The Night Gwen Stacy Died (17 page)

Gwen laughed. “How many years do you think you would get?” She was tracing her fingers
in patterns along the small of his back, teasing him, testing him.

“Oh, ten? Twenty?” Peter said. “It doesn’t matter.” He leaned in for her mouth, bit
her lip softly. “We’re not going to get caught.”

“And if I say that I chose to leave with you, what would happen to me?” Her fingers
ceased their tracing pattern along the waist of his jeans. She was waiting for him
to answer.

“You wouldn’t say that,” Peter said.

“And if I did?” She persisted.

“You wouldn’t go to jail,” he said. “Your father would pull some strings.”

“What strings?”

“You know, with the law. It helps to have a father who’s the chief of police.”

Gwen wrinkled her nose. “My father’s an accountant,” she said.

“Admiral Stacy?” Peter said. He shook his head. “Only if by accountant you mean he’s
accountable for the safety of the entire New York police force.”

Gwen continued to talk over him. “He’s an accountant. He’s never even been to New
York! He’s fifty-two years old, and he has high blood pressure. He taught me to read.
He took me camping in the Ozarks every summer until I turned thirteen.”

“I have a hard time believing he’d have time for so many vacations!” Peter said.

“Stop it,” Gwen said.

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“We’re just playing.”

“I don’t want to play like this,” she said, and she turned from him suddenly, brusquely,
and pretended to sleep.

“Gwen?” he said.

She faked a snore.

“I guess I’ll sleep on the couch,” he offered.

“Good idea,” said Gwen’s back.

They didn’t have a couch in the apartment. She knew that, obviously. Peter dragged
a blanket and pillow to the cushioned chair near the window and began making a bed
for himself there. He looked out the window to the park where there was a man sorting
methodically through the trash can, seeming to catalog the contents of each object
he extracted. An order existed in the most unlikely things if you just waited to detect
it. Peter dozed off after a while, and when he woke up, it was because he could feel
her standing over him. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, the old dream as it
had come to him in Iowa, kneeling over his bed—he held his breath, he waited for it—but
this was different.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“You were sleeping?” she asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

“I love you,” she said quietly, simply. “That’s why I can become her when I’m with
you.”

Peter nodded.

“But if you confuse my father with some stupid cartoon character again, I’ll leave.”

“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 there 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.