by Blake Crouch
“No. And they’re not going to fund you.”
“Then how did you get that?”
“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to fund you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because this?” He tosses her grant proposal onto the wreckage of her desk. “Is timid. It’s just more of what you’ve been doing at Stanford the last three years. It’s not big-idea enough. You’re thirty-eight years old, which is like ninety in academia. One morning in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to wake up and realize your best days are behind you. That you wasted—”
“I think you should leave.”
“I don’t mean to insult you. If you don’t mind my saying, your problem is that you’re afraid to ask for what you really want.” It occurs to her that, for some reason, this stranger is trolling her. She knows she shouldn’t continue to engage, but she can’t help herself.
“And why am I afraid to ask for what I really want?”
“Because what you really want is bank-breaking. You don’t need seven figures. You need nine. Maybe ten. You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”
She stares at him across the desk. “I never mentioned human trials in that proposal.”
“What if I were to tell you that we will give you anything you ask for? No-limit funding. Would you be interested?”
Her heart is beating faster and faster.
Is this how it happens?
She thinks of the fifty-million-dollar chair she has dreamed of building since her mom started to forget life. Strangely, she never imagines it fully rendered, only as the technical drawings in the utility patent application she will one day file, entitled Immersive Platform for Projection of Long-Term, Explicit, Episodic Memories.
“Helena?”
“If I say yes, will you tell me who your boss is?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
He tells her.
As her jaw hits the desk, Jee-woon pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her over the bankers’ boxes.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”
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 arrives five minutes early to find Julia already seated at a table under an umbrella. They share a brief, fragile embrace, as if they’re both made of glass.
“It’s good to see you,” he says.
“I’m glad you wanted to come.”
They sit. A waiter swings by to take their drink orders.
“How’s Anthony?” Barry asks.
“Great. Busy with the redesign of the Lewis Building lobby. Your work’s good?”
He doesn’t tell her about the suicide he failed to stop the night before last. Instead, they make small talk until the coffee arrives.
It’s Sunday, and the brunch crowd is out in force. Every table in the vicinity seems to be a geyser of gregarious conversation and laughter, but they sip their coffees quietly in the shade.
Nothing and everything to say.
A butterfly flutters around Barry’s head until he gently brushes it away.
Sometimes, late in the night, he imagines elaborate conversations with Julia. Exchanges where he says everything that has been festering all these years in his heart—the pain, the anger, the love—and then listens as she does the same. A clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.
But in person, it never feels right. He can’t bring himself to say what’s in his heart, which always feels clenched and locked up, encased in scar tissue. The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.
“I wonder what she’d be doing today,” Julia says.
“I hope she’d be sitting here with us.”
“I mean for work.”
“Ah. A lawyer of course.”
Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.
“She would argue about anything,” Julia says. “And she usually won.”
“We were pushovers.”
“One of us was.”
“Me?” he says with faux outrage.
“By five years old, she had you pegged as the weak link.”
“Remember the time she convinced us to let her practice backing up in the driveway—”
“Convinced you.”
“—and she drove my car through the garage door?”
Julia snorts a laugh. “She was so upset.”
“No, embarrassed.” For a half second, his mind’s eye conjures the memory. Or at least a piece of it. Meghan behind the wheel of his old Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle-clenched the steering wheel. “She was tenacious and smart and would’ve done something interesting with her life.” He finishes his coffee and pours another cup from the stainless-steel French press they’re sharing.
“It’s nice to talk about her,” Julia says.
“I’m glad I finally can.”
The waiter comes to take their food orders, and the butterfly returns, alighting on the surface of the table next to Barry’s still-folded napkin. Stretching its wings. Preening. He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.
As the food arrives, Barry imagines Meghan sitting at the table with them. The rough edges of adolescence sanded down. Her entire life ahead of her. He can’t see her face, no matter how hard he tries, only her hands, in constant motion as she talks, the same way her mother moves when she’s confident and excited about something.
