LESSONS IN SURVIVAL 2 page

“But who’s Henry?” wonders Laura. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s somebody I haven’t met yet.” She nods. Everyone is weirded out. I’m very weirded out. Husband? Husband?

Thursday, April 12, 1984 (Henry is 36, Clare is 12)

HENRY: Clare and I are playing chess in the fire circle in the woods. It’s a beautiful spring day, and the woods are alive with birds courting and birds nesting. We are keeping ourselves out of the way of Clare’s family, who are out and about this afternoon. Clare has been stuck on her move for a while; I took her Queen Three moves ago and now she is doomed but determined to go down fighting.

She looks up, “Henry, who’s your favorite Beatle?” “John. Of course.”

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“Why ‘of course’?”

“Well, Ringo is okay but kind of a sad sack, you know? And George is a little too New Age for my taste.”

“What’s ‘New Age’?”

“Oddball religions. Sappy boring music. Pathetic attempts to convince oneself of the superiority of anything connected with Indians. Non-Western medicine.”

“But you don’t like regular medicine ”

“That’s because doctors are always trying to tell me I’m crazy. If I had a broken arm I would be a big fan of Western medicine.”

“What about Paul?” “Paul is for girls.”

Clare smiles, shyly. “I like Paul best.” “Well, you’re a girl.”

“Why is Paul for girls?”

Tread carefully, I tell myself. “Uh, gee. Paul is, like, the Nice Beatle, you know?”“Is that bad?”

“No, not at all. But guys are more interested in being cool, and John is the Cool Beatle.” “Oh. But he’s dead.”

I laugh. “You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.”

Clare hums the beginning of “When I’m 64.” She moves her rook forward five spaces. I can checkmate her now, and I point this out to her and she hastily takes back the move.

“So why do you like Paul?” I ask her. I look up in time to see her blushing fervently.

“He’s so... beautiful,” Clare says. There’s something about the way she says it that makes me feel strange. I study the board, and it occurs to me that Clare could checkmate me if she took my bishop with her knight. I wonder if I should tell her this. If she was a little younger, I would. Twelve is old enough to fend for yourself. Clare is staring dreamily at the board. It dawns on me that I am jealous. Jesus. I can’t believe I’m feeling jealous of a multimillionaire rock star geezer old enough to be Clare’s dad.

“Hmpf,” I say.

Clare looks up, smiling mischievously. “Who do you like?” You, I think but don’t say. “You mean when I was your age?”“Um, yeah. When were you my age?”

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I weigh the value and potential of this nugget before I dole it out. “I was your age in 1975. I’m eight years older than you.”

“So you’re twenty?”

“Well, no, I’m thirty-six.” Old enough to be your dad.

Clare furrows her brow. Math is not her strongest subject. “But if you were twelve in 1975....”

“Oh, sorry. You’re right. I mean, I myself am thirty-six, but somewhere out there”—I wave my hand toward the south—“I’m twenty. In real time.”

Clare strives to digest this. “So there are two of you?”

“Not exactly. There’s always only one me, but when I’m time traveling sometimes I go somewhere I already am, and yeah, then you could say there are two. Or more.”

“How come I never see more than one?”

“You will. When you and I meet in my present that will happen fairly frequently.” More often than I’d like, Clare.

“So who did you like in 1975?”

“Nobody, really. At twelve I had other stuff to think about. But when I was thirteen I had this huge crush on Patty Hearst.”

Clare looks annoyed. “A girl you knew at school?”

I laugh. “No. She was a rich Californian college girl who got kidnapped by these awful left-wing political terrorists, and they made her rob banks. She was on the news every night for months.”

“What happened to her? Why did you like her?”

“They eventually let her go, and she got married and had kids and now she’s a rich lady in California. Why did I like her? Ah, I don’t know. It’s irrational, you know? I guess I kind of knew how she felt, being taken away and forced to do stuff she didn’t want to do, and then it seemed like she was kind of enjoying it.”

“Do you do things you don’t want to do?”

“Yeah. All the time.” My leg has fallen asleep and I stand up and shake it until it tingles. “I don’t always end up safe and sound with you, Clare. A lot of times I go places where I have to get clothes and food by stealing.”

