by Blake Crouch
“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”
“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”
“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”
“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering. I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”
Holy fuck.
He remembers racing down the hill, into the house, screaming her name. His hands frozen on the deprivation chamber hatch as the timeline ended.
What if Slade was right? What if those old timelines are still out there? Take his memory of Lake Tear of the Clouds. He could see the faces of Julia and Meghan clearly. He remembered their voices. What if he could restart a dead memory by the sheer force of his consciousness breathing life and fire into the gray?
Is there a chance it might also skid everyone else’s consciousness back onto that dead timeline as well?
And if he could return, not just to a prior timeline, but to the original, there would be no false memories from subsequent timelines, and none from earlier ones either.
Because there are no timelines that pre-date the original.
It’d be like none of this ever happened.
He already took the pills. Probably has a half hour, maybe longer, before the drug takes over.
He sits up in the grave, sharp-awake.
Thoughts racing.
Maybe Slade was lying, but isn’t staying here, killing himself next to Helena’s body as he drowns in the memory of her the same fetishizing of nostalgia he did with Meghan? Just another instance of longing for the unreachable past?
* * *
Back at the station, Barry grabs a skullcap and the tablet that remotely controls the terminal. He climbs onto the chair and lowers the MEG microscope onto the skullcap, which begins to hum softly.
He sprinted the half mile from Helena’s gravesite to the station, and figures he has ten to fifteen minutes before the oxy takes effect.
He’s lived the events of the original timeline several times over—Julia, Meghan, his daughter’s death, his divorce, his life as a cop in New York City. In his mind, the dead memories overlay one another, each lifetime manifesting in his mind’s eye as a gray, haunted tableau. But the older the timeline, the darker it becomes, like whiskey left in the cask. He finally circles the oldest timeline—darker than the moodiest film noir and carrying the palpable gravity of the original.
He wakes the tablet and opens a new file to record the memory.
He’s running out of time.
He doesn’t remember anything about November 5, 2018. It’s just a date in his head from Slade, and from a conversation he had with Helena many, many lifetimes ago.
But November 4 is Meghan’s birthday. He knows exactly where he was.
Barry presses Record and remembers.
When he’s finished, he waits for the program to calculate the memory’s synaptic number. It occurs to him that if the number comes back too low, he’ll have to dig into the software and disable the firewall, and that’s going to take more time than he has.
The tablet flashes a number.
121.
Just barely in the safe zone.
Barry affixes an injection port to his left forearm and loads the drug cocktail into the mechanism.
He keeps thinking he feels the first signs of oxy as he programs the memory-reactivation sequence at the terminal, but soon he’s naked and climbing into the tank.
Floating on his back in the water, he reaches up and pulls the hatch closed over the top of him.
His mind going in a thousand different directions.
This is going to fail and you’re just going to die in this tank.
Fuck the world, save Meghan.
Go back out there and die beside your wife like you’ve been intending for the last two months.
You have to keep trying. Helena would want this.
There’s a subtle vibration in his left forearm. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, wondering if it will be his last.
BARRY
The world stands as still as a painting—no movement, life, or color—and yet, he is aware of his own existence.
He can see only in the direction he’s facing, staring across an arrangement of tables west toward the river, the water almost black.
Everything is frozen.
Everything in shades of gray.
Straight ahead, a waiter—dark as a silhouette—carries a pitcher of ice water.
People occupy tables shaded by umbrellas, caught in moments of laughter, eating and drinking, holding napkins to their mouths. But there is no motion. They might as well be carvings on an urn.
Straight ahead, he sees Julia, already seated at their table. She’s waiting for him, paused in a pensive, anxious moment, and he registers a terrifying fear that she will forever be waiting.
This is nothing like returning to a memory on a live timeline. That is a process of slowly embodying yourself as the sensations of the memory wash over you. You come into action and energy.
Here, there is none.
And it occurs to him—I am finally in a moment of now.
Whatever he is or has become, Barry registers a freedom of movement he has never known. He is no longer in three-dimensional space, and he wonders if this is what Slade meant by—And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled. Was this how Slade experienced the universe?
Impossibly, he turns around inside of himself and stares back through…
He doesn’t know what it is exactly.
Not right away, at least.
