Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Other smells emerge and merge in an aroma more complex than any wine. It’s one he would recognize anywhere—the house in Jersey City he once lived in with his ex-wife and his dead daughter.

  The smell of home.

  Suddenly, he tastes the beer and the constant presence in his mouth of the cigarettes he used to smoke.

  His brain fires an image that cuts through the dying whiteout—blurry and fuzzy at the edges, but quickly sharpening into focus. A television. And on the screen, a baseball game. The image in his mind’s eye as clear as sight, gray-scale at first, but then color bleeding into everything he sees.

  Fenway Park.

  The green grass under the burn of the stadium lights.

  The crowd.

  The players.

  The red clay of the pitcher’s mound and Curt Schilling standing there with his hand in his glove, staring down Todd Helton at the plate.

  It’s as if a memory is being built before him. First the foundation of smell and taste. Then the scaffolding of visuals. Next comes an overlay of touch as he feels, actually feels, the cool softness of the leather chair he’s sitting in, his feet propped up on the extended footrest, his head turning, and a hand—his hand—reaching for the bottle of Rolling Rock resting on a coaster on the table beside the chair.

  As he touches the bottle, he can feel the cold wetness of the condensation on the green glass, and as he brings it to his lips and tilts it back, the taste and the smell overwhelm him with the power of actuality. Not of a mere memory, but an event that is happening now.

  And he is keenly aware, not just of the memory itself, but of his perspective of the memory. It is unlike any recollection he has ever experienced, because he is in it, peering through the eyes of his younger self and watching the movie of his old life unfold before him as a fully immersed observer.

  The pain of dying has become a dim and distant star, and now he begins to hear sounds, just brushstrokes at first, muffled and indistinct, but slowly gaining in volume and clarity, as if someone were slowing turning up the dials.

  The announcers on the television.

  A telephone ringing in their house.

  Footsteps moving down the hardwood floor of the hallway.

  And then Meghan is standing in front of him. He’s staring up into her face, and her mouth is moving, and he hears her voice—too faint, too distant to make out any specific words, only to hear that familiar tone that has been quietly fading in his memory for eleven years.

  She is beautiful. She is vital. Standing in front of the television, blocking the screen, with her backpack slung over one shoulder, blue jeans, a turquoise sweater, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  This is too intense. Worse than the torture of asphyxiating and equally out of his control, because this is not a memory he is retrieving of his own volition. It’s somehow being projected for him, against his will, and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

  He wants out of his memory, but he can’t leave. All senses are fully engaged. Everything as clear and vivid as existence. Except he has no control. He can do nothing but stare through the eyes of his eleven-years-younger self and listen to the last conversation he ever had with his daughter, feeling the vibration of his larynx, and then the movement of his mouth and lips forming words.

  “You talked to Mom about this?” His voice doesn’t sound strange at all. It feels and sounds exactly the way it does when he speaks.

  “No, I came to you.”

  “Is your homework done?”

  “No, that’s why I want to go.”

  Barry feels his younger self leaning to see around Meghan as Todd Helton gets a piece of the next pitch. The third-base runner scores, but it’s a groundout for Helton.

  “Dad, you’re not even listening to me.”

  “I am listening to you.”

  Now he’s looking at her again.

  “Mindy is my lab partner, and we have this thing due next Wednesday.”

  “For what?”

  “Biology.”

  “Who else is going to be there?”

  “Oh my God, it’s me, Mindy, maybe Jacob, definitely Kevin and Sarah.”

  Now he watches himself lift his left arm to glance at his watch—one he will lose when he moves out of this house ten months from now in the wake of Meghan’s death and the explosive decompression of his marriage.

  It’s a hair past 8:30 p.m.

  “So can I go?”

  Say no.

  Younger Barry watches the next Rockies player walking to the plate.

  Say no!

  “You’ll be back no later than ten?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven is for weekends, you know that.”

  “Ten thirty.”

  “OK, forget it.”

  “Fine, ten fifteen.”

  “Are you kidding me with this?”

  “It takes ten minutes to walk there. Unless you want to drive me.” Wow. He had repressed this moment because it was too painful. She had suggested he drive her, and he had refused. If he had, she would still be alive.

  Yes! Drive her! Drive her, you idiot!

  “Honey, I’m watching the game.”

  “So ten thirty then?”

  He feels his lips curling up in a smile, remembers acutely the long-lost feeling of losing a negotiation with his daughter. The annoyance, but also the pride that he was raising a woman of grit, who knew her own mind and fought for the things she wanted. Remembered hoping she would carry that fire into her adult life.

  “Fine.” Meghan starts for the door. “But not a minute later. I have your word?”

  Stop her.

  Stop her!

  “Yes, Dad.” Her last words. Now he remembers. Yes, Dad.

