by Blake Crouch
Near Highway 1, she stops at a convenience store to gas up her Jeep. When the transaction is complete, she throws her credit card in the trash, lowers the soft-top, and climbs in behind the wheel. She doesn’t know where she’s going. This is as far as she planned last night on the rig, and her mind is racing with both exhilaration and terror.
There’s a dime in one of the cup holders. She flips it in the air and catches it against the top of her left hand.
Heads, she goes south.
Tails, she goes north.
* * *
The road winds along the craggy coastline, the sea yawning out into gray mist several hundred feet below.
She speeds through cedar forests.
Past coastal headlands.
Across windswept balds.
Through towns that barely warrant a name—tiny outposts on the edge of the world.
Her first night, she stops a couple hours north of San Francisco at a refurbished roadside motel called Timber Cove, which is perched on a cliff that overlooks the sea.
Sits alone by a fire pit with a glass of wine from a bottle that was made just twenty miles inland, watching the sun drop and considering what her life has become.
She takes out her phone to call her parents but hesitates.
At this moment, Marcus Slade is expecting her imminent arrival on his decommissioned oil platform to begin work on the chair, no doubt believing that the knowledge of its true, mind-blowing capability rests solely with him. When she fails to show up, he’ll not only suspect what she’s done, he’ll turn the world inside out looking for her, because without her, he doesn’t have a prayer of building—or, in a sense, of rebuilding—the chair.
He might even use her parents to get to her.
She sets the phone on the ground and crushes it under the heel of her boot.
* * *
She pushes north up Highway 1, taking a short detour to a place she’s always wanted to see on the Lost Coast—Black Sands Beach in Shelter Cove.
Then on through redwood groves and quiet seaside communities and into the Pacific Northwest.
A couple days later, she’s in Vancouver, heading up the coast of British Columbia, from city to town to village to some of the most beautifully desolate country she’s ever laid eyes on.
Three weeks later, while meandering through the wilds of northern Canada, a storm catches up with her as night is falling.
She stops at a roadside tavern on the outskirts of a village that’s a relic from the Gold Rush days, settles onto a stool at a wood-paneled bar, and drinks beer and bullshits with the locals as a fire burns in a massive stone hearth and the first snow of the season whisks against the window glass.
* * *
In some ways, the village of Haines Junction, Yukon, feels every bit as remote as Slade’s oil rig—this hamlet in the farthest reaches of Canada, tucked into an evergreen forest at the foot of a glaciated mountain range. To everyone in the village, her name is Marie Iden—first name inspired by the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and whose work led to the discovery of radioactivity, the last name by one of her favorite thriller writers.
She lives in a room above the tavern and gets paid under the table to tend bar on weekends. She doesn’t need the money. Her knowledge of future markets will turn her investments into millions in the years to come. But it’s good to keep busy, and it might cause questions if she has no apparent source of income.
Her room isn’t much—a bed, a dresser, and one window that overlooks the emptiest highway she’s ever seen. But for now at least, it’s all she needs. She makes acquaintances, no friends, and enough wanderers pass through the bar and the town to afford the occasional twenty-four-hour-lonely-heart liaison.
And she is lonely, but that emotion appears to be the norm here. It didn’t take her long to clock Haines Junction as a refuge for a distinct class of people.
Those looking for peace.
Those looking to hide.
And, of course, those hoping for both.
She misses the mental stimulation of her work. Misses being in a laboratory. Misses having a goal. It eats her up inside to wonder what her parents must make of her disappearance. She feels guilty every hour of every day that she isn’t building the memory chair that could preserve core memories for people like her mom.
It has crossed her mind that one solution to all of this would be to kill Slade. It’d be easy enough to get close to him—she could call Jee-woon, say she’s reconsidered the offer. But she doesn’t have it in her. For better or worse, she simply isn’t that person.
So she comforts herself with the knowledge that every day she remains in this secluded corner of the world, undiscovered by Slade, is a day she keeps the world safe from what she has the potential to create.
* * *
After two years, she procures fake credentials and identification documents from the Dark Web and moves to Anchorage, Alaska, where she volunteers as a research assistant for a neuroscientist at the university—a kind man who has no idea that one of his underlings is the preeminent research scientist in the world. She spends her days interviewing Alzheimer’s patients and recording their deteriorating memories over weeks and months as the disease progresses through its cruel, dehumanizing stages. The work is hardly groundbreaking, but at least she’s lending her intellect to a field of study she’s passionate about. The boredom and purposelessness of her time in the Yukon had driven her to the brink of depression.
