Rollback (22 page)

Don laughed. "You know what I mean." He looked at the blue machine. "What do we do with you when we go to bed?" he asked. "Do we turn you off?"

"You may if you wish," said Gunter, and he smiled reassuringly. "But I suggest you leave me on so that I can respond instantly to any emergency. You can also set me tasks to perform while you're sleeping: I can dust and do other chores, and have a hot breakfast ready for you when you get up."

Don looked around the living room, and his eyes landed on the fireplace. "Do you know how to make a fire?"

The robot tilted his head a little to one side, and, if glass lenses could be said to have a faraway look, Gunter's did for a second. "I do now," he said.

"Great," said Don. "We'll have to get some wood, come winter."

"Do you get bored if you have nothing to do?" asked Sarah.

"No," said the robot, and he smiled that reassuring smile again. "I'm content just to relax."

"An admirable trait," said Sarah, glancing at Don. "I wonder how we ever got along without one."
 

Don found himself feeling more and more confused with each passing day. He'd had a handle on life, damn it all. He'd understood its rhythms, its stages, and he'd moved through them all, in the proper sequence, surviving each one.

Youth, he knew, had been for education, for the first phase of professional development, for exploring sexual relationships.

Mature adulthood had meant a committed marriage, raising children, and consolidating whatever material prosperity he had been entitled to.

After that had come middle age, a time for reevaluation. He'd managed to avoid the affair and sports car then; his midlife crisis, precipitated by a minor heart attack, had finally spurred him to lose weight, and hearing so many women—and some men—tell him how good he looked, how he was hotter at forty-five than he'd been at thirty, had been tonic enough to help him weather those years without needing to do anything more to prove he was still attractive.

And, finally—or so it should have been—there had been the so-called golden years: retirement, becoming a grandparent, taking it easy, an epoch for acceptance and reflection, for companionship and peace, for winding things up as the end approached.

The stages of life; he knew them and understood them: collectively, an arc, a storyline, with a predicable, cliched beginning, middle, and end.

But now there was suddenly
more
; not just an epilogue tacked on, but a whole new volume, and a totally unplanned one, at that.
Rollback: Book Two of the Donald Halifax Story
. And although Don understood he was its author, he had no idea what was supposed to happen, where it was all supposed to lead. There was no standard plot skeleton to follow, and he didn't have a clue how it was going to end. He couldn't begin to visualize what he should be doing decades down the road; he wasn't even sure what he should be doing in the present day.

But there
was
one thing he knew he had to do soon, although he was dreading it.
 

"I have something to tell you," Don said to Lenore the next time he saw her.

Lenore was lying naked in bed next to him, in her basement apartment on Euclid Avenue. She propped her head up with a crooked arm and looked at him. "What?"

He hesitated. This was more difficult than he'd thought it would be, and he'd thought it would be
very
difficult. How'd he ever get into a situation in which telling his ... his ... his whatever Lenore was ... that he was married would be the
easy
part?

He let the air out of his lungs through a small opening between his lips, puffing his cheeks out as he did so. "I—um, I'm older than you probably think I am," he said at last.

Her eyes narrowed a bit. "Aren't you the same age as me?"

He shook his head.

"Well, you can't be any more than thirty," she said.

"I'm older than that."

"Thirty-one? Thirty-two? Don, I don't care about six or seven years. I've got an uncle who is
ten
years older than my aunt."

I can do ten years for breakfast
, he thought. "Keep going."

"Thirty-three?" Her tone was getting nervous. "Thirty-four? Thirty—"

"Lenore," he said, closing his eyes for a moment. "I'm eighty-seven."

She made a small raspberry sound. "Jesus, Don, you—"

"I'm eighty-seven,"
he said, the words practically exploding from him. "I was born in 1960. You must have heard about the rejuvenation process they've got now. I underwent a rollback earlier this year. And this"—he indicated his face with a counterclockwise motion of his hand—"is the result."

