Wherein the affairs of imaginary people are thoroughly discussed.
I used to tell people that I had four brothers, but they always pointed out to me that my parents only had four children. Rather than chalk this up to simple mathematical miscalculation or the likelihood I didn’t know what I was talking about, I instead believed that I had a fourth brother, one that other people weren’t aware of or that they simply never talked about.
I began to imagine various facts about this fourth brother. For example, during the summer, he made extra money by working at the small concession stand at the local pool selling ice cream. I imagined that some of the girls there had small crushes on him, as he stayed cool and aloof in the concession stand. Sometimes he would bring me home packets of Fun-Dip that he bought at the end of his shift with his discount. I’d be sitting cross-legged watching TV, and he’d come into the room and ruffle my hair before tossing the candy into my lap. His grin said, “Here you go, kiddo.” Then as I dug into my overly-sugary treat, he would wander off to unwind after work.
Other times I would reminisce about what I was doing the day my mom brought him home from the hospital, and how I would look through the bars of his crib at his little face, so small and so full of promise. I could never quite decide whether he was younger or older than me; typically he hovered nebulously between four years older and four years younger. I was the youngest of all my real brothers, so sometimes it was convenient to have a younger brother, while other times I liked to imagine an older brother who paid a little bit more attention to me.
It is a testament to my convoluted yet tremendously vague imagination that months went by before this extraneous brother had a name. I realized this need to be corrected. I auditioned various names, but none quite fit. I flipped through a phonebook looking for names, but with no 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 encountered the perfect name for my anonymous brother: Zeppo.
History has largely glossed over the life of Zeppo Marx, and by “history”, I actually mean Pop Culture – wikipedia is full of helpful information on the life of Zeppo Marx. But if you asked the average person on the street, what would they be able to tell you about Zeppo Marx? Would you be cursed off? Would you receive dumbfounded stares? Would you tire of saying, “No, not the one with the horn!”? While the other Marx brothers had comic personas, Zeppo was the perennial straight man that the others played off of. Since he wasn’t funny, he was easily forgotten. He was in most of the amusing scenes, and many have enjoyed a laugh due to his performance, but few saw him standing in plain sight. It is this in-plain-sight invisibility that made the name perfect for my brother. Zeppo became his name like it had always been his name; in fact, I told everyone it always was his name – previously they had simply been mistaken.
Despite the fact that others never remembered my brother Zeppo, I never considered him an imaginary friend. He was very real, just unacknowledged, unappreciated. Zeppo was made of pure fiction: unadulterated lies kept spinning by a child’s mind. That put him far above a mere imaginary friend. We used to go to the preschools to insult all the kids with their imaginary monsters and baseball stars. If we had a particular good insult, we’d get the kid to cry; Zeppo and I had some real good laughs. Often we had to settle with “My fictional brother can beat up your imaginary friend.” Good times.
Unfortunately, this fun was not meant to last. Fiction has its own rules, and I did not anticipate the evil that is Anita Andrews.
“You don’t have a brother Zeppo,” she said. We were on the school bus and I was regaling everyone with tales of my rascal brother. Anita had initially sat off on her own, but now she was intruding on the court I was holding. “I live on the same block as you and know your family. You have three brothers, but Zeppo isn’t one of them.”
The energy in the area dropped noticeably. I looked to each of my new friends’ faces, noticing their expressions change. One laughed, the others began to return to their seats. “No, it’s true!” I protested.
“You don’t have a brother Zeppo,” repeated Anita, staring at me, ignoring the rest. I didn’t like the attention, particularly from Anita Andrews. She was two years older than me, and a known pariah at our school. She was known for her creepy stare, like she was looking through people. She was morbid and 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 attention from the bus, and found myself sitting alone in my seat.
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 not privileged enough to know him.”
Her dark eyes stared half-lidded at me, and her face stayed impassive. “That’s not true. I’ve seen your house. Just you, your three brothers and your parents. No Zeppo.”
“You must be mistaken.”
She smiled, and mischief entered her eyes, which I should have known for the look of evil. “I know, he’s your imaginary friend.”
“What?” I said, “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. “It’s different. Zeppo is a work of fiction. He exists beyond me. An imaginary friend would be just in my head. 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. “A brother who exists on the strength of your lies, yes?” She turned to me, so I nodded weakly. “So he exists out there,” she parodied my motion, “and not in your head. How do you know what he is up to?”
