Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Meghan laughs, and something about the way her mouth moves makes him see the little girl in her face again, though only for a fleeting second.

  Barry says, “It’s your birthday Sunday.”

  “I know.”

  “Mom and I still want to take you out for brunch.”

  “Are you sure it won’t be weird?”

  “Oh, it will be, but we want to do it anyway if you’re up for it. We want to be OK again.”

  “I’m in,” Meghan says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I want us to be OK too.”

  * * *

  After drinks with Meghan, he grabs a bite at his favorite pizza joint in the city—an Upper West Side hole-in-the-wall that’s not too far from his precinct. It’s a midnight kind of place with attitude, bad lighting, and no seating—just a bar that lines the perimeter of the restaurant, everyone standing, holding greasy paper plates with massive slices and giant cups of oversweetened soft drinks.

  It’s Friday night and loud and perfect.

  He considers a drink, but decides drinking alone post-signing-divorce-papers is too pathetic, and heads for his car instead. Drives the streets of his city feeling happy and emotional and overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of being alive. He hopes Julia is OK. He texted her after he signed the papers. Wrote that he was glad they were going to be friends, and he would always be there for her.

  As he sits in traffic, he checks his phone again to see if she responded.

  Now there’s a text from her:

  Here for you always. That will never change.

  His heart is full in a way it hasn’t been in as long as he can remember.

  He looks up through the windshield. Traffic still isn’t moving, even though the light ahead is green. Cops are diverting cars away from the street ahead.

  He rolls down his window and shouts to the nearest cop, “What’s going on?”

  The man motions for him to move along.

  Barry hits his grille lights and bloops his siren. That gets the young patrolman’s attention. He comes running over, all apologies. “Sorry, they got us closing down the street ahead. It’s pretty chaotic.”

  “What happened?”

  “Lady jumped off the building on the next block.”

  “Which one?”

  “That skyscraper right there.”

  Barry looks up at a white Art Deco tower with a crown of glass and steel, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

  “What floor?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What floor did she jump from?”

  An ambulance screams past, lights and sirens blaring as it barrels through the intersection straight ahead.

  “Forty-one. Looks like another FMS suicide.”

  Barry pulls his car over to the curb and climbs out. He jogs across the street, flashing his badge at the patrolmen cordoning off the area.

  He slows down as he approaches a circle of cops, EMTs, and firemen, all gathered around a black Lincoln Town Car whose roof has been spectacularly crushed.

  Walking over, he had steeled himself to see the grotesque effects a four-hundred-foot fall wreaks on the human body, but Ann Voss Peters looks almost serene. The only visible external damage is a small trickle of blood from her ears and mouth. She landed on her back, and in such a way that the smashed roof of the Town Car appears to be cradling her. Her legs are crossed at her ankles, and her left arm is crossed over her chest and resting against her face, as if she’s merely sleeping.

  An angel fallen from the sky.

  * * *

  It wasn’t that he’d forgotten. His remembrance of Hotel Memory, his death in the deprivation tank, and return to the night Meghan died was always there, on the outskirts of awareness—a bundle of grayed-out memories.

  But there was also a dreamlike quality to the last eleven years. He was swept up in the minutiae of living, and with no tangible connection to the life he’d been ripped out of, it was all too easy to relegate what had happened to the deepest recesses of consciousness and memory.

  But now, sitting in a café on the banks of the Hudson River with Julia and Meghan on the morning of his daughter’s twenty-sixth birthday, he has a blinding awareness of being in this moment for a second time. It all comes back to him in a rush of memory as clear as water. He and Julia sat at a table not far from this spot, imagining what Meghan would be doing if she were alive today. He had posited she would be a lawyer. They had laughed about that and reminisced about the time she drove his car through the garage door, before comparing memories of a family vacation to the headwaters of the Hudson.

  Now his daughter is sitting across from him, and for the first time in a long while, he is floored by her presence. By the fact that she exists. The feeling is as strong as the early days of his return to the memory, when every second shone like a gift.

  * * *

  Barry shudders into consciousness at three in the morning, roused by a pounding in his apartment. He rolls out of bed, slowly emerging from a shroud of sleep as he staggers out of his room. Jim-Bob, his rescue, is barking fiercely at the door.

  A glance through the peephole snaps him wide-awake—Julia is standing in the bleary light of the hall. He turns the dead bolt, throws the chain, pulls the door open. Her eyes are swollen from crying, her hair is catastrophic, and she’s wearing a trench coat over a pair of pajamas, her shoulders dusted with snow.

  She says, “I tried to call. Your phone was off.”

  “What happened?”

  “Can I come in?”

  He steps back, and she enters his apartment, a manic intensity in her eyes. Gently taking her arm, he guides her over to the sofa.

  “You’re scaring me, Jules. What’s wrong?”

  She looks at him, trembling. “Have you heard of False Memory Syndrome?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I think I have it.”

