People called him Hairy, but he had from a very early age rejected that. To himself he was always Harry.
(In moments of confidence (hubris) and hope (delusion) he even dared to fancy himself Harry Dursley)
But a name never even spoken would not change anything.
Harry was a deer, a roe deer to be precise, and just like that, the world dismissed him.
Not that he hadn't tried to convince himself he was actually human, that his deer body, even the Dursleys were all part of some elaborate delusion. Why he would do that to himself was beyond him, but he liked this idea, because it offered him the possibility of waking up. Whenever he convinced himself of this he would run headfirst into the wall, step on the firecrackers Dudley left lying around oh-so-surreptitiously on the lawn, anything, anything that might pull him out of his own mind and into what could only be a real life.
So far he had yet to transcend reality, and had only a lot of injuries that would have been the death of him if he lived in the wild to show for his numerous attempts. (The Dursleys were convinced theirs was a particularly stupid deer.)
Like other mammals, he could not recall his own beginning. All he had ever known was the garden behind 4 Privet Drive and the Dursleys. He did, however, know that he had not always been unhappy.
He was not sure when he had become self-aware, no one is, though he had vague recollections of the day he ceased to be happy.
This day was probably the only real recollection he had, not because of its importance, but because this was the only event that ever stood out in his dull life. Even so, he had been very little at the time, so it was more split into flashes and feelings, accompanied by the knowledge of what had happened, than it was a single coherent, detailed memory.
What happened was roughly this: Harry, a bit shorter than Petunia's garden chairs and slightly unsteady, had approached Dudley, who had been knocking two Lego figures together (the slow finesse of sticking them together to create something escaped him. His was a spirit of destruction and being entertained). He wanted to play and be friends. He had known that Dudley had feet instead of hooves, he was not blind, but he was very little and thought this no more an obstacle than gender, or skin colour.
Dudley was not so innocent.
His memories were fussy, he wondered if there hadn't been things being thrown as well, but the boy had at least screamed. That he knew. Loudly. Vernon and Petunia had come running at the racket, and a shocked Harry had been kicked and pushed back behind the house, where Vernon had tied him to the fence.
That day was important because he knew, intrinsically, that before he had assumed his life to be a good and positive thing. After came the dreary existence he had to accept every day ever since. His spirit had been stepped on that day, and it never got back up. It was his Rubicon.
When Vernon at last released him from the fence he did not move. Where would he have gone?
Time had slowed to a crawl. He watched Dudley go from being a kindergartner to a schoolboy, and he watched the Dursleys enter and leave the house, have celebrations and friends over and live. His own days were so monotonous, waking up and eating and shitting and rewind, he had not been much older when he realized he was pretty much living the same day over and over. Snow, the edibility of grass and the changing leaves were his only interactions with the passage of time.
His was a bizarre little existence and he suspected it might have been the most meaningless one that had ever been.
(If the sum of a life is determined by its consequences for others, then Harry had no influence over his equation at all, as he held no power over others. He had heard of the butterfly whose wings start a hurricane on the other side of the world, but that only made him feel worse. His was even less than the might of a dying larvae. His own insignificance galled him. What was the point?)
This is not to say he was so self-absorbed as to think himself the only one in the world who suffered or lived in monotony. Sheltered though he may be, he knew that humans could be sad too. And yet he could not imagine a thing more wretched than he, for no matter how desolate or pitiful, a human would communicate with others at some point in their lives. Even if they were stillborn, severely brain damaged or tortured everyday in a hole in the ground, their peers would still know they were handling human beings, and so they were acknowledged. Their mothers would know they had born a human.
Harry would never be afforded such a luxury.
This is not to say that he took his uniqueness for granted.
Because if he could be a deer with the mind of a man, how could he know that other animals did not have human minds too? Who was he to say that all living things were not intelligent? If it were so, did that mean they too lived in melancholia and isolation, or were they all content knowing their place in the world and he the lone freak? If yes, how could they not feel lonely when only humans were capable of speech? Or was there some language he did not know?
(Was the world a place of enslaving and eating the barking and meowing screams of the helpless? Petunia swatted flies with clinical precision and Vernon had mousetraps lying around. Were they murderers?)
