⠠⠭⠠⠊⠠⠧ . ⠙⠑⠎⠅⠝⠽

It wasn’t my brother that hung from the spinning fan.

It was his teddy bear.

I won it for him at the local carnival. I spent half of my first allowance trying to toss the ring around its stupid head and didn’t have enough to spend on other games that I wanted to play.

My brother had long outgrown teddy bears at that point, but he accepted it with the graciousness befitting of a kind older brother. Even when our parents hounded him to study, study until his carpal tunnel flared, until I had eaten his half of the spicy marinated boiled eggs, he found time always to play pretend with his little sister, who spilled water on his textbooks and didn’t understand that her old brother had dreams and aspirations of his own.

Then, when his little sister grew up, and the kids at school took a liking to the funny way she dressed and the way she sweated, my brother took it upon himself, even at the expense of his studies, to accompany me to and from school.

He filed complaints with the school administrators when I returned drenched in toilet water. He accompanied me to and from school to protect me from the ones who jumped me in the side street behind the school's back entrance.

He never wavered. Not a single time.

Our parents were often furious. How could their pathetic daughter get in the way of their prodigal son's success? And so my brother got into arguments with them all the time. In those days, it was normal to come downstairs to hear shouting and fists banging on tables followed by my brother fuming up the stairs and throwing the door closed behind him.

One day, he simply disappeared.

For a while, my brother kept his door closed. My parents were delighted by this separation thinking that he was studying but became suspicious once they realized that he had not come down to eat anything in days.

When I found the key to my brother’s room and opened it, I saw the teddy bear that I had given to him spinning beneath the fan. It had spun until friction of rope and fur sheared the sheepskin off of its neck.

My parents looked everywhere, sanctioned every police officer and private investigator they could pay off, but my brother had truly vanished, and the searches ended in vain.

There were only two traces of where he had gone.

The first trace was our mother’s garden, where his boots had trampled over her rosarias, brassicas, and herbs.

The second trace was an old video tape he had left behind on his table. He had overwritten a famous war movie from the late seventies, I forgot the name, and recorded a video of himself speaking.

“My name is of no concern to you,” said my brother, his face covered by a beige mask, his voice altered. “From now on, I am the Electromagnetic Man, one cursed by the waves spawned from this hate-filled Earth. All of us propagate these waves, but a few of you propagate them further and with more sinister intent than anyone else. You are the ones who cause suffering, pain, separation, who rob others of their human dignity and subject them to horrors because you yourself cannot see beyond the limitations of your own interior World. I shall hunt you now. Know that I will hunt those who propagate the worst of these electromagnetic waves, and I intend to stop only when those waves fall into utter disquiet.”

The video then just kept repeating itself.

Even as a grown teenager, I had a hard time following my brother. He was always the philosopher, and I the baffled plebeian. But my brother, even through the electronic modifications to his otherwise gentle voice, spoke with an odd, uncompromising sobriety that I knew meant business.

I was worried at first when my brother disappeared, but school life continued with few interruptions. I moved schools, so outside of a few accidental run-ins, I hadn’t seen anyone from the old days. By then, I had already changed my habits, donned white shirts to mask my sweating, avoided crowds, and asked the teachers to seat me by the windows where it was too bright for people to turn and look at me.

In that quiet solace, I missed my brother.

Several weeks later, investigators arrived at my school.

They sat me down in one of those teacher parent conference rooms. They asked me if I knew my brother, if I had seen him, where he was, whether he had a reason to do what he did.

What did he do?

The investigators left unsatisfied, but they returned on occasion, every few weeks to ask me those questions again. By then, even I had heard the rumors, but I had nothing to offer them that they already didn’t know.

Half a year into my brother’s disappearance and rumors of dozens of victims later, I was kidnapped.

On the usual road home from school, several hands grabbed me from behind. One of them pressed a wet cotton towel over my mouth. It smelled sweet until the dizziness hit. They carried my limping body into the back of a van where I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I found myself strapped to a chair. Rope bound my hands. There was a potato sack pulled over my head. It was transparent, and I spotted several shadows surrounding me. The light from the top of the interior shined into the sack revealing sheets of black mold suffocating me with its pungent damp odor.

“You like that smell?” the voice of a man sneered. “Serves you right. Look at you, grown up and thinking you could get away from us by just changing schools. Still relying on your brother too. You better pray that he got the message, or else you’ll be living the last few hours of your life being asphyxiated by Stachybotrys chartarum. Am I saying that right?”

