Let me set the stage for you, just in case you’re new to all of this.
Right now everyone
hates me. And I mean hate! Rocks and
bottles and curses are hurled at me. I’ve even had a few people pop off a few
rounds. Nothing ever struck home—it never does—but that doesn’t mean it didn’t
hurt. Especially after all I’ve done for them. But do you think they could
focus on that? Nope. Thanks to the media running that damned photo again and
again and again I’m right up there with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Von Doom as the
most hated men in the country (and I’m aware that two of them are dead, but
people still hate them—a lot). Although, I guess it is a little bit of poetic
justice: me, a struggling freelance photographer getting scooped with a picture
of myself taken by some teenage girl with her phone.
The image isn’t
crystal clear and it’s off center. And there is too much light, washing out
most of the contrasting colors. The red looks pink and the vibrant blue is
practically black. No shadows, either. Real amateur stuff. If I had taken it, I
would have found the beauty in the tragedy. I would have captured the faces
(well, the one you could see—the other was masked). I would have adjusted the
F-stop so that the colors soaked through the lens and onto the film. Especially
the blood. The moment would have been immortalized as not only news, but art.
Instead, that millisecond, the one that ruined my life, will forever be a hazy,
bleached memory amid a sea of pouty-lipped selfies.
It’s a curious image.
One that, if you ignore the headlines, when you first see it, you aren’t quite
sure of what it shows. It kind of looks like hundreds of others that have
appeared over the years, only there is something just not right about the
posture of the two figures.
The male figure is
identifiable enough, given his audacious costume of red and blue, not to
mention the mask that covers his entire face, and those lifeless white/silver
eyes that gleam like the gossamer wings of an insect that has been caught in
the spider’s web that is printed on the mask. The red and blue fabric of the
full body suit is blotched with shreds and tears showing pale white flesh that
is red and angry from recent abuse. The head is lowered, looking too heavy to
hold up any longer. It is looking down at the other figure. The girl. The young
woman.
Her body is cradled in
the arms of the other like some surrealist version of Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Her head is tilted back, her round chin pointing skyward, her eyes
closed. The white gold of her hair that normally bounces and billows around her
almond-shaped face falls straight down like molten sunlight. A thin truckle of
blood runs from the corner of her mouth. There was even some in her ears—but
you can’t see it in the picture.
Like I said, if I had
taken it, it would have been so good you could have even seen the dark stains
around those terrifyingly blank eyes.
MURDERER! KILLER!
Whoever said that
words can never hurt you was obviously never called these things. And what
twists the knife in my chest is that they are probably right. Although, the one
that took my breath away, the bold-face, thirty-four point font bullet to the
head was the one that said: FIRST CAPTAIN GEORGE STACEY, NOW HIS DAUGHTER!
SPIDER-MAN’S VENDETTA AGAINST ONE FAMILY EXPOSED!
J. Jonah Jameson and I
have never gotten along. Not as J.J and Peter, but especially not as J.J. and
Spider-Man. But I was always able to take his ridiculous outrages as pure
marketing, intended to sell one more copy of the Bugle. Yet, when I read those words I wanted to kill him. I wanted
to crash through his widow and literally tear him apart one piece at a time. To
hell with Uncle Ben’s haunting dirge of power and responsibility. I wanted to
rid myself of that Dickensian spirit and put things right in my mind. I had
followed the old man’s hogwash every day since his death and where had it
gotten me?
But I was too hurt to
move from my bed. The inner pain had me trapped in a way that all of my enemies
were unable to do. I had been broken. Spider-Man had been broken. And I
wondered which of us was the real persona. Was he just my Id, running loose all
over the city, making up for what poor Peter Parker had missed out on his whole
life? Or was Peter, the weak wallflower, the part the kept Spider-Man from
going too far? I know lots of doctors (Richards, Banner, Strange, hell, even Octavius),
but none of them understand the fragile psyche of a twenty-year-old with a
split personality, superiority complex, abandonment issues, and a huge guilt
complex.
I tried not listening to
the news, avoiding the papers, but in New York, the walls are notoriously thin.
My neighbors, a lovely old Jewish couple, have their TV turned up so loud I’ll
bet Logan can hear it all the way upstate at Xavier’s school. So even in my
bleak solitude I am pestered with my most horrible mistake. The anchors do
nothing but sit and speculate on my motives. There were several news choppers
there that caught most of the incident on film. So why can’t they see that I
dropped everything, put the world on pause, while I went after her?
I remember those
chilling seconds as we both fell. Physics says that two objects of unequal mass
will fall at the same rate, so I knew that I couldn’t just dive over the edge
and catch her. I had to push off. As I hit the edge of the bridge tower, I
curled my toes on the lip and used my sticking ability, to shove off at a
downward angle, hoping that my increased momentum would give be a chance to
catch up with her. But she was too far down already. Even with all of my
powers, my increased everything, my body still couldn’t react as fast as my
mind and I was just that much too far behind.
