Recursion(26)

He realizes he’s floating on his back, with no effort, in a pool of water that is the exact temperature of his skin. When he’s motionless, he can’t sense it, and even as he becomes still again, he’s struck by the sensation of his body having no end and no beginning.

No…there is one sensation. Something has been affixed to his left forearm.

Reaching over with his right hand, he touches what feels like a hard plastic case. An inch wide, maybe four inches long. He tries to pull it off, but it’s either been glued to or embedded in his skin.

“Barry.” It’s the voice of the man from before. The one who was sitting on the stool making him talk about Meghan as Barry was strapped to that chair.

“Where am I? What’s happening?”

“I need you to calm down. Just breathe.”

“Am I dead?”

“Would I be telling you to breathe if you were? You aren’t dead, and where you are is irrelevant at this point.”

Barry reaches a hand straight up out of the water, his fingers touching a surface two feet above his face. He searches for a lever, a button, something to open whatever he’s been placed inside, but the walls are smooth and seamless.

He feels a slight vibration in the device on his forearm, reaches over to touch it again, but nothing happens. His right arm will no longer move.

He tries to lift his left—nothing.

Then his legs, his head, his fingers.

He can’t even blink, and when he tries to speak, his lips refuse to part.

“What you’re experiencing is a paralytic agent,” the man says from somewhere in the darkness above. “That was the vibration you just felt—the device injecting the drug. Unfortunately, we need to keep you conscious. I won’t lie to you, Barry. The next few moments are going to be very uncomfortable.”

Terror swallows him—the most profound fear he has ever known. His eyes are locked open, and he keeps trying to move—arms, legs, fingers, anything—but nothing responds. He might as well be trying to control a single strand of hair. And that’s all before the real horror hits: he is unable to contract his diaphragm.

Which means he can’t draw breath.

A maelstrom of panic washes over him, and finally pain, everything distilling down to a second-by-second escalation of the desperate need to inhale oxygen. But he is locked out of the controls of his own body. He cannot cry out or flail or beg for his life, which he would be more than willing to do if he could only speak.

“You’ve probably realized by now that you no longer have the ability to breathe. This isn’t sadism, Barry. I promise you that. It will all be over soon.”

He can only lie in the utter darkness, listening to the screaming of his mind and the torrent of racing thoughts while the sole sound is the thunderous pounding of his heart as it beats faster and faster.

The device on his forearm vibrates again.

Now a white-hot pain courses through his veins, and that jackhammer thudding of his heart responds instantly to whatever was just blasted into his bloodstream.

Slowing.

Slowing.

Slowing.

And then he no longer hears or feels it beating.

The silence of wherever he is becomes complete.

In this moment, he knows that blood is no longer circulating in his body.

I cannot breathe and my heart has stopped beating. I’m dead. Clinically dead. So how am I still thinking? How am I aware? How long will this last? How bad will the pain get? Is this really the end of me?

“I just stopped your heart, Barry. Please listen. You have to maintain focus during the next few moments, or we will lose you. If you make it to the other side, remember what I did for you. Don’t let it happen this time. You can change it.”

Explosions of color detonate in Barry’s oxygen-and blood-starved brain—a light show for a dead man, each flash closer and brighter than the one before.

Until all he sees is a blinding whiteness that is already beginning to fade through shades of gray toward black, and he knows what lies at the end of that spectrum—unbeing. But maybe an end to the pain. To this brutal thirst for air. He’s ready for it. Ready for anything that makes this stop.

And then he smells something. It’s odd, because it conjures an emotional response he can’t quite name, but which carries the ache of nostalgia. It takes a moment, but he realizes it’s what his house used to smell like after he and Julia and Meghan had finished dinner. In particular, Julia’s meatloaf and roasted carrots and potatoes. Next he catches the scent of yeast and malt and barley. Beer, but not just any beer. The Rolling Rocks he used to drink out of those green bottles.

Other smells emerge and merge in an aroma more complex than any wine. It’s one he would recognize anywhere—the house in Jersey City he once lived in with his ex-wife and his dead daughter.

The smell of home.

Suddenly, he tastes the beer and the constant presence in his mouth of the cigarettes he used to smoke.

His brain fires an image that cuts through the dying whiteout—blurry and fuzzy at the edges, but quickly sharpening into focus. A television. And on the screen, a baseball game. The image in his mind’s eye as clear as sight, gray-scale at first, but then color bleeding into everything he sees.

Fenway Park.

The green grass under the burn of the stadium lights.

The crowd.

The players.