Freak Like Me
By
Santanico==
Eight: Dive
==
Now
There's a pale dawn rising up ahead of me, whiter than sea foam and washing across the sky, drowning the stars. The dark road crunches under the tires of the gleaming black Cadillac, and peels off into the horizon. On either side of me, the endless emptiness of the desert, broken up only by weary-looking cacti, rusted chain-link fences, weather-beaten signposts, the bleached bones of dead things. I've been driving for three days. If I'm at all tired, my body doesn't know it.
Every nerve, every synapse, is firing at full blast, lighting up my mind like fireworks. This road could be the most fascinating thing I've ever seen; I could watch it go on forever, I really could. Miles and miles of black asphalt monotony, and it's never boring for a moment.
The reason I like this road so much is because this is the road that's taking me to Tucson, Arizona. And the reason I'm looking forward to getting to Tucson, Arizona – a location I'd never previously felt any desire to visit – is because Tucson, Arizona is where a certain Philip James Watson currently resides.
Philip James Watson is my father.
And I'm on my way to Tucson, Arizona because that's where I'm going to kill him.
==
Then
"What does it feel like to die?"
Midnight. The second floor of the multi-level car park is cold, dark, deserted; the wind, whistling through this concrete hive, scratching against the walls, aimlessly blows loose pieces of trash across the floors like fallen leaves. Flashes of light from the city beyond momentarily illuminate shining chrome, mud-splashed tires, gleaming license plates. And all I can see is her face, in profile, as she walks beside me; all I can hear is her voice, echoing through this lonely space, flat, uninflected, devoid of emotion.
Her question, coming as it does at this time, is not unexpected, though it is one I was hoping to avoid. But anything is better than silence; anything is better than having to look at her, having to remember my weakness. She has sewn up the tear in her shirt with the same rough black thread she used to sew up my wound; every time I catch sight of it, I can't stop myself from thinking that at least our scars are identical now.
I respond, brusquely, as briefly as I can. "It doesn't feel like anything, Mary Jane."
She casts me an unreadable glance, catlike, from the corners of her eyes. So many of her glances, her gestures, her words seem unreadable to me now. "Come on. There must've been pain, at least."
"No. At least, none that I can recall."
She bites down on her pale, chapped lips, and the thought snakes into my mind: last night, those lips were kissing me.
Forget that. A dangerous memory, the path to a black abyss. But it lies there between us now, buried inside every word, beneath every exchange, few as they have been since the previous night. The memory of what almost happened, that shadowed glimpse of what could have been, heavy in the air like perfume. Nothing is innocent any more; everything is fraught with meaning.
"I bet it was easier," she says quietly.
And she, and she. A hardness to her now. That playfulness, that quality that made all her crimes seem no more harmful than a kitten playing with a ball of yarn, has submerged itself beneath something else, an unnatural calm. The calm of the eye of a hurricane; the calm of a battlefield just before the first shot is fired. When I look at her now, I feel an inexplicable sense of loss, as if someone I cared for had moved away overnight without letting me know where they had gone.
"What was easier, Mary Jane?" I ask. I say her name so often now. Soon she will be gone, gone away to do what she has to do, and I will no longer be able to address her by it.
Only temporary. Only for a little while. She is coming back, after all. She is.
"Being dead," she says, so still, so calm. "Sometimes I think I should..." She shakes her head. "I dunno."
I exhale, watch my breath evaporate in a cloud of cold mist, wrap my coat tighter around myself. "You are genuinely determined to do this." I'm not certain if it's a statement or a question.
"He deserves it," she says, her voice harsh, jarring to the ear in its total lack of feeling. "He deserves it and more." She glances across at me. "You agree with me, right? This is the right thing to do."
"This...is the thing you feel you must do," I reply, not really having any idea what that means.
"Things'll be better once I do it," she says decisively, raising her chin, staring off into the distance. "It won't take me too long. I'll feel better once I do it. I'll work better once I do it. Work better with you."
My heart, my traitorous, disobedient heart, lifts at these words.
Mary Jane stops short, in front of an enormous black Cadillac; the half-light glimmers across its arching tail-fins, the whiteness of its tires, the leather of its seats. It is polished, buffed and waxed to perfection; its owner must love it dearly.
"Man," murmurs Mary Jane, as she moves to stand beside it, running a hand over its shining surface, stroking it as if it were a pet. She smiles, a pale, wan smile to match her pale, wan face. "Do you remember when we boosted that limo, Otto?"
"The fashion show," I say softly. "Your first job. Our first job together."
"That's right," she says, and laughs quietly. "God...so long ago. And, and, do you remember, there was a Cadillac in the parking lot, too, only we didn't take it? It was really pretty, from what I remember...Damn, what color was it?"
"Blue," I say, and my voice scrapes against the sides of my throat, making it painful to talk. "Pale blue."
"Huh. Yeah. Yeah, that's right." She looks up at me, her eyes narrowed against the dark, the corner of her lip twisted in a small and weary smile. "You really do remember everything, don't you?"
"Some things. The things I want to remember."
She watches me, studies me closely, with the detached intensity of someone watching an exhibit behind glass. "I want to remember," she says, her voice quiet. "I want to remember you like this."
Freezing, sour panic enfolds me; my heart seizes up, but I show her nothing of this, keep this irrational terror to myself. "You don't need to remember me," I say, my voice as icy as I can make it, which happens to be quite considerably so. "You are coming back."
"Yeah. Of course I am," she says distractedly, the claws of her tentacle picking the Cadillac's lock. The door comes loose; an alarm begins to squeal, then dies, as the tentacle plunges into the mess of wires beneath the dashboard, small blue sparks flickering in the night.
"Gayle lives upstate," Mary Jane says, no longer looking at me, concentrating on the task at hand. "Shouldn't be too long a drive. After that it's just a matter of finding out where he's occupying space these days, and then...Well." A beat of silence. "And then, it'll just be over, won't it?"
I don't know. Will it? "I hope so," I say, but the register of my voice has fallen so low that I don't think she hears me.
The car's engine roars into life, settles into a deep and steady purr. She leaps over the door, lands squarely in the driver's seat, places her hands on the wheel, looks at me expectantly. "You want me to drop you off home?" she asks.
I seize her by the arms, pull her out of the car, shake her until her teeth rattle, and bellow at the top of my lungs, "You almost made love to me last night! Does that mean nothing?! How can you just leave like this?!"
No. I'm lying. Of course I don't do any of that. Only an idiot, a weak, sentimental idiot, would.
"No," I say. "Don't bother. Unless there's anything you need to take with you?"
Mary Jane grins, her dead eyes making it a horrible sight, like the rictus of a skeleton. "Nah." Her tentacle flicks through the air, undulates in a showy fashion, winds around her shoulders. She strokes its metal skin tenderly. "I've got all I need right here."
She backs the car out of the parking space, not sparing me another glance, and peels off down a ramp, her hair whipping around her shoulders like black wildfire, her tentacle draping itself across the white leather of the seats. The trash, whipped into the air in her wake, dances and whirls before me, and by the time it comes to rest again upon the cold cement floor, she is gone.
And I remain behind, staring after her, at the place where she used to be. It's for the best, of course, the very best. I admire her courage, the fact that she has the bravery to do what I never had the opportunity to; and, unlike the previous nonsense with that film-maker, I have no doubt that she will see this through to the end. And when she does, she will return to me, satisfied, stronger, at peace with herself. It will make her happy.
But even as I convince myself of this, another track of my mind is stuck, like a record in a groove, at a certain point in time. A moment in the past, when she grabbed hold of my hand, and begged me not to leave her alone.
Yes, Mary Jane. It was so long ago.
==
Detective Garrett shuts the door to his office, sighing, running a hand through his rumpled brown hair as he collapses behind his desk. The second he sits down, a newspaper falls from the sky, landing with a soft smack upon the wooden surface of his desk.
"True or false?" asks a voice from on high.
Garrett knows he ought to be at least slightly fazed by this, but the last few weeks have been so weird, so saturated with endless discussion of the misadventures of a tentacled model and her octopedal boyfriend, that it wouldn't surprise him to look out the window and see that it's raining newspapers all over Manhattan.
He picks up the paper, scans the headline, reads the story aloud in a tired voice: "'WATSON ATTEMPTS MURDER OF HOLLANDER. Acclaimed film-maker Tim Hollander has been to the NYPD with claims that former model turned terrorist, Mary Jane Watson, made an attempt on his life yesterday morning. 'She was like some wild beast,' Hollander declared in a press conference held at his Manhattan apartment last night. 'I feared for my life. I believe I am only alive today due to my ability to reason with her; artists instinctively know how to communicate with the outlaw element.'" Garrett snorts. "Jesus. Even his soundbites are pretentious."
"So. Is it true?"
Garrett looks up to the ceiling, where Spider-Man crouches, watching him through narrowed, anxious white eyes. "From what we gather, yeah. Hollander was here most of yesterday, tiresome little peckerwood that he is, and he did indeed tell us that Watson tried to kill him that morning. I'll tell you something, though, he didn't mention anything to me about his 'ability to reason with her'." Garrett gets up, walks across to the coffee machine, sets it to boil. "Guy was gibbering with terror so damn hard, he could barely reason with us. We did find out the details eventually - that she just let him go, no heroics on his part whatsoever. Still, it's nice to know he's recovered enough to turn the whole thing into free publicity."
Spidey drops from the ceiling, a dash of red and blue, and lands on the edge of Garrett's desk. "How can you be sure he's telling the truth, though?" he asks seriously. "Mary J - Watson has never even tried to kill anybody prior to this. I can't believe she'd just change her M.O. like that, for no reason."
"I wouldn't say for no reason." Garrett pours steaming black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, turns back around to face the webslinger, leaning back against the table. "I only spent a few hours with Hollander, and by the end of it, I pretty much wanted to kill him, too."
"You don't sound like you're taking this very seriously," Spidey says, and Garrett detects a hint of hope in the other man's voice.
"I wouldn't say that. Though there weren't any witnesses around at the time, a brief medical examination revealed that Hollander does have some pretty nasty marks on his throat. He says she tried to strangle him with that tentacle thing on her back, so that would line up."
"Maybe he did it himself," Spidey says. "To back up his story."
Garrett shakes his head. "No dice. The examination showed that they couldn't possibly have been self-inflicted."
"Doc Ock, then, maybe?" Spidey asks, a note of desperation creeping into the voice he swore he would keep neutral, aware that he is beginning to grasp at straws. "He's the only one of the two with a murder rap. Watson, she's never hurt anyone. It would kind of have to be him, wouldn't it?"
"Nope. His tentacles are much thicker than the one that seems to have a hold on Hollander. Besides, why would Hollander lie about that? Octavius has just as much supervillain cachet as Watson does - more, really. So we figure he's probably telling the truth." Garrett shrugs, wondering why he feels he ought to apologise for conveying this information. "Basically, from where I'm standing, it all looks pretty bad for Watson."
"Yeah. You can say that again," mutters Spidey.
Garrett clears his throat uncomfortably. "Which is why I've been ordered to step up the manhunt. And we've been authorised to bring her in by any means necessary." He coughs, even less at ease. "You know...'dead or alive'."
Spidey looks up sharply, eyes widening. "What?"
Garrett shrugs helplessly. "If there's even the slightest chance that Watson could bring herself to murder someone - "
"But she didn't," Spidey is quick to point out. "She let Hollander go. She couldn't kill him. She doesn't have it in her."
Garrett regards him suspiciously. A vague notion, only half-formed, flickers across the surface of his mind, then disperses, dismissed almost automatically. The wall-crawler is only concerned about Watson the way he would be about anyone in this situation. Garrett's just tired, just irritated. Mind's making up fantastical possibilities. Just need some sleep, or, conversely, more coffee.
"Yeah, well, maybe you can be sure of that," he resumes the discussion with an irked crick of the neck, "But we don't have that luxury. Watson's committed several major thefts, in league with a guy who's got the deaths of a hell of a lot of people under his belt."
"But she isn't -" Spidey tries, but Garrett, who has reached the end of his tether, cuts him off.
"You know something, Spider? I didn't know better, I'd wonder if you weren't defending her because you're in league with her somehow. Maybe I should run you in for some questioning, hahn?"
Under the mask, Spider-Man grits his teeth. Wonderful. The one ally he has on this police force is pissed at him, at a time when he can hardly afford to lose even one iota of the little influence he has. "I'm only trying to do what I think is right, Detective."