Might there be a whole world of intelligent animals out there, perhaps even a clandestine civilization? If so, then why was he not part of it? Had he been excluded? Why?
He approached other animals. He trotted over to Mrs Figg's and tried to communicate with her cats. They ignored him. His attempt at trying to socialize with Mr. Webster's dog quicky devolved into them barking at each other and Mrs. Webster running for the camera. He felt ridiculed.
Scratch that, he felt terrified.
There was nothing, nothing whatsoever indicating that other animals were intelligent. He had to assume that he was alone. Which in some ways made him the first man, the modern Adam of a new world. But there was no Eve to tempt him, no God to disobey… Oh.
Was it God who had created him?
It would explain so much, if not everything.
God created man in his own image, and while mankind presumed this to mean that he too had arms and legs and was human enough to even have a son, Harry realized that they were mistaken. Divinity lay not in their dominance of the world nor their forms, perfect adaptable predators that they were. Those were mere by-products. No, it lay in their souls.
And Harry, for whatever reason, had been granted one too.
Yes, there was the possibility that he had ben bred by scientists. That top secret labs and madmen in white coats had cultivated him on a petri dish like a damn vaccine, that his truest name wasn't Harry or Hairy but Case 395. It was a possibility, in fact a very logical one, but he desperately did not want to be. He was not a thing born of nature and reason. The thought of his struggle, of all the bizarre things about his existence and of his mind, his wonderful but problematic mind all being part of some callous experiment, funded by indifferent bureaucrats or some sick billionaire and of how there in this scenario would be some incongruous they watching his every move, observing him, taking bets on just how smart he was and how he would react to the Dursleys, paid actors, tormenting him… it made the grass in his stomach feel like heavy dirt, like mud, and he was left with the fantastical. He had to be magical.
For wouldn't that make him evidence that some higher power had the savoir-faire to create life? On their own, men could claim that their perfection was their own merit. That scientists had discovered the only truth there was. Harry proved that there was some other factor, something beyond the mundane calling the shots. Somebody had looked at his not yet existing form, and given it life.
He wondered if that had happened in the moment he had been conceived, or if the facts of his life had been weaved into the tapestry of the Universe at the Dawn of Time. If he was fated to exist, or an impulse decision- or an accident. He wondered if it had been a mistake, if there was a child wandering somewhere, in perfect health but as basic as any beast. He wondered if its parents loathed their freak like the Dursleys loathed him.
Or if there was any sentience behind the divine at all. Being a thinking deer was such a bizarre situation, there had to be some greater underlying reason behind the joke that was his existence. He had no way of proving anything, but he wanted there to be a reason for it all.
Or did he?
Assuming that God was indeed real, and had chosen to create him, Harry could be none other than the Chosen One.
(He felt safe in assuming he was the only one. If he wasn't, he would have known, of this he was sure – or else there were others, but they had made nothing of it and remained in obscurity.)
Following that line of thought, Harry contemplated his own significance. This had to change his outlook on life. Right? He could be that which had been sought after since the dawn of Man. He could be the proof of God. If he were to somehow prove his sentience to the rest of the world, like Darwin had proven Man was evolved from apes, there would be a philosophical reckoning. Harry would, without disproving nature and the discoveries that had been made, set a question mark behind near every conclusion man had come to. He would make God impossible to deny.
Or not.
The practical details of his vision put a spoke in his wheels. At the end of the day he was still a deer, and there would be those who would scream blasphemy at the thought of someone like him spreading the word of God. If he was believed at all. He had no way of proving that he wasn't just another trained clown, there to entertain the masses and make his trainer very rich. When Helen Keller, wealthy and human as she was, finally spoke, the world had been excited to listen.
Harry would be at the mercy of the masses. It would be a flip of the coin, a game of chicken. Who would want to be the first to be believe in God's Deer? Harry could be a venerated prophet or a dismissed Cassandra and his inability to speak would make him unable to influence the outcome.
And how he was even supposed to get that kind of attention in the first place? The Dursleys would not want to help him, they abhorred all things abnormal, and Harry was painfully aware that he would very literally be considered fair game if he tried to escape the suburbia. The symmetry of Christ giving his body in communion and Harry becoming steak was not worth dying over.
