Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  CONTENTS

  FALLSVIEW CASINO HOTEL: May 2011, E.S.T.

  The Untold Origin Story of The Girl With No Past

  Volume 1 — ESCAPE FROM THE Z-LANDS!

  One: A Tale of Two Timelines

  Two: Glow-in-the-Dark Pat Boone Lie Detector Test

  QUEEN ELIZABETH HOTEL, MONTREAL: May 2011, E.S.T.

  The Untold Origin Story of The Girl With No Past

  Volume 2 — SCHRÖDINGER SWINGS LIKE A PENDULUM DO

  One: Superpowers, Secrets and a Side Order of Salami and Cheese

  Two: There Be Dragons

  Three: The Day of the Dead

  Four: Trouble

  Five: Torture Chamber of the Lizard King

  HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS, SCARBOROUGH: June 2011, E.S.T.

  The Untold Origin Story of The Girl With No Past

  Volume 3 — “WE’RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO DRAW”

  One: Plonk

  Two: No Place Like Home

  Three: Jesus Weirdo Superstar

  Four: Collateral Damage

  Five: Breakfast on Planet of the Mothers

  Six: The Chronicles of Duff

  Seven: Hotter Than Hell

  Eight: Seduction by Comic Book

  Nine: Tender Fruit

  Ten: Shark Bite

  Eleven: Truth and Justice

  Twelve: Amchitka

  Thirteen: Break and Enter

  LAKE SUPERIOR PROVINCIAL PARK: August 2011, E.S.T.

  The Untold Origin Story of The Girl With No Past

  Volume 4 — A NOOK IN TIME

  One: Modern Bride

  Two: Out-of-This-World Honeymoon

  Three: Our Lady of the Algorithm

  Four: Beautiful Nobodies

  Five: A Nook in Time

  Six: Timesickness

  CRAZY LADY ISLAND: October 2011, E.S.T.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  For Ron, Jacob and Joey

  and in memory of Rosa Scrocchi, “Nonna Gigi”

  “Did I save a universe — or have I awakened as from a dream? Can a future that was, be forever erased? Is the cosmos itself but a flickering ember of imagination — only to be snuffed out at will? When all’s said and done, who is the dreamer and which is the dream?”

  The Silver Surfer (Stan Lee)

  “Worlds Without End”

  1969

  “Suppose you came across a woman lying on the street with an elephant sitting on her chest. You notice she is short of breath. Shortness of breath can be a symptom of heart problems. In her case the much more likely cause is the elephant on her chest.”

  Sally Ride, first American woman in space

  FALLSVIEW CASINO HOTEL

  May 2011, E.S.T. (Earth Standard Time)

  A thin line of mutants, villains and superheroes stretches from the entrance to Conference Room B all the way to the slot machines. Yawning into their Red Bulls, gently farting and burping as they slump against windows and walls, most of them look like they partied all night on the American side, crossing the Rainbow Bridge at dawn for the free all-you-can-eat breakfast at ComicFanFest Expo.

  No one makes eye contact with me. When a representative of Grey Wizard Comics hands me my contractually obligated low-fat chai latte before escorting me to the book-signing suite, a buzz ripples through the crowd. It’s starting to dawn on them that I’m the one they’re here to see.

  It’s a better turnout than I expected, mostly teens and twenty-somethings with a smattering of stuck-in-the-past baby boomers costumed as characters who sprang out of my head twenty-five years ago. True believers, every one of them desperate for my comics to lift them out of their disappointing lives and turn them into ass-kicking saviours of the planet.

  Sputnik Chick fans of all colours, shapes, sizes and genders — better known as Spunkies — form a queue, many of them wearing the trademark black tights, thunderbolt cleavage and lopsided haircut of the Girl With No Past herself. Mingled in the crowd are versions of Marco, his handsome Latin features unapologetically queer in MAC makeup, chatting up fans dressed as Johnny the K, the tall black love interest, with his wet-look anti-radiation suit and thermonuclearmagnetic boogie board. A lone Blond Barracuda towers over the others, all-white Andy Warhol hair and black synthetic armour covering his overdeveloped muscles like a spray tan.

