Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [166]
And he wanted Alice back, not to show her that he was worthy but to confess that he knew nothing of her at all. Or more accurately, to admit how little, really, he knew even after all this time. It was enough to bring a person to his knees in humility. It was the beginning but also the end: the necessary conclusion of Alice’s experiment.
“Please,” he said, leaning against the meter. “Come back to me.”
In the lobby, he noticed their mailbox was full.
When he opened it, he saw a large manila envelope, 8½ × 11, addressed to him in Alice’s hand. It had been postmarked only yesterday and was sent from New York City. In spite of his excitement, David opened it carefully. Several things fell out: a set of plane tickets and then a small envelope, his name written in her hand as well. The note was less than a page long, and he read it through quickly.
He didn’t understand.
He looked at the plane tickets, reread the note from Alice, then dropped all the other mail so he could hold the page in both of his hands. He sank to the floor and read the letter again, his expression going sour with tears. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, no.” He read Alice’s letter once more—in his mind hearing her voice reading the words aloud—and when he’d finished, he screamed like he’d run earlier. He screamed all the air from his lungs. Then, when he got his breath back, he screamed some more.
David spent the next three days in bed.
He called Cady and told him he was taking an indefinite sabbatical but would sell him his shares in Spellbound if he wished, and after hanging up he ripped the cord from the wall with a single pull.
For three days, he lay in his bed in their destroyed apartment. He drew the blinds and had only the vaguest sense of night and day. He left his bed only to piss and shit and drink water from the tap, then crawled back under the covers and went to sleep or lay awake for hours with all the lights off, dreaming in either state. He ignored the pain of hunger long enough until he felt a pleasant, cleansing emptiness that seemed to engender even more powerful dreaming—and there were times he imagined he might never eat again. He often woke with a start, unsure of where he was, and when he remembered he began to sob again, repeating this cycle until he felt nothing, until he was as empty of grief as he was of sustenance. He could feel his stomach shrinking with each day. It was like the opposite of pregnancy, and he wondered at one point if his stomach might pucker so much with hunger that he might not be able to eat again. Then he slept some more.
On the third day he woke up, got out of bed, and opened the shades. He didn’t know what day it was but he knew what he had to do. He’d thought that if he found Alice he’d know what happened next; and now that he knew, he understood that there was some work to accomplish before he got to the end.
He was weakened from his fast and walked gingerly to the bathroom and bathed like a man returned from an exile in the desert for months. He drank water from the shower head. He shaved and washed his hair, and after staring at his razor for a minute or more he decided to shave all the hair from his body, which took a very long time. Once out of the shower, he brushed his teeth and then went to the kitchen for a pair of scissors and cut off his thick locks of hair. And then, back in front of the mirror, he lathered his scalp and shaved that as well.
He put on jeans—slightly loose at the waist—and a T-shirt and set to work cleaning the apartment. Chaos is a far faster spirit than order, and it took him triple the time to restore their home. He put Alice’s clothes back into the boxes and sealed them, but before putting them