The webbing went out again.
This time he felt it before it happened, but that didn’t do much to alleviate the situation. He had just released one web-line and was attempting to shoot out another strand to swing on. When nothing emerged, he had just enough time to mutter “Uh-oh” under his breath as he soared through the air, a daring young man sans trapeze.
The angle of his fall sent him hurtling into an alley and he slammed into a cluster of garbage cans. They and he crashed to the ground, and he lay there with the trash for a long moment before staggering to his feet. He pulled off his mask, trying to breathe deeply and having only moderate success. His skin was thick with sweat.
“Why is this happening to me?” he gasped.
Shaking his head, he went to the wall and tried to scale it. No luck. He only got a foot or so off the ground and then he didn’t have the strength to adhere to the wall anymore. He lost his grip and fell backwards, landing amongst the garbage cans once again.
As he stood, with far more effort and pain this time, he spotted a newspaper lying in the trash. He picked it up. It was the bulldog edition of the Daily Bugle, and it read, “Spider-Man and Ock Crime Spree!” in large type across the front page.
He stared at it for a long, long time.
He read the story, and felt as if he were reading about someone else, someone he hadn’t even met and wouldn’t want to meet.
Peter didn’t remember retrieving his street clothes and hauling them on over his costume. He didn’t remember anything of the trip home, and wasn’t even sure how he accomplished it: Walked, took the subway, a cab, whatever. None of it mattered. All that kept happening, even after his door closed behind him, was that he kept reading the Daily Bugle, trying to reconcile the public perception of Spider-Man with who and what he thought he was. And he couldn’t.
Finally, in frustrated fury, he threw the newspaper against the wall, leaving an impressive dent. Then, bare-chested, wearing only his costume pants, he threw himself down onto his bed. He was sweaty, panicked, upset. His heart racing, his breath labored.
“Why is this happening?” he muttered again, and not for the first time he had no answers. “Maybe… maybe it’s something Ock did to me. I’ll just go right out and ask him… I’m sure he’s not doing anything important at the moment.”
Doc Ock proudly walked through the new lab that he had created within the confines of pier 56.
He was glad he’d realized the foolishness of pursuing his aims solely through stealing money. As a research scientist with access to classified knowledge, he’d known precisely where the government kept various items of research and scientific interest—items that would be of use to him in his work. Secret places. Places that when he smashed his way into them, and squashed efforts by the military to stop him, the government itself made sure to hush up, lest citizens be alarmed.
His tax dollars at work.
Large crates labeled “Property of U.S. Government” had all been cracked open, the equipment removed and set up. Finding a source of electricity had been a bit of a problem, but he’d managed to locate a main he could tap into. Theoretically the line was supposed to be shut down, but the cybernetics of his tentacles were exceptionally talented. They’d simply clamped into the lines and sent orders to the computer-controlled power grid that the circuits were to be reactivated. Eventually the power company would find the unauthorized startup. His estimate was that it would take them a couple of months. More than enough time.
He gazed once more with pride upon his handiwork and placed his hands on his hips. The tentacles followed suit.
“Time to go to work,” he said.
XIV
Seated in the shoe department at Barney’s, Mary Jane enjoyed the look of utter astonishment on Louise’s face. Louise, who’d been about to try on a nice little Prada number, sat there with the shoe in her hand and a look of disbelief on her face.
“See?” said Mary Jane. “You shouldn’t have left early last night. See what you missed?”
“You told him yes?” Louise squeaked it so loudly that every head within earshot turned to see what she was going on about.
Mary Jane could understand her incredulity. The proposal had unfolded so improbably. There they’d been at the party, and John had smiled at her and said, “You know, everyone keeps asking if we’re talking about setting a date. That I’d be crazy to let you get away. This keeps up, I may have to start thinking about finding a romantic spot to discuss possible—”
“Or you could just ask me now.” She hadn’t been aware she was going to say the words until they popped out of her mouth.
