Part II: A Past That Is Also a Future — LIBRARY SCIENCE FICTION - The Time Traveler's Wife

Wednesday, March 8, 1995 (Henry is 31)

Henry: Matt and I are playing Hide and Seek in the stacks in Special Collections. He’s looking for me because we are supposed to be giving a calligraphy Show and Tell to a Newberry Trustee and her Ladies’ Lettering Club. I’m hiding from him because I’m trying to get all of my clothes on my body before he finds me.

“Come on, Henry, they’re waiting,” Matt calls from somewhere in Early American Broadsides. I’m pulling on my pants in Twentieth-Century French livres d’artistes. “lust a second, I just want to find this one thing,” I call. I make a mental note to learn ventriloquism for moments like this. Matt’s voice is coming closer as he says, “You know Mrs. Connelly is going to have kittens, just forget it, let’s get out there—” He sticks his head into my row as I’m buttoning my shirt. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry?”

“You’ve been running around naked in the stacks again, haven’t you?”

“Um, maybe.” I try to sound nonchalant.

“Jesus, Henry. Give me the cart.” Matt grabs the book-laden cart and starts to wheel it off toward the Reading Room. The heavy metal door opens and closes. I put on my socks and shoes, knot my tie, dust off my jacket and put it on. Then I walk out into the Reading Room, face Matt over the long classroom table surrounded by middle-aged rich ladies, and begin to discourse on the various book hands of lettering genius Rudolf Koch. Matt lays out felts and opens portfolios and interjects intelligent things about Koch and by the end of the hour he seems like maybe he’s not going to kill me this time. The happy ladies toddle off to lunch. Matt and I move around the table, putting books back into their boxes and onto the cart.

“I’m sorry about being late,” I say.

“If you weren’t brilliant,” Matt replies, “we would have tanned you and used you to rebind Das Manifest der Nacktkultur by now.”

“There’s no such book.”

“Wanna bet?”

“No.” We wheel the cart back to the stacks and begin reshelving the portfolios and books. I buy Matt lunch at the Beau Thai, and all is forgiven, if not forgotten.

Tuesday, April 11, 1995 (Henry is 31)

Henry: There is a stairwell in the Newberry Library that I am afraid of. It is located toward the east end of the long hallway that runs through each of the four floors, bisecting the Reading Rooms from the stacks. It is not grand, like the main staircase with its marble treads and carved balustrades. It has no windows. It has fluorescent lights, cinderblock walls, concrete stairs with yellow safety strips. There are metal doors with no windows on each floor. But these are not the things that frighten me. The thing about this stairwell that I don’t like one bit is the Cage.

The Cage is four stories tall and runs up the center of the stairwell.

At first glance it looks like an elevator cage, but there is no elevator and never was. No one at the Newberry seems to know what the Cage is for, or why it was installed. I assume it’s there to stop people from throwing themselves from the stairs and landing in a broken heap. The Cage is painted beige. It is made of steel.

When I first came to work at the Newberry, Catherine gave me a tour of all the nooks and crannies. She proudly showed me the stacks, the artifact room, the unused room in the east link where Matt practices his singing, McAllister’s amazingly untidy cubicle, the Fellows’ carrels, the staff lunch room. As Catherine opened the door to the stairwell, on our way up to Conservation, I had a moment of panic. I glimpsed the crisscrossed wire of the Cage and balked, like a skittish horse.

“What’s that?” I asked Catherine.

“Oh, that’s the Cage,” she replied, casually.

“Is it an elevator?”

“No, it’s just a cage. I don’t think it does anything.”

“Oh.” I walked up to it, looked in. “Is there a door down there?”

“No. You can’t get into it.”

“Oh.” We walked up the stairs and continued on with our tour.

Since then, I have avoided using that stairway. I try not to think about the Cage; I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. But if I ever end up inside it, I won’t be able to get out.

Friday, June 9, 1995 (Henry is 31)

Henry: I materialize on the floor of the Staff Men’s Room on the fourth floor of the Newberry. I’ve been gone for days, lost in 1973, rural Indiana, and I’m tired, hungry, and unshaven; worst of all, I’ve got a black eye and I can’t find my clothes. I get up and lock myself in a stall, sit down and think. While I’m thinking someone comes in, unzips, and stands in front of the urinal pissing. When he’s done he zips and then stands for a moment and right then I happen to sneeze.

