The time traveler's wife (8 page)

He looks at me in the mirror. "It's
okay." He turns and looks directly at me. "I did it!" He grins,
largely. "You were brilliant!"

"Yeah!" The grin fades. "Henry,
I don't like to time travel by myself. It's better with you. Can't you always
come with me?"

He is standing with his back to me, and we look
at each other in the mirror. Poor small self: at this age my back is thin and
my shoulder blades stick out like incipient wings. He turns, waiting for an
answer, and I know what I have to tell him— me. I reach out and gently turn him
and bring him to stand by me, so we are side by side, heads level, facing the
mirror.

"Look." We study our reflections,
twinned in the ornate gilt Palmer House bathroom splendor. Our hair is the same
brown-black, our eyes slant dark and fatigue-ringed identically, we sport exact
replicas of each other's ears. I'm taller and more muscular and shave. He's
slender and ungainly and is all knees and elbows. I reach up and pull my hair
back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he
mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.

"It's just like mine," says my self,
amazed. "How did you get it?" "The same as you. It is the same.
We are the same."

A translucent moment. I didn't understand, and
then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once,
feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture
of future and present for the first time. But I'm too accustomed, too comfortable
with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine
and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only
me. The loneliness of it.

"You're me."

"When you are older."

"But...what about the others?"

"Other time travelers?"

He nods.

"I don't think there are any. I mean, I've
never met any others."

A tear gathers at the edge of his left eye.
When I was little, I imagined a whole society of time travelers, of which
Henry, my teacher, was an emissary, sent to train me for eventual inclusion in
this vast camaraderie. I still feel like a castaway, the last member of a once
numerous species. It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale
footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. My self, small as
a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry. I hold him, hold me, for a long time.
Later, we order hot chocolate from room service, and watch Johnny Carson. Henry
falls asleep with the light on. As the show ends I look over at him and he's
gone, vanished back to my old room in my dad's apartment, standing sleep-addled
beside my old bed, falling into it, gratefully. I turn off the TV and the
bedside lamp. 1973 street noises drift in the open window. I want to go home. I
lie on the hard hotel bed, desolate, alone. I still don't understand. Sunday,
December 10, 1978 (Henry is 15, and 15)

Henry: I'm in my bedroom with my self. He's
here from next March. We are doing what we often do when we have a little
privacy, when it's cold out, when both of us are past puberty and haven't quite
gotten around to actual girls yet. I think most people would do this, if they
had the sort of opportunities I have. I mean, I'm not gay or anything. It's
late Sunday morning. I can hear the bells ringing at St. Joe's. Dad came home
late last night; I think he must have stopped at the Exchequer after the
concert; he was so drunk he fell down on the stairs and I had to haul him into
the apartment and put him to bed. He coughs and I hear him messing around in
the kitchen. My other self seems distracted; he keeps looking at the door.
"What?" I ask him. "Nothing," he says. I get up and check
the lock. " No," he says. He seems to be making a huge effort to
speak. "Come on," I say. I hear Dad's heavy step right outside my
door. "Henry?" he says, and the knob of the door slowly turns and I
abruptly realize that I have inadvertently unlocked the door and Henry leaps
for it but it's too late: Dad sticks his head in and there we are, in flagrante
delicto. "Oh," he says. His eyes are wide and he looks completely
disgusted. "Jesus, Henry." He shuts the door and I hear him walking
back to his room. I throw my self a reproachful glare as I pull on a pair of
jeans and a T-shirt. I walk down the hall to Dad's bedroom. His door is shut. I
knock. No answer. I wait. "Dad?" Silence. I open the door, stand in
the doorway. "Dad?" He's sitting with his back to me, on his bed. He
continues to sit, and I stand there for a while, but I can't bring myself to
walk into the room. Finally I shut the door, walk back to my own room.

"That was completely and totally your
fault," I tell my self severely. He is wearing jeans, sitting on the chair
with his head in his hands. "You knew, you knew that was going to happen
and you didn't say a word. Where is your sense of self preservation? What the
hell is wrong with you? What use is it knowing the future if you can't at least
protect us from humiliating little scenes—"

"Shut up " Henry croaks. "Just
shut up."

"I will not shut up," I say, my voice
rising. "I mean, all you had to do was say—"

"Listen." He looks up at me with
resignation. "It was like.. .it was like that day at the ice-skating
rink."

