Henry, Kabir, and That Little Book
Page 3
Henry’s wife, Sarah, brought in that colorful birthday book on love, “Primitives” by Kathy Phillips, something she found in the discount bin at a chain bookstore for seventy-five cents. Henry studied it each morning like it was scripture—it was a basic way to keep life and love within, a meditation, and it acted like a type of superhero shield for him.
That said, Henry also couldn’t stop seeing himself licking walls, floors, windows, and toilet seats. It’s like the love book was blessed and rested on one shoulder, while on the other sat negative, sinister copies of Henry’s acts, his many sins. Good versus Bad, Angel versus Devil, Redeemed versus Cursed. The caustic pictures flew up into Henry’s face one after the next like a swarm of hornets.
Once Henry knelt to lick the commode at his home in Middletown a month ago, things unraveled—whacked out voices ricocheted inside of him, boundaries dissolving, psychic dominoes tumbling. But Henry combated the images by thinking of the diminutive book, so brightly colored, teeming with a kind of schlocky, pithy wisdom. Henry’s brain had Sarah offering the voice-overs.
“You are the blue in my sky,” she read.
“You are the mac to my cheese.”
While at the Psych ER, Henry sprawled naked on the cold concrete floor before the steel toilet, mind swirling, offering his tongue and body up for forgiveness, or something more sacred. Or was it only an oblong face he spotted in a horror film as a graduate student while tripping in a Belfast theatre with his soused great-uncle? Back and forth Henry’s mind raced—left, right, up, down, real, dream, nightmare, paradise, inferno, peace and wild, hoary violence.
Sarah read from the book, her voice so distinct:
“You are the water to my ocean.”
Roommate Barbo was unchanging his whole stay - forever at the nurses’ station, shouting so profanely at Scotty that the TV was turned off, and Henry and other patients retreated to their rooms, covering their ears, using ear plugs staff offered as a “relaxation tool.”
“Don’t talk to me as if I’m some juvenile, Scotty,” Barbo said. “Where has your respect for elders gone?”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” was the feature at movie night, and when it ended, many geriatrics spoke of how sorely missed Paul Newman was in Hollywood, and how younger stars should be more like him, and donate substantial portions of their earnings to charities. There was even an octogenarian lady weeping in the next room, sobbing over the whole thing.
“Oh, that film icon, Paul,” she cried. “What an eternal heartbreaker.”
“Newman was a pussy,” Barbo roared at her from the Day Room, before nurses finally gave him an injection, and then he was out of the picture for the next three days. By 10 p.m., the graveyard shift arrived and dimmed the lights, and the TV was switched off, and most patients disappeared into their thick, medicated slumbers.
Two weeks later, Henry scrawled in his journal that Kabir would want him to live a more self-respecting existence, and enjoy his life. Henry thought strictly of sweet, singular Sarah and her colorful book. One page displayed a dove soaring in a near perfect cerulean blue sky, an olive branch in her beak.
“With love, there are always miracles.”
Days later, Henry finds himself outside on an early morning, carrying his duffle of clothes in one hand, holding Sarah’s left hand tight with the other.