The Diner Incident

The power of the Sun... in the palm of my hand!

The diner’s lighting flattened everything it touched.

Faces became pale discs; gestures lost all meaning. The booths around them were packed with figures pretending not to listen. It was almost midnight.

Eddie sat in the corner, his broad shoulders compressing the cheap vinyl as he cradled his hardhat like a teddy bear and stared daggers into a cup of coffee that had long since cooled into something vaguely medicinal. He looked exhausted in the way large men often do when the world requires a bit too much explaining.

Across from him Lila sipped a lukewarm tea with the delicate and distracted movements of a woman constitutionally incapable of imagining herself inflicting harm, and even Eddie had to admit indifference looked great on her.

He swallowed nervously and lifted his eyes to meet hers in the manner of a fellow a little too accustomed to rereading his own text messages. “You knew exactly what you were doing,” he said. “You called me every night. Told me the sort of things women don’t tell men unless it means something...”

Her expression was a tincture of mild amusement and bureaucratic pity. “I was just being friendly, dude. And you interpreted that as romantic. That isn’t my fault.”

A few patrons glanced up as Eddie’s jaw began to tighten in exasperation.
“But… you spoke about your dreams, your traumas—cried into the phone! You showed me all those poems you’d never showed anyone else. Sent me pictures of your…”

“…and none of that obligates me to feel things on your schedule… or at all, frankly.” Lila offered him a small, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry if you misread the situation.”

“But just a few days ago you said… you told me—and now you’re dating some barista?!”

“I told you—he and I have been in an ambiguous thing for a really long time…”

The fry cook, sensing possible narrative, lowered the flame beneath a pan.

Lila continued: “I don’t even know what you want me to say, dude. Like, this is the twenty first century and girls are allowed to date the guys they want.”

Suddenly Eddie’s voice boomed throughout the diner: “Oh, Jesus Christ! Look—if you’re choosing him over me so be it, but can you just fucking admit you LED ME ON, Lila?!”

A couple in the next booth stiffened.
The cook paused at the grill.
A middle-aged woman muttered, Here we go.

Lila shrank into the vinyl seat, twisting her phone in her hands.

At that moment the door swung open with tremendous force and Spider-Man entered, approaching the booth with an air of palpable moral indignation.

“Sir,” he said to Eddie, “you’re upsetting her. That’s not acceptable.”

Lila exhaled in relief and folded her hands, grateful someone was finally here to restore the proper hierarchy of sentiment.

The construction worker looked up at Spider-Man genuinely bewildered.
“Wha…? I’m not upsetting her! We’re just having a conversation.”

Spider-Man shook his head gently.
“She seems uncomfortable. And that should be enough.”

Lila nodded with solemn authority, as if confirming a fact in a medical journal.
“I am uncomfortable,” she said. “This whole situation is becoming unpleasant.”

Eddie sunk slightly into the seat—undone not even by the threat of a superpowered asskicking so much as the creeping suspicion that he had become a Type.

Spider-Man prepared to launch into a final patronizing admonition.

…but then the room vibrated slightly.

and then the ceiling tiles shifted

and then in seconds the floor was a sea of plaster as Doctor Octavius descended through the hole nonchalantly, almost like a man stepping off a commuter bus.

He regarded the scene with mild distaste, as if catching the whiff of an old grievance.

“Good evening,” he said in a calm and cultivated baritone. Everyone remain seated. There’s nothing here worth panicking over, I assure you.”

Spider-Man tensed. “Not tonight, Ock,” he warned.

Octavius waved a hand vaguely. “Relax, Peter—I’ve no interest in violence. I simply overheard an argument and felt compelled to intervene, since you seem to be handling it with your characteristic lack of metacognitive insight.”

He addressed the room, as though unveiling an exhibit.

“Let us clarify what is happening here,” Octavius said, his voice oddly tender toward no one in particular. “You are witnessing an entirely predictable failure mode in human sexual cognition—two incompatible systems attempting contact without the cultural scaffolding that previously prevented disaster.”

He gestured toward Eddie. “On one side, the male architecture: propositional, diachronic, narrative. A man binds through time, and continuity is the very medium through which he experiences love. His identity extends into the future by default. When you spoke to him, you entered his temporal arc, and this is why your nightly conversations felt significant to him. The two of you entered into a story.”

He turned to Lila. “On the other side, the female architecture: affective, synchronic, atmospheric. A woman binds through emotional coherence in the present tense. Her truths are not stored along a graph; they light and extinguish themselves like small, exquisite fires. When the atmosphere changes, the emotional truth changes with it, because for a woman truth is largely contextual—she can love sincerely on Monday and sincerely not feel the same on Friday. Not because she deceives, but because sincerity regenerates itself from moment to moment.”

