fins on cars. Disco. Beetle Bailey. Those smiley-face buttons that told you to Have a nice day! Sean Connery as James Bond, until he was imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the Scottish Parliament.
Everyone on Earth — correction, almost everyone — existed in both worlds. Some lived very different lives, while others unconsciously thrummed to the same sympathetic harmonies as their alt-time doppelgängers. In moments of distress or ecstasy, a few sensitive souls, like my friend Bum Bum, could sense the actions of their alt-time selves, naively chalking up the eerie sensation to déjà vu. A select few, however, were keenly aware of their existence in parallel worlds, David Bowie being an obvious example. But of course, Bowie was an Exceptional. (Not the kind of degraded Exceptional portrayed by Crusty and Gooey, known as Twisties, but a shape-shifting mutant gifted with the ability to explore a full spectrum of diverse possibilities. How else could he be both the Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust?)
Suffice it to say that in Atomic Mean Time, we had many of the same hit TV shows, movies and comic books you knew and loved and most of the postwar world events that you slept through in history class, with one important exception: in Atomic Mean Time, the second great war of the twentieth century never ended, even after the surrenders had been signed. GIs segued from battlefields to factories. Their mission: the ceaseless manufacturing of nuclear weapons. As if the Cold War of Earth Standard Time was a flash-frozen fish stick that took thirty-odd years to thaw.
Atomic Mean Time saw no peace movement in its 1960s, except for a furtive, floundering one that wormed its way deep underground and stayed there. The few young radicals who attempted to organize a Ban the Bomb protest march in Washington, D.C., in 1965, were arrested as anarchists and swiftly exiled. Nothing would be permitted to get in the way of our world’s highly profitable march toward self-destruction.
Fortunately, in the event that the superpowers blew up Earth, we were prepared to colonize the moon. By 1969, unmanned rockets were sending geodesic domes and lunar life-support systems to the Sea of Tranquility, ready for the first batch of refugees from Earth.
I liked the idea of moving to the moon, even if it did mean my home planet had to be nuked first. I longed to be shaken out of the monotony of a childhood where the biggest challenge was deciding which flavour of Pop-Tart to warm up in the toaster oven. Whether on a flying saucer or an intergalactic surfboard, I was determined to escape from Shipman’s Corners. Population: 126,000. Economic activities: cross-border smuggling, the cultivation of local grapes into a sweet, bubbly wine known as plonk and the manufacturing of atomic bombs. Occasionally, rusty drums of radioactive leftovers heaved their way up out of vacant lots and construction sites where they had been dumped without much thought — until someone noticed things were a little off in those parts of town. Like kids being born with three ears and an extra set of teeth.
It was my father’s job to make sure nobody decided to build a school or playground or subdivision on the hot spots before the drums could be quietly whisked away to the deep, distant waters of Hudson’s Bay. Problem was, you couldn’t stop kids from playing hide-and-seek on contaminated land. Dad had barbed wire fences put up, but as he pointed out, there was only so much you could do.
Every year at back-to-school time, he took Linda and me on his sweep of a decontaminated landfill known as the Z-Lands, just before the annual Labour Day company picnic. Dad’s boss encouraged him to bring us along. Good public relations for the company’s community cleanup program, he said. People were comforted knowing that Dad wasn’t afraid to take his own kids to a former nuclear dumpsite.
The cleanup of the Z-La
nds was one of Dad’s big successes. A year earlier, he had been promoted to Senior Decontamination Supervisor, a really important job. The local newspaper took a picture of him with Linda and me, smiling over bouquets of mutated wildflowers. The story’s headline read: “Z-Lands soon safe enough for underprivileged children to play in, ShipCo Decon Chief promises.” Dad told us later that he’d promised no such thing, but the company framed the story and stuck it in the foyer outside Dad’s office. His boss said that maybe now everyone would relax and stop writing letters to the big shots in Queen’s Park, who really couldn’t do anything about the dumpsites, anyway. We were answerable to a higher authority: the ShipCo Corporation, managing body of the North American federal jurisdiction officially known as the Industrial Nation of Canusa, a fertile peninsula that hung like a ragged tooth between two Great Lakes with the world’s most potent waterfall leaking out of its tip. Canusa was a murky grey zone where territorial and commercial interests merged. Canadian laws were observed, as long as ShipCo didn’t mind. When a new warfront opened up in Korea, quickly followed by Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, New Guinea and New Zealand — a series of linked conflicts known as the Domino Wars — American draft dodgers were as welcome in Canusa as they were in Canada. ShipCo considered them useful. If they wouldn’t fight, they could still build bombs.
