Hours Until Morning: 11

Since the patient rooms are so small and there are two of us, we decide to interview Spider-Dan in the patient lounge.

The patient lounge is larger than the staff lounge, but it’s not any

nicer. Also, it must have been painted recently because there’s a faint fresh paint smell hanging in the air. I wait there, sitting on a sofa that has a pattern of cherries on it. I can’t stop tapping my feet. Tap tap tap. Between me and Mary with her knitting needles, we could be a band together. Tap tap tap. Click click click.

I try not to think about Jade. I get to leave here after tonight, but Jade is stuck here indefinitely. I don’t know what she did to land herself in this place, but I don’t doubt she deserves to be here.

What I know for sure about Jade is that she’s bipolar. That was the diagnosis she got when she was hospitalized when we were sixteen years old. I found out after that her mother had the exact same diagnosis—these things tend to run in families. They put her on a medication to control it, then a second medication. She seemed so different once she was on a bunch of medications—like a zombie. She wasn’t my best friend anymore. It was like she had a frontal lobotomy.

Well, the best I can say is that she seems like her old self right now.

God, I hope she doesn’t tell Dr. Beck that she knows me. That would be beyond mortifying. Especially if she tells him that—

“I’m not supposed to have these crackers!”

An elderly man is standing in front of me, gripping a crumpled paper bag. I don’t know who he is, but he’s got a white wristband on his left wrist, which means he’s a patient. He looks like that actor who used to be in the westerns a long time ago—my grandmother used to love him. Clint Eastwood, I think his name was.

“Excuse me?” I say to the old man.

“These crackers.” The Clint Eastwood look-alike shakes the bag in my face, which I can now see contains about a dozen packets of saltines. “I’m diabetic! Who gave me all these crackers?”

“Um,” I say. “I’m not sure.”

“I’m not supposed to have them,” Clint informs me. “This is a mistake.

These crackers could kill me!”

“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 how my patient, 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, you could make 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.”

Spider-Dan looks between the two of us. He has no idea that what he just said was complete nonsense. How does somebody get to the point where their brain stops functioning like a normal brain? That their reality completely breaks from the reality that every other person in the world lives in?

And what’s to stop it from happening to anyone else?

“Dan,” Cam says, “do you think that the Green Goblin is around here somewhere and is trying to hurt you? “

Spider-Dan considers this question for several seconds. Like it’s really important for him to let us know whether the Green Goblin is out to get him or not. “No, I don’t think that,” he says thoughtfully. “But my sense tells me that somebody here is trying to hurt me…”

“Who?” Cam asks.

Spider-Dan takes a shaky breath. “Damon Sawyer.”

Cameron blinks a few times, surprised by this response. Obviously, this isn’t something Spider-Dan told him the first time. Sawyer. That’s the name of the patient in the Seclusion One room. The one who somehow got out of his restraints and has been throwing himself at the door, trying to break it down.

“You think Damon Sawyer wants to hurt you?” Cam presses him.

Spider-Dan is quiet for nearly a full minute. Finally, he says, “Not just me.”

“Then who?” I blurt out.

“All of us,” Spider-Dan says in his monotone. “Damon Sawyer wants to kill every single one of us tonight.”

“Why…” My voice is a hoarse croak. “Why do you think that?”

“Because that’s what he told me he’s going to do.”