THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE PROLOGUE Page 2

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.