Recursion

by Blake Crouch

  The image changes to a live shot that overlooks the southern border of Central Park.

  There’s a building on West Fifty-Ninth Street that wasn’t there a moment ago.

  At well over two thousand feet, it’s easily the tallest thing in the city, and constructed of two towers, one on Sixth Avenue, the other on Seventh, which connect at the top to form an elongated, upside-down U.

  Meghan makes a sound like a whimper.

  Barry grabs his coat, slides out of the booth.

  “Where are you going?” Julia asks.

  “Just come with me.”

  They move through the stunned restaurant and back outside, where they pile into Barry’s Crown Vic. He fires the sirens and they speed north up Broadway, then onto Seventh Avenue. Barry can only get them as close as West Fifty-Third before the street becomes impassable with traffic.

  All around them, people are getting out of their cars.

  They abandon Barry’s cruiser and walk with the crowd.

  After several blocks, they finally stop in the middle of the street to see it with their own eyes. There are thousands of New Yorkers all around them, faces lifted skyward, many holding up their phones to take photos and videos of the new addition to the Manhattan skyline—the U-shaped tower standing on the southern end of Central Park.

  Meghan says, “That wasn’t there a moment ago. Right?”

  “No,” Barry says. “It wasn’t. But at the same time…”

  “It’s been there for years,” Julia says.

  They stare at the marvel of engineering called the Big Bend, Barry thinking that, up until this moment, FMS has flown largely under the radar—isolated cases wreaking havoc on the lives of strangers.

  But this will affect everyone in the city, and many around the world.

  This will change everything.

  The glass and steel of the building’s west tower is catching parting rays of the setting sun, and memories of Barry’s existence with this building in the city are flooding in.

  “I’ve been to the top of it,” Meghan says, tears running down her face.

  It’s true.

  “With you, Dad. It was the best meal of my life.”

  When she finished her bachelor’s degree in social work, he took her to dinner at Curve, the restaurant at the top with spectacular views of the park. It wasn’t just the view that attracted them; Meghan had a food crush on the chef, Joseph Hart. Barry distinctly remembers riding an elevator that transitioned from a vertical ascent to a forty-five-degree climb through the initial angle of the curve to a horizontal traverse across the top of the tower.

  The longer he stares at it, the more it feels like an object that is a part of this reality.

  His reality.

  Whatever that even means anymore.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?” His heart is pounding; he feels unwell.

  “Is this moment real?”

  He looks down at her. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Barry walks into the low-rent bar near Gwen’s place in Hell’s Kitchen and climbs onto the stool beside her.

  “You all right?” Gwen asks.

  “Is anybody?”

  “I tried to call you this morning. I woke up with this alternate history of our friendship. One where Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was fifteen. She’s alive, right?”

  “I just came from seeing her.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know. She remembered her own death last night.”

  “How is that possible?”

  He waits for their drinks to come, and then tells her everything, including his extraordinary experience in the chair.

  “You went back into a memory?” she whispers, leaning in close.

  She smells like a combination of Wild Turkey, whatever shampoo she uses, and gunpowder, Barry wondering if she came straight here from the range, where she is a sight to behold. He’s never seen anyone shoot like Gwen.

  “Yes, and then I started living it, but with Meghan alive this time. Right up to this moment.”

  “You think that’s what FMS really is?” she asks. “Changing memories to change reality?”

  “I know it is.”

  On the muted television above the bar, Barry sees a photograph of a man he recognizes from somewhere. At first, he can’t tie the recognition to a memory.

  Barry reads the closed captioning of the news anchor’s reporting.

  [AMOR TOWLES, RENOWNED ARCHITECT OF THE BIG BEND, WAS FOUND MURDERED IN HIS APARTMENT ONE HOUR AGO WHEN—]

  “Is this Big Bend building a product of the chair?” Gwen asks.

  “Yes. When I was in that weird hotel, there was this guy, older gentleman. I believe he was dying. I overheard this conversation where he said that he was an architect, and when he got back into his memory, he was going to follow through on a building he always regretted not pursuing. In fact, he was scheduled to go in the chair today, which is when reality changed for all of us. I’m guessing they killed him for breaking the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “They told me I was only supposed to live my life a little better. No gaming of the system. No sweeping changes.”

  “Do you know why he’s letting people redo their lives? This man who built the chair?”

  Barry slugs back the rest of his beer. “No idea.”

  Gwen sips her whiskey. The jukebox has been turned off, and now the bartender unmutes the television and switches channels. Every network has been running nonstop coverage since the building appeared this afternoon. On CNN, an “expert” on False Memory Syndrome has been dredged up to speculate on what they’re calling the “memory malfunction” in Manhattan. She’s saying, “If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? This is why we’re seeing an epidemic of suicides.”

