Time Traveler's Wife (English, Fantasy, 6:44)
Description
Read MoreVocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Cameron Mann, time Traveler's wife. How does it feel? How does it feel? Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant. Then with the start you realize that the book you were holding the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost hole in one heel. The living room. The about to whistle tea kettle in the kitchen. All of these have vanished. You were standing naked as a Jay bird up to your ankles and ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to your book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes of swearing and shivering and hoping to **** you can just disappear. You start walking in any direction which will eventually yield a farmhouse where you have the option of stealing or explaining, stealing will sometimes land you in jail. But explaining is more tedious and time consuming and involves lying anyway and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail. So what the **** sometimes you feel as though you have stood up too quickly. Even if you are lying in bed half asleep, you hear blood rushing in your head, feel ferous falling, sensations, your hands and feet are tingling and then they aren't there at all. You've mis located yourself again. It only takes an instant. You have just enough time to try to hold on to flail around, possibly damaging yourself or valuable possessions. And then you are skidding across the four green carpeted hallway of a motel six in Athens, Ohio at 4 16 AM Monday, August 6th, 1981. And you hit your head on someone's door causing this person. A Miss Tina Schulman from Philadelphia to open this door and start screaming because there's a naked carpet, burned man passed out at her feet. You wake up in the county hospital concussed with a policeman sitting outside your door listening to the Phillies game on a crackly transistor radio. Mercifully, you lapse back into an unconsciousness and wake up again hours later in your own bed with your wife leaning over. You looking very worried. Sometimes you feel euphoric. Everything is sublime and has an aura and suddenly you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone. You are throwing up on some suburban geraniums or your father's tennis shoes or your very own bathroom floor three days ago or a wooden sidewalk in Oak Park, Illinois circa 19 oh three or tennis court on a fine autumn day in the 19 fifties or your own naked feet in a wide variety of times and places. How does it feel? It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes and you've left your wallet at home. When I'm out there in time, I am inverted. Changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze Children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order. So incredible that I am actually true. Is there a logic a rule to all this coming and going all this dislocation? Is there a way to stay put to embrace the present with every cell? I don't know there are clues as with any disease. There are patterns, possibilities, exhaustion, loud noises, stress standing up, suddenly flashing light. Any of these can trigger an episode, but I can be reading the Sunday Times coffee and hand and Claire dozing beside me on our bed and suddenly I'm in 1976 watching my 13 year old self mow my grandparents' lawn. Some of these episodes last only moments. It's like listening to a car radio that's having trouble holding onto a station. I find myself in crowds, audiences, mobs just as often. I am alone in a field house, car on a beach and grammar school in the middle of the night. I fear finding myself in a prison cell, an elevator full of people, the middle of a highway. I appear from nowhere naked. How can I explain? I've never been able to carry anything with me. No clothes, no money. No ID. I spend most of my sojourns acquiring clothing and trying to hide. Fortunately, I don't wear glasses. It's ironic. Really. All my pleasures are homey ones. Armchair splendor, the sedate excitements of domesticity. All I ask for are humble delights. A mystery novel in bed. The smell of Claire's long red gold hair damp from washing a postcard from a friend on vacation cream dispersing into coffee. The softness of the skin under Claire's breasts, the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be unpacked. I love meandering through the stacks of the library after the patrons have gone home lightly touching the spines of the books. These are the things that can pierce me with longing when I am displaced from them by times, whim and Claire always Claire Claire in the morning, sleepy and crumble faced Claire with her arms plunging into the paper making vat and shaking it. So and so to meld the fibers Claire reading with her hair hanging over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed. Claire's low voice is in my ear often I hate to be where she is not when she is not and yet I am always going and she cannot follow.