During Christmas Eve Mass at St. Basil’s Church, Henry disappears after asking Clare where the restroom is. His involuntary displacement takes him first to an elementary-school bathroom and then to his own Chicago apartment on a date four days earlier; he eventually returns to the service, pale but walking. The episode makes the cost of his condition visible in the middle of a family ritual: Clare must wait, explain his absence without revealing its cause, and then introduce him to people he may already know from another point in time.

Setting and Immediate Circumstances

Clare and Henry attend the Christmas service with Clare’s family. In the midst of the Gospel reading and sermon, Henry is fidgeting, biting his lip, and trying to endure the ceremony. When he whispers that he needs the restroom, Clare directs him toward the back of the church and the side aisle. His answer, “If I don’t come back—”, makes the ordinary errand feel suddenly uncertain. Clare insists that he has to come back, but he stands and walks away while Father Compton continues the service.

The setting matters because the disappearance interrupts a shared, public occasion rather than a private moment between the couple. The Mass proceeds around Clare: the sermon continues, communion begins, and Alicia plays Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2. Clare’s father notices Henry’s absence and asks whether he is sick. Clare attributes the problem to a headache that sometimes makes him nauseous, protecting the family gathering from an explanation they could not readily understand. She tries to suppress the urge to leave and look for him herself.

The Displacement

Henry finds himself in what appears to be the hallway of an elementary school. He tells himself not to panic and looks for somewhere to hide. A door marked for boys leads to a miniature restroom, with low fixtures and brown tile. He opens the window a little and breathes cold air that smells of pine, then curls on the floor, knees drawn to his chin, trying to feel solid and present. The familiar church has given way to a strange place where he is alone and must wait for the next displacement to carry him elsewhere.

As he lies on the tile, Henry longs for continuity and asks himself why he cannot simply remain here and now. His thoughts turn to Clare, who is being left alone among her family, and to the embarrassment his disappearance may cause her. The restroom’s tiny porcelain fixtures acquire blue, green, and purple iridescent auras. Henry recognizes that the episode is continuing and that there is no stopping it; he shakes and is displaced again. The scene’s small, concrete objects—the school bathroom, its open window, its low fixtures—measure the gulf between the religious gathering he has left and the ordinary physical presence he cannot keep.

An Earlier Date in Chicago

Henry arrives on his knees in his dark Chicago apartment and staggers up, striking his elbow against the bookshelves. The displacement has not taken him to the present but to December 28, 1991, four days before the Christmas Eve gathering. There he encounters another version of himself, asleep on the sofa bed. Asked for the date, the other Henry supplies the information that clarifies the episode’s temporal disjunction: the man missing from the Mass has landed in his own home in the past.

This encounter gives the event a distinctive double structure. Henry’s body is absent from the church, but the service’s chronology continues; in the apartment, he confronts a self who belongs to the earlier date and can reassure him that he will return soon. The reassurance does not prevent the displacement or erase the interval Clare must endure. It only gives Henry a measure of knowledge about what is happening while leaving him unable to control when he will reappear.

Return and Social Aftermath

Henry does return before the Mass ends. Clare sees him enter the church pale but walking, make his way up the aisle, and squeeze in beside her. The service concludes, and the family files out. The disappearance has not been publicly explained, but its effects remain in the awkward social scene that follows: Clare introduces Henry to Helen and Ruth, and Helen claims that they have met before. Henry looks alarmed; Clare signals Helen not to pursue the remark. He then greets Ruth by name before Clare has introduced her, although Ruth does not appear to recognize him.

The greetings expose the unequal knowledge created by Henry’s time displacement. A meeting that is new for Clare or Ruth may not be new for him, while his unannounced absence has required Clare to manage the family’s concern without disclosing its cause. The incident ends with Henry back beside Clare, but not with time restored to a simple shared sequence. At the church door the family exchanges Christmas greetings and moves into the snowy world outside; the couple has to rejoin that ordinary procession after an interruption only Henry can fully locate in time.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The episode places an involuntary temporal break inside a ceremony organized around collective presence: standing, listening, receiving communion, and leaving together. For Clare, the central fact is immediate and bodily—Henry has gone, and she has to remain in her place while the Mass continues. For Henry, the same interval spans an unfamiliar school bathroom and an earlier night in his apartment. Their different experiences of the interruption make the service a compact demonstration of the distance his condition repeatedly opens between them, even when they are attending the same event.

The scene also turns the question of return into a practical rather than abstract matter. Clare’s insistence that Henry come back is followed by her watchful waiting, her guarded explanation to her father, and her relief when he walks through the door. Yet the reunion does not restore uncomplicated continuity: Henry’s knowledge of Ruth precedes the introductions, and Helen’s hint of a previous meeting unsettles the surface of the family gathering. The Mass can carry on and the family can resume its Christmas routine, but their shared present remains vulnerable to Henry’s sudden disappearance.