Recursion(47)
* * *
Two hours later, Barry walks into the low-rent bar near Gwen’s place in Hell’s Kitchen and climbs onto the stool beside her.
“You all right?” Gwen asks.
“Is anybody?”
“I tried to call you this morning. I woke up with this alternate history of our friendship. One where Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was fifteen. She’s alive, right?”
“I just came from seeing her.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. She remembered her own death last night.”
“How is that possible?”
He waits for their drinks to come, and then tells her everything, including his extraordinary experience in the chair.
“You went back into a memory?” she whispers, leaning in close.
She smells like a combination of Wild Turkey, whatever shampoo she uses, and gunpowder, Barry wondering if she came straight here from the range, where she is a sight to behold. He’s never seen anyone shoot like Gwen.
“Yes, and then I started living it, but with Meghan alive this time. Right up to this moment.”
“You think that’s what FMS really is?” she asks. “Changing memories to change reality?”
“I know it is.”
On the muted television above the bar, Barry sees a photograph of a man he recognizes from somewhere. At first, he can’t tie the recognition to a memory.
Barry reads the closed captioning of the news anchor’s reporting.
[AMOR TOWLES, RENOWNED ARCHITECT OF THE BIG BEND, WAS FOUND MURDERED IN HIS APARTMENT ONE HOUR AGO WHEN—]
“Is this Big Bend building a product of the chair?” Gwen asks.
“Yes. When I was in that weird hotel, there was this guy, older gentleman. I believe he was dying. I overheard this conversation where he said that he was an architect, and when he got back into his memory, he was going to follow through on a building he always regretted not pursuing. In fact, he was scheduled to go in the chair today, which is when reality changed for all of us. I’m guessing they killed him for breaking the rules.”
“What rules?”
“They told me I was only supposed to live my life a little better. No gaming of the system. No sweeping changes.”
“Do you know why he’s letting people redo their lives? This man who built the chair?”
Barry slugs back the rest of his beer. “No idea.”
Gwen sips her whiskey. The jukebox has been turned off, and now the bartender unmutes the television and switches channels. Every network has been running nonstop coverage since the building appeared this afternoon. On CNN, an “expert” on False Memory Syndrome has been dredged up to speculate on what they’re calling the “memory malfunction” in Manhattan. She’s saying, “If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? This is why we’re seeing an epidemic of suicides.”
“You know where this hotel is?” Gwen asks.
“It’s been eleven years—at least in my mind—but I could probably find it again. I know it’s in Midtown, assuming it’s still there.”
“Our minds aren’t built to handle a reality that’s constantly changing our memories and shifting our present,” Gwen says. “What if this is only the beginning?”
Barry’s phone vibrates in his pocket against his leg.
“Sorry about this.”
He pulls it out and reads a text from Meghan:
Dad. I can’t do this anymore.
I don’t know who I am. I don’t
know anything except I don’t
belong here. I’m so sorry.
I love you always.
He slides off the stool.
“What’s wrong?” Gwen asks.
And starts running for the door.
* * *
Meghan’s cell keeps going straight to voicemail, and in the aftermath of the Big Bend’s appearance, the city streets are still clogged.
As Barry drives toward NoHo, he grabs his radio’s hand mic and calls New York One to request that a unit in the vicinity of Meghan’s apartment stop by for a welfare check.
“New York One, 158, are you talking about the 904B on Bond Street? We have multiple units and fire companies already on scene and ambulances en route.”
“What are you talking about? Which building?”
“Twelve Bond Street.”
“That’s my daughter’s building.”
There’s silence over the airwaves.
Barry tosses the hand mic, hits the lights, and screams through traffic, weaving in and out of cars, around buses, tearing through intersections.
As he turns onto Bond Street several minutes later, he abandons his car at the police barricade and runs toward fire engines shooting streams of water at the fa?ade of Meghan’s building, where flames are curling out of windows on the sixth floor. The scene is pure chaos—an array of emergency lights and cops putting up tape to keep the residents of neighboring buildings at a safe distance while the occupants of Meghan’s building flood out of the front entrance.
A cop tries to stop him, but Barry rips his arm away, flashes his badge, and pushes on toward the fire engines and the entrance to the building, the heat of the flames making his face break out in beads of sweat.