Henry of Atlantic City

by Frederick Reuss

  “Smells good,” he said. “And wow, do I have a headache!” He looked even bigger without his shirt on and he scratched himself and yawned and thanked Henry for waking him up like that. Then he grabbed Pearl and began to kiss her.

  Pearl dropped her cigarette on the floor. “Let go,” she said and bent down to pick it up. “I’m taking Henry to the zoo.”

  Henry asked Mr. Earl if he had killed the man last night.

  Pearl gave Mr. Earl an angry look. “You just forget about what you saw last night, Henry. You’re too young to understand.”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Earl said.

  Pearl cracked some eggs into a bowl. “Now, go get cleaned up,” she told Mr. Earl.

  For breakfast they had pancakes and maple syrup and ham and Mr. Earl had three fried eggs on top of his pancakes.

  When they were finished eating Henry said he didn’t want to go to the zoo; he wanted to go to Philadelphia.

  Pearl and Mr. Earl looked at each other. Then Mr. Earl said, “There’s been a slight change of plan, kid. Pearl’s taking you to Philadelphia.”

  “The Philadelphia Zoo,” Pearl said.

  Henry said he didn’t want to go to the zoo; he wanted to go to Sy’s sister’s store.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid. Pearl wants to take you to the zoo first,” Mr. Earl said.

  Henry felt in his pocket and realized his money was gone. He ran into the Garden of Eden and tore the sheets off the bed and looked underneath it but didn’t find anything. Then he went back into the kitchen and told Mr. Earl to give it back.

  Mr. Earl was pouring whiskey into his coffee. “Give what back?”

  Henry said his money.

  “You accusing me of taking your money?”

  Henry said yes.

  “You can blame anyone you want, kid. But it ain’t going to get you your money back.” Mr. Earl sipped his coffee and smacked his lips together. Then he poured more whiskey into it. “Happens to me all the time. I’ve even got a system for dealing with it.”

  Henry asked what the system was.

  “It’s complicated,” Mr. Earl said.

  Henry said you stole my money!

  “Are you calling me a thief?”

  Henry said yes.

  “Well,” Mr. Earl said, “you’ll have to prove it. Innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law of the land, kid.” Then he took a big gulp of coffee and went, AHHHH. “You shouldn’t go pointing fingers at people unless you’re sure about what you’re saying.”

  Henry ran back into the Garden of Eden and closed the door and cried.

  Pearl came to get him. “What’s wrong?”

  Henry told her Mr. Earl had stolen his money and wouldn’t give it back. Pearl was all dressed up. She looked like a picture in a magazine, and tall because she was wearing boots and her hair was piled up underneath a big floppy hat. “Don’t worry, Henry. I’ll straighten it out.” She took Henry into the kitchen. “Give Henry his money back,” she told Mr. Earl. “I want to get going.”

  Mr. Earl sipped from his coffee cup. The jagged purple stain under his eye looked dark—almost black. “I don’t have Henry’s money.”

  Henry began to cry. Pearl took his hand. “Don’t cry,” she said and stroked Henry’s hair softly like he imagined a mother would. He stopped crying. Then she stood up. “Now, let’s get going!”

  Outside the sunlight was blinding. Henry shielded his eyes in the crook of his arm.

  “It’s a perfect day,” Pearl said. She opened the door to a pure white Cadillac Eldorado and told Henry to climb in. Inside everything smelled like perfume and the seats were red and soft.

  Henry had to kneel on the seat and look out the back window because he couldn’t see out the front window sitting down. Egypt looked different in the daytime. It looked like an old warehouse on a street filled with old warehouses and empty lots. Henry asked Pearl where they were.

  “No-man’s land,” she said. They drove without talking and pretty soon signs began to appear on the road that said Philadelphia and Henry was glad. He knelt on the seat and looked out the back window and watched everything disappear behind them in straight lines.

  The zoo was a crowd of names and cages and all Pearl did was pull Henry along by the hand and point. She bought a giant balloon on a string and a bag of peanuts and kept saying how much fun it was. She gave the balloon to Henry but he let it go.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  They stood and watched the balloon go up and up until it was a tiny speck in the sky. “Are you satisfied?” Pearl asked.

