The Night Gwen Stacy Died (8 page)

He told no one.

This week, six nights in a row, he had seen the same sequence of information each
time he closed his eyes. Always, it started with the girl. Peter would feel himself
giving in toward sleep when the girl from the gas station would appear there in his
bedroom beside him. She would be sitting on her knees near the foot of his bed, like
someone in prayer, when the warm feeling started to move around the room, when the
heat got under his fingernails, and then the heat became a warm breeze from an open
window in his taxi. The taxi was heading east on Interstate 80. The gun was in the
glove compartment. He was driving and the girl sat beside him in the car.

Just before he woke up each night he would get as far as the strange apartment. He
would watch the man swallow water. He would watch the man swallow pills.

It was the same way his brother had died.

But the girl had seen it too; she had been there in the bedroom, and somehow that
had implicated her. It made Peter think she was a part of the equation. It made him
think she was part of everything that would come next.

Peter lifted the gun from the passenger seat and turned it in his hand, assessing
the level of threat it posed. He didn’t want to scare the girl, but he wanted to encourage
her to help him. It wasn’t entirely clear to him what the point of the gun was, but
it had been in his hand in the dream. It seemed important to use it somehow, to point
it somewhere. Peter tried to think of it more as a prop than a weapon, something to
keep in his hand in order to ensure he would say what he had come to say, to make
certain he wouldn’t deviate. He angled the rearview mirror so he could see himself,
so he could watch his mouth form the lines. He understood, then, how he would appear
to the girl when he entered the gas station. “I’m going to Chicago,” Peter practiced,
steadying the gun so his hand wouldn’t shake, his best attempt to sound confident
and inviting. “I’m going to Chicago. I thought you might like to come with me.”

At twenty-six years old, Peter knew himself to be an expert driver, a decent pool
player, reasonably good looking, but he only needed to consult the corners of his
mouth in the rearview mirror of his taxi to understand what he was slowly becoming:
a man nearing thirty, living alone with his mother. The arrangement had been borne
of necessity and habit. They had been living like this for the past twenty years.

He never knew his father. As a child, he had been afraid that his father was both
everywhere and nowhere. Any male of a certain age he encountered in the street who
was not the father of another child he knew had the potential to be him. The man walking
a dog in front of the movie theater? Possibly. The new assistant principal of his
school? Unlikely, but maybe. Peter’s mother had been of the opinion that children
didn’t really need to know the details of everything, only the gist, so he understood
that his father and mother had met in Davenport, Iowa, that they had quarreled before
he was born, that he and Peter’s mother had lost contact shortly after. All the photographs
had been cleared out of the house. Peter had found an old Polaroid of his father,
but in the moment it captures, his father is bent over his shoe, his features largely
obscured by the angle. In the photograph, his father is sitting on the living-room
sofa—the same one Peter had sat on for years!—pressing his heels into a pair of loafers
with a shoe horn. A shoe horn? The instrument seemed superfluous to him and slightly
awkward, but his mother insisted that in those days everyone used them.

Then, there was what happened when his brother went missing. Peter had been six at
the time, and his brother eighteen. For two full days, Peter and his mother searched
the parks and police stations, while Jake had slept in the closet of his childhood
bedroom after swallowing every pill in the house. When their mother found him, she’d
had his stomach pumped clean, but two weeks after his medical release, Jake had tried
it again and succeeded. Then Peter and his mother had lived alone in the house. Sometimes
his mother played the piano in the evenings, and Peter sat beside her and turned the
pages of her music when she said, “Now.” Sometimes they went to the movies and ordered
the large popcorn with extra butter to share. But the house was too big for them.
It was two stories high with enough rooms for entertaining—which they never did—and
often Peter had a whole story and an attic to himself to make all the noise he wanted.
But mostly he stayed quiet.