"Aren't we all," mutters Garrett, slumping down behind his desk, rubbing his eyes with one hand. "G'wan, get outta here. I've got things to do."
"Ditto," Spidey tosses over his shoulder as he hauls up the window-sash, perches on the sill. "But, Detective?"
Garrett looks up blearily.
"No offense. But I really hope I can get to her before you do." And he vanishes.
==
Sunrise now, and I drove all night to get here.
A chill in the early morning air; I wrap my coat around my body, press Brenda closer against my spine. I lean back against the car, parked across the street from the vast black silhouette that is my sister's house. The sunlight is wan, hazy, giving me the odd impression that I'm looking at the watery reflection of the world rather than the world itself. Nothing feels quite real; nothing that I see strikes me as anything deeper than a mirage. I guess that'll change soon enough.
It's a nice little street, a tidy little street. Not like the place where Otto and I live. Here the lawns are neatly mowed, small clean squares of emerald green, glistening and frosted with icy dewdrops. Moisture drips down the white-painted walls, glimmers on the soccer-mom cars parked all in a nice little row out front. Kids' bikes, expensive-looking, new, rest on their sides near gracefully sloping driveways. Somewhere, a dog barks. Smoke peels from a chimney. I breathe in, the smell of fresh-cut grass and barbecue charcoal and clean, unpolluted air filling up my clear and empty mind. Only the crunch of gravel under my feet lets me know that I have started the journey, up Gayle's walkway, towards her front door.
I ring the bell before I have time to pause, to think about this, to rehearse what I'm going to say. I can't slow down now. I can't afford to. There's darkness gathering at my back, hellhounds on my trail.
No answer. She must be sleeping, tucked up safe and warm in her nice big bed in her nice big house in a nice, nice street. I press down on the doorbell again, listen to the tinny, high-pitched chimes; I press down again, more chimes, again, chimes, again and again and again.
"All right! All right! Hang on!" I hear that voice, that grating, nasal voice, filtering through the thick frosted glass. "Jesus," she mutters, and I see a shape, crimson and black and creamy-white, drawing closer to the door. Metallic clicks and rattles, a bolt being pushed back, the squeak of the hinges as the door opens, and there she stands. Gayle. Big sister Gayle. Worn red bathrobe knotted at the waist, just barely clinging on to her skinny, hipless figure; her short dark hair, going prematurely gray, tousled and tangled; her pinched, pale face, long and equine, as the sleepiness drains away from it and her mean little dark eyes grow large, larger, huge.
"Heya, Gaylie," I grin, and Brenda snaps through the air by way of emphasis.
Gayle can't seem to find any words. She's that overjoyed to see me again. So overjoyed she can't even bring herself to smile, or move, or do anything other than grip the edge of the door with taut, whitening knuckles.
"Don't I get a hello?" I enquire.
Gayle opens her mouth, shuts it, opens it again. "You..." Her voice is hoarse; she clears her throat, shuts her eyes tight, as if I'll be gone once she opens them. "What - are you - doing here?" she finally manages to strangle out, as if every word is a razor blade in her esophagus.
"Well, you know, Gayle, it's just been so long since I last visited!" I gush, stepping past her rigid form and sauntering into her living room. Sunlight splashes across teakwood furnishing, overstuffed couches, floral prints and Renoir reproductions on the walls. "I mean, we're family, right?" I continue conversationally, collapsing into a velvet recliner, throwing one leg over the arm. "Family members ought to see each other so much more often than you and I do. And you have such a glorious house! Divorce settlement paid off better than expected, am I right?"
Fury ignites in Gayle's eyes, that familiar mixture of disapproval and defensiveness she employed around me so often in the past, but before she can reply, I cut her off. You don't get to have your say here, Gayle. You don't get to have an opinion.
"Aw, I'm just yanking your chain, sis. Seriously, you have such a good thing going here." My voice drops into dreaminess, into reverie, and I can't tell which part of it I'm faking and which part I'm not. "You've got the pretty house, and the pretty children, and the pretty, safe, ordinary life. Whereas, me? Well, you know." I chuckle, a low and filthy sound, slithering up from somewhere deep inside me to bubble to the surface. "Not so much."
Gayle, never taking her eyes off me, as if I were a wild animal (not wrong there, Gaylie girl), slowly sits down on the couch opposite me. "Why are you here?" she asks carefully.
Short, direct, and to-the-point. That's my sister. "Well, I've been thinking a lot lately," I say, tossing my head back, leaning into the recliner, putting my feet up. "About family. Our family. It's not a great one, is it, really, Gayle?" I lean my head on the back of the seat, gazing languidly across at her. "All families have their problems. I'll give you that. But our family. Our family..." I trail off. Things are starting to cloud over, inside my brain; that feeling of unreality again, that notion that I am not really here. "Christ, Gayle," my voice says, faint, independent of me, working from somewhere far off beyond the horizon, "Christ. Doesn't it make you angry? Don't you feel anything about it any more? Don't tell me you really believe the past is dead and gone. Don't tell me you really think any wounds can heal. Because they don't. They just get infected. Turn to poison..."
"Just tell me what you want and leave my house," Gayle blurts out, and the sharp, shrill note in her voice snaps me back to what is probably best thought of as reality.
"I'll leave when I'm damn well ready to leave," I say quietly, sinking deeper into the chair, steepling my fingers. Brenda, balancing herself on her claws, scuttles across the top of the chair, crouching on the edge, as if ready to spring. "But have no fear. I'm in a hurry. I don't think I have much time left in which to do this. So I'll make this brief. Dad."
Gayle reacts; she immediately knows, she has to know, what I mean by this, but she has to ask anyway. "Dad? I don't -"
"Where is he?"
Gayle is silent.
"I know you know," I add. "Know you call him, talk to him, probably see him. Got his address in your little black book, Gayle? Got him on the speed-dial, maybe? Hell, maybe you've seen him so often you've got them committed to memory. I guess you're a forgiving type, Gayle. That's a good thing to be. I suppose. Because I really wouldn't know."
"Get out," Gayle says, softly, her voice trembling. "Get out."
"Where's Dad?"
"I'll call the police."
"Where's Dad?"
"I swear to GOD, Mary Jane!" she screams, slamming a fist into the depths of the couch with a muffled thump, leaping to her feet. "Get the hell out of my house right now, or I'll -"
"Sit down and shut up," I say, ice crystallising my voice, as Brenda whirls out, plants herself squarely on the middle of Gayle's chest, and shoves her so hard she collapses back down into her seat. "You don't get to give orders. You don't even get to make requests. You get to answer my question, and then you get to live. So. Where. Is. Dad?"
She hunches her arms and legs close together, stiff and unyielding, allowing me not even the slightest bit of eye contact. "I'll never tell," she mutters, shaking her head. "I'll never tell you."
I smile, ruefully, feeling it only as a stretch of my lips. "You never did like me much, did you?"
Gayle looks up, through hooded eyes, from beneath a snarl of dark brown hair. "I won't let you hurt him," she growls. "I know what you're thinking, Mary Jane, I know what you want to do, I know what you've become, and I just won't let you do it."
"Nobody has to let me do anything any more," I say calmly. "You spend your whole life waiting for permission, you just spend your whole life waiting."
"That doesn't even mean anything!" Gayle hisses, trembling with rage, her eyes dark slashes of hatred, set deep in her corpse-pale face. "You think you're so entitled, so justified in everything you do, just because you got hurt. Well, I got hurt, too, Mary Jane. News flash - everyone does. You're not special, and you sure as hell don't have the right to decide who gets punished and how."
"You're right, Gayle. You're absolutely right," I reply, and I'm really quite astonished at the way I seem to be maintaining this sense of unflappability, this sense of total control. "I should forgive and forget, right? Let bygones be bygones. Shove all my memories down deep into some dark place I'll never visit, because what's the use in dwelling on the past?"
I lean forward; I can feel the black dogs of Hell coming up close behind me now, their venomous breath warming the back of my neck. "The world's coming to an end, Gayle," I say quietly. "Time's going backward. Everything old is new again. The dead past is rising, bubbling to the surface. I held it down inside me for as long as I could. But I can't any more. It's broken its bonds, it's roaming free inside my brain. I've been in pain like you wouldn't believe, so much pain it paralysed me, made me forget that there was anything in the world other than pain. And you know why I'm this way? Because of him." My voice is a striking snake, sharp of fang, filled with poison. "It's all his fault. Everything I am. Everything I never wanted to be. Maybe you can forgive him, Gayle. You didn't turn into this. But if I'm ever gonna find any quiet and peace and grace in this life, I've got to find him, and I've got to kill him."
Gayle sits there on the couch, a thousand miles away from me, her mouth open and her eyes moist. "You're insane," she says softly. "I don't know if it's being with Doctor Octopus, or if you've always been this way, or what, but you are insane."
I've had enough. I tried to explain to her, even though I didn't have to. Tried to make her see my reasoning, tried to make her see how necessary this is. She suffered because of him, too. I don't know why she's resisting this, don't know why she doesn't want to help me. Doesn't matter. She's going to anyway.
I stand; Brenda slithers through the air, across the room, stopping only inches away from Gayle's face; I am satisfied to see her jump when the claws open, as they undulate, unbearably close to Gayle's eyes. "You and I have never really gotten along, have we, Gayle?" I say. "Never really saw things the same way. But you're gonna help me out here. Just this once. Where is he?"
Gayle swallows; the tears in her eyes spill over, tremble on her colorless cheeks as her body shakes and shudders. "I can't tell you, MJ."
I'm doing the right thing. I know I'm doing the right thing. Everyone who gets what I have coming to them, deserves it. Gayle deserves it. Brenda presses closer, closer, so close that if Gayle blinks, her eyelashes will brush the edge of Brenda's claw. "Where is he?"
Gayle's breath is coming in short, sharp gasps, brief rushes of air entering and escaping her throat. "You'll have to kill me," she whispers. "I won't tell you. You'll just have to kill me."
I want to tear this house apart, scream at the top of my lungs. He's not worth it! I want to shriek at her, into her tear-stained face. He's not worth your life or anyone else's! Don't you remember how he treated you? How he treated Mom? All of us?
Instead, I grit my teeth. I steel myself, resolve myself, retreat into myself even further. I'm going to have to play the card I swore would be only a last resort, make the threat that no one will ever forgive me for.
"Gayle," I say, my eyes fixated on some point far away in the distance, "Which one of your sons would you say you're more attached to?"
Gayle pulls back, snaps her head up to look at me. Her expression is raw, naked, a self-explanatory definition of terror. "Oh my God," she whispers. "You wouldn't. You wouldn't. No."
"Where's Dad?"
"Leave them out of it, please. Even you couldn't be so -"
I can't stand this any more. I want to get out of this house, out of this street, away from her, off to someplace else, anywhere else. I just want to get this all over with, go home, go back to Otto, the only person in the world I'll believe when he reassures me that I've done well. But I can't do any of that until I'm finished here. I can't do any of that until Gayle lets me go.
"Where's Dad?" I ask again, the words automatic.
Gayle lowers her eyes, shivering, and I know then that I've won. "He's in Arizona," she mutters. "Tucson, Arizona. In..." She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. "In a nursing home, the Toussaint Nursing Home. There. Are you happy now?"
I guess I should be. I should be happy. I've got a destination now, someplace to focus on, someplace to go. But all I feel is cold.
"Thanks," I say shortly, turn on my heel, and stride towards the door. Gayle is still sitting, huddled on the couch, shaking uncontrollably, every muscle locked into a spasm. "You're a monster," she whispers.
"Yeah," I throw back over my shoulder. "I get that a lot."
"You're a monster," she goes on, raising her voice, cold and hard, "And it's got nothing to do with the way you look."
That stops me. I don't really know why, but it stops me, right there in the doorway. I think, once, maybe, I would've been able to figure out what it was about that statement that bothered me, that made me stand so still, but now it just sinks into the quicksand of my mind, along with everything else. I shrug, raise my head, and leave, slamming the door behind me, slamming the door on her and whatever it was that she meant by that.
I wouldn't really have hurt Tommy or Kevin. Of course. I'm not like that. I know I'm not. I'm sure I'm not. But Gayle thinks I am, and I wonder, if I wasn't hurting so much already, whether or not that would hurt me even more.