He had blinked in surprise. “Um… okay. Would you want to get married?”
In retrospect, she felt as if her mouth had been on autopilot. She was, as the acting term went, in the moment. The problem was, she hadn’t been sure if she was going with her gut, or acting in spite of what her instincts were telling her… just to prove something. It didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was her response: “Sure.”
John clearly couldn’t believe it. Out of nowhere, his life had suddenly shifted on its axis. “Wow! Can I spread the word?”
“Now?”
She’d been momentarily taken aback by the question. It was natural, of course. But some part of her almost felt as if this were all a game, and would remain so for as long as it was just the two of them playing it. As soon as others were invited to participate, it became…
… real.
Well, wasn’t that what she wanted? Real?
“Okay?” he had prompted, starting to look worried.
She had shrugged. “Why not?”
A grin had split his face as he took her by the shoulders. “I promise you won’t regret it, Mary Jane.”
And that was that. He’d made the announcement, and Mary Jane tried to tell herself that it was purest coincidence that, although she’d apparently been looking up at John, she’d actually been watching Peter Parker’s reflection in a nearby tureen. It was hard to make out, though, since it was distorted by the curvature. Well, why not? It was appropriate. Everything about her relationship with him had become distorted.
“You told him yes?” Louise repeated, hauling Mary Jane back to reality. “Just that fast?”
“It felt right,” Mary Jane said. That seemed to be becoming a habit for her. She studied her friend. “Well? You might congratulate me.”
“Congratulations,” Louise said quickly and, Mary Jane thought, not all that sincerely. She added, “Good luck in the world.”
For some reason, that made Mary Jane feel slightly defensive. “John loves me, and he tells me so. My father’s words still ring in my head. ‘You’ll never be worth anything’ and ‘No man will ever want you.’ ”
Louise looked taken aback. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove something to your father?”
To him… and to Peter, showing him how he’d missed out. She brought herself up short. What sort of ridiculous way was that to think?
As if sensing M.J.’s uncertainty, Louise asked, “You really love this guy?”
Her thoughts awhirl, Mary Jane replied, “Very much.”
But Louise picked up on something in the response. “ ‘Very much’? That doesn’t fly.” She leaned in toward her friend, rested a hand on her knee. “If you really love the guy, then the answer is…” She paused and then said in an overly passionate, overly dramatic, breathless manner, “ ‘Do I love him? I adore him. He’s my comfortable afghan, he’s all I can think about. Everything he is, everything he says, everything he does to me, for me, with me. His sweet kisses. He makes up for all the grief and pain I’ve ever had. And in the dark of night, he’s there.” She sagged against the chair, “spent” from her emoting. Going along with it, Mary Jane politely applauded. Louise half smiled, then turned serious. “That’s the answer I need. Not ‘I love him very much.’ You’re going to marry the guy.” When Mary Jane didn’t say anything immediately, Louise prom
pted her, “Hello?”
Mary Jane just shook her head. “You’ve read too many love stories,” she chided.
“What about that perfect kiss you said you had once? The guy you believed in. He sounds worth waiting for.”
The memories came back. That night, in the rain, her sopping clothes clinging to her, the whole surreal feeling of it all… and he’d been there, and the rest of the world had gone away when their lips met.
“That was a fantasy,” Mary Jane said, trying to make herself believe it. “That’s all he is.”
“Hey!” protested Louise. “What’s wrong with believing in love stories?”
As a shoe salesman approached them, carefully balancing an armload of boxes, Mary Jane said, “Nothing, if you don’t mind making yourself sick over relationships.”
XV
Peter had waited so long at the university’s Student Health Services department that he was starting to worry he’d miss his own graduation. Considering that was several years away, it indicated just how much longer he anticipated sitting around until a doctor found time to see him.
