Recursion(38)
She climbs out of bed and walks over to the window, sweeps away the blackout curtains.
The moon is high and full and shining down on the sea, whose surface is a gleaming, blue-black lacquer, as still as a frozen moment.
There will never be a day when she flies her mother here and puts her in the chair to map whatever is left of her mind.
That was never going to happen. It’s time to let the dream die and get the fuck out.
But she can’t. Even if she made it out on one of the supply ships, the moment Slade realized she was gone, he’d simply return to a memory before she escaped and stop her.
He could stop you before you even tried to escape. Before the idea even occurred to you. Before this moment.
All of which means—there’s only one way off the platform now.
BARRY
December 2007
He is better at his job, partly because he remembers some of the cases and suspects, but mainly because he gives a shit. The powers that be try to promote him to a better-paying, supervisory desk job, but he declines. He wants to be a great detective, nothing more.
He stays off cigarettes, drinks only on weekends, runs three times a week, and takes Julia out every Friday night. It isn’t quite perfect between them. She doesn’t carry the trauma of Meghan’s death and the destruction of their marriage, but for him there is no escaping how those events corroded their bond. In his previous life, it took him a long time to stop being in love with Julia, and even though he’s back to before everything imploded, it’s not just a light switch he can flip back on.
* * *
He watches the news every morning, reads the papers every Sunday, and while he remembers the big moments—the candidate who will become president, the first tremors of a recession—the majority of it is granular and insignificant enough as to feel brand-new all over again.
* * *
He sees his mom every week now. She is sixty-six years old and in five years will exhibit the first symptoms of the glioblastoma brain cancer that will kill her. In six, she won’t recognize him or be able to carry a conversation, and she will die in hospice care soon after, a wasted husk of herself. He will hold her bony hand in her final moments, wondering if she is even capable of registering the sensation of human touch in the annihilated landscape of her brain.
Oddly, he finds no sadness or despair knowing how and when her life will end. Those last days feel untouchably remote as he sits in her Queens apartment the week before Christmas. In fact, he considers the foreknowledge a gift. His father died when Barry was fifteen from an aortic aneurysm, sudden and unexpected. With his mom, he has years to say goodbye, to make certain she knows he loves her, to say all the things that are in his heart, and there is immeasurable comfort in that. He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.
He’s brought Meghan along with him today, and his daughter and mother are playing chess while he sits by the window, his mother singing in that delicate falsetto that always stirs something deep inside of him, his attention divided between their game and the passersby on the street below.
Despite the old technology all around him and the occasionally familiar news headline, he doesn’t feel like he’s living in the past. This moment feels very much like now. The experience is having a philosophical impact on his perception of time. Perhaps Vince was right. Maybe it is all happening at once.
“Barry?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“When did you become so introspective?”
He smiles. “I don’t know. Maybe turning forty did it to me.”
She watches him for a moment, turning her attention back to the chessboard only when Meghan makes her next move.
* * *
He lives his days and sleeps his nights.
Goes to parties he’s already been to, watches games he’s already seen, solves cases he’s already solved.
It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before.
And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?
HELENA
October 22, 2007
She is sitting at her old desk again in the musty depths of the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, caught in a transition between memory and reality.
The pain of dying in the tank is still fresh—the burn in her oxygen-starved lungs, the excruciating weight of her paralyzed heart, the panic and the fear, wondering if her plan would work. And then, when the memory-reactivation program finally engaged and the stimulators fired—pure exhilaration and release. Slade was right. Absent DMT, the experience of reactivating a memory was nothing more than watching a movie we’ve already seen a thousand times before. This is like living it.
Jee-woon is sitting across from her, his face coming into hard focus, and she wonders if he notices anything off about her, since she doesn’t have control of her body yet. But she’s catching words here and there—pieces of a familiar conversation.
“…very taken with the memory-portraiture article you published in Neuron.”