“Oh.” Her face clouds, and then she sees her move, and makes it, and looks up at me triumphantly. “Checkmate!”

“Hey! Bravo!” I salaam her. “You are the chess queen dujour.”

“Yes, I am,” Clare says, pink with pride. She starts to set the pieces back in their starting

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positions. “Again?”

I pretend to consult my nonexistent watch. “Sure.” I sit down again. “You hungry?” We’ve been out here for hours and supplies have run low; all we have left is the dregs of a bag of Doritos.

“Mmhmm.” Clare holds the pawns behind her back; I tap her right elbow and she shows me the white pawn. I make my standard opening move, Queen’s Pawn to Q4. She makes her standard response to my standard opening move, Queen’s Pawn to Q4. We play out the next ten moves fairly rapidly, with only moderate bloodshed, and then Clare sits for a while, pondering the board. She is always experimenting, always attempting the coup d’eclat. “Who do you like now?” she asks without looking up.

“You mean at twenty? Or at thirty-six?” “Both.”

I try to remember being twenty. It’s just a blur of women, breasts, legs, skin, hair. All their stories have jumbled together, and their faces no longer attach themselves to names. I was busy but miserable at twenty. “Twenty was nothing special. Nobody springs to mind.”

“And thirty-six?”

I scrutinize Clare. Is twelve too young? I’m sure twelve is really too young. Better to fantasize about beautiful, unattainable, safe Paul McCartney than to have to contend with Henry the Time Traveling Geezer. Why is she asking this anyway?

“Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you married?” “Yes,” I admit reluctantly. “To who?”

“A very beautiful, patient, talented, smart woman.”

Her faces falls. “Oh.” She picks up one of my white bishops, which she captured two moves ago, and spins it on the ground like a top. “Well, that’s nice.” She seems kind of put out by this news.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Clare moves her queen from Q2 to KN5. “Check.” I move my knight to protect my king.

“Am I married?” Clare inquires.

I meet her eyes. “You’re pushing your luck today.”

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“Why not? You never tell me anything anyway. Come on, Henry, tell me if I’m gonna be an old maid.”

“You’re a nun,” I tease her.

Clare shudders. “Boy, I hope not.” She takes one of my pawns with her rook. “How did you meet your wife?”

“Sorry. Top secret information.” I take her rook with my queen.

Clare makes a face. “Ouch. Were you time traveling? When you met her?” “ I was minding my own business.”

Clare sighs. She takes another pawn with her other rook. I’m starting to run low on pawns. I move Queen’s Bishop to KB4.

“It’s not fair that you know everything about me but you never tell me anything about you.”

“True. It’s not fair.” I try to look regretful, and obliging.

“I mean, Ruth and Helen and Megan and Laura tell me everything and I tell them everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t tell them about you.” “Oh? Why’s that?”

Clare looks a bit defensive. “You’re a secret. They wouldn’t believe me, anyway.” She traps my bishop with her knight, flashes me a sly smile. I contemplate the board, trying to find a way to take her knight or move my bishop. Things are looking grim for White. “Henry, are you really a person?”

I am a bit taken aback. “Yes. What else would I be?” “I don’t know. A spirit?”

“I’m really a person, Clare.” “Prove it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, I don’t think you could prove that you’re a person, Clare.” “Sure I can.”

“How?”

“I’m just like a person.”

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“Well, I’m just like a person, too.” It’s funny that Clare is bringing this up; back in 1999 Dr. Kendrick and I are engaged in philosophical trench warfare over this very issue. Kendrick is convinced that I am a harbinger of a new species of human, as different from everyday folks as Cro-Magnon Man was from his Neanderthal neighbors. I contend that I’m just a piece of messed-up code, and our inability to have kids proves that I’m not going to be the Missing Link. We’ve taken to quoting Kierkegaard and Heidegger at each other and glowering. Meanwhile, Clare regards me doubtfully.

“ People don’t appear and disappear the way you do. You’re like the Cheshire Cat.”

“Are you implying that I’m a fictional character?” I spot my move, finally: King’s Rook to QR3. Now she can take my bishop but she’ll lose her queen in the process. It takes Clare a moment to realize this and when she does she sticks out her tongue at me. Her tongue is a worrisome shade of orange from all the Doritos she’s eaten.

