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Living and working in the military left you calloused and rough, no matter how much you distanced yourself from the idea of killing and death. It wasn’t like Henry hadn’t seen death before. His mother and now his father. He comprehended his mother dying, as sad as it was, but he knew she was gone and never coming back. His father’s death however? He never really came to terms with the fact he was dead, because he still haunted him. That house, his father still haunted that house, his soul was etched into the walls, an ugly blotted stain. It was in the drywall, his intoxicated and violent soul, rotting away in there, festering a nauseating feeling which drowned the house. It was trying to take Henry down with it. Thus, the army, his only salvation.
This blood, fresh and red, so salient in nature, vivid like spring flowers and the morning sun, they could never possibly be worse than that house. Even if his life here was suffocating, it was a different kind of suffocation than that house. Polished off rounds of ammunition and bombings alongside newfangled and astonishingly impressive communications technology would surely cleave you but it’d hesitate to kill you, if you could manage to escape their clutches in time. So, the army wasn’t his final resting place as well. He’d have to leave, eventually. Everything out there was trying to kill him, his dead father and his new job now. He’d find an out. He always does. Henry’s a tricky bastard.
—
Heavy tobacco cigars with thick and acrid smoke pouring out of the university dorm’s windows as he poured over tiny-print text books complete with the anatomical innards of new and groundbreaking pieces of mechanical technology. Gorey illustrations of the insides of theoretical all american spaceships which’d beat out the Sputnik anyday, the abdominal cavities of a metal creature’s fuel cells destined for the stars, closer to heaven than any human would ever get in this lifetime. Call him a pretentious piece of shit but he did quite enjoy how they were the ‘anatomical’ illustrations, just like Martha’s medical textbooks. His early university years were tinted in this warm haze, lit warmer than any other period of his life, less volatile than his father’s house and more awake and lively than the ghost-like presence of his work in the war. The war was good for him, he’d decided a while back, it’d kept him creating, it provided a chance to produce his works of art, be around like-minded individuals, but all good things came to an end. Maybe he wasn’t as perfect a fit as he’d thought when he was first brought on to create America’s best war machines. But all of that was behind him, and armed with the knowledge of the gritty engineers he worked beside in his war days and his own life experience, he could develop his theories in his own perfect academic environment, where he was respected, could live, thrive, love. Sappy bullshit, wasn’t it? Henry Miller studying what he loved, which were the newest improvements in mechanical engineering, and the way Martha’s eyes glinted in the warm afternoon light.
It was all perfect when he ignored the way his chest tightened at the sound of a starting pistol at the university’s sport events or the way he still thought of bloodied bodies and marred faces in the middle of the night and the way that the smell of liquor made his stomach churn and his mind spiral. It's perfect. Just like the machines he loved so much. He’s been imperfect so long but this could be perfect, just for him, this was his chance at salvation, by way of divine machinery and whatever holiness was imbued in Martha.
—
Nothing good ever lasts forever. Henry knew that and yet, their deaths shook him to his core. Broke something in him he didn’t know wasn’t broken. He saw their deaths like he saw his father: they were still around, haunting him. Not maliciously or violently like his father, but forlorn and melancholy, like snowflakes melting against your palm and flowers wilting in the winter. They were so warm in life and so cold in death, Henry felt so cold. What good was this world if only to take him and scorn him, beat him like a misbehaving child? He never would have beaten David like his father did to him, but David never got to grow up. What Henry would give for them back, his life, namely, but his life serves to punish him, he’d never get the chance to.
—
Martha and David had revealed themselves to him and he’d created his thesis for them. Their beings and their souls etched into the divine machinery of his car radio. They’d cried for him, he’d answered, and the world wasn’t ready. Prometheus had been punished for giving flame to the human race, too. There was no God, at least not a kind one, as they’d killed his wife and child for no reason. No reason at all. He could accept their deaths as part of the whole. Part of his achievement of greatness and name burnt into the pages of science’s history. An unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. Greatness—he was destined for greatness. Their deaths could have been a part of that. But for nothing? What was this Hell, this madness, what sins could he have committed to deserve this? Doctor Miller, goddamnit! Who thought they could take away his title, which he’s worked so hard for? His wife, his child, then his honorifics? Damn you all, fools!
You will see. You all will see. What you refuse to, what you blind yourself towards, dig out your eyes all you wish with the bluntest of objects, you’ll be forced to see. Flesh merged with steel. Steel merged with flesh. The joy of creation.
Doctor Henry Miller will show the world. Prometheus’s gift of fire to the people. Make a martyr of me all you wish. You’ll see.
I will show you The Joy of Creation.
—
He was standing in purgatory, or at least a place unbound by death and life, eternal punishment or eternal rapture. Unbound by silly human concepts of reality or unreality. But it was closer to hell than heaven, if, godforbid, Henry had to apply a human perception to it. It’s not like the void. He knew it wasn’t death. He couldn’t die, never, not like this. Not ever. He’d learnt it was spite. That which vested him here, left him to rot and fester in this place. It was hellish. Just like that house. He couldn’t remember that house any more. Not the details, at least. All he remembered was drowning. All he remembered was the haunting. Daemons, or just one, one violent and sick and drunk one. Rotting and festering. Both him and that devil. Rotting and festering. He didn’t remember his fathers face all that clearly, only his pain which leached onto poor and pathetic young Henry.
That dying liver that he prayed every day would finally take the old man down. There was no God who could watch that little boy suffer in that house each and every day, but he still prayed, because he was ten years old and didn’t know what else to do, but if there was at least a mean God, it must of had a mean sense of humour, with how his father’s soul had stained him and that house after the death had succeeded. He was sure those black ashes of the burning house were intertwined with it, too. That was cold hard proof of his theories, presented before Martha or David. What was he intertwined with? His destiny and spite, of course, but this place was cold like their dead bodies, and cold like his younger years in life. So directionless. He was a mere ghost here… even if ‘Henry Miller’ and ‘mere’ were each other's antonyms.
However, he had to find an out. He always does, he’s a tricky little bastard, isn’t he? Son of a bastard. He’d haunt this place, just like that bastard, and find no shame in it until he found his out. He’d find a way out. This couldn’t be the end. He couldn’t end up like his fathers sick soul.