Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [50]
She didn’t like to fly. In fact, she loathed it. It was a testament to the power of movies that Fearless, about a group of passengers who miraculously survive a plane crash, had permanently scarred her, traumatizing her with an extended graphic sequence—they’d watched the film together—that depicted the inside of the cabin upon impact: the seats came unbolted in rows and carried people on crests of force, the energy ripping infants from mothers’ arms and sending luggage down the aisles at warp speed, slicing through dangling ganglia of oxygen masks, the tangled tubing indistinguishable from flayed guts, the passengers wide-eyed when the rent fuselage revealed gashes of ground and sky. This montage, David imagined, must have played itself out over and over again in her dreams, always pressing near the surface of her consciousness the moment she got near an airport, because even at the gate her breathing became shallow and by the time they reached the walkway she was dizzy, her face seasick-green, and when the plane finally took off, after the accusation that he’d forced her on board, her palms were sweating like tidal pools in his own and her breath went rank for reasons he didn’t understand.
“What was that?” she said after there’d been a rumble, as they climbed, as Queens fell away, her wedding ring pinching his finger until his skin nearly broke. She buried her face in his arm.
“Those are the wheels,” David said, pressing his forehead to hers. “They’re retracting.”
She clung to him tightly as he waited and held her close. She seemed to relax, finally, and this relaxed him too. She’d closed her eyes, so he closed his for a time. At every sound, her fingers contracted in his. It was a night flight under a full moon, and soon they’d climbed over that impossible land on top of the clouds, that great glacial meringue as pristine as a ceiling and also never to be explored. Ever since he was a boy this particular view had thrilled him. Give him emptiness. Endless fields of snow. A city devoid of people, wide avenues empty of cars. His thoughts turned to the apocalyptic movies he’d loved growing up: Damnation Alley. A Boy and His Dog. The Omega Man. (The last man on earth, its poster read, is not alone.) The plots now escaped him, but they weren’t important. It was the open space that he recalled. The freedom. Vastness. Speeding down Park Avenue at a hundred miles per hour, weaving through expressways littered with wreckage, the smoke and gutted skyline rising into view. Give him strange beds in the apartments of total strangers. Let him forage without guilt through other people’s rooms, pull down clothes from racks in abandoned stores, spend nights in ancient buildings preserved in museums. In these places he would find his true love. She was out there. When they found each other they wouldn’t be afraid; each would look at the other and understand.
It was odd to be so pleasantly haunted: to want such things. These were dreams, after all, engendered by someone else’s. Had he and Alice found such an understanding? He could remember believing they had. Yet it was more often in his own dreams that he recalled this, in the dreams of somehow losing her that he became aware of his singular need. “I had the worst dream,” he would say, just waking, still half asleep. “Tell me,” she said. “I dreamed that you left,” he told her. And at the same time it was the view out his window and those thoughts of living at the end of possibility that woke him up now, increasing altitude bringing him back to earth. We’re having a child, he thought, and it does matter. This fear and anxiety—for Alice, about everything—carved not a path for love but a canyon,