Le temps n'est rien

She first sees him in a meadow when she is six years old. He appears out of nowhere, a naked man standing in the tall grass, bleeding from the mouth. He knows her name. “I came from the future,” he tells her. “In the future we are friends.” And just as suddenly, as they are shaking hands, he vanishes, leaving her alone in the waning light. This is how Clare Abshire meets Henry DeTamble, the man she will love for her entire life. He is a time traveler, afflicted with a rare genetic disorder that pulls him, without warning, from his present and drops him into moments of his past or future. For Clare, their story begins here. For Henry, it will not begin for many years.

Fourteen years later, Clare walks into the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is twenty, an art student, and she knows this is the day. When the librarian turns to help her, she finds herself face to face with a younger, stranger Henry than she has ever known. “Henry!” she breathes, jubilant. He looks at her, polite but utterly perplexed. “Have we met?” he asks. For him, this is their first meeting; for her, it is the culmination of 152 secret visits he has paid to her childhood. She has spent her life waiting for this man who has no memory of her at all. She hands him a small diary filled with dates - a list he once dictated to her of every time he would ever visit - and their life together in the present finally begins.

Henry's existence is a constant battle for survival. His departures are violent and uncontrollable, stripping him of everything, leaving him naked and disoriented in another time. He arrives shivering in alleys, freezing in snowbanks, or bleeding on concrete floors. To endure, he has learned to become a thief and a fighter, skills taught to him by an older, more cynical version of himself who visits him in his own troubled youth. These brutal lessons are a stark contrast to the quiet, scholarly life he builds with Clare. He is a librarian surrounded by the stillness of history, yet his own history is a chaotic storm he can neither predict nor command.

Their shared life is a tapestry woven with threads of deep, abiding love and the constant, aching tension of absence. A normal evening can be shattered in an instant, leaving behind nothing but a pile of clothes on the floor and a silence that stretches for hours, or days. Clare learns to live with the fear, the waiting, the not-knowing. She is the anchor, the fixed point to which he always returns. She finds him bleeding in the hallway, nurses his wounds, and holds him as he recounts his harrowing journeys. Their small apartment becomes a haven, a pocket of warmth and normalcy in a life defined by dislocation.

Their attempts to have a child become a recurring tragedy. Clare becomes pregnant, and for a few weeks, they are suspended in a state of fragile hope. But then the bleeding begins. The miscarriages are brutal and devastating, each one a universe of possibility lost. A geneticist, Dr. Kendrick, finally provides an explanation: the fetus inherits Henry's condition. In the womb, it begins to time travel, tiny, unformed, tearing itself away from the uterine wall and causing Clare to hemorrhage. Each pregnancy is a beautiful, deadly secret that her body cannot keep. The hope for a family seems impossible, a dream that dissolves into blood again and again.

After five losses, when all hope seems gone, a miracle occurs. Another pregnancy, this one aided by immunosuppressant drugs, holds. Clare carries the baby, a girl, through months of terror and cautious joy. The birth is as chaotic as their life: in the middle of labor, Henry vanishes, only to reappear moments later, naked and disoriented, just in time to catch his newborn daughter as she enters the world. They name her Alba. She has Henry's dark hair and Clare's gray eyes, and in her, they see a future they never thought they would have. She is their perfect, impossible child.

But time is not kind. As Henry ages, his travels become more frequent, longer, and more dangerous. He loses the ability to run, his primary means of escape, after a brutal journey leaves him with severe frostbite, resulting in the amputation of his feet. He is confined to a wheelchair, a prisoner in his own home when he is not a prisoner of time. During one of his travels into the future, he meets a ten-year-old Alba at the Art Institute. She is bright, and beautiful, and she already knows the secret of her own chrono-impairment. She also knows, and tells him, the date of his death. From that moment, Henry lives with the precise knowledge of his own end.

He sees it happen before it does. It is a cold morning in 1984, in the meadow of Clare's childhood. He is there, an older version of himself, watching as Clare's father and brother are out hunting. A deer runs through the tall grass, and a shot rings out. But it is not a deer that falls. It is Henry - a younger Henry, traveling from the future, from a New Year's Eve party in 2006.

On the last night of the year, the house is filled with friends and family. The air is warm with laughter and champagne. Henry holds Clare on the cold front porch as the snow falls, watching the clock tick toward midnight. He knows this is the last time. “It's time,” he whispers, and as the world erupts in celebration, he feels the familiar, sickening pull. He vanishes from the porch, from the present, and materializes in the past, in the Meadow, directly in the path of a hunter's bullet. He appears back in his own living room, in the middle of the party, bleeding from a fatal wound in his abdomen, and dies in Clare's arms.

The years pass. Clare is left behind, the one who stays. She raises Alba, who begins her own travels through time, sometimes visiting the father she barely knew. Clare lives in their house, surrounded by the ghosts of their life together, waiting. Henry left her a letter, a final secret, telling her of one last visit he will make. And so she waits. Decades later, an old woman with long white hair sits by a window looking out at the lake. She hears a floorboard creak. She turns, and there he is, young and whole, standing in the doorway. He has come from a time long before he ever met her, a stranger who does not yet know her name. She rises slowly to meet him, and for one last, impossible moment, he is home.