  “You know where this hotel is?” Gwen asks.

  “It’s been eleven years—at least in my mind—but I could probably find it again. I know it’s in Midtown, assuming it’s still there.”

  “Our minds aren’t built to handle a reality that’s constantly changing our memories and shifting our present,” Gwen says. “What if this is only the beginning?”

  Barry’s phone vibrates in his pocket against his leg.

  “Sorry about this.”

  He pulls it out and reads a text from Meghan:

  Dad. I can’t do this anymore.

  I don’t know who I am. I don’t

  know anything except I don’t

  belong here. I’m so sorry.

  I love you always.

  He slides off the stool.

  “What’s wrong?” Gwen asks.

  And starts running for the door.

  * * *

  Meghan’s cell keeps going straight to voicemail, and in the aftermath of the Big Bend’s appearance, the city streets are still clogged.

  As Barry drives toward NoHo, he grabs his radio’s hand mic and calls New York One to request that a unit in the vicinity of Meghan’s apartment stop by for a welfare check.

  “New York One, 158, are you talking about the 904B on Bond Street? We have multiple units and fire companies already on scene and ambulances en route.”

  “What are you talking about? Which building?”

  “Twelve Bond Street.”

  “That’s my daughter’s building.”

  There’s silence over the airwaves.

  Barry tosses the hand mic, hits the lights, and screams through traffic, weaving in and out of cars, around buses, tearing through intersections.

  As he turns onto Bond Street several minutes later, he abandons his car at the police barricad
e and runs toward fire engines shooting streams of water at the façade of Meghan’s building, where flames are curling out of windows on the sixth floor. The scene is pure chaos—an array of emergency lights and cops putting up tape to keep the residents of neighboring buildings at a safe distance while the occupants of Meghan’s building flood out of the front entrance.

  A cop tries to stop him, but Barry rips his arm away, flashes his badge, and pushes on toward the fire engines and the entrance to the building, the heat of the flames making his face break out in beads of sweat.

  A firefighter staggers out of the entrance, whose door has been ripped off its hinges. He’s carrying an older man, and both their faces are blackened.

  A fire lieutenant—a bearded giant of a man—steps in front of Barry, blocking his path. “Get back behind the tape.”

  “I’m a cop, and that’s my daughter’s building!” He points up at the flames peeling out of the top floor window at the far end. “That’s her apartment flames are coming out of!”

  The lieutenant’s face falls. He takes Barry by the arm and pulls him out of the way of a train of firefighters carrying a hose toward the nearest hydrant.

  “What?” Barry asks. “Just tell me.”

  “The fire started in that apartment in the kitchen. It’s spreading through the fifth and sixth floors right now.”

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  The man takes a breath, glances over his shoulder.

  “Where’s my fucking daughter?”

  “Look at me,” the man says.

  “Did you get her out?”

  “Yes. I am very sorry to tell you this, but she died.”

  Barry staggers back. “How?”

  “There was a bottle of vodka and some pills on her bed. We think she took them and then tried to make tea, but lost consciousness soon after. Something on the counter got too close to the burner. It was accidental, but—”

  “Where is she?”

  “Let’s go sit down and—”

  “Where is she?”

  “On the sidewalk, on the other side of that truck.”

  Barry starts toward her, but suddenly the man’s arms are gripping him from behind in a bear hug.

  “Sure you want to do that, brother?”

  “Get off!”

  The man lets him go, Barry stepping over hoses, moving in front of the truck, closer to the fire. The commotion dies away. All he sees are Meghan’s bare feet poking out from underneath the white sheet that’s covering her, which is soaking wet and almost translucent from the spray of the fire hoses.

  His legs fail him.

  He sinks down onto the curb and breaks as the water rains down on him.

  People try to talk to him, to get him to come with them, to move, but he doesn’t hear them. He stares straight through them.

  Into nothing.

  Thinking—I’ve lost her twice now.

  * * *

  It’s been two hours since Meghan died, and his clothes are still damp.

  Barry parks at Penn Station and starts walking north from Thirty-Fourth Street, just like he did after returning from Montauk on a midnight train, the night he stumbled into Hotel Memory.

  That night, it had been snowing.

  Now it’s raining, the buildings cloaked in mist above their fiftieth floors, and the air cold enough to cloud his breath.

  The city stands strangely silent.

  Few cars on the road.

  Fewer people on the sidewalks.

  The tears are cold on his face.

  He pops his umbrella after three blocks. In his mind, it’s been eleven years since the night he wandered into Hotel Memory. Chronologically, it happened today, just in a false memory.

