This Time Tomorrow(63)

Leonard’s lights—the house lights—were off. Alice wondered if Debbie would be there—she hadn’t been there that morning. Maybe she and Leonard had the dreamy sort of marriage that Alice herself wanted, or used to think she wanted, where they lived a few blocks apart and could always retreat to their own spaces. Pomander wasn’t tiny by New York City standards, but for someone who lived and worked at home, and had bookshelves lining every wall, and who had never learned how to buy or cook real food, it was tight. Debbie. The thought of her made Alice happy. She was so clearly kind, the sort of woman who would help you with your homework. Alice could picture Debbie as a loving, supportive teacher so clearly, with her bra line and the waistline of her full pleated skirt one and the same, the word bosom personified.

Alice unlocked the door, and Ursula was against her legs. Ursula had ruined Alice for other cats—the aloof layabouts who pretended not to know the humans were there until it was feeding time. “Oh, Ursula,” Alice said, and picked her up. The cat scrambled delicately onto Alice’s shoulders like a living stole. Some mail was splashed inside the door, where it had fallen through the slot. She moved over to the kitchen table and sat down in the dark. Ursula leaped down onto Alice’s lap and batted around some feathers before curling into a tight black ball and closing her eyes. Alice turned on the light.

There was a shelf on top of the fridge that held Leonard’s various prizes—an award shaped like a spaceship, another shaped like a comet. Alice had never understood why speculative fiction and outer space were so closely identified—surely the number of science fiction novels that took place on Earth vastly outnumbered the ones that took place on Planet Blork, or in some distant galaxy. Maybe it was because it was easier to imagine a totally different life outside the walls you were used to. Comforting, even, just to spend however many hours in some totally different place. Alice stood on her tiptoes and grabbed one of the silver spaceships. There were two of them, which Alice didn’t remember. It was dusty but heavy—a real piece of hardware, not like some flimsy trophy from a souvenir shop. There was a small plaque at the bottom, and Alice rubbed it clean as she read.


Best Novel, 1998

Dawn of Time

Leonard Stern



Alice put the spaceship on the counter next to the book. Ursula leaped up next to her, purring loudly and offering her chin to scratch. Alice turned on the faucet and Ursula began to flick her sandpaper tongue in and out of the water, an inefficient fountain. Alice splashed some water into her mouth, too, and then rested her hand on Ursula’s sleek back.



* * *



? ? ?

There were bookshelves everywhere, but Leonard had never put his own books on them, and even if he had, the shelves weren’t alphabetized or organized in a way that anyone but him could understand. When Alice was a kid, there were certain areas she knew how to find—the Agatha Christies, the P. G. Wodehouses, the Ursula K. Le Guins. Her eyes scanned the shelves, looking for her father’s name, knowing that she wouldn’t find it.

Leonard did have a stash, though—Alice could remember him signing copies of Time Brothers for various Belvedere fundraisers and things like that, auctions for some cause or another. She flipped on the light in the single, narrow hallway closet, in which Leonard had shoddily built wooden shelves, unfinished and full of splinters. There were several dinged-up cardboard Bankers Boxes. The one Alice could most easily reach was labeled tb foreign editions. Alice pushed it aside to see the box next to it, labeled dawn. Alice unfolded the small ladder that was tucked in for changing lightbulbs and heaved the box down with a thud. Dust rained on her pink feathers like fresh snow.

There were hardcovers and paperbacks—the orange paperback that Sam had thrust at her, and a hardcover edition with an understated black-and-white jacket, mostly type but with a small yellow door at the center, like a sunset as seen through a cartoon mousehole. In addition to several copies of those, there were foreign editions—Alba del Temps, ?wit Czasu, D?mmerung der Zeit—all shoved into the box as if Leonard had been cleaning out his desk in a hurry. There were DVD boxes, which Alice hadn’t seen in years. A Time Brothers box set had snuck in—six discs, plus bonus material, and right underneath it was a DVD box for Dawn of Time, which appeared to have been made into a movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

She put the movie back in the box and shoved it all toward the back of the closet, except for the hardcover copy of Dawn of Time, which she tucked under her arm and carried to the couch. Leonard had always been a dedicated napper, and so the couch had a threadbare but still cozy blanket thrown over the top, and a pillow that belonged to Ursula but which she was willing to share. Alice lay down and closed her eyes. It was late, and she was exhausted. Ursula jumped onto the couch and started making biscuits on Alice’s chest, poking tiny holes into the bodice of her dress. She opened the book, knowing that she wouldn’t stop until she was finished.

If Time Brothers was Leonard looking for adventure and for family—he had not had a brother; his parents had been well-meaning but disinterested in his internal life—then Dawn of Time was Leonard looking at her—looking at himself looking at her. Alice knew that she wasn’t Dawn, that Dawn was a creation, a mix of people, of Leonard himself and what he thought about Alice, and other people, too, and then that strange alchemy of writing, when the character began to do and say things the writer didn’t expect. Alice loved her father’s book. Books! She wished there were more of them to read, hidden in a box somewhere. It didn’t matter if they were published, or if no one else read them. It was better than a diary, because there was nothing that could make her cringe, nothing that felt inappropriate for her to see. People were allowed to have privacy, even parents. But in Leonard’s book—his books!—Alice could find little messages. Sometimes it was as simple as a description of a meal that she knew Leonard himself liked to eat—fried eggs left alone in the pan long enough to turn brown and crispy at the edges—or the mention of the Kinks. They were all tiny little parts of him, preserved forever, molecules that had rearranged themselves into words on a page, but Alice could see them for what they were, which was her father.