Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [51]
She slept through dinner and he set hers aside for later. After he ate, he dozed briefly himself. When he woke, the first movie they were showing was ending. He checked the time. The captain announced they were above the Grand Canyon, but David could see nothing but blackness. He removed the safety pamphlet and considered the different points of exit in the event they went down. In an open-water crash, the plane floated all of a piece, as if built for just that. Would he and Alice be able to survive on a desert island? Have their child there? First you must make a fire. But desert islands didn’t exist, or at least the possibility of getting so lost. There were no unknown places in the world.
He ordered himself a drink and when the attendant returned with it, he discovered he had no cash in his wallet. Alice’s purse sat between them, and searching through it he noticed the small box of Unisom, a sleep aid whose active ingredients were antihistamines and which the doctor had cleared her to take. He figured the length of flight and took two pills himself and ordered another drink, then settled in to watch Dodgeball, the movie that had already begun, but the earphones were on the fritz, the sound as garbled and static-filled as a mayday sent from the center of a storm, so he took them off and closed his eyes and then sleep came over him, fairy tale deep, the kind that arrives when everything you have to do on earth is done, that allows you to pass from one world into the next …
He woke to a crash.
It felt as if the plane had been broadsided, for it was knocked to the left by an impact at the tail that sent a creak down the whole fuselage. People gasped, as did David, not because he was afraid (nothing about flying ever scared him) but because Alice was gone. The seatbelt lights flashed on, their game-show gong tolling repeatedly, the captain asking people to return to their seats in a voice that sounded comically calm. They’d hit some bad chop, he explained, and were trying to climb out of it. “We’re looking for some good air,” he said. Out the window, no clouds now. Nothing below but the ocean. It seemed sickeningly close, molten iron in texture and streaked with chalk-white glare from the moon. David, looking up and down the aisle, saw two attendants rapping on one of the bathroom doors, knowing full well that his wife had locked herself in. Puzzled that she hadn’t wakened him, he went to unbuckle his seatbelt, but the moment he touched the clasp the plane plummeted, so suddenly that in the seat in front of him the liquid in the man’s drink rose in a neat stream from the cup he held, gone airborne above his tray table before landing back in place without the loss of a drop.
This fall sent another collective gasp through the passengers, and when the oxygen masks dropped down from above there were screams. They were being shaken now, the vibration landslide-loud. David’s skull was trembling, his teeth rattling. The captain was speaking again, inaudibly. A woman across the aisle from David said, “What did he say?” and he shrugged. “I can’t hear him either,” he said, already getting up. The woman gripped the arms of her seat, pressed her head back, and began to cry. David approached the flight attendants, one of whom had already sat down in her jump seat and was clipping her four-point belt together. When she saw him, she ordered that he sit down. Then another blow,