The Heart of Henry Quantum (21 page)

He sat himself down, kicked the nearest chair, and watched it roll into the one beside it. It doesn't feel a thing, he thought. Not a thing. He could take an ax to that chair and it wouldn't know the difference. And yet if he did chop it into firewood he'd certainly get fired. Because we hold these objects, these nothings, more dear than we do actual, living people.

It was the whole capitalist system! He was just an ox yoked to a millstone!

And naturally this made him think about Genghis Khan.

Because when Genghis was a boy he was shackled to a stone yoke. Had he not escaped he would have been executed when he'd grown to the height of a wagon wheel. He ran hundreds of miles with that yoke around his neck to get away. At least he did in the movie. But Henry Quantum understood Genghis Khan very well. Because poor Genghis never did get away. He carried that yoke all his life. That's why he extracted so cruel a vengeance, a vengeance such as the world had never seen.

Do I want vengeance? wondered Henry Quantum. Not really. It only makes things worse. And who wants that?

Because on a macro level, on the level of thermodynamics, which he had to admit he only barely comprehended, things were quite opposite of all those gluons and quarks. Here an idea called entropy ruled—being the tendency of objects in nature to fall apart. And guess what? Entropy is called the
strong force
. And that which binds things together? The
weak force
. And what is it that binds people together? Why, love. Love binds people together. Love is the weakest force of all.

He sighed and said to himself, “How many sighs can a person sigh in one fucking day?”

He might as well have asked how many stars are in the galaxy and how many galaxies are in the universe and how many universes are in the multiverse. Because that's how many sighs are in a day.

And maybe entropy is also why everyone comes to work. Because every attachment is ephemeral, because we really are just representations of data on the edge of a black hole, because love is useless and it's better to settle for an illusion than to have nothing at all. The truth is, if you make a decent commercial for Protox, maybe you won't notice the entropy for another half hour and maybe your customer won't, either. That's not such a bad thing, is it? Although what could have more entropy than Protox? It's a fucking laxative. At least it won't kill you like Samurai Brand Real Beef Chewing Jerky and Pinch of Beef.

“You still here?”

He looked up. It was Denise, the art director.

“Oh, hi. I thought I was alone. I was just thinking about things,” he said.

“You should know better than to do that. You look positively suicidal.”

“Do I?”

“All crumpled. And you're incredibly wet.”

“I got caught in the rain.”

Denise wrapped her long, languid fingers around his arm and drew him up. “Come with me,” she said.

She led him through the hall to the bathroom and pulled a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “Here,” she said. “Dry your hair. And take off your jacket, and—oh man, strip off that shirt. We can dry it on the hand dryer. T-shirt, too.”

He did as he was told.

“And check out your pants, man,” she said. “They are seriously gross.”

“What can I do?” he asked.

“Dude,” she held out her hand, “just give them to me.” When he didn't, she stepped forward and unhooked his belt. “Hey, man, you're not, like, going to make me do the rest, are you?”

“No, no,” he said. He slid them off and held them out to her.

She laughed. “Henry Quantum! I wouldn't have expected it, but you have a pretty decent body. It's cool you don't work out. I like the no-abs thing.”

“Thank you.”

She laughed again. “Do you always have to be polite?”

“Was that wrong?”

“No. It's cute.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She laughed once more.

“Sorry,” he said.

She hung his trousers over the stall and asked, “You like me, don't you?”

“Of course I like you.”

“No, I mean, like, you
like
me.”

“I—Well—”

“It might surprise you to know I like you, too.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

She tapped his nose with her forefinger, that eel-like forefinger with the black-enameled nail that curved ever so slightly inward like a Chinese empress's.

“We're completely alone,” she said. “The place is ours.”

“Uh . . .” he said.

