by Sarah Bruni
“Admiral Stacy is hardly a cart—”
She put her hand up to silence him. “Cartoon, comic book, whatever. Listen, I like who I am when I’m with you—enough to want to alter certain parts of myself, even. But don’t let it make you arrogant enough to think you can go around changing everything. You can’t play God in other people’s memories, mess around with other people’s families.”
“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “It has nothing to do with your father. It has nothing to do with us.”
“I know that,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you knew it.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Also,” she paused, “I know what happens to Gwen Stacy.”
“What do you mean?” asked Peter.
“She gets killed.”
“Yes,” said Peter.
Gwen stared. “Maybe you better tell me what happened to her?”
Peter looked at the ceiling, then back at her. “The Green Goblin kidnapped her. He brought her to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge to get Spider-Man’s attention. But just when Spider-Man arrived, the Green Goblin pushed Gwen over the edge.”
“And Spider-Man doesn’t save her?”
“He tries to. He flings out his webbing. And it reaches her; his web wraps around her thigh as she’s falling. So for a second it seems like he’s rescued Gwen, but when he pulls her up to the bridge, she isn’t moving.”
“Because she’s dead,” Gwen offered.
“Pretty much,” Peter said. Of course it was more complex than that. There was the issue of responsibility that would plague him for a long time, because the fact that she was dead was one thing, but the cause of her death was another, a question that would remain obscured and unanswered to him.
Gwen swallowed. “This part of the story doesn’t have anything to do with us either.”
“Of course not,” said Peter.
She studied him around the eyes until she decided this answer would satisfy her. “Come back to bed with me?” Gwen asked.
Peter smiled. “Yes,” he said. “The couch was kind of starting to hurt my back.”
She kissed him and pulled him back into bed with her. She rubbed his back until she fell asleep, leaving him alone in the room.
All this time the dreams did not return. Peter had been trying to channel them. He had been trying to encourage a sign that he’d done the right thing to “kidnap” Gwen, or whatever you wanted to call it, to rob the gas station, to cross state lines in a car that was not his own. But the dreams did not return, and Peter began to worry that he had taken Gwen for a reason that was slowly receding, that he’d convinced her to accompany him on a quest whose rules she didn’t understand, because, of course, he hadn’t explained them. It had seemed for a time that Gwen had intuited their mission, for she had been a very take-charge kind of girl initially, but that too was waning, and now Peter wasn’t sure he trusted these motives himself. Peter resolved in this moment to stop overlapping this childhood story over the very real woman whose bed he shared. So he kept quiet about their responsibility, he stopped searching for overlaps, stopped waiting for the dreams to direct him, forgot about all of it for a time and allowed himself to focus on nothing but his love for her, and his desire to preserve it.
Gwen was developing her own ideas of how things should be directed with respect to their identities, and they weren’t always in agreement with Peter’s. The day of their joint makeovers, Peter sensed it was the beginning of the end. But to clutch a fistful of that hair! Peter barely had time to process the difference in her before Gwen began introducing the change she had in mind for him as well: glasses, a haircut. She had her reasons. They were wanted criminals; their faces were on the news. Surely this was true, but this truth wasn’t a reality that Peter spent much time considering. He knew that they would not get caught until they had accomplished what they had come here to do. Of this he was so certain, that in the first two weeks, he didn’t bother thinking of their mutual safety all that much, in terms of the law. But now safety was on the forefront of his mind. She was flirting with disaster designing disguises straight out of the comic books. She had held up the glasses and told him to put them on, and he had complied. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose and blinked his eyes. Watching her movements around the kitchen through the smudged plastic lenses, her body blurred, the general outline intact, she was Gwendolyn Stacy in the flesh.
“You’re next,” Gwen said. She produced a pair of scissors from the plastic bag on the table and gave a few preemptive snips in the air, like a gunshot signaling a race has begun.
He had let his hair grow for the past few months, and the longest strands now touched the collar of his shirt, but it was due to laziness more than choice. Sitting in a kitchen chair, watching snips of his black hair coast to the floor all around him, around the blond blur that was Gwen Stacy, he felt completely devoted to her, he felt his love for her deepen and expand even as his fear grew.
It was a few days later when Gwen came home from work talking about a place Peter had seen in a dream. She and Iva had started cleaning some new houses in Lincoln Park, blocks away from one branch of the Chicago River.
“There was this river filled with scrap metal,” Gwen explained over dinner. “It was floating on huge barges—piles of smashed up cars, stuff like that. Really strange looking.”
Peter felt the muscles in his stomach tense. It was starting to happen. She was going to lead him. “Where was it?” he asked. He swallowed the bite in his mouth. “Could you find your way back?”
Gwen looked impressed with herself to be carrying information that was somehow valuable to him. “Yeah, I think so,” she said.
“Tonight,” Peter said. “After dinner.”
Gwen shrugged. “Sure.”
After dinner, Gwen disappeared for fifteen minutes into the bathroom while Peter did the dishes. It seemed to be his lot lately, dishes at work, dishes at home, but he didn’t mind; he felt useful. He was just finishing up on the last of the pans when he heard Gwen behind him. “About ready?” she asked.
