What’s Going on in “Lucifer”

Here’s this kid, Spider, who is petrified of dogs and death. He’s seen death up close, witnessing and thereby surviving his twin brother’s accident. Death and disfiguration—even if his mom doesn’t speak of her own—are all very real to him. He’s terrified of Lucifer, but Spider was also terrified of Tuck, a dog whose mouth is in no danger of biting someone, much less finishing a beef stick which it would love to do. Spider was terrified of dogs the moment he arrived in the world because his mom was terrified.

Even parents who try their hardest to hide their own narratives from their kids rarely succeed in fooling anyone. Let’s say two-year-old Spider and his mom are walking down the street and encounter the cutest, most adorable puppy on a leash. Of course Spider wants to pet the puppy, and his mom, not wanting to spread her fear tells him, “Oh! Oh, yes. Okay, all right, you can pet him. But gently, gently! He’s just a little puppy. Be nice. Careful now!” And when the puppy tries to climb up Spider’s arm, his mom can’t help but let out a string of Oh, oh, oh, ohs. She’s trying to fake it, but it’s clear enough to anyone watching: this woman is freaked out.

And so her narrative, based on real life events, becomes Spider’s narrative based on someone else’s trauma.

This is how trauma is passed down from one generation to the next. (For some excellent reading, check out Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, which, among many things, examines how hundreds of years of enslaving Africans have created patterns of traumatized behavior which, when not viewed in the context of this history, is seen as culture rather than continued intergenerational trauma.)

How then does Spider grapple with this narrative of fear? And what exactly does he fear? He confronts it by tormenting Lucifer. He straddles that edge of fear by taunting Lucifer and running away, “gleeful in his terror.” And why gleeful? Because he knows what will happen to Lucifer when the dog reaches the end of his line: Lucifer will be physically hurt, not Spider who can safely swing free of trouble. 

So Spider invites Lucifer to engage in their co-created struggle, for they each have their part. Spider excites Lucifer who charges and then chokes himself. It’s as if they are both caught up in a pattern neither can stop. They’re each driven to act and react. In fact, you could say that Lucifer, too, is caught in a pattern of behavior driven by a narrative.

What might Lucifer’s narrative be? Perhaps something like: these people want to get in to my space and I have to defend it. I charge and threaten and they run away, which means I’m successful and it works. If I don’t growl and charge, then the bad people will invade this space which I have to guard.

Yes, Lucifer is dog, and can’t consider his options, but he never gets to experience another narrative: what if he didn’t growl and charge? Would the people still invade and hurt him and his home?

Now enters our narrator—which I should clarify is not me, the writer, for this is fiction and made up. The narrator has an advantage that Spider never got: his Papi has compassion for Barky Dog and, in so doing, encourages the narrator to adopt a similar narrative. His Papi sees Barky Dog as a product of his upbringing, that he only needs a family that will “love him right.” His Papi isn’t scared of the dog, which he names Barky Dog, a name which downplays his fierceness. He isn’t the fierce, scary devil dog but an imprisoned dog that barks too much.

With this narrative, the narrator can help Spider start to develop a new narrative about dogs. It’s a small attempt, for the narrator is himself a child and has few resources, much less a complex understanding of what’s going on inside Spider. But he tries, and that, in the end, is enough for now.

There’s one more piece to Spider’s story. The final scene where Spider pets Tuck is not really the end because in the middle of the piece, there’s a flash-forward when the narrator and Spider hide on Old Mr. Cray’s couch and the narrator comments that a year later, Spider will cry for the first time when he can’t remember his brother’s face. This flash-forward serves to guide the reader towards a larger understanding of what is going on inside of Spider.

With any traumatic loss comes the fear of continued losses—for example, not remembering his brother’s face—and this becomes part of Spider’s narrative. He’s lost a brother, his mom nearly lost an eye, and they are both afraid of outside forces coming to steal things away from them. That is Spider’s truth which he would like to escape, swinging free on his imagined Spiderman threads. It will be slow going for Spider, but there is hope for him, as suggested in the flash-forward: he will start to cry and to confront his losses with the help and compassion of others, and this, hopefully, will restore him.