Recursion(83)
“OK. I’ll see you soon.”
He closes the hatch on his wife, floating in agony in the saltwater.
Rushing back to the terminal, he initiates the injection sequence. As the paralytic drug fires, he tries to sit down, but the pain is so all-encompassing he can’t stay still.
He heads through the lab and up the spiral staircase, through the office and the fire-bombed remnants of his and Helena’s home.
Back outside on the steps of the firehouse, it’s as dark as night and raining flecks of fire from the sky.
Barry descends the steps and walks out into the middle of the street.
A burning newspaper blows across the pavement.
On the other side of the road, a blackened figure lies in the fetal position, curled against the curb in its final resting place.
There is the whisper of hot wind.
Distant screaming and groans.
And nothing else.
It seems impossible that less than an hour ago, he was sitting in a snowy glade at ten thousand feet, overlooking Denver on a perfect spring afternoon.
We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves.
He can barely stand anymore.
His knees buckle; he collapses.
Sitting now in the middle of the street in front of the firehouse, watching the world burn and trying not to let the pain overwhelm him.
It’s been several minutes since he left the lab.
Helena is dying in the tank.
He’s dying out here.
He lies back on the pavement and stares up into the black sky at the fire raining down on him.
A bright rod of agony knifes through the back of his skull, and he registers a wave of relief, knowing that means the end is coming, that DMT is flooding Helena’s brain as she tunnels back into the memory of her walking toward a white-and-blue Chevy as a sixteen-year-old girl with her entire life ahead of her.
They will do all of it again, hopefully better next time.
And the motes of fire gradually fall slower and slower, until they’re suspended all around him in the air like a billion lightning bugs—
* * *
It’s cold and damp.
He smells the salt of the sea.
Hears waves lapping at rocks and bird cries carrying over open water.
His vision swings into focus.
There’s a ragged shoreline a hundred yards away, and mist hovers over the blue-gray water, obscuring the spruce trees in the distance, which stand along the shore like a line of haunted calligraphy.
The pain of his melting face is gone.
He’s sitting in a sea kayak in a wetsuit, a paddle across his lap, wiping blood from his nose and wondering where he is.
Where Helena is.
Why there are no memories of this timeline yet.
He was lying in the middle of the street in front of their firehouse in Denver just seconds ago, watching in agony as the sky rained fire.
Now he’s…wherever he is. His life feels like a dream, flitting from one reality to the next, memories becoming reality becoming nightmares. Everything real in the moment, but fleetingly so. Landscapes and emotions in a constant state of flux, and yet a twisted logic to it all—the way a dream makes sense only when you’re inside it.
He dips an oar into the water and pulls the kayak forward.
A sheltered cove slides into view, the island sweeping up gently for several hundred feet through a forest of dark spruce, interspersed with the white brushstrokes of birch trees.
On the lower flanks of the hill, a house sits on an expanse of emerald grass, surrounded by smaller buildings—two guesthouses, a gazebo, and down by the shore, a boathouse and pier.
He paddles into the cove, picking up speed as he approaches land, running the kayak ashore on a bed of crushed rocks. As he hauls himself awkwardly out of the cockpit, a single memory drops—sitting at that bar in Portland as Helena climbed onto the stool beside him for the third time in their odd, recursive existence.
“You look like you want to buy me a drink.”
How strange to hold three distinct memories of what is essentially the same moment in time.
He moves barefoot across the rocky shore and into the grass, bracing for the tidal wave of memories, but they’re late today.
The house is built on a stone foundation, the wood turned driftwood gray by decades of salt and sun and wind and punishing winters.
A massive dog comes bounding toward him through the yard. It’s a Scottish deerhound, the same color as the house’s weathered siding, and it greets Barry with slobbering affection, coming up on its hind legs to meet him eye to eye and lick his face.
Barry climbs the steps to the veranda, which boasts a commanding view of the cove and the sea beyond.
Opening the sliding-glass door, he steps into a warm living room built around a freestanding stone hearth that rises up through the heart of the house.
The small fire burning on the grate perfumes the interior with the scent of woodsmoke.
“Helena?”
No answer.
The house stands silent.
He moves through a French country kitchen with exposed beams and bench seating around a large island topped with butcher block.
Then down a long, dark corridor, feeling like a trespasser in someone else’s home. At the far end, he stops at the entrance to a cozily cluttered office. There’s a woodstove, a window overlooking the forest, and an old table in the center of the room sagging under stacks of books. A blackboard stands nearby, covered in incomprehensible equations and diagrams of what appear to be intricately forking timelines.