THE TIME
TRAVELER'S WIFE

by Audrey Niffenegger

Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector;
this inner time is our wife.
-J. B. Priestley, Man and Time

LOVE AFTER LOVE
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
-Derek Walcott

PROLOGUE
Clare: It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is,
wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays.
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I
watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter.
Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by
absence?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge
of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He
vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait
feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass.
Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he
gone where I cannot follow?
Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel? Sometimes it feels as though your
attention has wandered for just an instant. Then, with a start, you realize that the
book you were holding, the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite
black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost-hole in one heel, the living
room, the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished.
You are standing, naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch
along an unidentified rural route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just
snap right back to your book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes
of swearing and shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear, you start
walking in any direction, which will eventually yield a farmhouse, where you
have the option of stealing or explaining. Stealing will sometimes land you in
jail, but explaining is more tedious and time-consuming and involves lying
anyway, and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail, so what the hell.
Sometimes you feel as though you have stood up too quickly even if you are
lying in bed half asleep. You hear blood rushing in your head, feel vertiginous
falling sensations. Your hands and feet are tingling and then they aren't there at
all. You've mislocated yourself again. It only takes an instant, you have just
enough time to try to hold on, to flail around (possibly damaging yourself or
valuable possessions) and then you are skidding across the forest-green-carpeted
hallway of a Motel 6 in Athens, Ohio, at 4:16 a.m., Monday, August 6, 1981, and
you hit your head on someone's door, causing this person, a Ms. Tina Schulman
from Philadelphia, to open this door and start screaming because there's a naked,
carpet-burned man passed out at her feet. You wake up in the County Hospital
concussed with a policeman sitting outside your door listening to the Phillies
game on a crackly transistor radio. Mercifully, you lapse back into
unconsciousness and wake up again hours later in your own bed with your wife
leaning over you looking very worried.
Sometimes you feel euphoric. Everything is sublime and has an aura, and
suddenly you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone. You are throwing
up on some suburban geraniums, or your father's tennis shoes, or your very own
bathroom floor three days ago, or a wooden sidewalk in Oak Park, Illinois, circa
1903, or a tennis court on a fine autumn day in the 1950s, or your own naked feet
in a wide variety of times and places.
How does it feel?
It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that
you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any
clothes. And you've left your wallet at home.
When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version
of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old
women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so
incredible that I am actually true.
Is there a logic, a rule to all this coming and going, all this dislocation? Is there
a way to stay put, to embrace the present with every cell? I don't know. There are
clues; as with any disease there are patterns, possibilities. Exhaustion, loud
noises, stress, standing up suddenly, flashing light-any of these can trigger an
episode. But: I can be reading the Sunday Times, coffee in hand and Clare dozing
beside me on our bed and suddenly I'm in 1976 watching my thirteen-year-old
self mow my grandparents' lawn. Some of these episodes last only moments; it's
like listening to a car radio that's having trouble holding on to a station. I find
myself in crowds, audiences, mobs. Just as often I am alone, in a field, house, car,
on a beach, in a grammar school in the middle of the night. I fear finding myself
in a prison cell, an elevator full of people, the middle of a highway. I appear from
nowhere, naked. How can I explain? I have never been able to carry anything
with me. No clothes, no money, no ID. I spend most of my sojourns acquiring
clothing and trying to hide. Fortunately I don't wear glasses.
It's ironic, really. All my pleasures are homey ones: armchair splendor, the
sedate excitements of domesticity. All I ask for are humble delights. A mystery
novel in bed, the smell of Clare's long red-gold hair damp from washing, a
postcard from a friend on vacation, cream dispersing into coffee, the softness of
the skin under Clare's breasts, the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the
kitchen counter waiting to be unpacked. I love meandering through the stacks at
the library after the patrons have gone home, lightly touching the spines of the
books. These are the things that can pierce me with longing when I am displaced
from them by Time's whim.
And Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning, sleepy and crumple-faced.
Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and
shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading, with her hair hanging over
the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed.
Clare's low voice is in my ear often.
I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and
she cannot follow.
I
THE MAN OUT OF TIME
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
...Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,-just what is wholly
unsayable.
- from The Ninth Duino Elegy,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Stephen Mitchell
FIRST DATE, ONE
Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20)
Clare: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is
marble. I sign the Visitors' Log: Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I
have never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that I've gotten past
the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning
sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit,
almost silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Reader's
Card, then I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden
floor. The room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books
and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the
tall windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a
paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I
look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also want to read about
papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to ask
for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to find, she glances over my
shoulder at someone passing behind me. "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you,"
she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to face
with Henry.
I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed, younger than I have ever seen
him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library, standing in front of me, in the
present. Here and now. I am jubilant. Henry is looking at me patiently, uncertain
but polite.
"Is there something I can help you with?" he asks.
"Henry!" I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him. It is obvious
that he has never seen me before in his life.
"Have we met? I'm sorry, I don't..." Henry is glancing around us, worrying
that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory and realizing that
some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him.
The last time I saw him he was sucking my toes in the Meadow.
I try to explain. "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl.,." I'm at
a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no
memories of me at all. Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the