  Henry said the image must rise again through the image.

  She took him to see Panthera leo and Panthera tigris because Pearl said she loved cats. “Go ahead,” she told him. “Stand up on the rail if you want. Help you see better.”

  Henry said he could see everything just fine.

  “But all you’re seeing is the sign!”

  Henry said that was all he needed.

  “But the animal is in the cage, dummy! That’s just a sign.” Then she pulled him away and they continued through the zoo. They went inside a big building where Varanus komodoensis lived with what remained of its whole suborder of Suaria of the class Reptilia. There were other suborders too. Serpentes, Chelonia, and a few of the genus Crocodylus, where Pearl stopped and looked for a long time. “I don’t know what scares me more,” she said. “Being eaten by a crocodile or squeezed to death by a snake. I guess being eaten by a crocodile scares me less because the idea of being swallowed whole is too terrible to even imagine. If I had my way there wouldn’t be any snakes in the whole world.”

  Henry said there are many animals in the world in human form.

  Pearl pulled some pins out of her hair and put them in again and adjusted her hat. Then she ate some peanuts and stared at Henry. Her eyes were fixed but her jaw moved and her silence hovered over him. Henry turned toward the glass case and read: Crocodiles are not related to any other group of reptiles and derive from an evolutionary line of dinosaurs that did not become extinct. Crocodiles and their relatives resemble mammals in having a four-chambered heart. All other reptiles have a two-chambered one. This increased pulmonary efficiency gives the crocodile a great advantage as a predator.

  When he looked up Pearl was walking toward the door. She threw the bag of peanuts into a garbage can and brushed the bits of shell from the front of her coat. As she walked her whole body swayed and so did the floppy brim of her hat. Henry ran after her but when he caught up she turned and shook her finger at him. “If you keep following me, I’ll go tell a guard. They know how to deal with runaways,” she said.

  Henry watched her as she walked through the door of the Reptile House and out into the sunlight. He began to cry. He tried to stop but couldn’t. His stomach shook and he felt hungry even though he didn’t want to eat anything. He stood there in the entrance to the Reptile House and the tears just kept coming. Then snot began to run from his nose and got smeared across his face. He forgot about the degradation of the flesh. He forgot about the angel in his ear. He forgot that he was a saint. Every passage of every gospel and book he’d ever read was useless to him. He even forgot about Father Crowley and Dr. Alt and the O’Briens—even though they were probably looking for him. He looked out into the sunlit zoo and had no idea where he was.

  Then his angel spoke to him. It said everything bound together eventually comes unbound, whether it is a mother from her child or just cars passing each other on a busy highway.

  What about Pearl? he asked the angel.

  The angel said a pearl is the precious deposit that oysters form around a grain of sand and keep hidden inside themselves. It takes a long time to make, and the older and uglier the oyster the more beautiful the pearl inside.

  Henry asked why.

  The angel said because when you spend your whole life making something beautiful, it makes you ugly.

  People were starting to look at him. One lady asked him if he was lost. He stopped crying an
d went back into the Reptile House and started reading the signs again so nobody would think he was lost. The first sign he stopped in front of said, Sphenodon punctatum, also called the Tuatara, is the sole survivor of the order Rhynchocephalia, a group that has characteristics more primitive than those of lizards. Surviving unchanged for more than one hundred million years, Sphenodon punctatum exhibits one of the slowest rates of evolution known.

  Henry climbed up on the rail and looked into the glass case. Sphenodon was resting on top of a flat rock with one tiny eye fixed on him. Henry looked straight into the little eye and recognized the angel that lived there as the same one that lived in his ear. He tapped on the glass. The lizard didn’t flinch. Suddenly the voice of a man said, “Get down from there.”

  Henry climbed down.

  “Where are your parents, son?”

  Henry said nothing.

  “Are you lost?”

