The Heart of Henry Quantum (7 page)

2:24–4:16 p.m.

Of all the people to run into on this very day—in the midst of his critical mission to buy perfume for his Margaret—why on earth did it have to be Daisy? Why couldn't it be—he couldn't think of anyone except for Donald Trump for some reason. But even Donald Trump would have been better than Daisy.

And why vision science? That's what she said she was studying, right?
How we see.
How can you see how we see? Just because you determine some neuron shoots off at a certain wavelength, what does that tell you about
seeing
? Still, it was great she was in school. She'd actually end up with the PhD he'd never gotten. But what did she mean, she never stopped dreaming about him? She'd been living with some other guy: the one he once got a glimpse of in the white suit and the Panama hat at that fundraiser they both happened to attend a year or so after they'd stopped seeing each other. Seeing each other. Did they in fact see each other? Yes, perhaps they had. Perhaps that's what she meant. She had been seen. That's what scared her and that's what she wanted back. But you can't have things back. It's like going on the same vacation twice. It's never the same.

He meandered back to where he had first run into Daisy, in front of SlinkyBlink, and here at last he stopped and took a breath. In the window were shredded jeans and rhinestone-studded T-shirts, flouncy skirts, platform shoes, bright-colored handbags with huge buckles—things he could barely imagine anyone wearing, except maybe Denise, the art director, and Gladys, the receptionist, but not really—Gladys was ultraconservative in her dress because she wanted to be taken seriously and become a copywriter. And he was pretty sure Denise was more Goth than SlinkyBlink, if people were still called Goth, which Henry seriously doubted. This all got back to the question of
seeing.
Fashion looked great one year and stupid the next. But the clothes—they stayed just the same. How is it they no longer looked the same? How is it the woman you loved last year is no longer the woman you love this year? And to whom was he referring? Daisy or Margaret?

But Daisy said she dreamed about him every day.

When he thought about it, it was all crazy. Before the divorce, Daisy had it all. The mansion in Ross, the rich and beautiful husband, the two brilliant kids, the garden parties, the Tesla runabout, the Land Rover, the Lynch-Bages as the house wine ($200 a pop!), and the Dom Pérignon in the fridge. Why did she throw that all away?

She'd asked him, “Did you ever write that novel?” He had forgotten that he even wanted to write a book, that he'd actually taken notes, sketched out a few scenes, did a little research. Where was all that stuff? He knew very well where it was. In the earthen storeroom in the back of the garage, in a box, with the mildew and the smell of mouse turds and mushrooms. Maybe he should take it out and try again. But no. That would be Daisy entering his life again, too. That's what she did to him. False hope, he called it. He had zero talent and he knew it.

True, he had written little stories and poems for her. “I love your writing!” she'd say, her face flushed, tears forming in her eyes. He didn't believe her, but he swelled with pride anyway. Even now he could feel her enthusiasm course through him. She would be spread out on the couch with his typed sheets piled next to her and would throw open her arms as if he had just written
Moby Dick
or
Love Story
or something, and would swallow him up. He figured it was just the pleasure she felt for having been the object of all this writing. She would shower him with kisses, wrap her legs around him, and seem to melt beneath him. But perhaps he had not really understood these moments. Perhaps her passion was much deeper than that. Maybe it wasn't just flattery when she gushed that no one had ever written her poetry before, not to mention the little love stories. Maybe it was more. Maybe he was a good writer, after all.

This whole business of writing was now in his mind, and his struggle with it. In graduate school he found he could compose a decent paper, but Daisy had liberated something else in him. For her, he conjured medieval lovers, stolen hours, secret trysts, island hideaways, and erotic messages conveyed by carrier pigeon. Ordinary joes and janes were transformed by ecstasy or condemned to fathomless depths of despair. The sex in these tales was never explicit, mainly because it embarrassed him to write about it, but it didn't seem to matter. Daisy wrote those parts in her own imagination, and the real-life lovemaking was immediate and overwhelming and, he had to admit, wilder than anything he could have captured on paper.

Why had he insisted he loved Margaret?