Well, it doesn't matter. I'll put it out of my mind, file it away somewhere, the same place I filed away what happened last night with Otto, the same place I file away anything and everything that might trip me up if I think about it, might grab me in a stranglehold and force me to my knees. It's over now. It's no longer important.
What is important is that I got what I needed. I know where I'm going.
Tucson, Arizona.
==
It's the silence that hurts the most.
Seeping in through every crack in the floorboards, every splinter in the windowpanes; enveloping the furniture, even seizing hold of the clock, choking in the throat of Time itself, forcing it to crawl upon its knees.
This house has died since she left. Or, if not actually dead, it hibernates, lies unconscious until her return. Her presence here was the kiss of life; without her, nothing living walks these floors - only ghosts, among them my own. There is not a thing here, no single thing, that is untainted by some memory - snatches of song here, and the swish of a skirt there, and my father's laughter over here, and screams and bellows over there. My life story is written upon the faded wallpaper of this house, in ink that only I can see.
I could leave, I suppose. I tell myself this, often, as I sit on the couch, or walk aimlessly from room to room, or make myself endless cups of tea to pass the time of my solitary vigil. I could leave whenever I want. I'm not bound to this place. I'm not bound to her.
But there's always a chance. Always a chance that the phone will ring, seconds after I have stepped out the door; always a chance that the sound of a black Cadillac's wheels, crunching upon gravel, will whisper outside the window of a house I have abandoned only an hour before. I am trapped here, as surely and securely as if I had been chained. I must wait. I must exercise all my reserves of patience, and I must wait.
I have this feeling, you see. This strange and indefinable feeling – an instinct, a premonition, I know not what. Call it what you will, but I am possessed by the almost physical sensation, vertiginous and nagging, that something dreadful is going to happen.
Of course, one might argue that something dreadful has already happened. The dining room table…I can't even bring myself to look at it any more. That table, where my mother served my father and me our meals every night throughout my childhood, now only recalls the shame that was us, a mass of silver and black tentacles, writhing on the polished surface in the world's least successful attempt at sexual congress. The image comes to me as if I had been only an observer of the incident; the image of her, delicate and small, and me, clumsy and oversized, and both of us equally desperate. The recollection makes me shudder. The very thought of it, of what we almost did with each other, rutting like animals, makes me sick, disgusts me. To think of how easily I allowed myself to descend into that bestial state, how close I came to losing all control. But none of that does a thing to stop the unwanted, treacherous throb of arousal that runs through me whenever I think of it.
So I shouldn't want her to come back, I suppose. She weakens me, dilutes me. I would be better off without her. Much better off.
I wonder if it is my fault she's gone. What I almost did with her, what I didn't do.
No. No, this line of thinking produces nothing. The whole question is irrelevant. She is coming home, after all. Soon, very soon. And everything will be the way it was before. Improved, perhaps. More efficient. More professional. We will work better together than ever before.
It's starting to rain again; the sound of the droplets, scattered at first, then steadily increasing, solidifying into a repetitive rhythm, fails to even make a dent in the wall of silence that surrounds the house.
I am just about resolved to make my exit from this place when, as if controlled by my own mind, the telephone gives off a great peal of sound. One of my tentacles shoots out, snatches the receiver off the cradle before the first ring has even been completed.
"Hi." Her voice, coiling into my ear like a ribbon of smoke. "It's me."
"Of course it is," I say with what I deem appropriate coldness, leaning forward on my seat. "Who else would it be?"
"Grabbed it on the first ring. That's pretty impressive." A trace of amusement, of mockery. It irritates my temperament even further. "You haven't been sitting by the phone this whole time, have you?"
"Don't be ridiculous," I snap.
"That's not exactly a 'no', is it?"
"Where are you?" I ask, having no desire to pursue this subject any further.
"Gas station. Pulled over to fill up, they let me use the phone here." A clattering in the background. "And I'm, uh. I'm not exactly in New York any more."
I sit up, my back ramrod straight. A pulse in my throat begins to beat. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I went to see Gayle, like I said, and she told me where he is. He's in Tucson."
"Tucson?" My head is starting to hurt.
"Arizona. So that's where I'm going, right now. I just thought I should let you know."
"How very considerate," I reply frostily.
"Don't be like that, Otto. Look, I've gotta go. I'll be back in about three days' time, okay? Take care."
"But you are coming back?" I ask, before I can stop myself.
But the line is dead.
==
The sun beats down on my neck and shoulders as I replace the phone in its cradle, absently fiddle with the coin slot in the hope of some change. I think I heard rain in the background over there. Doesn't surprise me. It's always raining somewhere.
Otto sounded kind of weird. He thinks about things too much, that's his problem. If you don't think about anything, nothing can touch you. I've shut off the part of my brain that's responsible for connecting feelings to memories; even if I hadn't, I'm pretty sure it would've shut down by now anyway.
I shade my eyes with one hand, look out past the tin roof of the gas station, past the makeshift wooden sign advertising cheap petrol. Beyond my own shadow is nothing but flatland, dry and dusty, shading into sand as it nears the horizon, as the road winds on and on. My eyes are stinging, heavy as sandbags, but I've got to keep going. I can sleep any other time. I've got to keep my eyes open, got to move on and on until I finally get where I need to be.
The gas station attendant approaches, a grubby kid about nineteen, sand in his shaggy brown hair, acne scars on his cheeks, plaid shirt, oil-stained jeans. "She's all full up, Ma'am," he tells me. "And then some. That'll be twenty dollars."
I hand him the cash, saunter back across to the car, the sand gritty beneath my boots. The kid looks at the Caddy with naked admiration. "That's some sweet ride you got there," he says with a shy grin.
"Thanks," I say carelessly, slamming the door and gunning the engine. "Maybe on my way back, I'll let you keep it."
The kid's eyebrows shoot up his forehead; before he can reply, I've lost him in a cloud of dust.
==
Garrett is on his fifth cup of coffee for the day, and doesn't foresee his caffeine intake going down any time soon. His fingers drum on the edge of his desk as he inhales the thick black scent of the beans, bathes his face in the steam; his coffee breaks are about the only opportunity for a little peace and quiet he's had in the course of the last few months.
So, of course, it just stands to reason that this one doesn't last very long.
There's a commotion outside his office; sounds of a scuffle, a woman yelling, "Let me through, for Christ's sake! I have to see him! I have to see someone!"
Garrett sighs, downs the coffee, stands, opens the blinds that shield his office, peers out into the chaos of the department.
The woman is tall, thin, wrapped in a gray overcoat, looks like she got dressed in either a hurry or the dark; no make-up on her thin, drawn face, and her eyes, shadowed by a tangle of dark hair, are wild, frenzied with fear. Three uniformed officers are trying their hardest to restrain her, to calm her; their efforts yield nothing but a fresh barrage of loud protests.
"Get off of me – get off me!" she snarls, yanking her arm away from one of the befuddled officers. "Don't any of you goddamn people understand?! I'm Gayle Watson, I'm Mary Jane Watson's sister, I have to talk to somebody, it's urgent –"
The sister. Okay. This is definitely worth investigating.
Garrett puts down the cup, opens the door and shoves his way through the crush of bodies towards the distraught woman. "Ms. Watson? I'm Detective Neil Garrett…"
"Oh, thank God!" Gayle breathes, one trembling hand pressed to her chest, eyes closing under the weight of her relief. "Are you the man in charge of finding my sister?"
"One of them, yes." Garrett motions to the officers, who fall away and leave them alone. "Would you like to step into my office?"
Once the door is closed, Gayle collapses into the chair in front of Garrett's desk, breathing out harshly, kneading her forehead with her fingers. Closer to her now, Garrett notices the sharp lines of her face, the black smudges underneath her eyes. She looks older, much older, than she is.
"Something to drink, Ms. Watson?" he offers solicitously. "Tea, coffee - ?"
She waves the offer away irritably. "No, no. There isn't time. I – I tried to call, as soon as she left –" She's almost babbling now, almost insensate with fear " – I tried to ring you people, but nobody would talk to me, they just kept putting me on hold and transferring me, putting me on hold, transferring me, over and over again, so eventually I just said 'screw it' and decided to come –"
"Ms. Watson," Garrett tries, leaning across the desk, palms pressed together in supplication, "I realise this is difficult, but please, try and calm yourself. I gather this is about your sister, but I don't know what you're saying here. Have you had some kind of contact with her?"
Gayle laughs hysterically. "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Contact. If by 'contact' you mean that she showed up on my doorstep this morning and threatened me until I had to – Oh, God, I just shouldn't have told her, but my kids, she threatened my kids –"
"Told her what, Ms. Watson?" Garrett has gotten the gist of it by now, and is leaning forward on the edge of his seat, every nerve acute, a muscle in his jaw growing tighter by the minute. "What did she want to know?"
Gayle shudders, knots her pale, bony hands together in her lap. "Where our father is," she whispers. "Our father. In a nursing home, a goddamn nursing home, in Tucson. She said she was going to – oh, my God, she's crazy, you should have seen her –"
"Going to what?"
"Kill him!" rasps Gayle, snapping her head up to stare blankly into Garrett's eyes. "She's going to kill him! He abandoned us when we were children, he drank and he beat up our mother and he hit me sometimes, and now she's going to find him and kill him!"
Garrett sits back in his chair, feels the rush of air escaping his lungs. "That's what she said?"
"That's what she said and that's what she'll do. You didn't see her face, you didn't see her eyes. She's so lost, she's so completely lost inside herself, and I…" Gayle shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't even know if she can be stopped. But you have to. You have to try, at least. Our dad, he's an old man now, he can't defend himself…"
Garrett gets up, awkwardly pats her on the back. "Try not to worry, Ms. Watson…" he begins, painfully aware of how hopelessly inadequate those words really are. Apparently also in recognition of this, Gayle snorts derisively. Garrett moves on.
"We'll alert the US Marshalls, as well as the Tucson PD, and they'll head her off as she arrives. Who knows, we may even catch her before she reaches Arizona at all."
Gayle sniffs loudly. "Will you – will you be moving my father to a safe house, or - ?"
"I…" Best just to be honest with her. "No, Ms. Watson. I think it would be best if we kept him where he is, under heavy police protection, of course. This may be the best chance we have of taking Mary Jane down, and if she discovers your father is no longer there – "
"Are you saying that you're going to use my father as bait?" Gayle's voice, stabilised, has acquired an iciness, the rigid quality of a shield, something that encloses and protects her.
Garrett sighs, leans his forehead on the palm of his hand as he sits back down. "That's a pretty unappealing way of putting it, Ms. Watson."
"But it's the truth. Yes?" An edge to her now, sharp, finely honed. Briefly, Garrett wonders if this is how she survived life with the man she now seeks to protect, if this is how both sisters survived.
"Yes, Ms. Watson. I suppose it is. But it's the only way, and you must believe me when I assure you that your father will not be placed in any danger –"
"My father already is in danger." Gayle shuts her eyes, shuts them against this world, against this truth, and then, without warning, slams her fist down hard upon the top of the desk. "MJ, damn you! Damn you to hell, you psychotic bitch!" she grinds out through clenched teeth, no longer aware of the detective's presence. "How did you come to this? How did everything come to this?! I don't…It…" She bites the sentence off, sits, stiff and silent, her trembling fist still resting on the tabletop.
Garrett is quiet, unwilling to intrude on the woman's naked grief. It is a great relief to him when she is the one to speak again.
"Just…When you send them out after her. Just, please, don't hurt her. She's sick. She's very sick. She's my sister." The tears begin to roll down her pallid face, to drip off the end of her pointed chin. "Please?"
Garrett says nothing. Then:
"We will do whatever we have to do, Ms. Watson."
Gayle emits an indefinable sound, a moan, a smothered wail, heavy and thick with pain. She hunches over, wraps her arms across her stomach, bows her head so low her hair almost brushes her knees, and gives way to the sobs that wrack her spindly body. Garrett stands, walks across, and kneels by her side, stroking her bowed back, for what seems a very long time.
==
The engine cools in the night air, as tumbleweeds dance over the darkened horizon, rolling past the car parked by the side of the road. Steam rises gently from the tarmac, curling past the dry and dust-coated plant life, the black shapes of cacti whose outstretched limbs cast shadows, almost human, across the unmoving sands. A warm breeze, the last remnants of the hot desert day, blows across my still form as I lie in the back seat of the Caddy, arms tucked behind my head, watching the stars. So many more of them out here, away from the city lights and the smog; so strange to think that every single one of them is actually dead by the time its light arrives in our world. Beautiful, sparkling things that no longer exist, ghosts moving across the sky.
