“I looked up at them, heatstruck, and I realized that my co-workers think I am dying” – p.437
Henry doesn’t usually look in the mirror when he shaves in the morning, but in honour of his 43rd birthday he looks and he sees before him a man prematurely ageing. As he comes to grips with his own reflection, I start crying. And I don’t really stop until the end of the book 81 pages later.
I teach pregnancy yoga, teary eyed at least a quarter of my brain still with Henry and his reflection. I cycle home dangerously inattentive to the road around me, still at Henry’s birthday dinner.
Because Henry is 43.
We’ve known since the very beginning of the book that Henry doesn’t time travel past the age of 43. We’ve hoped with Clare + Henry that this is because he finds a way to stop travelling, whilst at the same time knowing, like Clare + Henry, that the truth is much much worse.
Henry is 43 and it doesn’t matter about the frostbite and the foot amputation, it doesn’t matter about Clare’s father and brother in a field with a gun, because Henry is dying anyway. We only have to look in the mirror with him to see that.
As Henry gets older he seems to time travel more and more. Most of his visits to Clare as she grows up are in his late 30s and early 40s. And each movement back down the timeline of his and Clare’s relationship seems to take its toll, sucking at his cells and his soul like HIV until he is a shadow of who he used to be.
This is no happily ever after. This isn’t Marty McFly making sure his parents do get together. This isn’t Bill and Ted bogusly going where no dude has gone before to discover why it is they must work hard in school. This is the harsh reality of time travel (if time travel were ever to become a reality). Watching Henry fall apart from his time travelling, is tragic, horrific, terrifying.
Looking in the mirror with Henry is a reminder to stay present. To take a breath and feel the ground under our feet, the breath in our lungs. To look at the way the light flickers off the dust motes in the French windows, to gaze momentarily at the last of this summer’s roses. We all have regrets (yes, even me who boldly tells the world she regrets nothing) and we all have worries and fears about the future. It’s human nature. But the past is done, and the future will become present soon enough and is rarely as terrifying as our dreams.
Henry’s reflection is a gentle nudge to stay as firmly rooted in the here and now as we can be, lest we age before our time under the weight of worry and regret.
This section to me, marks the beginning of the end. The point where Henry loses what little control he had over his life and has to learn to submit to the inevitable.
A few pages earlier the present Henry has answered the phone in the middle of the night to his cold and shivering future self. By the time he reaches the payphone his future self has vanished. Present Henry goes back to bed. But as soon as I read it I knew this passage was of monumental significance.
And then suddenly future Henry is present Henry, frostbitten and hypothermic, lying on the living room floor, begging for Clare’s help. His feet are beyond saving and Henry wakes, in a hospital of staff curious to know how he got hypothermia in September, to this realisation.
“Henry stares up at the ceiling. Then, slowly, he pushes himself up against the pillows and stares at the foot of the bed. He leans forward reaching with his hands under the blanket . I close my eyes.
Henry begins to scream.” – p.459
And well he might. When Henry loses his feet, he loses his ability to run, his ability to look after himself when time travelling. He also loses his grounding in his present. He becomes completely reliant upon those around him for the day to day things and he knows that the end, the brutal bloody end that he and Clare have been dreading, is nearly here.
He dreams of his feet, in a box. He dreams of running until his arms fall off, of dancing until he collapses to his knees. He dreams of losing control again and again and again. When he time travels now he is more at risk than ever before and when he finds himself back in 1994 at Ingrid’s apartment he knows he is powerless to stop her killing herself. Just as he will be powerless to run away from his own end.
But how much power and control did Henry’s feet give him anyway?
Yes, he had more chance of running away from danger, from the police, from the situations he found himself in, but, unlike his daughter, he never had any control over where or when he would go. The amputation of Henry’s feet shows that despite all his travelling up and down his own timeline, he was never able to change the past or manipulate the future. Could he have saved Ingrid even before the amputation if Ingrid was meant to die when she did?
He never had any control.
And a lot of the time neither do we.
I for one spend too much time trying to control the uncontrollable, trying to predict the future, trying to have power over thingsI am not meant to (the rain for example!).
Sometimes we have to let go of the reigns a little.
Sometimes we have to allow ourselves coast along.
Sometimes we have to let go of a little bit of control, before we lose our feet entirely.
I finished the book last night. The last 100 pages make you feel as if you will never be happy again. Foolishly I read between classes. By the time I taught my last class of the day I was a mess. My pregnancy yoga students understood as soon as they saw what book I was reading.
In many ways I feel I’ve fled through too quickly, desperate to get to the sad part, to get it over with. My book is covered in post-it notes marking places to re-read next week. Things I want to write about when I’m less raw. But for now a reading from much nearer the beginning.
A feeling of loneliness and isolation pervades this book. Henry is one of a kind, a lone time traveller in a world of people living by linear time. He knows too much; the birth dates of children not yet born, when he’ll get married, his own death date. Even the knowledge of winning lottery tickets, while helpful when it comes to financial burdens, just isolates him from the rest of humanity and prevents him from living the normal life he so desires.
The loneliness is Henry’s alone. Even after he meets Clare in linear time, fucked up and out of control, waiting to be tamed by the love of his life, he is never going to be anything but lonely. Even after spending his first Christmas surrounded by the gentile chaos of Clare’s horribly disfunctional family he identifies “what I am feeling as loneliness, and Christmas is officially over for another year” (p. 211)as though he knows he is back in his real world by this sense of isolation, being cut off from the norm.
We’ve all experienced that crippling loneliness at times. For me it was the first few years of school (if ever there was a candidate for home-schooling!), the final year of university, those two years when my career was all I had – working late and coming home to a cold empty flat every night. It does feel like your throat closing up, exactly as Henry describes it.
But there is a difference between loneliness and being alone. I crave solitude and at times in my life loneliness has been a small sacrifice for peace and quiet. Clare too, despite worrying where Henry is, what he’s doing, wondering when he’ll come back, secretly loves the solitude his absence allows her, especially once Alba is born.
“Sometimes I walk through the house late and night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking or sitting, or taking a bath. Sometimes I lie on the living room floor and listen to Fleetwood Mac, the Bangles, the B-52s, the Eagles, bands Henry can’t stand…..Sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone…” (p.395)
When Henry is gone, despite her worry she knows, until he is 43 at least, that he will come back. Meanwhile she has Alba, her family, her friends, her work, her normal life.
Henry just has Henry. There is nobody else really in Henry’s world except various versions of himself spread through time. And it is this heartbreaking degree of loneliness, a form of isolation few of us will ever understand, that is the real tragic undercurrent of the story. An undercurrent that left me, at times, feeling empty and alone, adrift in the middle of an ocean of words.
punk rock yogini, teacher, writer, massage therapist , general sprinkler of fairy dust with a love for all things glitter, cupcakes, kittens, pugs and Dave Grohl
I am a BWY registered yoga teacher, but only you truly know your body. If you try out any of the yoga sequences in this blog and they don't feel right for you please stop! Please do consult a doctor before starting any new exercise regimes, especially if you have pre-existing injuries or illnesses.
(To find out more about our Summer Readalong see Amy’s site)
