Henry of Atlantic City

by Frederick Reuss

  Henry tried to see through the darkness but his eyes didn’t help him. He felt the top step with his foot and took one step down. Then he sat on the top step and did tushie pops—Helena had taught him how to do tushie pops—pop; pop, pop, step by step down into the darkness. He came to a landing, crawled around to a second set of steps, and then slid down them until he saw a light switch glowing in the blackness below him. He descended into the blackness and when he reached the bottom he turned on the switch and found himself facing a door at the bottom of the staircase. He pushed it open and walked into a brightly lit corridor. He ran to the end of the corridor and called the elevator. On the elevator were a man and a woman who were holding drinks in their hands. “A little past your bedtime, isn’t it, kid?” the man said.

  Henry stared at the panel of buttons and didn’t say anything.

  The man put his arm around the woman and whispered something in her ear. It sounded like he said crazy parents or something but Henry didn’t really hear. The woman shook her head and looked away.

  When the doors opened Henry walked straight through the lobby, where people were still coming and going and laughing and talking, through the revolving door at the entrance. There were taxis and cars and people were standing around in groups. Then he felt the night air on his face and heard the thrumming of the ocean and smelled its smell. He ran as fast as he could down the lighted boardwalk.

  He stayed in the shadows on his way to the water. Procopius said the streets of Byzantium were crowded late at night with groups and factions. Most were coming from the games and were still charged by the glory of their color. It didn’t matter if Blue or Green had won; their supporters tumbled through the streets and shouted and sang and made the night noisy. Sy used to tell Henry the city was great because it devoted as much energy to the night as it did to the day, and when Henry was clear of the shadow of Caesar’s Palace he knew he was safe because now it would be hard to find him in all the clattering.

  The ocean was calm and he stood at the water’s edge, where everything stretched out forever. Sometimes the dead were carried across the water standing up in long boats and sometimes they rose up into the air and their spirits made an invisible trail across the sky and sometimes they just woke up disoriented in a place without a name. He felt the breeze blow through his hair and the water splashing up the backs of his legs. He stooped and lifted a handful of wet sand and let it dribble through his fingers. He took the chain from around his neck, the chain his father had given him, and held it in his sandy palm. Gold was heavier than sand, but as it dribbled through his fingers it felt no different. He watched as the surf washed over it, a sliver of gold glimmering in the foam. Then, just as it was about to disappear, he snatched it up and put it on again.

  Rising up into the night sky were all the dizzy lights of the city. He could see Caesar’s Palace and Balley’s Wild West and Trump Plaza and the Tropicana and the Taj Mahal and the Hagia Sophia and the golden statue on top of the Column of Constantine. In the days when he came down to the water with Helena, Henry would try to see how far he could walk along the shore before the city vanished into the horizon. He never made it far enough to escape the sights and the smells and the sounds of the city but when his father brought him out to the beach and told him he had to leave the Palace, they walked so far that even the tallest buildings looked like small huts on the shore. That day everything receded and became like decorations floating in the middle distances. The middle distances are the places where the things you can’t take with you have to be left, the places where nothing originates. Henry and his father walked farther away from the city than Henry had ever walked before and when they returned to the Palace Henry’s father told him to pack up his gear and be ready to leave first thing in the morning.

  It grew darker and darker and Henry walked and walked and went way past everything. When he turned to look, the city twinkled in the distance like something on top of a cake. He watched it twinkle for a while and his angel began to talk but Henry paid no attention. Instead he listened to the waves breaking on the shore and tried to hear the underlying voices of the ocean, but after trying and trying to decipher the crashing and tumbling and hissing he gave up and continued walking. His feet sank into the wet sand. His angel continued talking. Henry forced himself not to listen and he tried to concentrate on the smells in the air and the feel of the breeze against his skin. He sat down and took off his sneakers and dug his feet and hands into the sand. He tried to concentrate simultaneously on the feeling of all the grains of sand together and the feeling of each one apart and he fingered the chain around his neck and promised that he would always keep it no matter what and that it would always remind him of his father. He looked up at the stars and thought of them as the sand’s counterpart in heaven, and his angel put the image in his mind of a beach up there and sitting on that beach another Henry with another angel in his ear and a chain around his neck and stars spilling from his hands and his feet dug underneath a trillion suns. But then it all collapsed. That Henry was merely vaster. In the great conflation of names and things that make up the world, being more vast only means being supported by a greater nothingness. Instead of wishing he were identical to the cosmic Henry, the Henry on the beach wished both would just disappear. In the vastness of the world, the scale of loneliness is constant and can never be divided. Loneliness is the most meaningless treasure in existence.

  Henry watched the moon rise. He tried to imagine his self and his self apart fulfilling all the duties of a saint. The first thing he would do would be to bless and forgive all the people he had ever known or who had ever known him. Even the drunken couple in the elevator. Henry’s angel said only through this perversion of forgiving can the perversion that is the world be transformed into the eternal realm. His angel also said that none shall be able to torment him even while he dwells in the world because a saint has had the light revealed to him and the light is the truth and the truth is what makes you free.

  Across the water the limitless darkness of the night sky met the limitless churning of the ocean. Henry saw that where the two met was also the place where the beginning and the end came together. Not in the neat line of the horizon but in the jagged edges of chaos. You needed light to see the neat line of the horizon, but you needed secret knowledge to see the jagged edges of chaos. A saint had to know these things. A saint had to know that Creator and creation are separate and distinct and that the one does not recognize itself in the other. They can never know each other. They can never be united. Reunions do not happen. A child cannot return to the mother, nor the mother to her mother, and dissolve all creation backward to the beginning. A saint had to know that the chains that bind each child to life will one day break but that it doesn’t matter because once it was it will have been forever. Most important of all, a saint had to know that knowing all this did not bring anything nearer to its origins. Everything that is originated in something else that could not be known. A mother was a mother and the child of the mother was the mother’s child and they were other and separate and alien.

  In Atlantic City the biggest buildings were built along the shore. They were always noisy and never still. Henry walked and walked and walked along the beach until the moon was almost directly overhead. Then, when the city was not even a pinprick of light on the horizon, he turned and walked back to Caesar’s Palace. He wondered how it was that such a busy place—a place where there was nothing but playing and shouting and carrying on all day and all night, a place that was both the starting point and the destination of so many simultaneous voyages, a place where east toucheth west, ocean toucheth land, a rock toucheth a hard place—could also seem so calm? And when his angel finally left him, Henry understood that it was always like that wherever one thing ended and something else began.

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