by Lavie Tidhar
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.
Spin-Man awoke in a void, buffeted on all sides by peculiar purple rain. He bowed his head in shame. I've failed, he thought. I've fallen into the unknown, somewhere beyond the far reaches of the multiversal continuum. If I don't find my way back, the Forces of Chaos will engulf the universe and all that I hold dear. Spin-Man coughed. For a moment, his visage shifted into that of James, his human alter-ego. His eyes glimmered with hope. Spin-Man's course was clear. I have to find my way back, no matter how long it takes. With that, he launched himself into the void, away from the reader, as the words "never the end" appeared beneath him, like a promise. It was the last issue of Spin-Man to achieve publication. I swear, I broke down right there in the middle of the bookshop, holding onto that stupid little comic book. I realised, right then, that I needed to do something; anything, or else James would be lost forever.
These days, CATS no longer sells comic books. They've since turned into a specialty store for action figures, and though I visit it from time to time, the bargain bins I used to thumb through are no longer there. I still buy comics every Wednesday when I have the money. I keep track of my favourite superheroes' lives. For me they affirm that, despite hardship, some things may still endure. I've taken a course in Fine Arts, and I've been applying it to my comics' illustrations, working hard to improve to a professional level. As soon as I finish college, I'll send off applications to the major comic book companies. I'll get a job in the States, and when I've saved up enough money, I'll look up Echo Comics and buy the rights to Spin-Man.
Then I'll publish Spin-Man #3, and in that issue, Spin-Man will be at the edge of the universe, contemplating his path home. A blue-and-gold wormhole will appear before him. With superhuman courage, Spin-Man will activate his cosmic powers, jump through the vortex, and spin his way back into our world.
Borrowed Time
Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro
Translated by Daniel W. Koon
Cuban author Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro is a prolific writer of short stories, articles and scripts, and has organised several conventions and workshops in Cuba. The following story, appearing here in English for the first time, has won the first prize in the 2005 Juventud Técnica SF competition.
Your hair, a centimetre or two longer, your skin maybe more tanned than the last time. Smooth, yes, like a shiny shell, without a single fold, without a scar. Me, on the other hand, my face could serve as the canvas for an astronavigation map: you could catalogue all my wrinkles by latitude and longitude. And locate all its globular clusters, wormholes, and black holes. There's room for the entire universe on my face.
You don't see my face. You have taken up residence on a spot on the terrace where you watch the stars fall—m-e-t-e-o-r-s, you make me repeat, letter by letter, helping me to spell it out with your hands. And even the perfume of the poplars in bloom seems to bother you. Serena-Ceti is a world without a future—you shake your fingers wildly and point at the night sky over the terrace.
Look up above, so many worlds to visit, so many twilights beneath double and triple stars, the chance to use hyperjumps to effectively live forever…an eternity of journeying between the stars. I struggle in vain to understand your words, your passion for those faraway lights in unknown and unreachable houses that inhabit the night; I am only five years old.
I run my fingers through your hands, as I did back then, trying to find some final assignment in them. But they are rigid, muteness, fingers that refuse to surrender the secret behind your need to transcend.
The Persephone docked for the first time on Serena-Ceti a few days after your confession on the terrace. How long ago was that for you? Three months, four…? It doesn't matter… For you it is time elapsed, time transcended. For me, the indelible image: the hydrogen smell of the aerotransporter that carries you to the spaceport; the shards of glass embedded in the soles of my boots (from the last glass lamp we would ever put in our hallway); the colour of helplessness on my father's face… You don't need any superior intelligence to understand what "stomping out of the house" means to a five-year-old girl, even if she's a deaf-mute. But I didn't understand then what it meant for you. Father did.
Father spends hours writing up his Academy lectures, the crumpled papers piling up around him and his computer growing mouldy beneath the dust. He never sleeps more than two hours. He never rests. I think that he is afraid of falling asleep and aging at an accelerated pace. Or of falling asleep and dreaming of you. Father accompanies me to the pulse station in the capital to receive a message you sent barely a week after you left on the exploration ship, The Persephone, with that splendid annual contract as back-up exobiologist. I am twelve. You are exactly as I remember you. And your fingers speak with the same fluency as ever: maybe, when you see this message I will be arriving home. Funny how these transmissions keep coming from the Sorceress of Hyperspace. You must be quite grown up, sweetheart. And then, in gestures: I'll bring you some glass rock earrings from Delta Altair to set off your ears with that short haircut of yours. I am twelve years old, hair down to my waist, my ears marked with scars from the cochlear surgery and the rejected implants that have not cured my deafness. But you don't know. And in my naïve twelve-year-old eyes, that not knowing makes you innocent; and besides, I already know that you will be back in less than three years for my fifteenth birthday, and I will wear those earrings at a party and my ears will shine with the light from other worlds, from other stars, from the entire universe.
