They Aren't Real

Every night, a solitary fear keeps me from falling asleep. I have no known phobias, and yet I will never be able to shake off the feeling that there are secret agents hiding in my walls, maybe next door, or under my bed, and once I fall asleep, they’ll catch me, and it will be game over.

I’m not paranoid, you have to believe me. You and everybody else who reads this might be my only hope. You might even be the only hope for humanity.

Allow me to explain.

My name is Moacir. And I’m the world’s only superhero.

Shocked? No, I don’t think so. You’ve read enough comic books to know this type of story. The typical superhero troupe. Subconsciously you might have begun to guess what’s my superpower. Am I really fast? Do I have phenomenal strength? Maybe I can turn invisible? Or perhaps I can insert a flash drive the right way in my first attempt?

No. I mean yeah, sort of. My powers are quite difficult to describe, and I haven’t seen them in any movie or comic book, and I have read a LOT of comic books.

I can… become a ghost. That’s the simplest way to put it. I can vaporise at will, completely disappear. While I am a ghost, I can touch speeds of Mach 15 (You really don’t want to know how I know my speed limit). Although I cannot pass right through objects, I can exert substantial amounts of force if I try hard enough. Ever had your toes not tucked into your bedsheet and felt a tingle? It might have been me.

What does being a ghost feel like? Extremely strange. I retain consciousness but my body feels like it’s trying to rip itself apart in every possible direction. Have you ever juggled? It’s a bit like that, except you have a hundred balls and each one seems to have its own gravity. I have to keep juggling my atoms with the sheer force of my mind to stay alive.

By now you must have realised, dear reader, that none of what I’m saying makes sense as per the underdeveloped principles of science. How could I possibly retain control of my mind if I’ve theoretically been ripped into atoms? How do my parts not get mixed up at times? How do I breathe? Believe me I’ve had those questions as well. I fancy myself as an atheist, and the supernatural does not sit well with a mind that seeks to condemn the idea of an omnipotent who willingly lets his subjects experience pain and sorrow and suffering. And yet, here I am, a pinnacle of irony.

My powers cannot be explained by science. But that does not imply that a God exists and that he gave them to me as some kind of compensation for my experience as an orphan. Some will say that he gave me ‘a chance to write my own destiny’. But all that would only make such an entity more devil-like. After all, many in this world have faced far worse situations. Many are nobler than me. Many are more capable to be in possession of my powers, and yet I am their sole user.

I rose to fame when I stopped a classic bank robbery. Three goons couldn’t really keep down a ghost, you see. I was hailed as a saviour sent by God - my photos taken as if I was to leave for heaven tomorrow...

…And for the first time in my life, I felt loved.

Years of being on the streets, having to beg to survive, not even knowing who my parents were, or why they left me and my brother, had taken quite a toll on me. I had been kicked around like a pebble on the sidewalk for so many years, that… when this illusion of fame and popularity covered my vision like a dense fog, I took decisions that ruined the only strings of true love that had bound me to my humanity. 

Looking back at it now, my little public stunt was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my entire life. 

There was no stopping the rise of ‘Ghost-Boy – The blessing of God’ after that. I toured the world, spoke with various global leaders, I even had a cereal to my name – ‘Ghostflakes’. I got to live in the finest of resorts, buy things I never could have even imagined buying. They were dreams come true. Dreams that fuelled my evils much beyond what my present self would have liked.

The screams of newspapers eventually reached the ‘scientific’ community, who demanded that I allow them to run some tests that might help them determine what exactly makes my powers possible. I declined. I didn’t really want to know what caused my powers. I was happy as they were, and besides, who likes the doctor?

The scientists did not like being refused. It was the first major breakthrough they’d have in years. A breakthrough large enough to stop people from suspecting that they had all been paid off by large corporations to keep mum. How else can we not have flying cars in the 21st century? Heck, we sent people to the moon in 1969 and you want me to believe that we can barely even send a satellite to Mars in 2019? Invention has come to a standstill so that iPhones can sell for a thousand dollars and not the hundred they are worth without the name of the company. 

And besides, who wouldn’t want to replicate my powers? They could effectively make me a product, and then I would lose all the love that I had gotten so fond of. I would go back to being a nobody again.

They pressurised me. I ran away. Ran back to where my brother was still content living. In an abandoned factory, just outside the city physically, but miles away metaphorically, with lead skies that had limited the imagination of its inhabitants since time immemorial, and a sewer system that brought the waste of the city to where it ‘belonged’, the neighbourhood of the homeless.

I ran home. But life couldn’t be that easy right? With that complex a life story, how could things just end on a simple note?

And as you might have guessed, when I got home, I realised something wasn’t quite right. 

The place was just as I remembered, the dull grey concrete walls, the smell of drugs and old cigarettes everywhere, adults passed out, either temporarily from a fight or for good as we are all destined to one day. 

And then my heart and brain could finally understand my fear. Quidel was nowhere to be seen.

The bastards had taken him off with them once they realised they couldn’t have me.

The world seemed to crumble in front of my eyes. All my memories of my brother came rushing back to me at once, and their weight forced me to my knees. And I lay there crying for a few hours, with no company except for all the souls that were dead the day they were born into this world.

Quidel didn’t have any powers. I knew that. He knew that too. The world knew that I was Ghost-boy and not he. And yet, they had kidnapped him. 

The government allowed this abduction in the name of science. It had been all over the papers the next day. Funny how on one hand the government won’t acknowledge the obvious matter of climate change and on the other hand, violating all ethics that made us human and conducting painful experiments on an innocent boy is somehow scientific.

Either they hoped that the secret to my power might be in my brother’s blood just as it was possibly in mine, or they were counting on the fact that I would come to help my brother.

And forgive me, Quidel, for I was the biggest coward there could ever have been. I’m sorry I didn’t come to save you, even as they cut you open and looked inside, searching for secrets that didn’t exist. Your cries for help went on the television. But I’m sorry they remained unanswered. Nobody really sticks up for orphans. We were nobodies, and nobody helps a nobody. How could anyone else have, when his own brother, a literal superhero, didn’t.

I was selfish. Perhaps I had thought that my life was ‘superior’ to his, as I had saved lives, but now it is clear to me that he was superior, for he had given up his life for the life of a brother whose empty self-proclaimed claim of superiority today buries him in shame. 

He had given up everything for a brother who had given him nothing.

Quidel endured the torture for 28 days before his heart gave up. His pale corpse was simply discarded into the ocean with the trash. I wept bitterly that night. I had lost the only person who loved me unconditionally, who loved Moacir and not Ghost-boy.

Since then, I knew I had to stay on the run. I couldn’t trust anybody. The one person who actually loved me had been brutally murdered, and anyone else I team up with will likely meet the same fate. 

The clock ticks monotonously on my dressing table, reminding me of my incoming doom. The four walls of the cubicle are no better than the lead skies I lived under as a kid. My eyes are red and sunken. Moacir and Ghost-Boy are becoming one. One of them has given up their freedom, the other their powers. One lost his reality, the other was simply hit by reality. 

I’m bound to die, one day or the other. They will eventually catch me, and as a guinea pig for their experiments, I shall most certainly perish. I bury my head under my pillow, hoping to drown out the screams I alone hear.

Peter Parker could become Spider-Man after his uncle died. But Ghost-Boy became Moacir when his brother died. Peter Parker was someone who deserved to be a superhero. Moacir was someone who most certainly did not. Peter Parker was a fictional character, Moacir is a real one.

Superheroes are fiction, they can’t exist in reality. And I hope your God realises that.