Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  Other times I would reminisce about how I was riding my bike on the day my mom brought him home from the hospital and how I looked through the bars of his crib at his little face, so small and full of promise. I could never quite decide whether he was young or older than me; each new fact might swing his age up or down for convenience. Typically he hovered nebulously between four years older and four years younger. I am the youngest of all my real brothers, so sometimes it was convenient to have a younger brother. At other times, I liked imagining an older brother who had more time for me.

  Perhaps it might be shocking to you, but I will admit that it was months before this extraneous brother had a name. For a while it did not matter, as in the vagueities of my imagination the traits and actions of this brother mattered more than any moniker. Since I rarely talked about him to anyone, he never needed a name to communicate to them. But eventually I noticed this absence and strove to correct it. I auditioned various names, but none quite fit. Some just sounded wrong. My young mind had already associated others with a list of traits and that list did not fit this brother. I flipped through a phone book for inspiration, but I had no real luck. I did underline a few of the funnier names, but the likes of Richard Head and Hugh Jorgan were not fit to be my brother. After further searching, I finally discovered the perfect name for my anonymous brother: Zeppo.

  History has largely glossed over the life of Zeppo Marx. Oh, you can find his Wikipedia page, but that's not what I mean. If you asked a random person on the street, what would they be able to tell you about Zeppo Marx? Would you receive dumbfounded stares? Would you tire of saying, "No, not the one with the horn. No, not the one with the mustache and cigar. And no, Horshack was not a Marx brother"? While the other Marx brothers had comic personas, Zeppo was the perennial straight man that the others played off. He was whatever the movie needed him to be. He had no persona other than "straight man", and so few traits attached to him. His lack of comedy made him easily forgotten. If you've watched Marx brothers movies, you've seen him, but I dare you to point out the man standing in plain sight in all those funny scenes. It was that invisibility that made this name perfect for my brother. Zeppo became his name like it had always been his name. In fact, I told everyone it had always been his name. If anyone suggested otherwise, I was quick to point out they were mistaken and that the issue should be dropped.

  Despite the fact that no one else ever remembered my brother Zeppo, I never considered him an imaginary friend. He was very real, just unacknowledged and unappreciated. Zeppo was made of pure fiction; he was unadulterated lies kept spinning by a child's mind. That put him far above a mere imaginary friend; if anything, he was a strong yet very specific psychosis. I actually looked down on kids with imaginary friends. Zeppo and I used to go to preschools and insult all the kids with the imaginary monsters and invisible celebrity baseball stars. If we had a particularly good insult, we'd get the kid to cry - Zeppo and I had some good times. "My fictional brother can beat up your imaginary friend!"

  Unfortunately, these good times were not meant to last. Fiction has rules and it is bound by them. Every story has to have conflict, as well as a beginning, middle, and end. And some stories have villains. Thus I never anticipated Anita Andrews.

  "You don't have a brother Zeppo," she said. We were on the school bus for the first day of school and I was regaling everyone with tales of my rascal brother. I had become more confident in my brother and now didn't mind telling people, despite their disbelief. I also was trying to make new friends by telling them of my awesome brother's adventures.

  Anita had been sitting off on her own, but she came over and was now intruding on the court I was holding in the center of the bus. "I live on the same block as you," she said. "You have three brothers, but none of them are called Zeppo."

  The energy in the area dropped noticeably. I looked to each of my new friends' faces, watching their expressions change. One laughed, the others returned to their seats.

  "No, it's true!" I protested.

  "You don't have a brother Zeppo," repeated Anita, staring at me and ignoring the rest. I didn't like this sort of attention and especially not from Anita Andrews. She was two years older than me and a known pariah at our school. She was known for her creepy stare where she seemed to look right through people. She was morbid and strangely obsessed with her collection of dolls. Having her speak to me was the kiss of death to any social life.

  "But I do!" I said. "She's crazy, she doesn't really know me..." But it was too late. I had lost all their attention and I found myself alone. Crestfallen, I sat down.

