▸ Column · Modern Marvel age — Otto Octavius answering correspondence from his lab, an unwelcome cackle arriving from Norman Osborn's glider
DOCTOR OCTOPUS replies.
Replied to by Doctor Octopus, with a rebuttal from Green Goblin.
The letter
I've been conducting a transatlantic relationship for two years. Patricia is in Lisbon caring for her ailing mother; I'm in Minneapolis. Every time I ask when we close the distance, the answer erodes — "next spring," then "once things settle," then a shrug. Her mother won't recover, so I grant there's no clean finish line. But I've staked my whole future on a reunion that may never occur. Last month I turned down a promotion in Denver rather than add a time zone, and the instant I declined I felt ill, as though I'd traded something solid for something imaginary. I still love her voice on our nightly calls. But I'm thirty-four, and I want a shared kitchen, a dog, a Sunday — not a screen. How do I tell patience from foolishness when there is genuinely no date to wait for?
Doctor Octopus replies
You declined the promotion. Let me sit with the elegance of that disaster a moment, because it is the only datum I require. You sacrificed a confirmed advancement for an undefined variable, and your own body told you it was an error before your sentiment could rationalize it. Listen to the body. It is doing arithmetic your heart refuses.
Here is your confusion, dressed up as a virtue. Patience is not waiting — patience is the discipline of a man who can afford to wait because he knows precisely what he waits FOR. The Master Planner does not loiter; he times. You are not patient. You are conducting a two-year experiment with no hypothesis and no endpoint, which any competent physicist would have terminated by month three. That is not love. That is superstition.
I arranged my whole existence once around a woman's approval — and the world's — and both fled the instant I needed them. I do not counsel you to wait politely for permission to have a life. Set the boundary condition: a real date, mutually owned, or a defined parting. Not an ultimatum shouted — that is amateur theatrics — but the cold terms of any rational plan. Then reclaim your Denver. Lesser men shrink their lives to fit a screen. You will extend your reach until the life is the size you deserve.
— Doctor Octopus
Green Goblin weighs in
Heh heh HEE HEE! Octopus, you tragic windup toy — "boundary conditions," "mutually owned dates." You'd schedule a heartbreak like a dental cleaning! Listen, Minneapolis: the tentacled bore is half right and twice as dull. There's nothing to NEGOTIATE. Patricia isn't your villain — YOUR cowardice is, sniveling in a Lisbon phone line while Denver burns a hole in your pocket! Take the job. Take the dog. Glide out laughing and don't leave a forwarding number — let the nightly call ring into the dark forever! Two years you fed a ghost your whole life. Stop asking permission to exist and drop a pumpkin on that phone bill! HEE HEE!
— Green Goblin
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