ht 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 p