Harry fantasized about simply fleeing to the woods for good, so disheartening was his mundane, catastrophe-filled life. But he was no true loner—although forced to be one, since his peers jeered him for his misfortunes—and he realized with a child’s clarity that even if he could survive physically in the wild, he would soon grow lonely and sad.
So Harry lived till roughly age ten with a curious dichotomy he could not rationalize, but only endure. At home and at school, anywhere in fact among the trappings of modern life, he was an utter incompetent, prone to seemingly inescapable collisions with everyday innocent objects. In the woods, he was simply a normal, well-coordinated boy who did not suffer at all.
One night, the split in his perception of himself was healed. As he lay abed, drifting into sleep, all his half-formed intuitions, those vague and inchoate night-thoughts of childhood, assumed a definite shape and substance, became a clear and coherent theory that could explain everything, a theory which he would alter or refine only slightly over the next twenty years. At the instant his suspicions crystallized, he felt two simultaneous strong emotions.
Immense relief and justification, since his theory allowed the belief that there was nothing wrong with his physical self.
Equally overpowering fear and dismay, since there had to be something very wrong with the world he was forced to inhabit, despite all the teachings of science and religion to the contrary.
Harry’s theory was simply this: manmade objects possessed a certain vitality, a shadowy kind of life allowing desires and the will to enact them, in whatever limited way they could. One of their desires was “to get him.” It was as straightforward as that, and the only possible explanation. Since his body did not betray him among natural things, but only among artifacts, then it must be the fault of the artifacts, and not his body.
Harry fell asleep eventually that night, his mind torn by elation and despair. In the morning, his theory stood clear in his eyes as fact. While he had slept, it had assumed a weight of reality beyond anything his conscious mind could have deliberately conferred. Only two unresolved things were to trouble him over the next few years: where did artifacts derive their energy and malignity from; why had they singled him out of everyone he knew as their victim?
The answer to the first question he deduced himself after a few years. The second he had revealed to him by a dead man.
Harry was a great reader. Thrust into his own company, he was forced to be. In early adolescence, he came, by a combination of chance and research, upon the writings of all the great believers in animism, whether as metaphor or reality. Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, Eisley, Muir, Burroughs (John, not E. R.). Their accounts of their perceptions of Nature dovetailed neatly with his own experiences, and he came to see the very soil beneath his feet, every particle of living and “inanimate” matter as imbued with some fractional charge of Nature’s great life, forming a unified whole. This belief explained rather neatly where manmade things drew their energy from. They had simply always had it. All the refining and forging, shaping and annealing that Man applied to ores and hydrocarbons and plant byproducts had no effect on their connection with Nature. If the veins of iron below the ground carried any intrinsic force, then so did the alloy head of the hammer which had cruelly smashed his thumb the other day. Man’s intervention had no effect on the true preternatural qualities of the materials.
Of course, this did not explain the enmity of artifacts, which Harry began to feel more and more as a palpable scheming aura. Nature in the raw imparted no such sensation, either in his own experience or in the works of the authors he had read. Even when Nature killed, as by avalanche or flood, there seemed no overt hatred or revenge involved. The violent, sadistic personality of manmade objects was not readily explicable, but Harry—through pain and misery—was forced to accept it.
And to believe that he was its sole object within his ken.
All this intellectualizing about his condition allowed Harry to fare a little better through adolescence and into adulthood. Before, he had had no reason to approach objects suspiciously, believing that if he only exerted the utmost conscious control over his muscles and will, then he would not suffer any “accident.” The failure of such a policy had not been enough to induce a thorough wariness in him. He had always felt that the problem was ultimately under his control, amenable to some heightened carefulness on his part.
Now, however, knowing that all things sought to entrap and hurt him, he was able to avoid their worst efforts. Realizing that skillets were liable to twitch out of his grip, he held them with two hands. Because electrical appliances were likely to short out when he touched them, he always made a point of flicking light switches, for instance, with nonconducting pencils.
This was not to say that Harry passed the succeeding years unscathed. Locker doors left bruises on his shin. Guitar strings snapped under his touch and whipped across his cheek. Toilets flooded if he so much as flushed a cigarette down. And naturally, he never dared to drive, all cars qualifying as the epitome of human-contrived complexity.
On the whole, Harry lived a halfway normal life, as long as he kept his vigilance up. His long walks in the woods allowed him to recover a semblance of dignity after the traumas of the day. He sought while afield to commune wordlessly with Nature, to ask it why its man-warped offspring hated him so.
He received nothing but a subliminal susurrus of alien contentment in reply.
When Harry discovered psychiatry and its easy labelling of complex mental states—especially that one termed “paranoid”—he became a bit unsettled and unsure of himself.
But a quick slice with Occam’s razor soon pared away his doubts. His solution was the simplest. These things happened to him. He had to be right.
By the end of high school, Harry was a quiet, well-adjusted, cautious and slow-moving young man. His parents remarked occasionally how he had outgrown “that clumsy young colt stage.” (Harry managed to keep the most outrageous of his continuing accidents secret from them.) They wanted Harry to continue his education, but he refused. He knew that simply to enter a college chemistry lab would be to seal his doom. Instead, he informed them that he was moving away. He said it was “to find himself.” (It was that decade.) Really, it was because his parents’ house was too full of hostile things, and because the town they lived in had over the years become an urbanized eyesore where one such as Harry could feel the weight of artifice like a brewing oppressive storm.
Amid many tears and gruff handshakes, Harry departed. He found a small rural village and landed the least mechanical job he could find: tending horses at a riding stable. There the only instruments he had to deal with were curry-brush and shovel. Even so, more than once he found the horses’ tackle inexplicably wrapped around his neck.
He lived in a single room that was almost bare. His mattress rested on the floor, since the slats in a conventional bed tended to break quite often. His single lamp he turned on with a pair of insulated pliers. He did not cook, but ate all his meals out. Briefly, he had a girlfriend named Mary Lynne. Until the night they decided to make love, when five condoms in a row shredded away in his fingers, and Mary Lynne’s waterbed burst. She never answered his calls after that.
At times, Harry still wondered, Why me? He briefly identified with Jonah, and those people who, science claimed, could stop computers and other devices dead merely by approaching them. But his case was not precisely like theirs. He did not usually bring misfortune on anyone else (despite the soaking Mary Lynne had suffered). And he did not have the ability to hurt gadgets. Quite the opposite: gadgets hurt him.
Diligently, Harry searched through mountains of literature for a life similar to his own. When he finally found it, he almost refused to believe it.
The volume was a thin hardcover, bound in black cloth and privately printed by a regional press. Entitled Confessions of a Hater of Civilization, it was owned by the village library, and had been written by one Alden Winship. The book was mostly a tirade against modern (First Printing: 1921) life. Spurious enjoyments, creeping commercialization, disappearing morality, all the immemorial complaints that had filled books since Ur. Harry nearly stopped reading