SpiderMan
"Mr. and Mrs. Grissom... we've conducted several tests, and the results have me concerned." Dr. Lawton takes off his glasses, placing them on the table with a sigh. "Gil's social skills are poorly developed. He avoids eye contact, has trouble answering direct questions, becomes agitated when touched... He's displaying characteristics of a mild form of autism that was only discovered a little over fifteen years ago..."
My dad glances over to the couch, worried that I can hear the conversation, but I just pretend I'm asleep.
I like bugs.
I like the way they think, because they think like I do.
Bugs are like me for the following reasons, which I have categorized into bullet points, because bullet points make your argument clearer.
- Bugs are very smart and logical. I am smart and logical too. Sometimes my teacher yells, "Don't be smart, Gilbert." But I can't help being smart and she is stupid to think that I can.
- Bugs have clear goals and are very focused. My goal is to go to college and become a bug doctor, which is called an entomologist, which comes from two Greek root words: entomo which means something which is segmented (like insects) and logos which means knowledge. After I go to college I will have knowledge of insects. (I do have knowledge of insects now, but not as much as I will later.)
- Bugs love symmetry. This is very much like me because I do not like asymmetry. An example of asymmetry is when Mother cut my hair and one side was longer than the other and I hid in my closet and screamed. Now Mother gives me a buzz cut on alternating Saturday mornings, and when I measure my hairs they are all the same length.
- Bugs have a nervous system, just like human beings do. But bugs touch things with their antennae. They don't want to put out their feet to touch something new. They want something far away from the body to do it. I do not like touching new things with my hands either. But I do not have antennae, so I touch new things with my shoes. That way there is a protective covering in case the new thing carries a deadly virus.
"Come up and say goodbye to your father, Gil."
I let Uncle Richard lead me by the hand to the front of the room. I don't like Uncle Richard, but I have to be nice to him because Mother said so. I should tell her that every time her back is turned, he refers to me as the fucking retard. But I am not allowed to use swear words, and I don't know how to tell Mother about what Uncle Richard calls me without using a swear word.
"Don't you want to say anything?"
He points in front of us, where Dad is lying in a wooden casket. The casket looks like our dining room table, except it is a lot shinier and doesn't have the mark where I threw my plate after Mother gave me eleven cherries instead of ten.
"Say something, Gil." He's making his voice really soft, like he's nice.
"Do you think he has blood in his body?"
This was not what Uncle Richard wanted me to say. "What?"
"People have blood in their bodies, and it's always circulating in a big loop, but if your heart stops beating then the blood won't move. So does that mean that the blood is all lying in his back now?"
Uncle Richard drops my hand, mutters fucking retard, and stomps off.
I step up to see Dad's face better.
"You're just an exoskeleton," I tell him.
"I wonder if bugs will eat you," I tell him.
Susan is watching me work.
It's okay, though. I've gotten used to the way she watches me, and it doesn't bother me much anymore.
"So how did this one die, Gil?"
I pick up a scalpel, making a clean, even line down the seagull's throat. "It's another one," I announced with a frown. "Why do people keep throwing their prophylactics into the ocean? The birds think they're fish and then when they swallow them they choke to death."
"It's good that you're investigating," Susan says. She knows that I like the word investigate. "How is school going?"
There's a beetle on the ground. I can tell it's thinking Susan should mind her own business. "School is fine."
"Are you still doing the things we talked about?"
I pretend to concentrate on the inside of the seagull, because I know Susan will be unhappy that I'm not doing the things she told me to, which are:
- Talk to two strangers every day. Once I talk to them, they are no longer strangers, so I can't talk to the same two people each day.
- Shake hands with one person each day.
"I'm in love," I tell her instead.
"Really?" Susan's voice gets really squeaky. This is because I have never used the word love before. "Oh, Gil, that's wonderful."
"Her name is Nicole, and her face is perfectly symmetrical. And she likes bugs, like me."
"Have you told her that you love her?"
"Mm-hmm." I take a pair of tweezers and lift the prophylactic clear of the bird's throat. "We're going to get married. I already gave her a ring."
Susan talks to Mother before she leaves. Then Mother looks in the drawer for her mother's ring, and then she gets very, very angry at me.
"People don't make sense," I tell Susan one day.
"Tell me about that," she says, because she is a psychologist and a behavioral therapist and that is her favorite sentence to say.
