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Can I…talk to the Hulk? Yeah, sure. He doesn’t much like to talk to me, though. I’ve had to learn his way and, trust me, it hasn’t been easy.
You told me that if logic is my thing, maybe Hulk’s is creative. I started with art lessons. Simple ones, drawing trees, birds that kinda stuff. Then I started to find drawings, left for me of a bird he saw that day. I studied figures, faces a little more. I wasn’t great at it but he kept drawing this face; a woman. I left a note one time asking who this was and on the back of it he wrote “Mommy”. I couldn’t believe it…I don’t remember what my mother looked like. There are a few pictures but it’s like I can’t see her in my imagination. But he knows, he remembers.
Then I tried music. I tried classical and jazz and pop, just kind of everything and sometimes he’d know songs I didn’t remember. It was hard for me to figure out at first, what I was doing…I was singing along to songs I didn’t know because he was singing. But the feeling part was the hardest. I read several books on interpreting emotions. Everything about it felt wrong and scary. Emotions were a no-go even before the incident but after it I was terrified. I mean if I “changed” in my house… I didn’t want to get overwhelmed. But I wanted him to remember, to show me things like my mother’s face. I’d tried meditation in the past but it was always about control, dulling the swell of feelings. This time I just sat down and listened to my own breathing and things came to me, like tugs on a spider’s web. I opened myself to feeling what he was feeling, if only a little bit.
If I played a song he liked during it, sometimes I’d see a memory. I put on this one song, some hair metal ballad about love and I remembered walking into the ocean with my mother and holding her hand. When the song ended I cried because even though it still felt like I was watching a stranger, I felt like I knew that boy. Hulk carried this, all of this, and he carries its loss, the grief of losing her at the same time. No wonder he’s always so angry.
It’s not always pleasant. Sometimes I get his nightmares too. People shooting at me, yelling at me. Hurting me, not with their weapons but with their hatred. A thousand eyes of a hostile planet on a creature that never asked to be here.
But it worked. The more we connected, the easier I found it to switch without it being forced. It still hurts to transform of course, I don’t think anything can change that. But it’s not as slow so it doesn’t last as long.
Eventually, I was ready to take the next step. This one really scared me. You remember how long it took, all the times I decided to do it and then changed my mind. I didn’t want to lose control. I was starting to understand that there was more to him than just wanton destruction but I still didn’t like the idea of being somewhere else while he controlled my body. Our body, sorry.
Fighting was one thing. I don’t have the stomach for conflict so in a way, even though I struggled to keep hold of Hulk, I didn’t really want to be present for things like that anyway. But every second outside of that felt like it belonged to me. I was Bruce Banner, the name on my birth certificate is mine not his. It took me some time to stop thinking of this life as only ever intended to be mine. If this was our life, he deserved a shot at it too and not just when I needed him for something.
I found a good spot out in the desert, drove all the way out there and just sat by the truck. I invited him to trigger the transformation and he did. In the note I explained that this day would be his to do with as he pleased. Until this same time tomorrow, we were the Hulk and the Hulk only.
I don’t know what he did with that day. Part of the deal was that I wouldn’t ask. Have you ever kept fish? They’re such simple animals compared to us and yet…you have to put places in their tank for them to hide. The need for privacy is so deeply rooted in our brains that even fish need it to be healthy.
When I woke up, I was back at the truck. According to the watch I had taken off and thrown in the back seat, it was the next day.
Hulk had scrawled a message in the dirt for me. A smiley face. And that’s how it started. One day became two, which became more if it could be spared responsibility wise. I left him sandwiches and fruits and when I woke up he’d have tossed a bagel or some old pizza into the truck for me. It was probably stolen from a nearby town, scavenged from a deserted table or something but I let it slide. It’s the thought that counts.
Something sort of amazing happened later on. It was during one of his days and he called to me while I was, you know, “in the back”. And I’m suddenly there, in the body while it’s hulk- sized. I’ve had blurry memories before, where everything is too intense and strange to really register anything but this time is crystal clear.
We’re standing on a cliff face, up in the great basin. The sky is this huge dome above us, striped with clouds and the ground stretches out below us in hills and fields for miles. It’s beautiful, but I’m a little scared. He tells me to jump down and eventually he convinces me to actually do it. It’s a hell of a rush, in that body. I can feel something, it must be gamma radiation shimmering in the air and coursing through me like pure energy. When I jump, I inhale and it’s like I take it all inside me and I leap into the air like it’s nothing. When I land, I nearly topple us over and Hulk is laughing at me. I spring forward and leap again and again, covering a huge distance.
I have a million questions about how to do things and why he’s brought me to the front now but he doesn’t say much. Instead he shows me some of the flowers from his drawings, some of his favorite spots, hidden caves in the sides of mountains. We see a herd of buffalo and even though I was scared he just walks right up to them. Well, everything is a lot less intimidating when you’re hulk-sized that’s for sure, but they were still so big and so powerful. They didn’t run, just sniffed at us and let us pet them like he had seen them before. He only let me pet the biggest ones, I was so clumsy with the strength of those hands. I never realized before how skilled involved being gentle when you’re just that strong.
At some point in the evening, he brought us back to the truck and I understood it was time for us to go home. We sat down and slowed our breathing, listening to the animals of the plains change shifts. The transformation hurts on the way back too, him more than me. But I had the idea to use his hand as my hand, and hold hands as our muscles shrank and our frame crumpled back into shape. I just wanted to help him through the pain a little, just like I wanted someone to do for me when it’s the other way around. We still do that now for transformations a lot of times. Our way of comforting each other without words. In a weird way, it’s something we’ll always have in common, that pain, even if we can’t always understand each other.
I don’t exactly make a habit of doing that whole thing. Co-piloting? Co-fronting, right. Sometimes I accompany Hulk on his wanderings, a few times we’ve even done it in combat when he’s needed an edge that strength alone can’t give. But no, no I feel much more at home in this body than I ever could giant and green. I’m sure he feels the same any time he needs to be puny to draw or fit into smaller buildings.
As for what’s next I’m not sure. Things still happen. Bad guys still try and destroy the world, or strangle it or whatever else. Sometimes Hulk and I are a part of it. Sometimes we’re not. We still disagree on a case by case basis, whether or not to get involved but there’s always a discussion now, even if it’s without words.