The interminable wait finally ended when a gum-chewing nurse escorted him in to see one Doctor Wally Davis, as the name tag on his white lab coat indicated him to be. The coat was a sharp contrast to the cheery Grateful Dead T-shirt he sported underneath. In his forties, Davis was a rather tired-looking but reasonably congenial fellow. From his manner during the examination, Peter would have guessed him to be an aging ex-hippie, until he remembered that when hippies were in vogue, Davis had been in diapers.
Peter, sitting in his briefs on the edge of the examining table, watched as Davis finished checking his blood pressure. The doctor unwrapped the cuff and nodded with apparent satisfaction. “You seem okay to me,” he said.
Peter realized there wasn’t any way the doctor could know that for sure, since he couldn’t examine Peter for any of the specific symptoms he was experiencing. What was he supposed to say?
“Doc, I’m not climbing the walls anymore.”
“Well, good, it’s nice that you’re not letting yourself get upset.”
Good. Great plan.
So instead, he’d just told the doctor about exhaustion, general weakness. The doctor’s first concern was that Peter had mononucleosis, a very common disease for college students. But the absence of fever or swollen glands prompted him to do a more general checkup, and he was left shaking his head. “My diagnosis?” said Davis. He tapped his head. “It’s up here. You say you don’t sleep? Heartbreak? Bad dreams?”
Desperately wishing he could address the problem head-on, Peter said cautiously, “There is… one dream. I’m climbing a wall. But I keep falling.”
“Oh?” Davis raised an eyebrow. “Why are you climbing?”
“Well, it’s not exactly me who’s climbing,” he amended. “It’s not even my dream. It’s a friend of mine’s dream.”
“Ah,” said Davis, who apparently had heard this clever code before and was perfectly capable of cracking it. “Somebody else’s dream.” He glanced at Peter’s records. “What’s your major? Theater Arts?”
“Science.”
“Connors?”
“Yeah,” Peter said cautiously.
“He flunking you?”
“Says he might.”
“There you go,” said Davis, as if that explained everything. “What about this ‘friend.’ Why does he climb? What does he think of himself?”
“That’s the problem,” Peter admitted. “He doesn’t know what to think.”
Davis nodded in what seemed an air of commiseration. “Got to make you mad not to know who you are. Your soul disappears. Nothing as bad as uncertainty. I’ve been there. Who was I? Wow, identity! Big one.” He leaned in toward the uncertain Peter and whispered, “Me? I go to my shrink.”
There’s a surprise, thought Peter. Aloud he said, trying to hide his nervousness, “Oh? What does he tell you?”
The doctor leaned in even closer. “She tells me,” he said, loudly emphasizing the female pronoun, “that I need some strong focus on what I want. And I have to find out who won’t let me have it. And why. And then,” he was so nearly on top of him that Peter thought the doctor was about to ask him out on a date, “I have to tackle that guy and make him hear me.”
He stood upright and started to turn away, much to Peter’s relief… and then the doctor was back, close in and facing him, and Peter decided that however many times a week this doctor was seeing his shrink, he needed to triple it, at the minimum.
“And one more thing,” Davis said, sounding like a demented Lieutenant Columbo. “I have to make sure I’m right about what I want.” He paused, as if considering his own words. “Listen, maybe you’re not supposed to be climbing that wall. That’s why you keep falling. You always have a choice, Peter.”
Despite the seeming insanity of the situation—not to mention the doctor himself—Davis was making a point that Peter hadn’t truly dared consider earlier. “I have a choice,” he said, as if only just then learning that man had free will.
Davis stood up, clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Put your pants on. You’re fit as a fiddle.”
But Peter wasn’t feeling fit, fiddle or not, dressed or not. Despite the fact that he was falling behind in his classes, he couldn’t bring himself to attend any that day. Instead, he went home, stripped off his clothes, and climbed into bed, even though sunlight was still filtering through the window. He knew that to the casual observer it might seem like a classic case of clinical depression. He didn’t care. He was too depressed to care.
