The Heart of Henry Quantum

by Pepper Harding

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  For M. Gorman and R. Futernick.

  If they had known what they were talking about, this book could never have been written.

  And for RDH, my friend and inspiration.

  PART ONE

  HENRY

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  December 23rd, 7:35–10:14 a.m.

  My friend Henry Quantum, whom everyone called Bones because he was so tall and thin, and because Dr. McCoy was his favorite character from Star Trek, had a single task that day, and that was to buy a Christmas present for his wife. Having put this off for several weeks (or months, actually), and having noted with alarm when checking his iPhone for updates from the Huffington Post that the twenty-third of December had arrived without the purchase of anything at all, not even a stocking stuffer, he knew he had no choice but to go shopping. It was a workday, so there were a few other things on the agenda, but in terms of mission only one: make Margaret happy. He had already settled on a bottle of Chanel No. 5—and decided where to get it, too: at Macy’s; and he also figured that the best time to get it would be first thing in the morning so that he wouldn’t have to worry about it the rest of the day. All this he decided in a panic upon waking, but, having made his decisions, a kind of peace descended upon him and he entered the shower with a happy heart. Done, done, done, and done! he told himself.

  However, when he reached for the soap his hand froze mid-grab because the water bouncing off his shoulders made him think about the miraculous impermeability of his own skin, and this made him think of the wonder of nature, which, when he thought about it, included the entire cosmos, and thus the Hubble telescope came into his mind and the pictures of the galaxies he had seen at the NASA booth at the Sausalito Art Festival back in September, particularly the Sombrero Galaxy, which actually did look like a sombrero, and this led him to recall something that had been drilled into his head since junior high school, namely that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and when you look at a distant object, like, say, the Sombrero Galaxy, what you are actually seeing is how the object appeared millions of years ago (in the case of the Sombrero Galaxy, thirty million years) and not how it is now; in fact, who could say what it looked like now? For all anyone knew, it could already be colliding with our own galaxy, because a lot can happen in thirty million years, and when he thought about that, he just couldn’t quite reach the soap dish, just as he could never get to the Sombrero Galaxy even if he had the power to transport himself there instantaneously, because the galaxy that he envisioned no longer existed. In fact, everything outside of himself was happening in the past—that soap dish, for instance—it was already over, done, finished, kaput, history. He had been a sometime practitioner of Zen and was always going on about living in the present—the breath of the present, they called it—but now he had to admit he could never achieve that goal no matter how hard he tried. No one could achieve it, not even the Buddha himself. He stepped over the lip of the tub, and the velour of the bath mat felt the same as it always did, soft and welcoming, only now he realized it was an illusion. It used to be soft and welcoming, a nanosecond ago. But now? Who knew?

  He threw on his robe and marched into the kitchen.

  Margaret looked up from her oatmeal and said, “What now?”

  He grabbed two slices of whole grain, slid them into the toaster, and watched the coils rouse themselves to brilliant orange. He warmed his palms over the slots. “What if a small star was suddenly created one light-year away from us?” he said to Margaret. “And what if it instantly began traveling toward us at just under the speed of light. What would we see? We’d see a star six trillion miles away, when actually it was almost already here, or maybe, because it was so close, we’d see it big and bright and also small and distant at the same time. But the main thing is, we’d never see it as it is and by the time we figured it out, by the time we knew it had been created, it would be on top of us and we’d all die.”

  “Would you like regular or decaf?” she replied.

  “No, I’m serious,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s a hypothetical star, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then have some coffee first.”

  He carried his toast to the table and sat down dejectedly.

  “Maybe we can worry about something else today. What do you think?” she said.

  “It’s on my mind.”

  “I know, but why don’t you tell me what your day’s like today.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, the usual,” he answered cagily, remembering he was going to buy her a bottle of perfume. But then he also recalled he had a client coming in, and he had to present to them the new TV spots at around ten thirty, so he couldn’t buy the perfume in the morning and he said, “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “The Protox people are coming in today.”

  “You’ll do fine,” she said.

  The words “fine” and “Protox” together instantly brought up an image of Denise, the art director, and her tattoos, and he tried to imagine what it felt like to get tattooed, the needle going into his arm, leaving behind lines of orange and blue, but he had no idea if this was really how it was done, whether it was lines or dots or what, or if you had to be drunk or if they let you do it sober, because he didn’t like needles, period. And Denise had such thin arms. Whenever he went to have his blood drawn he had to turn his head away because he couldn’t stand watching his own blood fill up the vial, and then he wondered how much blood there is in a human being, and the answer is ten pints if you’re a man and less if you’re a woman, unless you’re a big woman, like a weight trainer, and he thought about the muscles on those women and he wondered what it would be like to sleep with a muscle-bound woman, it would be kind of gay-straight, because their breasts do sort of disappear. . . .

  “Aren’t you going to eat your toast?” Margaret asked.

  “Oh. No. You take it. Thinking about Protox.”

  “It’s a disgusting product,” she said. “Don’t you ever get sick of hawking that crap?”

