2018

In 2018, Ted’s story reaches a suspended moment in a crowded New York City emergency room: unable to turn his head, staring into a glaring fluorescent light, he tries to persuade himself that a head wound cannot kill him. Fear interrupts that reasoning. The episode brings his past into the hospital corridor, where memories, online glimpses of former partners, and the women of The Imagined Court of Girls gather around him as he lies with glass embedded in his forehead.

The Emergency-Room Present

Ted is supine on a gurney in the corridor, unable to look right or left. A woman has thrown a glass full of water at him, and he has sustained a head injury. He tells himself that the wound is minor and that he is probably not dying, but the possibility has already taken hold. His thought of Rachel Derwin-Finkel returns as a taunting reminder that people do die from head injuries. Beneath his attempt at rational reassurance, he recognizes a simpler truth: he is frightened, alone, and unhappy with what is happening.

The scene ends not with an explanation of his condition but with a call for help. His throat is dry and irritated as he shouts for someone to tell him what is going on. The question marks the limits of his control: he cannot turn his head, cannot resolve his fear by reasoning, and does not yet know what is happening around him.

The Past Recalled from 2018

The hospital scene gives Ted a vantage point from which to measure the consequences of his earlier choices. Looking back twenty years, he has to admit that life began to go badly after he left a New Year’s Eve party with Anna Travis, having arrived there with Rachel Derwin-Finkel. At the time, leaving with Anna had felt like the most triumphant moment of his life; from the gurney, that remembered high point carries a sharply different weight.

Another memory reaches forward from that departure. On March 13, 1999, after three and a half months of courtship at a distance, Ted and Anna had sex for the first time in the upper bunk of the bed she shared at university. Ted’s difficulty maintaining an erection is linked to his reading of Anna’s solemn expression, which he misinterprets as reluctance. The narration corrects that impression: Anna has sex with him because she loves him, and describes him as good in the sense of safe. In 2018, those memories make safety and the fear of harm part of the same emotional landscape as Ted’s physical vulnerability in the emergency room.

Online Lives and the Tribunal

By 2018, Ted is in contact through Facebook with both Anna and Rachel, though he has not seen either in years. Rachel is married, works as a pediatrician, and has four children. Anna lives in Seattle and is a single mother. Ted thinks Anna seems to be doing reasonably well after a difficult period; he suspects she may be in a support program and finds the motivational quotations she posts unusually banal for her.

As he lies on the gurney, this distant knowledge gives way to an immediate, imagined encounter. Anna approaches amid rainbows and a chorus of voices, accompanied by the women of The Imagined Court of Girls. They stand around Ted, scrutinize him, and argue over a misunderstanding he believes he could explain. But a large shard of glass is lodged in his forehead, and blood fills his mouth. The tribunal’s return turns judgment into a presence at his bedside, while the injury makes his wished-for explanation impossible. In this 2018 frame, the past is not settled: it presses in as memory and judgment at the very moment Ted is physically unable to answer.