But he knew he must not call Daisy, must not start all that again. It was so much easier, so much cleaner is how he put it to himself, to live a life without secrets. Secrets cause pain, and the avoidance of pain was his current preoccupation. So he moved away from the display window at SlinkyBlink—these places come and go so fast, he told himself—like everything else, like everything else—and continued on his way to Macy's, although this time he did decide to go by way of Sutter and not Geary, because he didn't want to pass the saxophonist again. Or—he stopped himself just as his foot touched the sidewalk on the other side of the street—maybe it really was because he was hoping to run into Daisy again, knowing she parked at the Sutter-Stockton garage and this was the direction she would have to take to get there, and perhaps she was dawdling, maybe even waiting for him beside the flower shop near the garage entrance. The flower shop run by the beautiful East European blonde—Henry guessed she was Serbian by the crisp line of her chin and the way she had of dispensing with anyone who gave her a hard time—but she certainly was a great beauty, and he wondered why such a beauty would work in a flower shop— well, probably because she owned it, she and that husband of hers, who was quite a bit older and had the head of a buffalo—couldn't she have done better? Couldn't she have married a rich man or been a fashion model or something? He admired her, actually. For not trying to get by on her looks. Because, let's face it, if you're extremely good-looking, you get much further. There was a Darwinian force at work there. Surely there were studies on this. He would look into it when he got back to the office.

Henry trudged up the Sutter Street hill, and when he reached the entrance to the garage, he did look in, and the beautiful Serbian woman was indeed sitting on her stool in the flower shop, clipping roses, but Daisy was nowhere to be seen.
How do you know you're in Serbia?
he quipped to himself.
When you can choose between several war criminals in the presidential election.
He read that online and for some reason it stuck with him. And here she was cutting flowers, one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco. And what about the Jews and Palestinians? And Islamic State and Al Qaeda and that horrible business in Paris with the newspaper and then the theater, and those morons in Somalia or Nigeria or wherever that Boko-whatever was. And then Russia going into Ukraine and China in Tibet and North Korea with that new guy, and then Iran and—it could be World War III at any second. We don't think about it. We go on as if everything is fine. But a bomb, a nuclear one, why not? Everyone in the world is afraid of something. The Serbs are afraid of the Muslims because they're afraid all Muslims want to go back to the Dark Ages and if you don't believe what they believe, then they want to kill you. Actually, he was afraid of the Muslims, too, he was sorry to admit. Like on the plane. You try to be cool about it, but let's face it. Then again, when you think about it, guess what? They're afraid, too. Afraid of their children becoming polluted by the rest of us. Afraid of being taken over because they were already taken over. Afraid of being profiled and abused by . . . people like me!

And here it was Christmas!

Jesus is about love and forgiveness and joy and brotherhood, isn't he? Not that Henry believed in Jesus. Not really. Only when he was scared, maybe. Or when he was really, really alone. Maybe it was because he
wanted
to believe in Jesus. Like he did when he was a kid. You know, beginner's mind. That's what he was after. Beginner's mind. He was ashamed to say he mostly prayed to Jesus when he couldn't sleep or if he thought someone was breaking into the house, which was frequently. As if God cared if Henry Quantum had insomnia or someone was sneaking into his house. Jesus has to be realistic, too, he scolded himself.

And yet—if God didn't care, if God didn't care about Henry Quantum, if God didn't care about each and every one of his creatures individually, if he didn't have the power to care for every single soul at the same time, then he wasn't God, was he? The mystical Jews, the cabalists, they thought that God had retreated from the world because the world was too broken for him, or maybe the world was broken because he retreated, Henry couldn't quite remember. But it was true. The world was broken. Broken, broken, broken. That's the God's truth.

He stood on the corner of Stockton and Sutter with JoS. A. Bank behind him and the new CVS across to his right, and Henry Quantum was bereft of God, although the Starbucks across the street did seem to be graced with people coming in thirsty and going out holding their paper cups of coffee, and all the money going into those registers, and all the people typing away on their laptops listening to something on their earbuds. And that made him feel a little better.

