Read Online The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œPerfume!” 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