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 supremely cold January morning and I’m just getting home. I’ve been out dancing and I’m only half drunk but utterly exhausted. As I fumble with my keys in the bright foyer I fall to my knees, dizzy and nauseated, and then I am in the dark, vomiting on a tile floor. I raise my head and see a red illuminated EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing 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 congregate in the twentieth century. I get up, shaking, and venture toward the doorway, tile icy under my bare feet, gooseflesh and all my hairs standing 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 beetles. 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 fettered 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 sprint 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.