He lay there for quite some time, trying to get to sleep and having no success. Just my luck. Just my lousy luck, he thought, and then realized that if his luck was running contrary to what he wanted…
So he tried to stay awake, and managed that for all of ten minutes before falling into a deep slumber.
The world swirled around him in his sleep, different aspects of his life splintering apart like a smashed window. Events that genuinely had transpired intermixed freely with those that hadn’t but were drawn from his deepest fears and imaginings. One moment he saw his uncle Ben lying in the street, his life’s blood seeping out of him in relentless streams, then suddenly he was sitting next to his uncle inside Ben’s beloved Delta 88, the car he had died for.
For some reason, Peter wasn’t surprised. It was more than just the way that everything seemed to make sense in a dream, no matter how nonsensical. It felt as if everything that had been happening to him lately was leading to this. He’d been seeing his uncle again and again, his imagination running rampant, to the point where being awake or asleep didn’t seem to matter. Ben would come to him when he was dozing, when he was wide-awake… whenever he felt like it, pretty much. And Peter was helpless to stop these visitations. Helpless because he wanted to be. Helpless because he felt he deserved to be.
Yet ironically it was that growing sense of helplessness that had triggered this latest visitation. On some level, even in his sleeping mind, Peter knew this. Moments before he’d found himself in the late, lamented Delta 88, that nut-job doctor had been repeating the one thing he’d said that made sense to Peter: You always have a choice. In the dream he’d been saying it while wearing a tutu, but that was neither here nor there. The words had merit no matter who said them, or where. And although they were perfectly self-evident on the face of it, they nevertheless struck Peter with the impact of a Louisville Slugger across his mouth.
“Hello, Peter,” Ben said softly.
“Uncle Ben?”
“What you’re thinking of, Pete… it makes me sad.”
Sad? How could he claim to know from sad? He was cavorting with angels while Peter was scrambling to salvage any hope he had of regular human contact.
“Can’t you understand?” he asked, desperately. “I’m in love with Mary Jane.”
“You know I understand,” Ben said consolingly. “But I thought I’d taught you the meaning of responsibility.”
Oh, yes. Yes, he had. With his blood and his life, he had driven that lesson like a stake into Peter’s heart. Now Peter lived a twilight life, one that couldn’t include someone like Mary Jane. How could he possibly pursue a relationship with her when there was a side of his existence that he had to keep from her? One that superseded her needs and desires every day of the week, every minute of the day? A woman wanted to know that she was the most important thing in a man’s life… and that could never, ever be the case as long as Spider-Man existed.
“You don’t know how it feels,” Peter said, his voice hollow.
Ben shook his head and thumped his hand gently on the steering wheel for emphasis. “All those times we talked about honesty and justice and fairness. I’ve counted on you to have courage. And to one day take my dreams into the world with you.”
Ben Parker had never said these words to him. Very likely, he hadn’t even thought them. They were instead Peter’s own conjuring of Ben’s desires, blossoming from that portion of his consciousness that could never, ever forgive him the great sin he had committed, the sin that had lost him his uncle. But because they came from deep within Peter’s soul, they had that much more meaning and resonance for him.
In the shades of his dreaming self, Peter looked with ferocity at his uncle, and suddenly hated him. Hated the capricious fate that had placed Ben directly on a collision course with that damned thief. That guy could have jacked someone else’s car, on some other street, anywhere in the city. Yes, Peter had stepped aside and let the thief dash by, but there had been more twists and turns than that in the clashing destinies.
Why? Why do I have to suffer endless torment for what I did? Why am I the one domino in the endless tik-tik-tik row of circumstances leading to Uncle Ben’s death who has to do endless penance? It’s not fair!
IT’S NOT FAIR!
“I can’t live with your dreams!” Peter cried out. “I want a life of my own!”
“With great power comes great responsibility,” Ben told him, every word filled with the weight of the world. He reached out to Peter, and his face flickered in concern and doubt. “Take my hand, son.”