The plane taxis. Lifts. Toronto drops away below us, a grey grid of frozen streets and lake-effect cloud cover, and then we're above it, punching through the overcast into a sky that's going pink and gold at the edges.
Arjun has not spoken to me since we sat down. I know what this is. I've been studying the language of Arjun Kapoor's discomfort for two years, and right now, every fluency I've built is screaming the same translation: he is terrified.
Not of flying. Arjun flies constantly, conferences and consultations and visits to the family he's about to throw me at like a six-foot-three Canadian grenade. He's terrified of what's on the other end. And he's terrified of the fourteen hours of proximity in between, because proximity is the thing Arjun controls most ruthlessly, and right now, in this intimate pod with the four-inch armrest and the angled seats, he cannot control it at all.
“So,” I say, because someone has to break this silence before it develops its own gravitational field. “Did you bring anything to watch, or are you just going to stare at the safety card for fourteen hours? Because I'll be honest, it's a bold entertainment choice, but I respect the commitment.”
His jaw tightens. Then, very slightly, the corner of his mouth moves. It's not a smile. Arjun Kapoor does not smile casually. It is a micro-expression, a seismic event registering at approximately 0.3 on the Richter scale, and I feel it in my chest like a bass drum.
“I have reading material,” he says. “Two journal articles on advances in minimally invasive posterior fossa decompression, and a monograph on intraoperative neuromonitoring protocols.”
“Fun.”
“They are professionally critical.”
“I brought Jurassic Park on my iPad.”
He turns his head and looks at me. He has that specific expression, the one where his green eyes narrow and his sculpted eyebrows draw together by approximately two millimetres and his entire face communicates, with devastating aristocratic clarity, that he is silently re-evaluating every decision that led him to this moment.
“The film?” he asks.
“The book. Crichton. Although I've also got thefilm downloaded as a backup, because some situations call for Jeff Goldblum.”
“I have never seen Jurassic Park.”
I stare at him. I stare at him long enough that the flight attendant pauses mid-aisle to check if I'm doing okay.
“You've never seen Jurassic Park.”
“It did not seem necessary.”
“It has dinosaurs, Arjun. Dinosaurs that eat people. And a chaos theory mathematician in a leather jacket. It is necessary to the human experience.”
“It was never available on any streaming platform I used, and I was not going to seek it out independently. I had a surgical caseload.”
“You had a surgical caseload. That's your excuse. You were too busy saving brains to watch a dinosaur eat a lawyer.”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Your priorities are completely messed up.” I reach into my bag, pull out my iPad, and hold it up. “We're fixing this. Right now. Fourteen hours, with nowhere to run. You're watching Jurassic Park.”
He looks at the iPad. He looks at me. He looks back at the iPad. A war is happening behind his eyes, a war between the part of him that wants to read about posterior fossa decompression and the part of him that is, despite his best efforts, a human being who is trapped in a pressurized tube with a man holding an iPad and radiating weaponized enthusiasm.
“Fine,” he says. “But if it's scientifically inaccurate, I reserve the right to provide commentary.”
“Doc, it's a movie about a theme park full of cloned dinosaurs. The science is not the point.”
“The science is always the point.”
He is going to be the worst person to watch a movie with, and I am going to enjoy every single second of it.
I set up the iPad on the tray table between us, angling it so we can both see. Then I pull out my old-school wired earbuds — theones that somehow survived all of my high school and college years and continue to endure in spite of the time that has gone by — and hold one out to him. He stares at it as if I'm offering him a live insect. “We can't blast dinosaur carnage through the cabin, Doc. We’re going to have to share.” He takes the earbud between two fingers, examines it for approximately four seconds as if assessing its sterility, and places it in his right ear. I put the other one in my left ear. The cord stretches between us like a tether, and now we are linked by a three-foot white cable, which means leaning in. Which means our shoulders are approximately two inches apart.
I can feel the warmth radiating off him even through his shirt, which is remarkable because Arjun runs cold. He is always cold. He wears extra layers under his scrubs. He drinks his coffee scalding. He once, during an extraordinarily long surgical case, asked the OR team to raise the theatre temperature by two degrees, and three nurses nearly passed out. The man is a reptile in a lab coat.
But right now, this close, in this dim cabin with the overhead lights turned down and the pink sky fading to deep blue outside the window, he is warm. Or maybe I am warm enough for both of us. That's probably more accurate.
The movie starts. The opening sequence, the raptor crate, the arm, the screaming. Arjun watches with narrowed eyes and says nothing.