“You know that a lot of girls like you,” she continued. “There's something about you. I mean, aside from the cluelessness, which I have to admit, I find attractive. You don't put on airs. You don't judge. I like that. I like that you treat people so nicely. Like Schwartz. He's a complete douche. You know he's a douche. I know he's a douche. But you are kind to him anyway. You don't even notice how kind you are. And that cowlick or whatever it's called—you always have some hair sticking up out of place. It's cute, that's all. You kind of look like Cary Grant, when he played the nutty professor.”

One had to admit, Denise was extremely beautiful in her strangeness, in the wild colors of her hair and the feather extensions that seemed so exotic to him, in the boyish body with those tiny breasts with their razor-sharp nipples that all of the guys remarked upon on a daily basis because they were almost always visible beneath her skimpy blouses and clingy sweaters, a beautiful boyish body made the more so by the skintight floral pants and the Western shirt with its embroidered collar and pearl snaps and the sleeves ripped off at the shoulders to expose tattoos of snakes and flowers and strange geometries in blue and red and brown and green that ran all the way down to her wrists and ended in a single tendril of ivy that curled along the back of her hands. He knew a lot of people thought she was gay, and in fact she once told him that she sometimes was, but apparently she wasn't today; and though it was true that her face was a bit boyish with its large, hard features, the softness of her mouth, and the way her bottom lip protruded like a little cup, and the musky insinuation of her voice, which matched the musky insinuation of her scent, didn't seem boyish at all.

“Are my pants dry yet?” he asked

“I just hung them up, Henry. So I doubt it. Anyway, what's the rush?”

“No rush. It's just—”

“Don't you like me?”

“Of course I like you. It's just, you know, I have my pants off.”

“I think we've already established that.”

“Oh,” he said.

The whole of Denise seemed to be made of liquid rubber. She had no edges at all. Tall, gangly, bony, yet structureless. She was like some strange amorphous sea creature that slithers along the ocean floor and he watched with some alarm as her jellylike hand slid from the tip of his nose down to his bare chest, found his nipples and squeezed them like she might two ripe plums in the market. She smiled one of her Mona Lisa smiles.

That's also when he noticed her other hand had gone all the way down to his groin, where it clamped on to what it found there like an octopus engulfing its pray.

“Merry Christmas, Bones!” she chimed.

“Uh . . .” he said.

5:50–9:03 p.m.

What a crazy day this had been! He was blown away, simply blown away at how things had turned out and also at himself and at life and at all the good and bad that had been thrown in his direction. But for better or worse, everything having happened as it happened, he put his clothes back on and left the office as quickly as he could, saying to Denise that he really had to pick up his brother-in-law right away, which wasn't precisely true, because the flight wasn't due for an hour and a half. He was a little surprised that Denise didn't mind, in fact she laughed that same mocking, affectionate laugh. Unfortunately she had never gotten around to using the hand dryer on his shirt or on anything else, so his clothes were still filthy, soaked, and freezing. He spotted his reflection in the office window. He looked like he'd been dragged though the mud by a pickup truck. He was okay with that, all things considered.

This time, though, he grabbed an umbrella—he always kept one propped near the trash can—and bid Denise good-bye with a rather chaste wave of his hand. He made his way out onto the street, bent his umbrella into the wind, and pushed on to the garage on Battery Street. Roberto was still there behind his little podium and when Henry saw him, he waved happily.

“I guess the drought is over,” said Roberto. “You can rest easy now.”

“One rain doesn't end a drought,” he clucked.

“But it's a good start, yes?”

“Yes it is. Yes it is!”

Henry liked Roberto. Roberto was unchanging, solid as the promontories that held up the Golden Gate Bridge; each morning and night he was a kind of marker in the stormy sea of Henry's life. But he'd forgotten to give Roberto his Christmas bonus, and only now did he realize this, and even though Roberto was his usual smiling self, Henry worried that this rock might falter if its feelings were hurt; and also Henry just enjoyed making Roberto happy. For some reason, he was always telling Roberto jokes. He set down his umbrella, took out his checkbook and wrote out a Christmas bonus right then and there, quite a large one, larger than he had planned upon, and Roberto thanked him effusively, saying, “Please, please, Mr. Quantum, it's not necessary,” and handed Henry a little cellophane package of chocolates, exclaiming, “For our special customers only!” Henry cried with delight, “Really?” and then the two of them wished each other merry Christmas and Roberto fetched the BMW 528i, which, when it arrived, thrilled Henry as always, and Roberto said, “I filled it up for you,” and Henry swelled with self-satisfaction and well-being because there was nothing like having a full tank, and again they wished each other Merry Christmas, and Henry drove off thinking that at least there was one relationship in his life he could count on.

