Twenty minutes in, Sam Neill finds the sick Triceratops. Arjun tilts his head. “The pupillary response is inaccurate. A genuinely ill reptile would present with more pronounced nictitating membrane dysfunction.”
“Arjun.”
“I'm providing commentary. As you may recall, I reserved the right.”
Forty minutes in, the T-Rex breaks out. The rain, the flare, the ripples in the water glass. I'm watching Arjun's face more than I'm watching the screen, because I have seen this movie approximately thirty-seven times and the look on Arjun Kapoor's face as aTyrannosaurus Rex flips a Ford Explorer is something I have never seen and may never see again.
His eyes widen. Not much but just enough. His lips part by a fraction. His right hand, resting on his thigh, twitches, and for one glorious, perfect second, the Dread Prince of Paediatrics is a thirty-three-year-old man seeing a dinosaur eat a lawyer off a toilet for the first time. He is transfixed.
“The bite force is actually quite accurate,” he murmurs, and his voice is almost, almost soft with something that might be wonder. “Approximately twelve thousand eight hundred pounds per square inch. The mandibular structure is well-rendered.”
“Arjun. Are you enjoying this?”
“I am observing it with professional detachment.”
“You just complimented the dinosaur's jaw.”
“I complimented the animatronics department's anatomical research.”
“So you're enjoying it.”
He turns his head, and we are very close, close enough that I can see the individual flecks of gold in his green eyes, and he says, with tremendous dignity, “The film is... not without merit.”
I grin at him. He looks away quickly. But his hand, now resting on the armrest, has moved approximately one inch closer to the centre line, and the tips of his fingers are almost touching the edge of mine.
Almost.
We watch the rest of the film in a silence that has changed texture, gone from rigid and loaded to something softer, something that has settled in around us like the pressurized cabin air. When the velociraptors stalk through the kitchen, Arjun's breathing changes. When the banner drops in the rotunda and the T-Rex roars, his chin lifts slightly, and I swear I see the ghost of a smile, a real one, flickering at the edge of his mouth.
The credits roll. The cabin is dark now, the overhead lights dimmed to a blue glow. Most of the other passengers are asleep.The engines hum a deep, constant drone that vibrates through the seats.
“Verdict?” I ask.
He considers this for a long moment, staring at the frozen credit scroll on the iPad screen. “The ethical framework regarding genetic manipulation was surprisingly nuanced. The chaos theory elements, while dramatically overstated, raised legitimate epistemological questions about scientific hubris. And the practical effects work was...” He pauses. “Remarkable.”
“So you liked it.”
“I found it intellectually stimulating.”
“You liked it.”
“Go to sleep, Dr. Welling.”
I smile in the dark. I close the iPad, slide it back into my bag, and settle into my seat. The business class pod has a recline function that goes almost flat, and I push it back, stretching my legs as far as the footrest allows, which isn't quite far enough because nothing built for humans is quite far enough for me.
We are somewhere over the Atlantic. Three hours in, eleven to go. Through the window, the sky is a vast, black, star-scattered expanse, and somewhere far below us, invisible in the dark, an ocean is doing whatever oceans do at ten o'clock at night when no one is watching.
Arjun reclines his seat. He has changed into a pair of slim, dark travel trousers and a soft grey cashmere pullover that he produced from his messenger bag that appears to have been packed for every conceivable contingency. He looks, in the dim blue light, like a painting. Like something behind glass in a museum that you're not allowed to touch, staring at the ceiling of the cabin as though he could intimidate sleep into arriving.
He won't sleep. I know this. Arjun doesn’t sleep easily. He’s told me this in fragments over two years, offhand comments about insomnia during long shifts, about the way his brain won't stop running case scenarios, about the three a.m. hours when he lies in his immaculate condo and calculates margins of error forsurgeries that are already finished. Sleep requires surrender, and surrender requires trust. Arjun Kapoor trusts nothing he cannot control with a scalpel.
I turn onto my side, facing him. He’s on his back, his profile sharp in the blue cabin light, and I watch his jaw tighten and release, tighten and release, a rhythmic clench that I know means he’s working through something, chewing on a thought that he can't digest.
“Hey,” I say, quietly. “You okay?”
A long breath. His eyes close, then open. “I am calculating the probability of various disastrous outcomes upon our arrival.”
“What's the current frontrunner?”