She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened on her last trip—all the days had run together. She hadn’t told him, she thought, at the end of the night, as she sometimes did.
“Fine, fine. Yeah, you seem fine,” Leonard said, teasing.
“You’re better,” Alice said. “Better than I’ve seen you.”
Leonard nodded. “You know, they don’t know what’s wrong with me. They know I’m dying, of course”—here he smiled at the plain truth of it—“but they don’t know why. I think when they look at my blood tests, it’s like looking at a ninety-six-year-old man.” He wiggled his eyebrows. He knew. Of course he knew.
“Dad,” Alice said, “I haven’t been able to talk to you.” She tried to do the math—it had been twenty-four years since her sixteenth birthday, but it had also been a day, a week, two weeks. “Can you just tell me what you know? I mean, I keep going back and trying to help—trying to solve this, like”—she gestured around the room—“this whole thing, but this is the first time you’ve even been awake! I just don’t know what to do. And so I’ve been going back and forth, because, like, why not?” She tried to laugh but it came out more like a groan. Alice wished that they were at home, and that Ursula was on her lap. Did hospitals have cats? She’d seen segments with dogs on the news, docile and fluffy golden Labradors who would tuck their sweet snouts into the hands of the sick. Leonard wouldn’t have wanted some random dog to lick him; he would have wanted the ageless, limitless dignity of Ursula.
“Well, it only works between the hours of three and four a.m., and it has to be empty. Which it usually isn’t. I make sure of that. That’s that, really. I learned a long time ago, the rules are the rules. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make sense. It’s just how it works. Is that what you mean?” Leonard smiled. “Science fiction only has to make sense within its own walls, even if the walls are your world.”
“You explained that part. Once. Who else knows?” Alice asked. “Is it just us?”
Leonard nodded, his face tight. “The Romans know. Cindy used to go back to the seventies and dance all night. That was before we moved in. It gets harder, going back and forth. Harder to come back, really. You feel it in your body. For a long time, I didn’t think it actually hurt you, but, well . . .” He gestured around the room. “Cindy used to go to Studio 54 and boogie, the whole bit, and when she came back, she started running into some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Alice thought of her own body and how it seemed to be getting slower, the way her head hurt in the mornings, no matter where or when she was.
“It feels like double vision, a little bit wobbly, and the wobbling gets more pronounced the older you get. It’s sort of the reverse of what you’d really want, you know—you’d want things to be more and more clear the farther you get away from a certain time, the less you can rely on your own memory, but that’s not how it works.” Leonard knit his fingers together. His skin looked thin and pale.
“And how do you make sure you get back to where you want to be?” This was what she hadn’t figured out. “I mean, how do you know when to stop?”
“Do you know where you want to be?” Leonard raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t fucking know. I know things weren’t perfect, originally, but then when I got back, things weren’t perfect in a totally different direction.” She thought about Tommy and the two beautiful kids and the giant apartment and she was so glad not to be there.
Leonard nodded. “Oh, sure. Once, and only once, when I came back, you had moved to California to live with Serena. That was a disaster, so I made sure it never happened again. But you see how it works—you see what changes and what doesn’t. Not to sound too Buddhist about it, because I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m sure to get it wrong, but everything outside of you is window dressing, you know?”
Alice shook her head. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure the Dalai Lama has never said anything about window dressing.”
“Thank you, miss. But you know what I mean. There’s the stuff that changes, and there’s the stuff that doesn’t. We’re all trying to sort out our inner messes—no one has it any better. Even the Buddhists! They’re better at trying, maybe, or better at pushing aside all of that. It’s not about the time. It’s about how you spend it. Where you put your energy—” Leonard closed his mouth in midsentence, and then his eyes, too. Alice could see it now—just because he was awake and talking, it didn’t mean that he was better. Whatever she’d done, it hadn’t been enough. He’d found love, he’d quit smoking, he’d written another book, he’d taken up jogging, and a thousand more things she hadn’t seen, Alice was sure—but none of it mattered. This was still where they were.