The Apex Book of World SF 2 (17 page)

"Yes!" James
exclaimed, almost lost in delight. "I mean, no! I don't mind!"

It was
unprecedented—my brother's idea was going straight into an actual comic book to
be published in the States. His idea was going to be the name of the superhero,
if not the title of the series. I was a little jealous of his moment of
brilliance, but conceded that it was fair since he'd thought of it first. That
was, of course, before things got out of hand.

"Can I be Spin-Man?"
James asked, pulling on Tito Fermin's shirt sleeve. We had just arrived at my
grandfather's house, and our uncle seemed lost in a daze.

"You mean his
alter-ego? That would be a little like Shazam, wouldn't it?"

"Yes! Please? I can
be a good character. I'll fight the Forces of Chaos."

James made a
spinning move, grinding his sneakers against the pavement, and ended it with a
punch to the air and a shout: "Spin-Man!"

Tito Fermin laughed.
"All right, all right. You can be Spin-Man. What about your brother?"

By that time, I was
foul-tempered and indignant. James had thrown a load of ideas at Tito Fermin,
including Spin-Man's name, his costume, thoughts on potential enemies and even
a love interest. My jealousy was frothing at the mouth. I was an artist; a
creative; I should have had more ideas than my colourist brother, but my mind
was blank. I couldn't visualise Spin-Man. He was merely a figment, a cipher; I
had no story to hang him onto. I struggled to keep my resentment in check, but
when you're nine years old it's a difficult thing to hide. "No thank you, Tito
Fermin. I think I'd rather draw Spin-Man. At least I'll make money doing it."

"You can draw it
when you're older. I'll even ink you, if you'll have me." It was a promise that
I knew would never be fulfilled. With that, Tito Fermin ruffled my hair and
walked off to his room. As he moved away, I caught my little brother staring at
me, and this is the face that I will never forget: James biting his lips, his
eyes wide open, his expression a mix of guilt and apology, as if he had done
something wrong.

That night, before
we went to bed, he broached the topic one last time. I had ignored him
throughout dinner and he had respected my silence, but after Lolita had tucked
us in, he turned to me and asked, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I said,
though obviously I wasn't.

"You can be Spin-Man
if you want. I can just tell Tito Fermin—"

"No thank you," I
said, cutting him off.

And that was that.

I awoke late the
next day. The sun was shining, the midday heat had begun to settle in, and my
first thought was that I'd somehow overslept and missed Tito Fermin's
leave-taking. My second thought was of James. There was no-one in the next bed,
and I assumed that he must have been too bothered about my reaction the
previous night to wake me. I put on my slippers and went downstairs. Santa
Claus was asleep on his favourite couch, and Lolita was in the next room,
sweeping.

"Good morning," she
said. "Your Tito Fermin left early. He didn't want to wake you because it's
your vacation, but he said that he loves you and that he'll keep in touch."

"I'm sorry about
that, Lola. Have you seen James?"

"James?" she asked.
She seemed puzzled. I rubbed my eyes and thought,
She must be going senile
in her old age.

"James," I repeated.
"My brother."

She stopped sweeping
and eyed me with suspicion. For a moment, she seemed to be considering what I
meant, though it should have been obvious. And then she smiled. "Perhaps when
you sleep tonight, you will see him again. Lunch will be ready soon."

I frowned at her. My
grandmother was patronising me. Clearly, some sort of joke was happening that I
was unaware of. I left the room and began to look for James. I had searched the
living room, the terrace, the dining room and the balcony before I began to
wonder if James was playing an impromptu game of hide-and-seek with me. I
pursued him through the house. I looked in bathrooms, closets, cabinets and
convenient hiding places behind doors, between bookshelves and under beds. It
was only when I noticed that his bag was missing; the bag that my mother had
packed for him the day before we left for Los Baňos; it was only then that
I began to worry.

"James!" I called
for him as I ran through the house. "Where's James?" I yelled at Lolita as she
was putting out dishes for lunch. Lolo Doming walked in on us, scratching his
head.

"What is he talking
about?" he asked. "Who's James?"

