Interview with a Spider

(Moments)

The girl on camera coughed a little bit into the elbow of her olive green bomber jacket, then started singsonging, "Red leather, yellow leather. Red leather, yellow reather. Leather. Lead reather—oh, screw it." She shuffled anxiously through the notecards in her lap, lips moving silently, then pulled out her phone and started making faces into the camera, stretching out the muscles. She tried several different smiles: one smug, closed mouth was quickly discarded in favor of too many teeth, so she ended up looking slightly maniacal. She shook her head aggressively, flipping her braids over her shoulder, and slouched back down in the black plastic chair. Turning to the camera, she stage-whispered, "Hey, be honest, do these jeans make my butt look—wait, are you filming this!?"

A cackle sounded from close to the camera. The girl got up abruptly and stormed over, an absolutely terrifying look on her face. The camera view jostled a bit and bounced up and down as if the boy behind it were backing away and tripping over his own feet, then swung around as the girl began to run, now laughing like the cameraman. The swing revealed more of their surroundings. The boy and girl, both around sixteen, were alone in a grimy cement parking garage with two cars visible, well-lit by harsh fluorescent lights. The camera got to the horizontal bars separating the level from the drop-off to the one below it and swung around to face the girl again. She had her hands on her knees and was laughing breathlessly.

"Okay, not funny, Ivanov! Can we"—pant, giggle— "please take this seriously? This could get me into my dream college, okay? This interview is a big deal!" She straightened up, still cracking up with the cameraman.

"Relax, we can cut this part out. 'Cause, lucky for you, I've got mad editing skills."

The girl threw a few braids out of her face and swung around to stalk back to her chair, muttering something about "big-shots" and "iMovie". "Fine, but seriously. He could show up any moment now!"

A snigger echoed across the parking structure. The girl and boy both froze, and then the camera swung wildly around, searching for the source of the chortling and finally focusing and zooming in on a slim figure leaned in the shadow of a grey concrete column, half-doubled over as its shoulders shook in suppressed laughter. It braced a hand against the column to straighten up and uncrossed its legs. A tenor voice called, "Sorry, it's just that you guys are cute. Funny. You can cut this part out, right?"

He started walking over to them, shoulders hunched a little self-consciously. As he came into the light, a viewer could now make out the red and dark blue of his fitted suit and wonder how he or she had missed him. He had crossed the fifteen yards or so to the two chairs and was looking back and forth helplessly between them by the time the girl seemed to shake off her stupor.

"Of course, sorry! Yeah—yes, we'll definitely be deleting that. Um, you can get situated in the chair on the left—no, the—my left, yeah—and we can get started whenever you're ready."

The cameraman jogged over and carefully placed the heavy equipment down on a tripod set in front of the chairs. The masked figure fidgeted, crossing and uncrossing his legs, while his young interviewer deftly caught the microphone tossed to her and smoothed down her hair and clothes. The cameraman waited until her companion was looking at her and then launched the other mic at him with a hard underhand toss. One hand snapped up with a movement almost too fast to track and caught it an inch from his face, and then the head turned to look at it, expressive eyes widening slightly in something a little like surprise. The camera's built-in mic caught the boy behind it quietly breathe, "So cool..." The girl sent him a quick glare before snapping into professional mode.

"Hi, and welcome to Walkin' with Watkins, bringing you the word on the street here in Queens, New York. I'm your host, Monique Watkins, and today we have a very special guest. Introducing New York's very own Spider-Man!"

The boy in red seemed to smile (although it was hard to tell with the mask) and waved at the camera, almost unconsciously touching his mask as he brought his hand back down. "Hi! It's nice to be here."

"Today, Spidey is going to be answering a few questions posed by you, the viewers! So, Spidey, ready for the first question?"

He laughed nervously. "As I'll ever be."

She chuckled along with him. It was easy to see, now that they had started the interview for real, how quickly Monique's casual mannerisms cut out the awkwardness from the spaces between words and put her guest more at ease. "I'm going to take that as a yes. So, Jane from Manhattan wants to know, what's with the suit? I mean, it's so bright! Wouldn't it be easier for stealth to wear plain black?

He laughed again, a little less nervously. "Thank God, an easy first question. I gotta be recognizable so the police don't shoot at me during fights. I mean, the police still shoot at me, but if I'm recognizable the ones who don't want to don't. And that's a good number of 'em by now."

Monique smiled (a bit thinly). "Glad to hear it! Okay, this one may get a little bit personal"—he tensed—"but Chris from Long Island wants to know: is it difficult keeping your life as Spider-Man separate from your regular life?"

He spoke a little haltingly and kept his answer purposefully vague. "It's...hard, yeah. For one thing, when you can walk on walls or bench-press a truck, you kind of want to be doing that all the time, 'cause it's just more fun, you know? But you have to hide it. Not just physically, though. It's like...you have to split yourself into two different people, and then you'll slip up and mix them and it's like, 'Shit, dude, your Spidey's showing.' And then there's the lying, and... Anyway, yeah. I'm kind of terrible at keeping my identity secret, if I'm honest."

Monique chuckled with him a little louder to ease the tension: her guest looked ready to bolt. "I'm sure you can't be that bad at it. Actually, now I have my own question: what happened to the puns? You're a lot less loud in person than when you're fighting, did you realize?"

