by Blake Crouch
In a parking space beside the store, she kills the engine and pushes her thumbs into her temples against the searing pain, but it keeps building and building—so intense she’s afraid she’s going to be sick.
And then the strangest thing happens.
Her right arm moves toward the steering column and grasps the keys.
She says, “What the hell?”
Because she didn’t move her arm.
Next, she watches as her wrist turns the key and restarts the engine, and now her hand is moving over to the gear shift and sliding the lever into reverse.
Against her own will, she looks over her shoulder, out the rear window, backing the truck through the parking lot, and then shifting into drive.
She keeps thinking, I’m not driving, I’m not doing any of this, as the truck speeds down the highway, back toward home.
A darkness is creeping in at the edges of her vision, the Front Range and the lights of Boulder dimming away and getting smaller, as if she’s falling slowly into a deep well. She wants to scream, to stop this from happening, but she’s just a passenger in her own body now, unable to speak or smell or feel a thing.
The sound of the radio is little more than a dying whisper, and all at once, the pinprick of light that was her awareness of the world winks out.
HELENA
October 15, 1986
Helena turns off the country road into the driveway of the two-story farmhouse where she grew up, feeling more at home with each passing moment in this younger version of herself.
The farmhouse looks smaller, so much more insignificant than how she remembered it in her mind’s eye, and undeniably fragile standing against the blue wall of mountains that sweep up from the plains, ten miles away.
She parks and turns off the engine and looks in the rearview mirror at her sixteen-year-old face.
No lines.
Many freckles.
Eyes clear and green and bright.
Still a child.
The door creaks as she shoulders it open and steps down into the grass. The sweet, dank richness of a nearby dairy farm is on the breeze, and it is unquestionably the smell she most associates with home.
She feels so light on her feet walking up the weathered steps of the porch.
The low din of the television is the first thing she hears as she pulls the front door open and steps inside. Down the hallway, which runs past the stairs, she hears movement in the kitchen—stirring, mixing, pots clanging, water running. The whole house smells of a chicken roasting in the oven.
Helena peers into the living room.
Her father is sitting in his recliner with his feet up, doing what he did every weekday evening of her youth—watching World News Tonight.
Peter Jennings is reporting that Elie Wiesel has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“How was your drive?” her father asks.
She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives. But she sees her father in this moment like she never has before.
He’s so young and handsome.
Not even forty.
She can’t take her eyes off him.
“It was a lot of fun.” Her voice sounds odd to her—high and delicate.
He looks back at the television set and misses seeing her wipe tears from her eyes.
“I don’t need the truck tomorrow, so check with Mom, and if she doesn’t either, you can take it to school.”
This reality is feeling sturdier by the second.
She approaches the recliner, leans down, and wraps her arms around his neck.
“What’s this for?” he asks.
The scent of Old Spice and the faint sandpaper scratchiness of his beard just beginning to come in nearly breaks her.
“For being my dad,” she whispers.
She walks through the dining room and into the kitchen, finds her mother leaning back against the counter, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback romance.
Last time Helena saw her she was in an adult care center near Boulder, twenty-four years from now, her body frail, her mind destroyed.
All of that will still happen, but in this moment, she’s wearing a pair of blue jeans and a button-down blouse. She has an ’80s perm and bangs, and she is in the absolute peak of her life.
Helena crosses the small kitchen and pulls her mother into a hard embrace.
She’s crying again, and she can’t stop.
“What’s wrong, Helena?”
“Nothing.”
“Did something happen on your drive?”
Helena shakes her head. “I’m just emotional.”
“About what?”
“I don’t even know.”
She feels her mother’s hands running through her hair and smells the perfume she always wore—Estée Lauder’s White Linen—against the bite of cigarette smoke.
“Getting older can be scary,” her mom says.
It feels impossible that she is here. Moments ago, she was suffocating in a deprivation tank, fifteen hundred miles away and thirty-three years in the future.
“Do you need help with dinner?” Helena asks, finally pulling away.
“No, the chicken still has a little ways to go. You’re sure you’re OK?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call up when it’s ready.”
Helena heads through the kitchen and down the hall to the foot of the stairs. They’re steeper than she remembers, and much creakier.
Her room is a wreck.
Like it always was.
Like all of her future apartments and offices will be.
She sees articles of clothing she had forgotten about.
A one-armed teddy bear she will lose in college.
A Walkman, which she opens to see the clear cassette of INXS’s Listen Like Thieves.