  His stomach tightens. “What makes you say that?”

  “An hour ago, I woke up with a splitting headache and a headful of memories of this other life. Gray, listless memories.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was in high school. You and I divorced a year later. I married a man named Anthony. It was all so real. Like I had really lived it. You and I had brunch yesterday at that same café on the river, only Meghan wasn’t there. She’d been dead eleven years. I woke up tonight, alone in my bed, no Anthony, realizing that, in actuality, you and I had lunch with her yesterday. That she’s alive.” Julia’s hands are shaking violently. “What’s real, Barry? Which set of memories is the truth?” She breaks down. “Is our daughter alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I remember going to the morgue with you. I saw her broken body. She was gone. I remember like it happened yesterday. They had to carry me out. I was screaming. You remember, don’t you? Did it happen? Do you remember her dying?”

  Barry sits on the couch in his boxers, coming to the realization that this all makes some terrible kind of sense. Ann Voss Peters jumped off the Poe Building three nights ago. He had brunch with Meghan and Julia yesterday. Which means that tonight is the night he was sent back into the memory of the last time he saw his daughter alive. Catching back up to this moment must have unleashed all of Julia’s memories of that lifeless timeline when Meghan died.

  “Barry, am I losing my mind?”

  And then it hits him—if Julia has those memories, so does Meghan.

  He looks at Julia. “We have to go.”

  “Why?”

  He stands. “Right now.”

  “Barry—”

  “Listen to me—you’re not losing your mind, you’re not crazy.”

  “You remember her dying too?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I promise I will
explain everything, but right now, we have to go to Meghan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s experiencing the same thing you are. She’s remembering her own death.”

  * * *

  Barry takes the West Side Highway, heading south through a snowstorm out of Washington Heights and the northern reaches of Manhattan, the road abandoned at this time of night.

  Julia is holding her phone to her ear, saying, “Meghan, please call me when you get this. I’m worried about you. Your father and I are coming over right now.” She looks across the center console at Barry, says, “She’s probably just sleeping. It is the middle of the night.”

  They ride through the empty streets of lower Manhattan, cutting across the island into NoHo, the tires sliding on the slick pavement.

  Barry pulls to a stop in front of Meghan’s building, and they climb out into the pouring snow.

  At the entrance, he presses the buzzer for Meghan’s apartment five times, but she doesn’t answer.

  He turns to Julia. “Do you have a key?”

  “No.”

  He starts ringing other apartments until someone finally buzzes them in.

  Meghan’s building is a sketchy-looking prewar walk-up. He and Julia race up six flights of a gloomy stairwell to the top floor and run down a dimly lit hall. Apartment J is at the end—Meghan’s bicycle is leaning against the window to the fire escape.

  He bangs on the door with his fist. No answer. Taking a step back, he raises his right leg and front-kicks the door. A spike of pain shoots up his leg, but the door only shudders.

  He kicks it again, harder this time.

  It bursts open, and they rush inside into darkness.

  “Meghan!” His hand fumbles across the wall and hits the lights, which illuminate a tiny studio. There’s a sleeping alcove on the right—empty. An efficiency kitchen to the left. A short hallway leading to the bathroom.

  He starts toward it, but Julia rushes past him, shouting her daughter’s name.

  At the end of the hall, she drops to her knees, says, “Honey, oh God, I’m right here.”

  Barry reaches the end of the hall, and his heart falls. Meghan is lying on the linoleum floor and Julia is down on the ground next to her, running her hand across her head. Meghan’s eyes are open, and for an agonizing second, he thinks she’s dead.

  She blinks.

  Barry carefully lifts Meghan’s right arm, checking the pulse in her radial artery. It’s strong, maybe too strong, and quite fast. He wonders—does she recall the trauma of being struck by a two-ton object traveling sixty miles per hour? The moment her consciousness stopped? Whatever came after? What would it be like to remember your own death? How would someone even recall a state of unbeing? As blackness? Nothingness? It strikes him, like dividing by zero, as an impossibility.

  “Meghan,” he says softly, “can you hear me?”

  She stirs, staring up at him now, and her eyes look full, as if she actually sees him.

  “Dad?”

  “Mom and I are right here, honey.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In your apartment, on the floor of your bathroom.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I have this memory. It wasn’t there before. I was fifteen, walking to Dairy Queen to see my friends. I was on the phone, wasn’t thinking, went to cross the street. I remember the sound of a car engine. I turned and stared into the oncoming headlights. I remember the car hitting me and then lying on my back, thinking how stupid I was. I didn’t hurt that much, but I couldn’t move, and everything was going dark. I couldn’t see, and I knew what was coming. I knew it meant the end of everything. Are you sure I’m not dead?”

  “You are here with me and Mom,” Barry says. “You are very much alive.”

  Meghan’s eyes flit back and forth, like a computer processing data.

  She says, “I don’t know what’s real.”

