Free The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding

out.
    He also liked reading those Zen koans. His favorite was:
    Lightning flashes,
    Sparks shower.
    In one blink of your eyes,
    You have missed seeing.
    And there it all came round again. Daisy studying the eye. Him trying to see what she was up to. But that’s the problem, the whole quantum, Zen, Heisenberg problem: If you look, you miss seeing. If you don’t look, there’s no way you can see, either.
    He had been inching down Stockton, thinking, Only through action can one achieve enlightenment, but all action is useless. And since all action is useless, he stood stock-still. You put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere, but all you get is nowhere. It was like Zeno’s paradox, only for the soul.
    That’s when he noticed the woman.
    The woman with the three children.
    They were in front of the Nike store having a meltdown. Actually it was the mother who was having the meltdown and the kids were staring at her with stricken faces and probably wet pants. She screamed at the top of her lungs and stomped her feet.
    What an interesting family! he thought. Why? Because the mom was white, the eldest daughter was black, the little boy was Chinese, and the two-year-old looked kind of Latina. That’s America. Naturally, they didn’t get along.
    â€œIf you cry one more time—if you ask for one more soda or ice cream—if you hit one another even a little, if you whine, complain, run off, or beg for one more thing, or,” she said screaming, “if you say anything at all—then, then—that’s it !”
    The two older kids became quiet as stones, but the baby, the Latina one, or maybe it was Latino, who can tell at that age?—started howling more loudly than ever.
    â€œGoddammit! Goddammit!” the woman yelled.
    â€œIt’s okay, Mom,” said the middle child, taking her hand. “We’ll take care of it.”
    And the older girl reached into the stroller and started cooing and tickling. “See?”
    Oh, how Henry’s heart went out to those children and to their mother. He knew exactly what she was feeling! She can’t take it anymore. She’s had it. That’s it.
    But no matter what the little girl did, the baby wouldn’t stop crying. The mother half collapsed against the plate glass windows of the Nike store and began to sob. And Henry thought to himself, here she is, the woman who got her wish. She’d wanted those children, she’d dreamt of them, even had their names picked out long before she knew what they might look like, or even what country they might come from; she’d convinced her husband she had to have at least three, when he would have been happy with one; she’d explored and researched fifteen different agencies, interviewed dozens of adoptive parents, hired a whole office full of lawyers, and coughed up twenty, thirty, maybe fifty grand for each one of those kids, even though they couldn’t possibly afford it—and finally her dream came true: she traveled to far-off lands—three different continents in five years—to rescue each one of these children from their shoddy orphanages and corrupt caretakers; she triumphed as she disembarked the aircraft at SFO, presenting her new baby conquests to their new grandparents, uncles, and aunts; and then diligently she fed and clothed them, lavished them with toys and books, televisions and computers, Xboxes and Wiis, reporting it all daily on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest—and for what? So that she might see, in this one prescient moment, that her life was no longer her own, that it had become a shambles, a nightmare; that the kids couldn’t care less what she had gone through to get them, that they were spoiled rotten and that she hated them, hated them profoundly, and wanted nothing more than to run back to Nordstrom this very second, run back alone— as if they never existed, as if she could unwind the coil