Rollback

"Don?" said Lenore, into what had become an uncomfortable silence.

He closed his eyes. "Sure," he said. "Sure, why not?"

Don had arrived at the ferry docks at the foot of Bay Street about ten minutes early, and he kept sca

Ah, there she was: the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore. She came ru

And he was stu

They boarded the Max Haines, a white, double-decker ferry, and took the kilometer-and-a-half journey to Centre Island, with its boardwalks, beaches, amusement park, and gardens.

Lenore had wanted to come down here, she said, because she missed the water. But the result was not proving entirely satisfactory: gulls eating garbage were no substitute for Vancouver’s great blue herons, and, besides, there was no salt tang to the air. Once they’d docked, they jogged for about half an hour. Don found that exhilarating, and he loved to feel his hair — yes, hair! — whipping in the breeze.

After that, they just strolled along a paved walkway, gingerly trying to avoid all the goose droppings. Off to their right was the bay, and across it was Toronto itself, with the skyline that Don had watched grow and spread over the better part of a century. It was still dominated by the CN Tower, once, but certainly no longer, the tallest freestanding structure in the world; as a teenager, he had gone downtown with his friend Ivan to watch a Sikorsky Skycrane assemble its huge components.

Blockish sky-scrapers, like the elements of a bar chart, trailed off left and right from the Tower. He recalled when Toronto’s downtown had been a tiny cluster of tall buildings, but now it went on and on along the lakeshore, west toward Mississauga, and east until the Scarborough Bluffs forced it to stop.

More than just the skyline had changed during Don’s lifetime — and yet some things hadn’t changed nearly as much as he’d expected. He remembered seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey with his dad when it had come out, back in 1968. The nice thing about being born in a year that ends in a zero was that it made math simple. Even as a kid, he knew he’d be forty-one in 2001, and his father, sitting next to him at Toronto’s Glendale Theatre, had been forty-three then, meaning Don would be younger than him when the wonders that film portrayed were supposed to come to pass: Pan Am space planes, giant wheel-shaped space stations with Howard Johnson hotels, cities on the moon, humans traveling out to Jupiter, cryogenic suspended animation, and — Open the pod-bay doors, Hal — true artificial intelligence.

But by the time the actual 2001 had rolled around, none of those things were realities.

So perhaps Don shouldn’t have been too surprised that the extravagant wonders predicted in the science fiction of the first decade of the new mille

Don looked out over the water, back at the city he’d been born in. Nestled at the foot of the CN Tower was the stadium where the Blue Jays played. He pointed at it.

"See? The roof’s open on SkyDome."

Lenore looked at him as though he were speaking a foreign language, and—

Oh, shit. He still referred to it as SkyDome; so did lots of people his age. But that hadn’t been its name for over forty years. Christ, the gap between them was everywhere, in everything. "The Rogers Centre, I mean. The, um, the roof is open."

It was such a trivial observation, he was sorry now he’d made it.

"Well, it is a lovely day," said Lenore. It buoyed him that she made no further comment on what he’d said.

They were holding hands as they walked, skateboarders, hoverpadders, rollerbladers, and joggers passing them in both directions. She was wearing her big, floppy hat; with her pale skin, she doubtless burned easily. For his part, he was enjoying being out in the sun without having to wear a hat. After four decades of baldness, it was wonderful to have his own built-in protection.

They’d talked about this and that: a lively, animated conversation, so unlike — what had one of his friends called it? — the companionable silence of old married people who had, decades ago, run out of points of view to share or jokes to tell or issues to explore.

"Do you play te

"I haven’t since…" Since before you were born.

"We should play sometime. I can get you a guest pass to Hart House."

"That’d be great," Don said. And he meant it. He’d been sedentary the first time he’d been this age; now, he was loving the sheer physicality of being alive. "You realize I’m going to beat your pants, off, though. I mean, I’m medically enhanced."

She gri

"Sure. Just call me Bjorn Borg."

She looked at him, totally baffled, and his heart fell a bit. Sarah would have gotten the joke.

"Um," he said, painfully aware of Joh

"You are a supremely silly man," Lenore said, smiling warmly at him.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and looked — really looked, for the first time — at Lenore.

She was a grad student studying SETI.

She liked to eat in restaurants, to talk about philosophy and politics.

She was confident and fu

And now she was even talking like—

But he’d missed putting it together until just now. She reminded him of—

Of course. Of course.

She reminded him of Sarah as she’d been back in her twenties, back when Don had fallen in love with her.

Oh, true, they looked nothing alike physically, and perhaps that’s why he’d failed to notice all the other similarities when they’d been together before. Lenore was shorter than Sarah, or, at least, shorter than Sarah had been in her prime. And Sarah had originally had brown hair, and still had blue-gray eyes, while Lenore was redheaded, freckled, and green-eyed.

But in spirit, in attitude, in the joy they took in life, they were kindred spirits.

Coming toward them was a young couple: an Asian woman and a white man, the man pushing a stroller. Don was wearing sunglasses — as was Lenore — so he felt no compunction about looking at the beautiful young woman, with long black hair, wearing pink shorts and a red tank top.

"Cute kid," said Lenore.

"Um, yeah," said Don. He hadn’t even noticed.

"Do you — do you like kids?" Lenore asked, a tentative note in her voice.

"Sure. Of course."

"Me, too," she said.

There was a park bench on the grass a short distance from the walkway, facing back across the water toward the city. Don pointed at it with his chin, and they went over and sat. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they stared out at the water, watching a ferry coming toward them.