by Blake Crouch
He heads inside through the kitchen, past the dining-room table, to the sitting area by the television. Lifting the remote, he hesitates as Helena’s barefooted steps move toward him across the cool tile.
She takes the remote out of his hand and presses the Power button.
The first thing he reads is a banner across the bottom of the screen.
MASS SUICIDES REPORTED ACROSS THE WORLD.
Helena lets out a pained sigh.
Cell-phone footage from a city street shows bodies bouncing off the pavement like some kind of horrific hailstorm.
Like Barry, the world just remembered the previous timeline when the chair’s existence became public knowledge. The attacks on New York City. WikiLeaks. Widespread usage of the chair across the globe.
Barry says, “Maybe it’ll all be OK. Maybe Slade was right. Maybe humanity will adapt and evolve to accept this.”
Helena turns the channel.
A frazzled-looking anchor is trying to maintain some vestige of professionalism. “Russia and China have just released a joint statement at the UN, accusing the United States of reality theft in an effort to prevent other nations from using the memory chair. They have vowed to rebuild the technology immediately and warned that any further use of the chair will be seen as an act of war. The US has not yet responded—”
She turns the channel again.
Another shell-shocked anchor: “In addition to the mass suicides, hospitals in all major cities are reporting an influx of patients suffering catatonia—a state of unresponsive stupor brought about by—”
The co-anchor cuts him off: “I’m sorry to interrupt you, David. The FAA is reporting…Jesus…Forty commercial jet crashes in United States airspace in the last fifteen—”
Helena turns off the television, drops the remote on the sofa, and walks into the foyer. Barry follows her to the front door, which she pulls open.
The view from the porch overlooks the gravel driveway and the gentle decline of the desert as it slopes for twelve miles toward the city of Tucson, shimmering like a mirage in the distance.
“It’s still so quiet,” she says. “Hard to believe everything is falling apart out there.”
The last thirty-three years of Barry’s existence is putting down roots in his mind, feeling more real with every breath. He isn’t the man he was in Slade’s hotel. He isn’t the man who spent the last twenty-four years with Helena, trying to save the world from experiencing this day. He’s, somehow, both of them.
He says, “There was a part of me that didn’t believe it would happen.”
“Yeah.”
Helena turns and embraces him with a sudden force that drives him back several steps toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I don’t want to do this.”
“What?”
“This! My life! Go back to 1986, find you, convince you I’m not crazy. Amass a fortune. Build the chair. Try to prevent dead memories. Fail. Watch the world remember. Rinse, repeat. Are the rest of my many lives nothing more than trying to figure a way out of this inescapable loop?”
He looks down at her, framing her jaw in his hands. “I have an idea,” he says. “Let’s forget all of this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s just be together today. Let’s just live.”
“We can’t. This is all happening. This is what is real.”
“I know, but we can wait until tonight for you to go back to ’86. We know what comes next. What has to happen. We don’t need to obsess over it. Let’s just be present for the time we have left together.”
* * *
They set off on their favorite hike through the desert to force themselves to stay away from the news.
The trail is one they’ve blazed over the years, right out the back of their house and up into the saguaro-covered hills.
Sweat is pouring out of Barry, but the exertion is exactly what he needed—something to burn through the surreal shock of the morning.
At midday, they top out on the rock outcropping several hundred feet above their house, which is practically invisible from this height, camouflaged against the floor of the desert.
Barry opens his backpack and takes out a liter of water. They pass it back and forth and try to catch their breath.
There is no movement anywhere.
The desert as silent as a cathedral.
Barry is thinking there’s something about the rock and the ancient cacti that suggests the frozen, timeless permanence of a dead memory.
He looks at Helena.
She pours a little water over her face and hands him the bottle.
“I could do this on my own next time,” she says.
“That’s what you’re sitting here thinking during our last hours together?”
She touches the side of his face. “For decades, you’ve shared the burden of the chair with me. You’ve known this day was coming, that it would probably mean the end of everything, and I’d have to go back to 1986 and try it all over again.”
“Helena—”
“You wanted kids, I didn’t. You sacrificed your interests to help me.”
“Those were all my choices.”
“Next time around, you could have a different life, without the knowledge of what’s coming. That’s all I’m saying. You could have the things you—”
“You want to do this without me?”
“No. I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life, no matter how many timelines I live. That’s why I found you in the first place. But this chair is my cross to bear.”
“You don’t need me.”
“That is not what I’m saying. Of course I need you. I need your love, I need your mind, your support, all of it. But I need you to know—”
“Helena, don’t.”
