Henry’s interrupted vasectomy attempt

Henry’s interrupted vasectomy attempt turns a private medical decision into a meeting across mismatched timelines. Trying to spare Clare the pain and uncertainty of repeated pregnancy loss, he goes alone to a doctor; before the procedure can take place, his involuntary time travel sends him to the Meadow, where he meets Clare at about fifteen or sixteen and cannot tell her why he is distressed.

Background and decision

About two years into their marriage, Henry and Clare decide to try for a baby. Clare is absorbed by the hope of having a child, while Henry is not optimistic about their chances. She fears that his time-travel condition might be hereditary or affect a child, but avoids asking him about those possibilities because she does not want to know. Her hopes and fears are already shaped by the repeated miscarriages she and Henry endure.

By June 2000, Henry has resolved to get a vasectomy without telling Clare. He waits at the office of Dr. Robert Gonsalez, on Sheridan Road near Diversey, and thinks of the procedure as necessary: he believes it will spare Clare further horror and pain. His intention is protective, but secrecy makes the choice a solitary one. He imagines that Clare might understand someday, while repeating to himself that he is not betraying her and that they have tried.

The interruption at the Meadow

When the doctor’s office calls Henry’s name, he becomes physically unwell and disappears before he can undergo the procedure. He arrives in the Meadow, alone, on a cold, late-November day. The clothes box contains clothing from the mid-1980s, including a Gang of Four T-shirt, a black wool overcoat, and large baby-blue mittens. From the clothes, Henry estimates that Clare is about fifteen or sixteen.

Henry considers leaving rather than facing Clare’s youthful exuberance, but she runs after him and catches his arm, asking what she has done and why he will not speak to her. He says only that he tried to do something important for her, became nervous, and ended up there. He refuses to explain what it was, adding that he had not planned to tell her even in his own present and that she would not like it. The time displacement thus interrupts both the medical procedure and Henry’s attempt to keep his decision private.

Consequences and significance

The episode’s consequence is not an immediate operation but a divided disclosure: adult Henry acts on his fear for Clare’s future, while the younger Clare encounters his distress without knowing its cause. The scene makes visible the cost of a protective decision made in secret, even as time travel prevents Henry from controlling when or to whom his intentions become apparent.

The later chronology sharpens the irony. Henry does eventually undergo a vasectomy, but Clare becomes pregnant after a time-displaced encounter connected to their earlier efforts to conceive. She tells him she is pregnant; Henry initially begins to ask how, then remembers that for him the relevant night belongs to years earlier, whereas for Clare it is only weeks in the past. The interrupted attempt therefore sits within a larger conflict between reproductive choice and the novel’s non-linear time: a decision made to prevent another pregnancy cannot simply erase events already set in motion across Henry’s timeline.