Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Her dad worked for NORAD. Not as a physicist or anything glamorous like that — he was an electrician who kept the Cold War hideout warm and comfortable for the scientists and generals. Even super-secret installations in the Colorado Rockies need someone who knows how to keep the lights on and the life-support systems working. It’s amazing how those handy guys with the skills to turn piles of junk into working water processors are the ones who quickly climb the food chain once civilization goes to hell.

  It’s the start of an origin story, but it’s all I’ve got so far. Many questions remain unanswered. If Sputnik Chick’s dad was so shit-hot at protecting himself and his family after the apocalypse, why did she separate herself from them? Was she kidnapped? Was the rest of her family murdered? Why didn’t they time hop with her? Or did she do something her family couldn’t forgive, even by the standards of a post-apocalyptic world?

  That’s the problem with creating stories out of imagination and bullshit. You never know what’s supposed to happen next. Much easier to simply write the truth, but also more painful.

  I wrote Sputnik Chick from memory in the early years, working out what happened to me starting in July 1979, Atomic Mean Time. Therapy by comic book, you might say.

  When Sputnik Chick became a hit, I pumped out an issue a month. Pretty soon, I ran out of first-hand experiences and had to start making things up. I couldn’t bring myself to describe events that were part of my deeper past, pre-A.O.A.M.T. (Apocalypse of Atomic Mean Time), before all matter collapsed into a subatomic, deep space wormhole, hurling me into Earth Standard Time like a space station in free fall.

  I rest my head in my arms and let my Sharpie roll off the drafting table. Even with a belly full of vodka and lorazepam, I don’t have the stomach to go exploring in that deep dark pit of truth anymore.

  * * *

  On my third idea-dry, martini-wet day in Montreal, I visit the cathedral next door to the hotel. I’ve been a lapsed Catholic for thirty years, but I’m at the point where I’ll try anything. I drop a dollar into the donation box, light a candle and ask Mary, Queen of the World to provide inspiration for my foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, sex-obsessed, ass-kicking heroine. After all, Mary, Queen of the World and Sputnik Chick both found themselves in the position of having to change the course of history without anyone checking with them first.

  Back at my desk, it’s no surprise when nothing comes to me. So, I decide to call Crazy Lady Island. I’m not sure if it’s loneliness or an attempt to prime the pump of my rusty imagination, or a desire to talk to one of the two people who remember my prehistory, but I want to speak with my sister, Linda.

  She’s surprised to hear my voice. At first, we talk about nothing special: The garden she’s trying to coax out of the salty Gabriola earth. The concerts she plays here and there on Vancouver Island — sad, that she’s so excited about performing at a bar in Nanaimo when she used to draw a decent crowd in Greenwich Village.

  “How’s Dad doing?”

  The pause goes on too long. Linda might be taking a sip of tea. Or she might be struggling with annoyance. Most likely both.

  “Good days and bad. I dropped by the care home yesterday, and he thought I was Mom. This morning, I was there to help out with breakfast, and he’s all, ‘Linda, where have you been, I haven’t seen you in weeks.’”

  “At least he remembers you,” I say, surprised by the tightness in my throat. I thought I was past the rage and sorrow of my father’s memory banks being wiped clean of me. As if I never existed at all.

  Again, a pause. “Maybe he’d recognize you if you visited once in a while.”

  “We both know that wouldn’t matter,” I say. “Dementia or not, he’s forgotten me the same way everybody else has.”

  A long windy sigh travels down the line all the way from the Straits of Georgia. “Debbie, get a grip. I’m starting to think you can’t tell the difference between your fantasy world and reality anymore.”

  “That’s unfair,” I say, rummaging in my purse for a vial of lorazepam.

  “You’ve been like this ever since you were a kid,” she continues. “You get bored, so you invent stuff to keep things interesting. Fun when you were a five-year-old, but now it’s just weird.”

  “Why are you being so mean to me, Linda?”

  “I’m not being mean. You need to hear this, little sister. You. Are. Not. Sputnik Chick.”

