oint 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?
A VERY SMALL SHOE
Spring, 1996 (Clare is 24, Henry is 32)
Clare: When Henry and I had been married for about two years we decided,
without talking about it very much, to see if we could have a baby. I knew that
Henry was not at all optimistic about our chances of having a baby and I was not
asking him or myself why this might be because I was afraid that he had seen us
in the future without any baby and I just didn't want to know about that. And I
didn't want to think about the possibility that Henry's difficulties with time travel
might be hereditary or somehow mess up the whole baby thing, as it were