“It makes me kind of wonder about fairy tales. I mean, if you’re real, then why shouldn’t fairy tales be real, too?” Clare stands up, still pondering the board, and does a little dance, hopping around like her pants are on fire. “I think the ground is getting harder. My butt’s asleep.”

“Maybe they are real. Or some little thing in them is real and then people just added to it, you know?”

“Like maybe Snow White was in a coma?” “And Sleeping Beauty, too.”

“And Jack the beanstalk guy was just a real terrific gardener.” “And Noah was a weird old man with a houseboat and a lot of cats.” Clare stares at me. “Noah is in the Bible. He’s not a fairy tale.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” I’m getting very hungry. Any minute now Nell will ring the dinner bell and Clare will have to go in. She sits back down on her side of the board. I can tell she’s lost interest in the game when she starts building a little pyramid out of all the conquered pieces.

“You still haven’t proved you’re real” Clare says. “Neither have you.”

“Do you ever wonder if I’m real?” she asks me, surprised.

“Maybe I’m dreaming you. Maybe you’re dreaming me; maybe we only exist in each other’s dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other.”

Clare frowns, and makes a motion with her hand as though to bat away this odd idea. “Pinch me,” she requests. I lean over and pinch her lightly on the arm. “Harder!” I do it again, hard enough to leave a white and red mark that lingers for some seconds and then

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vanishes. “Don’t you think I would wake up, if I was asleep? Anyway, I don’t feel asleep.” “Well, I don’t feel like a spirit. Or a fictional character.”

“How do you know? I mean, if I was making you up, and I didn’t want you to know you were made up, I just wouldn’t tell you, right?”

I wiggle my eyebrows at her. “Maybe God just made us up and He’s not telling us.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Clare exclaims. “Besides, you don’t even believe in God. Do you?”

I shrug, and change the subject. “I’m more real than Paul McCartney.”

Clare looks worried. She starts to put all the pieces back in their box, carefully dividing white and black. “Lots of people know about Paul McCartney—I’m the only one who knows about you.”

“But you’ve actually met me, and you’ve never met him.”

“My mom went to a Beatles concert.” She closes the lid of the chess set and stretches out on the ground, staring up at the canopy of new leaves. “It was at Comiskey Park, in Chicago, August 8,1965.” I poke her in the stomach and she curls up like a hedgehog, giggling. After an interval of tickling and thrashing around, we lie on the ground with our hands clasped across our middles and Clare asks, “Is your wife a time traveler too?”

“Nope. Thank God.”

“Why ‘thank God’? I think that would be fun. You could go places together.” “One time traveler per family is more than enough. It’s dangerous, Clare.” “Does she worry about you?”

“Yes,” I say softly. “She does.” I wonder what Clare is doing now, in 1999. Maybe she’s still asleep. Maybe she won’t know I’m gone.

“Do you love her?”

“Very much,” I whisper. We He silently side by side, watching the swaying trees, the birds, the sky. I hear a muffled sniffling noise and glancing at Clare I am astonished to see that tears are streaming across her face toward her ears. I sit up and lean over her. “What’s wrong, Clare?” She just shakes her head back and forth and presses her lips together. I smooth her hair, and pull her into a sitting position, wrap my arms around her. She’s a child, and then again she isn’t. “What’s wrong?”

It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: “It’s just that I thought maybe you were married to me.”

Wednesday, June 27, 1984 (Clare is 13)

