Recursion(48)

A firefighter staggers out of the entrance, whose door has been ripped off its hinges. He’s carrying an older man, and both their faces are blackened.

A fire lieutenant—a bearded giant of a man—steps in front of Barry, blocking his path. “Get back behind the tape.”

“I’m a cop, and that’s my daughter’s building!” He points up at the flames peeling out of the top floor window at the far end. “That’s her apartment flames are coming out of!”

The lieutenant’s face falls. He takes Barry by the arm and pulls him out of the way of a train of firefighters carrying a hose toward the nearest hydrant.

“What?” Barry asks. “Just tell me.”

“The fire started in that apartment in the kitchen. It’s spreading through the fifth and sixth floors right now.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

The man takes a breath, glances over his shoulder.

“Where’s my fucking daughter?”

“Look at me,” the man says.

“Did you get her out?”

“Yes. I am very sorry to tell you this, but she died.”

Barry staggers back. “How?”

“There was a bottle of vodka and some pills on her bed. We think she took them and then tried to make tea, but lost consciousness soon after. Something on the counter got too close to the burner. It was accidental, but—”

“Where is she?”

“Let’s go sit down and—”

“Where is she?”

“On the sidewalk, on the other side of that truck.”

Barry starts toward her, but suddenly the man’s arms are gripping him from behind in a bear hug.

“Sure you want to do that, brother?”

“Get off!”

The man lets him go, Barry stepping over hoses, moving in front of the truck, closer to the fire. The commotion dies away. All he sees are Meghan’s bare feet poking out from underneath the white sheet that’s covering her, which is soaking wet and almost translucent from the spray of the fire hoses.

His legs fail him.

He sinks down onto the curb and breaks as the water rains down on him.

People try to talk to him, to get him to come with them, to move, but he doesn’t hear them. He stares straight through them.

Into nothing.

Thinking—I’ve lost her twice now.



* * *





It’s been two hours since Meghan died, and his clothes are still damp.

Barry parks at Penn Station and starts walking north from Thirty-Fourth Street, just like he did after returning from Montauk on a midnight train, the night he stumbled into Hotel Memory.

That night, it had been snowing.

Now it’s raining, the buildings cloaked in mist above their fiftieth floors, and the air cold enough to cloud his breath.

The city stands strangely silent.

Few cars on the road.

Fewer people on the sidewalks.

The tears are cold on his face.

He pops his umbrella after three blocks. In his mind, it’s been eleven years since the night he wandered into Hotel Memory. Chronologically, it happened today, just in a false memory.

As Barry reaches West Fiftieth, it’s raining harder, the cloud deck lowering. He’s confident the hotel was on Fiftieth, and he’s pretty sure he headed east.

He keeps catching glimpses of the two bases of the Big Bend, luminous in the rain. The curve is hidden in the clouds a couple thousand feet above.

He’s trying not to think of Meghan in this moment, because when he does, he crumbles all over again, and he needs to be strong, needs his wits about him.

Cold and so tired, he’s beginning to wonder if perhaps he walked west that night, instead of east, when a red neon sign in the distance catches his attention.





McLachlan’s Restaurant


Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Open 7 Days

24 Hours



Barry moves toward the sign until he’s standing under it, watching the rain fall through the red illumination.

He picks up his pace.

Past the bodega, which he remembers, and then the liquor store, a women’s clothing store, a bank—all closed—until, near the end of the block, he stops at the entrance to the dark driveway, which slopes down into the subterranean space beneath a neo-gothic building, wedged between two higher skyscrapers.

If he walked down that driveway, he’d arrive at a garage door built of reinforced steel.

This is how he entered Hotel Memory all those years ago.

He’s absolutely sure of it.

There’s a part of him that wants to run down there, charge through, and shoot every fucking person he sees inside that hotel, ending with the man who put him in the chair. Meghan’s brain broke because of him. She is dead because of him. Hotel Memory needs to end.

But that would most likely only get him killed.

No, he’ll call Gwen instead, propose an off-the-books, under-the-radar op with a handful of SWAT colleagues. If she insists, he’ll take an affidavit to a judge. They’ll cut power to the building, go in with night-vision gear, do a floor-to-floor sweep.

Clearly, some minds, like Meghan’s, cannot handle the changing of their reality, and the collateral damage is also tragic—in addition to his daughter, three people died in her building from the fire, and over the radio on his drive to Penn Station, he heard more reports of people—unbalanced by the appearance of the Big Bend—wreaking havoc in the city.