Even though there's more of them out here, some of them are the same no matter where you are. I can make out Orion, the Big Dipper, Sirius, Betelgeuse. The same stars that whirled over Otto's rooftop, over our heads, as we sat together on the cold slate, only nights ago. When I think of that night, I can't imagine myself actually participating in it; I picture Otto and someone who looks like me sitting next to each other, carefully not touching, the one who looks like me babbling something about her husband or her baby. It's another skin I've shed, another life I've managed to cast off. I wonder if Otto will even recognise me when I come back.
Otto. Why did you pick me, Otto? Back when this all began, back when we lived in our own small worlds, compartmentalised away from each other. Why was it me, and not some other pretty girl, some other flirtatious, winking catwalk honey stalking down the runway? Did I send out some kind of frequency that only you could hear? Was everything I kept inside, hidden even from myself, written upon my face in a language only you could read? And why is it that, after you changed me, after you gave me a whole new self to try and understand, you became so afraid of me, shied away from me every time I tried to get close to you?
That night on the table. The last night of my second life, before I entered this one, the third and final one. I haven't let myself think of it until this moment; even now, I don't know what I feel when I do. I can't decide if I wish it hadn't happened or if I wish I'd seen it through to the end. If it hadn't happened, we'd have gone on exactly as we were, a constant repetition of highs and lows. If I'd seen it through, well, I guess we'd be lovers, or something, and what that would mean I can't even begin to fathom. Idly, I slide a hand up under the thin cloth of my T-shirt, cup my right breast, try to remember what it felt like when Otto was the one doing that; impossible to recapture the exact sensation, just as it's impossible to imagine it ever going any further.
Well. Either way. If things had gone any differently, I know I wouldn't be here now. I'm not sure if that would be good or bad.
Although, I haven't wanted a drink since I set out. That has to be good. A sign that I'm getting better. Maybe it's possible to get so sick that you eventually come out the other side and are well again; stoke the fire until the fever finally breaks. I'm doing exactly what I should be doing. What I should've done right from the start.
Father. Dad. Daddy. Feel me, you old son of a bitch. Feel me coming for you. Feel the ground shake under your feet, feel the earth vibrating as I speed in your direction. Feel the heat of the fever that burns me from the inside, and know that the daughter you lost, the daughter you rejected, the stupid little bimbo you wasted your money and time on, who said and did nothing as you heaped misery upon the woman who bore her – know that she's heading straight for you, and know that, soon enough, even the stars in the sky won't be nearly as dead as you are.
No more thinking. No more contemplation. Thought may arrive at lightning speed, but damned if it doesn't slow you down. And I've got to be fast. Fast and quick, clean and empty as the desert wind.
In one motion, I sit up, leap over the back of the front seat, flop down in front of the wheel, and gun the engine. It briefly occurs to me that I might've taken the last half-hour or so to get some sleep, but it's too late for that now. Oh, well. Doesn't matter.
No regrets, huh?
==
Interesting, how the days and nights all blend together when no longer divided by sleep.
I tried, I truly did. I lay awake on the cold and uncomfortable couch, watching the reflections of the raindrops on the ceiling, listening to the growl of thunder outside. I wondered if it was raining where she is, if she was asleep someplace, warm and dry. No; she'd be in the desert by now, speeding through the night, every bit as sleepless as I. The whole world, I feel certain, is unconscious except for us.
Just because the days blend together doesn't mean they are any easier to bear; I find it very hard to believe that she has only been gone for two. My fingernails are stubby, bleeding, bitten to the quick; a nervous tic left over from childhood, one I resumed without even realising I did so. My past lives are catching up with me, I feel sure of it; the longer I am in this house alone, the longer I feel the phantoms of my own dead personae rising up out of the woodwork to possess me, to fill me once again with old doubts, fears, night terrors. I hear them whispering behind the wainscoting, skittering under the floorboards, giggling inside my brain. The monsters you knew were under the bed when you were a child are still there, still there, and if you're not careful, even now, they will devour you whole.
I throw aside the covers, sit up, sliding a hand through my tangled hair. I glance over at the grandfather clock, peer through the gloom to read the numbers: twelve-fifteen. If Mary Jane were here, we would go out, fill up the lonely hours until dawn with the thrill of our shared work, the exhilaration that lifts the soul when two minds are united in one single pursuit. We'll do that when she comes home. Something simple, something easy – an uptown boutique, maybe, or a jewellery store. Something I know she would enjoy.
She made a list, at one point. A list of places she felt we ought to descend upon, places worthy of her fury. I remember her, sitting on this couch, where I am sitting now, one leg casually thrown over the other, shining dark head bowed over a yellowing notepad, scribbling away furiously with a black felt-tip. So absorbed was she in this exercise, she never noticed that I was watching her from the kitchen. I didn't watch her for that long, anyway. Long enough.
Yes. There's something to occupy myself. I'll find that list. She misplaced it somewhere, didn't seem too concerned about it at the time, but if I find it, that will help us to make our plans when she gets back. It never hurts to be organised, to prepare in advance for eventualities. We are, after all, still professionals.
I get up, allow my tentacles to carry me up the stairs; in my parents' room, I ransack the drawers, pulling them out, sifting through perfumed papers, random objects, the assorted clutter of a life in stasis. The list isn't here. Most likely, she threw it away; but I keep searching nevertheless. I pull out one drawer, plunge the claws one tentacle inside, rummage around; one of the objects in the back of this drawer, long neglected, is a crumpled cigarette packet, one cigarette remaining. I surrendered the habit almost five years ago, but now, gazing upon this relic of the past, the craving returns, exacerbated by my jangled nerves; one of my tentacles, without even requiring a mental cue from me, snatches up a matchbook, strikes a light, sets it to the end of the cigarette, places it between my lips. It is a relief, to be able to occupy my hands, occupy my mind, with something, even if it is only a release of chemicals inside my brain; yet nicotine is a poor substitute for the narcotic that is her presence.
I sit on the edge of the bed, allowing the cancerous vapor to wreathe my head and shoulders, the scent of tobacco thick in the air; every so often I pluck it from the corner of my mouth, hold it in my hands, watch it burn away. Perhaps it is simply the smoke, making me dizzy, but my hands seem to shake, as if I am viewing them under water.
I know what this is. This nameless, ceaseless desire for that which I know not to be good for me. These are the symptoms of withdrawal. Unconsciously, my left hand slides beneath the leather of my overcoat, runs its fingers, delicately, as if over the keys of a piano, across the scar on my side. I shiver at the delicate whisper of pain, more a ghostly sense memory than a physical reality; the fingers of my other hand travel up, brush across the other scar, the one on my face, the one her tentacle left me with, a million years ago. Mary Jane, I wonder, how many more scars will I eventually accrue because of you?
I shake my head, throw the cigarette down, grind it deep into the carpet. This is all for the best, I know. Mary Jane needs to do this, and it is only right that she do this. Fathers…Ah, the damage they do. The pain that they deal out, the pain that they deserve. Brutish creatures, as unwilling to understand what it is to love as they are unable to give it. I'm certain, from the minor clues and allusions that she has made, that Philip Watson was not far removed at all from Torbert Octavius; certain that the former, like the latter, had not the faintest idea what to do with this child that was so far beyond him. A callous monster, crushing his delicate daughter like a butterfly caught under a booted foot; breaking her spirit down, beating her soul into the ground, until she could only conceive of herself as unworthy and wretched, worthwhile only as an object of beauty, manufactured and ornamental as a piece of spun glass. No surprise, then, that she shattered so easily; no surprise that her edges, having broken, are now so razor-sharp. And he will feel those edges, feel them as his bastard throat is slit.
Yes, he deserves it. No matter how old he must be now, no matter what his situation. He hurt her, damaged her beyond repair. And she deserves her vengeance. To murder one's father is no crime, no crime at all, when he does not even deserve to called by that name; one's soul cannot be destroyed by the elimination of someone who had no soul to begin with.
So I have nothing, nothing at all, to be concerned about. Nothing to feel bad about. Everything is going exactly as it ought to. All I have to do is wait. Wait just a little while longer.
Outside, the rain has stopped. The night air breathes into this room, cold and silent; I cannot suppress a shiver. I can't even make out the sound of the clock any more; all sound has left this house, this house that once held voices that sang and laughed and cried and shouted, and spoke to me, told me things, in the dead of night. There was a time, so many years ago, that I prayed for silence to descend upon this house, a silence that would cut off my father's rantings, quell my mother's sobbings, and leave me to myself. Now, I don't know what I wouldn't give to hear the voice of life inside these walls again.
Perhaps she left the list up in the attic. I know she had a fondness for that place. A refuge for her, just as it once was for me.
I enter the half-lit hallway, extend a tentacle, pull down on the frayed cord, allowing the rickety wooden staircase to descend; soundlessly, I slip up to the attic room, too exhausted to make much of an effort, letting my tentacles do all the work.
Nothing seems to have been rearranged since last I was up here; the dust has re-gathered, the hush re-settled. I can remember only dimly the rage I felt when I found her up here, and cannot bring myself to summon it again at the recollection. She is a part of this place now, part of the fabric of memories that lie draped across every surface.
The albums are carefully stacked, one upon the other, on top of one of the crates; I don't remember doing that, so Mary Jane must have, in some sort of belated effort to appease me. I saunter across, pick up the one on top, the one she was playing when I found her. My fingers leave bare track-marks in the patina of dust that coats it; I lightly blow the rest away. Julie London. A half-smile quirks the corner of my mouth; Mother loved this album. Thanks to her incessant playing of it, I, who was never particularly inclined towards music, know every song on it by heart.
After she died, I swore I would never disturb anything in this room again, keep it as a shrine to her spirit; yet I can't even seem to conjure surprise at my actions as I slide the thin vinyl disk from the sleeve, place it down upon the Victrola, set the needle in the groove.
That voice, mournful and smoky, the background voice of my younger days, slithers through the attic, filling with sound as surely as a candle would fill it with light. Accusing, controlled, as elegantly bitter as poison. "Now you say you love me; you've cried the whole night through. Well, you can cry me a river…"
The trapdoor creaks, rattles, yawns wide, a fleshy hand grasping hold of the handle. Mother pokes her head through the aperture, blinking indignantly, shielding her eyes to squint through the darkness. "Otto? What on earth are you doing, playing with my records?"
"I'm sorry, Mother," I apologise immediately. "I don't know what…" I hesitate. "I just felt like hearing some music, that's all."
She hrrrmph's, although I can tell she's secretly pleased; she didn't think I liked this kind of music that much. "Well, come down. Supper's just about ready. And your father just got home; you should say hello to him?"
"Whatever for?"
She gives me her severest look. "Otto…"
I throw up my hands in mock surrender. "All right. All right. Just give me a moment."
She nods, satisfied that she has won, and disappears down the stairs. I gather the folds of my coat around myself, run a cursory hand through my hair, and follow after her. The record continues to play, but I am aware of it only vaguely now; it's nothing more than background noise.
The sound of the television, turned up full blast, greets me as I descend the staircase into the living room; sports, as usual, car racing this time around. All I can see of him is the back of his thick head, rolls of muscle bunched around his hairy neck. In the dining area, Mother sets the plates out upon the table; a wave of guilt washes over me, and, careful not to make too much noise, not to alert him to my presence, I cross over to the table, gently take the plates from Mother's hands. They are soft and cold, and smell of lavender, dishwashing liquid, and ashes.
She looks surprised, though not unpleasantly so. "You want to help me set the table, sweetie?"
"I…" I clear my throat. "I was thinking perhaps we could eat in the living room tonight."
She laughs, gently places her hands on my shoulders, pushes me into a dining chair. "Oh, honey. I know you're uncomfortable sitting here now, but honestly, it doesn't bother me."
"It…doesn't?" I ask uncertainly, wondering if we are talking about the same thing.
"Of course not." She sets down the salad bowl in the middle of the table, places an empty glass on the coaster in front of me. "It wasn't your fault. Not entirely." She sighs, in a melodramatic fashion. "Some girls, well…they're just trouble right from the get-go. Just nasty, brazen little tarts." She gives me a sideways look, difficult to interpret, as she busies herself in the kitchen. "Most men with some sense of pride," she murmurs, "Would know to stay away from girls like that."
