Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [59]
“Now, listen to me.” He reached across the table and put his hand over David’s. “You think what just happened to you is some sort of culmination. Like the end of a chapter. That it had to happen exactly like this. But it didn’t. It’s no culmination at all. You have no agency here. It’s the effect of travel. When people travel, and especially when they fly, they see the choice to do so as unique. That’s part of its lore, its miracle and romance. Its magic. People give special status to their point of departure. ‘That flight that went down,’ a person says. ‘I was scheduled to take it, but my cab got stuck in traffic.’ As if God had intervened. They afford divine status to this means of transportation. It was, in fact, just a flight they were trying to catch. That was the end of the sequence. It was where they were going, so it had to be. But they’re wrong. Because when they do catch that flight, they take travel’s interstitial nature and apply it to themselves. Once they’re on that plane, they see it as a break in their life’s sequence, a kind of limbo or safe haven. But life travels with you. Think about it. Divorces have occurred on planes. People get engaged up there. Children have been conceived miles high. They’ve been delivered, healthy, up there too. And people die—of coronaries, strokes, aneurysms. They have a drink, then slip off to permanent sleep. They choke on airplane food. They’re saved. People fall in love. Books are finished, both being written and read. Great discoveries and scientific breakthroughs are made. Yet in spite of all this, people think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they’re wrong. Movement isn’t a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.” In closing, he squeezed David’s hand firmly.
“Tell me again that you’re sure,” David said.
“Of all the thoughts we think, it’s only those that actually manifest themselves that seem significant. But the thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune’s as random as the thought.”
“Promise me.”
“Think of all the thoughts we think. Think of all the ones we don’t remember.”
“Please.”
“It was nothing you did, David. I promise there was nothing you could’ve done.”
David laid his other hand over Harold’s and pressed his forehead to their clasped hands. It was like a sculpture over which his tears ran. “Why couldn’t I have been a better man?” he said.
“You will be.”
“Why didn’t I think something else?”
“You already have.”
David sobbed. More than anything, he wanted to see his wife, to hold her.
“Ease her down now,” Harold said, “ease her down.”
Dr. Ahmed put Alice on a program of blood thinners and kept her under observation for the evening. The next morning, she and David agreed to have their son cremated.
The boy’s ashes were presented to them in a white rectangular plastic container the size of a small Thermos, along with a death certificate that specified David Pepin. The dates of birth and death were the same, of course. The remains felt somehow heavier than the child had, which David found utterly mysterious.
Alice received the urn without any noticeable reaction, having become more and more withdrawn. At the same time, David sensed within her a gathering anger, though he was strangely unafraid. He knew this was due to his conversation with Harold.
Just as David had felt that her pregnancy cleaved Alice from him, it seemed the child’s death had as well. There was nothing to be done about it, however. He’d already accepted it somehow. But what came afterward was something else entirely.
While Alice was in the hospital, he made several calls to Harold, and the comfort he enjoyed from these talks was immeasurable. Of course, his first concern was Alice and how to help her down as well. When the doctor indicated she’d probably be discharged that afternoon, he called Harold immediately, unsure how to proceed. Harold’s advice, albeit cryptic, made a kind of higher practical sense that David couldn’t comprehend until he made use of it. “Be firm with her, but