What’s Going on in “Full Lockdown”

Full Lockdown explores the effect of Spider’s past on his present, in particular his witnessing the death of his identical twin brother. In other stories involving Spider—Lucifer and Peek-a-boo—this death is looming offstage; in Full Lockdown, we directly see how the trauma—and its ensuing narratives—affect Spider’s behavior.

Spider clearly over-reacts as if there’s a real threat despite the lockdown being a drill. He thinks the teacher, Ms. McCree, will be inadequate and “a serious liability,” just as he believes “grown-ups never actually [stop] bad things from happening.”

It’s as if by being hypervigilant, he—and only he—can save himself and others.

We see this not only when he’s under duress with the drill, but at the story’s opening when he inspects the sixth grader’s tongue depressor bridges. He assumes the bridges will fail, and though it’s three years away, he feels pressured to plan how he will build his bridge. If this seems like an intellectual exercise, don’t be fooled. His preparing is driven by his anxiety, underscoring a belief that he must prepare himself for an unsafe world.

All this makes sense given his past. His brother was killed in an unpredictable, random accident. His solution—his hypervigilance—is an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

His mom’s role

For kids, the parent’s omnipresence and omnipotence serve to protect and reassure the child in a world that is too big, too unpredictable, and potentially too hostile.

In his fading memory of the day Frankie was killed, Spider recalls “a woman who is their mom somewhere behind them, there but not there.” For Spider, his mother is absent at the moment she is most needed. She doesn’t protect Frankie, and Spider experiences this not only as his mother’s failure, it establishes a generalized expectation for all adults.

This informs Spider’s trauma narrative: if a parent can’t be relied upon to keep a child safe, then it’s up to the child to keep himself (and others) safe.

When Spider sees his dead brother

A surprise comes in the story’s second half: Spider reveals to the reader that he saw his dead brother among the other kids. What’s the meaning of this? Is Spider crazy?

I don’t think so. Instead, I think his brother’s imaged presence is a kind of reenactment. It’s as if Spider can recreate the circumstances of his brother’s death but with a different outcome.

In this case, Spider believes he and some five-year-olds are in imminent danger. Unlike the past, he can now actively save his brother—as represented by the other five-year-olds—rather than passively witness his death.