As we fell, I realized
I couldn’t catch her, so I used my other tool. I flung out both arms and shot a
thin line of webbing in each direction; one towards her, the other towards the
tower’s wall. The webbing being pressurized was able to accelerate at a greater
velocity than I was and ensnared her feet at the ankles just as the anchoring
line struck the wall, and with all of my might, I heaved upward, pulling her
toward me.
And that was my fatal
mistake; the one that I can never take back—the one that, if I had had another
heartbeat of time, I would have realized what was about to happen and corrected
my actions.
Newton’s first law.
She had reached
terminal velocity, and when the webbing struck and I yanked, her momentum
continued in a wave from her toes through her hair. I tried to tell myself that
the soft, sucking pop I heard was the wet webbing going taut.
My webbing, when dry,
is stronger than the steel cables holding up the bridge we loomed over, but
when it is freshly fired, it is wet and has some elasticity to it. This is how
I am able to get such great air when traversing the city. I use it like a
bungee cord, propelling myself with increased velocity. It is also how I’m able
to catch things that are falling, like pianos, safes, anvils, or anything else
out of the ACME catalogue of cartoon mayhem. And had this been anybody else but
her, I would have let the line go taut, stretch a little to slow them, then
grab them on the rebound. But this was her. I wanted to have her back. I needed
her in my arms to know she was safe.
Through my wall, I
heard my neighbors’ TV explain the gruesome details of internal decapitation.
How the spinal column is pulled away from the back of the skull resulting in
instant (and probably painless)
death.
As Peter, I’m expected
to attend the funeral, to show my love for the girl I will never see again. And
I wonder if I’m supposed to express outrage over her passing. Should I yell at
Spider-Man during her eulogy? Should I damn him to an existence of misery and
horror? What good would it do? He’s already damned, and I already hate him. The
best I could hope for would be some kind of Shakespearian soliloquy where I parade
back and forth before her coffin brandishing balled fists as I argue with
myself. Condemning and defending my own actions. Would everyone figure it out
then? Would they all know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man? Or would they assume
that Peter had lost his mind (though it is really Spider-Man who’s gone mad)?
I woke up this morning with her perfume in my nose. It was mixing with
my male stink, but I knew it was her. The floral scent of jasmine and roses
wafted up from my chest; a little patch of flesh over my heart where her head
had rested for the last time as I lost myself under that bridge.
It was like she was
reminding me that she would always be with me.
Several months ago, I
talked to Doc Strange about the afterlife. At the time I was curious about
Uncle Ben. Strange told me that there are hundreds of billions of trillions of
dimensions, and that when the spirit energy dies on this plane of existence,
there is a distinct probability that it is born again in another; as he pointed
out, knowing my love of science, energy, once created, can never be destroyed,
it just transitions from one form to another. Being the blatantly over-curious
nerd-boy that I am, I asked if that was an explanation for ghosts. Strange
laughed one of those laughs where you know the other person feels sorry for
your ignorance. He said to think of it like this: the people we love and who
love us, if in fact they exist on another plane after death, would miss us as
much as we miss them; so it stands to reason that they would stop at nothing to
try and get back to us—and just maybe, someone over there has figured out a way
for it to happen, albeit ethereally. I left his sanctum convinced that every
time I’d heard Uncle Ben’s voice in the back of my head, guiding me, that it
was really him, speaking to me from another dimension. So naturally, when I
smelled her perfume on my skin, I believed it was her giving me a hug to tell
me it was okay, that she didn’t hate me.
So began my psychosis.
All that day I felt better. I was able to eat and bathe. And all the while I
talked to her, hoping she was still around, listening. I told her all sorts of
things that I hadn’t been able to just several days prior. I told her flat out
that I was Spider-Man and that it hadn’t been me that killed her father, but
rather Doc Ock. I plowed through the story while chomping on soggy flakes of
cereal, describing how Captain Stacy had interrupted a fight between Octavius
and me and how Ock had used one of his metal tentacles to throw the older man
aside, sending him crashing through a dilapidated brick chimney and over the
ledge of the building. I ignored the fight and went for the rescue. I cried
into my breakfast as I told her how I’d tried a similar move as the one that
took her life, only instead of catching Mr. Stacy, I’d missed by a fraction of
an inch and snagged a chunk of the falling debris. The captain hit the pavement
and was pummeled by falling bricks as an added insult to his bravery. But the
large section I’d stopped would have killed him right then. My actions allowed
me enough time to jump to him in order to hear his last words. “You take care
of her, Peter.”
The very last thing
her father had said was my name. Not Spider-Man, but Peter. He knew. He’d
probably known for a long time, and he’s still trusted me with his daughter.
After the tears
passed, I even felt myself getting a little angry at her for hating my other
self so much, for blaming Spider-Man for her father’s death. As if I had
happily tossed him over the side of the building like he was a gum wrapper. But
I couldn’t stay mad at her for long. I understood, after all, what it was like
losing a father-figure. I’d lost two. Even I blamed Spider-Man for Uncle Ben,
because if he hadn’t been such a big part of me, I might have been home and
able to stop the guy. Or I might have been shot dead instead.
