by Sarah Bruni
“I understand that,” Sheila said. “You’re telling me you don’t have it.” She started to put her money away.
“Hang on a second,” said the boy in charge. “I said it wasn’t the sort of thing that’s usually just going to be sitting in a shop, collecting dust. I didn’t say I don’t have it.”
“How much?” Sheila said.
“Look,” the boy in charge said slowly, looking her up and down, “you’re obviously not a collector. What do you want with it?”
Sheila paused and consulted the ceiling. “It’s a gift for my boyfriend,” she said.
“Try again.”
“It’s a gift for my brother?” She hadn’t planned on the need for constructing an elaborate story.
The first boy piped up from behind the counter. He smiled at his coworker. “Well which one is it?”
The boy in charge chuckled.
Sheila said, “It’s important.”
Just then Patch began to howl from her post on the sidewalk. A fierce long howl that commanded the attention of the boys in the comic book store. “What the hell was that?” one boy said to the other.
“It’s my dog,” Sheila said. “She’s getting sick of waiting out there. I really can’t stay too much longer.”
The first boy she had spoken to peered through the front window. “Jesus,” he said. “Some dog. What do you feed that thing?”
Sheila glared. “Do you harass all your customers like this? Or just me?”
“Okay,” the boy in charge said slowly, putting up his hands as if establishing order again, “Tell you what. You’re obviously in a hurry. You name me three of Spider-Man’s most important arch-enemies from 1962 to 1973 and issue 121 is yours.”
“The Green Goblin,” Sheila said. It was the only one she knew. It would have to be good enough. The boy continued to stare at her, as he waited for the names of two other villains. She looked down at the corner of this boy’s T-shirt where it was torn, and wondered if he had bought it that way, or if he had gotten it caught on a fence, or a tree. She looked back up at his face and noticed that he was older than she first had estimated. He was at least thirty, older even, but his clothes were of someone who jumps fences.
“Your shirt’s ripped,” Sheila said.
“Don’t change the subject,” the boy said in mock, or genuine, disgust, “You got one of the biggies and I’ll give it to you, but you’re two enemies short of a sale,” he said. He paused, and when he noticed Sheila had exhausted her repertoire of enemies, he opened his mouth as if to prompt, “Doc … ? Doc … ? No? Doesn’t ring a bell? Doctor Octopus? Doc Ock?”
Sheila glared.
“Try again?” he said. “I’ll make it easy. Green tail? Scientist and friend to Spidey in his saner moments, when he also cares for his wife and son—boy’s name’s Billy. The Liz, the … Lizzzz… . The Lizard? No, don’t know that one either, huh?”
“Forget it,” said Sheila, and she turned to leave.
But the boy raised his hand in truce. “Hey, come on! I’m playing. You want the issue, you can have it. It’s not doing me any good sitting here.” He went into the back and produced the issue and placed it on the counter in front of Sheila. It was in a thick Mylar sleeve as she expected it would be, and at first glance, the cover was not nearly as terrible as she had imagined it.
On it, there were pictures of everyone in Spider-Man’s life. Each person close to him was represented in a self-contained black frame, and Spider-Man hung from a bit of webbing before each of their portraits, frantically looking between them. In the little bubbles of speech by his head, his thoughts raced: Someone CLOSE to me is about to DIE! Someone I cannot save! My Spider sense is never wrong! But who? WHO?
The cover promised a Turning Point, promised a moment after which things would never look the same again. Sheila ran her hand along the wrapped edge of the pages, fingering the price tag in the corner.
“That’ll be three fifty and change,” one of the boys said. Sheila counted out the money to pay them, flattening each bill onto the counter under her palm. On the cover, you couldn’t see Spider-Man’s face, only the back of his costume, but he was clearly frantic, swinging between all the illustrations of these people he loved, looking for the one he was going to lose.
“Thanks,” Sheila mumbled.
“Hey, no sweat.”
She was still looking at the cover when one of the boys started to put her purchase into a plastic bag.