  Barry’s younger self is staring at the television again, watching Brad Hawpe rifle a ball straight up the middle. He can hear Meghan’s footsteps moving away from him, and he’s screaming inside, but nothing’s happening. It’s as if he’s inhabiting a body over which he exerts no control.

  His younger self isn’t even watching Meghan as she moves toward the door. Only cares about the game, and he doesn’t know he just looked into his daughter’s eyes for the last time, that he could stop this from happening with a word.

  He hears the front door open and slam shut.

  Then she’s gone, walking away from her house, from him, to her death. And he’s sitting in a recliner watching a baseball game.

  The pain of not being able to breathe has left him. He has no sense of floating in that warm water or of his heart lodged dormant in his chest. Nothing matters but this excruciating memory he is being forced to endure for reasons beyond his comprehension and the fact that his daughter has just left his house for the last—

  His left pinkie moves.

  Or rather, he is aware of having moved it. Of the action being a result of his intention.

  He tries again. The entire hand moves.

  He extends one arm, then the other.

  He blinks. Takes a breath.

  He opens his mouth and makes a sound like a grunt—guttural and meaningless—but he made it.

  What does this mean? Before, he was experiencing the memory as an observer scrolls through a read-only file. Like watching a movie. Now he can move and make sound and interact with his environment, and every second, he is feeling more in control of this body.

  Reaching down, he lowers the recliner’s footrest. Then he’s standing, looking around this house he lived in more than a decade ago and marveling at how exquisitely real it is.

  Moving across the living room, he stops in front of the mirror beside the front door and studies his reflection i
n the glass. His hair is thicker and back to the color of sand, devoid of the silver, which, over the last few years, has been claiming more and more real estate on his thinning head of hair.

  His jawline is sharp. No sagging jowls. No puffy bags under his eyes or gin blossoms on the side of his nose, and he realizes he let his body go to absolute shit since Meghan’s death.

  He looks at the door. The door his daughter just walked out of.

  What the hell is happening? He was in a hotel in Manhattan, being killed in some kind of deprivation tank.

  Is this real?

  Is this happening?

  It can’t be, and yet it feels exactly like living.

  He opens the door and steps out into the autumn evening.

  If this isn’t real, it’s torture of the worst possible kind. But what if what the man said to him was true? I’m about to give you the greatest gift of your life. The greatest gift a person could ever hope to receive.

  Barry slams back into the moment. Those are questions for later. Right now, he is standing on the front porch of his house, listening to the leaves of the oak tree in his front yard twittering in a gentle breeze that also moves the rope swing. By all appearances, it is, impossibly, October 25, 2007, the night his daughter was killed in a hit-and-run. She never made it to Dairy Queen to meet up with her friends, which means this tragedy will happen in the next ten minutes.

  And she already has a two-minute head start.

  He isn’t wearing shoes, but he’s wasted enough time already.

  Pulling the front door to the house closed, he steps down into the lawn, leaves crunching under his bare feet, and heads off into the night.

  HELENA

  June 20, 2009

  Day 598

  Someone is knocking at her door. Reaching out in the darkness, she turns on the lamp and climbs out of bed in pajama bottoms and a black tank top. The alarm clock on her desk shows 9:50 a.m.

  As she moves through the living room and toward the door, hitting the button on the wall to raise the blackout curtains, she’s gripped by a powerful sense of déjà vu.

  Slade is standing in the corridor in jeans and a hoodie, holding a bottle of Champagne, two glasses, and a DVD. First time she’s laid eyes on him in weeks.

  He says, “Shit, I woke you.”

  She squints at him under the glare of the light panels in the ceiling.

  “Mind if I come in?” he asks.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Please, Helena.”

  She takes a step back and lets him enter, following him down the short entryway, past the powder room, and into the main living space.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  He takes a seat on the ottoman of an oversize chair, beside the windows that look out into a world of infinite sea.

  He says, “They tell me you aren’t eating or exercising. That you haven’t spoken to anyone or gone outside in days.”

  “Why won’t you let me talk to my parents? Why won’t you let me leave?”

  “You aren’t well, Helena. You’re in no state of mind to protect the secrecy of this place.”

  “I told you I wanted out. My mom’s in a facility. I don’t know how she’s doing. My dad hasn’t heard my voice in a month. I’m sure he’s worried—”

  “I know you can’t see it right now, but I am saving you from yourself.”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “You checked out because you disagreed with the direction I was taking this project. All I’ve been doing is giving you time to reconsider throwing everything away.”

  “It was my project.”

  “It’s my money.”

  Her hands tremble. With fear. With rage.

  She says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. You have ruined my dream. You have blocked me from trying to help people like my mom. I want to go home. Are you going to continue keeping me here against my will?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So I can leave?”

  “Do you remember what I asked you the first day you got here?”

  She shakes her head, tears coming.

