by Blake Crouch
A series of locks release, the door free to swing on its hinges.
He pushes it open, and the coldest breath of air he has ever encountered blasts him in the face with a sensation beyond temperature. Like fingernails clawing away his skin. Instantly, he feels his nose hairs freezing, and when he draws breath, he chokes on the pain of it sliding down his esophagus.
Through the open hatch, he sees a walkway angling down from the station toward the icecap, the world cloaked in darkness and swirling with needles of snow that sting his face like shrapnel.
The visibility is less than a quarter mile, but by the light of the moon, he can just make out other structures in proximity. A series of large cylindrical tanks he suspects is a water-treatment plant. A swaying tower that’s either some sort of gantry or a drilling rig. A telescope, folded down against the storm. Vehicles of varying size on continuous tracks.
He can’t stand it anymore. He takes hold of the door with fingers already beginning to stiffen and forces it to close. The locks engage. The wind downshifts from a scream to that sustained and ghostly moan.
He walks out of the vestibule and under the lights of the pristine and seemingly empty station, his face burning as it reawakens from the slightest touch of frostbite.
In this moment, he is a man without memory, and the sense of being adrift in time is a crushing, existential horror. Like waking from a troubled sleep, when the lines between reality and dreams are still murky and you’re calling out to ghosts.
All he has is his first name, and an out-of-focus sense of himself.
At the seating area around the television, he sees an open DVD case and a remote control. He sits on one of the sofas, takes the controller, and presses Play.
On the screen, the woman is sitting exactly where he is, a blanket draped over her shoulders and a cup of tea steaming on the table in front of her.
She smiles at the camera and brushes a wisp of white hair out of her face, his heart kicking at the sight of her.
“This is weird.” She laughs nervously. “You should be watching this on April 16, 2019—our favorite day in history. Your consciousness and memories from the last timeline have just shifted over. Or should have. With each new iteration, your memories are coming in more slowly and erratically. Sometimes you miss entire lifetimes. So I made this video—first, to tell you not to be afraid, since you’re probably wondering why you’re in a research station in Antarctica. And secondly, because I want to say something to the Barry who remembers all timelines, who’s quite different from the one I’m living with now. So please, pause me until your memories arrive.”
He pauses the video.
It is so quiet here.
Nothing but the roar of the wind.
He goes to the kitchen, and as he brews a cup of coffee, a tightness forms in his chest.
There’s a storm of emotion on the horizon.
His head pounds at the base of his skull, and a nosebleed hits.
The Portland bar.
Helena.
Her slow revelation of who she was.
Buying this old research station at the turn of the millennium.
They refurbished it, then flew the chair and all its component parts down here on a privately chartered 737 that stuck a harrowing landing on the polar runway.
They brought a team of particle physicists with them whom they had apparently scoped out in a prior timeline, who had no concept of the true nature of their research. They drilled out 1.5 foot–diameter cores 8,000 feet deep into the polar cap and lowered highly sensitive light detectors more than a mile below the ice. The sensors were designed to detect neutrinos, one of the most enigmatic particles in the universe. Neutrinos carry no charge, rarely interact with normal matter, and typically emerge from (and therefore indicate) cosmic events such as supernovae, galactic cores, and black holes. When a neutrino hits an atom on Earth, it creates a particle called a muon, that’s moving faster than light in a solid, causing the ice to emit light. These light waves caused by muons passing through solid ice is what they looked for.
Barry’s theory, carried over from prior timelines, was that if micro black holes and wormholes were flashing in and out of existence when someone’s consciousness re-spawned in an earlier memory, these light detectors would register the light waves caused by muons caused by neutrinos ejecting from the black holes and smashing into the nucleus of earthbound atoms.
They got nowhere.
Discovered nothing.
The team of particle physicists went home.
Six lifetimes pursuing a deeper understanding of the memory chair, and all they had managed to do was postpone the inevitable.
He looks up at the screen, where Helena is frozen mid-gesture.
Now come the dead memories of prior timelines. Their lives in Arizona, Denver, on the rugged coast of Maine. His life without her in New York City, their life together in Scotland. But there are still holes. He has flashes of the last timeline near San Francisco, but it’s incomplete—he can’t remember the last days of it, when the world remembered.
He presses Play.
“So you’ve remembered? Good. The only way you’re watching this is because I’m gone.”
Tears release. It’s the weirdest sensation. While the Barry of this timeline knows she’s dead, simultaneously the Barrys of the prior timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time.
“I’m sorry, honey.”
He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her.
But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year.
“This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.”
She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.”
Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness.
“We have four years until doomsday.”
“Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?”
“We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.”
They are.
Before her mind broke
completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living.
Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too.
“It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.”
It’s true. He did.
“But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this—when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me—it tortures us. Because I’m locked in my moment, and you’re locked in yours.”