  Anita slid into the seat next to me. "I've heard you talk about Zeppo before. Why do you pretend that you have another brother? You already have three."

  "Zeppo is my brother. He's just... different. Perhaps you're just not privileged enough to know him."

  Her dark, half-lidded eyes stared at me. "That's not true. I've seen your house, I've seen your family. Just you, your three brothers and your parents. No Zeppo."

  "You must be mistaken," I said haughtily.

  She smiled and mischief entered her eyes, which I should have known for the look of pure evil. "I know," she said, "he's your imaginary friend."

  "What?" I said. "No! No. Of course not. That's preposterous."

  "Aren't you a bit old to have an imaginary friend? Does your mother know? You might need to see the school psychologist."

  “He’s not imaginary!” I said before realizing I had raised my voice. I looked around, embarrassed, and lowered my voice. “It’s different, okay? He's not imaginary. Zeppo is a work of fiction. He exists beyond me. An imaginary friend would be just in my head. But Zeppo is more than that. The more stories I tell, the more real Zeppo becomes. He’s real, he exists out there,” I said, waving my hand in the air in front of us to punctuate the “out there”.

  “How strange and unusual,” she said, thinking to herself for a moment. “So he's not just imagination. He has some independent existence from your stories, which of course are not true. How interesting!" She smiled again. "Basically, Zeppo exists on the strength of your lies, yes?” She turned to me, and I nodded weakly, not wanting to challenge her, though I disagreed that they were lies. “So he exists out there,” she parodied my motion, “and not in your head. How do you know what he is up to? Like, when you're not with him, what's he doing?”

  "Well, it depends on the story. The stories usually dictate what he's doing or likes to do. Whatever is told about him is true. You see, as a work of fiction, he has independent existence. I tell the stories so that he doesn't disappear if I forget about him, like an imaginary friend would. He exists in the story."

  “Oh I see,” she said, turning to me with an evil smile. “Well, did I tell you I kidnapped Zeppo?” Her voice was an even matter-of-fact tone, as if relating to me what she had for breakfast. “I invited him over this morning and kidnapped him.”

  "What! That’s not true!”

  “Of course it is. Isn't it? How do you know? Let's see. Maybe you were having breakfast and were distracted. I invited him over for morning tea, very generous of me, I know. What he didn’t know is that I drugged his tea. Quick acting, not really detectable in the bitter tea I served. Once he passed out, I tied him up and hid him in my closet.”

  “That’s not true! You’re just telling lies. Zeppo isn't in your closet.”

  "Is that so? How do you know? I've just told you a story of Zeppo. Was there something else he was already doing at that time?"

  "Well, no..."

  "Then that's it," she said. "That's the story. Canonically, Zeppo is in my closet."

  I found myself growing flustered. I was angry and nervous. I felt powerless and betrayed. I felt like I had just been robbed. I was in over my head and needed help. But who would care that my fictional brother had been co-opted into someone else's story?

  “W-well, he…” I grasped for anything. “He escaped afterwards. The twine you bound him up with was weak. He… rubbed up against
a sharp corner of something and broke it. Then he went out your window and climbed out a conveniently placed ladder.” I smiled. The burst of inspiration felt good. There's no way Zeppo would be so easily defeated.

  She smiled. “After climbing down the ladder, he was beset by a pair of jaws belonging to my dog Lucille. Weakened by the tea and intimidated by the dog's sharp teeth, he was dragged to my back porch. There Lucille alerted my mother, who I had given specific instructions to before leaving for school. Within minutes of his escape, Zeppo was back in my closet as my prisoner once again.”

  I was furious. How could she do that? I quickly began to formulate a counter to that. “After that, he –“

  She cut me off. “Too late, we’re at school.”

  The bus’s brakes screeched, we lurched forward as the bus stopped, and the doors opened. Anita stood up, smiled evilly, and then left. I tried to follow but I lost her in the rush of the crowd.

