by Blake Crouch
“So you still remember the original timeline, where you were my forty-six-year-old lab assistant?”
“Yeah. Those memories traveled with me.”
“Why don’t I have them?”
“Think about our experiment just now. You and I had no memory of it until we caught back up to the precise moment when Reed died in the egg and traveled back into his tattoo memory. Only then did your memories and consciousness from that previous timeline, where you tried to throw a chair through the glass, slide into this one.”
“So in nine years, on the night of November 5, 2018, I’m going to remember this whole other life?”
“I believe so. Your consciousness and memories from that original timeline will merge into this one. You’ll have two sets of memories—one live, one dead.”
Rain is sheeting down the glass, blurring away the world beyond.
Helena says, “You needed me to make the chair a second time.”
“That’s true.”
“And with your knowledge of the future, you built an empire on this timeline, and lured me with the promise of unlimited funding once I’d made my initial breakthroughs at Stanford.”
He nods.
“So you could completely control the creation of the chair and how it was used.”
He says nothing.
“You’ve basically been stalking me since you started this second timeline.”
“I think ‘stalking’ is a bit hyperbolic.”
“I’m sorry, are we on a decommissioned oil rig in the middle of the Pacific that you built solely for me, or did I miss something?”
Slade lifts his Champagne glass and polishes off the rest.
“You stole that other life from me.”
“Helena—”
“Was I married? Did I have kids?”
“Do you really want to know? It doesn’t matter now. It never happened.”
“You’re a monster.”
She gets up, goes to the window, and stares through the glass at a thousand shades of gray—the ocean near and the ocean far, stratified layers of cloud, an incoming squall. Over the last year, this apartment has felt more and more like a prison, but never more so than now. And it occurs to her as hot, angry tears run down her face that it was her own self-destructive ambition that carried her to this moment, and probably the one in 2018.
Hindsight is also having a clarifying effect on Slade’s behavior, especially with regards to his ultimatum several months ago that they start killing test subjects to heighten the memory-reactivation experience. At the time, she thought it was reckless on his part. It had resulted in the mass exodus of almost everyone on the rig. Now she sees it for what it was—meticulously calculated. He knew they were in the homestretch and wanted nothing but a dedicated skeleton crew to witness the chair’s true function. Now that she thinks about it, she isn’t even certain the rest of her colleagues made it back to shore.
Up until now, she has suspected her life might be in danger.
Now she’s sure of it.
“Talk to me, Helena. Don’t go inward again.”
Her response to Slade’s revelation will probably be the determining factor in what he decides to do with her.
“I’m angry,” she says.
“That’s fair. I would be too.”
Prior to this moment, she had assumed Slade possessed an immense intellect, that he was a master manipulator of people, as all industry leaders tend to be. Perhaps that’s still true, but the lion’s share of his success and fortune is simply attributable to his knowledge of future events. And her intellect.
The invention of the chair can’t just be about money for him. He already has more money, fame, and power than God.
“Now that you’ve got your chair,” she says, “what do you plan to do with it?”
“I don’t know yet. I was thinking we could figure that out together.”
Bullshit. You know. You’ve had twenty-six years leading up to this moment to figure it out.
“Help me streamline the chair,” he says. “Help me test it safely. I couldn’t tell you what I meant the first time, or even the second when I asked this question, but now you know the truth, so now I’m asking for a third time, and I hope the answer will be yes.”
“What question?”
He comes over and takes hold of her hands, close enough now that she can smell the Champagne on his breath.
“Helena, do you want to change the world with me?”
BARRY
October 25–26, 2007
He walks into his house and closes the front door, stopping again at the mirror by the coat rack to stare at the reflection of his younger self.
This isn’t real.
This can’t be real.
Julia is calling his name from the bedroom. He moves past the television, where the World Series is still on, and turns down the hallway, the floor creaking under his bare feet in all the familiar places. Past Meghan’s room, and then a guestroom that doubles as a home office, until he’s standing in the doorway of his and Julia’s room.
His ex is sitting in bed with a book opened across her lap and a cup of tea steaming on her bedside table.
“Did I hear you go out?” she asks.
She looks so different.
“Yeah.”
“Where’s Meghan?”
“She went to Dairy Queen.”
“It’s a school night.”
“She’ll be back by ten thirty.”
“Knew who to ask, didn’t she?”
Julia smiles and pats the bedspread beside her, and Barry enters their room, his eyes drifting over wedding photos, a black-and-white of Julia holding Meghan on the night of her birth, and finally a print over the bed of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which they bought at MoMA ten years ago after seeing the original. He climbs onto the bed and sits against the headboard next to Julia. Up close, she looks airbrushed, her skin too smooth, only beginning to suggest the wrinkles he saw at brunch two days ago.