  Henry said nothing and turned to look at Sphenodon punctatum again. The guard reached out to take Henry’s arm but Henry ran. He darted through the crowd. The guard shouted, “Come back,” and stayed close behind at first but Henry got away because the guard was too fat to keep up. Henry ran in the direction of Panthera leo and Panthera tigris. “Stop! Come back here,” the guard shouted. But Henry kept running as fast as he could. He ran into the Fish House. It was dark and quiet and the tanks glowed. He went into a room on one side of the hail. It was dark and he stopped to catch his breath. A small plaque on the wall glowed and was the only light in the room. The plaque said Myctophidae: the family of deep-sea fishes having phosphorescent light organs. Henry looked all around for the fish but the room was empty. There were no tanks and no other people. Only a plaque on the wall that glowed. Henry continued reading. At eight hundred meters (two thousand six hundred feet) the effects of sunlight disappear. This is the depth where the luminous fishes live.

  Then a movie started and a voice said, “The room you are standing in approximates the light conditions at eight hundred meters. The atmospheric pressure at this depth is so great that scientists have only recently been able to send down equipment capable of withstanding the conditions.” Then a tiny glow appeared on the screen. It was Myctophidae.

  Henry remembered going down to the Sea of Marmara to watch for Theodora. He used to imagine what it would be like to be a whale and to live underwater and when he imagined that he always imagined a mother whale swimming ahead and guiding his way through the deepest depths of the ocean. Then he remembered that it is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that actually exist unless he became like them—even Myctophidae, who were as fallen and lived as far from the light as any creature in this world and whose name meant snake nose because they were so ugly and forsaken their nose was a lantern which lighted their way.

  Henry began to cry again. Then he began to feel sick. He sat down on the floor and watched the rest of the movie about Myctophidae and the other fishes of the darkness. There were fish with tubular eyes that were pointed upward to catch the light and fish with retinas made entirely of tiny golden rods that were sensitive only to the blue light of the spectrum because that was the last light to make it down so far. There was a fish called Ipnops that scientists thought had no eyes at all until they discovered a tiny plate on top of its head covered with retinal cells. There were fish with teeth like daggers, spears, and sabers and jaws big enough to eat anything they bumped into. The voice in the movie said scientists were trying to devise ways of bringing these specimens up to the surface so they could study them. The conditions the fish lived in were so severe that bringing them up would destroy them unless special methods could be devised. The voice said that even though scientists had learned a great deal it would be years before they knew all there was to know about these strange and bizarre creatures from the deepest depths of the ocean.

  After the movie was over Henry stayed in the room and tried to adjust to the dark. But even with the plaque glowing he couldn’t get used to it so he got up and left. The coast was clear and he left the Fish House. It was still a bright, sunny day outside and he was blinded. The daylight hurt. He rubbed and rubbed his eyes and waited until he could see again. Then he went to look for Pearl. He walked and walked but saw no sign of her. Then he went to where the car had been parked and found that it was gone.

  There were lots of places in the zoo to hide, and it was easy to fool the guards by following along behind a family and pretending he was the straggler. Then the zoo closed and Henry found a room with buckets and mops and stayed in it for a long time. When it got dark he left the closet and snuck around. Most of the animals were asleep but there were plenty awake too. Henry read all the plaques. In the zoo things were scary only when they didn’t have a name. As soon as they were named they weren’t scary anymore. That was the power of names. Even Myctophidae was less scary once you knew its name. Henry tried to imagine what the scientist thought who saw Myctophidae for the first time. He imagined it was as scary as anything that had ever happened since the beginning of the world before anything was named.

  When it was morning Henry found a telephone in the office near Gorilla gorilla. He used it to call Sy’s sister at Mitzi.

  “Oh my God! Henry, where are you? Are you all right?”

  Henry said he was at the zoo.

  “The zoo? What are you doing at the zoo?” Before Henry could answer she said, “Never mind. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Meet me at the front entrance. Do you know where that is?”

  Henry said yes.

  “The whole world is looking for you, Henry. Everyone is worried sick.”

  Henry said promise you’ll come?

  “I’m leaving this minute. Be at the front gate.”