“Who’s there?” says Roberto. I sit silently. Through the space between the door and the stall I see Roberto slowly bend down and look under the door at my feet.

“Henry?” he says. “I will have Matt bring your clothes. Please get dressed and come to my office.”

I slink into Roberto’s office and sit down across from him. He’s on the phone, so I sneak a look at his calendar. It’s Friday. The clock above the desk says 2:17. I’ve been gone for a little more than twenty-two hours. Roberto places the phone gently in its cradle and turns to look at me. “Shut the door,” he says. This is a mere formality because the walls of our offices don’t actually go all the way up to the ceiling, but I do as he says.

Roberto Calle is an eminent scholar of the Italian Renaissance and the Head of Special Collections. He is ordinarily the most sanguine of men, golden, bearded, and encouraging; now he gazes at me sadly over his bifocals and says, “We really can’t have this, you know.”

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

“May I ask how you acquired that rather impressive black eye?” Roberto’s voice is grim.

“I think I walked into a tree.”

“Of course. How silly of me not to think of that.” We sit and look at each other. Roberto says, “Yesterday I happened to notice Matt walking into your office carrying a pile of clothing. Since it was not the first time I had seen Matt walking around with clothing I asked him where he had gotten this particular pile, and he said that he had found it in the Men’s Room. And so I asked him why he felt compelled to transport this pile of clothing to your office and he said that it looked like what you were wearing, which it did. And since no one could find you, we simply left the clothing on your desk.”

He pauses as though I’m supposed to say something, but I can’t think of anything appropriate. He goes on, “This morning Clare called and told Isabelle you had the flu and wouldn’t be in.” I lean my head against my hand. My eye is throbbing. “Explain yourself,” Roberto demands.

It’s tempting to say, Roberto, I got stuck in 1973 and I couldn’t get out and I was in Muncie, Indiana, for days living in a barn and I got decked by the guy who owned the barn because he thought I was trying to mess with his sheep. But of course I can’t say that. I say, “I don’t really remember, Roberto. I’m sorry.”

“Ah. Well, I guess Matt wins the pool.”

“What pool?”

Roberto smiles, and I think that maybe he’s not going to fire me. “Matt bet that you wouldn’t even attempt to explain. Amelia put her money on abduction by aliens. Isabelle bet that you were involved in an international drug-running cartel and had been kidnapped and killed by the Mafia.”

“What about Catherine?”

“Oh, Catherine and I are convinced that this is all due to an unspeakably bizarre sexual kink involving nudity and books.”

I take a deep breath. “It’s more like epilepsy,” I say.

Roberto looks skeptical. “Epilepsy? You disappeared yesterday afternoon. You have a black eye and scratches all over your face and hands. I had Security searching the building top to bottom for you yesterday; they tell me you are in the habit of taking off your clothing in the stacks.”

I stare at my fingernails. When I look up, Roberto is staring out the window. “I don’t know what to do with you, Henry. I would hate to lose you; when you are here and fully clothed you can be quite...competent. But this just will not do!”

We sit and look at each other for minutes. Finally Roberto says, “Tell me it won’t happen again ”

“I can’t. I wish I could.”

Roberto sighs, and waves his hand at the door. “Go. Go catalogue the Quigley Collection, that’ll keep you out of trouble for a while.” (The Quigley Collection, recently donated, is over two thousand pieces of Victorian ephemera, mostly having to do with soap.) I nod my obedience and stand up.

As I open the door Roberto says, “Henry. Is it so bad that you can’t tell me?”

I hesitate. “Yes ” I say. Roberto is silent. I close the door behind me and walk to my office. Matt is sitting behind my desk, transferring stuff from his calendar into mine. He looks up as I come in. “Did he fire you?” Matt asks.

“No,” I reply.

“Why not?”

“Dunno.”

“Odd. By the way, I did your lecture for the Chicago Hand Bookbinders.”

“Thanks. Buy you lunch tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Matt checks the calendar in front of him. “We’ve got a Show and Tell for a History of Typography class from Columbia in forty-five minutes.” I nod and start rummaging in my desk for the list of items we’re about to show. “Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“Where were you?”

“Muncie, Indiana. 1973.”

“Yeah, right.” Matt rolls his eyes and grins sarcastically. “Never mind.”