He’s caught at the leading edge of something that reminds him of a time-lapsed star path, only it’s a part of him, as much an extension of his being as his arm or his mind, falling away and spiraling in on itself into a glowing, fractal-like form more beautiful and mysterious than anything in his experience. And he knows, on a level he cannot begin to explain, that this is his original worldline, and that it contains the breadth of his existence as formed by memory.
Every memory he has ever made.
Every memory that has made him.
But this is not his only worldline. Others branch off from this one, twisting and turning in on themselves through space-time.
He feels the worldline of memories where he saved Meghan from the hit-and-run.
A trio of minor worldlines, each of which ended in his death at Slade’s hotel.
The subsequent lifetimes he and Helena lived in their attempts to stave off the end of reality.
Even the branches he created in their last life in the Antarctic—spokelike radials of memory forming the ten times he died in the tank to be with her again.
But none of those matter anymore.
The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.
All anything is made of.
When the needle of his consciousness touches a memory, his life begins to play, and he finds himself in a frozen moment—
The smell of dead leaves and the cool bite of autumn in the city, sitting in the Ramble in Central Park, crying after signing his divorce papers.
Moving again—
Faster now—
Through more memories than he can count.
As numerous as stars—like staring across a universe that is him.
His mother’s funeral, looking down into her open casket, his hands on hers and the cool stiffness of them as he studies her face, thinking, That isn’t you….
Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise.
Finding her on the side of the road near their house.
Why these moments? he wonders.
Driving through the suburbs on a cold, dark night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Julia in the front passenger seat beside him, Meghan in the back, everyone quiet and content, watching Christmas lights through the windows—an exhale in the midst of life’s journey, between storms, where everything has settled into fleeting alignment.
Ripped away again, now hurtling through a tunnel whose walls of memory are rifling down on him.
Meghan behind the wheel of his Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle clutches the steering wheel.
Meghan’s grass-stained knees after a soccer game, six years old, her face ruddy and happy.
Meghan’s first wobbly steps in their Brooklyn studio.
What is the reality of this moment?
The first time he touches his daughter in a hospital room—his hand to the side of her tiny cheek.
Julia taking him by the hand, leading him into the bedroom of their first apartment, sitting him down and telling him she’s pregnant.
Am I in my final seconds in the deprivation tank in Antarctica, reviewing my life as it slips away?
Driving home after his first date with Julia and the weightless elation of hope that he might have found someone to love.
What if this is nothing more than the last electrical firings of my dying brain? Frantic neuronal activity bending my perception of reality and conjuring random memories?
Is this what everyone experiences at death?
The tunnel and the light?
This false heaven?
Does this mean I’ve failed to restart the original timeline and the world is finished?
Or am I outside of time, being pulled into the crushing black hole of my own memories?
His hands on his father’s casket and the stark realization that life is pain and always will be.
Fifteen years old, getting called into the principal’s office where his mom sits on the couch, crying, and he knows before they even tell him that something happened to his father.
The dry lips and trembling hands of the first girl he ever kissed in junior high.
His mother pushing a shopping cart through the coffee aisle of a grocery store and him trailing behind, a piece of stolen candy in his pocket.
Standing with his father one morning in the driveway of their house in Portland, Oregon, the birds gone quiet, everything still, and the air as cold as night. His father’s face watching the moment of totality is more impressive than the eclipse itself. How often do you witness your parents awestruck?
Lying in bed on the second floor of his grandparents’ nineteenth-century New Hampshire farmhouse as a summer storm sweeps in from the White Mountains, drenching the fields and the apple trees and pattering on the tin roof.
The time he crashed his bike and broke his arm when he was six.
Light coming through a window and the shadows of leaves dancing on the wall above a crib. It’s late afternoon—he doesn’t know how he knows this—and the tones of his mother’s singing drift through the walls into his nursery.
My first memory.
He can’t explain why, but it feels like the memory he’s been searching for his entire life, and the seductive gravity of nostalgia is pulling his consciousness in, because this isn’t just the quintessential memory of home, it is the safe and perfect moment—before life held any real pain.
Before he failed.
Before he lost people he loved.
Before he experienced waking to the fear that his best days were behind him.