  A handful of Spunkies have shown up as Exceptionals, post-nuclear mutants who live short, tragic lives in the form of gooey baked goods with a single functioning lung under their pulsating carapaces. Mutations are as likely to be bacteria, spores or yeast as flesh and blood, I’ve tweeted, but I only started describing the Exceptionals as glutinous geopods after Bum Bum gave me the idea by baking a batch of hash-laced sourdough muffins and forgetting to fold in the baking soda.

  A girl — I think — stands before me in a garment that’s been coated with podge to give it a gelatinous sheen. She looks like a giant wet amoeba. In my head, I dub the fan Gooey. Her fingertips protrude just far enough to drop a Sputnik Chick comic book in front of me to sign.

  “You’re a freaking legend,” says Gooey, her muffled voice coming out of what can only be described as a blowhole.

  “Now, now, don’t go calling me a ‘legend,’” I say, using a thick black Sharpie to sign my name on the front cover of her copy of Volume 25, Issue 9. “Makes me feel old.”

  “Why have you never written an origin story?” her friend wants to know. Mouldy bread-crusts dangle from fishing line stitched to coveralls smeared with something that looks like it was cultured in a petri dish. I nickname her Crusty. “Sputnik Chick just shows up out of nowhere in New York City in 1979. Where did she come from? Even if her past was obliterated, she still has one, right?”

  Gooey nods her head vigorously. Through her blowhole, I can smell tobacco and salt-and-vinegar chips. “Isn’t she ever going to get it on with Johnny the K? Why the hell does she always have to be so alone?”

  Crusty chimes in again. “And you never even say what her real name is. She must have one — I mean, did her parents call her Sputnik Chick?”

  “Of course not. Her real name is Debbie,” I say, flatlining my voice to control the quiver that afflicts me whenever the topic of Sputnik Chick’s provenance comes up.

  Gooey shakes her head. “You named Sputnik Chick after yourself?”

  I grip my Sharpie with both hands to disguise the fact that I’ve got the shakes. Gooey and Crusty are starting to get on my nerves. Why do so many young Spunkies become obsessed with knowing all these little details?

  “Seems to me I can call Sputnik Chick whatever the hell I want,” I say. This time, it’s impossible to disguise the quiver in my voice.

  The two of them look at one another through their eye slits.

  “It’s just sort of weird,” says Gooey slowly.

  I push the autographed comic across the table, hoping they don’t notice how shaky my signature is. “As for how Sputnik Chick got to New York City from another time and place — let’s just say I’m working on her origin story right now.”

  Gooey and Crusty squeal and hop up and down, their Exceptional costumes billowing around them like rising bread dough.

  “Cool!” exclaims Gooey.

  “Anything you’re willing to, like, talk about?” asks Crusty.

  “Not. Quite. Yet,” I answer slowly, trying not to stare at the nasty blue spores on an ancient slab of rye dangling from Crusty’s costume. “You know how it is — you talk about what’s in your head, you can’t get it down on paper.”

&nbs
p; After oozing their thanks, Gooey and Crusty move on. Next in queue is a six-foot cross-dressing Spunky costumed as Sputnik Chick, gripping a vintage, not reprint, copy of Volume 5, Issue 2, “Love Hurts,” an all-time fan favourite. I handle the comic with care. A collector’s item these days, it could have cost this fan a month’s pay. It’s the issue where Sputnik Chick finally breaks up with Johnny the K after she tangled with the evil Barracuda. The Dark Lord of the Seas, as he calls himself, might be a sadistic psychopath, but Sputnik Chick finds herself irresistibly drawn to him.

  The Spunky takes my hand and tells me she understands the complex interplay of emotions leading to Sputnik Chick’s inexplicable betrayal of Johnny the K. “Who wouldn’t want to fuck Barracuda?” she says breathily. “I totally get it.” She asks me to autograph the centre spread with the infamous fight/love scene, where Sputnik Chick brings Barracuda to his knees with a well-executed kick to the chin and a Pussy Galore–style over-the-shoulder judo toss. Barracuda responds by seizing her ankle and pulling her off her feet. Sex ensues. Six pulsating pages of it, the Barracuda’s submarine-shaped penis quivering in front of Sputnik Chick’s then-futuristic shaved pussy, a decade before every suburban mom got Brazilianed. I think it might have been the naked pudendum, rather than the penis, that got “Love Hurts” stopped at the border by the censor board in 1989, simultaneously transforming The Girl With No Past from an underground cult comic into a commercial hit and making me enough money to quit my day job art-directing Psychics of Fortune magazine out of an industrial park in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

  Over the entwined bodies of Sputnik Chick and her arch-enemy sharing a post-coital cigarette, I sign the page with a flourish.