Sunday, December 17, 1995 (Clare is 24, Henry is 8)

Clare: I’m visiting Kimy. It’s a snowy Sunday afternoon in December. I’ve been Christmas shopping, and I’m sitting in Kimy’s kitchen drinking hot chocolate, warming my feet by the baseboard radiator, regaling her with stories of bargains and decorations. Kimy plays solitaire while we talk; I admire her practiced shuffle, her efficient slap of red card on black card. A pot of stew simmers on the stove. There’s a noise in the dining room; a chair falls over. Kimy looks up, turns.

“Kimy” I whisper. “There’s a little boy under the dining room table.”

Someone giggles. “Henry?” Kimy calls. No answer. She gets up and stands in the doorway. “Hey, buddy. Stop that. Put some clothes on, mister.” Kimy disappears into the dining room. Whispering. More giggles. Silence. Suddenly a small naked boy is staring at me from the doorway, and just as suddenly he vanishes. Kimy comes back in, sits down at the table, and resumes her game.

“Wow,” I say.

Kimy smiles. “That don’t happen so much these days. Now he’s a grown-up, when he comes. But he don’t come as much as he used to.”

“I’ve never seen him go forward like that, into the future.”

“Well, you don’t have so much future with him, yet.”

It takes me a second to figure out what she means. When I do, I wonder what kind of future it will be, and then I think about the future expanding, gradually opening enough for Henry to come to me from the past. I drink my chocolate and stare out into Kimy’s frozen yard.

“Do you miss him?” I ask her.

“Yeah, I miss him. But he’s grown-up now. When he comes like a little boy, it’s like a ghost, you know?” I nod. Kimy finishes her game, gathers up the cards. She looks at me, smiles. “When you guys gonna have a baby, huh?”

“I don’t know, Kimy. I’m not sure we can.”

She stands up, walks over to the stove and stirs the stew. “Well, you never know.”

“True.” You never know.

Later, Henry and I are lying in bed. Snow is still falling; the radiators make faint clucking noises. I turn to him and he looks at me and I say, “Let’s make a baby.”

Monday, March 11, 1996 (Henry is 32)

Henry: I have tracked down Dr. Kendrick; he is affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospital. It is a vile wet cold day in March. March in Chicago seems like it ought to be an improvement over February, but sometimes it isn’t. I get on the IC and sit facing backwards. Chicago streams out behind us and soon enough we are at 59th Street. I disembark and struggle through the sleety rain. It’s 9:00 a.m., it’s Monday. Everyone is drawn into themselves, resisting being back in the workweek. I like Hyde Park. It makes me feel as though I’ve fallen out of Chicago and into some other city, Cambridge, perhaps. The gray stone buildings are dark with rain and the trees drip fat icy drops on passersby. I feel the blank serenity of the fait accompli; I will be able to convince Kendrick, though I have failed to convince so many doctors, because I do convince him. He will be my doctor because in the future he is my doctor.

I enter a small faux Mies building next to the hospital. I take the elevator to Three, open the glass door that bears the golden legend Drs. C. P. Shane and D. L Kendrick, announce myself to the receptionist and sit in one of the deep lavender upholstered chairs. The waiting room is pink and violet, I suppose to soothe the patients. Dr. Kendrick is a geneticist, and not incidentally, a philosopher; the latter, I think, must be of some use in coping with the harsh practical realities of the former. Today there is no one here but me. I’m ten minutes early. The wallpaper is broad stripes the exact color of Pepto-Bismol. It clashes with the painting of a watermill opposite me, mostly browns and greens. The furniture is pseudocolonial, but there’s a pretty nice rug, some kind of soft Persian carpet, and I feel kind of sorry for it, stuck here in this ghastly waiting room. The receptionist is a kind-looking middle-aged woman with very deep wrinkles from years of tanning; she is deeply tanned now, in March in Chicago.

At 9:35 I hear voices in the corridor and a blond woman enters the waiting room with a little boy in a small wheelchair. The boy appears to have cerebral palsy or something like it. The woman smiles at me; I smile back. As she turns I see that she is pregnant. The receptionist says, “You may go in, Mr. DeTamble,” and I smile at the boy as I pass him. His enormous eyes take me in, but he doesn’t smile back.

As I enter Dr. Kendrick’s office, he is making notes in a file. I sit down and he continues to write. He is younger than I thought he would be; late thirties. I always expect doctors to be old men. I can’t help it, it’s left over from my childhood of endless medical men. Kendrick is red-haired, thin-faced, bearded, with thick wire-rimmed glasses. He looks a little bit like D. H. Lawrence. He’s wearing a nice charcoal-gray suit and a narrow dark green tie with a rainbow trout tie clip. An ashtray overflows at his elbow; the room is suffused with cigarette smoke, although he isn’t smoking right now. Everything is very modern: tubular steel, beige twill, blond wood. He looks up at me and smiles.

