Recursion(29)

She says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. You have ruined my dream. You have blocked me from trying to help people like my mom. I want to go home. Are you going to continue keeping me here against my will?”

“Of course not.”

“So I can leave?”

“Do you remember what I asked you the first day you got here?”

She shakes her head, tears coming.

“I asked if you wanted to change the world with me. We’re standing on the shoulders of all the brilliant work you’ve done, and I came here this morning to tell you that we did it.”

She stares at him across the coffee table, tears gliding down her face.

“What are you talking about?”

“Today is the biggest day of my life and yours. It’s everything we’ve been working toward. So I came up here to celebrate with you.”

Slade begins to untwist the wire holding the muselet to the bottle of Dom Perignon. When he gets it off, he tosses the wire cage on the coffee table. Then, gripping the bottle between his legs, he carefully pops the cork. Helena watches him pour the Champagne into the glasses, carefully filling each flute to the brim.

“You’ve lost your mind,” she says.

“We can’t drink these yet. We have to wait until…” He checks his watch. “Ten fifteen, give or take. While we wait, I want to show you something that happened yesterday.”

Slade takes the DVD from the coffee table to the entertainment center. He loads it into the player and turns up the volume.

Onscreen: a tall, emaciated man she has never seen before is reclined in the memory chair. Jee-woon Chercover is leaning over him, inking a tattoo of letters—M-i-r-a-n—into his left shoulder. The emaciated man lifts an arm and says, “Stop.”

Slade steps into the frame. “What is it, Reed?”

“I’m back. I’m here. Oh my God.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The experiment worked.”

“Prove it to me.”

“Your mother’s name is Susan. You told me to tell you that right before I got into the egg.”

Onscreen, a huge grin spreads across Slade’s face. He asks, “What time did we do the experiment tomorrow?”

“Ten a.m.”

Slade turns off the television and looks at Helena.

She says, “Was that supposed to make any sense to me?”

“I guess we’ll know in a minute.”

They sit in awkward silence, Helena watching the Champagne bubbles effervesce.

“I want to go home,” she says.

“You can leave today if you want.”

She looks at the wall clock—10:10 a.m. It’s so quiet in her apartment, she can hear the hiss of gas escaping the flutes. She stares at the sea, thinking whatever this is about, she’s over it. She’ll leave the rig, her research, everything. Forfeit her money, her profit participation, because no dream, no ambition, is worth what Slade has done to her. She’ll go back home to Colorado and help take care of her mother. She couldn’t preserve her fading memories or stop the disease, but at least she can be with her for however much time she has left.

Ten fifteen comes and goes.

Slade keeps looking at his watch, a bit of worry now creeping into his eyes.

Helena says, “Look, whatever this was supposed to be, I’m ready for you to leave. What time can the helicopter fly me back to California?”

Blood slides out of Slade’s nose.

Now she tastes rust, realizes blood is trickling out of hers as well. Reaching up, she tries to catch it in her hands, but it seeps through her fingers and onto her shirt. She rushes into the powder room, grabs a couple of washcloths out of the drawer, and holds one to her nose as she carries the other back out to Slade.

As she hands it to him, she feels a stabbing agony behind her eyes, like the worst ice-cream headache of her life, and she can see by the look on his face that Slade is experiencing the same sensation.

He’s smiling now, blood between his teeth. Rising from the ottoman, he wipes his nose and tosses the towel away.

“Do you feel them coming?” he asks.

At first, she thinks he’s talking about the pain, but it’s not that. She is suddenly aware of an entirely new memory of the last half hour. A gray, haunted-looking memory. In it, Slade didn’t come here with a bottle of Champagne. He invited her to come down to the testing bay with him. She remembers sitting in the control room and watching a heroin addict climb into the deprivation tank. They fired a memory of him getting a tattoo, and then they killed him. She was trying to throw a chair through the window between the control room and the testing bay when, suddenly, she’s here instead—standing in her apartment with a nosebleed and a killer headache.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “What just happened?”

Slade lifts his Champagne glass, clinks it against hers, and takes a long sip.

“Helena, you didn’t just build a chair that helps people relive their memories. You made something that can return them to the past.”





BARRY





October 25, 2007

The windows of neighboring houses seem to flicker from the illumination of television screens inside, and there’s no one out except Barry, who’s running down the middle of a street that is empty and plastered with fallen leaves from the oaks that line the block. He feels stronger than he has in ages. There’s no pain in his left knee from the ill-advised slide across home plate during a softball game in Central Park that will not happen for another five years. And he’s so much lighter on his feet, by thirty pounds at least.