Shadows Out of Time

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…