The vigilante leaned back in his chair. "I mean, a lot of that is the adrenaline. But just because I'm not saying the puns doesn't mean they're not there. My internal monologue is like 30 percent sarcasm and 70 percent puns. Just be glad the world isn't exposed to the worst of them."

She paused. "...Was that a subtle camera pun?"

"...Maybe."

There were a few moments of everyone in the room glaring silently at the kid in the mask. Monique finally broke the silence, saying through a plastic smile of gritted teeth, "Moving on, you've been doing this for about three years now, right? And it's a pretty unusual pastime. Bananagram23 told me to ask you, 'What's the funniest story you've got' from that time?"

The mask stretched more, as if he were grinning widely now. "Oh, God. Um, there are a lot. It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that everyone in this business is kinda crazy. There was this incident with Thor and Daredevil and Asgardian mead—naw, I don't really remember enough of that one. Wait, I got it! Ok, so I'm fighting Shocker, right? Which is pretty painful if he gets you, but his little costume with the, like, carpet material is so ridiculous that I can't help but find it funny. It looks like he's wearing fishnet stockings over everything. Then, out of nowhere, Hulk just comes in and completely wastes the guy! Except he gets a pretty bad shock that keeps him from changing back. Which probably should have worried me, now that I think about it, because anything that screws with the Hulk's neurons can't be good, but at the time I was pretty fried, too. And I'd lost some blood from a cop getting a lucky shot while I was dealing with a mugger. So anyway, then Deadpool shows up, and I don't really like that guy or agree with his"—shudder—"methods, but we do agree that with great power comes a great responsibility to mess with people. And Hulk's pretty calm, so we decide to take him out for pizza." He was almost dissolving into giggles at this point. "So we walk into that Domino's off of 26th, and the waitress' face is just hilarious! She has no clue what to do! So she gets her manager, and he calls the regional manager, and the whole time we're waiting to order I keep having muscle spasms and Deadpool is yelling stuff that I can't repeat. In the end, two hours later, the poor regional manager has to drive down and tell us Hulk's not allowed to eat there because of the company's"—he was doubled over and gasping at this point—"no shirt, no shoes policy!"

Monique and her camera guy, Ivanov, were laughing, but not as raucously as the vigilante. He noticed and hunched over sheepishly as his laughter subsided, huge, white eyes still narrowed in mirth. "Ah, think maybe you had to be there. I feel a little bad, actually, but they could have just given us the pizza."

"I'll be sure to pass on your customer service complaints," Monique joked. "Okay, since I promised to keep this short, last question. This one is from JMoneysTwitter, and it goes with the last one. What's the scariest thing that's happened to you on this job?

He froze. Monique started to feel a little uncomfortable. Humans shouldn't be able to sit that still. (Then again, he wasn't really human, was he?) His right hand twitched, made a grabbing motion. Again.

She was falling, falling. So fast. He reached out to catch her, and reached, and reached, and the thread spun out, the Thread of Fate, was it? and it caught her and she hung in the air like a ballerina in a movie in slow motion. Graceful. Infinite. But it wasn't infinite, was she? And then he heard the crack.

Monique peered at the hero's face. The eyes were blank, stared straight ahead. The mask gave nothing away. She snapped her fingers in front of his face. "Spidey? Spidey."

He flinched, and the moment was over. There was something wrong with the motion. Liam Ivanov, Monique's guy behind the lens, had never before gotten why the guy had themed himself around a spider instead of some other bug. Sure, he had the webs and wall-crawling, but everyone knew the webs were inorganic. However, in that moment Liam was forcefully reminded of when a spider you think has been squashed by a shoe suddenly, heart-stoppingly twitches back to life.

"Sorry, yeah. Spaced out for a sec. Um, I guess...well, I've been kidnapped once or twice." His voice was a little tight, but he continued, "It's...not fun. Especially when you're a biological anomaly and they're the experiment-y type." His laugh was rushed and shaky, entirely different from his guffawing of a minute before. "And people ask why I don't trust the government..."

Monique had gone a little pale. The tense atmosphere in the room was oppressive. All three could feel every ton of the layers of concrete above them. This time, no one broke the silence for a long time. Too long.

Liam coughed pointedly, and Monique took a deep breath and shot him a grateful glance before launching into her pre-planned ending speech. "Okay, I promised I would keep it short, or we would be talking to you all day! You can check out this episode and my other vlog interviews on my YouTube channel, and updates come from my Twitter account, WalkAndTalk, where you can suggest questions for upcoming interviews. Thanks so much for coming on the show!

Aunt May's good breeding kicked in. "I'm grateful you had me! It's nice to get good press, really. I totally appreciate it." He was back to a casual slouch in the cheap chair, only the tenseness of his shoulders betraying his real emotions.

"Anytime." Monique and Liam watched as the masked hero walked to the edge of the level, leaned out, and shot up a web to catch the ceiling of the next level. He crouched on the thin railing bar, gave a two-fingered salute than carried almost all of his public brash persona, and swung up out of sight quick as a flash.

Monique and Liam were still for another minute after he left in the echoing, empty garage. Finally, Liam broke the silence.

"Well, shit."

…

"Yeah."

The camera shut off.