19th
The Book of Henry Part 1
*Been wanting to write this for a while, but could never figure out how. I still don’t know how but fuck it I’m doin it anyway.
When his only son was buried between the jagged silver spirals of a chain-link fence, taken apart by the momentum of an alcoholic motorcycle joyride and sharp steel, Henry woke with the knowledge. And across the world, hour by hour, the rest of us awoke with knowledge too. We awoke with a surety, so deep in our bones that it seems as though the very nucleii of our calcium held this undeniable truth, a statement that would dissassemble the very center of Descarte’s law, splitting it in two to inclue: we know it because we know. A singularity event stretched over 24 hours that, like all singularity events, both united and fractured every collection of every human being on the planet. While rain falls on us all, the arid man knows it far different than the chilly New-Englander bicyclist.
Henry’s wife had died a day after Henry’s son Josh was born. It wasn’t from childbirth, but rather it was because when she held her healthy son to her exhausted chest, felt his tiny heart and tiny lungs and saw life in his tiny eyes, something told her that her only job had been successfully completed and that she could leave. And she did, when her brain hemorraged, Josh allowed to slip quiety to her lap, where he didn’t cry, but rather slept peacefully.
I only asked Henry once. We were sitting in his cabin someplace lost in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, helecopters circling overhead that had become so commonplace even the wildlife had learned to ignore, and he didn’t look at me. Rather, he continued watching the living fireplace. I was behind him and I could see the flames dancing off the lenses of his thin, gold-rimmed glasses. And the only response I ever got when he sighed, removing his glasses, effectively extinguishing the flames existing in reflection. Rather than repeat myself, I sat next to him, picked up his brown cat with white feet, and enjoyed the warmth collected on its fur from the fireplace.
That was around the time that everyone was asking him that same question. When he hadn’t time to say anything within himself, but rather every thought had to be expelled before an international public that innocently sought his wisdom while humanely ravaging it with logic and opinion and oration. It was during those ten months when he was the single most important human being to our race. It was after the celebration had ended, when people realized that simply knowing that an answer existed was not enough, that it wasn’t necessarily for them to know, that perhaps those with the wisdom had reason to be selfish, to be cautious, to be human. Henry wasn’t mute, however. He was far from it. His love for literature was ever present on his lips, spicing every thought that passed by. And for a while, there was solace in what he would say. Questions of every sort were broadcast throughout every language and his answers were immediately taken to be absolute truth. Never claiming to know but one thing, he told them millions of things and they would only ever go on to doubt the one he was not so forthcoming with. Years after his death, when what had once united every human being inevitably died under the weight of progress and intuition, one answer was repeated throughout schools and muttered by parents in the early AM to children who were simply afraid because it was the only way their brains knew how to develope. Exhausted and irritable from his predictable obstinance finally dropped her carefully manicured hands to the side of her carefully ironed dress and simply asked,
“At least tell us, should we be afraid?” And Henry smiled, his head tilted, and said, “Of course not. No one should ever be afraid.”
