The Night Gwen Stacy Died (28 page)

Then she slipped the note under Iva’s door where she was sure to see it. She turned
from the door, walked back across the hallway and up the stairs, and it was only in
walking away from the note that she considered that she, in all likelihood, wouldn’t
see Iva again. She should have at least written the whole note in French, or added
some pleasantries at the end, or learned some Czech, but it was too late, and it didn’t
matter now. She had bigger problems to sort out, so she tried to put Iva out of her
mind as she turned the knob of her front door, stepped inside, and proceeded to trash
her own apartment.

She started with the cabinets. She pulled the few boxes and cans from the shelves
and let them land in the sink and on the counter. Patch eyed her with a look of panic,
beginning to pant heavily and pace around the apartment, but Sheila didn’t stop. If
the cops were to show up, it would look like they had fled. She pulled all the sheets
off the bed and threw them in the middle of the floor in a heap. She unplugged the
CD player Peter had bought her for her birthday and shoved the CD in her handbag.
Her movements were practiced, methodical, erasing their habits and routines from the
place. She went to the closet where they each had two sets of clothes. She pulled
each item of clothing from its hanger, until she got to the secondhand dress that
Peter loved. She kicked off her jeans and T-shirt and slipped the dress over her head.
She pulled her hair out of its ponytail, so the blond mass of it rested long against
her back. In the bathroom mirror, she decided she could pass for someone else.

She placed a hand on her hip. Name? she demanded of the girl in the bathroom mirror.

Gwendolyn Stacy, she replied.

Then she practiced pulling the ID from her wallet to back it up, because everyone
knew Gwen Stacy didn’t stutter when giving a straight answer, and she didn’t have
any trouble dealing with the cops. Her father was a cop.

She arrived at the comic book store just before closing, and this time she didn’t
waste her energy riffling through the issues along the walls or worrying about the
etiquette of the place. She parted with Patch on the sidewalk outside the store. “Stay,”
she said. Patch growled slightly, but seemed ready to comply. Then she walked straight
to the checkout and placed her hands on the counter.

“Can I help you?” the boy behind the counter asked.

“Hope so,” Sheila said. “I’m looking for
The
Amazing Spider-Man
# 121.”

The boy squared her up. “Is that right?”

Sheila dug in the bottom of her handbag and produced several hundred-dollar bills,
placing them one at a time on the counter. “That’s right,” she said.

“Hold please,” said the boy slowly, and he went off into the back. After several moments,
he reappeared with another boy, slightly taller, who seemed to be in charge.

“I’m looking for a particular Spider-Man comic book,” Sheila said again. “
The Night Gwen Stacy Died
.”

“Issue 121,” the boy who was in charge said. “I’m familiar. You know it’s not the
kind of thing you can just walk into a shop and expect to pick up. What you’re asking
for is something of a collector’s item.”

“I understand that,” Sheila said. “You’re telling me you don’t have it.” She started
to put her money away.

“Hang on a second,” said the boy in charge. “I said it wasn’t the sort of thing that’s
usually just going to be sitting in a shop, collecting dust. I didn’t say I don’t
have it.”

“How much?” Sheila said.

“Look,” the boy in charge said slowly, looking her up and down, “you’re obviously
not a collector. What do you want with it?”

Sheila paused and consulted the ceiling. “It’s a gift for my boyfriend,” she said.

“Try again.”

“It’s a gift for my brother?” She hadn’t planned on the need for constructing an elaborate
story.

The first boy piped up from behind the counter. He smiled at his coworker. “Well which
one is it?”

The boy in charge chuckled.

Sheila said, “It’s important.”

Just then Patch began to howl from her post on the sidewalk. A fierce long howl that
commanded the attention of the boys in the comic book store. “What the hell was that?”
one boy said to the other.

“It’s my dog,” Sheila said. “She’s getting sick of waiting out there. I really can’t
stay too much longer.”

The first boy she had spoken to peered through the front window. “Jesus,” he said.
“Some dog. What do you feed that thing?”