The dress. She had changed into it without him asking her to, and the sight of her standing on the other side of the kitchen table in it without proper preparation made him feel the need to steady himself against the counter.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Gwen.
“Why are you wearing that?”
“Oh, this?” Gwen said, as if it were any random article of clothing. “I thought you liked it.”
“I love you in that dress,” he said. “But I didn’t think you liked to wear it out of the apartment.”
“Well why shouldn’t I?” she asked. “It’s comfortable, and I have a pretty limited wardrobe here.”
Of course it was reasonable for her to want to wear the dress for reasons that had nothing to do with him, but surely Gwen understood that there was more to the dress than that. She was smart enough to understand that in wearing it, she exercised a kind of power over him.
“Do you want me to change?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “You look great. Let’s go.”
They left around nine. As the bus turned onto Cortland Street, Gwen pulled the cord above their seat to request a stop. They walked under an expressway viaduct and crossed a busy street. At first, it didn’t look familiar at all. There was a slight incline up Cortland past a gas station, past a steel banner that announced the workplace of A. FINKL AND SONS FOUNDRY. Then the bridge appeared, and beneath it the floating metal just as he’d seen it. Gwen joined him on the bridge and together they looked out onto the barges and watched how slowly they moved down the river. “Just like I said, right?”
He felt a shiver pass through him. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “See what else is here.”
They wandered closer to the scrap pile itself, inside an open gate, past several NO TRESPASSING signs, and watched the metal as it was collected and distributed by a giant metal arm. Even in this t
here was an order. Peter followed the route of several rounds of scrap, as it made its journey from the haphazard pile to the teeth of the crushing mechanism. He had been standing, watching for several minutes, when he felt the first explosion.
Giant billows of smoke rose from the scrap yard, and then the bursting sound rose with it. Two smaller bursts followed. Peter grabbed Gwen by the arm and started running, past the gate and the posted signs. He ran to the edge of the metal fence and ducked behind a gutted car parked there. He pulled Gwen to his chest, trying to keep the smoke from her face. He was thinking, Forgive us our trespasses. It was a phrase he remembered from his mother, part of the prayer she would say before they ate supper at night, and now it played on a loop in his brain—as if testament to the fact that he didn’t belong here, that this shaking ground and smoke had nothing to do with him. He covered his head in his hands and waited for the ground to stop shaking, waited for the smoke to clear. Forgive us… Forgive us… He remembered hearing you weren’t supposed to breathe in smoke, so he batted at the thick air with his hands, looking around, trying to get his bearings. The first moving thing he saw was a black man on a bicycle. Peter called to the man from behind the car.
“Get down,” Peter yelled. “Over here.”
The man was walking his bike from the scrap yard, as if completely oblivious to all the rising smoke and dust.
“What you mean ‘get down’?” the man yelled back. “The fuck you think you are, Gaza?” The man started to walk toward Peter and seemed surprised to see Gwen there as well. He shook his head for a moment as if reluctant to confirm that there was a girl there in the scrap pile. “Evening, miss,” he said finally, laughing, removing his cap. He offered Gwen his hand, and she accepted it.
“Thanks,” Gwen said. Now she was snickering too.
Peter lifted one knee from the pavement. He felt suddenly ashamed, but still more confused than anything. Of course Chicago was not known for its roadside explosions. “The smoke,” Peter said, as if in defense. “Something went off.”
The man laughed. “Happens all the time. Some asshole puts an engine in the scrap pile … Kaboom.” He mimed the force of the explosion with his two hands, then offered one to Peter.
Peter accepted the lift. He dusted off his knees. “Fuck,” he said. He shook his head.
“Fuck, that’s right,” the man repeated, still laughing. “Where you from? Not here.”
Peter noticed the man’s bicycle again, now leaning against the car where they had taken cover. It was so small, it looked like a child’s bicycle, and behind it there was a slack bit of rope that kept it tethered to a shopping cart. The shopping cart was filled with scrap metal.
“We’re from New York,” Gwen said.
Peter gave her a look. “You work for the foundry?” he asked the man.
“I work for myself,” the man said. “Finkel pays by weight. I gather what I can.” The man looked them up and down again, then between them—from Gwen to Peter and back again—as if he was contemplating something. His gaze rested heavily on Peter finally, and Peter could feel the man sizing him up as if comparing his features to something else he’d seen. Peter thought of the grimy, heavy-lined police sketches that depicted kidnappers. He wondered if such a sketch existed in a rough approximation of his own face.
“You lost? You in the wrong neighborhood.”
Peter pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his finger. He put his arm around Gwen’s shoulders. “We’re on vacation. We’re out for a late night walk,” he said. He tried to smile. “Is that a crime?”
It occurred to him that if there was a reward being offered in exchange for information, this man could use the money. His brain raced, and he tried to think of something to say.
But before he could say anything, Gwen’s face was next to his, her mouth beside his mouth. The kiss was quick, but he could feel Gwen directing it; he could feel the small bones that were her teeth tense behind her thin smile. It was more certain and steady than anything he could have managed. When she pulled away, she said, “Honey, it’s late. Let’s go home.”
