The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger

back up the path and there
was this noise and somebody said Ouch. Dang, that hurt. And then I was scared.
     
    Henry: I kind of slam into the rock when I
appear and scrape my knees. I am in the clearing and the sun is setting
beautifully in a spectacular J. M. W. Turner blowout orange and red over the
trees. The clearing is empty except for a shopping bag full of clothes and I
rapidly deduce that Clare has left these and this is probably a day shortly
after our first meeting. Clare is nowhere in sight and I call her name softly.
No response. I dig through the bag of clothes. There's the pair of chinos and
the beautiful pair of brown wool trousers, a hideous tie with trout all over
it, the Harvard sweater, the oxford-cloth white shirt with ring around the collar
and sweat stains under the arms, and the exquisite silk bathrobe with Philip's
monogram and a big tear over the pocket. All these clothes are old friends,
except for the tie, and I'm happy to see them. I don the chinos and the sweater
and bless Clare's apparently hereditary good taste and sense. I feel great;
except for the lack of shoes I'm well equipped for my current location in
spacetime. "Thanks, Clare, you did a great job " I call softly. I am
surprised when she appears at the entrance to the clearing. It's getting dark
quickly and Clare looks tiny and scared in the half light.
    "Hi."
    "Hi, Clare. Thanks for the clothes.
They're perfect, and they'll keep me nice and warm tonight." "I have
to go in soon."
    "That's okay, it's almost dark. Is it a
school night?"
    "Uh-huh." "What's the
date?"
    "Thursday, September 29,1977."
"That's very helpful. Thanks." "How come you don't know
that?"
    "Well, I just got here. A few minutes ago
it was Monday, March 27, 2000. It was a rainy morning and I was making
toast."
    "But you wrote it down for me." She
takes out a piece of Philip's law office letterhead and holds it out for me. I
walk to her and take it, and am interested to see the date written on it in my
careful block lettering. I pause and grope for the best way to explain the
vagaries of time travel to the small child who is Clare at the moment.
    "It's like this. You know how to use a
tape recorder?"
    "Mmhmm."
    "Okay. So you put in a tape and you play
it from the beginning to the end, right?"
    "Yeah"
    "That's how your life is. You get up in
the morning and you eat breakfast and you brush your teeth and you go to
school, right? You don't get up and suddenly find yourself at school eating
lunch with Helen and Ruth and then all of a sudden you're at home getting
dressed, right?"
    Clare giggles. "Right."
    "Now for me, it's different. Because I am
a time traveler, I jump around a lot from one time to another. So it's like if
you started the tape and played it for a while but then you said Oh I want to
hear that song again, so you played that song and then you went back to where
you left off but you wound the tape too far ahead so you rewound it again but
you still got it too far ahead. You see?"
    "Sort of."

 
    "Well, it's not the greatest analogy in
the world. Basically, sometimes I get lost in time and I don't know when I
am." " What's analogy?"
    "It's when you try to explain something by
saying it's like another thing. For example, at the moment I am as snug as a
bug in a rug in this nice sweater, and you are as pretty as a picture, and Etta
is going to be as mad as a hatter if you don't go in pretty soon."
    "Are you going to sleep here? You could
come to our house, we have a guest room." "Gosh, that's very nice of
you. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to meet your family until 1991."
    Clare is utterly perplexed. I think part of the
problem is that she can't imagine dates beyond the 70s. I remember having the
same problem with the '60s when I was her age. "Why not?"
    "It's part of the rules. People who time
travel aren't supposed to go around talking to regular people while they visit
their times, because we might mess things