Henry of Atlantic City (13 page)

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 and 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.

After a little while they went back inside. Henry was happy to see Mohammed Ali and Helena with a baby in her stomach. His angel was happy too and said no creation was so completely flawed that no good could come out of it.

“Are the O’Briens treating you badly?” Helena asked.

Henry said not only were they unable to detain the perfect man, they were unable to see him; for if they saw him they would detain him.

“Henry, this is serious. Everybody’s in trouble.”

Henry told Helena that her mother and Sy were married.

“I know,” Helena said. “They’re all in big trouble. Your father too. Did Mrs. O’Brien tell you?”

Henry said no.

“Do you know what a fugitive is?”

Henry said no.

“It’s someone who is wanted by the police and who has to go underground.”

Henry asked where underground.

“Nobody knows where. That’s why they say underground. It means they have to live in hiding. If they’re caught they’ll be put in jail.”

Henry said by coming into being the whole creation became enslaved forever, from the foundation of the world until now, and he fingered the chain his father had given him.

“Why did you run away?” Mohammed Ali asked.

Henry said because he wanted to live in Philadelphia.

Sy’s sister came into the room. “The police are here.”

Henry asked why she called the police.

“I didn’t call them, Henry. They’ve been searching for you for two days.”

The police took Henry into their car and made him sit in the back seat while one of them talked on the radio and the other one wrote in a book. It was a Ford Crown Victoria. Henry liked Mohammed Ali’s Land Rover much better. In the Land Rover Henry could see out the window. The Ford Crown Victoria had bars on the window and all he could see was the backs of the policemen’s heads. One policeman turned around. “What’s your name, son?”

Henry said nothing.

“I asked you a question, son.” The policeman had on a badge that said
Shumacher
.

Henry said nothing.

“Okay, son, let’s get something straight. You’ve caused a lot of trouble. You can make it harder on yourself by not cooperating, or you can cooperate. Understand?”

Shumacher took Henry into a room at the police station and made him sit down until a woman came in and asked him some questions. She was wearing a badge that said
Farley
. “You feeling okay, Henry? You hungry?”

Henry shook his head.

“Anyone mistreatin’ you? Hurt you in any way?”

Henry shook his head.

Farley took some papers out of a drawer and sat down on a bench in the office and asked Henry to sit down next to her. “I’m here to help you, Henry. It’s my job to help children like you. But first you need to tell me why you ran away.”