Page 26 of Ward D
“I don’t think they’re going to kill you.”
“How do you know? Are you a doctor?”
“I’m a medical student.”
Clint shakes the bag of saltines at me again. “This should be part of your training. You don’t give crackers to a diabetic.”
“Well,” I say, nodding at the garbage in the corner of the room, “you could just throw them out then?”
“I’m not wasting food! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Um.” I would be happy to take the crackers, except I’m not sure what to do with them aside from throwing them in the trash, which is apparently unacceptable. “Why don’t you bring the crackers back to your room and we’ll have someone get rid of them for you?”
He looks at me for a long time, considering my proposal. Then he shakes his head. He walks off, grumbling, “Useless. All of them—useless.”
Okay, that was strange.
Before I have time to look up in UpToDate whether crackers could actually kill a diabetic, Cameron’s voice rings out through the hallway. “Here we are!” he booms. A second later, he and the man in the Spider-Man T-shirt show up at the door to the lounge. “That’s Amy. The other student. The one I was telling you about.”
What did he tell Spider-Dan about me? I can’t even imagine.Amy is another medical student who is working here tonight. She’s smart, but not as smart as I am. And she’s always dragging me out to get Indian food, and I go, even though it always gives me heartburn.
Spider-Dan looks me up and down, and nods without expression. He doesn’t seem upset that I’m there, and he doesn’t seem happy either. It’s like talking to a robot. It reminds me a bit of how Jade was on her medications. And it’s very different from howmypatient, Will Schoenfeld, acted.
I scoot down the sofa so that Spider-Dan can sit, while Cameron pulls over a chair. Cameron is quite a bit bigger than Spider-Dan—between the two of them, Cameron looks far more like a superhero in disguise. Spider-Dan looks to be in his mid-forties, with thinning brown hair and a double chin. While he sits, he holds out his hands with the wrists pointed up, and he looks down at them.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Amy.”
“Hi,” Spider-Dan says, still not looking up at me.
“So I was telling Amy a little bit about you,” Cameron says. “About your webs.”
Spider-Dan nods with a tiny bit more enthusiasm. He points down at the tendon on his left wrist. “You see these? I think these are kind of like webs. The webs are underneath my skin. And I need to get them out. I think I could get them out, but I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it. But I think if I could get them out, they would be webs.”
“He’s web-challenged,” Cam tells me.
“I see,” I murmur.
“You know,” Cam says to Spider-Dan, “a lot of the Spider-Man superheroes actually don’t shoot webs out of their bodies. They make them themselves. So technically, youcouldmake your own webs.”
Spider-Dan stares at him.
“Like out of dental floss or something,” Cam adds.
“Dental floss,” Spider-Dan repeats.
I shoot Cameron a look. He shrugs. “What?” he says. “Just making a suggestion.”
“Mr. Ludwig,” I say. “I was just wondering, do you have superpowers?”
He nods again. “I have Spidey sense. Like if something is wrong, then I know about it. Because the sense is in the spider. That’s how you know. That’s how everybody knows.”
I look over at Cam to see if this is making any sense to him. He shakes his head.
“And I’ve got a ring,” Spider-Dan goes on. “The ring gives me power. If I wear the ring, then I have more power.”
“No,” Cam says patiently. “You’re thinking of the Green Lantern. He’s the one with the ring.”
Spider-Dan looks at Cameron, a slightly put-out expression on his face. “No, I have the ring. Not Green Lantern. I need it if I’m going to fight Dr. Octopus and the Green Goblin. So that’s why I have to have the ring. The ring is in the thing. It’s the bling. It’s the sting. And if I get the thing, then I’ll have the ring. So that’s why I need it.”
