by Blake Crouch
“The batteries will only give us thirty minutes of power,” she says.
“We have generators and plenty of gas.”
“Yeah, but it’ll take ages to reroute the power.”
He sheds his fire-burned parka and snow pants and takes the chair beside Helena, who’s already typing on the keypad as quickly as her scorched fingertips will let her, blood running out of the corners of her mouth and eyes.
As she begins to strip out of her winter clothes, Barry goes to the cabinet and takes the only remaining skullcap that has a full charge. He powers it on and places it carefully on top of his wife’s head, which is blistering over.
The second-degree burns on his face are entering the arena of excruciating. There’s morphine in the medical cabinet, calling to him, but there’s also no time.
“I’ll finish positioning the skullcap,” she says. “Just get the injection port.”
He grabs a port and turns it on, making sure the Bluetooth connection with the terminal is online.
In sharp contrast to her nuclear-sunburned hands, Helena’s forearms are creamy and smooth, protected from the initial flash by her parka and several layers of shirts and thermal underwear. It takes him several tries with his ruined fingers to thread the IV into her vein. He finally straps the port to her forearm and heads for the deprivation tank. The water is a degree and a half cooler than the ideal 98.6, but it will have to do.
He lifts the hatch and turns to face Helena, who’s stumbling toward him like a broken angel.
He knows he looks no prettier.
“I wish I could do this next part for you,” he says.
“It’s only going to hurt a little while longer,” she says, tears running down her face. “Besides, I deserve this.”
“That isn’t true.”
“You don’t have to walk this road with me again,” she says.
“I’ll walk it as many times as it takes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Completely.”
She grips the side of the tank and swings her leg over.
When her hands touch the water, she cries out.
“What is it?” Barry asks.
“The salt. Oh my God…”
“I’ll get the morphine.”
“No, it might fuck up the memory reactivation. Just hurry please.”
“OK. I’ll see you soon.”
He closes the hatch on his wife, floating in agony in the saltwater.
Rushing back to the terminal, he initiates the injection sequence. As the paralytic drug fires, he tries to sit down, but the pain is so all-encompassing he can’t stay still.
He heads through the lab and up the spiral staircase, through the office and the fire-bombed remnants of his and Helena’s home.
Back outside on the steps of the firehouse, it’s as dark as night and raining flecks of fire from the sky.
Barry descends the steps and walks out into the middle of the street.
A burning newspaper blows across the pavement.
On the other side of the road, a blackened figure lies in the fetal position, curled against the curb in its final resting place.
There is the whisper of hot wind.
Distant screaming and groans.
And nothing else.
It seems impossible that less than an hour ago, he was sitting in a snowy glade at ten thousand feet, overlooking Denver on a perfect spring afternoon.
We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves.
He can barely stand anymore.
His knees buckle; he collapses.
Sitting now in the middle of the street in front of the firehouse, watching the world burn and trying not to let the pain overwhelm him.
It’s been several minutes since he left the lab.
Helena is dying in the tank.
He’s dying out here.
He lies back on the pavement and stares up into the black sky at the fire raining down on him.
A bright rod of agony knifes through the back of his skull, and he registers a wave of relief, knowing that means the end is coming, that DMT is flooding Helena’s brain as she tunnels back into the memory of her walking toward a white-and-blue Chevy as a sixteen-year-old girl with her entire life ahead of her.
They will do all of it again, hopefully better next time.
And the motes of fire gradually fall slower and slower, until they’re suspended all around him in the air like a billion lightning bugs—
* * *
It’s cold and damp.
He smells the salt of the sea.
Hears waves lapping at rocks and bird cries carrying over open water.
His vision swings into focus.
There’s a ragged shoreline a hundred yards away, and mist hovers over the blue-gray water, obscuring the spruce trees in the distance, which stand along the shore like a line of haunted calligraphy.
The pain of his melting face is gone.
He’s sitting in a sea kayak in a wetsuit, a paddle across his lap, wiping blood from his nose and wondering where he is.
Where Helena is.
Why there are no memories of this timeline yet.
He was lying in the middle of the street in front of their firehouse in Denver just seconds ago, watching in agony as the sky rained fire.
Now he’s…wherever he is. His life feels like a dream, flitting from one reality to the next, memories becoming reality becoming nightmares. Everything real in the moment, but fleetingly so. Landscapes and emotions in a constant state of flux, and yet a twisted logic to it all—the way a dream makes sense only when you’re inside it.
He dips an oar into the water and pulls the kayak forward.
A sheltered cove slides into view, the island sweeping up gently for several hundred feet through a forest of dark spruce, interspersed with the white brushstrokes of birch trees.
