“But Clare, it’s just personal taste. You should be able to figure out how you like coffee whether I say anything or not. Besides, you’re the one who’s always bugging me to tell you about the future.”

 

　“Knowing the future is different from being told what I like,” Clare says.

　“Why? It’s all got to do with free will.”

　Clare takes off her shoes and socks. She pushes the socks into the shoes and places them neatly at the edge of the blanket. Then she takes my cast-off flip-flops and aligns them with her shoes, as though the blanket is a tatami mat. “I thought free will had to do with sin.”

　I think about this. “No, ” I say, “why should free will be limited to right and wrong? I mean, you just decided, of your own free will, to take off your shoes. It doesn’t matter, nobody cares if you wear shoes or not, and it’s not sinful, or virtuous, and it doesn’t affect the future, but you’ve exercised your free will”

 

 

　Clare shrugs. “But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.”

　“That’s called determinism,” I tell her. “It haunts my dreams.”

　Clare is intrigued. “Why?”

　“Well, if you are feeling boxed in by the idea that your future is unalterable, imagine how I feel. I’m constantly running up against the fact that I can’t change anything, even though I am right there, watching it.”

 

 

　“But Henry, you do change things! I mean, you wrote down that stuff that I’m supposed to give you in 1991 about the baby with Down Syndrome, And the List, if I didn’t have the List I would never know when to come meet you. You change things all the time.”

 

 

　I smile. “I can only do things that work toward what has already happened. I can’t, for example, undo the fact that you just took off your shoes.”

　Clare laughs. “Why would you care if I take them off or not?”

　“I don’t. But even if I did, it’s now an unalterable part of the history of the universe and I can’t do a thing about it.”