The Time Traveler's Wife Read online

finished piece. “This door is a worm hole, a bridge between the future and the past. We are time travelers” he said, ecstatic.

  “Did you get the things I asked for?”

  “Fuck” he shouted.

  “I thought you might forget, so I picked some things up earlier.”

  John followed her around the house, observing her intensely as if she were an equation that he had just noticed.

  “I made this dress today,” she said, spinning in a circle; the dress, lifting to show her bare naked feet.

  “I always said she had talent,” said John’s Nipple. “Didn’t I always say that?”

  “You did,” said John, acknowledging his nipple. “You did indeed.”

  “Amor, have you seen my necklace?” Tracy asked. “I took it off earlier, but I didn’t come across it anywhere. Did you see it when you came in?”

  “It’s here,” John said, picking the silver necklace up from the coffee table.

  He held the pendant in his hands and unlocked it with his two stubby fingers and it was empty. The leaf he had given her when he was a young man, the single leaf she had carried close to her heart all these years, it was gone.

  “Where is it?” he shouted.

  “Sorry. I didn’t hear you” she said.

  “The leaf. Where is it?”

  “What? What leaf were you thinking of?” she asked confused.

  “Our leaf” he shouted. “The leaf I gave you, under the tree, when we were…”

  John stared at the empty pendant and then down at his nipple and then back at his wife who had since entered the room and had a look on her face as if he were talking utter nonsense.

  “What leaf Amor? You never gave me a leaf.”

  John stared deeply at his wife, deep into her eyes and at the lines on her skin, some of which had lightened and faded and even vanished, as if her skin were a balloon that had filled with an extra breath of life.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Did you have anything to drink yet?” Tracy asked, holding up a carton of Shante Creative Milk.

  “I fucking hate that shit,” said John. “Milk shouldn’t burn. Just, you know, milk and pepper don’t mix. They shouldn’t bloody mix.”

  “Amen to that brother,” John’s Nipple said.

  “Oh, I told everyone to come round at six so you know…”

  “What’s the time now?” John asked.

  “Well it was five fifty eight two minutes ago” Tracy replied, brushing her hand lightly over John’s. So light was it that John didn’t even notice that her hand passed right through his, like a ghostly shadow.

  Tracy wandered off into another room, preparing some snacks, drinks, and games. John watched her. He watched how she floated about like a grain of sand in a tiny puddle. He watched how her buttocks rounded and clenched as he leant over to pick up things from way down low and he watched how her supple breasts curved and shaped like smooth and unspoiled ranges. And he watched too, how her nipples stood round and firm and erect, even when she wasn’t cold or aroused. And he watched her, as he watched her every day of his life, and he felt as empty and content as he always had.

  “I love you,” he said, feeling nothing. “I love you,” he said again, this time shouting.

  “I heard you,” Tracy said. “I said I love you back. I said I love you even more.”

  He didn’t hear it, but he knew that she did. She always did. There wasn’t a moment they passed one another when they didn’t exchange such pleasantry; a thousand times and minute, one million times per day.

  “What’s wrong?” asked John’s Nipple. “I can always tell when you’re down.”

  “Look at her,” he said, lifting his shirt so his nipple could see Tracy, as her silhouette carved into the fading evening light.

  “What about her?”

  “That’s just it. I know any other guy would die to take her out, to dine her, to dance her, to bed her, to make her cum, to make her sing, to make her shiver and shake with delight, to make her feel how she deserves to feel, how I wish I could make her feel.”

  “But you do. She loves you. You make her feel like that.”

  “But I don’t feel it myself. And I don’t think she does either. If she does, it’s just a memory of how I made her feel in the past. It’s not how she feels right now.”

  “But you love her right?”

  “Of course I do. I don’t deny that. I tell her I love her because I do, I do love her. It’s just… It’s been so long since I felt what our love was like, outside of fighting and almost breaking up of course. When everything is like now, calm and placid, without any fracture or worry, without any excuses or blasted apologies. I wish we didn’t have to almost sever, to feel the way we did the first time.”

