Many Moons

Office Work

Agent Necessiter pulled six comic books out of the manila folder. I recognized them immediately because they were mine.

Each issue was emblazoned with the title: "DIRK MATTER" and each one had a heroic cartoon version of me on the cover. In some I was saving a space damsel, in others I was in fierce confrontation with a space alien, and in one I was on a giant galactic space throne ruling the entire universe.

It had been a pretty cool art class project. I got a 4.0.

In one cover, the one that lay on top of the other five, I had clearly ripped off Frank Frazetta, the artist who used to paint those amazing barbarian pictures. One of his most famous works was of a loincloth-clad warrior holding a sword, standing on a hill of skulls with a voluptuous maiden curled at his feet, whose arms were wrapped around his legs. In my version Dirk Matter was in a tight-fitting space suit and it was he who was curled around the feet of a beautiful space warrior woman.

I was not a great artist so largely for Dirk Matter I had used pictures of myself as the reference. But the thing that struck me after all these years was how much the space warrior mistress looked like Mona. I had literally painted the woman of my dreams in a comic book and was now with her. I wondered if I could convince Mona to wear such a skimpy outfit. I smiled a bit thinking of such a conversation.

The conference room door opened and three people in lab coats, two men and a woman, came in and sat down on the other side of the table from me.

"This is Dr. Epping, Dr. Salarico, and Miss Parminder. They need you to answer some questions." Agent Neccesiter informed me as he sat back in his chair. My first thought was why they were wearing suits and not lab coats but then decided that I was being overly maudlin about my belief in what doctors and scientists should look like. The two men looked more like aged and aging professors, respectively. The woman, who had dark skin and beautiful dark eyes and Indian heritage, looked like she was my age. She appeared to be about as comfortable in the room as I was.

"When did you first work on Dirk Matter?" Dr. Epping asked. He was a much older man, perhaps in his seventies. He had stray hairs sprouting from his ears, nose, eyebrows, and collar. A well-worn tweed jacket with wispy clumps of dog or cat hair around the wrists bulged underneath the white lab coat.

"I had the idea in high school but didn't really write it down until I took a Graphic Art class at Pasco-Hernando Community College a few years ago. I told them how I had used Photoshop on the pictures and was about to tell them the amazing coincidence about Mona but they stopped me in mid-explanation.

"We want to know about the stories, specifically. How did you come up with the ideas in your comics?"

I wasn't sure where they were going with this.

"They were just things I thought about."

Dr. Salarico spoke next. They seemed to be taking turns, oldest to youngest.

"But where did you get the ideas for them? These are some fairly high-end concepts that don't really fit in with accepted scientific views."

"Well. I guess it started in Philosophy. I took a five credit class at Pasco-Hernando Community College. It was actually the first class I signed up for. At the first session the professor asked a bunch of stupid bullshit about 'what one hand clapping' sounded like, or 'if a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, would it actually make a sound'. I kind of realized that these were all just very unclever word games and I said as much."

I saw Agent Necessiter's eyes scan his watch again, but the doctors all seemed interested.

"How were they word games?" Ms. Parminder asked.