Henry's disappearance during Christmas Mass

Henry's disappearance during Christmas Mass interrupts his first Christmas visit with Clare's family at St. Basil's Church, turning a formal communal ritual into a test of his involuntary time displacement and Clare's trust in his return. The scene moves between their perspectives: Henry is carried out of the present and briefly encounters himself four days later, while Clare remains in the pew, waiting through the service. He comes back before Mass ends, pale but able to walk, and rejoins the family as they leave the church.

Setting and Background

Henry enters the church from the cold night into the warmth and light of a Catholic Mass he has never attended. His last religious service was his mother's funeral, so the Christmas liturgy is both unfamiliar and marked by an earlier bereavement. He holds Clare's arm as she guides him up the central aisle; she has told him to sit while her family kneels. The church is crowded with relatives and neighbors, poinsettias, wax, wet coats, and a Nativity scene beside the altar.

The gathering is carefully established as a family occasion rather than an abstract religious backdrop. Clare sits with Mark, Sharon, and Philip; Nell is behind them with her husband and son, and Dulcie sits with someone her own age. Alicia performs with the musicians, whose slow opening note gives way to dissonant modern music. The ceremony draws the family into a shared order of prayer, music, and waiting, while Henry sits uneasily at its edge, physically dependent on Clare's guidance.

Departure from the Present

During the service, Henry's leg jiggles and his eyes are closed; he bites his lip. After the readings, he leans toward Clare and asks where the restroom is. She explains how to reach it, but his unfinished warning that he may not come back exposes the real danger behind the ordinary request. Clare answers that he has to come back. As the sermon begins, Henry rises and walks toward the rear and side of the church. Clare watches him slip out through the door as it swings shut.

The departure is not a chosen escape from the service. In the unfamiliar restroom where he arrives, Henry finds himself in what appears to be an elementary-school hallway. He searches for somewhere to hide and enters a miniature boys' room, its fixtures low to the ground and its radiator intensifying the smell of institutional soap. He opens the window slightly and breathes cold air that tastes of pine, then curls on the tile floor until he feels solid again. The familiar need to establish a bodily foothold in an alien time and place makes the displacement immediate and physical.

A Brief Encounter Across Time

On the restroom floor Henry tries to hold to the present, thinking of continuity and wondering whether God could expect goodness without offering an incentive. He also fears that his disappearance will embarrass Clare in front of her family. But the small porcelain fixtures take on iridescent blue, green, and purple auras; he recognizes that the transition cannot be stopped, and vanishes.

He reappears in his Chicago apartment, on his knees in the living room, and strikes his elbow on the bookshelves as he staggers up. The displacement has carried him four days forward, to December 28, 1991. There, he encounters a later version of himself, who tells him he will be back in a few minutes and that nobody will notice; the future Henry assures him he will be all right for the rest of the visit. Their exchange gives the episode an unusual pocket of continuity: Henry cannot control when he leaves, but a future self can tell him that this particular absence will be brief. The assurance does not remove his distress, and the scene ends with the immediate, practical aftermath of the jump: Henry runs for the bathroom and almost makes it.

Return and Significance

Clare experiences the absence without access to Henry's encounter across time. While the service continues, Philip asks whether her friend is sick. Clare says Henry has a headache that sometimes makes him nauseous, and insists that he will be all right, though she suppresses the urge to go look for him herself. During Communion, Alicia plays Bach's Cello Suite No. 2; Clare listens and silently longs for Henry to return. The family ritual keeps moving while she waits, making the separation public to her and private to him.

Henry walks back into the church while the last people are receiving Communion. He is a little pale but walking, and he squeezes into the place beside Clare before the Mass ends. After the dismissal, the family files out and Sharon asks whether he is okay. Clare is distracted by Helen and Ruth, who intercept them, and introduces Henry. Ruth shyly offers her hand; Henry greets her by name before Clare has introduced her, though Ruth does not appear to recognize him. The return restores him to the family gathering, but his unprompted recognition hints that his own experience of time exceeds what the others know. The episode's central contrast is between the Mass's ordered sequence and Henry's involuntary departures: the service proceeds toward its close, while Clare's ability to trust his return is tested in the interval.