My face begins to burn. "Girls like her."
"Beg your pardon, dear?" she enquires delicately, stirring the contents of the steaming pot on the stove.
"You mean, girls like her. Don't you? Girls like Mary Jane."
Mother shrugs. "Well, dear, you said it, I didn't."
I shake my head. "She isn't actually like that, Mother. You would like her. Really, you would. She just…made a mistake. That's all."
A guffaw, familiar, mocking, chilling my bones to the marrow, erupts from the living-room armchair. "That's not all she made, is it, kiddo?" A snort. "Or, well, tried to make, anyhow. Put a stop to that pretty quickly, didn'tcha, Tubby?"
I stare ahead of myself, feel my fists clench as if in the grip of a spasm. Mother frowns, purses her lips. "He did the right thing, Torbert. What kind of a relationship could he possibly have with a girl like that?"
"Hell, Mary – girls like that, you don't have relationships with." He leans out from the armchair, the sickly light of the television distorting his grinning, fatuous face, highlighting every scar, every rough stretch of stubble, all the emblems of the working man he is so proud to call himself. "Of course, any hope you might've had in that direction was pretty much shot right outta the water, right, kid?" He shakes his head, chuckling nastily. "What a stud you turned out to be. What a stallion. Chick starts crying and you leap offa her like her tits have caught fire or something."
Mother grimaces in disgust, but says nothing, keeps stirring. For my part, I am rigid, sightless, at the table; my broken fingernails dig deep into the palms of my hands.
"You," I say, finally and slowly, the words grinding out of my voice-box one by one, "Are not real. You were killed years ago by a staph infection, resulting from an accident at the construction site. I know this. I watched you die."
Father laughs, spreads his arms wide. "Hey. I'm here, ain't I? Hey, Mary," he calls into the kitchen, "That dinner cold yet or what?"
"It's coming, Torbert," Mother grates out.
"Anyway," he continues, putting his feet up in a leisurely motion, "I can't say as I'm surprised that you didn't manage to break off a piece. Not surprised that she split pretty soon after, either. You always did have problems holding onto your women, huh, boy?"Is it possible to kill someone you know is already dead? "That is none of your business," I reply through clenched teeth.
"Yeah, none of 'em seemed to stick around that long," he goes on blithely. "Not that there were that many of them to begin with. Ah, hell, maybe you're better off, kiddo. Women…they get mad, y'know, they cry. Make you feel things you don't want to." He shrugs. "Who knows? Maybe it's best that this one's gone, too. Looked like you were getting too attached to her, anyway."
"Point One: I was – am – not 'attached' to her," I say furiously. "We have a mutually beneficial partnership. That is all."
He snickers. "Riiiight. You've just 'grown accustomed to her face', is that it?"
"Such a remark only goes to prove my earlier point that you are not really my father," I shoot back, as Mother tsk-tsks and places a dish of casserole on the table before me. "Even a literary allusion as elementary as that would have been beyond his capacities."
"A lit'ry whosit?" he asks, swigging from a can of beer.
"That's more like it," I reply; Mother ladles food onto the plate in front of me. Absently, automatically, I begin to eat, despite the fact that I am not hungry. "And, Point Two: Mary Jane is not 'gone'. She is coming back. Soon. Very soon. She told me so herself, and I have no reason to doubt her."
"I'd say you have plenty of reason to doubt her, dear," Mother murmurs dubiously.
"Got that right, Mary," Father rejoins. "C'mon, Otto, even you can't be that thick. You and me, we both know she ain't coming back."
"You're wrong!" I snap, feeling a pulse beginning to beat inside my temples.
"I don't think so. Oh, sure, maybe she'll come on back to live here with you, hang around the house, maybe even letcha give her a tumble this time around. She won't really have come back, though." He gives me what passes for a meaningful look, takes a philosophical pull off his beer, exhales in satisfaction, smacks his lips together. Taking his time, the old bastard.
"One thing you never did, Otto. You've done all sorts of things, yeah, some of 'em pretty far gone - but not what she's gonna do. You never killed your old man. Never had the stones when you were younger, and then it was too late, right? And now you're gonna let that girl go off and destroy herself just for what you never had the balls to do. She comes back – if she comes back – you won't have her, you'll have an empty shell, all burned out inside." He shakes his head in mock sorrow. "Pret-ty screwed up, you ask me. 'Course, you been a screw-up since forever, anyway, so whaddaya expect?"
"She is not going to destroy herself!" I snarl, my voice growing strangled, oddly high-pitched. "And if I never killed you, you disgusting old swine, I can assure you, it was purely due to a lack of opportunity. I'm proud of what she's doing. Deeply proud. It is exactly what I would've done."
"That's true. But then, you don't like yourself very much, honey," Mother smiles beatifically, as she pours milk into my glass.
I blink, not having the faintest idea as to how I should respond to this. Father laughs uproariously.
"Ahhh…good one, Mary."
I bow my head, clamping my eyes shut, pressing my fingers to my temples, so hard they could almost penetrate through to my skull. "Leave me alone," I mutter beneath my suddenly short, rasping breaths. "You aren't even real. Just leave me alone."
"Kid's talking to himself, Mary," I hear him sneer.
"That's the first sign of madness, isn't it?" she asks innocently.
I slam the palms of my hands down upon the tabletop so hard it hurts, sending messages of pain shooting up my nerve-endings. "Leave me ALONE!" I cry.
And I am alone.
No plates upon the table. No salad, no casserole. The television is off. The stove is cold. The armchair and the kitchen are both empty. An icy wind moans, softly, near-imperceptibly, through the crack in the living-room windowpane. My whole body is wracked by a violent shiver.
That's it.
I cannot remain here one single moment longer.
==
The street lamps reflect, blurs of failing luminescence, in the dark puddles of rainwater that bestrew this empty street. The wind cuts through me; I wrap my plain brown coat around myself tighter, sink deeper into its folds, adjust the brim of my hat. The sun will not show itself for hours to come; if it rains again, as it surely will, then it will not show itself at all.
It was only after I left that house that I was able to come up with a reason for doing so. I'm going to a store, buy a packet of cigarettes. I'll sit on a bench in the park and smoke them, one by one, until dawn. It isn't that I'm afraid to go home. Not at all. I just need some air, that's all.
I dare not think about what it was that drove me to leave the house. Such thoughts lead to a dark place, a mad place. I am not mad. Sleep-deprived, perhaps. Unwilling to be left on my own. Perhaps. But I know I am not mad.
I pass by a large, sleek building, dark and slender, arching gracefully into the stratosphere. A gold-plated plaque, chiselled with flowing, elegant script, reads: Julienne Academy of Ballet. The name rings a bell; I seem to see it, scribbled upon lined notepaper, in a rushed and feminine hand. It was one of the places on Mary Jane's list, one of the bastions of beauty she and I hoped to topple. And topple it we shall, when she comes back. To celebrate. It will be my gift to her.
I must stop thinking of her, dwelling upon her return. I am falling into a pattern I dislike, an endless loop from which I must extricate myself. When Hades allowed Persephone to leave him, he gave her a handful of pomegranate seeds; eating them bound her forever to his world, to the underworld. If only I could have such an ironclad guarantee.
For the first time in a long while, I feel lost. Wayward. Empty inside. Why this should be so, I have no idea; only that feeling, that eternal bleating in the background of my mind, gives me a clue: that feeling that something is going, or will go, terribly wrong.
I close my eyes, walk along the street blind, feeling my breath rushing past my lips in a frozen cloud. Escape. That's what it's all about. The search for an escape, for a way out, an emergency hatch. I open my eyes just as I set foot in front of a tavern, run-down, seedy, smoky windows sealing it away from the cold world outside. Mary Jane found her escape in alcohol, at least for a while, perhaps for only a night. One night, sinking into eternity, allowing it to wash over your head and drown everything you feel, everything you are. That's all I really need right now. One night of nothingness. One night of no longer being who I am.
I take a breath, and push against the smeared glass door.
The interior of the bar is every bit as dismal as the exterior. More so. The light is a sick, flickering yellow, giving the three ashen alcoholics perched on the ripped barstools a jaundiced look. The floor is uncarpeted, coated in muddy boot-tracks, the smell of spilled beer seeping up from it, infecting the sinuses. Two threadbare pool tables. A jukebox in one corner, which is, dispiritingly enough, playing one of those vapid 1960s girl group songs that Mary Jane so adores. "And you can never go home any more..."
None of this is particularly conducive to making me want to stay, but I remind myself that the setting doesn't matter, nothing around me matters, and make my way resolutely to the bar.
The barman, fiftyish and ungainly, gazes at me through tired, bloodshot eyes, arms folded in a resigned kind of posture. "What's your poison?"
How apt. I study the dusty bottles on the shelf behind him; it's been so many years since last I was truly intoxicated that it is difficult for me to remember what got me drunk within the shortest space of time. "Tequila, thank you," I finally say. The barman nods, ducks down, resurfaces with a cracked shot glass and a bottle of amber liquid; he up-ends the latter quickly over the former and slides it across to me. I catch it, down it, and shudder; heat flashes through my body, the alcohol thick on my tongue. I pour out another one, gulp that one down, too.
"You might want to take it easy there," the bartender drawls, the indifference of his tone belying the concern of his words. "That rotgut's strong stuff."
"I know," I say shortly, studying the grimy surface of the bar.
"You okay there?"
I give a short, flat laugh. "Don't I seem 'okay'?"
He leans on the edge of the bar, studies me with a squint. "Not really. If you don't mind my saying so. Look a little down. Like you lost someone, maybe." He shrugs. "Hey, what do I know. None'a my business, right?"
"That's right," I say coldly, and pour out another shot. I slug it back, growing more accustomed to the taste, to the burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. "And I haven't lost anyone," I add, a touch too loudly; I feel a sudden need to convince this man that he is wrong in his assessment of me. "Not permanently, anyway. She is coming back."
"Ah," says the barman, smirking slightly in triumph. "It's a 'she'. Yeah. I kinda guessed it."
I scowl, fill up my glass again in silence, wondering why I bothered to volunteer such information to a total stranger.
Unfortunately, he seems unwilling to let it go. "Hell, I'd say most guys come in here, it's 'cause of a 'she', know what I mean?" He chuckles huskily, his laugh a dry rasp. "Women. More trouble than they're worth."
"No woman controls me," I mutter darkly as I drink.
The barman sighs. "Ah, we'd all like to think so. But look around you." He sweeps an arm in the direction of the barflies, none of whom seem to acknowledge or take any offense at this. "Here we all are."
I look up at him sharply; despite the fact that he cannot see my eyes, I know he feels them, for his own widen slightly, and he takes an involuntary step back. "Kindly stop talking to me," I growl.
He raises his arms in a helpless gesture, and turns away, busying himself once again. I pour out another shot, raise it to eye level, study the light refracting through its liquid depths. My head feels oddly light, my tongue loose, sliding around inside my mouth.
"We're not lovers," I say.
The barman turns back around, one eyebrow raised. "Sorry?"
"She and I. We're not lovers. We're not friends. Partners, maybe." I consider it. "Yes, that works. Partners. That phrase covers a whole range of possibilities." I laugh, once, a harsh sound, like the report of a rifle. "A multitude of sins. Yes." I drink.
The barman doesn't seem to know how to respond to this. I can't honestly say that I blame him. Another shot. I feel very warm, all my limbs, even my artificial ones, tingling ever so slightly.
"I wouldn't ordinarily be here, you know," I remark, apropos of nothing; I feel I owe him some sort of explanation. "In a place like this. I kept her away from alcohol for as long as I could. She'd probably say I was being hypocritical. But she's not here now, so I don't suppose it matters. Does it?"
"Well, like you said," the bartender replies, picking up my glass and giving it a smooth wipe with a washcloth, "She is coming back, so I wouldn't get myself into too ragged a state, if I were you."
"Coming back..." I repeat dully, watching, almost hypnotised, as the cloth passes across the surface of my glass, making it shine. I practically snatch it out of his hand as he sets it down again, pour another shot, down it. Am I drunk? I don't feel drunk. Surely it would take longer than this to make me drunk. (Or is that 'get' me drunk? Oh, well.)
"In the beginning," I say, sloshing the liquid in my glass around in an absent fashion, "I let her get away from me. Leave me, I mean. But it was different then. I was so confident, so utterly confident, that she'd come back. And she did. I was right."