There are days she wants desperately to start building the MEG microscope and the reactivation apparatus as a means for capturing and preserving the memories of the people she interviews, who are slowly losing themselves and the memories that define them. But the risk is too great. It could alert Slade to her work, or someone might, as she apparently did, accidentally make the leap from memory reactivation to memory travel. Humans cannot be trusted with technology of such power—with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb. The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive. Was she herself not changing the past now, and at her first opportunity?
But the chair has been unmade, she has vanished, and there is no threat to memory and time but the knowledge in her own mind, which she will take to the grave.
The thought of killing herself has occurred to her on more than one occasion. It would be the ultimate insurance policy against Slade finding her and forcing her cooperation. She’s gone so far as to make potassium chloride tablets in the event that day ever comes.
She keeps them with her at all times, in a silver locket around her neck.
* * *
Helena parks in a visitor’s space near the entrance and steps out into the sweltering August heat. The grounds are well kept. There are gazebos and water features and picnic areas. She wonders how her father is affording this place.
She checks in at the main desk and has to write her name on a visitor’s sign-in form. As the admin makes a copy of her driver’s license, Helena looks around, nervous.
She’s been three years on this new timeline. Slade’s false memories of their time together on his oil platform would have found him early in the morning on July 6, 2009, the same moment (in the previous timeline) when she died in the deprivation tank and returned to the memory of Jee-woon coming to her lab at Stanford.
If Slade wasn’t looking for her prior to that, he will be now. In all likelihood, he’s paid off someone here to alert him if Helena ever turns up.
Which she just has.
But she didn’t come here ignorant of the risk.
If Slade or one of his men tracks her down, she’s prepared to handle it.
Reaching up, she clutches the locket hanging from her neck.
“Here you are, hon.” The admin hands Helena a visitor’s badge. “Dorothy’s in Room 117, end of the
hall. I’ll buzz you through.”
Helena waits as the doors to the Memory Care wing slowly open.
The smells of cleaning products and urine and cafeteria food comingle to conjure the memory of the last time she set foot in an adult-care facility—twenty years ago, during the final months of her grandfather’s life.
She passes a common area, where residents in a heavily medicated stupor sit around a television showing a nature program.
The door to 117 is ajar, and she eases it open.
By Helena’s math, it’s been five years since she last saw her mother.
Dorothy is sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs, staring out the window toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She must have seen Helena in her peripheral vision, because she turns her head slowly toward the doorway.
Helena smiles.
“Hi.”
Her mother stares at her, unblinking.
No sign of recognition.
“Is it all right if I come in?”
Her mother lowers her head in a gesture that Helena takes for assent. Moving inside, she shuts the door after her.
“I like your room very much,” Helena says. There’s a muted television showing a news channel. Photographs everywhere. Of her parents in younger, better times. Of her as a baby, as a child, as a just-turned-sixteen-year-old sitting behind the wheel of their family’s Chevy Silverado, on the day she got her driver’s license.
According to the CaringBridge page her father made, they moved Dorothy into memory care after last Christmas, when she left the stove on and nearly caught the kitchen on fire.
Helena sits down beside her mother at the small, circular table by the window. There’s a bouquet of flowers that’s old enough to have shed a carpet of leaves and petals around the vase.
Her mother’s frailness is birdlike, and the late-morning light that strikes her face makes it look as thin as paper. Though only sixty-five, she looks much older. Her silver hair is thinning. Liver spots cover her hands, which still look remarkably feminine and graceful.
“I’m Helena. Your daughter.”
Her mother looks at her, skeptical.
“You have a really nice view of the mountains.”
“Have you seen Nance?” her mother asks. She doesn’t sound anything like herself—her words coming slowly, and with considerable effort. Nancy was Dorothy’s older sister. She died in childbirth more than forty years ago, before Helena was born.
“I haven’t,” Helena says. “She’s been gone a while now.”
Her mom looks out the window. While it’s clear over the plains and the foothills, farther back, black clouds have begun to coalesce around the high peaks. Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they’re living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you,” Helena says. “It’s not because I didn’t want to—I think about you and Dad every day. But these last few years have been…really hard. You’re the only person in the world I can tell this to, but I was given a chance to build my memory chair. I told you about it once, I think. You were the reason I built it. I wanted to save your memories. I thought I was going to change the world. I thought I’d gotten everything I ever dreamed of. But I failed. I failed you. And all the people like you, who could’ve used my chair to save a part of themselves from this…fucking disease.” Helena wipes her eyes. She can’t tell if her mother is listening. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “I brought something awful into the world, Mama. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and now I have to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I shouldn’t have come here, but…I needed to see you one last time. I need you to hear me say I—”
“It’s going to storm in the mountains today,” Dorothy says, still watching the black clouds.
