Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [57]
David looked at his own hands. His palms—he’d never noticed this before—were bare of such striation. But he had the same fate line: interrupted, incomplete.
“It’s amazing what we believe if we hear it at the right time,” Harold said. “When she told me this, I somehow felt like a failure, as if I suffered some crippling blindness about myself. Ever since then, from the day of that reading, I felt like everything I did with my life was an attempt to complete this line. Isn’t it odd that a total stranger could have an influence like that?”
David nodded.
“You don’t feel like you own your feelings now, do you?”
“No,” David said.
The man flicked a finger at David’s plate as if knocking on a door. “Can I get this for you?”
“No, thank you,” David said.
Harold put his wallet back. “I’m glad you’re eating.”
Something in David eased infinitesimally. The man’s tone, the very sound of his voice, promised a future that was not of this event.
“I’m here for several reasons, Mr. Pepin, first of all for aid. When something tragic happens in our skies, we do our utmost to extend sympathy. But sympathy without action, that’s an empty emotion. Mainly I’m here for the purposes of reentry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Adjustment,” Harold said, “to earth. I’m here to make sure you didn’t leave your whole life in the sky.”
Waiting, David crumpled his napkin and rested his wrists on the table, staring at his hands once again. No matter how anyone tried to help him now he felt like he was being interrogated.
“I know it sounds mysterious,” Harold said. “Let me begin practically. I have your family’s luggage. It’s in a car parked outside, along with a driver from the airline. If there’s anything you and your wife need from it, any particular article, even all of it, I’ll have it brought to you right now.”
David nodded.
“Did the doctor say how long Alice would be hospitalized?”
“He said she had to go on blood thinners to get home. He said it was dangerous for her to fly right now.”
“Will you stay at the hospital?”
David shook his head.
“Why don’t you tell me what hotel you’re staying in, and I’ll have the driver deliver your luggage immediately. If you find your stay here is extended, everything’s there. He can bring anything back to you at any time.”
“We were supposed to be at the Mandarin Oriental. But … ”
“You don’t know where you’ll be,” he said.
“No.”
“Do you feel like you’re still moving? Like when you drive for a long time and try to sleep afterward, but it’s like your mind’s been windblown.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I’m here.” Harold put his two index fingers up, then pressed their sides together. “It’s a condition, David, like shock. A person suffers a disaster traveling between two points in the air. It’s a unique brand of trauma. For two reasons. First, it’s the initial act of faith when you fly—the obvious thing you put out of your mind in order to board. That your reptile brain knows at thirty thousand feet you’re at risk of death. Second, because we travel at such great speeds and in such complex systems and routes, should anything interrupt the connections required for us to move between these locales, should we somehow get thrown out of that sequence of departure and arrival, then our most fundamental sense of security is blown from our possession as surely as if it had been detonated. The psychological and spiritual aftermath of such an event can be devastating.”
David was able to look up now, and the man’s eyes were blue and comforting.
“Something happens between two points,” Harold said, “something in the air, and it’s as if our own lives have been shot, like Phaethon’s, right out of