  “You’re real. I’m real. This moment is real.” But even as he says it, he isn’t sure. Barry studies his ex, thinking how she looks like the Julia of old, that black weight of Meghan’s death back in her eyes.

  “Which set of memories feels more real to you?” he asks Julia.

  “One isn’t more real than the other,” she says. “It’s just that I’m living in a world that aligns with my daughter being alive. Thank God. But I feel like I’ve lived through both of them. What’s happening to us?”

  Barry releases a long exhale and leans back against the shower door.

  “In the…I don’t even know what to call it…the past life where Meghan died, I was investigating a case involving False Memory Syndrome. There were things that didn’t add up. One night—this night, actually—I found this strange hotel. I was drugged, and when I woke up, I was strapped into this chair and facing a man who threatened to kill me if I didn’t recount the night Meghan died.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know his name. Later, I was put into a deprivation chamber. He paralyzed me, and then stopped my heart. As I was dying, I started experiencing these intense flashes of the memory I had described to him. I don’t know how, but my fifty-year-old consciousness was…returned to the body of my thirty-nine-year-old self.”

  Julia’s eyes go a mile wide; Meghan sits up.

  He says, “I know it sounds crazy, but I was suddenly back in the night Meghan died.” He looks at his daughter. “You had just walked out the door. I rushed after you and caught up to you seconds before you would’ve crossed the street and been hit by a speeding Mustang. Do you remember that?”

  “I think so. You were weirdly emotional.”

  “You saved her,” Julia says.

  “I kept thinking it was all a dream, or some strange experiment I would be pulled out of at any moment. But days went by. Then months. Then years. And I just…I fell into the grooves of our life. It all felt so normal, and after a while, I never really thought about what had happened to me. Until three days ago.”

  “What happened three days ago?” Meghan asks.

  “This woman jumped off a building on the Upper West Side, which was the event that had set me down the road of that false-memory case to begin with. It was like waking up from a long dream. A lifetime of a dream. Tonight was the night I was sent back into that other life.”

  Whether the expression on Julia’s face is disbelief or shock, he can’t tell.

  Meghan’s eyes have gone glassy. She says, “I should be dead.”

  He brushes her hair behind her ears the way he used to when she was a little girl.

  “No, you’re right where you should be. You’re alive. This is what is real.”

  * * *

  He skips work that morning, and not just because he only got back to his apartment at seven a.m. He fears his colleagues’ memories of Meghan’s death will also have emerged last night—an eleven-year stretch of false memories where his daughter wasn’t alive.

  When he wakes, his phone is blowing up with notifications from half his contacts list—missed calls and voicemails, frantic texts about Meghan. He doesn’t respond to any of them. He needs to talk with Julia and Meghan first. They should be on the same page with what they’re telling people, although he can’t imagine what that page might look like.

  He walks into the NoHo bar around the corner from Meghan’s apartment to meet his daughter and his ex, finds them waiting for him in a corner booth, close enough to the open kitchen to feel the heat of the stove and hear the clang of pots and pans and food sizzling on a griddle.

  Barry slides in next to Meghan and tosses his coat across the bench.

  She looks worn out, bewildered, shell-shocked.

  Julia isn’t much better.

  “How you doing, Megs?” he asks, but his daughter just stares back at hi
m, her face a blank wall.

  He looks at Julia. “Have you spoken to Anthony?”

  “I tried to call him but haven’t been able to get through.”

  “You OK?”

  She shakes her head, eyes shimmering. “But this isn’t about me today.”

  They order food and a round of drinks.

  “What do we tell people?” Julia asks. “I’ve gotten over a dozen calls today.”

  “Same here,” Barry says. “I think for now we stay with the idea that this is FMS. At least that’s something they might’ve heard of.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell people what happened to you, Barry?” Julia asks. “About that strange hotel and the chair and you living those eleven years for a second time?”

  Barry remembers the warning he was given on the night he returned to the memory of Meghan’s death.

  Tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.

  “This knowledge we have is actually dangerous,” he says. “We have to keep all of this to ourselves for now. Just try to live a normal life again.”

  “How?” Meghan asks, her voice unraveling. “I don’t even know how to think about my life anymore.”

  “Things will be weird at first,” Barry says, “but we’ll fall back into the grooves of our existence. If you can say nothing else about our species, we’re adaptable, right?”

  Nearby, a waiter drops a tray of drinks.

  Meghan’s nose begins to bleed.

  He feels a glint of pain behind his eyes, and across the table, Julia is clearly experiencing something similar.

  The bar goes silent, no one talking, everyone sitting frozen at their tables.

  The only sound is the music coming through the speakers and the drone of a television.

  Meghan’s hands are trembling.

  So are Julia’s.

  And his.

  On the television above the bar, a news anchor is staring into the camera, blood running down his face as he searches for words. “I, um…I’m going to be honest, I don’t exactly know what just happened. But something clearly has.”