He had been playing dominos with his mother when he first understood. They did that
sometimes, if he didn’t have homework, and after the dishes were done. His mother
would wash and Peter dried. There was a drawer in the kitchen that held the dominos
and he and his mother would divvy them up face-down on the table. Every once in a
while, they convinced Jake to play with them. But usually he was too busy to play
with dominos.

Peter was counting dots. He was very close to winning.

“You and me, honey,” his mom had said very quietly.

Peter was counting the dots on his tiles. He was trying to concentrate. Sometimes
if his mom drank a little wine with dinner she talked quietly, under her breath. It
was not such a strange thing. He was adding the dots on the tiles in multiples of
five. Those were the rules.

“How about it?” his mom said again. “How about you and me.” Her voice was so soft
it sounded like it was coming from the other room.

Peter looked up at his mom.

“How about what?” he said.

His mom was running the palm of her hand slowly up and down the side of her face.
She wasn’t looking at him. And she wasn’t looking at her tiles either.

“Honey?” his mom said after a minute.

He didn’t know why he’d said something that night. His brother sometimes didn’t come
home for a few days at a time. Even after his first try with the pills, it was not
such a strange thing for Peter to be left alone with his mother in the evening.

“Where’s Jake?”

She hadn’t told him then. It was another four days of waiting before his mother would
tell him Jake was gone. Still, Peter had understood then that it would be him and
his mother alone for some time.

Around then Peter began spending his afternoons in his brother’s old bedroom. His
mom was often working late into the evening at the hospital, and after school Peter
was alone in the house. His mother had kept the room exactly as he had left it, so
it wasn’t hard to find the milk crates filled with comic books and drag them out of
his closet one at a time. At first, the sliding doors of the closet had been a place
that Peter avoided. He looked at them and saw his brother slumped in the corner as
they’d found him before his mother dragged him out. But eventually, he could look
at the closet doors and think only of the comic books behind them.

Peter had never seen his brother read the comic books. But once Peter had watched
him from the hallway sorting through issues, organizing them into the crates where
they were kept.

“You’re not a very good spy,” Jake had called into the hallway. “I can hear you breathing.”

Peter knelt on the floor next to the crate Jake was pulling from. There were hundreds
of them, and Peter had the impulse to run his fingers along their stapled edges.

“Take one if you want,” Jake said. “It’s just a pile of trash.” But he never threw
them out, and when Peter found them after Jake left, each issue was still preserved
in a cellophane sleeve.

“Where did you get them?” Peter had said, but then he was sorry that he asked.

“My old man,” Jake replied.

Jake’s father was not Peter’s father, but when Jake talked about him, sometimes Peter
liked to pretend he was. Jake remembered all kinds of things about his dad—his taste
in music, the type of beer he liked to drink, where he used to take Jake sledding
when it snowed—but Peter remembered nothing of his own father, and his mother never
spoke of him.

“Can I have this one?” Peter asked.

“Any one you want,” Jake said, without looking.

Peter chose a later issue, once Spider-Man had already settled down with Mary Jane,
because he was attracted to the red swath of her hair, filling the empty space; but
it was later—it was after Jake was gone—that he read from the beginning of the story.
How Spider-Man was just a regular kid whose family kept getting killed by villains,
and what it was like to be lonely for a long time before he discovered these powers
that showed up out of nowhere, and then even after that, to be lonely sometimes still.

After school, during the afternoons, Peter read the comic books Jake had left behind,
and he started to realize there were certain undeniable similarities. There was a
long history of superheroes being lied to, men and women with superhuman strengths
who only ever had been told half their own stories and had to find out the other half
on their own. It also wasn’t uncommon for their families to be largely absent or dead
by the time they reached adulthood. These were the facts. Peter was not embellishing.
He also was not suggesting that his was the life of such a hero—obviously there were
certain abilities missing. For example, he couldn’t move buildings. He couldn’t propel
off them either. He couldn’t see through them. Basically, he couldn’t do anything
extraordinary having to do with buildings. So he wasn’t superhuman. It had really
been devastating to come to this realization. But when his so-called nightmares had
started shortly after, Peter understood that while he wasn’t
necessarily
superhuman, there was definitely something abnormal going on with him. When, at eight
years old, he told his mother that he wanted her to call him a different name, a name
that just happened to be the same as Spider-Man’s alter ego, his mother complied.
She was working under the assumption that this request was a reasonable response to
childhood trauma, and at the suggestion of some child psychologist at the hospital,
she went with it. But the more time that went on, the easier it was for the name to
become permanent, and for neither of them to use his old name at all.