“Why aren’t you watching your game?” she asks. The last time they sat on this bed together was the night she left him. Stared into his eyes and said, I’m sorry, but I can’t separate you from all this pain. “Honey. What’s wrong? You look like someone died.”
He hasn’t heard her call him honey in ages, and no he doesn’t feel like anyone died. He feels…an intense sense of disorientation and disconnect. Like his own body is an avatar for which he’s still getting a feel for the functionality.
“I’m fine.”
“Wow, you want to try that again, but more convincing this time?”
Is it possible that the loss he’s carried since Meghan’s death is bleeding from his soul through his eyes and into this impossible moment? That on some lower frequency, Julia senses that shift in him? Because the absence of tragedy is having an inverse, proportional effect on what he sees when he looks into her eyes. They astound him. Bright and present and clear. The eyes of the woman he fell in love with. And it hits him all over again—the ruinous power of grief.
Julia runs her fingers down the back of his neck, which puts a shiver through his spine and raises gooseflesh. He hasn’t been touched by his wife in a decade.
“What’s the matter? Something happen at work?”
Technically, his last day of work consisted of getting killed in a deprivation tank, and sent back into whatever this is, so…
“Yeah, actually.”
The sensory experience of it is what’s killing him. The smell of their room. The softness of Julia’s hands. All the things he’d forgotten. Everything he lost.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.
“Would you mind if I just lie here while you read?”
“Of course not.”
&nb
sp; And so he rests his head on her lap. He has imagined this a thousand times, usually at three a.m., lying in bed in his Washington Heights apartment, caught in that wearisome handoff between intoxication and hangover, wondering—
What if his daughter had lived? What if his marriage had survived? What if everything had not derailed? What if…
This isn’t real.
This can’t be real.
The only sound in the room is the soft scratch of Julia turning the page every minute or so. His eyes are closed, he’s just breathing now, and as she runs her fingers through his hair the way she used to, he turns onto his side to hide the tears in his eyes.
Inside, he’s a quivering heap of protoplasm, and it takes a herculean effort to maintain his mental composure. The pure emotion is staggering, but Julia doesn’t seem to notice the handful of times his back heaves with a barely suppressed sob.
He was just reunited with his dead child.
He saw her, heard her voice, held her.
Now he’s somehow back in his old bedroom with Julia, and it’s too much to take.
A terrifying thought creeps in—What if this is just a psychotic break?
What if it all goes away?
What if I lose Meghan again?
Hyperventilating—
What if—
“Barry, you OK?”
Quit thinking.
Breathe.
“Yeah.”
Just breathe.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Go to sleep.
Don’t dream.
And see if all of this still exists in the morning.
* * *
He is woken early by light coming through the blinds. Finds himself lying beside Julia, still wearing his clothes from last night. He climbs out of bed without disturbing her and pads down the hallway to Meghan’s room. The door is closed. He cracks it open, peers inside. His daughter sleeps under a mound of blankets, and it is quiet enough in the house at this hour for him to hear her breathing.
She is alive. She is safe. She is right there.
He and Julia should be in a state of grief and shock, just getting back to their house after spending all night in the morgue. The image of Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise—has never left him, although his memory of it has taken on the same haunted complexion as the other false memories.
But there she is, and here he is, feeling more at home in this body with every passing second. That clipped line of memories of his other life is receding, as if he’s just woken from the longest, most horrific nightmare. An eleven-year-long nightmare.
That’s exactly what it is, he thinks—a nightmare. Because this is feeling more and more like his reality now.
He slips into Meghan’s room and stands next to the bed, watching her sleep. Bearing witness to the formation of the universe couldn’t fill him with a more profound sense of wonder and joy and overwhelming gratitude at whatever force remade the world for Meghan and for him.
But a cold terror is also breathing down his neck at the thought that this might be a delusion.
A piece of inexplicable perfection waiting to be snatched away.
* * *
He wanders through the house like a ghost through a past life, rediscovering spaces and objects all but lost in his memory. The alcove in the living room where every Christmas they put up the tree. The small table by the front door where he stashed his personal effects. A coffee mug he favored. The roll-top desk in the guestroom where he paid the bills. The chair in the living room where every Sunday he read the Washington Post and New York Times cover to cover.
It is a museum of memories.
His heart is beating faster than normal, keeping time with a low-level headache behind his eyes. He wants a cigarette. Not psychologically—he finally quit five years ago after numerous failed attempts—but apparently his thirty-nine-year-old body physically needs a nicotine bump.
