Recursion

by Blake Crouch

  Most of downtown Montauk has been closed for the season. He was here once before, twenty years ago, with Julia and Meghan, on a crowded summer weekend when the streets and beaches were jammed with vacationers.

  Pinewood Lane is a secluded, sand-dusted road, cracked and buckled by tree roots. A half mile in, the cab’s headlights strike a gated entrance, where a plaque with the Roman numeral “VI” is affixed to one of the stone pillars.

  “Pull up to the box,” he tells the driver.

  The car edges forward, Barry’s window humming down into the door.

  He reaches out, presses the call button. He knows they’re home. Before he left New York, he called, pretending to be FedEx trying to schedule a late delivery.

  A woman answers, “Behrman residence.”

  “This is Detective Sutton with the New York Police Department. Is your husband at home, ma’am?”

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Yes. I need to speak with him.”

  There’s a pause, followed by the sound of hushed conversation.

  Then a man’s voice comes through the speaker. “This is Joe. What’s this regarding?”

  “I’d rather tell you in person. And in private.”

  “We were about to sit down to dinner.”

  “I apologize for the intrusion, but I just took a train here from the city.”

  The private drive is a one-laner that winds through stretches of grassland and forest on a gradual ascent toward a residence that’s perched atop a gentle bluff. From a distance, the house appears to be constructed entirely of glass, the interior glowing like an oasis in the night.

  Barry pays the driver in cash, including an extra $20 to wait for him. Then he steps out into the rain and climbs the steps toward the entrance. The front door swings open as he reaches the stoop. Joe Behrman looks older than his driver’s license photograph, his hair now streaked with silver and carrying just enough weight in his sun-damaged face to make his jowls sag.

  Franny has aged more gracefully.

  For three long seconds, he’s unsure if they’re going to invite him in, but then Franny finally steps back, offers a forced smile, and ushers him into their home.

  The open-concept space is a marvel of perfectly apportioned design and comfort. In daylight, he imagines the curtain of windows affords a spectacular view of the sea and surrounding forest preserve. The smell of something baking in the kitchen permeates the house and reminds Barry of what it was like to have things cooked from scratch instead of reheated in a microwave or brought to him in plastic bags by strangers.

  Franny squeezes her husband’s hand, says, “I’ll keep everything in the warming drawer.” Then she turns to Barry. “May I take your coat?”

  Joe leads Barry back into a study with glass on one wall and the rest covered in books. As they sit across from each other in the vicinity of a gas-log fireplace, Joe says, “I have to tell you, it’s a little unnerving to get an unannounced visit from a detective at dinnertime.”

  “Sorry if I spooked you. You’re not in trouble or anything.”

  Joe smiles. “You might have led with that.”

  “I’ll get right to it. Fifteen years ago, your wife went up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building on the Upper West Side and—”

  “She’s much better now. A completely different person.” A flicker of annoyance, or fear, crosses Joe’s face, which has taken on a measure of color. “Why are you here? Why are you in my house on what should be a peaceful night with my wife, digging up our past?”

  “Three days ago, I was driving home, and a call came in over the radio for a 10-56A—that’s a suicide attempt. I responded and found a woman sitting out on the ledge on the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. She said she was suffering from FMS. You know what that is?”

  “The false-memory thing.”

  “She described to me this entire life that never happened. She had a husband and a son. They lived in Vermont. Ran a landscaping business together. She said his name was Joe. Joe Behrman.”

  Joe becomes very still.

  “Her name was Ann Voss Peters. She thought that Franny had jumped from the place where she was sitting. She told me she came here and spoke to you, but that you didn’t know her. The reason she had chosen that ledge was because she held out hope that you would come to her rescue, making up for your failure to save Franny. But obviously, Ann’s memory was flawed, because you did save Franny. I read the police report this afternoon.”

  “What happened to Ann?”

  “I wasn’t able to save her.”

  Joe closes his eyes, opens them. “What do you want from me?” he asks, his voice just above a whisper.

  “Did you know Ann Voss Peters?”

  “No.”

  “So how does Ann know you? How did she know your wife had gone up on that same ledge with the intention of committing suicide? Why did she believe she had been your wife? That the two of you had a boy named Sam?”

  “I have no idea, but I would like you to leave now.”

  “Mr. Behrman—”

  “Please. I have answered your questions. I have done nothing wrong. Go.”

  While he can’t begin to guess why, he is certain of one thing—Joe Behrman is lying.

  Barry rises from the chair. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a business card, which he places on the table between the chairs. “If you change your mind, I hope you’ll call me.”

  Joe doesn’t respond, doesn’t get up, doesn’t even look at Barry. He’s holding his hands in his lap—to stop them from trembling, Barry knows—and staring intently into the fire.

  * * *

  As Barry rides into Montauk, he checks the schedules on his MTA app. He should have just enough time to grab a bite and make the 9:50 p.m. back into the city.

