Shadows Out of Time

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.