Sheila glared. “Do you harass all your customers like this? Or just me?”

“Okay,” the boy in charge said slowly, putting up his hands as if establishing order
again, “Tell you what. You’re obviously in a hurry. You name me three of Spider-Man’s
most important arch-enemies from 1962 to 1973 and issue 121 is yours.”

“The Green Goblin,” Sheila said. It was the only one she knew. It would have to be
good enough. The boy continued to stare at her, as he waited for the names of two
other villains. She looked down at the corner of this boy’s T-shirt where it was torn,
and wondered if he had bought it that way, or if he had gotten it caught on a fence,
or a tree. She looked back up at his face and noticed that he was older than she first
had estimated. He was at least thirty, older even, but his clothes were of someone
who jumps fences.

“Your shirt’s ripped,” Sheila said.

“Don’t change the subject,” the boy said in mock, or genuine, disgust, “You got one
of the biggies and I’ll give it to you, but you’re two enemies short of a sale,” he
said. He paused, and when he noticed Sheila had exhausted her repertoire of enemies,
he opened his mouth as if to prompt, “Doc . . . ? Doc . . . ? No? Doesn’t ring a bell?
Doctor Octopus? Doc Ock?”

Sheila glared.

“Try again?” he said. “I’ll make it easy. Green tail? Scientist and friend to Spidey
in his saner moments, when he also cares for his wife and son—boy’s name’s Billy.
The Liz, the . . . Lizzzz. . . . The Lizard? No, don’t know that one either, huh?”

“Forget it,” said Sheila, and she turned to leave.

But the boy raised his hand in truce. “Hey, come on! I’m playing. You want the issue,
you can have it. It’s not doing me any good sitting here.” He went into the back and
produced the issue and placed it on the counter in front of Sheila. It was in a thick
Mylar sleeve as she expected it would be, and at first glance, the cover was not nearly
as terrible as she had imagined it.

On it, there were pictures of everyone in Spider-Man’s life. Each person close to
him was represented in a self-contained black frame, and Spider-Man hung from a bit
of webbing before each of their portraits, frantically looking between them. In the
little bubbles of speech by his head, his thoughts raced:
Someone CLOSE to me is about to DIE! Someone I cannot save! My Spider sense is never
wrong! But who? WHO?

The cover promised a
Turning Point
, promised a moment after which things would never look the same again. Sheila ran
her hand along the wrapped edge of the pages, fingering the price tag in the corner.

“That’ll be three fifty and change,” one of the boys said. Sheila counted out the
money to pay them, flattening each bill onto the counter under her palm. On the cover,
you couldn’t see Spider-Man’s face, only the back of his costume, but he was clearly
frantic, swinging between all the illustrations of these people he loved, looking
for the one he was going to lose.

“Thanks,” Sheila mumbled.

“Hey, no sweat.”

She was still looking at the cover when one of the boys started to put her purchase
into a plastic bag.

My Spider sense is never wrong!
Spider-Man insisted from inside.

“Wait!” Sheila said. It came out in a shout, louder than she meant it. It was the
comic books, with their block letters and their interjections; they were mixing with
the order in her head. The boys looked startled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “How does
he know someone is going to die?”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” the boy in charge said.

Sheila swallowed a knot in her throat. “Spider sense,” she said. “What exactly does
it do?”

The first boy looked at his manager, as if asking for permission to explain something
so basic to the customer to whom they’d just sold a collector’s item. The manager
nodded, and the first boy looked back at Sheila. “It warns Spider-Man of danger,”
he said. “It tells him when something bad is going to happen so he can try to avoid
it in time.”

“And it’s always right?” Sheila asked.

Both boys nodded. “But it sucks,” the boy in charge said. “It’s a lot of heavy shit
to have to deal with.”

“I mean, that’s the thing about his enemies,” the other boy continued. “There’s a
ton of them, way more than three, and most of them reappear too, but everything that
goes on in his mind, the stuff that keeps him up at night, it’s worse than all of
them combined, you know? I mean you feel bad for the guy, genuinely bad.”

