My favorite book of all time is The Time Traveler’s Wife, the debut novel from Audrey Niffenegger. I began reading it on a summer day in 2007 after a friend recommended it to me and, one day later, it was both finished and my favorite book of all time, a proclamation that admittedly sounds cheeky when describing a book about time travel.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is equal parts science fiction and romance and both parts hooked me from the start. Librarian Henry DeTamble suffers from chronodisplacement disorder, which means he spontaneously travels through time. Married to artist Clare Abshire, he travels randomly through time but most frequently to Clare’s childhood home. Thus it is that Clare has known Henry since she was six, but Henry only meets Clare when he is 28.
Everything about Niffenegger’s novel is so out there that it should not work, but the story is meticulous and precise about its insanity. Henry’s condition causes him to leap around time, but that movement is scientifically grounded (according to at least one article). More simply put, time travel works like it does via Hermione’s time turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: there is only one timeline and Henry just moves around it. Sometimes the world features multiple Henrys at a particular moment.
When I first read the novel, I devoured it because the time travel was so seamlessly, logically executed that the story became that much more intriguing. Henry and Clare’s love story is a tragic one—imagine your partner disappearing randomly to anywhere in time, safety definitely not guaranteed—but there is a beauty in that tragedy: even an emotionally immature version of me grasped something profound and hopeful within it. I might even call the hope in the novel haunting—and haunting in a way that has stuck with me since finishing its final page that lands in the most perfect place such a story can.
There was a film adaptation with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in 2009—please read into my lack of further discussion of that point as telling—but this year HBO produced a series based on the novel directed by Steven Moffatt who does (or did? I’ve never watched) Dr. Who. With a much larger canvas to paint the story across, the hope was that the novel’s nuanced story would better translate.
Naturally, The Time Traveler’s Wife was canceled not long after airing its sixth and final episode. This was unfortunate for two primary reasons: 1) This was an imperfect but still excellent adaptation that lovingly embraced the original novel; and 2) This left multiple arcs completely unresolved and the novel’s perfect ending only hinted at.
Like Henry traveling back in time, I was aware of the future too: I watched the short series fully aware of its cancellation. These six episodes of what I knew only minutes in would be the definitive adaptation were all I was going to get. There was something both fatal and futile about that awareness; it shifted how I watched, making me impatient with side characters I should have loved and frustrated by beautifully rendered moments that stole time away from important beats I hoped to see brought to life. This didn’t affect the emotion the show induced from me—I can think about moments in the book and tear up, so seeing them treated with such reverence on screen destroyed me—but it changed how I looked at the central story.
Watching it with the knowledge of what was coming disrupted an element of it. Instead of breathing in this beautiful love story, I felt a lingering sadness for Henry and Clare. Not because of the tragic color of their story but because every element of their relationship is inevitable. Odd though it is to say, these two characters have no agency. Clare knows from when she is a teen that she will marry Henry and she carries that knowledge forward until the day she meets Henry, who then learns he will marry Clare and, eventually, travels back in time to induce that same knowledge into his future wife.
The causality is all messed up for them. To its credit, the show grapples with this quite often. We’ll never see where it ultimately would have landed, but from my eyes here, that snag begged a larger question:
How do you live when you know how things will eventually end?
This a huge question but, in a world without time travel, a toothless one. But it’s actually one I’ve been pondering during the months since my birthday and particularly some when I decided to finally attempt to finish the video game Cuphead.
Because I also know my future.
I’ve talked about games before, whether regarding my sidekick status with Joey in elementary school or my gamer’s resume with regards to my status in that community. But I haven’t really delved into actually playing games because I’ve basically stopped. I am in constant motion now, I am writing much more now, and I am both cooking and baking frequently. I can’t be stationary, but I also can’t justify the time, especially during school when there are not enough minutes for everything anyway. I just can’t afford to lose myself in games like I did as a coping mechanism during the first months of the pandemic or did regularly in the years before that. I don’t have time to play like I once did.
At least, that’s what I tell people. It’s true, of course, but it’s also not the whole truth either. I have also stopped because my body doesn’t work as well anymore.
I began to realize this during early 2021. To write immaculate solutions and rubrics required me to grip my pencil far tighter than ever before. After finishing a problem, I would shake out my hand and wrist to combat the strain I felt. I’d get headaches quickly from focusing my eyes in concentration to make each symbol or number, my hand-eye coordination likewise diminished.
But it wasn’t just that. I began to drop things constantly, particularly my keys, my fingers fumbling around trying to grip the metal rings as my brain sends signals to them that arrive tardily every time. There was more, from weird pitch issues in my ears to my feet getting tangled up to my vision deteriorating, but those uncooperative, sluggish hands were the most notable. They’re one of the reasons I revise the newsletters multiple times now: I can’t trust my fingers to work—especially not when teamed with autocorrect.
I am getting older, though, so a lot of this makes sense, even if I’ve had remarkably clean bills of health since altering my lifestyle. And there are explanations for other bits too: long stretches without an optometry visit, using headphones more often, even my extensive screen time on my phone. But the scary part is that, whether or not these are benign symptoms of nothing now, they remain harbingers of real things that I will end up facing.