"Oh. Shit." A couple years ago, I saw
a little girl get hit in the head with a hockey puck at Indian Head Park. It
was horrible. I found out later that she died in the hospital. And then I
started to time travel back to that day, over and over, and I wanted to warn
her mother, and I couldn't. It was like being in the audience at a movie. It
was like being a ghost. I would scream, No, take her home, don't let her near
the ice, take her away, she's going to get hurt, she's going to die, and I
would realize that the words were only in my head, and everything would go on
as before. Henry says, "You talk about changing the future, but for me
this is the past, and as far as I can tell there's nothing I can do about it. I
mean, I tried, and it was the trying that made it happen. If I hadn't said
something, you wouldn't have gotten up
 
"

"Then why did you say anything?"

"Because I did. You will, just wait."
He shrugs. "It's like with Mom. The accident. Immer wieder." Always
again, always the same.

"Free will?"

He gets up, walks to the window, stands looking
out over the Tatingers' backyard. "I was just talking about that with a
self from 1992. He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is
only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can
only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there."

"But whenever I am, that's my present.
Shouldn't I be able to decide—"

"No. Apparently not."

"What did he say about the future?"

"Well, think. You go to the future, you do
something, you come back to the present. Then the thing that you did is part of
your past. So that's probably inevitable, too."

I feel a weird combination of freedom and
despair. I'm sweating; he opens the window and cold air floods into the room.
"But then I'm not responsible for anything I do while I'm not in the
present."

He smiles. "Thank God."

"And everything has already happened."

"Sure looks that way." He runs his
hand over his face, and I see that he could use a shave. "But he said that
you have to behave as though you have free will, as though you are responsible
for what you do."

"Why? What does it matter?"

"Apparently, if you don't, things are bad.
Depressing."

"Did he know that personally?"

"Yes."

"So what happens next?"

"Dad ignores you for three weeks. And
this"—he waves his hand at the bed—"we've got to stop meeting like
this." I sigh. "Right, no problem. Anything else?" "Vivian
Teska."

Vivian is this girl in Geometry whom I lust
after. I've never said a word to her. "After class tomorrow, go up to her
and ask her out." "I don't even know her."

"Trust me." He's smirking at me in a
way that makes me wonder why on earth I would ever trust him but I want to
believe. "Okay."

"I should get going. Money, please."
I dole out twenty dollars. "More." I hand him another twenty.
"That's all I've got."

"Okay." He's dressing, pulling
clothes from the stash of things I don't mind never seeing again. "How
about a coat?" I hand him a Peruvian skiing sweater that I've always
hated. He makes a face and puts it on. We walk to the back door of the
apartment. The church bells are tolling noon. "Bye," says my self.

"Good luck," I say, oddly moved by
the sight of me embarking into the unknown, into a cold Chicago Sunday morning
he doesn't belong in. He thumps down the wooden stairs, and I turn to the
silent apartment.

Wednesday, November 17/Tuesday, September 28,
1982 (Henry is 19)

Henry: I'm in the back of a police car in Zion,
Illinois. I am wearing handcuffs and not much else. The interior of this
particular police car smells like cigarettes, leather, sweat, and another odor
I can't identify that seems endemic to police cars. The odor of
freak-outedness, perhaps. My left eye is swelling shut and the front of my body
is covered with bruises and cuts and dirt from being tackled by the larger of
the two policemen in an empty lot full of broken glass. The policemen are
standing outside the car talking to the neighbors, at least one of whom
evidently saw me trying to break into the yellow and white Victorian house we
are parked in front of. I don't know where I am in time. I've been here for
about an hour, and I have fucked up completely. I'm very hungry. I'm very
tired. I'm supposed to be in Dr. Quarrie's Shakespeare seminar, but I'm sure
I've managed to miss it. Too bad. We're doing Midsummer Night's Dream. The
upside of this police car is: it's warm and I'm not in Chicago. Chicago's Finest
hate me because I keep disappearing while I'm in custody, and they can't figure
it out. Also I refuse to talk to them, so they still don't know who I am, or
where I live. The day they find out, I'm toast because there are several
outstanding warrants for my arrest: breaking and entering, shoplifting,
resisting arrest, breaking arrest, trespassing, indecent exposure, robbery, und
so weiter. From this one might deduce that I am a very inept criminal, but
really the main problem is that it's so hard to be inconspicuous when you're
naked. Stealth and speed are my main assets and so, when I try to burgle houses
in broad daylight stark naked, sometimes it doesn't work out. I've been
arrested seven times, and so far I've always vanished before they can fingerprint
me or take a photo. The neighbors keep peering in the windows of the police car
at me. I don't care. I don't care. This is taking a long time. Fuck, I hate
this. I lean back and close my eyes. A car door opens. Cold air—my eyes fly
open—for an instant I see the metal grid that separates the front of the car
from the back, the cracked vinyl seats, my hands in the cuffs, my gooseflesh
legs, the flat sky through the windshield, the black visored hat on the
dashboard, the clipboard in the officer's hand, his red face, tufted graying
eyebrows and jowls like drapes—everything shimmers, iridescent, butter fly-wing
colors and the policeman says, "Hey, he's having some kinda fit—" and
my teeth are chattering hard and before my eyes the police car vanishes and I am
lying on my back in my own backyard. Yes. Yes! I fill my lungs with the sweet
September night air. I sit up and rub my wrists, still marked where the
handcuffs were. I laugh and laugh. I have escaped again! Houdini, Prospero,
behold me! for I am a magician, too. Nausea overcomes me, and I heave bile onto
Kimy's mums.

