Ben Matteson

Ben Matteson is a former library colleague of Henry DeTamble and one of the few people Henry turns to when the hazards of his involuntary time travel collide with ordinary life. A librarian in appearance and temperament, Ben offers practical help without demanding that Henry make his condition easy to understand; when that help goes disastrously wrong, he accepts responsibility, yet remains at Henry’s side.

Identity and Background

Ben has the unmistakable look of a librarian, and Henry did in fact meet him at Rosary. He left before completing his MLS, but his later home includes a laboratory, a detail that places him in a position to offer Henry more than sympathetic company. By the time Henry visits him, Ben has grown thinner and lost more hair. Henry also knows that Ben has AIDS, and each meeting carries the uncertainty of not knowing how his friend will be doing. The attention Henry pays him is therefore both affectionate and alert to the precariousness of Ben’s health.

Their reunion takes place in Ben’s dark, narrow house, whose maze of locks and security devices has long tempted Henry to try breaking in. They pass through the back stairway and bedrooms to the room Ben has arranged as a lab. The domestic setting is eccentric and familiar: Ben makes coffee before turning to Henry’s problem, while Henry waits on a folding chair. Their ease with one another does not erase the seriousness of what Henry has come to ask.

A Request to Stay Present

Henry needs to make it through the wedding planned by Clare Abshire’s parents in Michigan. It is to include a church ceremony, bridesmaids, a reception at the yacht club, and white tie; for Henry, the problem is not merely attending but getting through roughly eight hours of intense stress without disappearing. He asks Ben for a drug that will suppress the brain activity he thinks triggers his time shifts, describing the need to disable his dopamine receptors.

Ben responds to the request with a characteristic steadiness. He takes in the problem without alarm, a manner Henry finds soothing, but he also raises a specific objection: Henry has not tolerated antipsychotics well, and Ben questions whether the proposed medication will work differently from Haldol. Henry points out that its mechanism is not well understood. Their exchange shows a friendship in which practical candor and trust coexist; Ben does not simply endorse Henry’s plan, even though he wants to help.

The episode also makes clear how much Henry is asking of medicine, and of Ben. Time travel is not a choice he can suspend for a wedding, so he seeks a chemical means of controlling a condition he cannot reliably control himself. Ben’s caution recognizes the risk, but it does not prevent him from trying to relieve the immediate crisis.

The Medication and Its Cost

At Ben’s desk, he takes an empty pill bottle from a drawer, opens a much larger bottle, and places three capsules in the small one before tossing it to Henry. Henry swallows a pill before Ben can finish explaining what it is. Ben identifies it as an endorphin stabilizer combined with an antidepressant and then adds that it is morphine-based. His exasperated response to Henry’s casual approach to drugs underscores the difference between Ben’s caution and Henry’s willingness to act first.

The attempt ends in an emergency. After the ambulance takes Henry to Mercy Hospital, he has been admitted, injected, and intubated; he lies asleep and attached to a monitor. Ben arrives in the darkened room and apologizes, saying he should never have made the drug for Henry. Henry reassures him that he will be fine, while Ben insists the fault is his. The crisis leaves Ben with a sense of responsibility for the harm, even as Henry tries to spare him from it.

Friendship in the Wedding Crisis

Ben remains part of Henry’s circle when the wedding day arrives. At the South Haven Yacht Club reception, Henry is standing at a window with a drink while Clare has been taken away by her mother. He sees Ben and Gomez Gomolinski approaching and asks them to help him manage another expected disappearance. His plan requires Gomez to go back to the church, collect the version of Henry waiting in its vestibule, and bring him to the reception; Ben is to keep watch over the Henry who is already there and, when asked, bring his tuxedo to the men’s room.

The request is a practical improvisation around an impossible circumstance: Henry anticipates that he will be absent from the present at a moment when he has promised to be there. Ben’s role is not to cure the condition but to help Henry make a place for its consequences within the wedding. After the earlier drug emergency, his willingness to assist again is especially telling. Their friendship includes fear and culpability, but it is not reduced to either; Ben continues to show up, and Henry continues to trust him with the intimate logistics of his life.

Narrative Significance

Ben’s scenes give the effects of Henry’s condition a social and material dimension. Henry explains that time travel involves practical and genetic aspects, that it is a disease he cannot control, and that it brings lying, stealing, and fear into his attempt to maintain a normal job and life. Ben belongs to the small group with whom such an explanation can become a conversation rather than an abstraction. In the account Henry gives of his condition, he includes its practical disruptions alongside causal loops, quantum mechanics, and the effort to live normally; Ben’s help with medication and the wedding makes those disruptions concrete.

The two crises also establish a revealing contrast. Medication offers the promise of suppressing Henry’s disappearances, but the drug Ben provides becomes the cause of a hospital emergency. The wedding plan, by contrast, does not promise control: it makes room for the possibility of disappearance through coordination and trust. Ben’s importance lies in this steady, imperfect participation. He cannot make Henry’s life predictable, but he helps Henry face its contingencies without facing them alone.