“Which is sort of the genius of Parker as a superhero,” said the other boy. “I mean
he’s tough and everything. He fights some badass villains and wins, but I don’t envy
the guy. Not for a second.”

“He’s his own worst enemy,” the other boy translated.

“And then they went and killed the girl he loved.”

“
They?
” Sheila repeated. “They who? I thought it was the Green Goblin who killed her.”

“Who?” both boys boomed, “Conway and Romita, of course. The writers!”

Both boys shook their heads at the thought of it. “It gets worse. The way it’s drawn
you can’t tell if it’s the fault of the Goblin or whether it’s Spidey himself who’s
responsible. The Goblin pushes her off the bridge, sure, Spidey’s trying to save her,
he flings out his webbing, it catches her leg . . . SNAP! . . . but not in time, right?
Which means—”

“—it could have been that her neck snapped from the impact of being caught by his
webbing.”

“The way they write it, it could have been Spidey’s fault.”

“The fans were outraged! Some stopped reading after that issue, boycotted, because
the writers just couldn’t give the poor guy a break.”

“But that’s terrible!” Sheila cut in. “He was in love with Gwen Stacy,” she insisted.
“Everyone knows that.” She understood now that she was pleading—to whom, it wasn’t
clear. These stories had been written forty years ago. There was nothing the boys
could do.

The boys exchanged glances. The boy in charge said, “You’re preaching to the choir,
babe.”

Then the other boy ran into the back and produced a second comic book,
ASM
# 124, three issues later, and opened it to the back page where there were letters
to the writers. He placed the open issue in front of Sheila on the counter. Both boys
leaned back and waited, gave her the reading space to see for herself. Sheila leaned
in and began to read the letters printed there.

Gentlemen,

How much more agony must Parker live through? This issue, # 121, has a certain finality
to it. I know that Gwen is really dead. So I have the right to cry. I have the right
to mourn her death. I have the right to know that I will not feel absurd three issues
later when she is suddenly brought back to life by some super-alien life ray. The
rest of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” completes one of the most heart-rending, magnificently
scripted and laid out sagas to date.

After a dramatic, typical Spidey rescue . . . BLAM! It hits you! “I saved you, honey
. . . I saved you.” He didn’t save her. Fantasy? Reality? Where is the dividing line?
Gentlemen, you have succeeded in placing the comic book, SPIDER-MAN, onto a newly
defined aesthetic plane of realism. But Lord, you have also succeeded in touching
my soul.

Salvatore M. Trento

Dept. of Anthropology, S.U.N.Y.

Buffalo, N.Y.

Marvel,

How DARE you kill Gwendolyn Stacy!? You are a pack of soulless, mercenary sadists.
I am no longer a True Believer.

J. M. Black

Alamedam, Calif.

To whoever had the idea of killing off Gwen Stacy,

You rattlesnake, you buzzard, you large red insect, you worm, you cockroach, you lizard,
you skunk, you tapeworm in the digestive system of humanity: Why is it when a superhero
and his girl finally seem to be getting it together, you kill off the girl? May you
lose every tooth in your head but one, and in that one may you have a toothache; may
someone put arsenic in your midnight cocoa; may you be struck down by a spirit of
justice and be reincarnated as an amoeba!

RFO Sergio J. Andrade

Roselle, N.J.

Gentlemen,

As you said, SPIDER-MAN # 121 was a shocker. Frankly, I wonder what kind of home life
you people must have, or had as children.

Donald Shinners

Wauwatosa, Wisc.

Sheila blinked and backed away from the page. The readers were right; the writers
were sadists. When she looked up, both boys were huddled behind the counter. They
had been watching her read, waiting for her to react. The boy in charge and the boy
who worked under him nodded sympathetically in her direction. “Bastards,” one of them
mumbled, and everyone agreed, the things that the superhero was made to stomach were
shameful. After sticking it out for years watching Parker survive so many disappointments,
you couldn’t help imagining some other life for him and his girl where things work
out.