Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [66]
Nor did the pictures capture David’s terror staring at the stars on those nights when Alice cried herself to sleep, with a dull moan like an old engine turning over endlessly, resounding through the sliding doors of the lanai even if he plugged his ears. Never had he seen a sky as wide or brilliant as this, or as terrifically violent; he saw tens of shooting stars every night, and, once, what he was sure was a comet because of its slow progress across the horizon, its head brighter than any other star, its tail flickering clearly, on a cataclysmic collision course with who knew what or when or how many light-years away. This sky wasn’t star-hung but star-flung, the universe from this vantage a stage of explosions and near misses. No picture could yield his state of mind, an anxious span of minutes, of hours, spent wondering, semiparalyzed, that since nothing truly bad had ever happened to him until now, why was it impossible to think that this was only the beginning? That the rest of his life was an inescapable strip of suffering, relooping on itself for as long as he breathed. Nor did the pictures capture how golden the sunlight was in the morning or the relief those first rays gave him as he lay on the edge of their bed.
The pictures didn’t capture the grandeur of Waimea Canyon either, the silence of its reddish brown mountains, a quiet augmented by the sight, miles and miles distant, of waterfalls hundreds of feet high, cascades reduced by perspective to tiny hairs, their movement still perceptible, a braided shimmer, your mind tricking you into thinking you could just barely hear their crash, or of what it was like from that lookout to spot goats in the valley two thousand feet below, or to dream of what life was like as many years previous, to have come here with the Polynesians, to have set foot on this place and thought you’d discovered paradise, to imagine yourself down there, hunting these creatures. To understand that a life based on survival as opposed to love was perhaps desirable. That after seeing this, all apocalyptic dreams seemed a pathetic longing for such simplicity. Nor did the pictures confirm Alice’s seriousness when, staring out over that precipice, she flatly said that she no longer felt like a woman and that if the feeling didn’t return to her, then she wanted to die.
Neither did they give you a true sense of how sheer the climb was down to Hideaway Beach in Princeville, the rusted railings wobbly on cement stairs steep as attic steps—“They should call it Fall Away,” David said—built literally off the edge of a cliff, as if the house to which they’d been attached had fallen into the ocean, since chunks of the last step had eroded and you had to jump down to the path, this adding to the comedy and terror. They didn’t render the slipperiness of the switchback trail you traversed, where your hands were burned by the rope lines you used to half rappel down at the risk of tumbling two hundred feet and bouncing off solid rock webbed by palms. They didn’t communicate the conviction that for all Kauai’s beauty there was always a concomitant anxiety about your safety: rip tides could take you; tiger sharks could ambush you from below; the nothingness of the Pacific stretched out and could carry you away.
No picture conveyed the power of the current at Ha’ena Beach, water too dangerous to swim in, where sign after yellow sign warned of lethal drop-off and shore break, the stickman figure crushed by stickwaves and washed out to sea. (“No wonder you never see stickmen,” David said to Alice, “those idiots are all dead.”) DANGEROUS MARINE LIFE! the signs read. DO NOT APPROACH THE MONK SEALS! NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN! David’s pictures didn’t communicate the invisible speed of the shallow river mouth they tried to cross that afternoon in order to reach the reef beyond, how it knocked their feet out from under them while they held hands and slid toward the giant surf—it was like being swallowed—and were finally beached in the shallowest stretch of stream, the last