* * *
In the summer of 1969 (A.M.T.), I was a couple of months shy of my thirteenth birthday. Linda was sixteen. We arrived in the Z-Lands at sun-up, the daisies already turning their monstrous heads toward the sticky, honey-coloured sky. Dad’s plaid clip-on tie dangled like a noose as he ran his Geiger counter over the hard-packed dirt. Linda hovered beside him in her skort and Keds, her volleyball-hardened arms crossed. Waiting for the verdict.
While Dad and Linda watched for the jump of the red needle, I wandered through Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans the size of trees, to an iron ship’s bollard squatting pointlessly beside the abandoned canal. I didn’t need the bollard to warn me of the thirty-foot drop ahead. The stench of industrial chemicals floated up from the bottom of the canal, where wrecked cars sat half-submerged in a frothy sulfate soup the colour of day-old dishwater.
Despite a fence topped with barbed wire and a DANGER: NO TRESPASSING sign, a couple of new wrecks had been pushed over the edge since our last visit: a banana yellow school bus and a pickup with the truck bed ripped off.
Something else I hadn’t seen down there before: a trespasser, crouched on top of the bus in the glare of the rising sun. At first I thought I was having a vision, like those kids at Lourdes. The figure slowly came into focus like a television picture tube warming up. An old man, with white hair to his shoulders. He was stooped over, his hands on his knees. He straightened himself up slowly and, it seemed to me, painfully. He couldn’t catch his breath. As if he had been running a long, long way.
In the distance, Dad’s Geiger counter started to click, no doubt picking up background radiation.
The Trespasser looked up at me, chest heaving. He was tall and as skinny as a twig, his face pink and peeling with something like a bad sunburn. He was dressed in a silver shirt and tight trousers that belled at the hems like a flamenco dancer’s.
“Debbie?” As if he knew me.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” I told him.
“I’m not a stranger. We know one another very well.”
Weirdly, I believed him, even though I’d never met anyone who wasn’t from Shipman’s Corners. Weirder still, I noticed that parts of his body were starting to shimmer and run like watercolours. Pink globs of flesh fell from the end of one arm into the frothy scum at the bottom of the canal.
“You’re melting,” I told him.
He looked down at himself, his mouth falling open at the sight of his liquefaction. Lifting his remaining hand, he pointed at me.
“You’re it, Debbie. Never forget that.”
I didn’t know what to say so I stuck out my tongue. He responded by holding up two dripping fingers in the shape of a V — a lopsided one, because his middle finger ended at the knuckle.
Sunlight bounced off the roof of the banana bus, blinding me for a moment. When I could see again, the Trespasser had vanished. Mingled with the stench of the chemical soup, I caught a whiff of something pleasantly spicy. As if, in liquefying, the Trespasser had turned into cinnamon.
Before I could decide whether he was what Dad called “a Fig Newton of my imagination,” the Geiger counter went nuts, chattering away like a set of wind-up teeth. Dad’s voice came loud and sharp and even a little scared sounding, telling us it was time to get a move on.
“But Daddy, we just got . . .” I heard Linda say.
Dad was already striding toward the gate, windmilling his arms to hurry us up. Linda moved toward me through the field of flowers. No time to tell her about the Trespasser. The two of us sprinted after Dad, Linda dragging me by the hand.
At the gate, a tendril of barbed wire, draped over the fence like a forgotten scarf, snagged my ponytail. The barbs clawed at my scalp as I struggled to free myself. My yelp of pain brought Dad rushing back.
“Hold still, Debbie, you’ll only make it worse,” he said, tossing my sister the car keys. “Linda, start the engine.”
