Great Responsibility
Spider-Man jerks awake behind the wheel of his parked Volkswagen Squareback, his sudden jolt into consciousness the effect of a voice shouting on the other side of his driver’s side window. Spider-Man has been sleeping in his car a lot lately, anchoring his vessel along whichever Los Angeles street he can find that is overlooked by the Parking Violations Bureau. He’s forgotten the name of the desolate road on which he is now located, but he’s never been good at remembering L.A.’s thoroughfares, so far from his native New York City.
“Hey, chica!” the voice yells again, having moved up the street ahead, attached to a brawny young tough in a sleeveless white shirt and low-slung jeans, his muscled arms rippling with tattoos. “Chica, I say, I’m talking at you!”
The young black woman the tough follows is dressed in business attire and carries a leather satchel, just the type Spider-Man would expect to see in a Hollywood executive production office elsewhere in the city, her high heels and tight black skirt a detriment as she hurries away from the aggressive Chicano at her back. Her clacking steps, audible even within the interior of the Squareback, take her toward the strip mall just up ahead, toward the supposed safety brought on by the presence of other people, but this hope is an illusion, and Spider-Man knows that it won’t save her.
Spider-Man steps out of his car, blinking in the harsh afternoon sun, then shuts the door carefully and quietly so as to avoid detection by the tough, as well as to prevent any dislodging of the five thousand brightly-colored strips of duct tape plastered all over the exterior of the vehicle in patterns designated by her, the young biracial girl—
No, no time to think about that, it’s time to get to work. He locks the car door, pulls on his mask and silently pursues the pursuer.
As expected, the tough soon catches up to the young exec with a sharp laugh. “Hey, puta,” he sings, drawing the sound out, pooooooooo-tah, “dint you hear me back there? I’m talking at you, girl.” He grabs her by the elbow and she recoils at the touch, causing him to lunge forward and grip her at the triceps. “Bitch, gonna learn you some respect,” he growls and pulls her into the alley between a McDonald’s and a Jiffy Lube.
Spider-Man’s heartbeat thunders in his head and sweat trickles down behind his ears under the stuffy mask, but he does not slow his pace as he follows them into the alley. At the far end, the tough—whom Spider-Man can now see is white rather than Latino, a poseur, play-acting the part of the machote—has pinned the exec to a Mickey-D Dumpster, and is whispering something intently in her ear, still unaware of Spider-Man’s presence.
“Stop, criminal!” Spider-Man shouts, the words slightly muffled behind the mask, and the machote falso looks up with a start. “Unhand that young woman, scoundrel!”
The tough just stares at him for a moment, then barks out a laugh.
“Why don’t you go mind your biz elsewhere, ese? Eh, araña loco? This don’t concern you.”
“I’m afraid all law-breakers are my business,” Spider-Man says, striking a heroic pose with fists on hips. “Now, unhand her or suffer the consequences.”
“Ah, fuck this noise, yo,” the tough says, then reaches into his pants pocket, withdraws a revolver, and fires. The impact knocks Spider-Man off his feet, and he crashes to the concrete, landing on his back hard enough to rattle all the bones in his body, vaguely aware of the tough now yelling, “Ha! Spidey-sense not tingling now, eh, motherfucker?”
Spider-Man lies on the ground for a long moment, dazed, slowly regaining his wits, then with a grunt he rises to a sitting position. His right arm doesn’t seem to work anymore, and a dull throbbing pulses from his shoulder, but he is otherwise unharmed. There is no pain. Spider-Man doesn’t feel pain.
The image of another white man with a gun abruptly imposes itself onto his mind’s eye, a different tough, older and unshaven and twitchy, a year-old image that won’t go away no matter how much he blinks or shakes his head. The likeness of the twitchy tough was accompanied by the recalled report of an accidental gunshot, an aural rupture in the world, an incongruous sound that at the time he thought was a car backfiring, but then in his memory the ten-year-old biracial girl who was standing next to him tumbled slowly to the ground and the gunman was running away and the primal roar of grief and disbelief that erupted from Spider-Man’s throat sounded as if it were coming from all around him.