Maybe she's in Starbucks, he thought.

He crossed Sutter but hesitated to go inside. Instead, he peered through the big plate glass windows and scanned the tables. Sadly, no Daisy.

“Perfume!” he said. “Perfume!”

So he continued his way down Stockton toward Geary, past the Campton Place Hotel, which was now the Taj Campton Place spelled in garish gold letters on the awning, and this saddened him, because why does everything change? Why can't you hold on to anything? Why? Ask Buddha! He'll tell you! Holding on is the source of pain. And pain is what we don't want. He'd been studying Buddhism lately. And here it was Indians who owned the Taj, teaching him this all over again. Though he preferred Zen, and that was Japanese.

Come to think of it, Zen didn't say very much about pain. It was more about the immediacy of experience, about nothingness and everythingness being sort of one and the same, and also he was very taken with this idea they called lightning Zen, where you could achieve enlightenment by putting your shoes on your head. He'd actually tried it. Margaret came into the bedroom and turned around and walked out.

He also liked reading those Zen koans. His favorite was:

Lightning flashes,

Sparks shower.

In one blink of your eyes,

You have missed seeing.

And there it all came round again. Daisy studying the eye. Him trying to see what she was up to. But that's the problem, the whole quantum, Zen, Heisenberg problem: If you look, you miss seeing. If you don't look, there's no way you can see, either.

He had been inching down Stockton, thinking, Only through action can one achieve enlightenment, but all action is useless. And since all action is useless, he stood stock-still. You put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere, but all you get is nowhere. It was like Zeno's paradox, only for the soul.

That's when he noticed the woman.

The woman with the three children.

They were in front of the Nike store having a meltdown. Actually it was the mother who was having the meltdown and the kids were staring at her with stricken faces and probably wet pants. She screamed at the top of her lungs and stomped her feet.

What an interesting family! he thought. Why? Because the mom was white, the eldest daughter was black, the little boy was Chinese, and the two-year-old looked kind of Latina. That's America. Naturally, they didn't get along.

“If you cry one more time—if you ask for one more soda or ice cream—if you hit one another even a little, if you whine, complain, run off, or beg for one more thing, or,” she said screaming, “if you say anything at all—then, then—that's
it
!”

The two older kids became quiet as stones, but the baby, the Latina one, or maybe it was Latino, who can tell at that age?—started howling more loudly than ever.

“Goddammit! Goddammit!” the woman yelled.

“It's okay, Mom,” said the middle child, taking her hand. “We'll take care of it.”

And the older girl reached into the stroller and started cooing and tickling. “See?”

Oh, how Henry's heart went out to those children and to their mother. He knew exactly what she was feeling! She can't take it anymore. She's had it. That's it.

But no matter what the little girl did, the baby wouldn't stop crying. The mother half collapsed against the plate glass windows of the Nike store and began to sob. And Henry thought to himself, here she is, the woman who got her wish. She'd wanted those children, she'd dreamt of them, even had their names picked out long before she knew what they might look like, or even what country they might come from; she'd convinced her husband she had to have at least three, when he would have been happy with one; she'd explored and researched fifteen different agencies, interviewed dozens of adoptive parents, hired a whole office full of lawyers, and coughed up twenty, thirty, maybe fifty grand for each one of those kids, even though they couldn't possibly afford it—and finally her dream came true: she traveled to far-off lands—three different continents in five years—to rescue each one of these children from their shoddy orphanages and corrupt caretakers; she triumphed as she disembarked the aircraft at SFO, presenting her new baby conquests to their new grandparents, uncles, and aunts; and then diligently she fed and clothed them, lavished them with toys and books, televisions and computers, Xboxes and Wiis, reporting it all daily on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest—and for what? So that she might see, in this one prescient moment, that her life was no longer her own, that it had become a shambles, a nightmare; that the kids couldn't care less what she had gone through to get them, that they were spoiled rotten and that she hated them, hated them profoundly, and wanted nothing more than to run back to Nordstrom this very second, run back
alone—
as if they never existed, as if she could unwind the coil she'd wrapped around her own neck and be free.