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.