  As Barry reaches West Fiftieth, it’s raining harder, the cloud deck lowering. He’s confident the hotel was on Fiftieth, and he’s pretty sure he headed east.

  He keeps catching glimpses of the two bases of the Big Bend, luminous in the rain. The curve is hidden in the clouds a couple thousand feet above.

  He’s trying not to think of Meghan in this moment, because when he does, he crumbles all over again, and he needs to be strong, needs his wits about him.

  Cold and so tired, he’s beginning to wonder if perhaps he walked west that night, instead of east, when a red neon sign in the distance catches his attention.

  McLachlan’s Restaurant

  Breakfast

  Lunch

  Dinner

  Open 7 Days

  24 Hours

  Barry moves toward the sign until he’s standing under it, watching the rain fall through the red illumination.

  He picks up his pace.

  Past the bodega, which he remembers, and then the liquor store, a women’s clothing store, a bank—all closed—until, near the end of the block, he stops at the entrance to the dark driveway, which slopes down into the subterranean space beneath a neo-gothic building, wedged between two higher skyscrapers.

  If he walked down that driveway, he’d arrive at a garage door built of reinforced steel.

  This is how he entered Hotel Memory all those years ago.

  He’s absolutely sure of it.

  There’s a part of him that wants to run down there, charge through, and shoot every fucking person he sees inside that hotel, ending with the man who put him in the chair. Meghan’s brain broke because of him. She is dead because of him. Hotel Memory needs to end.

  But that would most likely only get him killed.

  No, he’ll call Gwen instead, propose an off-the-books, under-the-radar op with a handful of SWAT colleagues. If she insists, he’ll take an affidavit to a judge. They’ll cut power to the building, go in with night-vision gear, do a floor-to-floor sweep.

  Clearly, some minds, like Meghan’s, cannot handle the changing of their reality, and the collateral damage is also tragic—in addition to his daughter, three people died in her building from the fire, and over the radio on his drive to Penn Station, he heard more reports of people—unbalanced by the appearance of the Big Bend—wreaking havoc in the city.

  Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.

  He pulls out his phone, opens contacts, scrolls to the g’s.

  As his finger hovers over Gwen, someone shouts his name.

  He glances across the street, sees someone running toward him.

  A woman’s voice yells, “Don’t make that call!”

  He’s already reaching into his jacket, thumbing off the button to his shoulder holster, getting a solid grip on his subcompact Glock, thinking she probably works for whoever built the chair, which means—fuck!—they know he’s scoping the building.

  “Barry, don’t shoot, please.”

  She slows to a walk, raises her hands.

  They’re open, empty.

  She approaches cautiously, barely five feet tall, wearing boots and a black leather jacket beaded with raindrops. A shock of red hair comes to her chin, but it’s damp. She’s been waiting for him in the rain. The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.

  She says, “I know you were sent back into the worst memory of your life. The man who did that is Marcus Slade. He owns that building. And I know what just happened to Meghan. I’m so sorry, Barry. I know you want to do something about it.”

  “You work for them?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a mind reader?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could you possibly know what happened to me?”

  “You told me.”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “You told me in the future, four months from now.”

  He lowers the pistol, his brain twistin
g itself in knots. “You used that chair?”

  She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Helena Smith, and if you go into Slade’s building with Gwen, it will lead to the end of everything.”

  Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

  —RAY CUMMINGS

  BARRY

  November 6, 2018

  The woman with fiery hair takes Barry by the arm and pulls him down the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the subterranean garage.

  “We’re not safe here,” she says. “Let’s walk to your car. Penn Station, right?”

  Barry pulls his arm away from her and starts moving in the opposite direction.

  She calls after him, “Standing on the driveway of your home in Portland, watching a total solar eclipse with your father. Spending summers with your grandparents at their farmhouse in New Hampshire. You’d sit in the apple orchard and tell yourself elaborate stories.”

  He stops and looks back at her.

  She continues, “While you were devastated when your mother died, you were also grateful, because you knew when her time was coming, and you had a proper chance to say goodbye. To make sure she knew you loved her. You didn’t have that with your father, who died suddenly when you were fifteen. You still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, wondering if he knew.”

  * * *

  He’s shivering by the time they reach his Crown Vic. Helena gets down on her knees on the wet pavement and runs her hands across the car’s undercarriage.

  “What are you doing?” Barry asks.

  “Making sure there’s no tracking device on your car.”

  They climb in out of the rain, and he turns on the heat and waits for the engine to warm the frigid air blowing through the vents.

  On the forty-minute walk down from Fiftieth, she told him a crazy story he isn’t completely sure he believes, about how she accidentally built the chair on a decommissioned oil platform in a previous timeline.