I waited a whole year when I turned fifteen. I watched so many twilights of our little sun and the conjunctions of the moons twice nightly. But not a single star came down from the sky. The Persephone arrived one random afternoon in the summer. I went by myself to pick you up at the spaceport. I'm sorry, Miranda, you said, with a quick hug and the same smile as ever. My calculation was off by a few minutes. You could not have forgotten the way. How far off was it this time…? Two minutes, five? That doesn't matter to you either. But I've turned eighteen and it would have been a miracle for me to still be so naïve. Something has changed dramatically in this lost little world during what has seemed like only three weeks to you. I can forgive you missing a lot of things in your absence: the operating rooms, puberty rudely taking over my body, the angst of my first unrequited love, the listless and frustrating experience of my first non-orgasm. But your absence from my successes was more painful.
Over my father's objections, I got a scholarship to study astronomy at the Academy for Physical Sciences in the capital. No more nights of tiptoeing through the house, an amateur telescope under my arm, hiding from my dad to get to the terrace to stare at the dawn. At first I naïvely looked for a sign from you in the heavens, but then my loneliness finally latched onto the stars themselves. I stopped necking with the neighbourhood boys, and they began to call me a junior lunatic.
I told you about the scholarship then. You smiled and I think I caught a glimmer of pride in your eyes. You apologised for not knowing about my interest in astronomy and you regretted the many things you could have brought me for my personal collection from the many planets you had visited. I gave you a lukewarm thank you. In the end, we were just two intimate strangers.
Later, after a week of rest, you left on another space mission. I will return for your wedding, no ifs ands or buts! you promised, winking an eye at Iranus, my boyfriend at the time, who accompanied us to the launch. We would be marred when I left the Academy. Back then, I believed in eternal love, and I believed that a mother kept her promises.
It was then, at the beginning of my final course at the Academy, that the first symptoms of papa's sickness began to show. I was called to his office several times to bring him home. I found him disorientated, physically exhausted and trembling. His formerly dark hair grew greyer and thinner by the day. Papa got old much too soon, while you rem
ained unchanged.
For you time sped by red-hot, while for Papa it froze ice-blue. And he was growing more distant from me by the second.
I had already been working two years in the pulse station when you came back the second time.
It has been barely six months since the birth of Harlan, my third child. Iranus? My God, how do you still remember him? That was an ancient chapter in my life, followed by so many other forgotten versions.
Deverios, Harlan's father, had just died in an aerial transit accident. I was two years older than you at the time, but I still couldn't understand what dragged you away from Serena-Ceti, and what I was supposed to understand by your need for transcendence: watching your children grow up? Seeing your own self carried on in their lives? No, Miranda, I'm watching you grow up, at a speed that any parent would envy. And I don't miss the changes, because for me the world is measured in astronomical units; what you see as abstract units are my reality. What I want is to transcend the time and space that are limiting us as a species. It was a lively lecture, but all I heard was the immature teenager underneath it all. Because now I no longer wonder why you left Serena-Ceti, but why you returned.
You and Papa saw each other for the last time on that trip. He was confined to the sanatorium for patients with retroviral dementia. Hospitalised for over a year with no definitive diagnosis.
A few short lines in his report spoke of a premature aging syndrome. Cause unknown. He confused you with me; he confused me with you. I still hold the memory in my cheek of the heat of his slap. Later, he lapsed into an impenetrable silence until the end, barely a week after The Persephone lifted off again.
Your third trip came at the end of an anguished time on Serena. Torrential rains and unknown epidemics that led to a planet-wide quarantine. The Persephone's planned return, coming as it did during the spaceport's closure, was delayed for thirty-two years, and when you appeared again, my grandchildren raced through the entranceway to greet you. For them, like my children before them, you were an almost magical and distant being, like the stars. And one week with you did nothing to change their opinion. It surprised you to see the holograms of so many strange persons in my albums, all of them bearing a trace of your DNA. You had a large family that you never knew and who never knew you either. It surprised you to see my room filled with trophies and awards from social and scientific organisations, some of them off-planet, in recognition of my work. But it was my old age that surprised you most of all. Although you knew that the years would not stop for me, it was still very difficult for you to accept that your daughter, your only remaining link to Serena-Ceti, now embodied everything that you had feared so much. And I learnt then, that now you would never come back again willingly.