Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [189]
“No!” Pepin said, running down the steps with the phone to his ear. “Please!”
Mobius held up something small and black in his other hand. “Boom,” he said.
Above the whale were twin puffs of smoke and a simultaneous discharge—two bursts as loud as M-80s—that drew all eyes to the ceiling. Alice was somehow the only person standing underneath, she too looking toward the sound, so she didn’t see Pepin running up to tackle her.
The blackness was followed by a dead silence, then moans and screams and cries. A snowstorm of fiberglass and polyurethane dust clouded the room blindingly, seeming to fall and rise at the same time. Alice wasn’t beneath him, and he could barely see his own hand, though within moments there was a slight clearing, a settling. People stood up, children too, mummy-white and caked in this billowing plaster, wandering in circles at first and coughing, some with the wherewithal to help whoever was lying beside them, others frozen on their knees, stunned by disaster, their hands on their thighs as they knelt upright like plaster sculptures of samurai. The whale was shattered all around them, its shards white with the dust, like pieces of a hatched dinosaur egg.
Alice was nowhere in sight. It was as if she’d been sucked down a wormhole. There was, between his knees, just her imprint: a snow angel he ran his hands through until he could see only the black floor.
HERE’S HOW IT (ACTUALLY) ENDED:
Dear David,
If you’re reading this letter, I’m dead.
There was a great deal of concern about my undergoing gastric bypass surgery due to potential complications related to my thrombophilia. The truth is that I was strongly advised against it. But I couldn’t stand the way I was any longer.
I’d planned to take a long trip afterward. Use the tickets if you wish. Find a new beginning. A new world.
What do you say when you come to The End? You can say a lot or a little. I could say that I love you (and I do), that I would do anything for you (and I have), and that I believe you’d do the same for me.
I asked that you not receive notification for nine months afterward. It was long enough to make my absence real. It’s long enough for a child to be conceived and come into the world. It’s long enough, in other words, for radical change. So here’s the thing I want you to answer:
During the time I was gone, what did you do?
After David finished writing the book, he wept.
Because no matter how she died, he thought, in fact or in his imagination, there was an inescapable feeling of complicity. Art was no exorcism, at least not for the artist, and these other things he knew to be true: there were no detectives, no contract killer, nothing at all. Only nothing. And then, because his wishes had been fulfilled, there came a much darker realization: he’d never shake this guilt, would always be stuck in this place. So the David who left this chair now to walk the world from here on out, the one who carried on as if this were past, could only be half-real. An avatar.
HERE’S HOW DAVID’S BOOK ENDED:
Pepin returned to his apartment, sick with defeat, with the waiting at the perimeter of the museum and then the endless walking and the futile inquiries with the authorities until finally his only recourse was to flee home.
When he arrived at his building, he saw himself reflected in the front door, his body white from head to toe, caked with dust. But the doorman was gone, the security monitors were off, and the elevator was stuck, apparently, on his floor. On the stairwell’s windowpane, EXIT was painted in red.
As you often do in dreams, he climbed like a moonwalker, in airy bounds, leaping from landing to landing, taking ten steps at a time. In fact, he was just running.
He stood at their door, which was slightly ajar, and went through into the kitchen, where she was at the table, showered, in clean clothes, with a plate of nuts in front of her. On the blue cylindrical container, Mr. Peanut tipped his top hat and smiled. She’d cried herself into a kind of exhaustion, her