My Spider sense is never wrong! Spider-Man insisted from inside.
“Wait!” Sheila said. It came out in a shout, louder than she meant it. It was the comic books, with their block letters and their interjections; they were mixing with the order in her head. The boys looked startled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “How does he know someone is going to die?”
“I’m not sure I’m following,” the boy in charge said.
Sheila swallowed a knot in her throat. “Spider sense,” she said. “What exactly does it do?”
The first boy looked at his manager, as if asking for permission to explain something so basic to the customer to whom they’d just sold a collector’s item. The manager nodded, and the first boy looked back at Sheila. “It warns Spider-Man of danger,” he said. “It tells him when something bad is going to happen so he can try to avoid it in time.”
“And it’s always right?” Sheila asked.
Both boys nodded. “But it sucks,” the boy in charge said. “It’s a lot of heavy shit to have to deal with.”
“I mean, that’s the thing about his enemies,” the other boy continued. “There’s a ton of them, way more than three, and most of them reappear too, but everything that goes on in his mind, the stuff that keeps him up at night, it’s worse than all of them combined, you know? I mean you feel bad for the guy, genuinely bad.”
“Which is sort of the genius of Parker as a superhero,” said the other boy. “I mean he’s tough and everything. He fights some badass villains and wins, but I don’t envy the guy. Not for a second.”
“He’s his own worst enemy,” the other boy translated.
“And then they went and killed the girl he loved.”
“They?” Sheila repeated. “They who? I thought it was the Green Goblin who killed her.”
“Who?” both boys boomed, “Conway and Romita, of course. The writers!”
Both boys shook their heads at the thought of it. “It gets worse. The way it’s drawn you can’t tell if it’s the fault of the Goblin or whether it’s Spidey himself who’s responsible. The Goblin pushes her off the bridge, sure, Spidey’s trying to save her, he flings out his webbing, it catches her leg … SNAP! … but not in time, right? Which means—”
“—it could have been that her neck snapped from the impact of being caught by his webbing.”
“The way they write it, it could have been Spidey’s fault.”
“The fans were outraged! Some stopped reading after that issue, boycotted, because the writers just couldn’t give the poor guy a break.”
“But that’s terrible!” Sheila cut in. “He was in love with Gwen Stacy,” she insisted. “Everyone knows that.” She understood now that she was pleading—to whom, it wasn’t clear. These stories had been written forty years ago. There was nothing the boys could do.
The boys exchanged glances. The boy in charge said, “You’re preaching to the choir, babe.”
Then the other boy ran into the back and produced a second comic book, ASM # 124, three issues later, and opened it to the back page where there were letters to the writers. He placed the open issue in front of Sheila on the counter. Both boys leaned back and waited, gave her the reading space to see for herself. Sheila leaned in and began to read the letters printed there.
Gentlemen,
How much more agony must Parker live through? This issue, # 121, has a certain finality to it. I know that Gwen is really dead. So I have the right to cry. I have the right to mourn her death. I have the right to know that I will not feel absurd thr
ee issues later when she is suddenly brought back to life by some super-alien life ray. The rest of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” completes one of the most heart-rending, magnificently scripted and laid out sagas to date.
After a dramatic, typical Spidey rescue … BLAM! It hits you! “I saved you, honey … I saved you.” He didn’t save her. Fantasy? Reality? Where is the dividing line? Gentlemen, you have succeeded in placing the comic book, SPIDER-MAN, onto a newly defined aesthetic plane of realism. But Lord, you have also succeeded in touching my soul.
Salvatore M. Trento
Dept. of Anthropology, S.U.N.Y.
Buffalo, N.Y.
Marvel,
How DARE you kill Gwendolyn Stacy!? You are a pack of soulless, mercenary sadists. I am no longer a True Believer.
J. M. Black
Alamedam, Calif.
