The Heart of Henry Quantum

by Pepper Harding

  And right around the corner from where he stood, the rain still cascading off his head, his socks being so wet that little puddles were forming under his toes, and his scarf a soggy rag around his chin, was the original Brandy Ho’s Hunan, which, by the way, was still great, and, down on Columbus where Zim’s used to be was the Cafe Zoetrope, which Francis Ford Coppola owned. It was situated in the Flatiron Building, which Coppola also owned but used to be owned by the Kingston Trio and in which one of Henry’s art director friends once had an office—a guy who did the best storyboards he ever saw, but then he died in a skiing accident and everyone forgot all about him.

  He sighed for his lost friend, and when he did, water poured into his mouth and he almost choked. He didn’t care—it was just so sad. Everyone forgot him! In fact, he himself couldn’t bring the guy’s name to mind at the moment, though he knew it would come to him probably at four in the morning when it no longer mattered. His poor, dead friend would never again taste the onion cakes at the House of Nanking, which was also right around the corner, and it had been his favorite place. He stifled another sigh so as not to get another mouthful of water—but this sigh was for himself, because he knew that someday his presence would also be obliterated and the city—his city—would go on without him, too. House of Nanking will go on, Tommaso’s will go on, but Henry Quantum will not.

  Oh, he was filled with grief! Filled with the San Francisco he would no longer inhabit! Just down the block was the Comstock Saloon, which used to be something else, but he still liked the beer there. And Mr. Bing’s, which in all his years he never entered because he assumed only Chinese gangsters were supposed to go there, but jeez, that bar must have been around since the fifties at least, and “Bing’s” doesn’t even sound Chinese, so he decided then and there that this was his year to get a drink at Mr. Bing’s!

  Yes, he was filled to the brim with San Francisco, with its eternal beauty and bounty—a city without boundaries, a beacon to all who did not fear the rain—and he was happy now that it would go on without him.

  When he finally arrived at the office, Gladys was putting on her coat and fishing an old umbrella out of the closet.

  “Bones! Where the hell have you been? Everyone was looking for you.”

  “I guess I was buying perfume,” he said.

  “I tried to reach you on your cell. Honestly!”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “So where’s the perfume?” She gestured at his empty hands.

  “Oh,” he shrugged, “I guess I forgot.”

  “Forgot?”

  “Something came up.”

  “It always does. But I have to tell you, Mr. Bigalow was concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “You missed a planning meeting.”

  “I did?”

  “Year-end wrap-up. It was in your calendar.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Bones, everyone’s calendar is automatically updated.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

  “Too late. He’s gone home. And look at you. You’re sopping wet!”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I am.”

  “I don’t know why you even own a cell phone,” she said.

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Maybe she has a point,” Gladys replied.

  He looked at her now, really for the first time—the bouncy ponytail, the toned athletic body in the tailored skirt and pink cashmere V-neck, the smooth bronze skin, the arms napped in auburn down, and saw that, in spite of her cool, aristocratic air, she was the most ordinary creature on earth.

  “It’s only rain,” he said.

  “Right. That’s why we have umbrellas.”

  She slipped out of her heels and tied on a pair of running shoes.

  “Don’t forget to lock the door behind you,” she said. “You’re the last.” Then she smiled politely, as always, and disappeared down the stairs.

  Henry waited until he heard the outer door close and only then strolled down the hall to his digs. It was as good to be alone in the office as it was to be a trailblazer on the stormy streets. He’d spent so much time in this place, but when had he ever been alone? Slowly he made his way past the empty desks and silent file cabinets, the copy machine that for once sat sleeping, the art directors’ tools that had found their way back into their compartments, the computers that had retreated into their own mysterious cyberspace, the conference rooms filled only with empty chairs: they all seemed quite content to be without their human masters. To tell the truth, he told himself, we all could just as easily work at home, couldn’t we? Connect by Skype or whatever. But somehow no. People have to congregate. Like colonies of yeast coagulating on the side of a test tube. What, though, he wondered, is the reason for all this propinquity?

  And then it came to him. Gluons!

  He had read about gluons. It was another quantum problem, maybe the very essence of the quantum problem. To understand a gluon (he explained to his imaginary and rapt class of physics-impaired copywriters), you first have to understand protons and quarks: a proton, which contains a good deal of the mass of an atom (neutrons supply most of the rest), is made up of three quarks. But quarks have almost no mass at all, even though they make up most of the proton. So where does the mass come from? It’s supposed to be supplied by something called a gluon. But guess what? The gluons have no mass of their own, either! They pop in and out of existence in far less than a blink of an eye, and although they seem to take up space, they don’t! This (dear amazed and totally mesmerized students) is the crazy universe we live in! But gluons do have a purpose even if they’re not really there. And that is: to glue the whole proton together—i.e., glu-on. Not with glue, he chuckled to his wide-eyed audience, but with a remarkable and, I would posit, satanic force. For here is the disturbing part: even though the impulse of a quark is to move away from other quarks—to get out of that damned proton as fast as it can—the gluon won’t let it. In fact, the farther one quark drifts from another, the stronger the force between them, just the opposite of gravity. Which means the poor little quark can’t flee. No matter how hard it tries, no matter how much it wants its freedom, it will never get away from the other quarks. That is a fundamental law of quantum physics. A quark is stuck to its partners no matter what it wants for itself.

  “Stuck,” he said, only half realizing that he was moaning at the same time. “Totally, completely, one hundred percent stuck!”

  He considered the empty conference room. Tomorrow it would be filled with staff anxiously awaiting their Christmas bonuses before heading off to the party at MoMo’s. He would be one of them. He would open his envelope and feel justly rewarded for selling products no one wanted or needed; rewarded and also emasculated. That envelope was the gluon. And none of us would ever escape, because the harder we tried, the farther we fled, the more strength it had to pull us back. And not just the money. But the whole thing. The whole need to congregate. To be part of something. To have a place in this world. To succeed no matter what.

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  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.