On the lower flanks of the hill, a house sits on an expanse of emerald grass, surrounded by smaller buildings—two guesthouses, a gazebo, and down by the shore, a boathouse and pier.
He paddles into the cove, picking up speed as he approaches land, running the kayak ashore on a bed of crushed rocks. As he hauls himself awkwardly out of the cockpit, a single memory drops—sitting at that bar in Portland as Helena climbed onto the stool beside him for the third time in their odd, recursive existence.
“You look like you want to buy me a drink.”
How strange to hold three distinct memories of what is essentially the same moment in time.
He moves barefoot across the rocky shore and into the grass, bracing for the tidal wave of memories, but they’re late today.
The house is built on a stone foundation, the wood turned driftwood gray by decades of salt and sun and wind and punishing winters.
A massive dog comes bounding toward him through the yard. It’s a Scottish deerhound, the same color as the house’s weathered siding, and it greets Barry with slobbering affection, coming up on its hind legs to meet him eye to eye and lick his face.
Barry climbs the steps to the veranda, which boasts a commanding view of the cove and the sea beyond.
Opening the sliding-glass door, he steps into a warm living room built around a freestanding stone hearth that rises up through the heart of the house.
The small fire burning on the grate perfumes the interior with the scent of woodsmoke.
“Helena?”
No answer.
The house stands silent.
He moves through a French country kitchen with exposed beams and bench seating around a large island topped with butcher block.
Then down a long, dark corridor, feeling like a trespasser in someone else’s home. At the far end, he stops at the entrance to a cozily cluttered office. There’s a woodstove, a window overlooking
the forest, and an old table in the center of the room sagging under stacks of books. A blackboard stands nearby, covered in incomprehensible equations and diagrams of what appear to be intricately forking timelines.
The memories arrive in a blink.
One moment nothing.
The next, he knows exactly where he is, the full trajectory of his life since Helena found him, and exactly what the equations on the blackboard mean.
Because he wrote them.
They’re extrapolations of the Schwarzschild solution, an equation that defines what the radius of an object must be, based upon its mass, in order to form a singularity. That singularity then forms an Einstein-Rosen wormhole that can, in theory, instantaneously connect far-flung regions of space, and even time.
Because his consciousnesses from the previous timelines are merging with his consciousness on this one, his perspective of their work during the last ten years is paradoxically and simultaneously brand-new and intimately familiar. He sees it, both with fresh eyes and a total loss of objectivity.
He spent much of this life studying black-hole physics. While Helena was right there with him in the beginning, these last five years, as April 16, 2019, drew closer with no breakthrough in range, she started to withdraw.
The knowledge that she would have to do this all over again simply broke her.
On the window glass overlooking the woods, the fundamental questions he wrote in black magic marker many years ago still taunt him, unanswered—
What is the Schwarzschild radius of a memory?
A wild notion…when we die, does the immense gravity of our collapsing memories create a micro black hole?
A wilder notion…does the memory-reactivation procedure—at the moment of death—then open a wormhole that connects our consciousness to an earlier version of ourselves?
He’s going to lose all of this knowledge. Not that it was ever really more than a theory—an attempt to pull back the curtain and understand why Helena’s chair did what it did. None of his knowledge means anything without scientific testing. Only in the last couple of years has it occurred to Barry that they should bring their equipment to the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and kill someone in the tank in the presence of the Large Hadron Collider particle detectors. If they could prove the appearance of the entrance to a micro wormhole at the moment someone died in the tank, and a wormhole exit at the moment their consciousness re-spawned in their body at an earlier point in time, they might begin to understand the true mechanics of memory return.
Helena hated the idea. She didn’t believe the knowledge payoff was worth the risk of their technology getting out in the wild again, which would almost certainly happen if they shared their knowledge of the chair with the scientific community at the LHC. Besides, it would take years to convince the powers-that-be to give them access to a particle detector, and years on top of that, plus teams of scientists to write algorithms and software to pull the physics data out of the system. At the end of the day, it was going to be far more difficult and time consuming to study the particle physics of the chair than it was to actually build the thing.
But time is what they have.
“Barry.”
He turns.
Helena stands in the doorway, and the shock of seeing this iteration of his wife, in contrast to the previous two, sounds an alarm inside of him. She looks like a disintegrating version of the woman he loves—too thin, her eyes dark and hollowed out, her orbital bones a touch too pronounced.
A memory takes hold—she tried to kill herself two years ago. The white scars running down her forearms are still visible. He found her in the old claw-foot tub in the windowed alcove with a view of the sea, the bathwater turned the color of wine. He remembers lifting her nearly lifeless, dripping body out of the water and setting her on the tile. Frantically wrapping her wrists in medical gauze just in time to stop the bleeding.