“Let me say this! It’s enough that I have to see the chair destroying the entire world. People throwing themselves off of buildings because of something I made. It’s another to see it ruin the life of the man I love.”
“Life with you isn’t a life ruined.”
“But you know this is all it can ever be. Stuck in this thirty-three-year loop, trying to find a way to stop this day from coming. All I’m saying is that if you want to just live your fucking life without the pressure of trying to keep the world intact, that’s OK.”
“Look at me.”
The water she dribbled on her face has beaded up on the layer of sunscreen. He stares into her emerald eyes, clear and bright in the sun.
“I don’t know how you do this, H. I don’t know how you carry this weight. But as long as it’s on your shoulders, it’s also on mine. We will find a way to solve this. If not in the next life, then the one after. And if not in that one, then the one—”
She kisses him on top of their mountain.
* * *
They’re a hundred yards from the house when the sound of a helicopter builds behind them, and then streaks across the early-afternoon sky.
Barry stops and watches it cruise toward Tucson.
“That’s a Black Hawk,” he says. “Wonder what’s going on in town.”
The chopper banks hard to the left and slows its groundspeed, now drifting back in their direction as it lowers from five hundred feet toward the ground.
Helena says, “They’re here for us.”
They take off sprinting toward the house, the Black Hawk now hovering seventy-five feet above the desert floor, the rotors roaring and swirling up a cloud of dust and sand, Barry close enough to see three pairs of legs hanging off each side of the open cabin above the skids.
The tip of Helena’s boot strikes a half-buried rock and she goes down hard on the trail. Barry grabs her under both arms and heaves her back onto her feet, blood now run
ning down her right knee.
“Come on!” he screams.
They pass the saltwater pool and reach the patio where they had breakfast.
Thick ropes drop out of the Black Hawk like tentacles, the soldiers already descending them.
Barry slides open the rear door, and they rush through the kitchen and turn down the hallway. Through the windows that look out into the desert on the other side of the house, he sees a cluster of heavily armed and armored soldiers in desert camo jogging up through the landscaping in a tactical formation toward their front door.
Helena is ahead of him, limping from her fall.
They race past the home office and guestroom, and through another window, Barry glimpses the Black Hawk setting down on his driveway behind their cars.
They stop where the hall ends, and Helena presses against one of the rocks in the river-stone wall, which opens to reveal its secret utility as a hidden door.
She and Barry slip inside as the sound of a small explosion shudders through the house.
Then it’s just the two of them, gasping for breath in the pitch-black.
“They’re in the house,” Barry whispers.
“Can you hit the light?”
He feels around until his fingers graze the switch.
“You sure they won’t see it?”
“No, but I can’t do this in the dark.”
Barry flicks the switch. A single, unshaded bulb burns down from overhead. They’re standing in a kind of anteroom, barely larger than a kitchen pantry. The inner door is the basic size and shape of a standard door, except that it weighs six hundred pounds, is built of steel plates layered to a thickness of two inches, and when activated, shoots ten massive bolts into a jamb.
Helena is typing in the code on the keypad, and the footsteps of at least half a dozen soldiers are moving toward them down the hallway, Barry picturing them closing in on the river-stone terminus, the sound of whispered voices and boot-falls and jostling gear getting closer and closer.
A shouted voice from the far side of the house—probably in their master suite—echoes down the long hall.
“Clear on the east side!”
“Impossible. We saw them enter the house. Everyone check closets? Under beds?”
On the illuminated display, Barry watches as Helena keys in the last number.
The high-pitched whirring of internal gears becomes audible inside the anteroom, and possibly beyond, Barry and Helena holding each other’s stare as the ten bolts retract one by one like muffled gunshots.
A woman’s voice comes through the other side of the hidden door: “You hear that?”
“It came from inside this wall.”
He hears what sounds like hands running across the faux stones. Helena drags open the heavy door. Barry follows her across the threshold into another place of darkness, just as the hidden door cracks open.
A soldier shouts, “There’s something back here!”
Helena pulls the vault door closed, types the locking code into the keypad on this side, and the ten dead bolts shoot home again.
When she hits the lights, they reveal a claustrophobic metal staircase, spiraling thirty feet down into the earth.
The temperature drops as they descend.
The soldiers pound on the vault door.
“They’ll find a way through,” Barry says.
“Then let’s hurry.”
Three stories underground, the staircase ends at a doorway that leads into a two-thousand-square-foot lab, where they’ve spent most of their waking hours for the last fifteen years. It is, for all intents and purposes, a bunker, with a dedicated air recirculation and filtration system, stand-alone solar-powered electrical system, a galley and sleeping quarters, and food and water rations for one year.