  Henry hung up the telephone and went to say goodbye to Gorilla gorilla. There was a whole family of them but one was in a cage all by herself. The man who fed her called her Big Nekkid. Henry felt sorry for her because she was all alone. He watched from a hiding place when the man went to feed her. “C’mon here, you Big Nekkid,” he said and left food for her. While Big Nekkid was eating in one part of the cage the man closed it off and cleaned up the mess in the other part. The plaque on the cage said, The relationship between gorillas and human beings, as measured biochemically, is so close that if they were members of any other group of organisms they would almost certainly be classified as members of the same genus despite their morphological differences.

  Big Nekkid was lonely. Henry could tell by the way she chewed, slowly and as if she didn’t like the taste. After the man left Henry came out of his hiding place and opened up the door of the cage. Big Nekkid looked at Henry and picked some things off her leg. She was so surprised that she went and sat down at the other end of the cage and put some branches in her mouth as if to say that she needed a minute to think. Henry said there are two trees in Paradise. The one bears animals, the other bears men. Adam ate from the tree that bore animals. He became an animal and he brought forth animals.

  Henry waved good-bye to Big Nekkid and snuck through the zoo until he came to the front gate, where Sy’s sister was already waiting in the car. Henry squeezed through the bars of the gate and when he got into the car Sy’s sister grabbed him with both arms. “Thank God you’re okay.” Then she said Henry smelled awful and they drove off.

  “How’d you get into the zoo?”

  Henry said Pearl brought him.

  “Who’s Pearl?”

  Henry said a pearl is the precious deposit that an oyster forms around a grain of sand.

  Sy’s sister took her eyes off the road and looked at Henry and shook her head. She told him about all the trouble he’d caused and how Father Crowley and the O’Briens and everybody including the state police were looking for him. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, kid.” Then she pinched her nose with her fingers and said, “Peeeyouuuu, kid. You stink.”

  Big Henry was at Sy’s sister’s house when they got there. He came to the front door. “Hiya, Henry! How’s it hangin’?”
He was barefoot and wearing a bathrobe and holding a cup of coffee.

  “Henry and I are married,” Sy’s sister said.

  Big Henry put his arm around her and took a sip from his coffee cup and looked at Henry without saying anything.

  “Go upstairs,” Sy’s sister said. “Get cleaned up before you stink up the whole house. You know where everything is.”

  “Good Christ, boy, you need to be disinfected,” Big Henry said.

  “And don’t put the same clothes back on. I’ll find something that will fit.”

  “Don’t just stand there, boy. Go to it.” Big Henry chased Henry up the stairs into the bathroom. He turned on the hot water full blast. After his bath Henry put on the new clothes Sy’s sister gave him and looked at himself in the mirror. He remembered the words to the Hymn of the Pearl, which he had read in the Philadelphia Public Library. Suddenly the garment seemed to be a mirror of himself and Henry saw in it his whole self and his self apart and he understood that he was two entities yet one form.

  That afternoon Helena and Mohammed Ali came over to see Henry. Helena’s stomach was huge because she was going to have a baby and she looked older than Henry had ever imagined her to be. Prettier too. She ran up to Henry and hugged him and he bounced off her stomach like it was a hard rubber ball.

  “Careful. Careful,” Mohammed Ali said. He looked the same as before except now he was dressed in jeans and Henry had never seen Mohammed Ali in jeans before.

  Henry asked Mohammed Ali where his Mercedes 450 SEL was.

  Mohammed Ali laughed. “I don’t have it anymore,” he said. He took one of his gold-tipped cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit it. He blew a big cloud of smoke up at the ceiling.

  Henry asked what kind of car he had now. Mohammed Ali took him outside to look.

  “It’s a Land Rover,” he said. “A good family car. What do you think?”

  Henry asked to get inside and Mohammed Ali let him get in and sit in the driver’s seat. It was huge inside and Henry pretended he was driving across deserts and over mountains because Land Rovers were good cars for escaping in. Saints could be thrown into boiling oil or skinned alive. When that happened they became martyrs, but if they were lucky they escaped and found places to hide.