“It’s about the story. Whatever has been told about him becomes true. He’s a work of fiction, so the more lies I tell, the more real he becomes. That way he doesn’t disappear if I forget, like an imaginary friend.”
“Oh I see,” she said, turning to me with an evil smile. “Did I tell you I kidnapped Zeppo?” Her voice was an even matter-of-fact tone. “I invited him over this morning and kidnapped him.”
“What! That’s not true!”
“Of course it is. Maybe you were having breakfast. I invited him over for morning tea. What he didn’t know is that I drugged his tea. Once he passed out, I tied him up and hid him in my closet.”
“That’s not true. You’re just telling lies. I know where Zeppo is.”
“Oh do you?” she asked. “But those are just stories too. Which are true? He’s a work of fiction, but you don’t own him. Right now, the story is that he’s in my closet.”
I found myself growing flustered, as if I had been robbed. I felt like 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 felt good about this sudden burst of inspiration.
She smiled. “After climbing down the ladder, he was beset by a pair of jaws belonging to my dog Lucille. 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, he 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.”
This was true. The bus’s brakes screeched, we lurched forward as the bus stopped, and the doors opened. Anita stood up, smiled evilly, and then left. She was only going to class, but I suspected she would ignore me until she was on the bus again.
I couldn’t pay attention to anything that was taught that day. I spent the day formulating an escape plan for Zeppo. I wanted something that evaded Anita’s dog Lucille and her mother. Did she even have a dog named Lucille? I couldn’t remember, but for this, it did not matter.
Finally the 3:15 bell rang, and school was over. I confronted Anita on the bus and 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. The entire house has been made aware of his escape. As Zeppo creeps down the hallway, my mother ambushes 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. Then again, it didn’t really matter at this point. Anything was fair game now. Realizing she had won for today, she moved to another seat on the bus, while I fumed in my own seat.
I’d like to say that the next day I freed my brother from her clutches, but that wasn’t the case. We began a cycle of challenges, where every morning and afternoon on the bus, I would attempt to rescue Zeppo with a story.
The stories ranged from the outlandish to the extremely specific. I had Captain America break into her house to save him, but she had his 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 looking for donations to get the Save Zeppo logo on the local water tower knock on her door, just to give Zeppo a good distraction, but Anita explained her crazy uncle happened to be visiting that week from the Ozarks, and he peppered Zeppo with rock salt, 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 Hokage clan of ninjas that her 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 year, with my nights and schooldays filled with my planning. On weekends I developed even more elaborate stories, often diagramming escape plans. After a year, it occurred to me that the situation might be more dire. What if Anita stopped taking the bus? Or if her family moved? She’d take Zeppo and the story with him, and he would be gone forever.
I thought upon this, and decided that I need to go for broke: I needed to make his escape Epic. It was risky, but I was running out of options. I formulated my plan, and sat down with Anita on the bus on the way home.
Zeppo received notice that the woman he loved was marrying another man tomorrow, and he knew he had to escape. He wriggled out of his bonds and into Anita’s bedroom, but he was at a loss for how to continue; too many times had he been thwarted here. This is where I show up. I had been looking for him all over the world, and at last had found him. In addition, I had found a hidden staircase to the roof, where I had a helicopter waiting for airlift. Zeppo, myself, and a red shirted companion I brought with me make our way up the hidden staircase. A monster jumps out, grabbing the red shirted companion and pulling him back into the wall. Zeppo and myself quicken our ascent and reach the roof. It is raining and night-time. I look around, but our helicopter is gone. We look up in the air, and find two other helicopters, their search lights flashing.
At this point, I realize we’re screwed. I pull a gun on Zeppo. Shocked, he asks, “Why?”
“It’s the only option,” I tell him. “Otherwise she’ll just capture you again. Then we’ll never be together.”
He is sad when he hears this, taking a snowglobe from his pocket, staring into it. Then he turns to me. “Please,” he says. “Let me go. I will run far from here, where she will never find me. I know we won’t be together, but at least I’ll be free.”
I am struck by the sincerity of his words, and I lower my gun. Stifling some tears, I nod and signal him to go. He turns, but then there is a loud gunshot. I turn and see Anita with a sniper rifle. “If I can’t have him, no one can!” she shrieks.
Zeppo teeters, then falls off the roof. I run to the edge, seeing him lying there. He peers at the snow globe, then lets it fall from his hand. He utters one word: “Rosebud.”
As I finish the story, Anita and I are both in tears about its ending. She nods, and we hug. We never speak to each other again.
That is how my brother Zeppo died.
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