Recursion(45)

She blinks.

Barry carefully lifts Meghan’s right arm, checking the pulse in her radial artery. It’s strong, maybe too strong, and quite fast. He wonders—does she recall the trauma of being struck by a two-ton object traveling sixty miles per hour? The moment her consciousness stopped? Whatever came after? What would it be like to remember your own death? How would someone even recall a state of unbeing? As blackness? Nothingness? It strikes him, like dividing by zero, as an impossibility.

“Meghan,” he says softly, “can you hear me?”

She stirs, staring up at him now, and her eyes look full, as if she actually sees him.

“Dad?”

“Mom and I are right here, honey.”

“Where am I?”

“In your apartment, on the floor of your bathroom.”

“Am I dead?”

“No, of course not.”

“I have this memory. It wasn’t there before. I was fifteen, walking to Dairy Queen to see my friends. I was on the phone, wasn’t thinking, went to cross the street. I remember the sound of a car engine. I turned and stared into the oncoming headlights. I remember the car hitting me and then lying on my back, thinking how stupid I was. I didn’t hurt that much, but I couldn’t move, and everything was going dark. I couldn’t see, and I knew what was coming. I knew it meant the end of everything. Are you sure I’m not dead?”

“You are here with me and Mom,” Barry says. “You are very much alive.”

Meghan’s eyes flit back and forth, like a computer processing data.

She says, “I don’t know what’s real.”

“You’re real. I’m real. This moment is real.” But even as he says it, he isn’t sure. Barry studies his ex, thinking how she looks like the Julia of old, that black weight of Meghan’s death back in her eyes.

“Which set of memories feels more real to you?” he asks Julia.

“One isn’t more real than the other,” she says. “It’s just that I’m living in a world that aligns with my daughter being alive. Thank God. But I feel like I’ve lived through both of them. What’s happening to us?”

Barry releases a long exhale and leans back against the shower door.

“In the…I don’t even know what to call it…the past life where Meghan died, I was investigating a case involving False Memory Syndrome. There were things that didn’t add up. One night—this night, actually—I found this strange hotel. I was drugged, and when I woke up, I was strapped into this chair and facing a man who threatened to kill me if I didn’t recount the night Meghan died.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know his name. Later, I was put into a deprivation chamber. He paralyzed me, and then stopped my heart. As I was dying, I started experiencing these intense flashes of the memory I had described to him. I don’t know how, but my fifty-year-old consciousness was…returned to the body of my thirty-nine-year-old self.”

Julia’s eyes go a mile wide; Meghan sits up.

He says, “I know it sounds crazy, but I was suddenly back in the night Meghan died.” He looks at his daughter. “You had just walked out the door. I rushed after you and caught up to you seconds before you would’ve crossed the street and been hit by a speeding Mustang. Do you remember that?”

“I think so. You were weirdly emotional.”

“You saved her,” Julia says.

“I kept thinking it was all a dream, or some strange experiment I would be pulled out of at any moment. But days went by. Then months. Then years. And I just…I fell into the grooves of our life. It all felt so normal, and after a while, I never really thought about what had happened to me. Until three days ago.”

“What happened three days ago?” Meghan asks.

“This woman jumped off a building on the Upper West Side, which was the event that had set me down the road of that false-memory case to begin with. It was like waking up from a long dream. A lifetime of a dream. Tonight was the night I was sent back into that other life.”

Whether the expression on Julia’s face is disbelief or shock, he can’t tell.

Meghan’s eyes have gone glassy. She says, “I should be dead.”

He brushes her hair behind her ears the way he used to when she was a little girl.

“No, you’re right where you should be. You’re alive. This is what is real.”



* * *





He skips work that morning, and not just because he only got back to his apartment at seven a.m. He fears his colleagues’ memories of Meghan’s death will also have emerged last night—an eleven-year stretch of false memories where his daughter wasn’t alive.

When he wakes, his phone is blowing up with notifications from half his contacts list—missed calls and voicemails, frantic texts about Meghan. He doesn’t respond to any of them. He needs to talk with Julia and Meghan first. They should be on the same page with what they’re telling people, although he can’t imagine what that page might look like.

He walks into the NoHo bar around the corner from Meghan’s apartment to meet his daughter and his ex, finds them waiting for him in a corner booth, close enough to the open kitchen to feel the heat of the stove and hear the clang of pots and pans and food sizzling on a griddle.