Recursion(4)

Reaching into his leather satchel, Jee-woon takes out a document in a navy binder.

Her proposal.

“Of course!” she says. “You’re with Mountainside Capital!”

“No. And they’re not going to fund you.”

“Then how did you get that?”

“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to fund you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this?” He tosses her grant proposal onto the wreckage of her desk. “Is timid. It’s just more of what you’ve been doing at Stanford the last three years. It’s not big-idea enough. You’re thirty-eight years old, which is like ninety in academia. One morning in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to wake up and realize your best days are behind you. That you wasted—”

“I think you should leave.”

“I don’t mean to insult you. If you don’t mind my saying, your problem is that you’re afraid to ask for what you really want.” It occurs to her that, for some reason, this stranger is trolling her. She knows she shouldn’t continue to engage, but she can’t help herself.

“And why am I afraid to ask for what I really want?”

“Because what you really want is bank-breaking. You don’t need seven figures. You need nine. Maybe ten. You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”

She stares at him across the desk. “I never mentioned human trials in that proposal.”

“What if I were to tell you that we will give you anything you ask for? No-limit funding. Would you be interested?”

Her heart is beating faster and faster.

Is this how it happens?

She thinks of the fifty-million-dollar chair she has dreamed of building since her mom started to forget life. Strangely, she never imagines it fully rendered, only as the technical drawings in the utility patent application she will one day file, entitled Immersive Platform for Projection of Long-Term, Explicit, Episodic Memories.

“Helena?”

“If I say yes, will you tell me who your boss is?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

He tells her.

As her jaw hits the desk, Jee-woon pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her over the bankers’ boxes.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”





BARRY





November 4, 2018

The café occupies a picturesque spot on the banks of the Hudson, in the shadow of the West Side Highway. Barry arrives five minutes early to find Julia already seated at a table under an umbrella. They share a brief, fragile embrace, as if they’re both made of glass.

“It’s good to see you,” he says.

“I’m glad you wanted to come.”

They sit. A waiter swings by to take their drink orders.

“How’s Anthony?” Barry asks.

“Great. Busy with the redesign of the Lewis Building lobby. Your work’s good?”

He doesn’t tell her about the suicide he failed to stop the night before last. Instead, they make small talk until the coffee arrives.

It’s Sunday, and the brunch crowd is out in force. Every table in the vicinity seems to be a geyser of gregarious conversation and laughter, but they sip their coffees quietly in the shade.

Nothing and everything to say.

A butterfly flutters around Barry’s head until he gently brushes it away.

Sometimes, late in the night, he imagines elaborate conversations with Julia. Exchanges where he says everything that has been festering all these years in his heart—the pain, the anger, the love—and then listens as she does the same. A clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.

But in person, it never feels right. He can’t bring himself to say what’s in his heart, which always feels clenched and locked up, encased in scar tissue. The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

“I wonder what she’d be doing today,” Julia says.

“I hope she’d be sitting here with us.”

“I mean for work.”

“Ah. A lawyer of course.”

Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.

“She would argue about anything,” Julia says. “And she usually won.”

“We were pushovers.”

“One of us was.”

“Me?” he says with faux outrage.

“By five years old, she had you pegged as the weak link.”

“Remember the time she convinced us to let her practice backing up in the driveway—”

“Convinced you.”

“—and she drove my car through the garage door?”

Julia snorts a laugh. “She was so upset.”

“No, embarrassed.” For a half second, his mind’s eye conjures the memory. Or at least a piece of it. Meghan behind the wheel of his old Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle-clenched the steering wheel. “She was tenacious and smart and would’ve done something interesting with her life.” He finishes his coffee and pours another cup from the stainless-steel French press they’re sharing.