She scuttled sideways on the bed, like a crab on hot sands, increasing the distance between them. "My ... God," she said. She was peering at him, studying him, clearly looking for some sign, one way or the other, of whether it was true. "But that procedure, it costs a fortune."

He nodded. "I, um, had a benefactor."

"I don't believe you," Lenore said, but she sounded as though she were lying. "I—I mean, it can't..."

"It's true. I could prove it in a hundred different ways. Do you want to see some photo ID, the way I looked before?"

"No!"
An expression of ... of disgust, perhaps, had fleetingly passed over her face. Of course she didn't want to see the old man she'd just had inside her.

"I should have told you sooner, but—"

"You're damn right you should have. Shit, Don!" But then, perhaps the thought occurring because she'd just uttered his name, a glimmer of hope appeared in her eyes, as if she'd realized that this might all be some elaborate put-on. "But, wait, you're Sarah Halifax's grandson! You told me that."

"No, I didn't.
You guessed
that."

She pulled even farther away, and managed to cover her breasts with the sheet, the first hint of modesty he'd ever seen from her. "Who the hell are you?" she said. "Are you even
related
to Sarah Halifax?"

"Yesss," he said, protracting the word into a gentle hiss. "But"—he swallowed hard, trying to keep it all together—"but I'm not her grandson." He found himself unable to meet her eyes, and so he looked down at the rumpled bedspread between them. "I'm her husband."

"Fuck," said Lenore. "Shit."

"I am
so
sorry. Really, I am."

"Her husband?" she said again, as if perhaps she'd misheard the first time.

He nodded.

"I think you should leave."

The words tore into his heart, like bullets. "Please. I can—"

"What?" she demanded. "You can
explain
? There's no fucking explanation for this."

"No," he said. "No, I can't explain. And I can't justify it. But, God, Lenore, I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt
anyone
." His stomach was churning, and he felt disoriented. "But I want you to ... to know, to understand."

"Understand what? That everything that has gone down between us has been a lie?"

"No!" he said. "No, no, God, no. This has been more ... more
real
than anything in my life for—"

"For what?" she sneered. "For years? For
decades
?"

He let out a long, shuddering sigh. He couldn't even protest that she was being unfair. The fact that she was even still
talking
to him was more, he knew, than he had a right to. Still, he tried to defend himself, although, as soon as the words were out, he realized how ill-advised they were. "Look," he said, "you're the one who turned things physical."

"Because I thought you were somebody you
aren't
. You lied to me."

He thought about protesting that he hadn't, not technically, or at least not often.

"And, anyway," she continued, "who started things is so beside the point it's not even in the same solar system. You're an
octogenarian
, for God's sake. You're old enough to be my grandfather."

He'd expected those last few words, but they didn't hurt any less for that. "Sarah underwent the same treatment," he said, blurting it out. "But it didn't work for her. She's still physically eighty-seven, and I'm ...
this
."

Lenore said nothing, but her mouth was slightly downturned and her eyebrows were drawn together.

"Cody McGavin paid for it," continued Don. "He wanted Sarah to be around when the next reply comes in from Sigma Draconis. I—I was just along for the ride, but..."

"But now you're Sarah's
caregiver
."

"Please," he said. "I didn't ask for any of this."

"No, no, of course not. It all just sort of happened—a multi-billion-dollar medical procedure."

He shook his head. "I should have known you wouldn't understand."

"If you want understanding, go to a support group. There must be one for people like you."

"Oh, yeah. Sure. They're meeting right now, in Vienna. I can't afford to go there. I am—I worked it out—I am four orders of magnitude poorer than the next poorest person who has undergone this process. For every single dollar I've got, they've each got ten thousand dollars.
That's
not being in the same solar system, Lenore."

"Don't snap at me. I haven't done anything wrong here."