"Well, there you go," he says off-handedly. "Guess you just gotta trust her."
I laugh again, this time longer, louder than before. "There isn't a single person in this entire city who trusts her. My own mother told me not to trust her. But I don't think it was actually my mother..." I add, furrowing my brow. The lights are very bright in here, rather painful. "I don't know. I really don't know what that was all about. Have you ever," I ask suddenly, hopefully, "Seen people you know aren't alive any more? Talking to you? Telling you things you'd rather not hear?"
He is beginning to look slightly uncomfortable. "Can't say as I have, man."
"Ah. Just me, then," I say, shrug, and down another shot. I squint at the bottle. "It's empty."
"Sure is."
"Am I drunk?" I ask him. I assume he would know.
He nods slowly. "Possibly. Very possibly."
I shake my head. "Then it's not nearly enough." I hold out my glass, wave it pointedly. "Give me another."
He frowns. "You know, I really don't think..."
"Another!" I bellow, slamming a hand down upon the table. Beneath my coat, my tentacles writhe in a threatening manner.
The bartender doesn't notice this, or maybe he does; either way, he's sufficiently intimidated to pour me another shot, which is what matters. I knock it back, motion to him to keep them coming.
She'd be arriving in Arizona right about now.
It's going to be a long night.
==
Has it been an hour already? That clock doesn't seem too clear. The numbers are blurred, wavy. I peer closer, trying to make some sense of it; actually, I think two hours might have passed. Been sitting here drinking for two hours. Something about alcohol poisoning flashes across my mind, but doesn't remain; besides, I'm filled with so much poison already that it should counteract any ill-effects. My brain stews, simmers, a kind of dank rage bubbling up inside me, the rage that's never really that far from the surface anyway. The bartender is saying something about not being legally able to serve me any more, but since when does the law apply to me? That's what I'd like to know.
"Listen," I state with dignity, trying not to sway too much, even though the rest of the room seems to be doing just that, "I can't stop drinking now. I haven't forgotten her yet. I'm not...not..." What's the word? "Unconscious," I continue smoothly. "Unconscious of myself. I can still think and I still know who I am." I hang my head, shake it slowly. "I don't feel very well," I mutter. "Something dreadful is going to happen."
"If you keep packing 'em away like that much longer, you bet it will," rejoinders the bartender, discreetly trying to take my glass away.
"Do you think it's my fault?" I ask him, suddenly urgent.
"I'm sure it's not," he says vaguely, not knowing what I mean, not caring. The jukebox is playing again, softly this time; someone has elected to play a song I don't recognise but could easily qualify as the single most depressing piece of music ever written. "To think we can find happiness, hidden in a kiss," sighs the disembodied, melancholy voice. "Ah, to think we can find happiness - that's the greatest mistake there is..."
"Did you ever..." I swallow. "Did you ever do something, and it felt right at the time, and you knew you were completely right to do it, but later you wondered if it was really for the best that you had done it? I mean, say you wanted to prove a point that was totally, one hundred per cent correct, so you found someone and you did something to her that did prove that point, proved it perfectly. But then, what if, maybe, even though you were right, it maybe ended up hurting that person, even though they didn't know it, and that hurt you, and your being right just didn't really seem that important any more?"
The bartender says nothing, keeps his eyes down, polishes the glass.
"I didn't wreck her life," I say firmly. "I made it better, so much better. I did not destroy her. Did I?"
The barman sighs, slings his washcloth over one shoulder, places his hands on his hips. "Look, buddy. I think you're about as sloshed as you're ever gonna get. I think you gotta leave now. Go home, sleep it off. Wait for your girl."
"All I ever do these days," I reply, "Is wait for my girl." I lean my head on the palm of my hand, slide crooked fingers through my hair. "It didn't used to be this way," I mumble. "I didn't used to be this way. People feared me. They still do fear me! But now they fear...us. Her and me."
One of the barflies, an unshaven, plaid-shirted brute in a trucker's hat, a few seats away from me, snorts loudly. "Be pretty surprising to find anyone's afraid of you, pal."
Slowly, I turn to him, my eyes narrowing. "I beg your pardon?"
He snickers, shakes his head, turns back to his beer. "Pussywhipped son of a bitch," I hear him mutter.
The black rage inside my head fizzes, percolates. Any second now, it will run over, spill into my blood. "Would you care to repeat that?" I ask softly, drawing stealthily to my feet.
The bartender looks nervously back and forth between us. "Hey, look, fellas, I don't need any - "
I slam a tentacle down onto the bar; his eyes grow huge, and he leaps back. "Jesus!"
The barfly, still nursing his beer, doesn't notice. I keep my eyes focused upon him, my vision narrowed through a tunnel of descending darkness. My pulse is quickening, in fury, in anticipation. "Repeat. What. You. Said."
He chuckles, and looks up. "I said, 'pussywhipped son of a bitch'. 'Kay, man? 'Cause that's what you are. Spent the whole night bitchin' and moanin' about some piece of ass, and then - " He finally looks over at me, sees the tentacle on the bar. It's an interesting thing, to see all the blood drain out of a man's face within the space of a minute. "Oh. No."
"Oh, yessss," I hiss.
With a sound of shredding cloth, my tentacles explode out of my coat, shining, beautiful, deadly limbs of steel, curling and twisting to the rooftops, almost entirely filling the small room. The other two barflies shriek, rush towards the door; I sweep out my right tentacle, block their path, shove them back so violently they fall, skid across the filthy floor.
The third barfly sits on his stool, rooted to the spot, able to do nothing but stare; I slowly make my way over to him, taking care not to swagger on my feet, and stand before him. I am unable to keep the smile from my face as I clasp his chin within the claws of one tentacle. "Do you know," I breathe, "I really ought to thank you. This is just what I think I've been needing."
And, still holding him by the chin, I lift him off the stool, high into the air; feel the crack of his breaking jawbone as it travels along the length of my tentacle. Behind me, I hear an overly familiar snick-snack; without letting the barfly down, I spin on my heel, smack the shotgun out of the bartender's hands, deal him a blow to the forehead that sends him to the ground, blood oozing from within the depths of his hair.
I turn back to the barfly, held aloft within my claws, limp as a ragdoll, moaning insensibly. "Still find it hard to believe," I ask, "That anyone would be afraid of me?"
"I sure don't. Oh, wait. Did you say 'afraid of' or 'amused by'?"
That voice penetrates through the alcoholic haze, cuts through to the core of my brain, finds the black and oozing centre of all my hatred. It is, of course, and could only be...
Spider-Man crouches, gangly as his arachnid namesake, his gaudy costume the only bright colors to be seen in this dismal place, upon the wall above the jukebox, gazing at me with his usual insolent stare. "I mean, there's just got to be a joke like this out there somewhere," he continues blithely. "You know - 'an octopus walks into a bar...'"
I growl, hurl the barfly as hard as I can; Spider-Man darts away, the barfly smashing into the wall, collapsing onto the jukebox, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass; he hits the floor, lies still.
I lash out, unbalanced, blinded by loathing and drink; he evades me with maddening ease, seizes hold of the tentacle, uses its momentum to leap into the air; an explosion of pain as his heel connects with my jaw. I stumble backward, regaining balance only thanks to my tentacles; I snatch at him again, catch him this time, smack him against the wall; I feel his spine jarring, the plaster cracking, but, to his credit, he does not cry out. My grip is, however, apparently less secure than I'd thought, because he manages to squirm out of the tentacle's grasp, leaps onto the ceiling in a single, agile motion.
"Well, that was a little sad, Otto," he comments, vaulting over my other tentacle as it swoops in for an attack, dropping down to the floor. "I had playground slap-fights in third grade that did more damage than you just managed to."
"I'll kill you," I grind out.
"Oh, that's original." Another lash of the tentacle; another leap away, this time hurtling towards me; I see his fist coming, but do nothing to stop it from connecting with my face. My jaw, already badly bruised, feels as though it will splinter, and my nose gushes blood; but surrender is out of the question, and besides, all the physical pain in the world is preferable to what I've been suffering lately. I just wish I could focus better, that's all. Stop the world from dipping and swaying.
"And what's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this, anyway?" the web-slinger goes on, leaping in for another punch, which I block. "Hey, different strokes and everything, but speaking for myself, this place has way too much of a Charles Bukowski thing going on."
"You know," I hiss, "It's aspects of my life like you that I came here in order to forget." Immediately, I regret having said this.
He peers at me. "Oh, my God," he finally says, voice filled with dawning glee. "You're...you're tanked, aren't you? Hammered. Sloshed. Shickered." He laughs uproariously, shaking his head, folding his arms. "Oh, this is just too great. After all these years, it's like a whole new side of you has suddenly revealed itself to me. I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for the opportunity to rhyme 'Otto' with 'Blotto'?"
I snarl, strike out, knock his feet out from underneath him; he falls backwards onto the palms of his hands, scurries, in what could only be described as a spider-walk, back up onto the wall, where he gazes down upon me, chuckling condescendingly.
"Now I wonder, what could have driven a super-stable guy like you to drink, Otto?" He cocks his head to one side. "Woman trouble, maybe?" It might be my imagination, but I think I detect an undercurrent of steel in his voice.
I bark out a mirthless laugh. "Oh, you don't know the half of it, wall-crawler." I lick my lips, taste the lingering burn of the alcohol, mixed now with the metallic flavor of my own blood. "You must feel quite satisfied. You probably think you've won. But you haven't. She's coming back to me. She told me. Promised."
That gets a reaction. "Coming back? What are you talking about?"
I slam a tentacle into the ceiling; one of the light fixtures comes loose, crashes to the ground in a brief eruption of glass, a rain of plaster following in its wake. He leaps down, lands atop me, his fist smashing into my nose; I feel a crunching sensation, wonder if it's broken again, but if it is, the tequila seems to be shielding me from feeling its full effects. His momentum, however, knocks me off my feet, and we crash into the ruins of the jukebox, my tentacles flailing wildly all around.
He seizes me by the collar, hauls my face close to his. "What do you mean, 'she's coming back'?" he demands, and I feel an immense satisfaction that he is finally treating this in all seriousness. "Isn't she with you?"
"Do you honestly think," I growl, "That I would be in a place like this if she was?"
He slams my head against the tiled floor; a fresh spasm of pain. "Where is she?"
Something clicks inside the murky haze that is my mind; an idea, so simple and so perfect, seizes hold of my imagination. Spider-Man. Of course. The one person alive who was ever able to defeat me. He can find her. He can stop her before she kills her father, before she wrecks herself, before she becomes a hollowed-out shell. Save her from herself. Bring her back to New York. Back to me.
Why didn't I think of this before?
"She's in Arizona," I hear myself saying. "Gone to Tucson, Arizona. To the Toussaint Nursing Home..."
He eyes me in something approaching disbelief. "What? Arizona? But why?"
"Because," I say slowly, drawing it out one word at a time, "The Toussaint Nursing Home, in Tucson, Arizona..."
"What?"
"The Toussaint Nursing Home, in Tucson, Arizona, is where her father lives. And when she gets to him..." I begin to laugh, drunkenly, despairingly, "She is going to kill him."
Spider-Man drops me so quickly you
would almost imagine that my words have burned him. He leaps to his feet,
staring down at me. "You're lying."
I shake my head, gesture towards
the door. "She left two days ago. I would think she'd be arriving quite soon,
now." I feel a hideous, malevolent grin stretch my features. "If I were you, I
wouldn't waste any more time, little spider."
He stares at me a while longer; he jerks a hand out, stabs a finger in my direction. "This is not over," he hisses. "Not by an incredibly long shot."
"Go," I whisper.
And he does, racing out the door, leaving it swinging wildly behind him.
In the street beyond, I hear the distant sound of police sirens drawing closer; the barman must have tripped a silent alarm at some point or another. Sighing, I haul myself to my feet, slip quietly out the door and into the night beyond. It has been raining, and the air is fresh, cold and clean. I can see the blurred shapes of the streetlights reflected in the slick black pavement. My tentacles do the majority of the work involved in getting me home in one piece; my legs feel like rubber bands, and I am only faintly conscious that my body is aching.
