Recursion(46)

Barry slides in next to Meghan and tosses his coat across the bench.

She looks worn out, bewildered, shell-shocked.

Julia isn’t much better.

“How you doing, Megs?” he asks, but his daughter just stares back at him, her face a blank wall.

He looks at Julia. “Have you spoken to Anthony?”

“I tried to call him but haven’t been able to get through.”

“You OK?”

She shakes her head, eyes shimmering. “But this isn’t about me today.”

They order food and a round of drinks.

“What do we tell people?” Julia asks. “I’ve gotten over a dozen calls today.”

“Same here,” Barry says. “I think for now we stay with the idea that this is FMS. At least that’s something they might’ve heard of.”

“Shouldn’t we tell people what happened to you, Barry?” Julia asks. “About that strange hotel and the chair and you living those eleven years for a second time?”

Barry remembers the warning he was given on the night he returned to the memory of Meghan’s death.

Tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.

“This knowledge we have is actually dangerous,” he says. “We have to keep all of this to ourselves for now. Just try to live a normal life again.”

“How?” Meghan asks, her voice unraveling. “I don’t even know how to think about my life anymore.”

“Things will be weird at first,” Barry says, “but we’ll fall back into the grooves of our existence. If you can say nothing else about our species, we’re adaptable, right?”

Nearby, a waiter drops a tray of drinks.

Meghan’s nose begins to bleed.

He feels a glint of pain behind his eyes, and across the table, Julia is clearly experiencing something similar.

The bar goes silent, no one talking, everyone sitting frozen at their tables.

The only sound is the music coming through the speakers and the drone of a television.

Meghan’s hands are trembling.

So are Julia’s.

And his.

On the television above the bar, a news anchor is staring into the camera, blood running down his face as he searches for words. “I, um…I’m going to be honest, I don’t exactly know what just happened. But something clearly has.”

The image changes to a live shot that overlooks the southern border of Central Park.

There’s a building on West Fifty-Ninth Street that wasn’t there a moment ago.

At well over two thousand feet, it’s easily the tallest thing in the city, and constructed of two towers, one on Sixth Avenue, the other on Seventh, which connect at the top to form an elongated, upside-down U.

Meghan makes a sound like a whimper.

Barry grabs his coat, slides out of the booth.

“Where are you going?” Julia asks.

“Just come with me.”

They move through the stunned restaurant and back outside, where they pile into Barry’s Crown Vic. He fires the sirens and they speed north up Broadway, then onto Seventh Avenue. Barry can only get them as close as West Fifty-Third before the street becomes impassable with traffic.

All around them, people are getting out of their cars.

They abandon Barry’s cruiser and walk with the crowd.

After several blocks, they finally stop in the middle of the street to see it with their own eyes. There are thousands of New Yorkers all around them, faces lifted skyward, many holding up their phones to take photos and videos of the new addition to the Manhattan skyline—the U-shaped tower standing on the southern end of Central Park.

Meghan says, “That wasn’t there a moment ago. Right?”

“No,” Barry says. “It wasn’t. But at the same time…”

“It’s been there for years,” Julia says.

They stare at the marvel of engineering called the Big Bend, Barry thinking that, up until this moment, FMS has flown largely under the radar—isolated cases wreaking havoc on the lives of strangers.

But this will affect everyone in the city, and many around the world.

This will change everything.

The glass and steel of the building’s west tower is catching parting rays of the setting sun, and memories of Barry’s existence with this building in the city are flooding in.

“I’ve been to the top of it,” Meghan says, tears running down her face.

It’s true.

“With you, Dad. It was the best meal of my life.”

When she finished her bachelor’s degree in social work, he took her to dinner at Curve, the restaurant at the top with spectacular views of the park. It wasn’t just the view that attracted them; Meghan had a food crush on the chef, Joseph Hart. Barry distinctly remembers riding an elevator that transitioned from a vertical ascent to a forty-five-degree climb through the initial angle of the curve to a horizontal traverse across the top of the tower.

The longer he stares at it, the more it feels like an object that is a part of this reality.

His reality.

Whatever that even means anymore.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” His heart is pounding; he feels unwell.

“Is this moment real?”

He looks down at her. “I don’t know.”