Barry wipes his eyes, the full emotional weight of the last two years with her, and the two months alone, pressing in on him. He only waited to experience this seventh timeline anniversary to see what it felt like to be a person with numerous histories. To fully understand himself. It’s one thing to be told you had a daughter. Another entirely to remember the sound of her laugh. The first seconds of holding her. The totality of all the moments is too much to bear.
“Don’t come back for me, Barry.”
He already did. The morning he rolled over and found her dead beside him, he used the chair to go back one month to be with her a little longer. Then when she died, he did it again. And again. Killed himself ten times in the tank to put off the great silence and loneliness of life without her in this place.
Helena says, “ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.”
The Barry on the screen is crying.
The Barry of this moment is crying.
“I would say it was worth it to accidentally build a world-destroying chair because it brought you into my life, but that’s probably bad form. If you wake up on April 16, 2019, and the world somehow doesn’t remember and implode, I hope you’ll go on without me and live an amazing life. Seek your happiness. You found it with me, which means it’s attainable. If the world remembers, we did what we could, and if you feel alone at the end, Barry, know that I’m with you. Maybe not in your moment. But I am in this one. My heart.”
She kisses the Barry beside her and blows a kiss at the camera.
The screen goes black.
He turns on the news, watches five seconds of a frantic BBC anchor reporting that the mainland of the United States has been hit by several thousand nuclear warheads, and then turns off the television.
* * *
Barry moves through the vestibule, toward the door that keeps him protected from the killing cold.
He’s with an ancient memory of Julia. In it, she’s young, and so is he. Meghan is there, and they’re camping at Lake Tear of the Clouds, high in the Adirondacks.
The moment feels close enough to touch. The smell of evergreens. The sound of his daughter’s voice. But the ache of the memory hangs like a black cloud in his chest.
Lately, he’s been reading the great philosophers and physicists. Plato to Aristotle. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s relativistic. One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue. Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end.
As if our choices, our fates, were locked from our first breath.
He studies the readout on the door:
Wind: Calm
Temp: -83.9 °F; -64.4 °C
Wind Chill: -83.9°F; -64.4 °C
Humidity: 14%
But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.
The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.
* * *
It doesn’t matter what time it is. For the next six months, it’s always night.
The wind has died, but the temperature has plummeted to an eyelash-freezing eighty below zero. The research station stands half a mile away, the only smudge of manmade light in the vast polar desert.
There are no land features to speak of. From where he sits, there is nothing but a flat, white plain of wind-sculpted ice stretching off toward every horizon.
It seems impossible, sitting out here all alone in the perfect stillness, that the rest of the world is going to pieces. Stranger still that it’s all because of a chair accidentally created by the woman he loves.
She’s buried in the ice beside him, four feet down in a casket he built of pine scraps from the woodshop. He crafted a little marker from the best piece of oak he could find and carved a little epitaph in the wood—his only purpose these last two months.
Helena Gray Smith
Born July 19, 1970, Boulder, Colorado
Died February 14, 2019, E. Antarctica
A Brave, Beautiful Genius
Loved by Barry Sutton
Saver of Barry Sutton
He looks out across the icecap.
Not even a breath of wind.
Nothing moving.
A perfectly frozen world.
Like it’s outside of time.
Meteors streak the sky, and the Southern Lights have just begun to dance on the horizon—a flickering ribbon of green and yellow.
Barry peers over the edge of the hole beside Helena’s.
He takes a frigid breath, then slides a leg over the side and lowers himself below the surface of the plain.
His shoulders touch the sides, and there’s a space hollowed out between his hole and Helena’s so he can reach through and touch her pine-box casket.
It feels good to be near her again. Or what was once her.
The dimensions of his grave frame the night sky.
Looking into space from Antarctica feels like looking into space from space. On a night like this—no wind, no weather, no moon—the smear of the Milky Way looks more like a celestial fire, brimming with colors you’d never see from anyplace else on Earth.
Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile aw
ay, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago.
It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is.
But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.
He’s looking back, not just through space but through time.
He’s colder than he was hiking out to their gravesite, but not cold enough. He’s going to have to open his parka and remove some layers.
He sits up, pulls off the outer shell of his right glove, and digs into his pocket.
He takes out a flask of whiskey, kept somewhat warm by proximity to his body and the air trapped between layers of clothing. Out in the open, it’s more than cold enough to freeze solid inside of a minute.
Next, he takes out the bottle of oxy. It contains five 20 mg tablets, and if they don’t kill him outright, they’ll certainly put him into a deep slumber while the cold finishes him off.
He opens the bottle and dumps the pills into his mouth, rinsing them down with several swallows of ice-cold whiskey that still feels hot when it hits his stomach.
He’s been imagining this moment obsessively since Helena died.
The loneliness has been unbearable without her, and the world beyond has nothing left for him, should it even continue to exist. He no longer wants to know what will happen next.
He lies back in the grave, thinking he’ll wait to open his jacket until he feels the first effects of the drug, when a memory comes.
He thought he had them all, but now the last moments of the previous timeline flash in.
Slade saying—
“You have to go back to what happened first.”