  The rest of the conversation sounds like the voice of the teacher in the old Charlie Brown TV specials. Wah wah wah. Eventually, I tell Linda I’m on deadline and have to cut it short. I’m relieved to hit END CALL.

  I don’t know why I feel so defensive. Guilt, probably. Linda is the one looking after Dad. Even if someone has a eureka moment and finds a way to cure Alzheimer’s disease, too many of Dad’s brain cells have already died. As one doctor told me, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

  I pick up my pencil. Set it down again. I need to take a break, but it’s too early for a drink.

  Then I decide it’s not.

  * * *

  The bar is almost empty. Too early for my favourite barman’s shift, there’s an older gentleman who solemnly shakes a martini for me. I open my sketchbook. The blank page looks up at me accusingly.

  On a stool at the far end of the bar, a man reads a book while drinking a pint of what looks like frothy maple syrup. Guinness, I assume.

  I glance over at him as I suck the brine off an olive. My fellow inebriant is a good ten years younger than me, dressed all in black with a silver patch twinkling on one pectoral muscle. He looks a bit like the Blond Barracuda. Incongruously, he has large dark eyes and wheat-blond hair. Doesn’t look like a dye job but you never know.

  He catches one of my glances. Smiles at me. Lifts his glass in greeting.

  “You’re not sketching me, I hope,” he says.

  “I’m working on a comic book.”

  He grins wider. “Really? Which one?”

  “Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past.”

  He sets down his Guinness and lifts his book off the bar to show me the cover.

  It’s the bound graphic novel version of Sputnik Chick, Issues 7 through 12.

  “Holy shit,” I say.

  “Holy shit, indeed,” he agrees. “Just bought it this morning. Quite a coincidence.”

  “There are no coincidences,” I say, quoting one of Sputnik Chick’s favourite lines.

  He picks up his beer and moves to the stool beside me.

  “Darren Scofield,” he says, offering his hand.

  “Debbie Biondi,” I respond, shaking it.

  We clink glasses. At St. Dismas the Good Thief Collegiate and Technical Institute, we had a two-word descriptor for guys like this — “pretty decent.” By which we did not mean honest or honourable, but someone whose decency might be called into question.

  He pushes the graphic novel toward me as he takes a pen out of his shirt pocket.

  “Would you mind?”

  As I autograph the book — To Darren: Stay Normal. Debbie Biondi, Girl With No Past — he says, “I’ve been following your work for years. I’ve always thought your style owed more to Hergé’s Tintin than to manga or the American alt-comic aesthetic. Did you study in Europe?”

  I’m probably staring at his face too intently. He’s one of the hottest Spunkies I’ve ever met. Those dark, dark eyes, that blond, blond hair. A grin some long-ago girlfriend probably once called cute. I think about the bottle of champagne up in my room. The vast, empty expanse of the luxury king-size bed.

  “Correspondence courses,” I tell him. “Norman Rockwell’s Famous Artists School. Remember those ads in the backs of comics?”

  “‘We’re looking for people who like to draw,’” he quotes and laughs. He thinks I’m kidding.

  “Is that a symbol of your people?” I ask, nodding at the silver insignia on his pocket.<
br />
  He looks down at himself, as if he’s forgotten what he’s wearing, and fingers the stitching. “That’s a Maytag logo.”

  “You’re the Maytag Man?”

  He grimaces. “Not the Maytag Man, per se. I repair all brands.”

  Spock-like, I raise an eyebrow at that “per se.” Probably not cool to talk about kitchen appliances when you’re a cult comic book creator. Bad for my once-edgy brand.

  “One thing I’ve often wondered,” says Maytag Man. “I know Sputnik Chick changed history and has some kind of hate-on for mutants from the future. But I’m curious to know what she was like before the apocalypse in her own time. Even the Girl With No Past had to have a childhood.”

  “When she jumps out of Atomic Mean Time, she loses all trace of her past,” I explain. “Remember, she never existed in Earth Standard Time. No doppelgänger in both continuums, unlike everybody else.”

  Maytag Man picks up his beer. “But she must have had a family. A real name. Something.”

