I was sitting in it some time ago when I became reminded of a desk at Morton Junior High School, in Lexington. It, too, was made of varnished oak and it, too, squeaked. It had an arm on it for writing and my Limbo chair does not, but otherwise they are much alike. I was sitting in the chair and staring at the fuzzy horizon of Limbo and squeaking every minute or so in a kind of slow dirge. And suddenly my memory came alive with myself in the eighth grade, in Miss Ralston’s Social Science class. That class met for an hour every day after lunch, and it was one of the most tedious things in my life. Remembering it here was like déjà vu; perhaps I had been in a kind of Limbo then and had not known it. I remembered the gravelly sound of Miss Ralston’s voice. I remembered the way she would adjust her teeth in her mouth with a kind of sucking between paragraphs. I remembered her dark flowered dresses, her grayish hair in a bun, her heavy brown shoes. I remembered the fight to stay awake.

And then I remembered a whimsical promise I had made myself as a teen-aged boy in that classroom: I promised I would return to that room at that time if I ever learned the secret of time travel when I grew up. I imagined myself astonishing everyone by my sudden appearance. I would be a grown and vigorous time-traveler stepping with confidence from a glass-and-chromium machine that would materialize just to the right of Miss Ralston’s desk. She would stop in midsentence and her jaw would drop. Everyone would stare. In that fantasy I was both observer and observed, both adult and boy, and the imagined pleasure was exquisite.

Then, in Limbo, I remembered the date I had made myself that promise: September 23, 1942. I was born in 1928, so I must have been fourteen. I had repeated the date over and over in that classroom so I would remember it years later. And clearly it had worked. I was joyful, pleased with the continuity.

Then something inside me told me to cross my ankles in a certain way and to slump in my oak chair in a certain way and to breathe in slowly and I did all this without really thinking about it and there I was. I was in Miss Ralston’s classroom in September of 1942. But I did not materialize as a grown man to see myself sitting as a young student. I found myself as that student again—ankles crossed, slumped in my chair, breathing in slowly. I heard Miss Ralston’s voice droning about the primary exports of Latin America. Fawn Harrington was on my left in a green tartan skirt and green sweater; Toby Kavanaugh sat on my right. I was wearing my Thom McAn shoes, the brown ones. They were too tight and my feet hurt. I had a headache; Mother and Daddy had been fighting in the kitchen the night before and I had barely slept. I hadn’t done my homework. Fawn had tried flirting with me before class but I had ignored her. I did not like flirts; I always felt they were up to something.