  I couldn’t pay attention to anything in school. While the teachers taught, I spent the day formulating an escape plan for Zeppo. It had to be good. I wanted something that evaded Anita’s dog Lucille and her mother. Did she even have a dog named Lucille? I couldn’t remember if I had heard barking from her house before. But for the story, it didn't matter if she did.

  Finally the 3:15 bell rang, and school was over. I confronted Anita on the bus. I was too worked up for subtlety or patience and so blurted out my story: “Using his trusty Swiss army knife that he carries on him at all times, Zeppo slowly cuts the rope he was tied up with, making sure to not attract notice. Once free, he uses the knife to pick the lock on the door. He slowly exits your room, moving to the hallway. Then he –“

  “Unbeknownst to Zeppo,” she said, interrupting me, “he has tripped the lasers on my room’s silent alarm security system. Alarms have sounded and now the entire house his aware of his escape. As Zeppo creeps down the hallway, it is child's play for my mother to ambush him with a police-issue taser gun. With fifty thousand volts entering his body, he collapses to the floor and is once again my prisoner.”

  I stared at her in awe of just how much of a bitch she really was. She just pulled that laser alarm stuff out of her ass. There was no way she could have such a thing in her room. I knew then that I should think big and not feel constrained by reasonable plausibility. Anything was fair game now. While I gnashed my teeth she moved to another seat on the bus. I fumed in my own seat, realizing she had won... for today.

  I’d like to say that the next day I freed my brother from her clutches, but that wasn’t true. We began a cycle of challenges, where every morning and afternoon on the bus, I would attempt to rescue Zeppo with a story. I would present an escape, and she would present a counter. We had no formal rules. The story just had to sound right.

  The stories ranged from the outlandish to the extremely specific. I had Captain America break into her house to save Zeppo, but she had Cap's arch-nemesis from WWII, the Red Skull, foil that rescue. A detailed middle of the night escape plan dodging every member of her family and most state of the art alarm systems was foiled by an unlucky wrong-number phone call to her house, waking up her family. I had members of the “Save Zeppo” campaign that was trying to get donations to get the Save Zeppo logo on the local water tower show up at her front door, just to give Zeppo a good distraction, but Anita explained that her crazy uncle happened to be visiting that week from the Ozarks, and he peppered Zeppo with rock salt from his shotgun, foiling that escape. I even explained that Zeppo had previously been pulled backwards in time where he apprenticed with the great Harry Houdini on how to escape from anywhere in a short amount of time. In this he was foiled by the clan of ninjas that Anita's father had hired to protect her house for extra security. I couldn’t argue with that, they were ninjas.

  This back and forth cycle took the better part of the school year, with my nights and schooldays filled with my planning. On weekends I developed even more elaborate stories, often diagramming escape plans. As we approached summer, it occurred to me that the situation might be more dire. What if Anita stopped taking the bus next year? Or if her family moved? She’d take Zeppo and the story with him, and he would be gone forever. I would not stand for this, he was my fictional brother.

  I realized I needed to go for broke. Yes, I had tried obscure and strange plans, but to no success. I needed to be epic. His escape needed to be something really epic so that it steamrolled over all possible objections and counters. I understood that epic events were often tragic and risky too, but I was running out of options. This needed to be done. I formulated my epic plan and sat down with Anita on the bus on the way home.

  Even in the closet he was imprisoned in, Zeppo received notice that the woman he loved was marrying another man the very next day. A true romantic at heart, he would not let love pass him by. He knew he had to escape and he did so with the passion of a man who does everything for Love. He wriggled out of his bonds and exited the closet. But now he was at a loss for how to continue. Too many times he had been thwarted here, and he came close to despairing.

  This is where I show up in the story. Distraught at the disappearance of my beloved brother, I had been seeking him across the whole world. I had studied with Sherlock Holmes, traded barbs with Vidoq, rode in battle with Cossacks, flown in airships, and finally arrived in Tibet where a mysterious old man told me my dear brother was imprisoned just a few doors down from our home. I flew back home post-haste and infiltrated Anita's home.