  Next up is a South-Asian Johnny the K wearing what looks like a custom-tailored anti-radiation suit, silver and green. I can tell that he’s got a beef with me from the way he brandishes his rolled-up comic.

  “Your fight scenes suck,” he says, shaking the comic at me like a club. “Your characters throw punches like ballerinas.”

  I keep my eyes on the comic I’m signing for him. Don’t engage, I tell myself.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I say, pushing him the comic. “That’s an awesome anti-radiation suit, by the way.”

  Unexpectedly, he smiles at me. “Thanks. My mom made it.”

  A few dozen more mutants and supervillains and I’m done. A respectable crowd, but not even close to the numbers I saw ten years ago. Cold War paranoia doesn’t sell like it used to. Even a Sputnik Chick movie has been back-burnered until I come up with an origin story exciting enough to reignite the fire in the bellies of the Spunkies who have drifted off to the respectable world of graphic novels, most of which bore the hell out of me. What’s wrong with superhero comics? They meet our collective need for gods and monsters, heroes and villains, demons and mystics, and other mythical forces that keep our universe glued together. Not that Sputnik Chick is a myth.

  In the ladies’ room, releasing a morning’s worth of low-fat chai latte into the toilet bowl, I hear the sound of feet shuffling into the bathroom.

  “She is so cool,” says a familiar voice: Gooey.

  “Older than I expected, though,” says her friend Crusty. “She looks like a Normal.”

  I sit frozen on the toilet. What did Crusty expect — that I’d look like Sputnik Chick? All wet-look, skin-tight black vinyl, fast-twitch muscle fibre and fetish boots?

  “I just hope that the origin story doesn’t, like, suck. You get the feeling she’s tired of the whole thing?” continues Crusty.

  “Roger that,” says Gooey.

  I take a vial from my backpack and slip a white tab of lorazepam under my tongue. When the shaking doesn’t stop, I pop another — these days I need more and more milligrams to help me escape under a numbing blanket of calm.

  Once I’m sure that Gooey and Crusty have moved on, I exit the bathroom and head for the casino. The stickman at a craps table smiles at me, her blonde hair in a French twist. The badge on her vest reads Emily Andolini. When I ask if she’s the daughter of Rocco Andolini, she says, “Granddaughter. You from around here?”

  “Not far away. I grew up in Shipman’s Corners but now I’m from a lot of places. I’m always on the move.”

  The stickman laughs. “Awesome. It must be exciting to spend your life travelling.”

  “It gets old after a while,” I say.

  I glance around the casino. A few bleary gamblers at the craps table look at me incuriously. One guy sways on his stool. Another nods and blinks, fighting to stay awake. The two of them have probably been here all night. Emily the stickman offers me the dice. I’m to be the shooter.

  “Boxcars,” I say, shaking the dice in my fist.

  Two sixes: I win. I may be losing fans, but at least I still have my predictive powers. I roll the bones a few more times, then head to the bar with my winnings to fortify myself before going back to my hotel room to work on my origin story.

  I sip my vodka martini (wet, dirty, Stoli, olives, rocks) and nibble peanuts from a tray of complimentary snacks on the bar. As usual, I’m starving. I catch myself calculating how long I’ll have to spend on the hotel treadmill to burn off the calories. In order not to create an imbalance in the time-space continuum, I have to maintain the same volume and mass as Sputnik Chick on the day she hopped from one time continuum to another — a trim one-twenty-five, give or take a few ounces. Otherwise, I could wake up without a limb or vital organ as time compensates for the extra space I take up. I discovered this fact when I woke up missing the little toe on my right foot after a week of all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets at a New Jersey Ramada Inn in the 1980s. I make a mental note to weigh myself later.