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CLARE: I am standing in the Meadow. It’s late June, late afternoon; in a few minutes it will be time to wash up for supper. The temperature is dropping. Ten minutes ago the sky was coppery blue and there was a heavy heat over the Meadow, everything felt curved, like being under a vast glass dome, all near noises swallowed up in the heat while an overwhelming chorus of insects droned. I have been sitting on the tiny footbridge watching waterbugs skating on the still small pool, thinking about Henry. Today isn’t a Henry day; the next one is twenty-two days away. It is now much cooler. Henry is puzzling to me. All my life I have pretty much just accepted Henry as no big deal; that is, although Henry is a secret and therefore automatically fascinating, Henry is also some kind of miracle and just recently it’s started to dawn on me that most girls don’t have a Henry or if they do they’ve all been pretty quiet about it. There’s a wind coming; the tall grass is rippling and I close my eyes so it sounds like the sea (which I have never seen except on TV). When I open them the sky is yellow and then green. Henry says he comes from the future. When I was little I didn’t see any problem with that; I didn’t have any idea what it might mean. Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older. I wonder if Henry could take me to the future. The woods are black and the trees bend over and whip to the side and bow down. The insect hum is gone and the wind is smoothing everything, the grass is flat and the trees are creaking and groaning. I am afraid of the future; it seems to be a big box waiting for me. Henry says he knows me in the future. Huge black clouds are moving up from behind the trees, they come up so suddenly that I laugh, they are like puppets, and everything is swirling toward me and there is a long low peal of thunder. I am suddenly aware of myself standing thin and upright in a Meadow where everything has flattened itself down and so I lie down hoping to be unnoticed by the storm which rolls up and I am flat on my back looking up when water begins to pour down from the sky. My clothes are soaked in an instant and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, an incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hands on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him.

Sunday, September 23, 1984 (Henry is 35, Clare is 13)

HENRY: I am in the clearing, in the Meadow. It’s very early in the morning, just before dawn. It’s late summer, all the flowers and grasses are up to my chest. It’s chilly. I am alone. I wade through the plants and locate the clothes box, open it up, and find blue jeans and a white oxford shirt and flip-flops. I’ve never seen these clothes before, so I have no idea where I am in time. Clare has also left me a snack: there’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich carefully wrapped in aluminum foil, with an apple and a bag of lay’s potato chips. Maybe this is one of Clare’s school lunches. My expectations veer in the direction of the late seventies or early eighties. I sit down on the rock and eat the food, and then I feel much better. The sun is

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rising. The whole Meadow is blue, and then orange, and pink, the shadows are elongated, and then it is day. There’s no sign of Clare. I crawl a few feet into the vegetation, curl up on the ground even though it is wet with dew, and sleep.

When I wake up the sun is higher and Clare is sitting next to me reading a book. She smiles at me and says, “Daylight in the swamp. The birds are singing and the frogs are croaking and it’s time to get up!”

I groan and rub my eyes. “Hi, Clare. What’s the date?” “Sunday, September 23, 1984.”

Clare is thirteen. A strange and difficult age, but not as difficult as what we are going through in my present. I sit up, and yawn. “Clare, if I asked very nicely, would you go into your house and smuggle out a cup of coffee for me?”

“Coffee?” Clare says this as though she has never heard of the substance. As an adult she is as much of an addict as I am. She considers the logistics.

“Pretty please?”

“Okay, I’ll try.” She stands up, slowly. This is the year Clare got tall, quickly. In the past year she has grown five inches, and she has not yet become accustomed to her new body. Breasts and legs and hips, all newly minted. I try not to think about it as I watch her walk up the path to the house. I glance at the book she was reading. It’s a Dorothy Sayers, one I haven’t read. I’m on page thirty-three by the time she gets back. She has brought a Thermos, cups, a blanket, and some doughnuts. A summer’s worth of sun has freckled Clare’s nose, and I have to resist the urge to run my hands through her bleached hair, which falls over her arms as she spreads out the blanket.

“Bless you.” I receive the Thermos as though it contains a sacrament. We settle ourselves on the blanket. I kick off the flip-flops, pour out a cup of coffee, and take a sip. It’s incredibly strong and bitter. “Yowza! This is rocket fuel, Clare.”

“Too strong?” She looks a little depressed, and I hasten to compliment her.

“Well, there’s probably no such thing as too strong, but it’s pretty strong. I like it, though. Did you make it?”

“Uh-huh. I never made coffee before, and Mark came in and was kind of bugging me, so maybe I did it wrong.”

“No, it’s fine.” I blow on the coffee, and gulp it down. I feel better immediately. I pour another cup.

Clare takes the Thermos from me. She pours herself half an inch of coffee and takes a cautious sip. “Ugh,” she says. “This is disgusting. Is it supposed to taste like this?”

“Well, it’s usually a little less ferocious. You like yours with lots of cream and sugar.”

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Clare pours the rest of her coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then she says, “You’re making me into a freak.”