  “In other words, you want an origin story,” I murmur.

  “Yeah.”

  I close my notebook. “Okay, yeah. Sputnik Chick had a family. Parents, grandparents, a sister. Funny thing about family love, though: It can be cozy or it can smother you to death. Or both at once.”

  Darren says nothing. Looks at the TV over the bar.

  Sensing that I’ve already gone too far, I feel stupidly compelled to go further.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” I ask him in a low voice.

  He looks surprised, but is politely agreeable. “Sure.”

  I lean toward him conspiratorially. “I’m Sputnik Chick. Or rather, I used to be. Okay, she’s still twenty-nine and I’m now somewhat older than that. I mean, yeah, some of the stories are made up, but broadly speaking, it’s my life story.”

  He takes a slow sip of his beer and looks at me. “You actually swung Schrödinger’s cat?”

  I nod. “Yes. I hopped out of Atomic Mean Time into your time.”

  He raises a brow. “Soooo . . . you must have issues dealing with the real world. I mean, with no past and all. It must be tough not to know who the hell you really are.”

  I nod, relieved to finally find someone who understands. “That’s right. I have no identity to speak of, not officially. No fixed address. No credit history. No kids. I can’t even set up a Facebook account. I live my life on a cash-only basis. Or I use cryptocurrency. I just wish more bars accepted Bitcoin.”

  He sips his beer and looks at me with the type of expression he probably gives an unruly fan belt.

  “With no fixed address, where do you live?”

  I wave my hand at our surroundings. “Hotels, mostly. When I’m in Toronto, I crash at a childhood friend’s place.”

  “You did have a childhood, then?” he clarifies, trying to punch a hole in my story.

  “Of course.”

  “How does this friend remember you, if you didn’t grow up in Real Time?”

  I signal the bartender for another martini. I’ve been fasting all day so I can accept the extra one hundred twenty calories.

  “My friend is exceptional,” I explain.

  He turns his attention to the baseball game on the TV over the bar. I can see what he’s thinking.

  She’s nuts.

  I turn back to my sketchpad, my visions of champagne-fuelled hotel sex vanishing. This guy is a Normal. Not someone who wants to bed a crazy lady. As the astronauts say, I have well and truly screwed the pooch.

  He drains his beer and sets the empty glass on the bar with finality, then pulls a business card out of his shirt pocket and drops it on the bar in front of me. It reads: Scofield Appliance Repair.

  “All makes and models. Gas and electric. Just in case you or your friend in T-Dot ever need something fixed,” he says with a smile, then gets off his stool and strolls out of the bar, swinging the bound version of my life story, Issues 7 through 12, in his hand.

  one

  Superpowers, Secrets and a Side Order of Salami and Cheese

  October 1969, A.M.T.

  My toes curled over the edge of the eavestrough as I spread my arms like a gymnast, wrists locked and fingers pointed, trying to get up enough nerve to swan dive off the roof. Thirty feet below, Mom’s naked rose bushes smiled up at me expectantly, no doubt wondering whether I was about to pull a Rapunzel and give them something to talk about all winter. I was wearing my red, white and blue JCPenney Wonder Teens™ bathing suit and nothing else, even though it was October. Every hair on my body stood at attention in the breeze.

  I was trying to suss out whether the radiation in the Z-Lands had turned me from an earthbound mortal into a gravity-defying mutant. Because to have any hope of rescuing Kendal from the ShipCo Industrial School for Boys, I had to find out if I could fly.

  On our first day back at St. Dismas the Good Thief Middle School, Bum Bum and I had started working on a plan to rescue Kendal. I had slipped away from my friends — the discussions of lip gloss and cologne, the slap, slap, slap of the younger girls’ jump ropes — to a ditch running along the boundary of school property, where the Twisties — the awful name we used for the slow learners in Exceptional Class — gathered to smoke and insult one another. They watched me approach Bum Bum, who was sitting in the grass in a bright blue jumpsuit that his mother probably got from the clothes-by-the-pound shop.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked Bum Bum.