“How’s your leg?” Barry asks.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She limps past the Eames lounge chair, which they retrofitted into a memory chair, and then a region of the lab they used for brain imaging, and their study of dead-memory processing.
Helena sits down at the terminal and uploads the memory-reactivation program they always keep idling in case of emergencies. Since she already mapped the memory of her first solo drive when she turned sixteen, she can go straight to the deprivation chamber.
“I thought we’d have more time today,” Barry says.
“Me too.”
A detonation above them shakes the floor and rattles the walls. Plaster dust rains down from the ceiling like fine snow.
Barry rushes back through the lab to the foot of the stairwell. The air is full of dust, but he doesn’t hear incoming voices or footsteps yet.
As he moves back into the lab, he sees Helena pulling off her shirt and sports bra, and then sliding her shorts down her legs.
She stands naked before him, strapping on the skullcap, her right leg bleeding, tears streaming down her face.
He goes to his wife and embraces her as another blast shakes the foundation of their subterranean lab.
“Don’t let them in here,” she says.
She wipes her eyes and kisses him, and then Barry helps her into the tank.
When she’s floating in the water, he looks down at her, says, “I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.”
“You won’t even recognize me.”
“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”
He closes the hatch and moves over to the terminal. It’s gone quiet for a moment, no sound but the humming of the servers.
He initiates the reactivation program and leans back in the chair, trying to wrap his mind around what comes next.
An earth-shaking blast cracks the walls and the concrete floor beneath his feet, Barry wondering if the Black Hawk dropped a bomb on their house.
Smoke is pouring through the vents, and the light panels are flickering, but the reactivation program continues to run.
He goes to the stairwell again—the only way in or out of the lab.
Now he hears voices above and sees beams of light swinging through the dust-choked smoke.
They’ve breached the vault door, their boots clanging down the metal steps.
Barry slams the door to the lab and turns the dead bolt. It’s just a metal fire door—they could probably kick it in.
He returns to the terminal and studies the readout of Helena’s vitals. She’s been flatlined now for several minutes.
Something hits the other side of the door.
Again.
And again.
A machine gun fires and another boot or shoulder or battering ram slams into the metal.
Miraculously, it holds.
“Come on,” Barry says.
He hears voices yelling in the stairwell and then a deafening blast that sets his ears ringing—a grenade or a charge.
A wall of smoke appears where the door had been, and a soldier steps through over the flattened door, pointing an automatic rifle at Barry.
Barry raises his arms over his head and rises slowly from the chair as more soldiers pour into the lab.
The screen at the terminal, which shows the status of the stimulators, flashes an alert—DMT RELEASE DETECTED.
Come on. Come on.
Inside the tank, Helena is dying, her brain dumping the last of the chemical that will fling her back three decades into a memory.
The lead soldier is coming toward Barry, screaming something that he can’t understand over the ringing in his—
* * *
Blood is dripping from his nose, melting little burgundy holes in the snow.
He looks around at the dark evergreens, their branches sagging under the weight of a recent storm.
He looks at Helena, her hair different from the last time he saw her, in their basement lab i
n the Sonoran desert. It’s now equal parts white and red. She’s wearing it long and pulled back into a ponytail, and her face looks somehow harder.
“What day is it?” he asks.
“April 16, 2019. Second timeline anniversary since I died in the tank at DARPA.”
They’re standing in snowshoes in a glade on a mountainside, overlooking a city on a plain, ten miles distant.
“That’s Denver,” Helena says. “We built our lab here so I could be close to my parents.” She looks at him. “Nothing yet?”
“It feels like I was in our home in Tucson literally seconds ago.”
“Sorry to say you just shifted from one shitty April 16, 2019, to another.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We failed again.”
Their first meeting at the Portland bar. For a second time. The claims of clairvoyance. He fell in love with her even faster, because she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.
The memory rush is more intense this time.
Almost painful.
He collapses in the snow as the past twenty-nine years with Helena hit his brain like a train of memories.
They spent the decade before technology was sufficient to build the chair studying space-time, the nature of matter, dimensionality, and quantum entanglement. They learned everything they could about the physics of time, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
Then they explored methods of traveling back into memory without using the tank, searching for a faster way. But absent the sensory deprivation, all they accomplished was killing themselves again and again.
Next come the memories that break him.
Losing his mother again.
Fights with Helena over not having kids (that must have been infuriating for her the second time around).
The sex, the love, the beautiful love.
Moments of exhilaration from knowing they were the only two people in the world fighting to save it.
Moments of horror from the same realization, and the knowledge they were failing.
And then he’s fully merged. The Barry with memories of all timelines.
