What’s going on in “Peek-a-boo”

On the flight home, Spider’s confronted with a baby who stares expectantly from the seat in front of him. It’s a common enough experience on planes—these staring babies!—and now Spider does what so many people do: he plays peek-a-boo, an appropriate game for a baby who is learning about object permanence. But Spider’s dealing with the same thing: he’s grappling both with the death of his dad and the effects of having a dad who was mostly absent. In this case, his father’s death is simply a continuation of the years of the dad’s absenteeism.

For the baby, peek-a-boo is just an innocent game in which he can learn that though someone’s face disappears from sight, it’s still actually there. There’s a parallel to Spider’s experience with his own father: the dad is sometimes present and sometimes absent. The Peek-a-boo game is relevant to Spider because it’s a kind of reenactment of his relationship with his own father. In this way, Spider can relate to the baby. Like all young kids who have a mostly absent parent, it’s like playing Peek-a-boo, waiting and staring and hoping to see a face appear.

And what joy for this baby when Spider’s face does appear! It’s a bit too much for this kid, who drools and has to look away because the game gets so intense. In this way, the baby is self-regulating to keep from being overwhelmed. You could say the baby is abandoning the game momentarily, causing a rupture in their connection. But then the baby turns back to Spider, smiles and reconnects: a reunion!

But then Spider does something a little odd: he covers his face and keeps it covered while the kid squeals in protest. If Spider can bring joy to the baby, he can also dish out anguish in the form of absence. He makes the kid wait and hope and suffer a loss of connection—which is very similar to Spider’s own experience with his father.

The baby needs this reconnection with Spider, not just to know there’s such a thing as object permanence, but because the baby wants a connection. So far, with Spider, the baby has experienced multiple interruptions in their connection, whether it’s because Spider covers his own face or because the baby looks away. But either way, the baby is learning to trust both of their abilities to reconnect even when there’s a disruption. This rupture and reunion is so key in a child’s building of trust. When kids regularly experience a reunion, this belief in reconnecting will sustain them through an absence. This is what kids learn, for example, when they first start going to daycare.

Let’s look at the end of the story, too, when Spider covers his face and keeps it covered: “For now, Spider would shield his face, waiting for his vision to settle and go dark and disappear. Then, and only then, would he let himself come back to the world.” What’s going on here?

The key piece is Spider’s waiting for his vision to “settle” and “disappear.” The intensity of seeing his father die after years of neglect seems to be dealing a blow to Spider. Just as the baby had to look away from the thing that was causing him to be disregulated, Spider is also trying to metaphorically look away from that which is overwhelming. Ironically though, Spider is trying to numb out his feelings. He might return to the world, but there will be no reconnection or reunion for him because he’s trying to disconnect to his own feelings of loss, anger, and confusion.

Spider shows up in another story on this website, Lucifer, in which Spider is terribly afraid of dogs. From this story, we learn that when Spider was five, he witnessed his twin brother being struck dead by a truck. This loss is perhaps even more intense than the death of his father, Spider having witnessed a violent and unpredictable death at a very young age, not to mention that he lost his twin, someone who he was likely very close to. In Peek-a-boo, there is no mention of his twin’s death, as if the loss doesn’t even register in Spider’s head. Which is likely his way of dealing with something that, at the time, was too overwhelming. He’s pushed away those feelings, and it looks like he’s trying to do the same thing with his dual feelings of loss—that is, grief around both his father’s actual death and the metaphoric death that accompanies the dad’s life-long absence.