He suspects he could slip his consciousness into this memory like an old man into a warm, soft bed.
Live this perfect moment forever.
There could be worse fates.
And perhaps no better.
Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?
For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror.
Until Helena.
The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.
Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain.
That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
And he’s in the café again.
The waters of the Hudson turn blue and begin to flow. Color enters the sky, the faces of the customers, buildings, every surface. He feels the cool air of morning coming off the river into his face. He smells food. The world is suddenly vibrant, brimming with the sound of people laughing and talking all around him.
He’s breathing.
He’s blinking.
Smiling and crying.
And moving at last toward Julia.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD
BARRY
November 4, 2018
The café occupies a picturesque spot on the banks of the Hudson, in the shadow of the West Side Highway. Barry and Julia share a brief, fragile embrace.
“Are you OK?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you came.”
The waiter swings by to take their drink orders, and they make small talk until the coffee arrives.
It is a Sunday, the brunch crowd is out in force, and in the initial, awkward silence with Julia, Barry pressure-checks his memories.
His daughter died eleven years ago.
Julia divorced him soon after.
He has never met Marcus Slade or Ann Voss Peters.
Never traveled back into a memory to save Meghan.
False Memory Syndrome has never plagued the world.
Reality and time have never unraveled in the minds of billions.
And he has never laid eyes on Helena Smith. Their many lifetimes together spent trying to save the world from the effects of the chair have been banished to the wasteland of dead memory.
There is no question—he can feel it in his bones.
This timeline is the first, the original.
Barry looks across the table at Julia and says, “It’s really good to see you.”
They talk about Meghan, what they each imagine she’d be doing with her life, and it’s all Barry can do not to tell Julia that he actually knows. That he’s seen it firsthand in a distant, unreachable memory. That their daughter would have been more vital, more interesting, and kinder than any of their speculation could begin to do her memory justice.
As the food comes, he remembers Meghan sitting at the table with them. Swears he can almost feel her presence, like a phantom limb. And while it hurts, it doesn’t break him the way it once would have. The memory of his daughter hurts because he experienced a beautiful thing that has since gone away. Same as with Julia. Same as with all the loss he has ever experienced.
The last time he lived this moment with Julia, they reminisced about a family trip into the Adirondacks, to Lake Tear of the Clouds, the source of the Hudson.
And the butterfly that kept coming around made him think of Meghan.
Julia says, “You seem better.”
“I do?”
“Yeah.”
I
t is late autumn in the city, Barry thinking this reality is feeling more solid by the minute. No shifts threatening to upend everything.
He is questioning his memory of all the other timelines. Even Helena feels more like a fading fantasy than a woman he touched and loved.
What feels real in this moment isn’t his phantom memory of watching a shockwave vaporize the Upper West Side. What feels real are the sounds of the city, the people at the tables all around him, his ex-wife, the breath going in and out of his lungs.
For everyone but him, the past is a singular concept.
No conflicting histories.
No false memories.
The dead timelines of mayhem and destruction are his alone to remember.
When the check comes, Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.
“Thank you, Barry.”
He reaches across the table and takes hold of her hand, clocking the surprise in her eyes at this gesture of intimacy.
“I need to tell you something, Julia.”
He looks out at the Hudson. The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders. Tourist boats go up and down the river. The noise of traffic is ceaseless on the highway above. The sky crisscrossed with the fading contrails of a thousand jets.
“I was angry with you for a long time.”
“I know,” she says.
“I thought you left me because of Meghan.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It was too much to keep breathing the same air as you in those dark days.”
He shakes his head. “I think that if you and I could go back to before she died, even if we could somehow prevent it, you still would have gone your way, and I would’ve gone mine. I think we were meant to be together for a time. Perhaps losing Meghan shortened the life-span of us, but even if she had lived, we’d still be apart in this moment.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do, and I’m sorry I held on to the anger. I’m sorry I only see this now. We had so many perfect moments, and for a long time, I couldn’t appreciate them. I could only look back in regret. This is what I wanted to tell you: I wouldn’t change anything. I’m glad you came into my life when you did. I’m glad for the time we had. I’m glad for Meghan, and that she came from the two of us. That she couldn’t have come from any other two people. I wouldn’t take back a second of any of it.”