I grew frantic,
panicked. "James! My brother! This isn't funny!" I ran back to our room,
looking for the pile of comics he had chosen the day before. There was only one
pile. Mine.

"What's the matter
with him?"

"I don't know."

I shouted. "I want
my brother!"

Lola Lita ran after
me. "What happened? What's wrong?"

"Where did he go?" I
ran out of the bedroom and tossed my stack of comics down the stairs. "I want
my brother!" I yelled.

Lola Lita bent over
the comics. "You have no brother."

"James!"

My grandfather held
me down. "Stop it right now!" he said. I struggled.

"James!"

I screamed. I cried.
I went into hysterics. I must have blacked out because the next thing I knew,
it was night time. My mother was there, in the bedroom, ready to take me home. "Where's
James?" I asked her. I told her that his bag was gone, and that my grandparents
wouldn't tell me where he was, and how could they not remember my little
brother when she had tucked us in the night before?

She carried me and
patted my back. "I know, honey, I know. Everything will be fine."

"I'm not fine," I
sobbed.

"I know."

One interminable car
ride later, I was home. I had secretly hoped that James had somehow got there
ahead of us, that by some miracle of time and space, he was sitting on his bed
or on his chair, waiting for me to arrive so that he could laugh at me and
confess that it was all a joke. But when I entered our room, he wasn't there.
Furthermore, the furniture had been rearranged; there was only one bed set, one
chair, one writing desk and a shelf where James's stuff should have been. Our
superhero posters still covered the walls, but apart from that, I could find no
trace of my brother.

I thought that I had
already cried myself out that day, but as I stood there in our empty room, the
tears began to trickle down my cheeks once more. Not tears of confusion or
anger, but of grief. As I lay in my bed, my mother sat beside me, stroking my
hair. "I don't know what you're going through," she said, "but I want you to
know that I'm here for you. Okay?"

She pulled out an
envelope from her bag. "Your Tito Fermin left this for you before he went to
the airport. I hope you at least had a good time meeting him."

She left the
envelope on my bedside table, kissed me on the forehead, and walked out of the
room. "I love you, son. Rest well. I'll be here when you wake up."

I didn't want to
sleep that night. I was exhausted, but I couldn't stand the idea of someone
else disappearing while I slept. It occurred to me that I might have entered
the Twilight Zone; that this was some horrible subconscious dream; that I would
wake up in Los Baňos and James would be there and everything would be as
it should have been. My throat felt raw. My eyelids were heavy. But fear got
the better of me, and after some time, I sat up in my bed and opened the
envelope from Tito Fermin.

My hands shook as I
pulled it out. There it was, in crisp, near-mint condition: a signed copy of
Spin-Man
#1
, written and illustrated by Fermin de la Cruz.

The story opened
with a scene featuring a young boy, James Jeronimo, reading a comic book. James
was a normal boy, like you or me, who dreamt of becoming a superhero. The
caption read:
At that precise moment, as James came to terms with his
inflexible humanity, he felt an unearthly presence in the room.
The planets
aligned. In an alternate dimension, a black mass crept over red skies, intent
on devouring all life. James's eyes lit up as a display of coruscating energy
erupted from his comic book, pulling him into a cosmic vortex. A wormhole
opened up in the centre of the universe, and from its luminous recesses, a
blue-and-gold figure emerged—Spin-Man, champion of the multiversal continuum!

Cloudy
thought-balloons rose from Spin-Man's head:
Who am I?
What is this
place? I thought I was a boy reading a comic book, and now I have been
summoned—to do what?
Then a vision appeared before him—black tendrils
blotting out the sun on a world teeming with innocent life. Spin-Man's eyes
narrowed.
The Forces of Chaos are threatening the continuum!
He
activated his cosmic powers, spinning himself from the centre of the universe
into an alternate dimension where, with the help of his cosmic abilities, he
banished the Forces of Chaos into a black hole.

Spin-Man hovered
over a crowd of green-skinned alien beings: inhabitants of the dimension he had
just saved.
It seems that I have found my true purpose,
he thought.
Whenever
Chaos threatens to engulf meaning in the universe, it will have to reckon with
the might of Spin-Man!
Then a smile, a wink at the reader and, under the
last panel on the last page, the words "to be continued" laid out in bold
letters.