The resistance he would meet on every step towards becoming God's prophet was overwhelming. Perhaps he was going about it all wrong.
Perhaps God was testing him.
But how could he possibly pass, when all he could perceive to be in his might was eating grass? Was that his purpose, then, to carve a path of godliness for deer? (There was no way he was expected to improve the ways of men, they were not about to go back to their hunter-gatherer ways on the say-so of a deer. No way. He hoped). How could he preach, and how would they understand? What was there for him to condemn?
How does a deer act right by God?
(It occurred to him that he might be cursed, or blessed. His existence was suffering, and if life was anything approaching fair, then surely his plight was compensating for something. Perhaps something wonderful was in store. Or perhaps he had done something terrible, and this was his punishment.
Perhaps he was the Messiah, chosen to suffer so that others might live in peace. But he could not recall consenting to any such martyrdom.
Perhaps life was unfair.)
(At times, certainly as he got older, his recurring asylum fantasies would make him wonder if he wasn't a madman going mad even in the world he himself had created. Madception. Except, and this amused him more and more, he was mad either way and no one ever leaves Platon's cave anyway.)
His thoughts on God were like his thoughts on everything else in that they changed nothing at all. The years passed him by, and at one point he started wondering about his own lifespan. Didn't deer have lifespans of roughly seven years? He was roughly that age, if not older, yet he felt as spry and healthy as ever. Did that mean he was unique in that too? It was another reason to suspect divine intervention. Evolution does not simply dump freak sentient deer with alarming lifespans in suburbia.
His depressive ponderings took a decisive step into sheer depression on one particular day he'd been watching Dudley play. He realized then that even if he were to wake up human the next morning he would still not be one of them, would still not belong. He would be too messed up. You can only pretend to be a thing for so long before it becomes you, and a part of him had to be irrevocably deer by then.
And wasn't that a ridiculous thought, he thought grimly, watching his reflection on Vernon's car, wasn't that a sign of denial if nothing else… at least part deer, how about arguably a bit human.
(Maybe people (living things, that is to say) were puzzles, mosaics glued together with different bits and pieces… pigeon, lion, human for some, or are humans so wholly human and their mosaic so even, that their pieces are merely cruel, youthful, mad?
It occurred to him that other people might not be fractured at all, that he might be the only one falling apart, mosaic so crudely glued together that you'll cut yourself if you touch it. It also occurred to him that his thoughts no longer made sense, even to himself.)
He did not feel sane.
And Dudley, Dudley the idiot, Dudley the unworthy little waste of space, Dudley who for whatever reason was blessed with a human form, Dudley playing with his friends, one of them, Dudley loved by his family - his family! Harry's deer heart was filled with as much hatred as blood, and it pulsed through him.
(A particularly devastating blow had been when he realized that, in spite of his three hundred and ten degree vision, his eyesight was in fact inferior to Dudley's, as the other boy could see a rich spectrum of colours and was able to tell when things were far away. It had been shocking. To him, vision had been shapes and shades and that had been that, but Petunia's cooing over her flowers and Dudley's fixation with screens had eventually made him realize that they had a gift he could not even imagine. The world held beauty he would never know, and fucking Dudley took it for granted)
He wanted to kick the boy in his face, make his head explode like a disgusting gooey watermelon. It would be beautiful, he would be killing his reflection, this unworthy human boy that had for some reason been granted the life Harry so craved. He would kill the Ego. (And be a real boy. Pinocchio had nothing on Harry's pain)
This never came to pass, nor for lack of will but because he was a four-foot tall deer with very skinny legs. He settled for daydreaming about it instead. This gave him a taste of happiness.
He sometimes thought about his creation. How had been conceived? Carried? Born? How had he come to live with the Dursleys? Even if he were right about God being his cause of existence it would not explain the how, the mechanics of things. The only ones who might be able to answer any of these questions were the Dursleys, but that was a bust. Butting one of them with his head was as far as he got before the headbutt victim sprayed lemon juice in his face.
His questions would remain unanswered.
(Something he did not want to contemplate, but that was likely true, was that even if someone one day gave him every answer he had ever wanted, and a purpose, he would still feel lost. His isolation was more than loneliness. It had become a part of him, like the feeling of sun on his fur or the desire to sleep when he was tired.
