Recursion(97)

Meghan’s grass-stained knees after a soccer game, six years old, her face ruddy and happy.

Meghan’s first wobbly steps in their Brooklyn studio.

What is the reality of this moment?

The first time he touches his daughter in a hospital room—his hand to the side of her tiny cheek.

Julia taking him by the hand, leading him into the bedroom of their first apartment, sitting him down and telling him she’s pregnant.

Am I in my final seconds in the deprivation tank in Antarctica, reviewing my life as it slips away?

Driving home after his first date with Julia and the weightless elation of hope that he might have found someone to love.

What if this is nothing more than the last electrical firings of my dying brain? Frantic neuronal activity bending my perception of reality and conjuring random memories?

Is this what everyone experiences at death?

The tunnel and the light?

This false heaven?

Does this mean I’ve failed to restart the original timeline and the world is finished?

Or am I outside of time, being pulled into the crushing black hole of my own memories?

His hands on his father’s casket and the stark realization that life is pain and always will be.

Fifteen years old, getting called into the principal’s office where his mom sits on the couch, crying, and he knows before they even tell him that something happened to his father.

The dry lips and trembling hands of the first girl he ever kissed in junior high.

His mother pushing a shopping cart through the coffee aisle of a grocery store and him trailing behind, a piece of stolen candy in his pocket.

Standing with his father one morning in the driveway of their house in Portland, Oregon, the birds gone quiet, everything still, and the air as cold as night. His father’s face watching the moment of totality is more impressive than the eclipse itself. How often do you witness your parents awestruck?

Lying in bed on the second floor of his grandparents’ nineteenth-century New Hampshire farmhouse as a summer storm sweeps in from the White Mountains, drenching the fields and the apple trees and pattering on the tin roof.

The time he crashed his bike and broke his arm when he was six.

Light coming through a window and the shadows of leaves dancing on the wall above a crib. It’s late afternoon—he doesn’t know how he knows this—and the tones of his mother’s singing drift through the walls into his nursery.

My first memory.

He can’t explain why, but it feels like the memory he’s been searching for his entire life, and the seductive gravity of nostalgia is pulling his consciousness in, because this isn’t just the quintessential memory of home, it is the safe and perfect moment—before life held any real pain.

Before he failed.

Before he lost people he loved.

Before he experienced waking to the fear that his best days were behind him.

He suspects he could slip his consciousness into this memory like an old man into a warm, soft bed.

Live this perfect moment forever.

There could be worse fates.

And perhaps no better.

Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?

For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror.

Until Helena.

The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain.

That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

And he’s in the café again.

The waters of the Hudson turn blue and begin to flow. Color enters the sky, the faces of the customers, buildings, every surface. He feels the cool air of morning coming off the river into his face. He smells food. The world is suddenly vibrant, brimming with the sound of people laughing and talking all around him.

He’s breathing.

He’s blinking.

Smiling and crying.

And moving at last toward Julia.





Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

   —S?REN KIERKEGAARD





BARRY





November 4, 2018

The café occupies a picturesque spot on the banks of the Hudson, in the shadow of the West Side Highway. Barry and Julia share a brief, fragile embrace.

“Are you OK?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you came.”

The waiter swings by to take their drink orders, and they make small talk until the coffee arrives.

It is a Sunday, the brunch crowd is out in force, and in the initial, awkward silence with Julia, Barry pressure-checks his memories.

His daughter died eleven years ago.

Julia divorced him soon after.

He has never met Marcus Slade or Ann Voss Peters.

Never traveled back into a memory to save Meghan.