by Sarah Bruni
His mother called them nightmares. The first time it happened he was seven: he woke up coughing, a mouthful of water lodged in this throat. His mother had been sitting at his bedside, striking his back, trying to get his lungs to take in the air. She thought that he must have reached for the glass of water on his nightstand in a dream, and tried to drink. But Peter had not been the one swallowing water in his dream. It had been quiet ten-year-old Henry Macy from the neighborhood whom Peter had watched drown, and when two weeks later the Macys found Henry face-down in a flooded ditch, Peter was afraid to tell his mother that he had seen it happen exactly the same way and had done nothing to warn anyone. Most nights he would dream like any other person, but there were a handful of things he saw around this time that could not be circumscribed to his own dormant brain. He saw the grocer slip on a patch of ice and break his hip, one week before he saw him lose his balance chasing a cart in the parking lot; he dreamed his own dog running away from home and wouldn’t leave the dog’s side unless absolutely necessary, until one time, they were playing with a tennis ball together, and he could do nothing to stop the dog from bolting out of the yard, away from him; for the past month he had endlessly dreamed two women he didn’t recognize fall asleep at the wheel of their car and slam into a highway median in the middle of the night. The women were so young. Girls. They looked barely old enough to drive, and when they crashed into the median each night Peter watched their long hair rush forward toward the dashboard as the car began to spin.
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.
Later—after they both were gone—it would seem sometimes as if his brother and the dog had planned it this way, that while Peter sat at home alone with his mother and dusted the piano keys with his fingers, Jake and the dog were in orbit somewhere, Jake asking the dog to give him his paw, and then feeding him some cryogenically frozen food scraps.
When Patch finally ran away, Jake had already been gone for four years. Peter was ten years old when he started dreaming of Patch standing on the cusp of a field near their house, looking both ways as if contemplating something. Within two weeks of the first occurrence of this dream, the dog was gone. For those two weeks, Patch couldn’t even go out into the yard to go to the bathroom without Peter following him out the door and c
rouching beside him.
They had been playing fetch with a tennis ball. “Go, fetch,” Peter told Patch, and Patch did. He was the sort of dog who was happy to fetch, content to bring any object back to the place from which it was launched. Peter was working on his arm. He was old enough to play baseball, but didn’t, and he wanted to know what it felt like to throw.
“Patch, fetch,” he yelled, and the tennis ball shot into the air with the dog trailing beneath it. Patch gathered the tennis ball between his teeth and lifted it, but then rather than bounding back with it, he paused.
“Patch, come,” Peter called.
Patch sat down. As soon as he saw the dog sit, Peter knew that it had started to happen. The dog looked at Peter and then he looked the other way, beyond their property, where there was an expanse of farm land full of corn that was already half harvested, and beyond that a forest of pine and fir. Peter didn’t call the dog again. He looked Patch in the eye, and under his breath he said, please, but it was an entreaty to no one, least of all to Patch, who clearly was already following a path he intended to keep. Patch dropped the tennis ball. He looked at Peter for maybe another four seconds before running the other way.
He couldn’t save his brother. Even with warning, he couldn’t keep his dog. How many nights had he watched Patch run from him? He had watched him take off at least fifteen times in his dreams. You’d think that it would make the real moment, the moment in which it truly happened, feel like just another enactment of the same scene. But it was different. It was the moment in which the possibility arrived to change the course of things. It was for this reason that he now wanted to save the man he’d seen swallowing pills in the bathroom, to finally for once separate someone from these certain fates he saw at night, and see if anyone was better off for his effort.