Was that all? It was habit and nothing more? Not exactly. Yes, it was habit, but even
now, there was some part of Peter that felt grateful to have this story to defer to.
If he actually had a friend call him out and say, “Who do you think you are, Parker?
You think you’re pretty goddamn special, huh?” of course Peter would punch the friend
in the arm and insult him for even coming to this conclusion in jest. “Yeah, I’m a
fucking superhero,” he’d say. “Let’s go out back and I’ll teach you how to fly.” He’d
give the guy a real hard time, rile him up a little for the mere suggestion that he
was trying to be someone he was not, trying to be something better than what he was.
There would be a good laugh over that. But Peter mostly spent the evenings with his
mother. There were a few guys he talked to over the CB radio or in the dispatch office,
but that was it.

The thing about keeping to yourself for so long is that there’s no need to defend
your actions, so a lot of gray area has room to grow. It is possible for two things
to be true at once in one’s own mind, for one statement and its opposite to coexist,
so that Peter could understand on the one hand the he is no one, that he is nothing
special, and at the same time to create a private space in which he knows certain
things about himself to be irrefutable. That there is something special about him,
that there is something wrong with him, that the thing that is special/wrong has to
do with reading too many comic books as a kid and with the dreams that started when
his brother died, that under the right conditions, in the right place and time, he
could actually be the kind of person who could use his gift or curse to do something
extraordinary.

The business of saving the world is tricky. The incredible difficulty of the endeavor
weighed on superheroes’ brains constantly. Spider-Man, for example, was overwhelmed
by how to balance superheroic feats with girls and biology class. But it was tricky
even to save a single living thing. The problem was that, in real life, events are
always already happening all the time, and there’s often little to be done in terms
of interception.

This is how it happened when Peter’s dog ran away.

Patch was Jake’s dog first. Jake had brought him home from the shelter one afternoon
with a red collar and a twenty-pound bag of food.

“Who’s this?” Peter’s mother had asked.

“Our new best friend,” Jake said. He placed his hand on the dog’s head and told Patch
to sit, but the dog only scratched its ear.

“He’s got all his shots?” their mother said.

“Sure,” Jake said.

Peter had given the dog his hand to lick, and the dog complied. “So you’re his favorite,”
Jake said. “Maybe you want to take him for a walk with me?”

By this time, there was little their mother could do to prevent the dog from inhabiting
their home. Peter had the leash and collar in his hand and Jake was helping him fasten
it around the dog’s thick neck. As they walked, Jake told Peter about how dogs were
really the first ones in space, but the reason no one around here ever talked about
it is because it was Russian dogs, and everyone had hated the Russians so much.

“Why?” Peter said.

“Because they’re communists,” Jake said.

Peter nodded. “The dogs too?”

“Yeah, they’re communists too,” Jake said. “But they can’t help it.”

Peter was five. He was interested in space travel.

Jake said, “You think Patch would make a good astronaut?”

“Yeah,” Peter said.

“Hell, you’re probably right,” Jake said, and Peter had laughed because he thought
this was supposed to be a joke.

But later that night, after Peter’s bedtime, when he had snuck downstairs to watch
his brother smoke a cigarette on the front porch, he heard Jake talking to the dog.
He heard his brother say the words
orbital velocity
and
stratosphere
. “The problem with space travel,” Peter heard his brother say to the dog, “is that
you always think there’s going to be enough oxygen saved up to go around, but there
never is.” This was the first time it occurred to Peter that maybe there was something
wrong with his brother.