He goes into the kitchen and fills a glass with water from the tap. Stands at the sink, watching the early light brushstroke the backyard into being.
Opening the cabinet to the right of the sink, he pulls out the coffee he used to drink. He brews a pot and loads what he can of yesterday’s dishes into the dishwasher, then sets to work completing the task that was his for the duration of their marriage—washing the remaining dishes by hand in the sink.
When he finishes, the cigarettes are still calling to him. He goes to the table by the front door and grabs the carton of Camels and throws them in the garbage bin outside. Then he sits on the porch drinking his coffee in the cold, hoping his head will clear and wondering if the man responsible for sending him here is watching him right now. Perhaps from some higher plane of existence? From beyond time? The fear returns. Will he be suddenly ripped out of this moment and thrown back into his old life? Or is this permanent?
He tamps down the rising panic. Tells himself he didn’t imagine FMS and the future. This is far too elaborate, even for his detective’s mind, to have dreamed up.
This is real.
This is now.
This is.
Meghan is alive, and nothing will ever take her away from him again.
He says aloud, the closest thing to a prayer he’s ever made, “If you can hear me right now, please don’t take me away from this. I will do anything.”
There is no response in the dawn silence.
He takes another sip of coffee and watches the sunlight stream through the branches of the oak tree, striking the frosted grass, which begins to steam.
HELENA
July 5, 2009
Day 613
As she descends the stairwell toward the superstructure’s third level, her parents—Mom especially—are on her mind.
Last night, she dreamed of her mother’s voice.
The subtle Western twang.
The lilting softness.
They were sitting in a field adjacent to the old farmhouse where she grew up. A fall day. The air crisp and everything tinged with the golden light of late afternoon as the sun slipped behind the mountains. Dorothy was young, her hair still auburn and blowing in the wind. Even though her lips weren’t moving, her voice was clear and strong. Helena can’t remember a word she said, only the feeling her mother’s voice conjured inside of her—pure and unconditional love coupled with the bite of an intense nostalgia that made her heart ache.
She’s desperate to talk to them, but since the revelation two weeks ago that she and Slade built something far more powerful than a memory-immersion device, she hasn’t felt comfortable broaching the subject of communicating with her mom and dad again. She will when the time comes, but everything is still too fresh and raw.
She’s having a hard time coming to grips with what she thinks about her accidental invention, how Slade manipulated her, and what lies ahead.
But she’s working in the lab again.
Exercising.
Putting on a good face.
Trying to be useful.
As she leaves the stairwell for the lab, a bump of adrenaline plows through her system. They’re running test number nine on Reed King today, a new one. She’s going to experience reality shifting beneath her feet again, and there’s no denying the thrill.
As she approaches the testing bay, Slade swings around the corner.
“Morning,” she says.
“Come with me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Change of plan.”
Looking tense and disturbed, he leads her into a conference room and closes the door. Reed is already seated at the table, wearing torn jeans and a knit sweater, his hands clutching a steaming cup of coffee. His time on the rig seems to be putting some meat on his bones and erasing the junkie hollowness from
his stare.
“Experiment’s off,” Slade says, taking a seat at the head of the table.
Reed says, “I had fifty thousand coming to me for this one.”
“You’ll still get your money. The thing is, we already performed the experiment.”
“What are you talking about?” Helena asks.
Slade checks his watch. “We ran the experiment five minutes ago.” He looks at Reed. “You died.”
“Isn’t that what was supposed to happen?” Reed asks.
“You died in the tank, but there was no reality shift,” Slade says. “You actually just died.”
“How do you know all this?” Helena asks.
“After Reed died, I got in the chair and recorded an earlier memory of cutting myself while shaving this morning.” Slade lifts his head, touches a nasty slice along his neckline. “We pulled Reed out of the tank. Then I climbed in, died, and returned to my shaving moment so I could come down here and stop the experiment from going forward.”
“Why didn’t it work?” she asks. “Was the synaptic number not high—”
“The synaptic number was well into the green.”
“What was the memory?”
“Fifteen days ago. June twentieth. The first time Reed climbed into the tank, with the full tattoo of Miranda on his arm.”
It’s like something just detonated inside Helena’s brain.
“No shit he died,” she says. “That isn’t a real memory.”
“What do you mean?”
“That version of events never happened. Reed never got a tattoo. He changed that memory when he died in the tank.” Now she looks at Reed, starting to put the pieces together. “Which means there was nothing for you to return to.”
“But I remember it,” Reed says.
“What does it look like in your mind’s eye?” she asks. “Dark? Static? Shades of gray?”
“Like time had been frozen.”