Recursion(23)

“So you’re sitting in your chair…”

“I’m probably drinking a beer.”

“Would Julia have been watching with you?”

Jesus. He knows her name.

“No. I think she was watching TV in our bedroom. We’d already eaten dinner.”

“As a family?”

“I don’t remember. Probably.” Barry is suddenly aware of a pressure in his chest, the intensity of which is nearly crushing. He says, “I haven’t talked about that night in years.”

The man just sits there on his stool, running his fingers through his beard and coolly studying him, waiting for Barry to push on.

“I see Meghan coming out of the hallway. I don’t remember for sure what she was wearing, but for some reason, I see her in this pair of jeans and a turquoise sweater she always wore.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Ten days shy of sixteen. And she stops in front of the coffee table—I know this happened for sure—and she’s standing between me and the television with her hands on her hips and this quasi-severe look on her face.”

Tears fill in at the edges of his eyes.

“It’s still incredibly emotional for you,” the man says. “This is good.”

“Please,” Barry says. “Don’t make me do this.”

“Continue.”

Barry takes a breath, blindly groping for some handhold of emotional balance.

He says finally, “It was the last time I would look into my daughter’s eyes. And I didn’t know it. I kept trying to look around her to see the television.”

He doesn’t want to cry in front of this man. Jesus, anything but that.

“Continue.”

“She asked if she could go to DQ. She usually went there a couple of nights a week to do her homework, hang out with friends. I went through the standard questioning. Did your mother say it was OK? No, she had come to me instead. Is your homework finished? No, but part of the reason she wanted to go was to meet up with Mindy, her lab partner in biology, to discuss a project they were working on. Who else was going to be there? A list of names, most of which I knew. I remember checking my watch—it was eight thirty and still in the early innings of the game—and I told her she could go, but that I wanted her home no later than ten. She made her arguments for eleven. I said, ‘No, it’s a school night, you know your curfew,’ and then she let it go and headed for the door.

“I remember calling out to her just before she left, telling her I loved her.”

Tears release, his body shaking with emotion, but the straps hold him tight against the chair.

Barry says, “The truth is, I don’t know if I called out to her. I think probably I didn’t, that I simply went back to watching the game and didn’t think of her again until ten p.m. had come and gone, and I wondered why she wasn’t home yet.”

The man says, “Computer, stop session.” And then: “Thank you, Barry.”

He leans forward and wipes the tears from Barry’s face with the back of his hand.

“What was the point of all that?” Barry asks, broken. “That was worse than any physical torture.”

“I’ll show you.”

The man taps a button on the medical cart.

Barry glances at the tube in his arm as a stream of clear liquid rushes into his vein.





HELENA





June 20, 2009





Day 598


The man is wiry and tall, his thin arms streaked with needle tracks. On his left shoulder is a tattoo of the name Miranda, which looks fresh—still red and inflamed. He wears a silver headpiece that fits him as snugly as a skullcap, only slightly thicker, and a second device the size of a whiteboard eraser has been affixed to his left forearm. Otherwise, he stands naked before a white, shell-like structure reminiscent of an egg. A man and a woman wait in the wings beside a crash cart.

Helena is watching it all through one-way glass from a seat at the main console in the adjacent control room, between Marcus Slade and Dr. Paul Wilson, project manager for the medical team. To the left of Slade sits Sergei, the only member of the original crew who stayed.

Someone touches her shoulder. She glances back at Jee-woon, who has just slipped into the control room to take a seat behind her.

Leaning forward, he whispers in her ear, “I’m really glad you decided to join us for this. The lab hasn’t been the same without you.”

Slade looks over at Sergei, who’s studying a screen displaying a high-resolution image of the test subject’s skull.

“How we looking on those reactivation coordinates?” Slade asks.

“Locked and loaded.”

Slade turns to the doctor. “Paul?”

“Ready when you are.”

Slade taps a button on the headset he’s wearing, says, “Reed, we’re all set on our end. Why don’t you go ahead and climb inside.”

For a moment, the wiry man doesn’t move. Just stands there shivering, staring into the tank through the open hatch. The lights give his skin a bluish hue, except for the needle scars, which glow red against his sickly pallor.

“Reed? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.” The man’s voice comes through four speakers positioned in the corners of the control room.