I don’t have a ready reply for this, since the idea has never occurred to me. “Uh, no I’m not.”

“You are so.”

“Am not.” I pause. “What do you mean, I’m making you into a freak? I’m not making you into anything.”

“You know, like telling me that I like coffee with cream and sugar before I hardly even taste it. I mean, how am I going to figure out if that’s what I like or if I just like it because you tell me I like it?”

“But Clare, it’s just personal taste. You should be able to figure out how you like coffee whether I say anything or not. Besides, you’re the one who’s always bugging me to tell you about the future.”

“Knowing the future is different from being told what I like,” Clare says. “Why? It’s all got to do with free will.”

Clare takes off her shoes and socks. She pushes the socks into the shoes and places them neatly at the edge of the blanket. Then she takes my cast-off flip-flops and aligns them with her shoes, as though the blanket is a tatami mat. “I thought free will had to do with sin.”

I think about this. “No, ” I say, “why should free will be limited to right and wrong? I mean, you just decided, of your own free will, to take off your shoes. It doesn’t matter, nobody cares if you wear shoes or not, and it’s not sinful, or virtuous, and it doesn’t affect the future, but you’ve exercised your free will”

Clare shrugs. “But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s called determinism,” I tell her. “It haunts my dreams.” Clare is intrigued. “Why?”

“Well, if you are feeling boxed in by the idea that your future is unalterable, imagine how I feel. I’m constantly running up against the fact that I can’t change anything, even though Iam right there, watching it.”

“But Henry, you do change things! I mean, you wrote down that stuff that I’m supposed to give you in 1991 about the baby with Down Syndrome, And the List, if I didn’t have the List I would never know when to come meet you. You change things all the time.”

I smile. “I can only do things that work toward what has already happened. I can’t, for example, undo the fact that you just took off your shoes.”

Clare laughs. “Why would you care if I take them off or not?”

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“I don’t. But even if I did, it’s now an unalterable part of the history of the universe and I can’t do a thing about it.” I help myself to a doughnut. It’s a Bismarck, my favorite. The frosting is melting in the sun a little, and it sticks to my fingers.

Clare finishes her doughnut, rolls up the cuffs of her jeans and sits cross-legged. She scratches her neck and looks at me with annoyance. “Now you’re making me self-conscious. I feel like every time I blow my nose it’s a historic event.”

“Well, it is.”

She rolls her eyes. “What’s the opposite of determinism?” “Chaos.”

“Oh. I don’t think I like that. Do you like that?”

I take a big bite out of the Bismarck and consider chaos. “Well, I do and I don’t. Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.”

“But, Henry, you’re forgetting about God—why can’t there be a God who makes it mean something?” Clare frowns earnestly, and looks away across the Meadow as she speaks.

I pop the last of the Bismarck into my mouth and chew slowly to gain time. Whenever Clare mentions God my palms start to sweat and I have an urge to hide or run or vanish.

“I don’t know, Clare. I mean, to me things seem too random and meaningless for there to be a God.”

Clare clasps her arms around her knees. “But you just said before that everything seems like it’s all planned out beforehand.”

“Hpmf,” I say. I grab Clare’s ankles, pull her feet onto my lap, and hold on. Clare laughs, and leans back on her elbows. Clare’s feet are cold in my hands; they are very pink and very clean. “Okay,” I say, “let’s see. The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway. Right?”

Clare wiggles her toes at me. “I guess.” “And what do you vote for?”

Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless. And after that? I don’t know. But right now Clare sits on the threshold of adolescence with her faith in one hand and her growing skepticism in

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the other, and all she can do is try to juggle them, or squeeze them together until they fuse. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I want God. Is that okay?”

I feel like an asshole. “Of course it’s okay. That’s what you believe.” “But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.”

I run my thumbs across Clare’s arches, and she closes her eyes. “You and St. Thomas Aquinas both,” I say.

“I’ve heard of him,” Clare says, as though she’s speaking of a long-lost favorite uncle, or the host of a TV show she used to watch when she was little.

“He wanted order and reason, and God, too. He lived in the thirteenth century and taught at the University of Paris. Aquinas believed in both Aristotle and angels.”

“I love angels,” says Clare. “They’re so beautiful. I wish I could have wings and fly around and sit on clouds.”

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 680