I could feel him breathing hard behind me, his fingers fumbling with my hair. He grunted a quiet swear as the barbs pricked his fingers. “You’re hooked like a fish. I’m going to have to cut you free.”
He gripped my scalp with one hand while he sawed at my hair with the jackknife he always carried in his trouser pocket. My ponytail, still in its elastic band, bobbed from the barbed wire like a foxtail. Warm air licked the back of my neck as Dad and I ran for the car.
In the driver’s seat of the Country Squire, Linda was singing along with the radio. Dad shoved her over into the passenger seat as I jumped in back.
“But you said I could drive home!” she protested.
“Not this time.” He threw the car into a fast reverse.
As we tore along the dirt track, kicking up a fog of probably radioactive dust, Linda said, “Mom’s going to kill you, Dad. You made Debbie look like a boy!”
“It’ll grow back.” The station wagon hit a rut, bouncing me to the car floor. “There’s no margin of safety for the levels I was getting. They’ve been going down steady as she goes, year after year. Now it’s higher than it’s been since ’55.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Linda.
“No, it sure as hell doesn’t — pardon my French,” said Dad.
I got up from the floor and draped my arms over the front seat, my chin on top of Linda’s elbow, while Dad tore out of the Z-Lands. I’d never seen him drive so fast. In the rear-view, I imitated the V sign that the Trespasser had made.
“Don’t do that,” said Linda, slapping my hand. “It’s rude.”
I stared at her through my fingers. “What’s it mean?”
“It’s how anarchists say hello to one another.”
I frowned. “Anarchists? Like spiders?”
“You’re thinking of arachnids,” said Linda. “No. Like Yammers.”
A drop of blood rolled off the tip of my nose and lazily hit the beige upholstery. Linda pulled out a crumpled tissue and spit in it. She dabbed at the bloodstain, then pressed it to my forehead. The tissue came away all bloody.
We were well away from the gate, bouncing along the dirt road at high speed, when we hit a pothole. A big one. The car listed to one side, engine revving and back wheel spinning.
Dad made a swear again — twice in one day! — then got out, slamming the door so hard it made my teeth rattle. He stomped around to the back of the car and groaned. When he stuck his head in the window, his face looked as saggy and white as a dead trout.
“Blew the tire right down to the rim. You’ll have to get home on your own. Debbie, tell Mom to draw you a decon bath right awa
y. Linda, you scrub down over at Nonno’s. Use those emergency kits in the basement I bought at Canadian Tire during the last missile crisis.”
Linda groaned. “I hate that stinky old shower in Nonno’s cellar. And I just set my hair, Daddy.”
“Do as I say, for once, Linda. And make sure your clothes go in the incineration bags.”
“But Daddy, how are we supposed to get home? It’s five miles, at least. Debbie’ll never keep up.”
“Carry her piggyback if you have to. Now go!”
We got out of the car and started running, first on dirt, then on gravel. By the time we reached the second gate with its PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF SHIPCO CORPORATION sign, we had slowed to a walk; Linda had a stitch in her side and I had a stone in my sneaker. Standing on one foot to shake it out, I looked back down the roadway. I could see the car but could barely make out Dad. I’d never seen him look so small before.
We started walking toward a hydro pole at the end of the gravel road, marking the beginning of Zurich Street — civilization, sort of. The pole reminded me of the lamppost at the entrance to Narnia. Maybe Mister Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would be leaning against it, enjoying a cigarette and waiting for the floating craps game to start.
I rubbed the barbed-wire cuts on my head with my grubby fingers, trying to send germs into my skin to do battle. Linda slapped my hand away.
“Stop that. You’ll get infected.”
“I’m invulnerable, like Superman,” I told her.
“Says who?”
“Says the doctor, after he gave me the Universal Vaccine. ‘This little lady’s generation might just live forever, if the Ruskies don’t drop the Bomb on us.’ That’s what he told Mom.”
Linda snorted. “He was making a joke, Debbie. The Universal Vaccine is just a polio shot with some immunizations for other stuff. That does not mean you’re invulnerable.”