And now, as Spider-Man rises from the concrete and charges the machote falso, the roar comes again, his entire body filled with rage and vengeance even as he watches the tough raising the gun once more, not caring not caring because his little Thalía is dead dead dead and he couldn’t do anything to stop it and he doesn’t deserve to live in a world that would cruelly snuff out a being of such light and humor and love, and he braces himself for the second bullet to punch through his body, when the black woman suddenly throws an elbow into the tough’s throat and he drops the gun in surprise. She sweeps his leg from under him, and he topples to the ground of the alley just as Spider-Man arrives to give the tough a sharp kick to the ribs with his booted foot. The tough screams and Spider-Man kicks him again, harder, feeling something give way in the young man’s chest. He steps back, the energy abruptly drained out of him, and the woman takes his place, aiming and then driving the pointed toe of her expensive executive shoe into the attacker’s balls.
Spider-Man pulls off his mask and leans against the alley wall, watching as the tough just writhes on the ground, his face turning purple at the pain. Spider-Man uses the mask to mop the sweat from his face, and breathes heavily. He feels quite exhausted. His shoulder aches and he still can’t move his arm. The woman steps into view with the machote falso’s revolver in her hands, aiming at its former owner. She glances at Spider-Man.
“Nice pajamas,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“That was really fucking stupid what you did. He could have killed you.”
“Yes. But he also could have killed you, citizen. And I could not let that stand.”
“Well, thank you for that.” She adjusts her stance. “Do me a favor, web-head? My bag’s over there on the ground, and my cell phone’s inside. Why don’t you call 9-1-1 and get the cops here quick before this bastardo recovers, yeah?”
Spider-Man does as he is told, and within fifteen minutes both police and paramedics have arrived. The machote falso is unceremoniously cuffed and thrown in the back of a squad car. Spider-Man sits down on the curb next to a row of newspaper pay-boxes as a female paramedic attends to his shoulder and a male police officer takes his statement. He doesn’t know where the young exec has gone.
“Lucky for you,” the paramedic says, taping gauze over both the entry and exit wound, “it went straight through and didn’t hit any bones.” She jogs over to the ambulance and returns with a blister pack of little white pills and a support strap for his arm; he refuses the latter.
“It will interfere with my web-slinging,” he says.
“Suit yourself,” she says, and drops the strap into his lap. “You’re going to need to get checked out at the hospital.”
“I will be fine,” he says. “Spider-Man does not go to the hospital.”
The police officer interjects: “Do you have someone who can take you home? Anyone you can call?”
And before he can tell them both that Spider-Man does not have a home, he has rattled off the memorized series of digits that was once his home telephone number. The officer steps to his patrol car and relays the number to the dispatcher.
“Would you happen to have a cigarette?” Spider-Man asks the paramedic. “I don’t normally smoke, but this is not a normal occasion, and I’m craving one right now.”
The paramedic looks around her, then digs in a pants pocket, produces a pack of Salems, shakes one out for him, and then lights it. The smoke expands within him, but does not fill all of the gaping holes of his self. Still, a slow wave of calm cascades through his body.
Some time later, after everyone else has left, Spider-Man still sits in the same spot as a black Saab stops in front of him. A beautiful Latina in a very expensive pinstriped pantsuit and long-sleeved doctor’s white coat steps out and approaches him.
“Daniel? Can you hear me?”
Spider-Man doesn’t look up. The name is unfamiliar, so he assumes she’s speaking to someone else.
“Danny? It’s Liliana, your wife.” At his continued silence, she sighs and says, “Papi?”
At the mention of his old pet name, he finally raises his head and says, “Spider-Man doesn’t have a wife. Or a daughter.”
“No, papi,” she says, her voice catching in her throat, “he doesn’t, not . . . not anymore.” She reaches a hand down and helps him to stand. “Look, you’re staying with me tonight. I told the police I’d take care of you. You’re coming home with me. Do you understand?”
Spider-Man looks into familiar brown eyes flecked with gold, the same eyes as those of the ten-year-old biracial girl who won’t stop falling to the ground. Thalía. He makes himself say the name out loud, and the Latina’s face drops, and then she is hugging him close and asking where he has been for the past year and saying many more words that he can’t catch because they come out in such a rush of both English and Spanish, and he finds himself gripping her back and inhaling the clean insistent smell of her.
“Come on,” she says, stepping back to wipe at her eyes and then taking his left hand in her right. “Let’s go home.”