Saturday, May 14, 1983 (Clare is 11 almost 12)

Clare: It's Mary Christina Heppworth's birthday
and all the fifth-grade girls from St. Basil's are sleeping over at her house.
We have pizza and Cokes and fruit salad for dinner, and Mrs. Heppworth made a
big cake shaped like a unicorn's head with Happy Birthday Mary Christina! in
red icing and we sing and Mary Christina blows out all twelve candles in one
blow. I think I know what she wished for; I think she wished not to get any
taller. That's what I would wish if I were her, anyway. Mary Christina is the
tallest person in our class. She's 5'9". Her mom is a little shorter than
her, but her dad is really, really tall. Helen asked Mary Christina once and
she said he's 67". She's the only girl in her family. and her brothers are
all older and shave and they're really tall, too. They make a point of ignoring
us and eating a lot of cake and Patty and Ruth especially giggle a lot whenever
they come where we are. It's so embarrassing. Mary Christina opens her
presents. I got her a green sweater just like my blue one that she liked with
the crocheted collar from Laura Ashley. After dinner we watch The Parent Trap
on video and the Heppworth family kind of hangs around watching us until we all
take turns putting on our pajamas in the second floor bathroom and we crowd
into Mary Christina's room that is decorated totally in pink, even the
wall-to-wall carpet. You get the feeling Mary Christina's parents were really
glad to finally have a girl after all those brothers. We have all brought our
sleeping bags, but we pile them against one wall and sit on Mary Christina's
bed and on the floor. Nancy has a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps and we all
drink some. It tastes awful, and it feels like Vicks VapoRub in my chest. We
play Truth or Dare. Ruth dares Wendy to run down the hall without her top on.
Wendy asks Francie what size bra Lexi, Francie's seventeen-year-old sister,
wears. (Answer: 38D.) Francie asks Gayle what she was doing with Michael
Planner at the Dairy Queen last Saturday. (Answer: eating ice cream. Well,
duh.) After a while we all get bored with Truth or Dare, mainly because it's
hard to think of good dares that any of us will actually do, and because we all
pretty much know whatever there is to know about each other, because we've been
going to school together since kindergarten. Mary Christina says, "Let's
do Ouija board," and we all agree, because it's her party and cause Ouija
board is cool. She gets it out of her closet. The box is all mashed, and the
little plastic thing that shows the letters is missing its plastic window.
Henry told me once that he went to a seance and the medium had her appendix
burst in the middle of it and they had to call an ambulance. The board is only
really big enough for two people to do it at once, so Mary Christina and Helen
go first. The rule is you have to ask what you want to know out loud or it
won't work. They each put their fingers on the plastic thing. Helen looks at
Mary Christina, who hesitates and Nancy says, "Ask about Bobby," so
Mary Christina asks, "Does Bobby Duxler like me?" Everybody giggles.
The answer is no, but the Ouija says yes, with a little pushing by Helen. Mary
Christina smiles so hugely I can see her braces, top and bottom. Helen asks if
any boys like her. The Ouija circles around for a while, and then stops on D,
A, V. "David Hanley?" says Patty, and everybody laughs. Dave is the
only black kid in our class. He's real shy and small and he's good at math.
"Maybe he'll help you with long division" says Laura, who is also
very shy. Helen laughs. She's terrible at math. "Here, Clare. You and Ruth
try." We take Helen and Mary Christina's places. Ruth looks at me and I
shrug. "I don't know what to ask," I say. Everybody snickers; how
many possible questions are there? But there are so many things I want to know.
Is Mama going to be okay? Why was Daddy yelling at Etta this morning? Is Henry
a real person? Where did Mark hide my French homework? Ruth says, "What
boys like Clare?" I give her a mean look, but she just smiles. "Don't
you want to know?"