The story opens not with a time machine but with a meticulous description of a mid-century office: the sixty-third floor of the Empire State Building, opaque glass doors, a receptionist named Margaret who stares at the floor hoping to glimpse her fiancé thirty-seven stories below. This patient, almost anthropological attention to setting establishes a world of precise details—the tilt of blinds, the placement of lamps—before any hint of the fantastic intrudes.

When Donald Fairfield walks in claiming to be from the future, the narrative immediately pivots to a battle of wits and words. Dr. Victor Quink, the psychiatrist, corrects Donald's idiom "right off the rat" to "right off the bat," and the two men engage in a playful, erudite exchange about colloquialisms and belief. The future, it seems, has forgotten baseball metaphors, but not the art of argument.

The Architecture of Belief

The office itself becomes a stage for the central tension: the rational versus the inexplicable. Dr. Quink's domain is described with clinical precision—a "stout wooden door" separating the reception area from a darker, quieter room where the blinds are "kept closed but tilted toward the sky." This controlled environment, with its strategic lamps and comfortable chairs, is the setting for a psychiatric interview that quickly becomes a philosophical debate.

Donald's claim is not met with shock but with linguistic scrutiny. When he says "right off the rat," Victor pounces: "Bat. Right off the. Not rat, right off the bat. It's a colloquialism, comes from baseball." This exchange does more than establish character; it reveals the story's method. The extraordinary is approached through the ordinary—through the cracks in language, the small errors that betray a different origin. Donald's slip suggests a future where baseball no longer exists, but the idiom has mutated. Victor, in turn, treats this as a puzzle to be solved, not a miracle to be accepted.

Dinner Table Diplomacy

The scene shifts abruptly from the office to a domestic setting, where Mimi, Donald's wife, serves squash and applesauce. The transition is jarring: from abstract debate about time travel to concrete questions about recipes. "How do you make it?" Victor asks, and Mimi replies with mock secrecy: "You just take the squash and then pour in the applesauce and cinnamon." The mundane details of cooking—the squash, the cinnamon—ground the story in the sensory world, even as the characters argue about reality.

Donald's frustration boils over: "Damn it, stop jibber-jabbering! We know why we're here, so let's talk about it. Can you cure my crazy wife?" This outburst, with its crude demand, contrasts sharply with the earlier intellectual fencing. Mimi, for her part, insists on no "shop talk" at dinner, enforcing a domestic truce. The tension between the extraordinary claim and the ordinary rituals of eating, drinking, and correcting idioms becomes the story's engine. Victor, sipping a lime martini, remains the calm center, observing both the delusion and the marriage.

A Future Without Desire

Embedded in the banter is a startling revelation about the future from which Donald claims to come. "We, for instance, have bred out sexual desire," he says early on, a line that hangs over the entire narrative. This is not a future of gleaming cities or advanced technology, but one defined by absence—the absence of a fundamental human drive. The story does not elaborate on how this was achieved or what society looks like; it simply presents the fact as a given, leaving the reader to ponder its implications.

This detail reframes the entire conversation. If Donald is telling the truth, then his presence in the 1950s is not just a temporal anomaly but an encounter between two radically different human natures. Victor's skepticism becomes not just professional caution but a defense of a world where desire—for love, for food, for baseball—still matters. The story's title, "You Don't Make Wine Like the Greeks Did," echoes this theme: every era has its own methods, its own losses, its own peculiarities. The future may have lost desire, but it has also lost the art of making wine—or of making love.

The excerpts offer no resolution to Donald's claim, leaving the reader suspended between belief and skepticism. What emerges is a story less about time travel than about the act of listening—to slips of the tongue, to the silence between sentences, to the way a person describes a recipe or corrects an idiom. Pay attention to what the characters do not say: the gaps in Mimi's memory, the unspoken rules of Victor's office, the future that is defined by what it lacks. The evidence is in the details, not the declarations.