  Here we go, he thought. “It’s advertising. It’s what I do.” But, happily, she let it drop and, instead, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “Are you all right now, Bones?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “No more planetary catastrophes? Can I be sure that when you come home tonight the world will still be in one piece?”

  “Ha-ha,” he said.

  She gave him one of her slightly condescending smiles and then returned to the Times, which she now read electronically.

  He went to the bedroom, threw on some slim-fit khakis and a sports coat, decided on the cordovan loafers, checked himself out in the mirror, congratulated himself on the fact his stomach didn’t stick out over his pants—which it did on practically everyone else his age, which was forty and some months. He still had a full head of hair, though he checked it every day for signs of thinning and could never seem to get rid of the cowlick that stuck out at strange angles whenever the wind blew. His eyes were a lighthearted blue, some would say dreamy, and Margaret complained that he always seemed to be gazing off into space, which of course he wasn’t; he was just thinking. Her kinder friends said he resembled the actor James Stewart—by which they meant gangly and awkward, but he took to mean elegant and pure of heart—and maybe he was both, because he had
to admit he could appear a bit discombobulated when he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing.

  “Oh well!” he said, and grabbed his briefcase and made his way down to the garage.

  They lived on a hillside, so their house was on stilts and their garage was dug into the earth and it reminded him of a bomb shelter, except that it was always damp and smelled of mushrooms. In the winter the ants invaded, and sometimes the back wall was stained with runoff, which made him worry about mudslides. But this year there weren’t any ants because it wasn’t raining, which meant there was a drought and come summer there could be a fire like the one in Oakland that had burned down a thousand homes. Although fires were actually worse in the summer after a lot of rain, which was ironic, but it was because of all the undergrowth. Some kid throws a match, some idiot knocks over the barbecue, and whufff!

  Margaret called down from the top of the garage stairs: “Henry, take your scarf, you get chilly. And oh, I forgot to tell you, I won’t be home for dinner; you’ll be all right, won’t you?”

  “Of course I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m not helpless.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure!”

  She blew him a dry kiss and disappeared back into the house. He stood looking at the door, the one that connected the garage to the kitchen, a portal between their two worlds, and he suddenly felt relieved to be leaving.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Now I also have to worry about dinner.”

  * * *

  The car Henry Quantum drove was a BMW 528i. Whenever he stepped into it and smelled the leather, whenever he touched the gleaming wood or glistening plastic of the dashboard, whenever he gripped the thick, supple padding of the steering wheel or the cool brushed aluminum of the gear shift, he believed for a moment in his own success. It was leased, of course, and the five hundred a month was tax deductible, but he was proud to pull into any parking lot or up to any restaurant, and it didn’t matter to him that there were thousands of these cars in San Francisco, or that they were a cliché, or that truly successful people drove bigger, fancier cars. Because inside his BMW 528i, Henry Quantum felt contentment, and the time he spent driving from Twin Peaks down to Jackson Square was the best half hour of his day. He wondered if maybe, though, he could squeeze in the perfume before work if he went to Nordstrom instead of Macy’s because you can’t make a left turn off Market Street and Nordstrom was a right, plus they had valet parking. Speaking of valet, he chided himself that the car needed washing and waxing and he promised himself to have Roberto do it or to even take it over to the Touchless Car Wash himself at some point, and he thought, why do people put things off? Why don’t we just do what we say we are going to do? And he wondered if perhaps there was some sort of survival benefit to procrastination, because otherwise, why would we have this trait? He was a firm believer in natural selection. He had just read an article by a guy named Pinsker or Pisker or, oh yes, Pinker, which was an amusing name, because that was also the name of sewing scissors—pinking shears—with a scalloped edge so the material you cut wouldn’t unravel, and this led him to think about the idea of invention, because somebody had to come up with the pinking shears and had named them pinking shears, and that was the way it was with just about everything. It was wonderful, just wonderful, because who invented cheese? The first person to make butter—you have to stir that cream a long fucking time to make butter—why would anyone do that in the first place? And yet they did. And that’s the whole human endeavor right there. Then he had to slam on the brakes because the light had turned red and he was about to hit the Honda in front of him.

  In a moment, the light turned green again, the Honda lurched forward and so did Henry, now determined to stop daydreaming while driving. When you think about it, he said to himself, people really don’t pay all that much attention when they’re driving. For instance when you want to change lanes, you are looking in the rearview mirror and still moving forward without looking ahead, and yet somehow you judge your distance correctly 99.99 percent of the time. And what about when you’re on the iPhone or texting? He admitted he called when driving, but no texting, at least not that. The truth is, he never quite got that two-thumbs thing down—and as for tweeting, he just didn’t do it. Though it was hard to be in advertising and not tweet, because tweeting was maybe the most important medium for targets under thirty.

  Shit, he said to himself. Now I have to fucking tweet!

  His first tweet would be: I am on my way to buy perfume for Margaret. Can’t decide which store. Second tweet: What’s the point of Christmas, anyway? Anyone know? Third tweet: Just almost hit hot girl on bike. Hate those fucking bike lanes. He tweeted all this mentally because he was not ready to tweet physically.