"They're too unpredictable. I never know what they are thinking or what they will do next."
She nods. "What can you predict about them?"
That is an interesting question. "Anything that's based in science, I guess. You can predict the way their bodies will behave if you know all the factors of their health and environment. And certain activities they do, you can predict. Like if a person is playing baseball, his strength and the angle of the baseball bat will determine where the ball will go."
"You like predicting things."
This makes me laugh, because she knows I like predicting things.
"I was thinking about what we talked about last week, Gil. College."
"I'm going to UCLA," I remind her. "Mother already sent in the deposit."
"Yes, but what will you study?"
"I'll study insects, of course."
"I'm concerned," she says. "I'm worried that you'll just shut yourself up in a room with bugs for the rest of your life."
"All rooms have bugs in them, Susan. Even ones you can't see with the naked eye-"
"I know, Gil, I know. But what if you could use your knowledge of insects to help people?"
"People don't make sense," I remind her.
"Insects can help make them make sense," she replies.
When she leaves that day, it's for the last time. I let her hug me, even though it feels like there's a thousand ants crawling underneath my skin when people hug me.
The class runs over, like they all do. I've never been good at stopping on time. By the time I look up, most of the class is gone. A handful of students are writing feverishly in their notebooks, which would give me great pride in my lecturing skills if I didn't already know they were doing assignments for other classes.
A girl in the front row is frowning at the board.
I clean up my materials, and she's still frowning at the board. I glance at it, wondering if I've spelled a word wrong. I hate when I spell words wrong.
"Is everything okay, Miss-"
"Sidle, and yeah." Her face isn't pretty. She has uneven eyebrows, and her teeth are a little crooked, and she smiles more with her right side than her left. "I'm just wondering if this field is right for me after all."
"Don't like the gore?"
"The gore I can deal with," she says, lifting one eyebrow even further out of place. "The science, I can deal with. It's the people."
"The people?"
"I just..." she sighs. "People don't make sense. They're too unpredictable."
It's not her fault her face is so asymmetrical. I give her my email address, and she writes to me about her cases, and I write to her about mine. Sometimes she sends me insect-related jokes. I've heard them all, but I don't tell her that.
Mother dies on a Wednesday morning. I've just finished shift, so I take a nap before heading to California.
I make all the arrangements for a beautiful service. Plenty of lilies, because they were her favorite flower. Plenty of friends and family, all coming up to me to pay their respects.
"She was so strong."
"She was a really funny lady, your mother."
"She always had a kind word for-"
"I remember how she used to-"
I'm almost fifty years old, and both of my parents are dead before I've had time to love them.
"What do you think it was like, Grissom?"
I throw a dirt-covered shovel into the back of the Tahoe. "What?"
"All the ants... crawling all over him, biting his skin in a hundred different places..." Sara's crying now. I hate it when she cries. "What do you think it felt like?"
It felt like his exoskeleton was melting, I want to tell her.
It felt like I would feel if I hugged you right now, I want to tell her.
Your face is so beautiful, I want to tell her.
"I'm worried," I say instead.
She sniffles. "About Nick?"
"No."
"About what, then?"
"Me."
I'm bracing myself for an onslaught of questions, but she just nods and says, "I am too."
It's been seven months of kissing, six months of sex, and four months of sleepovers. I've never liked to share my bed, but it's important to her, so I do it anyway. She's figured out that I'm not a cuddler, and she seems to be okay with it.
I wake up one day before she does. The sun is beginning to set, and the room is growing darker, making my eyelids heavy again. My tongue is dry, and my arm's asleep, but I don't want to move.
There's a spider on the ceiling, crawling slowly.
There's work to be done, it tells me. Time to get up now.
But the bed is so warm, and my arm's still asleep, lying across my belly. Clearly, the rest of my body should follow suit.
Work is the most important thing, the spider insists. It's time to weave, Gil, time to weave.
But then the arm moves, and it's not mine at all.
She yawns and brings her hand up to scratch her head, before throwing her arm back on top of me. I stare at it, waiting for the creepy prickles, waiting for the itchy skin, crawling with-
But it still feels like my own arm.
She's not even symmetrical, the spider says.
She's symmetrical with me, I tell it.
She's completely unpredictable, the spider says.
"I'm in love with you, Sara," I whisper.
Her arm tenses, and she doesn't say anything, and we both decide to pretend she's still asleep.