I still didn’t leave
the apartment until the next morning. The morning of her funeral.
That somber occasion was almost as bad as losing her again. Not only
because I couldn’t talk to her the way I had been in private, but also because
I couldn’t talk to anyone else. Who was there for me to commiserate with? Whose
ear could I bend to confess my sins, committed behind a mask? If any of the
others heroes had come to pay their respects, then the cat would have been out
of the bag. And thinking about it now, there probably isn’t one hero out there
that I socialize with who has a secret identity. Well, Daredevil, but we aren’t
really friends. More like associates who tolerate each other. Though I was
surrounded by people I knew and cared about, and those who cared about her—even
Flash Thompson—I was completely alone. Mrs. Stacy, so recently widowed, hardly
looked at me, as if she knew that I had witnessed the erasure of half of her
family. Maybe she sensed that I had some knowledge. Maybe the good captain had
confessed his secret—my secret—to her, though I doubted it. There were others,
too. The fakes. The phonies. The girls who came because they had walked by her
in the halls of Midtown a few times and thought that made them friends; the
ones who showed up so they could take selfies of their grief—of their smeared
makeup. There were also those there strictly for Mrs. Stacy. They stood behind
her like an army waiting for their orders. Blank faces and dark clothes.
Aunt May was really my
only shoulder to lean on. God love her. We stood at the corner of the grave, at
the front of the crowd. I could tell that most of the people didn’t know who I
was or why I was allowed such a choice spot. They looked at me from the corners
of their eyes, behind dark sunglasses, judging me, wondering if I was a cousin
they should remember. But then I saw him. The one who’d really killed her—the
one who’d knocked her off the bridge as part of some sadistic game where only
he was the winner.
That familiar rage twitched inside me. It took
literally everything I had to keep from leaping over the crowd in an inhuman
arc and strangling him at the foot of her grave. Him. His smugness mocked me
from only feet away. Even when we lowered our heads in prayer he continued to
glare at me. He didn’t look like a killer right then, but I could see the evil,
lurking just in the corner of his mouth; that wicked smile that showed just a
few too many teeth. After the “Amen” people shifted and he was gone. I searched
for him but he’d slipped away, hanging around just long enough for me to notice
him before slithering off.
If he’d ever really been there.
The whole time Aunt
May had her hand in mine, squeezing it gently now and then so that I began to
wonder if I were inadvertently using my spider-powers to keep her there. It was
an absurd thought. If anything, it was that wonder woman who had the power to
keep her hand stuck to mine. No force on earth could move her.
After the service,
several of our old classmates came up and consoled me on my loss, only I knew
they had come to see each other. They were probably all going out for drinks
and they were in a hurry to get away from me, just in case I asked to go with
them, or invited them back to my aunt’s house for flavorless casseroles and
awkward silences. Joke’s on them, though, because I want them gone. All they’re
doing is reminding of when I first met her, and how easily I’d fallen for her,
totally unaware that she’d fallen for me.
The rest of that day
is mostly a blur. It wasn’t that I’ve repressed the pain or the sorrow. More
like I just wasn’t paying attention. I relied on my enhanced reflexes to get me
around, but when I woke up the next day, I had no idea how I’d gotten home. I
knew I hadn’t put on the costume, that’s for sure. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d
ever put it on again. The one with her blood dried to the chest emblem still
hung in the closet like a museum piece.
I have several, you
know? There are three of my classic red and blues; there’s a couple in the same
style, but insulated against the colder temperatures—as well as electricity for
when Electro pops up; I even have a few in different designs in case I want to
change things up. I wish I could say that I’m just that handy with a needle and
thread. Really, there are a team of tailors and seamstresses on the payroll of
the Fantastic Four who make them for me. It’s all this fantastic material that
isn’t lycra or spandex, but fits like a second skin and is really comfortable.
It doesn’t bunch or pinch. It practically flows like a liquid. However, my
favorite feature was that they breathed so well. I could wear them under my
clothes and not breakout in sweats or get itchy. Usually, after a public battle
that makes it in the papers or on TV, a new one or two will show up at my door
to replace the shredded one. As I looked
at the one I held her in for the last time, I considered the fact that if I
were to quit, and I might have to give the suits back. But I’d never let that
one go. It was now as much a part of the story of her and I as all the dates
and the cuddling and the stories.
They say that every
story has an ending, even if you can’t see it from where you are. I’d have
never guessed that would be the end of ours. Then again, I could never guess
the next plot point in a movie. She could, though. It was like she’d read every
book, seen every movie. Her deductive reasoning was as good as her father’s.
Looking back, I can’t
believe she didn’t know. I can’t believe that she hadn’t put the pieces
together. And that makes it hurt that much more—even now. As she was falling, as eternity reached up
for her, did she hate me for letting it happen? Did she hate Peter Parker?
And this is where I begin the next chapter of my story…