She almost died.
The hardest part was there was no one she could talk to. No psychiatrist with whom she could share the burden of her existence. She only had Barry, and the guilt of not being enough for her has been eating him away for years.
In this moment, staring at her in the doorway, he is overcome by his devotion to this woman.
He says, “You are the bravest person I’ve ever known.”
She holds up her phone. “The missiles launched ten minutes ago. We failed again.” She takes a sip from the glass of red wine in her hand.
“You shouldn’t be drinking that before you get in the tank.”
She polishes off the rest. “It’s just a nip to calm my nerves.”
It’s been hard between them. He can’t remember the last time he slept in her bed. The last time they had sex. The last time they laughed at something stupid. But he can’t begrudge her. For him, their relationship begins each iteration in that Portland bar, when he’s twenty-one and she’s twenty. They spend twenty-nine years together, and while each loop feels brand-new to him (until they reach this doomsday moment and gain memories of the prior timelines), from her perspective, she’s been with the same man for eighty-seven years, reliving, over and over, the same stretch of time from twenty to forty-nine years old.
Same fights.
Same fears.
Same dynamic.
Same…everything.
No real surprises.
Only now, in this brief moment, are they equals. Helena tried to explain before, but finally he understands, and this knowledge reminds him of something Slade said in his hotel lab, just before his death—Your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives.
Perhaps Slade had a point. You can’t truly understand yourself until you’ve lived many lives. Maybe the man wasn’t completely raving mad.
Helena steps into the room.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Can you fucking relax for a minute? Nobody’s sending a nuke into the coast of Maine. We’ll get Boston, New York, and Midwest fallout, but that’s hours away.”
They’ve fought about this exact moment—when it became clear in the last couple of years that they weren’t going to find a solution in this loop, Barry advocated for killing this timeline and sending Helena back before the world remembered its violent end on the previous timeline, and suffered a new one again on this one. But Helena argued that even the slightest chance no false memories would return was worth letting it play out. And more important, she wanted, if only for the briefest window of time, to be with the Barry who remembered all timelines and everything they’d been through together. If he was honest with himself, he wanted that too.
This is the only moment in the entirety of their shared existence when they can truly be together.
She comes over to the window and stands beside him.
With a finger, she begins to erase the writing on the glass.
“This was all a waste, huh?” she says.
“We should’ve gone to CERN.”
“And if your wormhole theory was proven right? Then what?”
“I stand by my belief that if we could understand how and why the chair is able to send our consciousness back into a memory, we would be in a better place to know how to stop the false memories.”
“You ever considered the possibility that it’s unknowable?”
“Are you losing hope?” he asks.
“Oh honey, it’s long gone. Aside from my own pain, every time I go back, I destroy the consciousness of that sixteen-year-old girl walking out to the truck into her first moment of real freedom. I’m killing her over and over and over. She has never gotten the chance to live her life. Because of Marcus Slade. Because of me.”
“Then let me carry the hope for both of us for a while.”
“You have been.”
“Let me keep carrying it.”
She looks at him. �
�You still believe we’ll find a way to fix this.”
“Yes.”
“When? The next iteration? The thirtieth?”
“It’s so strange,” he says.
“What?”
“I walked into this room five minutes ago and had no idea what those equations meant. Then I suddenly had memories from this timeline and understood partial differential equations.” A fragment of conversation from another lifetime flickers in the neuronal structure of his brain. He says, “Remember what Marcus Slade said when we had him at gunpoint in his lab in that hotel?”
“You do realize, from my perspective, that was almost a hundred years and three timelines ago.”
“You told him that if the world ever knew of the chair’s existence, that knowledge could never be put back. Just what we’re fighting against now. Remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“And he said you’d been blinded by your limitations, that you still weren’t seeing everything, and that you never would unless you had traveled the way he had.”
“He was crazy.”
“That’s what I thought too. But the difference between you on that first timeline, and you now—it might be driving you mad, but you’ve mastered whole fields of science, lived entire lives the first Helena never would’ve dreamed of. You see the world in ways she never did. It’s the same with me. Who knows how many lives Slade lived, and what he learned? What if he really did figure some way out? Some loophole around the dead-memory problem? Something you’d need however-many-more of these loops to figure out for yourself? What if this whole time, we’ve been missing something crucial?”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea, but wouldn’t you like to ask Slade?”
“How do you propose we do that, Detective?”
“I don’t know, but we can’t just give up.”
“No, I can’t give up. You can tap out anytime you want and live your life in blissful ignorance that this day is coming.”
“You’ve really come to think so little of my presence in your life?”
She sighs. “Of course not.”
A paperweight rattles on the table behind them.
A crack spider-webs across the window glass.