Now, this is the
difficulty of my story. By all other accounts, I never had a brother named
James. No-one else seems to remember him. There is no birth certificate, no
extra toothbrush, no extra bed in my room—not even a picture. But I remember
him. I can see him in my mind. I remember his preferences, his
lactose-intolerance, his Cyclops T-shirt and his difficulties with Maths. I
remember his birthday (June 15, 1983,) his favourite colour (green) his lucky
number (4) and his best friend at school (Nicolo Suarez).

He was my little
brother. He talked in his sleep. He loved Honey Stars and hated fruit-flavoured
toothpaste. He was always our mother's favourite, and it had frustrated me that
she always took his side. We watched Ghostbusters every Friday night, and on
Saturday mornings we would get the garden hose and water-blast each other. We
stole a book once, from the library—
The Illustrated Monkey King—
and it
was James who eventually convinced me to give it back.

I remember him. But
if I position this as true, then you'll think it absurd. I'm no scientist. I
have no degree in quantum physics, no academic theory in my pocket, no
hypotheses by which I can even begin to make you believe that he ever existed.
I have no evidence, no proof. I only have what happened.

And now even that is
just a memory: limited, intangible, decaying, and wide open to contention. If I
die tomorrow, there will be nothing in this world to prove that James was ever
real.

I kept
Spin-Man #1
in a Mylar bag, in its own drawer beside my bed. It had become the most
precious comic book in my collection. Months passed before I came to terms with
the reality of my brother's disappearance. My mother was very supportive. She
took me to a psychiatrist and worked with me to uncover the root of my insistence
on an imaginary brother. After the first few sessions, I learnt to stop openly
asserting James's existence. With nothing to back up my claims, it was a losing
battle. No progress was to be made on that front.

I kept trying to
contact Tito Fermin. At first, they told me that he was too busy to talk to me,
but I later discovered that he had moved addresses upon his return to the
States and left no numbers by which we could contact him. I searched for
further issues of Spin-Man, but was unable find copies in CATS or in any of the
direct market stores. Apparently, they had never carried the title. I learnt
later, from a 1993 issue of The Comics Journal, that Echo Comics had been a
print-on-demand publisher that had struggled through low sales for two whole
years before finally declaring bankruptcy.

In the summer of
1996, I found out that Tito Fermin had died. He had quit making comics three
years earlier due to lack of money, and had become an automobile dealer in
California. One night, he drank too much and drove his car into a copse of
trees, which was where they found him three days later, wide-eyed with a long
piece of window lodged into his head. We held a memorial mass for him in Los Baňos.
His body was buried in the States. He bequeathed a number of items to the
family, amongst them a signed sketch of Spin-Man by Jim Lee, which was left in
my care.

Years went by. I
grew up. I had two girlfriends and one bad break-up. Peter Parker separated
from Mary Jane, who moved away to become a supermodel. The X-Men's line-up
shifted multiple times. Their Jim Lee costumes changed with each turnover until
they could only be glimpsed in flashbacks and back issues. The Hulk grew smart,
then dumb, then bald. Gotham City survived a plague, a major earthquake and an
army of ninjas. Superman died then came back to life. Green Lantern was
corrupted, went rogue, died saving the universe and was replaced by another
Green Lantern. Spin-Man never made it past issue two.

I know this because,
on the day after my graduation, I found a battered old copy of
Spin-Man #2
in a book sale bargain bin. James was on the cover, hovering in the void of the
universe as the tell-tale blue-and-gold vortex, the one that had transformed
him into Spin-Man, whirlpooled around him. In the comic, a black hole had
turned sentient and was trudging across the cosmos in the shape of an
impossible spider. The Forces of Chaos had returned. Spin-Man, as valiant as
ever, rushed to combat the threat, but in a critical moment, the Chaos Spider
spat a web of nebulae at our hero, disrupting his celestial abilities and
forcing him to spin into another dimension.