Genetics serve as my crystal ball.
My mom’s hands are wrecked with arthritis. New lumps of calcium grow on her every joint at random intervals; she’s had both knees replaced, both shoulders rebuilt, and both wrists operated on. There is no surgery to repair her fingers, though, and her hands don’t work like they used to. She is not alone in dealing with arthritis, which has afflicted nearly all of her family going backward in time (and I say “nearly all” because premature deaths obscure more than one potential case study).
On the flip side, my dad suffers from Parkinson’s disease. He can still do basically everything, but he does so with one hand guiding all of the work while the other suffers from constant tremors. His father suffered from Parkinson’s. His grandfather died too early for us to know how far back the condition stretches.
This is all to say: a functioning pair of hands is not guaranteed for me. Quite the opposite: just as Henry spots a wheelchair and wonders during jaunts into his future, I too preview my future fate every time I spend time with my parents. Each time I drop my keys or struggle to type something, I have to question: is this tiredness, aging, or the first sour notes of the soundtrack for my future of decay?
Other questions are begged as well about other body parts. Coming from a long line of knee replacements, what am I to make of my running and walking habits? Will the decreased weight on and increased strength of them mitigate their inevitable breakdown or exacerbate it? Was my early back surgery an expedient intervention to preserve my spinal health or an omen for a rough future on disability? In theory, all of these health-enhancing decisions should flatten (or at least soften) my aging curve, but will it? What if all of this work to protect my body is instead hastening it’s degradation? I can’t know those answers; the study is on-going and the sample size is n=1.
The fate of my hands, though, that feels a bit more certain. Barring medical breakthroughs, my hands are destined for a rough future. There’s no debating their trajectory. A day will come where, rather than typing whole novels, 52+ newsletter essays, and dozens of recommendation letters each year with my thumb, I will be dictating them because my hands don’t work. It won’t be absent hours that keep me from playing fast-twitch games but a physical inability. I can already feel the latter part becoming reality.
Just like Henry and Clare, though, this is my fate. I have no real agency in the future of my phalanges. I started drinking more milk again but it ain’t that simple; if it was, I wouldn’t see the proof of concept every week.
Knowing the future in The Time Traveler’s Wife warps how Henry and Clare perceive the future, so they adopt a firm focus on the present. Describing love in what will be the final episode of the series, Clare says “It's like setting sail into a storm. And you know for a fact, you both won't make it out the other side. You cling on for as long as you can, because you know that this is as good as anything ever gets.”
So it is for Henry and Clare, doomed and treated to love by a cruel but compassionate universe.
So too is it for my hands. They will never again be more nimble than they are right now. Never. Every day from now on is a new closed interval with their absolute maximum precision at the left endpoint. I know the future; it’s been written for me far longer than Niffenegger’s beautiful novel.
Returning the conceit once more then: how do I live when I know how things will eventually end?
What I do is play. I use my hands before I lose them. I go back and finish the games I never did and hope that enough fast-twitch remains to progress. I become careful with my decaying hands and clumsying fingers but I also revel in their powers. I enjoy the final fading traces of exceptional hand-eye coordination while I still have it.
And that has been my plan for the hour before going to bed this month. I finished the light world in Super Meat Boy a few weeks ago. My hands cannot handle the dark world (the original inspiration for Plus Tests and Standards Quizzes, by the way) which sucks but I accept it.
I also completed Cuphead’s final boss about ten days ago. It took me four days of repeating failure and mashing the wrong buttons and falling off platforms and mistiming jumps but I finally defeated the devil. And, after anticlimactically locating the last three stupid coins, I got to see a sparkling 100% alongside my file. The new downloadable content seems beyond my capabilities from what I’ve tried, but nothing can take away my 100% save file that sat at 93% for almost six years. It might well be my final 100% on a game like this.
So it goes. I can’t change that anymore than Henry and Clare could change their fates. We control a lot but, in some things, we simply lack agency. But that need not inhibit our ability to maximize the fading present.
I wish that the production team behind The Time Traveler’s Wife had heeded their own maxim and not saved so much for a future that will never arrive. But I enjoyed finally seeing my favorite novel given its best treatment, just as I enjoyed finally finishing Cuphead.
It was about time for both of them.
Content Consumption
FILM
(Each link leads to my full review on www.filmsofsteele.com.)
An earnest Canadien TV movie about Yellowstone dooming us all, Supervolcano looks its age and has its faults but far exceeds the quality of at least one 2022 Best Picture nominee.
Zoë Kravitz shines in a slick action film with an Alexa-clone stirring up trouble. It has shades of a diverse collection of movies but it never feels derivative and it had me so invested I was yelling at the TV for long stretches of its runtime.
I read a book this week! A book that wasn’t written by me or Alyiah! Granted, I only finished an hour ago so no review but it was nice to consciously trade time reading things on Reddit for an actual book.
There was more I was going to say, but then I found the All-Star Celebrity Softball Game being played live on YouTube and the inannity there is…distracting. But I chose this fate. I’ll stop here.