  He was actually enjoying all this tweeting, until he realized that he’d passed Fifth Street, where Nordstrom was, and hadn’t turned. In fact, he was already at the Ferry Building. But he was determined not to get upset, because he was a practitioner of Samatha meditation and also of Taoism, or at least he wanted to be, and since the path of life was pointing him away from Nordstrom, he decided to trust that this was the right way to go even though it was a big inconvenience. Thus he turned left on Drumm past the Bay Club and left again on Jackson—in other words, he went straight to the office. He could get the perfume later. Hoof it over to Union Square during lunch, why not? It would do him good. That’s the Tao for you!

  He pulled into the garage, cried “¡Hola!” to Roberto the attendant, and walked the three blocks to his office on Pacific. It was just up the block from the famous Thomas E. Cara espresso machine store, and also across from where American Zoetrope used to be when Francis Ford Coppola worked there. Every time Henry Quantum walked these three blocks, strolling past the magnificent antiques shops or cutting up the alley past BIX (best martinis in town) or checking out the scene at Roka Bar or the chicks coming out of the law offices or detouring past that crazy combination men’s shop/bar/golf simulator/wine cave on the corner of Montgomery and Clay, he was filled with love—love for this little corner of the universe and for the people who lived and worked in it. On this particular morning, just one day before Christmas Eve, the winter light was working its magic—golden yet somehow also porcelain, white and clarifying yet thick with mystery—imbuing the old brick buildings with shimmering vitality and the pedestrians with a healthy glow quite unlike the pallor they wore in those gloomy, foggy summers that felt so gray and damp. Half the people who passed him were bundled in winter coats, the other half in shorts and T-shirts. So San Francisco! Most of the country was freezing, big snowstorms in the Midwest and all, but here the young women, though they sported elegant boots, wore their skirts to the tops of their thighs and let their legs go bare; the young men were all squeezed into hypertight pants and tailored sports coats cut to look two sizes too small; some wore skinny black ties with open collars, some wore sweaters, some wore polos, and some were just in jeans and sneakers. All this gave Henry an oceanic lift, the tide of which swept him along until he reached number 46, yanked open the art deco door with its etched-glass insert, and bounded up the staircase that had been refitted with teakwood and aluminum to resemble nothing so much as the grand lobby of a Disney cruise ship.

  Like all the buildings on this quaint block, his was a relic of the old Barbary Coast, a narrowish, three-story brick Italianate that once housed a saloon or a brothel or perhaps a brewery or a dance hall, though now it was painted chalk white and had shutters the color of wild iris. The sign that hung above its door was not HIPPODROME or KELLY’S as in the old days, but BIGALOW, GREEN, ANDERSON AND SILVERMAN, and each time he passed under this sign and said good-bye to the wonderful flow of humanity that swelled his heart, he found himself coughing violently, as if the air inside was carcinogenic, which, in fact, he often thought it was.

  “But I’m fine with it,” he told himself each morning.

  The hour was now nine thirty. Naturally none of the creative department had yet arrived (everyon
e in account services had been there since seven), and this was perfect because Henry saw himself as inhabiting a privileged station midway between business and creative—he was neither right brain nor left brain—he was all brain, a man for all seasons, a pigeon not to be holed, as he put it at cocktail parties right before whomever he was speaking to found a way to escape. Yes, okay, he had once wanted to be a copywriter—that was ages ago, before he decided he had no talent for the witty line or the powerful metaphor; but he understood creative people—he did—and so he believed his mission was to champion their work to the idiots who paid the bills. That, in fact, is what he had in mind for the Protox presentation—support his creatives even if he hated their work, which in this case he did. This had to do with his samurai ethos.

  He set his briefcase on his desk as carefully as if it were a finely honed katana from the hand of Hattori Hanzo, the greatest sword maker of all time, at least in Kill Bill Volume 1, and rounding his desk, slowly lowered himself into his Aeron chair, a chair fit for a warrior. For the zillionth time he perused his workspace, which he again found lackluster in spite of the Grateful Dead posters and quotations from Nietzsche and the Dalai Lama hanging on the wall. It was an outer office, yes, and he was proud of that, but it was only eight by ten and it was fronted by a glass wall that afforded him no privacy at all. When he tried to draw the blinds they refused to work, or if they did, people would tap on the window as if it were illegal to have a minute to himself. But honestly, who would want to be closed in this office anyway? The carpet was stained, the desk was mostly composite, and the only natural light came from a small, soot-encrusted window that looked out across a trash-strewn alley to the crumbling rear of a speakeasy on Broadway. He had found himself looking out that window often, and for years tried to spy into the windows opposite his own. Who lives above a strip joint? he wondered. Ratty curtains blocked the view, and some of the windows were papered over with yellowed newspaper. Probably Vietnamese immigrants. Or maybe the bouncer who stands in front of the entrance lives there. Not the worst job in the world. He gets to kibitz with the girls at least.