“Good morning, Mr. DeTamble. What can I do for you?” He is looking at his calendar. “I don’t seem to have any information about you, here? What seems to be the problem?”

“Dasein.”

Kendrick is taken aback. “ Dasein? Being? How so?”

“I have a condition which I’m told will become known as Chrono-Impairment. I have difficulty staying in the present.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I time travel. Involuntarily.”

Kendrick is flustered, but subdues it. I like him. He is attempting to deal with me in a manner befitting a sane person, although I’m sure he is considering which of his psychiatrist friends to refer me to.

“But why do you need a geneticist? Or are you consulting me as a philosopher?”

“It’s a genetic disease. Although it will be pleasant to have someone to chat with about the larger implications of the problem.”

“Mr. DeTamble. You are obviously an intelligent man...I’ve never heard of this disease. I can’t do anything for you.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Right. I don’t.”

Now I am smiling, ruefully. I feel horrible about this, but it has to be done. “Well. I’ve been to quite a few doctors in my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever had anything to offer in the way of proof. Of course no one ever believes me. You and your wife are expecting a child next month?”

He is wary. “Yes. How do you know?”

“In a few years I look up your child’s birth certificate. I travel to my wife’s past, I write down the information in this envelope. She gives it to me when we meet in the present. I give it to you, now. Open it after your son is born.”

“We’re having a daughter.”

“No, you’re not, actually,” I say gently. “But let’s not quibble about it. Save that, open it after the child is born. Don’t throw it out. After you read it, call me, if you want to.” I get up to leave. “Good luck,” I say, although I do not believe in luck, these days. I am deeply sorry for him, but there’s no other way to do this.

“Goodbye, Mr. DeTamble,” Dr. Kendrick says coldly. I leave. As I get into the elevator I think to myself that he must be opening the envelope right now. Inside is a sheet of typing paper. It says:

Colin Joseph Kendrick

April 6, 1996 1:18 a.m.

6 lbs. 8 oz Caucasian male

Down Syndrome

Saturday, April 6, 1996, 5:32 a.m. (Henry is 32, Clare is 24)

Henry: We are sleeping all tangled together; all night we have been waking, turning, getting up, coming back to bed. The Kendricks’ baby was born in the early hours of today. Soon the phone will ring. It does ring. The phone is on Clare’s side of the bed, and she picks it up and says “Hello?” very quietly, and hands it to me.

“How did you know? How did you know?” Kendrick is almost whispering.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Neither of us says anything for a minute. I think Kendrick is crying.

“Come to my office.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” he says, and hangs up the phone.

Sunday, April 7, 1996 (Henry is 32 and 8, Clare is 24)

Henry: Clare and I are driving to Hyde Park. We’ve been silent for most of the ride. It’s raining, and the wipers provide the rhythm section for the water streaming off the car and the wind.

As though continuing a conversation we haven’t exactly been having. Clare says, “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“What? Kendrick?”

“Yeah.”

“Nature isn’t fair.”

“Oh—no. I mean, yeah, it’s sad about the baby, but actually I meant us. It seems not fair that we’re exploiting this.”

“Unsporting, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

I sigh. The 57th Street exit sign appears and Clare changes lanes and pulls off the drive. “I agree with you, but it’s too late. And I tried...”

“Well, it’s too late, anyway.”

“Right.” We lapse into silence again. I direct Clare through the maze of one-way streets, and soon we are sitting in front of Kendrick’s office building.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.” I am nervous.

“Be nice.” Clare kisses me. We look at each other, all our hopes submerged in feeling guilty about Kendrick. Clare smiles, and looks away. I get out of the car and watch as Clare drives off slowly down 59th Street and crosses the Midway. She has an errand to do at the Smart Gallery.

The main door is unlocked and I take the elevator up to Three. There’s no one in Kendrick’s waiting room, and I walk through it and down the hall. Kendrick’s door is open. The lights are off. Kendrick stands behind his desk with his back to me, looking out the window at the rainy street below. I stand silently in the doorway for a long moment. Finally I walk into the office.

Kendrick turns and I am shocked at the difference in his face. Ravaged is not the word. He is emptied; something has gone that was there before. Security; trust; confidence. I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground.