To whoever had the idea of killing off Gwen Stacy,
You rattlesnake, you buzzard, you large red insect, you worm, you cockroach, you lizard, you skunk, you tapeworm in the digestive system of humanity: Why is it when a superhero and his girl finally seem to be getting it together, you kill off the girl? May you lose every tooth in your head but one, and in that one may you have a toothache; may someone put arsenic in your midnight cocoa; may you be struck down by a spirit of justice and be reincarnated as an amoeba!
RFO Sergio J. Andrade
Roselle, N.J.
Gentlemen,
As you said, SPIDER-MAN # 121 was a shocker. Frankly, I wonder what kind of home life you people must have, or had as children.
Donald Shinners
Wauwatosa, Wisc.
Sheila blinked and backed away from the page. The readers were right; the writers were sadists. When she looked up, both boys were huddled behind the counter. They had been watching her read, waiting for her to react. The boy in charge and the boy who worked under him nodded sympathetically in her direction. “Bastards,” one of them mumbled, and everyone agreed, the things that the superhero was made to stomach were shameful. After sticking it out for years watching Parker survive so many disappointments, you couldn’t help imagining some other life for him and his girl where things work out.
THE TAXI COULD NOT drive fast enough, and he thought he was never going to get there, that perhaps the driver was taking a circuitous route only to let the meter run, which was something you had to watch out for even in Iowa—Peter should know—and certainly here it was more common. Peter sat in the back seat of the taxi, staring into the address in his hand. Since turning the corner away from the street that housed Lenka and Petra’s apartment, he recognized nothing in the dark—each time he managed to catch the name of a cross street in the taxi’s headlights, the intersections seemed absurd, unlikely: Hermitage and Armitage, Hoyne and LeMoyne. What sort of city planners would make rhymes of so many intersections?—so all he could do was trust the driver, put his faith in the route they traveled. But when the taxi finally rounded the corner onto Walton Street and stopped in front of an apartment, Peter felt he had arrived too soon. He stood before the front door with his hands stuffed in his pockets and waited for a long time before he pressed his fingers into a fist and began to knock. His heart shook at the thought of Sheila on the other side of it, walking toward him now, and how he would hold her, how he would inhale the citrus smell of her hair.
Within a few seconds he heard the sound of the deadbolt and chain unlocking. “Coming,” he heard a man’s voice say, “coming.”
Then the door was opened and the man who had spoken stood beside it. The man continued to hold the door open, but he didn’t get out of the way for Peter to pass, and Peter made no attempt to advance into the apartment. He remained rooted to the spot in the hallway, a mirror opposite to the man inside, who stood exactly eye-level at Peter’s height. So it was the eyes he saw first. The eyes of the man were dark, but clear. They were the same as those that he had dreamed every night for a week in Iowa. He felt his stomach drop in confirmation of this fact. He and Sheila had done it; they had done this thing together. It was as he was moving away from the man’s eyes to take in the rest of him that he took a step backward, his foot caught on the mat in the hallway, and he stumbled slightly, he looked down at his shoe, and then looked up again and saw that the man’s mouth now was beginning to open, as if to address him. There was something about the mouth too that Peter recognized.
The man was saying something now, and then he said it again. This time more quietly, more like a whisper.
Seth.
There was that saying, he had heard it said before: as far as the human ear is concerned, there’s no equal comfort to the sound of one’s name. People were always saying this, narcissists it seemed. But there was something else to it, he was now remembering; it had to do with the mouth of the other person, the one that was doing the speaking. Because it was rare for a mouth to be able to perform this trick, to offer asylum in a familiar sound, shelter in a syllable.
Peter stepped quickly through the doorway of the apartment so the man was close enough to touch. He pushed the palm of his hand against the man’s shoulder; it was solid. He touched the top of the man’s forearm where his shirt met his skin, and there was muscle there, and bone. He pulled together each one of his fingers into a fist and he landed the fist in the pit of the man’s stomach, between his ribs. The man reeled backward for a second, coughed, touched the place where Peter’s fist had made contact. He said nothing.