He isn’t hungry, but he makes himself eat. It seems like there’s something on Julia’s mind, but she just picks at the remains of her frittata, and he takes a drink of water and another bite of his sandwich and stares at the river in the distance.
The Hudson comes from a pond in the Adirondacks called Lake Tear of the Clouds. They went there one summer when Meghan was eight or nine. Camped in the spruce trees. Watched the stars fall. Tried to wrap their minds around the notion that this tiny mountain lake was the source of the Hudson. It’s a memory he returns to almost obsessively.
“You look thoughtful,” Julia says.
“I was thinking of that trip we took to Lake Tear of the Clouds. Remember?”
“Of course. It took us two hours to get the tent up in a rainstorm.”
“I thought it was clear.”
She shakes her head. “No, we shivered in the tent all night and none of us slept.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes. That trip was the foundation of my never-again wilderness policy.”
“Right.”
“How could you forget that?”
“I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. He says finally, “Maybe watching shooting stars with my girls felt like a better memory.”
She tosses her napkin on her plate and leans back
in her chair. “I went by our old house recently. Wow, it’s changed. You ever do that?”
“Every now and then.”
In actuality, he still drives past their old house anytime he has business in Jersey. He and Julia lost it in a foreclosure the year after Meghan died, and today it barely resembles the place they lived in. The trees are taller, fuller, greener. There’s an addition above the garage, and a young family lives there now. The entire façade has been redone in stone, new windows added. The driveway widened and repaved. The rope swing that used to hang from the oak tree was taken down years ago, but the initials he and Meghan once carved at the base of the trunk remain. He touched them last summer—having somehow decided that a cab ride to Jersey at two in the morning after a night out with Gwen and the rest of Central Robbery Division was a good idea. A Jersey City cop had arrived after the new owners called 911 to report a vagrant in their front yard. Though stumbling drunk, he wasn’t arrested. The cop knew of Barry, of what had happened to him. He called another taxi and helped Barry into the backseat. Paid the fare back to Manhattan in advance and sent him on his way.
The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders—a pleasing contrast. Tourist boats go up and down the river. The noise of traffic is ceaseless on the highway above. The sky crisscrossed with the fading contrails of a thousand jets. It is late autumn in the city, one of the last good days of the year.
He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.
The check comes and Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.
“Thank you, Barry.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“Let’s not go a year again without seeing each other.” She raises her glass of ice water. “To our birthday girl.”
“To our birthday girl.” He can feel the cloud of grief coalescing in his chest, but he breathes through it, and when he speaks again his voice is almost normal. “Twenty-six years old.”
* * *
After brunch, he walks to Central Park. The silence of his apartment feels like a threat on Meghan’s birthday, the last five of which have not gone well.
Seeing Julia always upends him. For a long time after their marriage ended, he thought he missed his ex. Thought he would never get over her. He would often dream of her and wake to the ache of her absence eating him alive. The dreams cut him deeply—half memory, half fantasy—because in them, she felt like the Julia of old. The smile. The unhesitating laugh. The lightness of being. She was the person who stole his heart again. All through the following morning, she’d be on his mind, the totality of that loss staring him down, unblinking, until the emotional hangover of the dream finally released its hold on him like a slowly lifting fog. He saw Julia once, in the wake of one such dream—an unexpected bump-in at the party of an old friend. To his surprise, he felt nothing as they chatted stiffly on the veranda. Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn’t want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreachable as the dead.
The trees in the park are peaking after a hard freeze several nights ago, the leaves all frost-burned into late autumn brilliance.
He finds a spot in the Ramble, takes off his shoes and socks, and leans back against a perfectly slanted tree. He pulls out his phone and tries to read the biography he’s been plodding through for nearly a year, but concentration is elusive.
Ann Voss Peters haunts him. The way she fell without a sound, her body rigid and upright. It took five seconds, and he didn’t look away when she hit the Lincoln Town Car, parked on the curb below.
When he isn’t replaying their conversation, he’s grappling with the fear. Pressure-checking his memories. Testing their fidelity. Wondering—
How would I know if one had changed? What would it feel like?
