Recursion(27)

The red clay of the pitcher’s mound and Curt Schilling standing there with his hand in his glove, staring down Todd Helton at the plate.

It’s as if a memory is being built before him. First the foundation of smell and taste. Then the scaffolding of visuals. Next comes an overlay of touch as he feels, actually feels, the cool softness of the leather chair he’s sitting in, his feet propped up on the extended footrest, his head turning, and a hand—his hand—reaching for the bottle of Rolling Rock resting on a coaster on the table beside the chair.

As he touches the bottle, he can feel the cold wetness of the condensation on the green glass, and as he brings it to his lips and tilts it back, the taste and the smell overwhelm him with the power of actuality. Not of a mere memory, but an event that is happening now.

And he is keenly aware, not just of the memory itself, but of his perspective of the memory. It is unlike any recollection he has ever experienced, because he is in it, peering through the eyes of his younger self and watching the movie of his old life unfold before him as a fully immersed observer.

The pain of dying has become a dim and distant star, and now he begins to hear sounds, just brushstrokes at first, muffled and indistinct, but slowly gaining in volume and clarity, as if someone were slowing turning up the dials.

The announcers on the television.

A telephone ringing in their house.

Footsteps moving down the hardwood floor of the hallway.

And then Meghan is standing in front of him. He’s staring up into her face, and her mouth is moving, and he hears her voice—too faint, too distant to make out any specific words, only to hear that familiar tone that has been quietly fading in his memory for eleven years.

She is beautiful. She is vital. Standing in front of the television, blocking the screen, with her backpack slung over one shoulder, blue jeans, a turquoise sweater, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

This is too intense. Worse than the torture of asphyxiating and equally out of his control, because this is not a memory he is retrieving of his own volition. It’s somehow being projected for him, against his will, and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

He wants out of his memory, but he can’t leave. All senses are fully engaged. Everything as clear and vivid as existence. Except he has no control. He can do nothing but stare through the eyes of his eleven-years-younger self and listen to the last conversation he ever had with his daughter, feeling the vibration of his larynx, and then the movement of his mouth and lips forming words.

“You talked to Mom about this?” His voice doesn’t sound strange at all. It feels and sounds exactly the way it does when he speaks.

“No, I came to you.”

“Is your homework done?”

“No, that’s why I want to go.”

Barry feels his younger self leaning to see around Meghan as Todd Helton gets a piece of the next pitch. The third-base runner scores, but it’s a groundout for Helton.

“Dad, you’re not even listening to me.”

“I am listening to you.”

Now he’s looking at her again.

“Mindy is my lab partner, and we have this thing due next Wednesday.”

“For what?”

“Biology.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Oh my God, it’s me, Mindy, maybe Jacob, definitely Kevin and Sarah.”

Now he watches himself lift his left arm to glance at his watch—one he will lose when he moves out of this house ten months from now in the wake of Meghan’s death and the explosive decompression of his marriage.

It’s a hair past 8:30 p.m.

“So can I go?”

Say no.

Younger Barry watches the next Rockies player walking to the plate.

Say no!

“You’ll be back no later than ten?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven is for weekends, you know that.”

“Ten thirty.”

“OK, forget it.”

“Fine, ten fifteen.”

“Are you kidding me with this?”

“It takes ten minutes to walk there. Unless you want to drive me.” Wow. He had repressed this moment because it was too painful. She had suggested he drive her, and he had refused. If he had, she would still be alive.

Yes! Drive her! Drive her, you idiot!

“Honey, I’m watching the game.”

“So ten thirty then?”

He feels his lips curling up in a smile, remembers acutely the long-lost feeling of losing a negotiation with his daughter. The annoyance, but also the pride that he was raising a woman of grit, who knew her own mind and fought for the things she wanted. Remembered hoping she would carry that fire into her adult life.

“Fine.” Meghan starts for the door. “But not a minute later. I have your word?”

Stop her.

Stop her!

“Yes, Dad.” Her last words. Now he remembers. Yes, Dad.

Barry’s younger self is staring at the television again, watching Brad Hawpe rifle a ball straight up the middle. He can hear Meghan’s footsteps moving away from him, and he’s screaming inside, but nothing’s happening. It’s as if he’s inhabiting a body over which he exerts no control.