She sits down at the small desk and stares through the charmingly distorted glass of the old windowpane. The view is of the lights of Denver, twenty miles away, and the purple plains to the east, the big, wild world looming unseen beyond. She would often sit here, daydreaming of what her life might become.
She could never have fathomed.
A science textbook lies open beside a take-home test on cellular biology that she will have to finish tonight.
In the middle drawer, she finds a black-and-white composition book with “Helena” written on the front.
This, she remembers.
She opens the book to page after page of her cursive, teenage scrawl.
While she never lost her memories of previous timelines after prior uses of the chair, she harbors a fear that it could happen now. These are uncharted waters—she’s never traveled back so far, or into herself at so young an age. There’s a chance she could forget what she came from, why she’s here.
She takes a pen and turns to a blank page in the diary, writes down the date, and begins a note to herself to explain everything that has happened in her previous lives:
Dear Helena—On April 16, 2019, the world will remember a memory chair you created. You have 33 years to find some way to stop this from happening. You are the only one who can stop this from happening…
When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
—KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
BARRY
April 16, 2019
Barry is sitting in a chair in the shade, looking out across a forest of saguaro at a desert catching morning light.
The sharp pain behind his eyes is mercifully ret
reating.
He was lying on the seventeenth floor of a building in Manhattan, bullets whizzing past and riddling his body and the blood rushing out of him as he pictured his daughter’s face.
Then a bullet struck his head and now he’s here.
“Barry.” He turns to look at the woman sitting beside him—short red hair, green eyes, Celtic paleness. Helena. “You’re bleeding.”
She hands him a napkin, which he holds to his nose to catch the blood.
“Talk to me, honey, she says. “This is new territory. Thirty-three years’ worth of dead memories coming at you. What’s going through your mind right now?”
“I don’t know. I was…it feels like I was just in that hotel.”
“Marcus Slade’s?”
“Yeah, I was shot. I was dying. I still feel the bullets hitting me. I was yelling at you to run. Then I was suddenly here. Like no time had passed at all. But my memories of that hotel feel dead now. Black and gray.”
“Do you feel more like the Barry from that timeline or this one?”
“That one. I have no idea where I am. The only familiar thing to me is you.”
“You’ll have the memories of this timeline soon.”
“A lot of them?”
“A lifetime of them. I’m not sure what to expect for you. It may be jarring.”
He looks at the range of brown mountains. The desert is flowering. Birds are singing. There is no wind, and the chill of the night lingers in the air.
“I’ve never seen this place before.”
“This is our home, Barry.”
He takes a moment to let that hit him.
“What’s today?”
“April 16, 2019. In the timeline where you died, I used a DARPA deprivation tank to go back thirty-three years to 1986. And then I lived my life all over again, right up to this moment, trying to find a way to stop today from happening.”
“What happens today?”
“After you died in Slade’s hotel, knowledge of the chair leaked to the public, and the world went insane. Today is the day that the world will remember all of it. Until now, you and I are the only ones who knew.”
“I feel…strange,” he says.
He lifts a glass of ice water from the table and drinks it down.
His hands begin to shake.
Helena notices, says, “If it gets bad, I have this.” She lifts a capped syringe off the table.
“What is it?”
“A sedative. Only if you need it.”
It starts like a summer storm.
Just a super-cooled drop of rain here and there.
The rumble of distant thunder.
Dry lightning sparking across the horizon.
The initial memory of this timeline finds him.
First time he ever saw Helena she climbed onto the barstool beside him in a dive bar in Portland, Oregon, and said, “You look like you want to buy me a drink.” It was late, he was drunk, and she was like no one he had met—early twenties but an old soul with the most brilliant mind he’d ever encountered. The instant familiarity of being in her presence felt, not just like he’d known her all his life but as if he were waking up for the first time. They bullshitted until last call, and then she took him back to the motel where she was staying and fucked him like it was the last day on Earth.
Another one—
They had been together several months, and he was already in love with her when she told him she could tell the future.
He said, “Bullshit.”
She said, “I’ll prove it one day.”
She didn’t make a big deal out of it. Said it in passing, almost like a joke, and he forgot all about her claim until December of 1990. They were watching the news one night, and she told him that next month the US would drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a mission called Operation Desert Storm.
There were other instances.
Walking into a theater to see The Silence of the Lambs, she told him the film would sweep the Oscars this time next year.