Peter took another step forward into the apartment, closing the distance between them. “It hurt?” he asked.
“Not bad,” the man said, taking a quick breath, releasing it. “Yeah, a little.”
Peter nodded. He spoke slowly to keep his voice from shaking. “You died twenty years ago.” He said this plainly, neither question nor accusation.
The man looked at the floor. “I tried to, yes,” he said. “I wanted to.”
Peter’s throat tasted of salt. He swallowed the taste. He had come here to save a man who died the way his brother had. Now, to find Jake standing before him in place of the stranger, alive, healthy, Peter thought he would kill him himself. He shook his head. “I tried to?” he repeated. He felt dizzy now, standing so close to the man, his brother, or some version of Jake, some vision of him.
“How long,” he said.
“How long what?” asked his brother.
“Have you been here?”
Jake said nothing for a minute. Then he said, “Twenty years.”
Peter was nodding now. He was trying to get his head on a single thought, he couldn’t focus on the place, this definite place all along, never dead, never not eating or sleeping or washing his hair like anyone else, all this time, one state away. “Chicago,” is what he said finally. Then, “Chicago, Illinois.” Then he felt the room start to get hot, the heat under his fingernails again, as it had happened when he dreamed this place, and he felt like he needed to sit down, like his legs could not support his weight, and his brain was running the name of this place through its reels like the even sound of a passing train—Chicago, Illinois, Chicago, Illinois—and then the room started to go funny, dark spots, all of them fuzzy, like after looking at the sun, the white wall behind his brother’s head was full of these dark pools, portals, negative spaces you had to watch not to fall into, he remembered thinking, which was the last thing he remembered thinking before he fell into one.
How to adjust the story you’d followed all your life to allow for the details that were continuously accumulating, piling on top of one another, until there was no sense in looking the other way? Always a new telling, a revision, had to be crafted to deal with the worst of it. He learned this from his mother. Jake was dead to them for twenty years because this seemed the only way to accommodate the reality of his abandoning them. But this had been his mother’s imposition, her organization of the latest details into something they could live with.
That night again at the kitchen table: his mother, the dominos.
You and me, honey. How she w
ouldn’t stop repeating it. How about you and me?
Where’s Jake? he’d asked her. And for a long time she hadn’t answered him, until finally she said, He’s gone.
Gone where?
How she had started with the truth. How Jake had gotten on a bus that crossed from Iowa into another place, this nearby city, in the middle of the night. In towns like theirs people talk; even outside of daylight, there are witnesses to everything.
He had started to cry, and his mother had pushed all the dominos to the side of the table. A few had clattered against the kitchen tiles. His mother had opened her arms and he’d crawled across the table and into her lap. And his mother had smoothed her hands against his hair and said, baby, I’m so sorry.
Because in a way wasn’t it worse? To have helped to bring someone back to life, into the life you had all maintained together, and then to have to hear secondhand, from neighbors, from spies, that your effort wasn’t worth anything. To not know whether he would ever come back, or whether he would always come back, and always they would be abandoned again and again.
His mother rubbing his back, rocking him back and forth in the kitchen chair. The white dots of the dominos on the kitchen floor winking up at him like faraway constellations.
Listen, his mother said. And Peter knew he would listen to anything. Whatever she said, he would believe her. He’s gone, she said. Do you understand?
Peter nodded.
He went to sleep again, his mother said. Asleep, the way we found him in the closet.
How he’d howled, how he’d bit down into the wool of her sweater. But his mother didn’t tell him this for nothing: it was better that he know, that he understand the bounds of their shared grief and his own place in it, understand irrefutably that they had only one another to care for from now on.
A pillow stuffed beneath his neck, a damp kitchen towel folded across his forehead. He blinked; he looked around. A kitchen chair had been pulled to the side of the couch, his bedside, and sitting on the chair was his brother. Jake was pushing his hair away from his face, away from the towel, like his mother used to do when he’d been down with a fever. Peter sat up with a start.