Recursion(74)

She takes a pen and turns to a blank page in the diary, writes down the date, and begins a note to herself to explain everything that has happened in her previous lives: Dear Helena—On April 16, 2019, the world will remember a memory chair you created. You have 33 years to find some way to stop this from happening. You are the only one who can stop this from happening…





When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

—KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE





BARRY





April 16, 2019

Barry is sitting in a chair in the shade, looking out across a forest of saguaro at a desert catching morning light.

The sharp pain behind his eyes is mercifully retreating.

He was lying on the seventeenth floor of a building in Manhattan, bullets whizzing past and riddling his body and the blood rushing out of him as he pictured his daughter’s face.

Then a bullet struck his head and now he’s here.

“Barry.” He turns to look at the woman sitting beside him—short red hair, green eyes, Celtic paleness. Helena. “You’re bleeding.”

She hands him a napkin, which he holds to his nose to catch the blood.

“Talk to me, honey, she says. “This is new territory. Thirty-three years’ worth of dead memories coming at you. What’s going through your mind right now?”

“I don’t know. I was…it feels like I was just in that hotel.”

“Marcus Slade’s?”

“Yeah, I was shot. I was dying. I still feel the bullets hitting me. I was yelling at you to run. Then I was suddenly here. Like no time had passed at all. But my memories of that hotel feel dead now. Black and gray.”

“Do you feel more like the Barry from that timeline or this one?”

“That one. I have no idea where I am. The only familiar thing to me is you.”

“You’ll have the memories of this timeline soon.”

“A lot of them?”

“A lifetime of them. I’m not sure what to expect for you. It may be jarring.”

He looks at the range of brown mountains. The desert is flowering. Birds are singing. There is no wind, and the chill of the night lingers in the air.

“I’ve never seen this place before.”

“This is our home, Barry.”

He takes a moment to let that hit him.

“What’s today?”

“April 16, 2019. In the timeline where you died, I used a DARPA deprivation tank to go back thirty-three years to 1986. And then I lived my life all over again, right up to this moment, trying to find a way to stop today from happening.”

“What happens today?”

“After you died in Slade’s hotel, knowledge of the chair leaked to the public, and the world went insane. Today is the day that the world will remember all of it. Until now, you and I are the only ones who knew.”

“I feel…strange,” he says.

He lifts a glass of ice water from the table and drinks it down.

His hands begin to shake.

Helena notices, says, “If it gets bad, I have this.” She lifts a capped syringe off the table.

“What is it?”

“A sedative. Only if you need it.”

It starts like a summer storm.

Just a super-cooled drop of rain here and there.

The rumble of distant thunder.

Dry lightning sparking across the horizon.

The initial memory of this timeline finds him.

First time he ever saw Helena she climbed onto the barstool beside him in a dive bar in Portland, Oregon, and said, “You look like you want to buy me a drink.” It was late, he was drunk, and she was like no one he had met—early twenties but an old soul with the most brilliant mind he’d ever encountered. The instant familiarity of being in her presence felt, not just like he’d known her all his life but as if he were waking up for the first time. They bullshitted until last call, and then she took him back to the motel where she was staying and fucked him like it was the last day on Earth.

Another one— They had been together several months, and he was already in love with her when she told him she could tell the future.

He said, “Bullshit.”

She said, “I’ll prove it one day.”

She didn’t make a big deal out of it. Said it in passing, almost like a joke, and he forgot all about her claim until December of 1990. They were watching the news one night, and she told him that next month the US would drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a mission called Operation Desert Storm.

There were other instances.

Walking into a theater to see The Silence of the Lambs, she told him the film would sweep the Oscars this time next year.

That spring, she sat him down in the small apartment they were living in, gave him a handheld tape recorder, and sang the chorus to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” two months before the song released. Then she recorded herself telling him that the governor of Arkansas would announce his candidacy for president of the United States by year’s end, and that he would win next year, defeating the incumbent and a strong third-party challenger.