  The bored barman channel surfs on the TV over the bar. A rocket appears, nose to the sky, the white fog of exhaust indicating that it’s about to launch. Across the bottom of the screen, a news crawl reads IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY AT THE CAPE. I slip the barman a twenty from my winnings to unmute the sound.

  An American voice as smooth as Skippy peanut butter reports that all systems are go for the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour. After this mission, Endeavour will be retired to some space museum on the west coast.

  “You know what this means?” I ask the barman.

  He shakes his head. I take a slug of my martini, preparing to enlighten him.

  “They’re scrapping the shuttle program. From now on, NASA astronauts will have to hitch rides with the Russians on Soyuz. Whose side won the Cold War, anyway?”

  The barman stares at me.

  “Ours?” he says uncertainly.

  “Unbefuckinglievable,” I murmur to myself.

  I watch Endeavour rise magnificently off the launch pad, the roar of thrusters shivering the racks of gimlet glasses suspended over the bar. Is Bum Bum watching this? Is my sister, Linda, out on Crazy Lady Island? Once upon a time, she and I sprawled in front of the Westinghouse for every liftoff, the long countdown wiping out everything else in the programming day — even the mighty daytime soaps bowed down before Apollo. Along with the rest of the Free World, we watched crewcutted cowboys rocket to heaven, their spent engines circumcising themselves on the knife edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Now I glimpse launches in passing between celebrity news and stock-market reports.

  In a few minutes, Endeavour will enter the region of maximum dynamic pressure, 13,000 kilometres above the Earth. If she passes through safely, she’ll escape the fate of her doomed sister, Challenger. Bum Bum and I witnessed that disaster together at a twenty-four-hour greasy spoon on Bleecker near Broadway, hungover from a night at the clubs. I can almost smell the fug of cigarette smoke, bacon grease and Poison, a perfume as subtle as a kick to the groin — my signature scent, in those days. On a TV over the grill, white smoke split into devil’s horns mid-air as the shaky voice of Mission Control said: Obviously a major malfunction. Sealed inside the plummeting crew cabin, seven astronauts
were alive and likely conscious when they crashed into the Atlantic at three hundred miles an hour. Watching the disaster unfold, Bum Bum laced his tangerine-tipped fingers through my magenta ones and breathed out a single horrified Fuuuuck.

  After Challenger fell out of the sky, I sketched the very first Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past. That’s why she looks so much like I had on that chilly day in 1986: asymmetrical haircut, purple lipstick, untamed eyebrows, linebacker shoulder pads, a black river of tears running down her cheeks. A lonely she-wolf who prowled the streets of a city that would never see the horror of a mutant dawn, thanks to trading her past for an alternative reality that didn’t include the planet being nuked to shit in 1979. And not just her past, but her identity. Hell, she didn’t even have a real name anymore.

  On the final panel of Volume 1, Issue 1 — “Disaster!” — her thought bubble reads: Challenger was no accident! It rushed in to fill a void in the time-space continuum — and it’s my freakin’ fault!

  Fast forward twenty-five years and Sputnik Chick is still an angry, horny, nameless twenty-nine-year-old, roaming the streets of New York City by night to kill mutants and, sometimes, have sex with them. She hasn’t aged. Unlike her creator.

  * * *

  With Endeavour safely in the mesosphere, I’m about to pay my tab and head upstairs when John Kendal’s chocolate eyes and cut-glass cheekbones swim onto the TV screen over the bar. The news crawl identifies him as “DAVID JOHN KENDAL JR.: ‘CANADA’S OBAMA.’” The sight of his face triggers an old familiar ache, like a migraine before a thunderstorm.

  Kendal, my one and only love. He wouldn’t recognize me if I passed him on the street. I’ve thought about stalking him but Bum Bum says that would be pointlessly self-destructive, even by my standards. Seeing Kendal in the media — and he’s always in the media — feels like a having cigarette snuffed out on my heart. To prolong the pain, I ask the barman to stay on CNN for a few more minutes. Obligingly, he crosses his arms to watch with me.

  “They say this Kendal dude could be running the country one day,” the barman tells me, a note of pride in his voice. “Local boy.”