Helena lets out a deep, trembling breath. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“I used to hike in those mountains with my family to a place called Lost Lake.”
“I remember that. I was there with you, Mom.”
“We would swim in the freezing water, and then lie out on the warm rocks. The sky was so blue it was almost purple. There were wildflowers in the meadows. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”
They sit in the silence.
Lightning touches the summit of Longs Peak.
Too distant to hear the thunder.
Helena wonders how often her father comes to visit. Wonders how hard it must be for him. She’d give anything to see him again.
Helena brings all of the photos over and takes her time showing each one to her mother, pointing to faces, saying names, recalling moments from her own memory. She starts to pick out memories she thinks her mother would count as her most special and important, and then realizes it’s far too intimate a choice to make for another person. She can only share her own.
And then the oddest thing happens.
Dorothy looks at her, and for a moment, her eyes have become clear, lucid, and fierce—as if the woman Helena has always known has somehow fought through the tangle of dementia and ruined neural pathways to see her daughter for a fleeting breath.
“I was always proud of you,” her mother says.
“You were?”
“You are the best thing I ever did.”
Helena wraps her arms around her mother, tears streaming.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, Mom.”
But when she pulls away, the moment of clarity has passed.
She’s staring into the eyes of a stranger.
BARRY
June 2010–November 6, 2018
One morning, he wakes up and it’s Meghan’s high school graduation.
She is salutatorian; she gives a great speech.
He cries.
And then an autumn comes when it’s just him and Julia and a very quiet house.
* * *
One night in bed, she turns to him and says, “Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life?”
He doesn’t know what to say to her. Strike that. He knows. He had always blamed Meghan’s death for his and Julia’s demise. It was their family—the three of them—that united him and Julia. When Meghan died, that bond disintegrated in the span of a year. Only now is he able to admit that they were always doomed. His second journey through their marriage has just been a slower, less dramatic death, brought on by Meghan growing up and pulling back and making her own way in life.
So yes, he knows. He just doesn’t want to say it.
This relationship was meant for a specific time, and no longer.
* * *
His mother dies exactly the way he remembers.
* * *
Meghan is already at the bar when he arrives, sipping a martini and texting someone. For a moment, he doesn’t see her, because she is just another beautiful woman at a chic Manhattan bar, having an early evening cocktail.
“Hi, Megs.”
She sets her phone facedown and slides off the stool, embracing him harder than usual, pulling him in close, not letting go.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“It’s fine, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She studies him dubiously as he takes his seat at the bar and orders a San Pellegrino with a small dish of limes.
“How’s work?” he asks. She’s in her first year as a community organizer for a nonprofit.
“Insanely busy and amazing, but I don’t want to talk about work.”
“You know I’m proud of you, right?”
“Yes, you tell me every time you see me. Look, I need to ask you something.”
“OK.” He sips his limey mineral water.
“How long were you unhappy?”
“I don’t know. A while. Years maybe.”
“Did you and Mom stay married because of me?”
“No.”
“You swear?”
“I swear. I wanted it to work out. I know your mother did too. Sometimes it just takes a while to finally call it a day. You may have contributed to our not noticing how unhappy we were, but you were never the reason we stayed.”
“Have you been crying?”
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
She’s good. He signed the separation agreement in his lawyer’s office an hour ago, and barring something unforeseen, a judge will sign a divorce decree within the month.
It was a long walk here, and, yes, for much of it he was crying. That’s one of the great things about New York—no one cares about your emotional state as long as there’s no blood involved. Crying on the sidewalk in the middle of the day is no less private than crying in your bedroom in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s because no one cares. Maybe it’s because it’s a brutal city, and they’ve all been there at one time or another.
“How’s Max?” Barry asks.
“Bye, Max.”
“What happened?”
“He saw the writing on the wall.”
“What writing is that?”
“ ‘Meghan is a workaholic.’ ”
Barry orders another mineral water.
“You look really good, Dad.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. I can’t wait to start hearing your terrible dating stories.”
“I can’t wait to start experiencing them.”