I didn’t ask what the message was. In spite of my panic, I possessed the discipline to keep my mouth shut. I tried to gesture with my body, but velcro straps tied my chest to the back of the chair. Shaking my head would rustle bits of mold off the top of the sack and onto my hair.

“If your brother doesn’t come,” someone else said. They were patting a baseball over their shoulder. “We’ll set you and the rest of this place on fire. Then we’ll jump him when he’s busy trying to find your ashes.”

“Let’s give it about an hour, boys and girls?”

That hour was the longest wait of my life.

I prayed for my brother to find me, just like he used to. But a part of me prayed for him not to come. Part of me wished that he was already dead, that whoever the Electromagnetic Man had become, they had simply usurped my brother’s place in the world. The rumors I had heard about had been sickening, unconscionable. It couldn’t have been him.

Then an hour passed. My captors grew bored and split off.

A few minutes later, I heard the first of many bloodcurdling screams.

“He’s here!” someone else hollered. “It’s the Electromagnetic Man!”

“Quick, get the girl, get the girl! Set the matches!”

A metallic bang. A baseball bat whalloped against bone and steel. Another painful scream followed by distressed begging.

“No! Stop. Please stop! I’m sorry I’m s–”

Silence. Someone yanked my chair down and pulled me along with it. Something gaseous filtered through the bag. I felt the place grow warmer. On the other side of the interior, a thin silhouette made its way towards the center of the room.

“We’ve already called the cops on this entire place,” the one pulling on me laughed. “Can you smell that? That’s the smell of kerosene. This fire is gonna burn both of you alive.”

I started sweating. The smell of black mold fused with the acrid taste of smoke.

The silhouette tried to step forward.

“Not so fast!” the voice above me said. “You come closer and I slit–”

A speedy projectile ripped across the length of the room. It slammed into the face of the one above me. They howled, gripped their nose and dropped me to the floor. The silhouette launched themselves across the room, picking up the bat and standing over their target.

“I didn’t mean it! I didn’t–”

Crunch came the sound of the falling bat. Then came another, but before the blows became excessive, the Electromagnetic Man dropped the instrument and rushed to my side. Police sirens blared in the near distance.

He said nothing, for he had nothing to say to me. He ripped off the velcro and the plastic wires pinned around my wrists. My pits smelled of fear and fire. When the potato sack was lifted, the warehouse was already engulfed in flames. Smoke rose to the roof, and I saw that tight metal doors had shut us in on all sides.

The Electromagnetic Man wore a mask, the same mask that he wore on the video tape found in my brother’s room. He pulled me tightly, running with me across the main floor.

My captors had poured oil everywhere. The metal walls groaned as wooden beams buckled and collapsed. The entire warehouse shook.

We climbed up a mezzanine. The fire closed in. I was light headed. Noxious fumes drew tears from my waning eyes. The heat below the steel platform made it near unbearable to stand. But there were windows there wide enough for both of us to get through.

I searched for the lever to unlock the windows, but the Electromagnetic Man shattered them with his elbows. With his bare hands, he snapped off the glass teeth around the manmade exit, then motioned with blood torn fingers for me to jump.

I barreled through the opening, using my arms to protect my face from any loose glass. I landed on a staircase, one that led down into the parking lot. I turned back to the Electromagnetic Man.

“Come on!” I shouted.

But the Electromagnetic Man shook his head.

“Alan!” I cried. “Come on. Please! We have to go now!”

My brother shook his head. He waved at me. When I reached forward to grab his hands, he backed away, then vanished into the smoke.

Soon after, the police found me at the bottom of the steps. They took me into custody. They asked me the same questions every other investigator had done.

By then, I had even less to tell them.

I couldn’t even tell them what anyone’s face looked like.

I realized on that day that if my beloved brother was not innocent, then neither was this world. The World had created him, molded him. My brother could do terrible things because the World could do terrible things, and it spoonfed that potential to all humans in its everlasting and magnetic embrace.

So I erased my brother’s face from the World.

And because I erased his face, I was compelled to erase every other face across the surface of the Earth, including my own, for only when I carved everything away could I convince the World that my brother was innocent, that all along I had found him there that day, a prized teddy bear, dangling from the top shelf of a carnival rack.