【时间旅行者的妻子】24

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Saturday, January 2, 1988, 4:03 a.m. /Sunday, June 16, 1968, 10:46 p.m.

(Henry is 24, and 5)

　

HENRY: It’s 4:03 a.m. on a supremely¹ cold January morning and I’m just getting home. I’ve been out dancing and I’m only half drunk but utterly² exhausted³. As I fumble⁴ with my keys in the bright foyer I fall to my knees, dizzy and nauseated⁵, and then I am in the dark, vomiting⁶ on a tile floor. I raise my head and see a red illuminated⁷ EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing⁸ and for a long liquor-addled moment I think Holy shit, I’ve gone all the way back to the Stone Age until I realize that EXIT signs tend to congregate⁹ in the twentieth century. I get up, shaking, and venture toward the doorway¹⁰, tile icy under my bare feet, gooseflesh and all my hairs standing¹¹ up. It’s absolutely silent. The air is clammy with air conditioning. I reach the entrance and look into the next room. It’s full of glass cases; the white streetlight glow through the high windows shows me thousands of beetles¹². I’m in the Field Museum, praise the Lord. I stand still and breathe deeply, trying to clear my head. Something about this rings a bell in my fettered¹³ brain and I try to dredge it up. I’m supposed to do something. Yes. My fifth birthday... someone was there, and I’m about to be that someone...I need clothes. Yes. Indeed.

　I sprint¹⁴ through beetlemania into the long hallway that bisects the second floor, down the west staircase to the first floor, grateful to be in the pre-motion-detector era. 

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