He took a deep breath. "You're right. I'm sorry. It's just that I don't know what to do, and ... and I don't want to lose you. I really do care about you; I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. And I don't know what I'm doing, but I do know this: the only times of late I've been happy—the
only
times—are when I'm with you."

"There must be somebody else who—"

"There's no one. My friends—what few I have who are still alive—they don't understand. And my kids—"

"Oh, crap. I hadn't thought about that. You've got kids!"

In for a penny, in for a pound.
"And grandkids. But my son is fifty-five and my daughter is about to turn fifty. I can't expect them to understand a parent half their age."

"This is crazy," she said.

"We can work it out."

"Are you nuts? You're
married
. You're sixty years older than me. You've got kids. You've got grandkids. And—God, you must be retired, right? You don't even have a job."

"I've got a pension."

"A pension! Jesus."

"This doesn't have to change anything," he said.

"Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"Lenore, please—"

"Get your clothes,"
she snapped.

"Pardon?"

"Get your clothes, and get the hell out!"
 

It had been months since Don had seen his grandchildren. He missed them, but he'd been avoiding contact, having no idea how to explain what had happened to him. But, finally, there was no choice. Today, Thursday, September 10, was Emily's fiftieth birthday, and just as attendance for everyone else had been mandatory at Don and Sarah's anniversary party, so his attendance was non-negotiable as his daughter reached the half-century mark.

The party was being held at Emily's house in Scarborough, about an hour away, but an easy journey on the 407. They had Gunter drive them. Don was happy about that. He would have felt silly being driven about by a woman who looked like his grandmother; he still hadn't gotten his license renewed. He'd be required to attend the mandatory driver-safety lectures with a group of other people who were over eighty, and, although the examiner had the power to waive the actual in-car test, Don would still need to endure the gawks from the licensing staff and, even worse, from the old people who
looked
old, many of whom would doubtless resent that he'd managed to forestall the fate that the rest of them would face in the next few years.

When they pulled into the driveway of the house—a large home that almost completely filled its lot—Don hopped out of the rear and ran around to help Sarah get out of the front passenger's seat. And then, with him cradling her elbow to guide her up the driveway, they went to the front door, leaving Gunter in the car, placidly looking out at the tiny strip of lawn. Carl and company were already here, but he'd parked his car on the street, leaving the driveway, and the shorter walk, for his parents.

Although the kids' biometrics were programmed into Don and Sarah's house, the reverse had never been the case, and so Don rang the doorbell. Emily appeared at once, looking out at them with apprehension on her face, and she hustled them indoors, glancing furtively back, as if concerned that her neighbors had seen the spectacle of her ancient mother arriving on the arm of some strange young man.

He tried to put that out of his mind, and managed the heartiest tone he could. "Happy birthday, Em!"

Sarah hugged Emily, and, as she did every year, she said, with a smile, "I remember precisely where I was when you were born."

"Hi," said Emily. Don sort of expected "Mom and Dad" to be appended to the greeting; the upward lilt to Emily's "hi" seemed to demand it. But she couldn't say the former without having to also give voice to the latter—and he hadn't heard either of his children refer to him as Dad since the rollback.

This house, like Don and Sarah's own, had stairs leading up from an entryway. Emily took her mother's cane and helped her climb them, and Don followed.

"Grandma!" shouted Cassie, who was wearing a pink floral-print dress and had her wispy blond hair tied into pigtails with pink ribbons. She came rushing over, and Sarah bent down as much as she could to hug her. When she released Cassie, the little girl then looked at Don without a trace of recognition on her face.

Carl bent down and picked his daughter up, balancing her in a crooked set of arms, the way one might to let a child examine a painting in a museum. "Cassie," said Carl, "this is your grandfather."

Don saw Cassie's little brow furrow. She had an arm around Carl's neck, and she pulled herself closer to him. "Grandpa Marcynuk ?" she said, sounding very unsure.

Don felt his heart sink. Gus Marcynuk was Cassie's mother's father; he lived in Winnipeg, and hadn't been in Toronto for years.