  We embraced and I told Zeppo of our escape plan. I had found a hidden staircase to the roof where I had a helicopter waiting to make our getaway. Zeppo, myself, and a red-shirted companion I brought with me made our way up the hidden staircase. The staircase was old and covered with strange writing that man was not meant to know. Out of nowhere, a slobbering beast pounced on our red-shirted companion, the two tumbling to the bottom of the steps in a mortal struggle I knew our companion could not win. Zeppo and myself broke out into a run and burst through the door at the top of the stairs onto the roof.

  The night was dark and it was pouring rain. Our helicopter was nowhere to be found. Instead, we saw two black helicopters in the night sky, despite the terrible weather. Their searchlights came to rest on us in the middle of the roof.

  I reached into my coat and pulled out a gun. I aimed it at Zeppo.

  Even in the rain, I could tell he was shocked. "Why?"

  "It's the only option," I told him, glad the rain was hiding my tears. "We've been through this so many times. She'll capture you again. We'll never be together. This way she'll never have you again."

  I could see the sadness written on his face. He took a snow globe from his pocket and stared at it longingly. He looked to me. "Please," he said. "Let me go. I will run far from here, beyond the sea and beyond the moon. Out beyond the fields we know I'll find a place she'll never find. I know that we won't be together, but I'll be free and alive. Let me go."

  I lowered my gun, struck by the sincerity of his words. My tears were now obvious, so I nodded and signaled him to go. Whatever words I would have said would be choked in my throat.

  He nodded to me and turned to go. But then there was a loud gunshot. I looked to my gun, but it had not fired. I turned behind me and saw Anita with a sniper rifle. "No one escapes me!" she shrieked.

  Zeppo looked back at me, his face pale and blood dripping from his mouth. When he looked at me, there was something in his eyes, like acknowledgement and a deep sadness. He teetered on the edge and fell off the roof.

  I ran to the edge of the roof, seeing him laying on the mud, his arms spread like an angel. The snow globe, intact, fell from his hand and rolled next to him. I saw his lips move in a final pronouncement, but it was lost to me in the rain.

  As I finished the story, Anita and I were in tears. The story was over. She nodded and we shared a strange hug.

  We never spoke to each other again.

  That is how my brother Zeppo died.

  Adventures in Science

/>   "We may have a problem," I said.

  "Are you going to finally tell me what that problem is?" said Bruce, sitting down in a chair next to my bed and folding his jacket in his lap. "That's the same thing you said on the phone. 'We have a problem, get your ass over here.' No elaboration. I'm shocked you didn't tell me to meet at the spooky mansion on the edge of town without any explanation."

  "We checked out the spooky mansion in high school, don't you remember?" I said with a smile.

  "Oh, how could I forget?" he said with his own smile. "It was Old Man Withers the whole time!"

  I grinned. With all the time spent in bed, it was good to just bullshit with a good friend. These nurses are all sweet as sunshine, but it would have been nice to get one to step out of their work persona and do some no-bullshit bullshitting with.

  "Anyway, the problem," I said. "When Becky was here, she said she had seen one of my brothers here at the hospital."

  "Oh really? Which one? I haven't seen any of them in ages. Probably not since high school, definitely not since I moved down here."

  "Here's a hint," I said. "She said they looked just like me."

  He frowned. "None of your brothers look like you."

  "Exactly," I said and stared at Bruce.

  It took him a minute of me uncomfortably staring at him and him finally realizing I wasn't going to tell him before he finally thought about it. Then he frowned and his brow furrowed. "Do you think...?"

  "Well, recovering a body would have been a little difficult."

  "But after all this time... why wouldn't he have...?"

  "I have no idea," I said. "I don't even have confirmation. Who knows? Becky could have just been really wrong. Maybe she saw someone who just looked at me, maybe one of my brothers was down here for some reason, introduced themselves, and she just thinks they look like me. She might just be wrong. But if she isn't... it's troubling."