Recursion(7)

“Like Facebook? How is that even—”

“No, I mean when a person is infected with FMS, some of the people they know become infected. Their parents will share the same false memories, but to a lesser degree. Their brothers, sisters, close friends. There was this case study of a guy who woke up one day and had memories of an entirely different life. Being married to a different woman. Living in a different house, with different kids, working a different job. They reconstructed from his memory the guest list of his wedding—the one that he remembered, but never happened. They located thirteen from his list, and all of them also had memories of this wedding that never happened. Ever hear of something called the Mandela Effect?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

The next round comes. Barry drinks his shot of Old Grand-Dad and chases it with a Coors as the light through the front windows fades toward evening.

He says, “Apparently thousands of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he lived until 2013.”

“I have heard of this. It’s the whole Berenstain Bears thing.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You’re too old.”

“Fuck you.”

“There were these children’s books when I was a kid, and a lot of people remember them being called The Berenstein Bears, S-T-E-I-N, when it’s actually spelled Berenstain. S-T-A-I-N.”

“Weird.”

“Scary actually, since I remember Berenstein.” Gwen shoots her whiskey.

“Also—and no one’s sure if it’s related to FMS—instances of acute déjà vu are on the rise.”

“What does that mean?”

“People are struck, sometimes to a debilitating degree, with the sense that they’re living entire sequences of their lives over.”

“I get that sometimes.”

“Me too.”

Gwen says, “Didn’t your jumper say that her husband’s first wife had also thrown herself off the Poe Building?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. Just seems…unlikely.”

Barry looks at her. The bar is getting full and loud.

“What are you getting at?” he asks.

“Maybe she didn’t have False Memory Syndrome. Maybe this bitch was just crazy. Maybe don’t worry so much.”



* * *





Three hours later, he’s wasted in a different bar—a wood-paneled, beer-lover’s wet dream with the taxidermied heads of buffalo and deer protruding from the walls and a million taps lining the backlit shelves.

Gwen tries to take him to dinner, but the hostess sees him wavering on his feet in front of her podium and refuses them a table. Back outside, the city feels unmoored, and Barry is laser-focused on making the buildings not spin as Gwen holds him by his right arm, steering him down the street.

He suddenly realizes they’re standing on a street corner God-knows-where, speaking to a cop. Gwen is showing the patrolman her star and explaining that she’s trying to get Barry home but is afraid he’ll throw up in a cab.

Then they’re walking again, stumbling, the futuristic, nighttime brilliance of Times Square swirling like a bad carnival. He catches the time, 11:22 p.m., and wonders what black hole the last six hours fell into.

“I don’t wannagohome,” he says to no one.

Then he’s staring at a digital clock that reads 4:15. It feels like someone caved his skull in while he slept, and his tongue is as dry as a strip of leather. This isn’t his apartment. He’s lying on the sofa in Gwen’s living room.

He tries to go back and Scotch-tape the evening together but the pieces are shattered. He remembers Julia and the park. The first hour of the first bar with Gwen. But everything after is murky and tinged with regret.

His heart pounds in his ears. His mind races.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

Thinking about his father who died when he was young, and the enduring question—Did he know that I loved him?

And Meghan. Always Meghan.

When his daughter was a little girl, she was convinced a monster lived in the hope chest at the foot of her bed. It never crossed her mind in the daylight, but the moment the sun went down and he had tucked her in for the night, she would inevitably call out for him. And he’d hurry to her room and kneel beside her bed and remind her that everything seems scarier at night. It’s just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us.

How strange then, decades later and his life so far off the course he charted, to find himself alone on a couch in a friend’s apartment, attempting to assuage his fears with the same logic he used on his child all those years ago.

Everything will look better in the morning.

There will be hope again when the light returns.

The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.

And he shuts his eyes and comforts himself with the memory of the camping trip to Lake Tear of the Clouds. To that perfect moment.

In it, the stars were shining.

He’d stay there forever if he could.





HELENA