“Henry DeTamble,” says Kendrick.

“Hello.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“Because I had come to you. It wasn’t a matter of choice.” Fate?

“Call it whatever you want. Things get kind of circular, when you’re me. Cause and effect get muddled.”

Kendrick sits down at his desk. The chair squeaks. The only other sound is the rain. He reaches in his pocket for his cigarettes, finds them, looks at me. I shrug. He lights one, and smokes for a little while. I regard him.

“How did you know?” he says.

“I told you before. I saw the birth certificate.”

“When?”

“1999.”

“Impossible.”

“Explain it, then.”

Kendrick shakes his head. “I can’t. I’ve been trying to work it out, and I can’t. Everything—was correct. The hour, the day, the weight, the.. .abnormality.” He looks at me desperately. “What if we had decided to name him something else—Alex, or Fred, or Sam...?”

I shake my head, and stop when I realize I’m mimicking him. “But you didn’t. I won’t go so far as to say you couldn’t, but you did not. All I was doing was reporting. I’m not a psychic.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No.” I don’t want to discuss it, although eventually I will have to. “I’m sorry about Colin. But you know, he’s really a wonderful boy.”

Kendrick stares at me. “I tracked down the mistake. Our test results were accidentally switched with those of a couple named Kenwick.”

“What would you have done if you had known?”

He looks away. “I don’t know. My wife and I are Catholic, so I imagine the end result would be the same. It’s ironic..”

“Yes.”

Kendrick stubs out his cigarette and lights another. I resign myself to a smoke-induced headache.

“How does it work?”

“What?”

“This supposed time travel thing that you supposedly do.” He sounds angry. “You say some magic words? Climb in a machine?”

I try to explain plausibly. “No. I don’t do anything. It just happens. I can’t control it, I just—one minute everything is fine, the next I’m somewhere else, some other time. Like changing channels. I just suddenly find myself in another time and place.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

I lean forward, for emphasis. “I want you to find out why, and stop it.”

Kendrick smiles. It’s not a friendly smile. “Why would you want to do that? It seems like it would be quite handy for you. Knowing all these things that other people don’t know.”

“It’s dangerous. Sooner or later it’s going to kill me.”

“I can’t say that I would mind that.”

There’s no point in continuing. I stand up, and walk to the door. “Goodbye, Dr. Kendrick.” I walk slowly down the hall, giving him a chance to call me back, but he doesn’t. As I stand in the elevator I reflect miserably that whatever went wrong, it just had to go that way, and sooner or later it will right itself. As I open the door I see Clare waiting for me across the street in the car. She turns her head and there is such an expression of hope, such anticipation in her face that I am overwhelmed by sadness, I am dreading telling her, and as I walk across the street to her my ears are buzzing and I lose my balance and I am falling but instead of pavement I hit carpeting and I lie where I fall until I hear a familiar child’s voice saying “Henry, are you okay?” and I look up to see myself, age eight, sitting up in bed, looking at me.

“I’m fine, Henry.” He looks dubious. “Really, I’m okay.”

“You want some Ovaltine?”

“Sure.” He gets out of bed, toddles across the bedroom and down the hall. It’s the middle of the night. He fusses around in the kitchen for a while, and eventually returns with two mugs of hot chocolate. We drink them slowly, in silence. When we’re done Henry takes the mugs back to the kitchen and washes them. No sense in leaving the evidence around, When he comes back I ask, “What’s up?”

“Not much. We went to see another doctor today.”

“Hey, me too. Which one?”

“I forget the name. An old guy with a lot of hair in his ears.”

“How was it?”

Henry shrugs. “He didn’t believe me.”

“Uh-huh. You should just give up. None of them ever will believe you. Well, the one I saw today believed me, I think, but he didn’t want to help.”

“How come?”

“He just didn’t like me, I guess.”

“Oh. Hey, do you want some blankets?”

“Um, maybe just one.” I strip the bedspread off Henry’s bed and curl up on the floor. “Good night. Sleep tight.” I see the flash of my small self’s white teeth in the blueness of the bedroom, and then he turns away into a tight ball of sleeping boy and I am left staring at my old ceiling, willing myself back to Clare.