I make my way up Arbor Street, not bothering to take the rooftops, not caring if anyone sees me. I'm tired, all of a sudden; tired as I have never been in my entire life, tired as though I have been wandering a desert or a jungle, not the streets of New York. At the door I search my pockets with clumsy fingers for the key; unable to find it, I allow one tentacle to pick the lock. I lean against the door as it opens, slamming it against the wall as I stagger inside.
Every light is off; nothing stirs amid the shadows. The place is exactly as empty as I left it, so many hours ago. Well, what did I expect, after all?
I don't remember climbing the staircase, although I must have done so, because the next thing I know I'm opening the door to my parents' room, stumbling inside, collapsing onto the warm, soft, welcoming bed. As I fall asleep, my face nestled in the pillow, I detect the faint smell of flowers on the sheets; the scent of her, the proof that she was once here, the trace of her that remains when everything else is gone.
==
The webs shoot out, one after another, relentless in the dark, wrapping around lamp-post, flagpole, telegraph wire, and all Spider-Man can hear is the pounding of his own heart, all he can taste is his own panic. There's every chance that Ock was lying. Every chance that this is all a ruse. MJ wouldn't kill her own father, surely, surely not...
Even as he tries to convince himself of it, he knows it is a lie. He feels it, feels the truth of what Ock has told him. Mary Jane is hell-bent, he knows that; driving herself to the limit, testing how far she can go before she self-destructs. To kill her father would be to kill herself, and that's exactly what she wants.
That's exactly what he's got to stop.
Later, the airport baggage-handlers will swear up and down that they had no idea there was a stowaway aboard Flight 397 to Arizona. Much less, they will state firmly, did they have any idea that that stowaway was a superpowered vigilante, possibly a mutant, who had been vilified on a near-weekly basis by the Daily Bugle for the last decade or so.
No, they didn't catch a glimpse, that rainy early morning, of a flash of blue and red streaking over their heads as they loaded the luggage into the belly of the plane. No, they didn't notice the traces of something that looked like webbing on the edge of the door - it was late, it was dark, how could they?
J. Jonah Jameson will write a blistering editorial excoriating these two baggage-handlers for their carelessness and lack of observance. It will cost them their jobs.
All of this will come later, though. Much later. After it is all over.
==
Now
Philip James Watson is my father.
And I'm on my way to Tucson, Arizona because that's where I'm going to kill him.
I adjust my eyepatch, flick Brenda around experimentally; the view in my right eye whirls up, down and around correspondingly. On the radio, over and above the crackling static, Lee Hazlewood growls a threat: "Some velvet morning when I'm straight, I'm gonna open up your gate..." I remember this song from when I was a little kid; it used to scare me so badly that I'd demand Mom turn it off every time she tried to play it. It doesn't scare me any more, though. Nothing does.
A large rectangular shadow looms by the side of the road, backlit by the dawn; as I draw closer, I can see that it's a billboard, painted in a tasteless shade of green, faded now by the ceaseless rays of the sun; in cheerful yellow lettering, it greets me: Welcome to Tucson! How nice of it. And in the distance, I see the city itself, a tiny dollhouse city scorched red by the sun.
I do. I do feel welcome. To Tucson.
==
The Toussaint Nursing Home is right at the end of a shady, elm-lined street, wide as a boulevard, quieter than the desert. As I draw closer, the Caddy's engine roaring in my ears, I can see that it looks like a nice place, large, well-designed, spacious. A well-tended flower garden out front, a big picture window overlooking it. Comfortable enough to accommodate a great many people in need of peace and quiet in their twilight years.
I sit there a few metres off, idling, my head on one side as I watch the place through one slitted eye, the sun winking off the black plastic of my eyepatch.
"One," I say calmly; behind me, Brenda writhes in anticipation. "Two. Three. Four...
"Five."
I stomp down on the gas as hard as I can; the car screams into life, barrelling down the road; my hair whips and lashes my face and shoulders, my knuckles are pure white on the wheel, sweat streaks away from my face and I scream like a goddamn banshee; the flower beds rear up, are crushed underneath my wheels, and I only barely catch sight of horrified elderly faces leaping away from the picture window as I drive this son of a bitch right through it.
The whole universe explodes in a shower of crystal; my skin feels as if it's being bitten into all over, blood runs down my arms, stains my shirt an even deeper red, but my system has gone into override mode, ignoring everything but the driving rhythm of my own heart. Even the bone-shaking thump of the car hitting the ground, of floorboards cracking underneath its weight, doesn't faze me; I leap out of the Caddy before it's even stopped moving, my eyes wild, my nostrils flaring, teeth clenched as hard as my fists.
All around me, total pandemonium. Poor old people screaming, clutching their chests, running away. They'll be okay. It's not any of them I'm looking to hurt.
"DADDEEEEEEEE!" I howl.
A couple of orderlies, dressed in white, burly, rush towards me; irritated, I knock them aside with a sweep of my tentacle, and stride forward, heading purposefully down a corridor, following the general crush of panicking humanity. Choosing at random, I allow Brenda to seize hold of a male nurse, slam him against the wall. "Where's Philip Watson?" I demand.
"I - I - I - " he stutters; I slam him back harder.
"Philip Watson!" I bellow.
"Ah - ah - Room 206!" he squeaks. I let him drop, stalk away. So much for the nursing profession's unshakeable commitment to the patient.
I swing round a corner, through another corridor; that nursing-home scent thick in my nostrils, that smell of cleaning fluid and linen and age. The walls are covered in peeling paper, cream-colored, patterned with tiny bunches of brown flowers. Every so often, a picture, usually a landscape or a rural scene. I don't really absorb any of this; my stare is fized straight ahead of me, my mind a writhing mass of snakes, my blood an electrified current inside me.
Room 206. Shabby wooden door, scuff marks at the bottom. I kick it in, feel it splinter around my boot. My head whirls, vertigo is setting in.
Dad's room. One single bed, the covers made up neatly, tucked in, hospital corners. The same wallpaper, the same prints in frames. Sunlight filtering in through thin gauze curtains. And pressed into the corner. Frozen like a deer. Able to do nothing, nothing more, than stare and stare and stare.
Dad.
God. He's so...small now. Old. Frail. His body, underneath the moth-eaten red robe and blue-and-white striped pyjamas, is bent and bowed, sticklike and pathetic. His hair and mustache are pure white, and the lines on his horsey face are so deep they look like scars. Liver spots, intertwined with ropey blue veins, dot his pale, shaking hands; his eyes are yellow, bloodshot, filled with uncomprehending fear.
"I remember you," I hear myself saying out loud, as I take one step into the room, "As a giant."
His breaths claw their way out of his throat. He makes no attempt to speak.
"A big, tall, strong, redheaded giant," I continue, moving slowly closer. "And it was your world we all lived in. Mom, Gayle and me. And we were all terrified of you."
"Mary Jane..." he croaks; even his voice has faded, aged.
"Even after we got away from you," I go on, "It wasn't enough. You still had to take everything from us, everything you could. All Mom's money...Did you know she died soon after that?"
He opens his mouth, closes it, then nods. "Gayle..."
"Oh, yeah. I guess she would've told you." I adjust one of the prints on the walls, try to avoid looking at him, try to avoid thinking about how fragile he looks now. Keep him in my mind's eye, as he was, as I remember him. Keep the monster in view. "God. It's been a long time. I should ask you all sorts of questions. How've you been? How's life been treating you? You ever finish that novel?" I laugh sadly.
"Mary Jane..." he begins hesitantly. "I never did mean to hurt you."
"Oh, that's just something people say, isn't it, Dad? The all-purpose excuse. Like if you didn't know what you were doing, that makes it okay." I lower my brows in his direction; my voice descends into a serpentine hiss. "You ruined my life. Did you know that? So many things I've done, so many things I can't do, because of you."
"I know I screwed up, MJ," Dad tries, his voice trembling, either with fear or some other emotion, I can't tell. Don't pay attention to it. He's been a liar his whole life. Don't pay attention. "I know I treated you and Gayle and your mom badly. I know, and I'm sorry. I kept trying to do the best I could, but my best was never good enough..."
I slam Brenda into the wall; veins of cracked plaster travel all the way up to the ceiling. "The best you COULD?!" I scream. "Screw you! I'm ruined because of you! I'm a monster because of you! Everything, everything in my world has gone to hell because of you! And you stand there, you old son of a bitch, and you tell me with a straight face that you did the best you could?!"
A more familiar look descends upon his features; a hard, cold look, an unforgiving and cruel look. "You know what? I don't care if you believe me. I don't care what you think of me. I mean, really, am I supposed to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness, Mary Jane?" he asks bitingly. "Am I supposed to cry and scream and tell you that everything you are is because of what happened years and years ago?" He shakes his head. "Oh, MJ. I knew you weren't that bright, but, Christ - I never thought you'd do anything this stupid."
He seems stronger, taller, as if the years have fallen away and he's the adult once more, I the child. I can feel this situation starting to slip away from me. I can feel all the power I have starting to drain out of me. "I'm going to kill you," I whisper. "Do you understand that?"
"You can try, honey," he says, an obscene gentleness in his voice, a grown-up indulging a little kid. "You can try."
I shriek, send Brenda flying in his direction; he ducks, and I'm surprised at his agility, his speed, even at his advanced age; he rushes past me, shoves me to one side, dashes out into the corridor. I spin around, race out after him.
He's far ahead of me, speeding around the corner up ahead; I pursue, blinded by a rage so intense that I can taste it, ashen and bitter in my mouth, like arsenic; Brenda, whipped into just as towering a fury, lashes from side to side, smashing holes in the walls as I run along.
I round another corner, look around wildly; the loud squeal of a rusted door-hinge draws my attention, and I look over just in time to see a shadow disappearing down a darkened staircase framed by a narrow doorway. On the slimy brick of the wall, a sign reads: This Way to Swimming Area.
I rush over, stand in the doorway, looking down into the darkness; the stone steps curve down in a rough spiral, beaded with droplets of water, as if they're sweating - unsurprising, considering that an infernal heat rises up from the unseen pool area below, plastering my bangs to my forehead. I make my way down, careful not to slip; Brenda clings to the wall beside me, holding my balance. I don't need to rush this. He's basically trapped down here; might as well have hidden in the basement. I can afford to take my time.
Gradually, a glimmer of watery blue light up ahead greets my eyes, a foxfire luminescence in the impenetrable dark. I step down, off the last stair, into the swimming area.
It's as big as a gymnasium, dark as a tomb; the only light available is that which is shed dimly by lights installed around the jewel-green pool itself, casting wavy aquamarine patterns all over the black tiled walls; it casts the place in an eerie, supernatural glow. Even the high windows, all along the Northern side, are tinted black, admitting no natural light. Every sound, no matter how minute, echoes off the walls, bounces away from the ceiling, dies in the watery depths of the pool. The smell of chlorine is thick in the still, dead, silent air.
"Dad!" I yell; "Dad!" "Dad! "Dad!" my voice cries back to me from all around. I turn, head whipping from side to side; no sign of him, not even a giveaway footstep.
I close my eyes, massage the lids; my eyes feel like they're burning, red with lack of sleep. Christ, it's so hard to think. But I shouldn't think, should I? If I think about this, everything will stop, and I can't afford to stop, never again. He deserves this. I deserve this. I can go home to Otto, and he'll be proud of me, and we'll live happily ever after or whatever happens after things like this...
Why didn't he apologise? I mean really apologise? Cry and beg and whimper? Every time I fantasised about this, that's what happened. Sometimes I forgave him, sometimes not. But he didn't even give me the opportunity. He hasn't changed. He'll never change.
Now I have to kill him. I mean, I don't have any choice. Until now, there was always this chance, this last-chance grab at redemption...But now I've just got to do it. I've just got to. I don't see any other way. There's just no way out now.
"Don't make this difficult, for Christ's sake!" I yell out in frustration. "I know you're here!"
"Really? Damn. I was kinda hoping to surprise you," a voice replies.
Not from anywhere close to me.
Not from ground level.
From above.
Spider-Man is framed in one of the darkened windows up on high, crouching on the pane, gazing down at me, and seeing him here is like seeing the ghost of someone you killed; it's the shock of something being so totally and utterly out of its context that it seems you must be hallucinating, that it can't really be there at all.
"You're here," I say, because I can't figure out what else to say.
"I'm here," he responds quietly, and drops down to the ground. We stare at each other over the shimmering pool, divided by this body of emerald water.