Peter nodded, took his cue. He said to the man, “We better be getting back.”
The man shook his head and smiled at something over their heads where the scrap pile rose behind them. “I see that,” he said, nodding at Gwen. “But don’t be walking no more round here at night. Ain’t no place for walking,” he said. He picked up his bicycle and the scrap metal in the shopping cart rattled beside it. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Gwen laughed all the way home, on the walk back down Cortland, and when the 73 bus let them off at their stop, Gwen launched into it again. “Parker, you saved my life,” she said for the hundredth time. “The next time I’m in imminent danger, I’ll know who to call.” She laughed, trailing off.
“Could you maybe stop saying that?” Peter said. “I mean you don’t even know what you’re talking about, do you?” He said it more sternly than he meant to, but it was irking him somehow, this cute way she just happened to want to slip into the dress, the way she was playing at being a damsel in distress. “Have you ever read a single one of the comic books, Sheila?”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.
“It’s your name, isn’t it?”
“As much as yours is whatever you scratched out of your driver’s license.”
He felt as if he had been punched in the stomach, and he wanted to return the blow. He couldn’t explain it. He wanted some power over her, as a kind of counterforce for that which she held over him. It was as if she hadn’t noticed how close they had come to being identified. But if not, why did she kiss him in that moment? With the kiss, she had absolved him.
Once they were in their room again and began undressing for bed, Peter tried to smooth things out.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry I tried to save you from that fake explosion. Okay?”
“Forget it,” Gwen smiled. She kicked off her shoes in the corner. “Never happened, right?”
She was still angry with him, but she pretended to laugh. She really did love him; he could see that. She was such a sweet and sensible girl, his Gwen; she was perfect, really. Peter took a few steps toward the bed and held out his hands.
Gwen shook her head. “Lose the street clothes, Parker,” she said suddenly, fitting her fingers into the waistline of his jeans, pulling him in. “And then maybe I’ll think about letting you near me.”
He started to remove his clothes, his shirt, his socks. He had started to reach for her again, but Gwen stopped and he saw something shift then in her face, her mouth soured at the corner. She sat up in the bed. She stood. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.” She placed her chin in her hands and started to sway back and forth.
“I’m just like those other girls,” she said.
Peter swallowed. He said, “What other girls?”
“The dead ones on the side of the road,” she said. “The ones you were trying to save.”
He spoke to her cheekbone, to her jaw, to the place where her hair was stacked behind her perfect ear. He said, “You’re nothing like those other girls.”
“Why not?” she said. “It kind of seems like you’re trying to save me.”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he said.
“Yes you are!” she was shouting now, pacing around the room. “You tried to save me from that explosion that wasn’t a real explosion. You’re going to start thinking up ways to save me, so you can feel powerful? Is that what you’re doing?”
“No, Gwen,” he said. “No.” He couldn’t explain the explosion. It was nothing he had anticipated. He reacted in the moment, nothing more.
Gwen turned fast and squeezed his arm at his wrist so hard he felt the blood working to push through. She leaned into him close, so that her breath was the only air in the room. She said, “This is not a comic book.”
“No, of course not,” he agreed.
“You are not a superhero. This thing we are toget
her—you don’t own it.”
“You think I don’t already fucking know that?” he said quietly, but then he got louder. “I’ve never been able to help anyone in my entire life. Not one. You’re the one who saved us in the scrap yard. That man might have recognized us, he thought I was a kidnapper, and you know he did, that’s why you kissed me. Don’t act like you don’t know that, because you do.”
Gwen loosened her grip on his arm, and he felt the blood pump greedily, hungrily into his hand and each of his fingers. She held his wrist tenderly now, stroking where his veins showed through the skin.
“How did they die?” Gwen said, quietly now.
Peter exhaled heavily. He pushed his face into his hands. “The one who was driving fell asleep. The car hit the median.”
Gwen swallowed. “How do you know that?”
“I saw it happen like that in a dream. I didn’t know it was going to happen that night, on that road, with you. I only knew it was going to happen.”
Gwen pulled him away from her, eyed him carefully.
She said, “It’s always been like this?”
Yes, he was going to say, always, but before the words rose in his throat, it occurred to him that it had not always been like this. “No,” he said, and his voice began to quiver, to wander off scale, and he pressed his face into Gwen’s shoulder. “It started when my brother died.”
Gwen stroked his hair, and she rubbed his back, and she said, “Shhh,” and she said, “Peter,” and then she led him back to the bed and he rested his head on her chest, where he listened to the steady rise and fall of her breath for balance.
When he woke up, it was with a start. Gwen slept beside him, the sheets tucked beneath her chin. The explosion, he was thinking. But what else was there to really say about it? The explosion had not been a real explosion; it had been a dummy, a standin, a stunt, a lot of noise and no substance. Ultimately, all he could say was that the explosion had been a distraction from the fact that Gwen had taken him to a place he’d seen in his dream. The implications of what this might mean he could only begin to surmise. But the bottom line was what the man at the foundry kept saying. They were trespassers. They had crossed a line that was meant to remain uncrossed.