It occurred to him that even though the universe definitively works toward entropy, and unquestionably time and distance are arrayed against us in the most profound ways, still, there are things that make you feel like there is some meaning in all this. And maybe if love wasn't possible, friendship at least was. It's the little things we do, he decided—having a younger woman take off your pants, for instance, or having a good garage guy, or having a nice chat with Santa Claus—that's what counts. Sure, you can look at all this as our pathetic attempt to avoid the cosmic void, but you can also see it as—he pondered for a moment—Zen sand painting!

Exactly! Look how carefully, how exquisitely the Zen master works, how ardent he is in the perfection of his technique, how profoundly moving is the beauty of his design, and yet the first wind that comes along—
poof
—it's all gone. And he welcomes that! He welcomes that wind. A true Zen master will not even photograph his sand painting. Why? Because that would utterly miss the point! And the point is: in this evanescent, impermanent, and utterly dark world, great beauty is not only possible, it is essential. This was such a heartening revelation that Henry Quantum almost came to tears. For even though the rain was clouding his windshield and the fog was obscuring the road ahead, he saw the truth clear as day: nothing beautiful is in vain.

By the time he had finished thinking this, he was already on King Street, having circled the Embarcadero, and was about to go up the ramp to the freeway toward the airport. In spite of the weather, traffic was moving quickly. He supposed people had finally had time to get used to the rain, or maybe it was just that nobody but idiots like him went to work so near to Christmas. Anyway, Henry decided to relax and enjoy the scent of his leather seats and the fresh zest of ozone coming through his slightly open window.

Maybe he should call Margaret, he thought. But when she was meeting with a client she never picked up. She was always yelling at him about not answering his phone, but she was just as bad. Although it seemed to him she always managed to answer everyone else's calls.

He so wanted to understand what was going on between himself and Margaret.

He recalled the first apartment they'd shared in North Beach—it was huge by their standards then—and the rent was four hundred a month, a fortune! The ceilings had been sprayed with sparkling foam—he laughed now recalling how they used to lie in bed looking at that ceiling, gathering clusters of sparkles into constellations that they named according to their mood: the constellation Sexpot, the constellation Pasta, and one of their favorites, the constellation Shakespeare, which meant it was time to read aloud from the sonnets. Did they actually do that? Or did he just imagine it? Or maybe it happened only once and he transformed it into something more. He had no way of knowing: only that thinking these things, remembering these things, created a painful longing in him. And yet he knew it was not for Margaret he longed—not even the Margaret of those days, if she ever existed. Perhaps he used to wish for those days to return, but not anymore.

Even so, he hadn't wanted an affair. For years he'd been living in the shadow of Margaret's indifference, waiting for the light to return, which sometimes it did in little flashes that might illuminate a walk or an evening at home. But the main light never did return, and when Daisy appeared, how could he avoid naming that darkness and running toward the flame Daisy held out to him?

He swung onto the feeder road to the airport, followed the directions to short-term parking, and found a space near the green signs for United. It was amazing Margaret had gotten Arthur on a flight so quickly. It was two days before Christmas—who gets a last-minute flight right before Christmas? She probably had to put him in first class, full fare. Yes, Margaret seemed to own the world, while he, Henry, simply observed. What, he wondered, had he done to make her hate him so? He walked from the garage to the terminal and ended up at the foot of the escalator in baggage claim where you were allowed to meet disembarking passengers.