Clare: Henry walks out of the building looking unhappy, and suddenly he cries out and he’s gone. I jump out of the car and run over to the spot where Henry was, just an instant ago, but of course there’s just a pile of clothing there, now. I gather everything up and stand for a few heartbeats in the middle of the street, and as I stand there I see a man’s face looking down at me from a window on the third floor. Then he disappears. I walk back to the car and get in, and sit staring at Henry’s light blue shirt and black pants, wondering if there’s any point in staying here. I’ve got Brideshead Revisited in my purse, so I decide to hang around for a while in case Henry reappears soon. As I turn to find the book I see a red-haired man running toward the car. He stops at the passenger door and peers in at me. This must be Kendrick. I flip the lock and he climbs into the car, and then he doesn’t know what to say.

“Hello,” I say. “You must be David Kendrick. I’m Clare DeTamble.”

“Yes—” he’s completely flustered, “yes, yes. Your husband—”

“Just vanished in broad daylight.”

“Yes!”

“You seem surprised.”

“Well—”

“Didn’t he tell you? He does that.” So far I’m not very impressed with this guy, but I persevere. “I’m so sorry about your baby. But Henry says he’s a darling kid, and that he draws really well and has a lot of imagination. And your daughter’s very gifted, and it will all be fine. You’ll see.”

He’s gaping at me. “We don’t have a daughter. Just—Colin.”

“But you will. Her name is Nadia.”

“It’s been a shock. My wife is very upset...”

“But it will be okay. Really.” To my surprise this stranger begins to cry, his shoulders shaking, his face buried in his hands. After a few minutes he stops, and raises his head. I hand him a Kleenex, and he blows his nose.

“I’m so sorry,” he begins.

“Never mind. What happened in there, with you and Henry? It went badly.”

“How do you know?”

“He was all stressed out, so he lost his grip on now.”

“Where is he?” Kendrick looks around as though I might be hiding Henry in the back seat.

“I don’t know. Not here. We were hoping you could help, but I guess not.”

“Well, I don’t see how—” At this instant Henry appears in exactly the same spot he disappeared from. There’s a car about twenty feet away, and the driver slams his brakes as Henry throws himself across the hood of our car. The man rolls down his window and Henry sits up and makes a little how, and the man yells something and drives off. My blood is singing in rny ears. I look over at Kendrick, who is speechless. I jump out of the car, and Henry eases himself off the hood.

“Hi, Clare. That was close, huh?” I wrap my arms around him; he’s shaking. “Have you got my clothes?”

“Yeah, right here—oh hey, Kendrick is here.”

“What? Where?”

“In the car.”

“Why?”

“He saw you disappear and it seems to have affected his brain.”

Henry sticks his head in the driver’s side door. “Hello.” He grabs his clothing and starts to get dressed. Kendrick gets out of the car and trots around to us.

“Where were you?”

“1971. I was drinking Ovaltine with myself, as an eight-year-old, in my old bedroom, at one in the morning. I was there for about an hour. Why do you ask?” Henry regards Kendrick coldly as he knots his tie.

“Unbelievable.”

“You can go on saying that as long as you want, but unfortunately it’s true.”

“You mean you became eight years old?”

“No. I mean I was sitting in my old bedroom in my dad’s apartment, in 1971, just as I am, thirty-two years old, in the company of myself, at eight. Drinking Ovaltine. We were chatting about the incredulity of the medical profession.” Henry walks around to the side of the car and opens the door. “Clare, let’s vamoose. This is pointless.”

I walk to the driver’s side. “Goodbye, Dr. Kendrick. Good luck with Colin.”

“Wait—” Kendrick pauses, collects himself. “This is a genetic disease?”

“Yes,” says Henry. “It’s a genetic disease, and we’re trying to have a child ”

Kendrick smiles, sadly. “A chancy thing to do.”

I smile back at him. “We’re used to taking chances. Goodbye.” Henry and I get into the car, and drive away. As I pull onto Lake Shore Drive I glance at Henry, who to my surprise is grinning broadly.

“What are you so pleased about?”

“Kendrick. He is totally hooked.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, great. But he seemed kind of dense.”

“He’s not.”

“Okay.” We drive home in silence, an entirely different quality of silence than we arrived with. Kendrick calls Henry that evening, and they make an appointment to begin the work of figuring out how to keep Henry in the here and now.