I haven't seen him since the night of the fashion show. I had thought that, after a while, I would forget exactly what he looked like, remember him in vague, unfocused terms: red, blue, black, a mask, white eyes. I thought he would become a stranger to me, someone I'd think of and be unable to connect to any particular feeling or memory. That or I would hate him, hate him the way Otto hates him, as a thorn in my side, disrupting my plans, spoiling my fun.
But he's here now. And I can't feel anything other than the whistlING wind as he holds me close and we soar above the skyscrapers, held up only by a length of webbing; and his mouth on mine, as I'd push up his mask and kiss him, tasting his sweat on his lips; and the way he'd step out the bedroom window in the mornings, the sun's rays casting the colors of his costume in an even brighter shade; and the frustration, and the excitement, and the love.
He floors me. After all this time, after everything that's happened, he still has the power to floor me.
"Why?" I ask him softly, pacing slowly across the pool's edge, never taking my eyes off him.
He knows what I'm talking about. Of course he does. "I have to stop you," he replies.
"Where's my father?" I ask, halting.
"I can't let you kill him."
"That's not an answer."
"It's my answer."
I feel like crying and I don't know why. "I'm not looking for a fight with you," I say, keeping my voice carefully under control.
"And you think I am?" he asks gently, and shakes his head, sighing. "Ohhh, God, MJ...how did we get here? How did things get this bad?"
"You should know," I say, ice seeping into my voice.
He looks down. I could attack him now. I stay still. "I want to apologise," he says slowly. "I want to tell you how sorry I am, for how I reacted and the stupid thing I said. I want to tell you how I've been eating my own heart ever since that day, and how every time people talk about you, every time someone says your name, my entire life just stops and can't go any further. I want to tell you a lot of things. But I think it would just make you hate me more. So I won't."
"You're right," I say.
He looks up.
"It would make me hate you more."
A shudder runs through him, and I'm grateful that I don't have to look at his face. Finally, he straightens up, looks right at me. "You don't seriously think that's gonna be enough to get me to give up on you, do you?"
I feel oddly trapped, oddly cornered. If only he weren't here. If only he'd stayed in New York. I don't even know how he found out about this, and I can't bring myself to care. "I can't see why you wouldn't," I say, without knowing why I'm saying it, "When even I've given up on me."
And Brenda lashes out, quicker than thought, stretching her entire length across the pool, snatching at him; he seizes hold of her, throws himself over the pool, lands only feet away from me. Holding onto Brenda, he pulls me close. "Is this really how you see yourself?" he asks, feet planted firmly onto the floor, holding on for grim death as Brenda thrashes madly. "Can you possibly hate yourself this much?"
"I like myself just fine, thank you," I hiss, pulling Brenda free with a mighty effort and slamming her up against the back of his head; he falls forward onto his hands, springs back up again. Brenda shoots out; he dodges her, leaping backward, coming to rest upon the wall.
"Really? Huh. And here I was thinking that people who like themselves don't generally, you know, try to destroy themselves with quite so much vigor."
I hit out at him again; he shoots out a jet of web-fluid, trying to web Brenda to the wall, but the moisture of the surface weakens its hold, and I pull her back in with relative ease. Even though I'm not exerting myself that much, I'm breathing hard, my hair in my eyes, my teeth ground together. "It's not myself I'm trying to destroy."
He leaps over my head, across to the wall behind me; I see him in my eyepatch, catch him in my sights, send Brenda after him; an explosion of breaking black tile is all that rewards my efforts, as he dodges me again. Why won't he fight me? Why won't he punch me, hit me, kick me, the way he does with Otto, with all the other rogues? Jesus, doesn't he even care that much?
"You can't kill your dad, MJ. I know he's scum. I know he's a waste of flesh. I know he hurt you, and I know that pain'll never stop. But - "
I cut him off with a piercing scream - I don't know why I do it, besides the fact that I always feel like screaming and so rarely get the chance - snatch him off the wall by one leg, and hurl him into the pool, trying to keep my grip, hold him down; but, as I knew he would, he twists around just before he hits the water and yanks hard on my tentacle, pulling me in after him.
The splash fills my ears, deafening me, and my world turns to water, flips end over end; nothing but cold, wet darkness. I break the surface, gasping for air, hear a hissing sound, a fizzing and crackling. The eyepatch. It's not supposed to be submerged in water, not supposed to be exposed to chemicals like chlorine. I cry out as a spark bites into my flesh; I tear the useless, short-circuiting item off, throw it away. The gift Otto gave me. It's ruined. He'll be so disappointed, so disappointed in me. I've disappointed everyone, everyone, and now I'll disappoint him.
Spider-Man seizes hold of me from behind, locks my arms behind my back. trapping Brenda against my spine. I howl, kick, thrash wildly, churning the water, great splashes of it erupting all around us.
"Eyepatch go boom?" he asks, trying to keep the levity in his voice; I can feel his breath, through the mask, warm on the side of my neck, and a sense memory brings me back to our bed, to waking up with his face pressed against my back. God, forget it, forget it, stay focused...
"It's for the best," he continues, raising his other arm, shooting a length of webbing up onto the edge of the diving board. "Seriously. I get that it was part of the whole villain makeover thing, but it really just made you look like a prettier version of Nick Fury."
He pulls us up, through the air. I'm limp, unmoving, watching as droplets of water fall from the ends of my hair down into the pool below, leaving tiny blemishes on the smooth surface that soon heal over. I should keep fighting. Brenda twitches slightly, listlessly; I know he feels it, but he doesn't do anything. I'm kind of glad. I'm just so damn tired all of a sudden.
We alight on the diving board; slowly and cautiously, he lets go of my arms, draws his away from its position around my waist. I slump down into a sitting position, my back and head bowed, not seeing or wanting to see anything other than the black curtain of my hair.
I feel him move towards me, hesitantly; "Get the hell away!" I snap, lashing out aimlessly with my arm, not having enough strength left to move Brenda. He doesn't protest; just makes a quick, quiet, graceful leap away, landing on one of the rungs of the ladder, gazing up at me from across the board's length.
I sit there, hunched over, my legs crossed. Brenda dangles down off the edge of the board, and I watch the water as it drips, drips, drips, down her shiny black length, off the tips of her claws. The dripping sound reverberates through the room, is the only sound left in all of creation.
"Are you happy?" Spider-Man asks me quietly.
I look up, over at him through the weariest eyes in the world. "What?"
"Are you happy?" he repeats. "Just...in general. Living this life. Does it make you happy?"
I don't answer. I just gaze out across the vast expanse of water stretching out underneath me, watch the glimmering patterns it throws up against the tiled wall.
"No," I say, without thinking about it. "No. I'm not happy."
And something inside me breaks. Something just...bursts, wide open. It's not exactly like waking up, or regaining consciousness, or remembering. A light doesn't go on inside my head, my heart doesn't start to sing, there's no big angelic choir to herald the moment. It's just this quiet, quiet thing that sneaks inside me, like something held taut for months and months and then allowed to go slack. I threatened my sister, my little nephews. I tore apart businesses, livelihoods, made people scared. I tried to kill my own father.
"I'm the worst human being in the world," I say, with infinite slowness, my voice devoid of expression. "The worst human being in the entire world."
Spider-Man shakes his head. "Oh, no, no, MJ..."
"I've destroyed everything," I go on. "Everything around me. I tore it all up. And it didn't...didn't make any difference, did it? Everything's different, but nothing's changed. Everything inside of me is dead or dying, but nothing's actually changed."
I hang my head again, unable to speak any more; it's washing over me now, that feeling, that thing that's burst within me. Waves and waves of it, like warm water, streaming through me. A systemwide failure. New life. Whatever you want to call it.
A sob escapes from somewhere deep within my chest; I didn't even realise I was crying. Thought that was just water from the pool, streaming down my face. I hug myself tightly, embrace myself, because nobody else will now, nobody else should.
Spider-Man doesn't come any closer, knows better than that. Spider-Man, the hell with that. Peter. His name is Peter. Once, I fell in love, and it was with Peter Parker.
I look up at him, look him dead in the eye. "Do you love me?" I ask softly.
"Yes," he says. He doesn't even hesitate. This isn't a question he has to think about.
"Then why haven't you stopped me yet?" And now I feel the tears as they come. My limbs are warming up. My heart is beginning to beat again. I'm coming back to life.
Peter carefully moves up the ladder, only one rung, taking it slow. He extends one hand in my direction, the fingers loose, the palm upturned and open. "Take my hand, MJ," he says gently. "Just take it. And that way we'll know where it is you want to be."
I sit. I look at his hand. I look at him. I look at his hand again.
Slowly, so very slowly, I draw myself to my feet. I stand there, on the edge of the diving board, looking only at him, seeing only him. The love I had. The love I still could have, if only, if only I deserved it.
"You're so full of light," I say softly, "It hurts me to look at you."
"Take it, MJ," he repeats, his voice wavering, barely above a whisper now. "Take my hand."
The blood in my body is starting to flow again; the great meltdown, the great thaw is starting, the end of the ice age. All I hear is the blood as it churns in my ears, roars like a waterfall; from somewhere far away, I think I hear someone yell something, but I don't know what, and I don't know if it's real or imagined.
I take one step forward, and another. I don't know if I'm going to take his hand or not. I don't know if I love him or not. I don't know just where it is that I want to be. But I do step forward.
An explosion. A sound so loud it echoes inside my skull, penetrates through to my bones, pounds its way inside my eardrums. Peter stares at me, screams: "NO! GOD, NO!"
What is he so upset about? I wonder idly. And then I feel it. Something wet, warm, oozing down my neck, pooling in my collarbone. And a searing, a burning, spreading through my brain.
I lift one shaking hand, press the palm
against my neck; it comes away soaked with red.
"Oh," I say. "Oh."
I turn my head, ever so gradually, to one side, look over my shoulder. Behind me, below me, on the other side of the pool, filling up that entire end of the room, men and women in black jackets, black caps, blue uniforms. All with guns. Rifles. Shotguns. Automatics.
Behind me.
Eyepatch. Would've let me know.
I've been shot.
I've been shot in the head.
I step backwards. The world is swaying, spinning away. Peter's face. Mask. The eyes, huge and white.
I'm lying in bed next to him as the sunlight pours through the curtains.
I'm bandaging his wounds, putting a compress on his blackened eye.
I'm eight years old, at my birthday party in the yard, and Mom is laughing in the sunshine.
I'm sitting on the couch next to Otto, my fingers drifting through his hair.
I'm on the catwalk. I'm striding down the catwalk, wearing something beautiful, being someone beautiful, as light erupts all around me, dazzling and brighter than the stars. The music is only for me, the lights are only for me, the applause, only for me.
If I fall, it will only be into a pile of red glitter. Not blood. Just red glitter.
And as my gaze flings up towards the ceiling, and I see the green-jewel lights of the pool dancing across it; as I sail backwards through the air, over the edge of the board, tumbling weightlessly and eternally through space, only one thought remains to me, one single thought left behind as all the others leave my brain one by one and the pale green water explodes into the sky above me:
You were right, Otto.
It really doesn't feel like anything.
==
The sickness sets in before I even open my eyes. She is not back yet.
I sit up, immediately regret it; white spots flash behind my eyes, a wave of nausea seeps through me, my head is clamped in a vise, and my nose and jaw, encrusted with dried blood, beat a dull, steady rhythm of pain throughout my skull. It hurts to move a muscle, hurts to take a breath. I don't remember a single thing I did last night. Upon deeper reflection, I do seem to recall a vague and hazy memory involving Spider-Man; perhaps my amnesia is a blessing in disguise.
I stagger downstairs, not even bothering to clean away the blood. Strong black coffee. That's what I need. One depressant counteracting the effects of another.
I stumble into the kitchen, set the kettle to boil; automatically, my tentacle stretches into the living room, snaps on the television. The noise stabs into my head, makes me wince in fresh agony, but it's better than silence.
The news. An anchorman, looking grave and serious, one finger pressed to the mike in his ear. "...On our top story, our Arizona correspondant, Diane Allison. Diane, what can you tell us?"
...Arizona?
I turn around, stare at the screen blankly.
"Well, David, although the police are attempting to keep things strictly under wraps for the moment, I can confirm the initial report filed earlier this morning. The New York-based fashion model turned urban terrorist, Mary Jane Watson, has been gunned down by the Tucson police force operating in collusion with the US Marshalls..."
And
The whole world
Just
Stops.