Red and orange leaves drift down through the sunlight, accumulating all around him in the dappled shade. From his vantage in the trees, he watches people walking the trails, moseying by the lake. Most are with others, but some are alone like him.
His phone pops a text from his friend Gwendoline Archer, leader of the Hercules Team, a counterterrorism SWAT unit in the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit.
Thinking about you today. You OK?
He writes her back:
Yeah. Just saw Julia.
How was that?
Good. Hard. What are you up to?
Just finished a ride. Drinking at
Isaac’s. Want some company?
God yes. OMW.
* * *
It’s a forty-minute walk to the bar near Gwen’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, whose only apparent virtue is its forty-five-year longevity. Prickly bartenders serve boring domestics on tap and not a single whiskey whose bottle you couldn’t buy in a store for under thirty bucks. The bathrooms are disgusting and still contain stocked condom dispensers. The jukebox plays ’70s and ’80s rock exclusively, and if no one feeds the box, there is no music.
Gwen is sitting at the far end of the bar, wearing biker shorts and a faded Brooklyn Marathon T-shirt, left-swiping on a dating app as Barry approaches.
He says, “I thought you gave up on that.”
“For a while, I gave up on your gender entirely, but my therapist is all the way up my ass to try again.”
She slides off the stool and embraces him, the faint smell of sweat from her ride combining with the remnants of body wash and deodorant, resulting in something like a salted caramel.
He says, “Thanks for checking in on me.”
“You shouldn’t be alone today.”
She’s fifteen years younger, in her mid-thirties, and at six feet, four inches, the tallest woman he knows personally. With short blond hair and Scandinavian features, she’s not beautiful exactly, but regal. Often severe without trying. He once told her she had resting monarch face.
They met and bonded during a bank robbery turned hostage situation a few years back. The next Christmas, they hooked up in one of the more embarrassing moments of Barry’s existence. It was one of the many NYPD holiday parties, and the night had gotten away from them both. He woke in her apartment at three in the morning with the room still spinning. His mistake was trying to sneak out when he wasn’t ready for consciousness. He threw up on the floor beside her bed, and was in the midst of trying to clean it up when Gwen woke and yelled at him, “I will clean up your puke in the morning, just go!” He remembers nothing of the sex, if they had it or attempted to, and he can only hope she shares the same merciful gap in her memory.
Regardless, neither of them has acknowledged it since.
The bartender arrives to take Barry’s order and deliver another Wild Turkey to Gwen. They drink and bullshit for a while, and as Barry finally registers the world beginning to loosen, Gwen says, “I heard you caught an FMS suicide Friday night.”
“Yeah.”
He fills her in on all the details.
“Be honest,” she says. “How freaked out are you?”
“Well, I did make myself an Internet expert on FMS yesterday.”
“And?”
“Eight months ago, the Centers for Disease Control identified sixty-four cases with similarities in the Northeast. In each case, a patient presented with complaints of acute false memories. Not just one or two. A fully imagined alternate history covering large swaths of their life up until that moment. Usually going back months or years. In some instances, decades.”
“So do they lose their memories of their real life?”
“No, they suddenly have two sets of memories. One true, one false. In some cases, patients felt like their memories and consciousness had moved from one life into another. In others, patients experienced a sudden ‘flash-in’ of false memories from a life they never lived.”
“What causes it?”
“Nobody knows. They haven’t identified a single physiological or neurological abnormality in those who are affected. The only symptoms are the false memories themselves. Oh, and about ten percent of people who get it kill themselves.”
“Jesus.”
“The number could be higher. Way higher. That’s the outcome of known cases.”
“Suicides are up this year in the five boroughs.”
Barry catches the bartender’s eye, gives the signal for another round.
Gwen asks, “Contagious?”
“I couldn’t find a definitive answer. The CDC hasn’t found a pathogen, so it doesn’t seem to be blood- or airborne. Yet. This article in The New England Journal of Medicine speculated that it actually spreads through a carrier’s social network.”
“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.