That spring, she sat him down in the small apartment they were living in, gave him a handheld tape recorder, and sang the chorus to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” two months before the song released. Then she recorded herself telling him that the governor of Arkansas would announce his candidacy for president of the United States by year’s end, and that he would win next year, defeating the incumbent and a strong third-party challenger.
They had been together almost two years when he demanded she tell him how she could possibly know these things. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. They were sitting at a bar in Seattle, watching the 1992 general election returns come in. And because of how she had gone about it—proving her bona fides before ever asking Barry to believe an insane story about a memory chair and a future they had already lived—he believed her, even when she told him he wouldn’t remember any of his past lives for another twenty-seven years, and that technology sufficient for her to build the chair wouldn’t exist for another fifteen.
“Are you OK?” Helena asks.
His focus is back in the moment, sitting on their concrete patio, watching a bee helicoptering around the remains of breakfast.
“It’s the weirdest feeling,” he says.
“Can you try to describe it?”
“It’s like…two separate people, two distinct consciousnesses, with vastly different histories and experiences, are merging inside of me.”
“Is one more dominant than the other?”
“No. At first I felt like the me who was shot in the hotel, but now I’m feeling equally at home in this reality.”
Remembering a lifetime in the span of sixty seconds is a hell of a thing.
He faces a tsunami of memories, but it’s the quiet moments that hit with the most force—
A snowy Christmas with Helena and her parents at their farmhouse in Boulder, Dorothy forgetting to put the turkey in the oven and everyone but Helena laughing it off, because she knew it was the beginning of her mother’s mental deterioration.
Their wedding in Aruba.
A trip, just the two of them, to Antarctica in the summer of 2001 to witness the migration of emperor penguins, which they would both come to see as the best moment of their life together—a respite from the ever-present race to fix the looming future.
Several bitter fights about having children and Helena’s insistence that they not bring a child into a world that would likely destroy itself in two decades.
The funerals of his mother, her mother, and most recently, her father.
The time she asked Barry if he wanted to know anything about his old life, and Barry saying that he didn’t want to know any reality but this one.
The first time she demonstrated the power of the chair.
Now the full arc of their time together is coming into focus.
They spent their lives constructing the memory chair in secret and trying to find a way to prevent the world from remembering how to build it. Although the chair had been used on countless occasions on prior timelines, the most “recent” use of the chair by Helena (in the DARPA lab) overrode all of the other false memory anniversary points. Which meant no one, not even Slade, would have knowledge of those prior timelines.
Until April 16, 2019.
Then, and only then, would the false memories of all that had happened come crashing down on everyone.
With a fortune amassed by 2001, they had an operational chair by 2007.
Once the chair was built, they spent a decade running experiments with it and imaging each other’s brains, studying neural activity at the moment a reality shift occurred and dead memories flooded in, searching for the accompanying neuron cascade of new information.
Their hope was to find a way to prevent dead memories from older timelines from f
lashing in without harming the brain. But all they accomplished was the recording of neural activity associated with dead memories. They made no progress toward finding a method of shielding the brain from those memories.
Barry looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, a completely different man from who he was just moments ago.
“We failed,” he says.
“Yeah.”
The other half of his duality, the one that lived every moment of this timeline, has just experienced the false memories of Meghan and Julia. His life as a detective in New York City. The death of his daughter, his divorce and descent into depression and regret. Meeting Slade and going back eleven years to save Meghan. Losing her a second time. Helena coming into his life. Their connection. His death in Slade’s hotel.
“You’re crying,” Helena says.
“It’s a lot.”
She reaches over, takes his hand in hers.
He says, “I finally remember it.”
“What?”
“Those handful of months in New York with you after I raided Slade’s hotel with Gwen the first time. I remember the end of that timeline, leaning down and kissing you as you floated in the deprivation tank, about to die. I was in love with you.”
“You were?”
“Madly.”
They’re quiet for a moment, looking out across the Sonoran desert, a landscape they have come to love together—so different from the lush, Pacific Northwest woods of his youth and the evergreen forests of Helena’s.
This has been a good place for them.
“We should look at the news,” Helena says.
“Let’s wait,” Barry says.
“What good will waiting do?”
“Let us live a little while longer with the hope that no one else remembered?”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“You always were the realist.”
Helena smiles, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.
Barry rises from the chair and turns to face the back of their sprawling desert home. Built of rammed earth and expansive panes of glass, it blends seamlessly into its environment.