Friday, April 12, 1996 (Henry is 32)

Henry: Kendrick sits with his head bowed. His thumbs move around the perimeter of his palms as though they want to escape from his hands. As the afternoon has passed the office has been illuminated with golden light; Kendrick has sat immobile except for those twitching thumbs, listening to me talk. The red Indian carpet, the beige twill armchairs’ steel legs have flared bright; Kendrick’s cigarettes, a pack of Camels, have sat untouched while he listened. The gold rims of his round glasses have been picked out by the sunlight; the edge of Kendrick’s right ear has glowed red, his foxish hair and pink skin have been as burnished by the light as the yellow chrysanthemums in the brass bowl on the table between us. All afternoon, Kendrick has sat there in his chair, listening.

And I have told him everything. The beginning, the learning, the rush of surviving and the pleasure of knowing ahead, the terror of know-‘ng things that can’t be averted, the anguish of loss. Now we sit in silence and finally he raises his head and looks at me. In Kendrick’s light eyes is a sadness that I want to undo; after laying everything before him I want to take it all back and leave, excuse him from the burden of having to think about any of this. He reaches for his cigarettes, selects one, lights it, inhales and then exhales a blue cloud that turns white as it crosses the path of the light along with its shadow.

“Do you have difficulty sleeping?” he asks me, his voice rasping from disuse.

“Yes.”

“Is there any particular time of day that you tend to.. .vanish?”

“No.. .well, early morning maybe more than other times.”

“Do you get headaches?”

“Yes.”

“Migraines?”

“No. Pressure headaches. With vision distortion, auras.”

“Hmm.” Kendrick stands up. His knees crack. He paces around the office, smoking, following the edge of the rug. It’s beginning to bug me when he stops and sits down again. “Listen,” he says, frowning, “there are these things called clock genes. They govern circadian rhythms, keep you in sync with the sun, that sort of thing. We’ve found them in many different types of cells, all over the body, but they are especially tied to vision, and you seem to experience many of your symptoms visually. The suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, which is located right above your optic chiasm, serves as the reset button, as it were, of your sense of time—so that’s what I want to begin with.”

“Um, sure,” I say, since he’s looking at me as though he expects a reply. Kendrick gets up again and strides over to a door I haven’t noticed before, opens it and disappears for a minute. When he returns he’s holding latex gloves and a syringe.

“Roll up your sleeve,” Kendrick demands.

“What are you doing?” I ask, rolling my sleeve above my elbow. He doesn’t answer, unwraps the syringe, swabs my arm and ties it off, sticks me expertly. I look away. The sun has passed, leaving the office in gloom.

“Do you have health insurance?” he asks me, removing the needle and untying my arm. He puts cotton and a Band-Aid over the puncture.

“No. I’ll pay for everything myself.” I press my fingers against the sore spot, bend my elbow.

Kendrick smiles. “No, no. You can be my little science experiment, hitchhike on my NIH grant for this.”

“For what?”

“We’re not going to mess around, here.” Kendrick pauses, stands holding the used gloves and the little vial of my blood that he’s just drawn. “We’re going to have your DNA sequenced.”

“I thought that took years.”

“It does, if you’re doing the whole genome. We are going to begin by looking at the most likely sites; Chromosome 17, for example.” Kendrick throws the latex and needle in a can labeled Biohazard and writes something on the little red vial of blood. He sits back down across from me and places the vial on the table next to the Camels.

“But the human genome won’t be sequenced until 2000. What will you compare it to?”

“2000? So soon? You’re sure? I guess you are. But to answer your question, a disease that is as—disruptive—as yours often appears as a kind of stutter, a repeated bit of code that says, in essence, Bad News. Huntington’s disease, for instance, is just a bunch of extra CAG triplets on Chromosome 4.”

I sit up and stretch. I could use some coffee. “So that’s it? Can I run away and play now?”

“Well, I want to have your head scanned, but not today. I’ll make an appointment for you at the hospital. MRI, CAT scan, and X-rays. I’m also going to send you to a friend of mine, Alan Larson; he has a sleep lab here on campus.”

“Fun ” I say, standing up slowly so the blood doesn’t all rush to my head.

Kendrick tilts his face up at me. I can’t see his eyes, his glasses are shiny opaque disks at this angle. “It is fun,” he says. “It’s such a great puzzle, and we finally have the tools to find out—”

“To find out what?”

“Whatever it is. Whatever you are.” Kendrick smiles and I notice that his teeth are uneven and yellowed. He stands, extends his hand, and I shake it, thank him; there’s an awkward pause: we are strangers again after the intimacies of the afternoon, and then I walk out of his office, down stairs, into the street, where the sun has been waiting for me. Whatever I am. What am I? What am I?