  The diner is nearly empty, and he slides onto a stool at the counter, still running on the adrenaline of his conversation with Joe.

  Before his food comes, a man with a shaved head enters and claims one of the booths. Orders coffee and sits there reading something on his phone.

  No.

  Pretending to read something on his phone.

  His eyes are too alert, and the bulge beneath his leather jacket suggests a shoulder holster. He has the concealed intensity of a cop or a soldier—eyes never still, always darting, always processing, even though his head never moves. It’s conditioning you can’t unlearn.

  But he never looks at Barry.

  You’re just being paranoid.

  Barry is halfway through his huevos rancheros and thinking about Joe and Franny Behrman when a glint of pain flashes behind his eyes.

  His nose begins to bleed, and as he catches the blood in a napkin, a completely different set of memories of the last three days crowds into his mind. He was driving home on Friday night, but no 10-56A ever came over the radio. He never rode up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. Never met Ann Voss Peters. Never watched her fall. Never looked at the police report regarding the attempted suicide of Franny Behrman. Never bought a train ticket to Montauk. Never interviewed Joe Behrman.

  Considered from a certain perspective, he was just sitting in his recliner in his one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, watching a Knicks game, and now he’s suddenly in a Montauk diner with a bloody nose.

  When he tries to look these alternate memories squarely in the eye, he finds that they carry a different feel from any memory he’s ever known. They’re lifeless and static, draped in hues of black and gray, just as Ann Voss Peters described.

  Did I catch this from her?

  His nose has stopped bleeding, but his hands have begun to shake. Throwing some money on the counter, he heads out into the night, trying to stay calm, but he’s reeling.

  There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us t
he sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

  He wonders if he’s going mad, if this is what it feels like to lose your mind.

  It’s four blocks to the train station. There are no cars out, the town is dead, and as a creature of a city that never sleeps, he finds the silence of this off-season hamlet unnerving.

  He leans against a streetlamp, waiting for the doors of the train to open, one of four people on the platform, including the man from the diner.

  The rain striking his hands is turning to slush, his fingers are freezing, but he wants them that way.

  The cold is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.

  HELENA

  October 31, 2008–March 14, 2009

  Day 366

  Two days after the first use of the chair, Helena sits in the control room, surrounded by the Imaging Team, staring at a huge monitor that shows a static, 3D image of her brain, the synaptic activity represented by varying shades of luminous blue.

  She says, “The spatial resolution is stunning, guys. Beyond what I ever dreamed of.”

  “Just wait,” Rajesh says.

  He taps the space bar, and the image comes alive. Neurons glowing and fading like a trillion lightning bugs brightening a summer evening. Like the smoldering of stars.

  As the memory plays, Rajesh magnifies the image to the level of individual neurons. Threads of electricity arcing from synapse to synapse. He slows it down to show the activity over the span of a millisecond, and still the complexity remains unfathomable.

  When the memory ends, he says, “You promised you’d tell us what we’ve been looking at.”

  Helena smiles. “I was six years old. My father had taken me fly-fishing to this stream he loved in Rocky Mountain National Park.”

  Rajesh asks, “Can you be specific in terms of exactly what you were remembering during these fifteen seconds? Was it the entire afternoon? Certain moments?”

  “I would describe it as flashes, which, in the aggregate, comprise the emotional return to the memory.”

  “For instance…”

  “The sound of water babbling over the rocks in the streambed. Yellow aspen leaves floating in the current, and how they look like gold coins. My father’s rough hands tying a fly. The anticipation of hooking a fish. Lying in the grass on the bank, staring down into the water. Bright-blue sky and the sun coming through the trees in shards of light. A fish my father caught quivering in his hands and his explaining that the red coloration under its lower jaw is why they call it a cutthroat trout. Later that afternoon, a hook going into my thumb.” Helena holds up the finger in question to show them the tiny white scar. “It wouldn’t come out because of the barb, so my father opened his pocket knife and cut the skin. I remember crying, his telling me to hold still, and when the hook was finally out, he held my thumb in the freezing water until it went numb. I watched the blood flowing out of the cut into the current.”

  “What is your emotional connection to that memory?” Rajesh asks. “The reason you chose it.”

  Helena looks into his big, dark eyes, says, “The pain of the fishhook, but mainly because it’s my favorite memory of my father. The moment when he was most quintessentially him.”

  Day 370

  They put Helena back in the chair and have her recall the memory again and again, breaking it down into segments until Rajesh’s team is able to assign individual synaptic patterns to specific moments.