  “I asked if you wanted to change the world with me. We’re standing on the shoulders of all the brilliant work you’ve done, and I came here this morning to tell you that we did it.”

  She stares at him across the coffee table, tears gliding down her face.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Today is the biggest day of my life and yours. It’s everything we’ve been working toward. So I came up here to celebrate with you.”

  Slade begins to untwist the wire holding the muselet to the bottle of Dom Perignon. When he gets it off, he tosses the wire cage on the coffee table. Then, gripping the bottle between his legs, he carefully pops the cork. Helena watches him pour the Champagne into the glasses, carefully filling each flute to the brim.

  “You’ve lost your mind,” she says.

  “We can’t drink these yet. We have to wait until…” He checks his watch. “Ten fifteen, give or take. While we wait, I want to show you something that happened yesterday.”

  Slade takes the DVD from the coffee table to the entertainment center. He loads it into the player and turns up the volume.

  Onscreen: a tall, emaciated man she has never seen before is reclined in the memory chair. Jee-woon Chercover is leaning over him, inking a tattoo of letters—M-i-r-a-n—into his left shoulder. The emaciated man lifts an arm and says, “Stop.”

  Slade steps into the frame. “What is it, Reed?”

  “I’m back. I’m here. Oh my God.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The experiment worked.”

  “Prove it to me.”

  “Your mother’s name is Susan. You told me to tell you that right before I got into the egg.”

  Onscreen, a huge grin spreads across Slade’s face. He asks, “What time did we do the experiment tomorrow?”

  “Ten a.m.”

  Slade turns off the television and looks at Helena.

  She says, “Was that supposed to make any sense to me?”

  “I guess we’ll know in a minute.”

  They sit in awkward silence, Helena watching the Champagne bubbles effervesce.

  “I want to go home,” she says.

  “You can leave today if you want.”

  She looks at the wall clock—10:10 a.m. It’s so quiet in her apartment, she can hear the hiss of gas escaping the flutes. She stares at the sea, thinking whatever this is about, she’s over it. She’ll leave the rig, her research, everything. Forfeit her money, her profit participation, because no dream, no ambition, is worth what Slade has done to her. She’ll go back home to Colorado and help take care of her mother. She couldn’t preserve her fading memories or stop the disease, but at least she can be with her for however much time she has left.

  Ten fifteen comes and goes.

  Slade keeps looking at his watch, a bit of worry now creeping into his eyes.

  Helena says, “Look, whatever this was supposed to be, I’m ready for you to leave. What time can the helicopter fly me back to California?”

  Blood slides out of Slade’s nose.

  Now she tastes rust, realizes blood is trickling out of hers as well. Reaching up, she tries to catch it in her hands, but it seeps through her fingers and onto her shirt. She rushes into the powder room, grabs a couple of washcloths out of the drawer, and holds one to her nose as she carries the other back out to Slade.

  As she hands it to him, she feels a stabbing agony behind her eyes, like the worst ice-cream headache of her life, and she can see by the look on his face that Slade is experiencing the same sensation.

  He’s smiling now, blood between his teeth. Rising from th
e ottoman, he wipes his nose and tosses the towel away.

  “Do you feel them coming?” he asks.

  At first, she thinks he’s talking about the pain, but it’s not that. She is suddenly aware of an entirely new memory of the last half hour. A gray, haunted-looking memory. In it, Slade didn’t come here with a bottle of Champagne. He invited her to come down to the testing bay with him. She remembers sitting in the control room and watching a heroin addict climb into the deprivation tank. They fired a memory of him getting a tattoo, and then they killed him. She was trying to throw a chair through the window between the control room and the testing bay when, suddenly, she’s here instead—standing in her apartment with a nosebleed and a killer headache.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “What just happened?”

  Slade lifts his Champagne glass, clinks it against hers, and takes a long sip.

  “Helena, you didn’t just build a chair that helps people relive their memories. You made something that can return them to the past.”

  BARRY

  October 25, 2007

  The windows of neighboring houses seem to flicker from the illumination of television screens inside, and there’s no one out except Barry, who’s running down the middle of a street that is empty and plastered with fallen leaves from the oaks that line the block. He feels stronger than he has in ages. There’s no pain in his left knee from the ill-advised slide across home plate during a softball game in Central Park that will not happen for another five years. And he’s so much lighter on his feet, by thirty pounds at least.

  A half mile in the distance, he sees the glow of restaurants and motel signs, Dairy Queen among them. He detects something in the left front pocket of his jeans. Slowing to a fast walk, he reaches in and pulls out a first-generation iPhone whose screensaver is a photo of Meghan crossing the finish line at a cross-country meet.

  It takes four attempts to unlock it, and then he scrolls contacts until he finds Meghan, calling her as he begins to jog again.

  It rings once.

  Voicemail.

  He calls again.

  Voicemail again.