Lila’s eyes softened in recognition, feeling properly understood for the first time that evening. Octavius continued, his voice growing almost pedagogical.

“Male desire is a function of projection; female desire a function of context. Each is consistent on its own terms—but together? They form a mutually negating system. Putting it game-theoretically, men operate under commitment strategies and women adaptability strategies. His stability is his currency; her flexibility is hers. But remove the coordinating institutions—the rites, the scripts, the social architecture—and the interaction becomes unstable and failure modes begin to proliferate.”

The aging naturalist counted calmly on his fingers:
“The affective drop: her feelings shift, and thus the truth shifts.
The narrative snap: his self-concept collapses because the story breaks.
The preference flip: she reorganizes her past to match her new present.
The substitution wound: he interprets rapid replacement as ontological negation.
The inversion spiral: he idealizes her as she devalues him.”

Octavius leaned closer to Lila, speaking almost kindly. “You did not lead him on; you simply behaved in accordance with your architecture. You expressed what felt true in the moment. Once the moment changed, the truth changed. It is internally consistent.”

Lila exhaled slowly, a subtle relief spreading over her face.

Spider-Man stepped forward, indignant.
“Look, man… the girl’s uncomfortable. That’s all that really matters here.”

There was a beat.

Then Octavius turned—slowly, almost indulgently—to Spider-Man.

“Of course YOU’D say that, Peter—always insisting on intervening in these scenarios as though you yourself are the least bit qualified to adjudicate them.”

Spider-Man stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Octavius smiled faintly.
“Well… let us walk through your own romantic history. That should clarify things.”

The diner leaned in.

“Consider Betty Brant—a woman whose emotional instability you attributed to her temperament, never once considering the game-theoretic implications of your own alternating distance and warmth. You interpreted her volatility as ‘neediness,’ whereas in truth she was merely recalibrating around your own inconsistency!”

Spider-Man opened his mouth, then closed it.

Lila’s gaze flickered toward him with the first faint note of skepticism.

“Gwen Stacy? A tragic lesson in male narrative fatalism! You elevated her to myth the instant she died—a perfect crystallization of your tendency to convert women into narrative absolutes they never asked to be.”

A few women in the diner exchanged knowing glances.

Octavius continued. “Her tragedy was not simply that she died, but that you forced her death to confirm your own self-image, narcissistically transforming her into a martyr for your narrative arc. She became, in your mind, the still point in a world too fast for you—not a person, but a reliquary. Because in truth you never ackshully loved Gwen; not truly. You loved what her absence permitted you to feel about yourself!”

A quiet exhale rippled through the room.

“And Felicia Hardy—the Black Cat! She presented you with a cognition incompatible with yours: a woman who refused temporal obligation. A woman who preferred the volatility of immediacy. You moralized her boundaries as defects; wanted her to speak in your grammatical tense. And when she refused? You classified her as dangerous.”

Spider-Man’s face reddened under the mask.

Lila’s expression shifted again—something closing.

“And finally,” Octavius said, lowering his voice, “Mary Jane Watson.”

He let her name settle like sediment.

“The woman you placed at the terminus of every thread in your psyche. You saw her as the answer to your narrative longing. But she always saw you as atmospheric—didn’t she? Never the story so much as weather. And you never forgave her for that.”

Spider-Man’s breathing grew shallow. Lila looked sharply at him now.

Octavius continued, utterly without malice:

“Her affection for you was always sincere! But it was sincerity of the moment, not the promise. You mistook her capacity for emotional presence as a pledge of emotional permanence. And when she hesitated, as women do, as is their right, you interpreted it as betrayal, because you cannot fathom truths that do not extend through time. And in this respect you’re no different from poor Eddie here—except, I suppose, in being clever enough to make her seem like a flaky bitch in your gay little comic book.”

Lila’s face hardened into granite.

Spider-Man’s protest sounded considerably smaller than he intended.
“That’s not—you’re twisting things.”

Octavius studied him with cool amusement.
“Peter, I am describing things… the twisting is what you do.”

He turned to the diner as though concluding a lecture. “Without scripts, these two cognitive species—the narrative male and affective female— collide painfully. He experiences betrayal; she experiences a shift in the weather. Neither party is wrong. But the two of them are ontologically incompatible without external mediation.”

Lila looked at Eddie with a sudden and disarmed tenderness, as though seeing him not as a threatening man but as a man suffering from a mismatch of epistemologies.

Eddie stared at the table, stunned not by insult but by unexpected comprehension.

Spider-Man stood rigid, as though waiting for someone to tell him what to feel.

The superhero shifted uneasily. “Doc… no… you don’t understand…”

“No, Peter,” Dr. Octavius replied with an expression bordering on pity.
“You do not understand. But that’s alright—you only have a 130 IQ. Mine is 145.”