  Day 420

  The first reactivation attempt occurs on Helena’s second Christmas Eve on the rig. They put her into the chair and fit her with a headpiece embedded with the network of electromagnetic stimulators. Sergei has programmed the apparatus with the synaptic coordinates of a single segment of Helena’s fly-fishing memory. When the lights go down in the main testing bay, Helena hears Slade’s voice in the headrest speaker.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  They’ve all decided not to tell Helena when the reactivation apparatus will fire, or which memory segment they’ve selected, the concern being if she’s anticipating the memory, chances are she may inadvertently retrieve it on her own.

  Helena closes her eyes and begins the mind-clearing exercise she’s been practicing for a week now. She sees herself walking into a room. There’s a bench in the middle, the kind one might find in an art museum. She takes a seat and studies the wall in front of her. From floor to ceiling, it transitions imperceptibly from white to black, passing through shades of subtly deepening gray. She starts at the bottom, taking her time scanning slowly up the length of the wall, fully observing the color of one section before moving on to the next, each subsequent region barely darker than the one before—

  The sudden pinch of a barbed hook jabbing into her thumb, her voice a shriek of pain, a red bubble of blood filling in around the hook as her father comes running.

  “Did you do it?” Helena asks, her heart slamming in her chest.

  “Did you experience something?” Slade asks.

  “Yes, just now.”

  “Describe it.”

  “A vivid memory flash of the hook puncturing my thumb. Was that you guys?”

  Cheers erupt from the control room.

  Helena begins to cry.

  Day 422

  They begin recording and cataloging the autobiographical memories of everyone on the rig, keeping strictly to flashbulb memories.

  Day 424

  Lenore allows them to record her memory of the morning of January 28, 1986.

  She was eight years old on a visit to the dentist’s office. The office manager had brought a television from home and set it up in the waiting room. Lenore was sitting with her mother before her appointment, watching coverage of the historic shuttle launch when the spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The information that encoded most strongly for her was the small television sitting on a rolling stand. The camera footage of the looping white clouds moments after the explosion. Her mother saying, “Oh dear God.” The severe concern in Dr. Hunter’s eyes. And one of the dental hygienists coming out of the back to stare at the television as tears ran down her face and under the surgical mask she still wore.

  Day 448

  Rajesh remembers the last time he saw his father before moving to America. They had taken a safari, just the two of them, in Spiti Valley, high in the Himalayas.

  He remembers the smell of the yaks. The sharp intensity of mountain sunlight. The frigid bite of the river. The light-headedness that plagued him from the 4,000-meter, oxygen-deprived air. Everything brown and barren, except the lakes like pale-blue eyes, and the temples with their vibrantly colored prayer flags, and the upper reaches of the highest peaks gleaming with bright snow.

  But especially the night Raj’s father told him what he really thought about life, about Raj, Raj’s mother, everything, in a fleeting moment of vulnerability as the two of them sat before a dying campfire.

  Day 452

  Sergei sits in the chair remembering the moment a motorcycle clipped the back of his car. The sudden impact of metal on metal. Seeing the bike somersault down the highway out the driver-side window. The fear, the terror, the taste of rust in the back of his throat and a sense of time slowing to a crawl.

  Then bringing his car to a stop in the middle of the busy Moscow street and stepping out into the smell of oil and gas leaking from the crushed motorcycle, and the biker sitting in the middle of the road, his chaps shredded down to skin, staring dumbfounded at his hands, most of the fingers shaved off, then shouting when he saw Sergei, the biker trying to stand and fight, then screaming when his leg, twisted imp
ossibly underneath him, refused to work.

  Day 500

  It is one of the first temperate days of the year. All winter, the rig has been pounded by storm after storm, testing the limit of even Helena’s threshold for claustrophobic working environments. But today is warm and blue, and the sea calm enough for the entire surface to lie glittering beneath the platform.

  She and Slade move leisurely around the running track.

  “How do you feel about the progress we’ve made?” he asks.

  “Great. It’s gone much faster than I had hoped. I think we should publish something.”

  “Really.”

  “I’m ready to take what we’ve learned and start changing people’s lives.”

  He looks at her, leaner and harder since they first met almost a year and a half ago. Then again, she’s changed too. She’s in the greatest physical shape of her life, and her work has never been more engaging.

  Nothing about Slade’s involvement in this project has matched her expectations. Since her arrival on the rig, he has left only once, and he’s been intimately involved during every step of the process. Both he and Jee-woon have attended every team meeting. Consulted on every material decision. She had assumed a man as busy as Slade would only parachute in occasionally, but his obsession has rivaled hers.

  Now he says, “You’re talking about publishing, and I feel like we’ve hit a wall.” They turn the northeast corner of the track and head west. “The experience of reactivating a memory is a disappointment.”

  “I’m shocked to hear you say that. Everyone who has undergone reactivation has come out reporting a memory experience far more vivid and intense than anything they’ve recalled on their own. Reactivation raises all vital signs, sometimes to the point of intense stress. You’ve seen their medical charts. You’ve had your memories lit up. You disagree?”