  One of the other boys laughed. “Looks like Bum Boy’s developed an unexpected taste for chicks.”

  Bum Bum stood up and casually grabbed the boy who made the comment, driving his arm up his back until he extracted an apology. Then the two of us wandered off to where we couldn’t be overheard.

  “You know about Kendal?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Saw the ISB van come pick him up yesterday morning. His mom was, like, a basket case.”

  I gathered my nerve. To gain Bum Bum’s trust, I had to be honest with him. “What happened to Kendal was my fault. Think there’s a way to get him out?”

  Bum Bum said there was always a way, so long as you had a getaway car. He explained that, although he was still too young to get his learner’s permit, he was a fast, fearless driver — no cop had ever caught him. He also knew how to hotwire any make and model of vehicle. Bum Bum was a specialist in crimes of opportunity. “When we find the right car, at the right time, we make our move,” he said.

  I looked around to make sure that none of the other Twisties were eavesdropping. “Keep your voice down. You don’t want ShipCo to give you a scholarship, too.”

  Bum Bum laughed. “Never gonna happen. I’m a Twistie. We’re too dumb to do anything but dig ditches. ShipCo’s only interested in sending smart guys like Kendal to the ISB. They haul ’em in, teach them how to fly, maybe some quantum physics, then send ’em down to Florida.”

  I shook my head. “What’s in Florida?”

  “The New Sydney M.U.E.C.F.,” said Bum Bum. “Mandatory Underprivileged Enrichment Containment Facility. It’s where they send you if you’re smart and poor. Know those unmanned test rockets they shoot up every month or so? They ain’t unmanned. The scholarship boys have to be in good enough shape to survive the launch and smart enough to learn how to handle a rocket, least until it burns up on re-entry. All the Z Streeters know about New Sydney. Some guys even volunteer to go.”

  “But why would they do that, if they’re just gonna die?” I asked.

  “Cause they’re surplus kids from underprivileged families like Kendal’s. Their moms and dads are all widows and Twisties and whatnot. Once their kid’s got a scholarship, they’re set for life.”

  Bum Bum explained that, to get Kendal out, we would need to find a way over a very high, well-defended fence.

  “I’ll look after getting us there and back, if you look after figuring out how t
o get us inside,” said Bum Bum. “Know how to fly?”

  Normally, that question would have ended our plan. But nothing that had happened to me since Labour Day weekend could be described as normal.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I answered.

  * * *

  I did my research at Cresswell’s Collectibles, a second-hand comic book store and pawn shop that hung off the end of the main street of Shipman’s Corners like a dirty afterthought. The wood-frame building had once housed a china shop, with the words ENGLISH BONE CHINA spelled out in faded coloured tiles in the sidewalk at the entrance. There still might have been some old English teacups floating around among the concertinas, broken radios, Depression-era toasters, hip-reducing vibration machines and K-Tel patty stackers. It was a receiving hall of old and semi-worthless possessions that families couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw in the garbage. Instead, they took them to Cresswell’s and got a few bucks for everything in the trunk of their car — or maybe not; I think some of the junk on the shelves was so worthless, Cressie probably just agreed to stash it there until someone shoplifted it. But his main stock in trade was used comic books.

  When I biked over to the store and Cressie saw the huge stack of little-kid comics I had in my basket — my lifetime collection of Moneybags McGurks and Little Henrys — his eyebrows went up behind thick glasses held together by a wad of masking tape over the bridge of his nose. Cressie had once bought a 1939 Superman comic from a nine-year-old for five bucks, which seemed like a fortune until word got around that he recognized the comic as a collector’s item and sold it in the States for a thousand dollars. Cressie knew that kids were the easiest customers to rip off, so he paid attention to our old issues of Lemurman and Betty & Velma, sorting them rapid-fire on the counter by genre (superheroes, little kids, romance, classic stories and everything else). Cressie wasn’t neat — the store looked as if it hadn’t been dusted in a decade, and he himself carried the faint stench of mouldy laundry — but he was well organized and a freak for categorization and comic book trivia.