There was also the less psychological but even scarier option of them not having an answer. They were far from the kind of people that took in orphaned livestock, leading him to wonder if they had even chosen to. Which led to him wondering if the whole setting wasn't literally too bizarre to be true. Maybe he was correct in his asylum fantasy, or maybe God had created them as well, for whatever reason. Which might just mean that this reality only existed for his sake.
Perhaps Harry was God, and this reality was here to – what, exactly?
What was the purpose of this pantomime?)
Something occurred to him one summer.
He had made it through another winter and the grass was amazing now, but he could no longer find joy in even that. The grass would go away and like Sisyphus he would push that rock back up the hill, nothing ever accomplished, nothing ever changed. He felt foolish, having been seduced by summer in his younger years, having let grass and little flower delicacies dictate his priorities… he had let his animal part take over.
He felt ashamed.
(This in itself was not unusual: who among us wouldn't feel ashamed, knowing ourselves to be something so silly and primitive as a deer? Who wouldn't feel singled out, and run in circles trying to justify this joke of an existence?)
He did not know much about Christianity, but he knew that the wisest of the humans sought to distance themselves from their fleshly needs and shortcomings. They were ridiculed for this, but if he were a creature born of something beyond nature and beyond sense, what was there to do but to reject his flesh?
He could be a modern cynic. And ascetic, quietly dignified in his refusal to eat any more grass than he strictly needed. Or he could continue his life as he's living, but let his morose thoughts go, become a Epicurean of sorts. He did not need to go to school or work, he had not commitments other than eating grass. He could manhandle his mind into a happy place.
(And maybe that was the evolution of the species. Maybe all creatures but men had given up on their intelligence, choosing dumb simplicity for reasons he was starting to understand, and forgotten themselves.)
But then, what would there to tell him apart from any other deer? He could not stand to lose the one thing that gave him worth. And neither school of thought would change anything. He might eat a bit less grass: but then, he did not eat much as it was. The sole difference was that he would be directing his own mind. He would compel himself to think in predetermined venues, but for what? A sense of belonging? Of purpose?
His choices made no difference to anyone, himself included. His life truly was pointless.
Like any other depressed mammal, Harry had his good days and his bad days. Slowly, as his mind made him unable to take joy in the joys in his life and brighter thoughts lost their resonance, the bad came to outnumber the good. On the worst days he would be too overcome by the tragedy of his own existence to even leave the shade.
The worst days came to outnumber the bad: for what was the point in eating grass, when the purpose of that would be to prolong the existence he so hated?
And here came the final steps of a dark path few but still too many find themselves upon, for Harry did at last realize he was suicidal.
Had he had something to look forward to, or even to dread, a change of even the slightest kind, a world of difference would have been made. He did not. And how could he claim to loathe his life, if he chose to cling to it? He would become a knowing hypocrite, stewed in self-loathing. How could he wish for autonomy when his thoughts did not affect the sole action he could take? How could he claim integrity?
And there was one practical question that he had always avoided, but now allowed to the front of his mind. If he did not age normally, how old might he get? Might he live for years and years, even decades, until his body failed him one last time? Could he bear to?
Did he have a reason to?
Harry's decision to kill himself was the realization that he could.
It was a defiance of his nature, of his fate, of life itself. He spat God in the face: he no longer cared whether he had only now perceived His plan or if this decision was him failing that divine test. For the first time in his life, he felt relief. It was light, and careless, and unfolded itself from his heavy sorrowful heart, blowing all the bad and painful darkness he'd been carrying away like smoke.
He was euphoric.
(And if his one remaining fiction was that he chose his suicide method for its irony, rather than it being one of the very few suicide methods available to deer living in suburbia, then he did for once choose not to overthink it.)
He jumped the Dursleys' fence that morning, fresh and graceful, a maiden in white running into her lover's embrace, and ran into the road. A Peugeot rammed into him, and he died instantly.
By noon, he had been scraped off the pavement and sent to a nearby landfill, and a letter addressed to Mr. Potter, The Garden, 4 Privet Drive, Surrey, England, had been picked up by a surprised Dudley.