  “Then think of her as delicate, as breakable, as something finite. Think of her as an egg” John’s Nipple said. “Look at her. Look at how she takes the carton from the fridge to the sink – with the utmost delicacy, as if every egg in that carton might smash and cover her and the floor in foul yellow decay. But look” John’s Nipple said, standing erect on John’s chest and pointing towards the kitchen counter where Tracy stood with the poise of a ballerina and the glare of a hangman. “She breaks the egg with such gentility. Even you do. I have seen you many times. All humans do, even the most brutish whose hands are all thumbs, they, like you and like Tracy, break an egg with delicate address. You need to think of her as an egg, something delicate, something fragile. You need to touch her gently as if the slightest coarse abrasion might peel away her skin. You must hold her – sure enough to keep her safe and warm but delicate enough as if her bones were made of sand and the slightest breeze, even a heavy breath, might blow her away so that nothing of her remains. You must kiss her as if her lips were a fine crystal that might shatter in the flurry of your typical orgiastic affection. Your love was and is a universe. The second you said I love you, your heart…”

  “Exploded,” said John.

  “The birth of a universe,” said John’s Nipple. “And like any universe, you fill your lives and your relationship with memories, some of them solid objects that you cling to and revolve about, and some of them dark invisible emotions that are unspoken and unseen, but are evidently there, only, for the moment, they are unprovable. And like any universe, after time, your love expands and expands until eventually, you become so distant from your beginning, that your love and your passion, it slows and cools.”

  “I want to feel that way again. I want to feel that love.”

  “Create another universe, a parallel plain or….”

  “Or what?”

  “Divide zero. Crumble the infinite fraction.”

  “Break up with her?”

  “No. Your universe would still exist. She would become a black hole, lurking in the back of your mind, ready to consume any new joy that you encounter. You must destroy the number line entirely. You must eradicate the fibers of her being from your heart and from your mind. Or….”

  “Or what?”

  “A parallel plain. Create a new universe. And feel love again.”

  “How?”

  “Have a child?” said John’s Nipple.

  John watched his wife gently crack an egg against the bowl and pull the shell apart with two fingers.

  “I wish she would break me like that,” he said to his learned nipple.

  When he walked into the kitchen, John saw Tracy leaning over the counter, playing solitaire on her computer as eggs bubbled and hissed in the pan beside her.

  “I don’t know why you play that,” he said.

  “You used to love Solitaire” she replied.

  “I just don’t see the point anymore. The game is already decided before you begin. Your only purpose is to flip the cards. That’s not playing, that’s participation. If the outcome is not in my hands, then what’s the point?”

  “I haven’t played it in ages. When I was young, I always chose the winning hand.”

  “That’s what I mean
. What’s the point?”

  “It felt good to win once in a while, and like you’re saying, it was in my hands, it was my choice.”

  “I’m tired of knowing how everything will turn out.”

  “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”

  “Tell me something about you,” John said, his voice sounding sterner, nearing on desperate and shaky, almost dangerous. “Tell me something you haven’t told me. A story, something about your family, about you, maybe a dumping or some stupid thing you did while drunk…..Anything, just something new, something you haven’t told me yet.”

  Tracy smiled.

  “Amor,” she said, “I already told you everything about me; everything.”

  “Is there really nothing? No stories? Nothing at all? No more depth? No more dimension? Are you telling me I know everything about you? Your desires, your secrets, your fears, your repressions, your doubts, and indecisions, your regrets….Everything?”

  “I told you everything my love, of course. Why, what did you keep from me?”

  She smiled playfully as she got up from the computer and walked through John, passing through his skin like a bitter chill on an icy morning.

  “Nothing,” John said flatly. “Nothing.”

  And he was right. He hadn’t kept a thing from her. They had, over the years, told each other everything; every dark and saucy secret and every deep seeded shame and regret. There wasn’t a piece of unturned soil in their marital terrain. Their universe was expansive indeed, but its very dimensions had been absolutely defined. There were no new areas to explore, there were no new shapes to take form. All that could be was.

  Their love offered nothing