by Blake Crouch
She wipes away a tear. “All these years, I thought you wished you’d never met me. I thought you blamed me for ruining your life.”
“I was just hurting.”
She squeezes his hand. “I’m sorry we weren’t the ones for each other, Barry. You’re right about that, and I’m sorry for everything else.”
BARRY
November 5, 2018
The loft is on the third floor of a converted warehouse in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, an old shipbuilding neighborhood on the bay.
Barry parks his rental car three blocks away and walks to the entrance of the building.
The fog is so dense it softens the edges of the city, laying a gray primer on everything and diffusing the globes of illumination from the streetlights, turning them into ethereal orbs. It reminds him, in some ways, of the color palette of a dead memory, but he likes the anonymity it provides.
A woman heading out for the evening opens the front door. He slips by her and into the lobby, heading up two flights of stairs and then down a long hallway toward Unit 7.
He knocks, waits.
No one answers.
He knocks again, harder this time, and after a moment, a man’s soft voice bleeds through the door.
“Who is it?”
“Detective Sutton.” Barry steps back and holds his badge to the peephole. “Could I speak with you?”
“What is it regarding?”
“Just open the door, please.”
Five seconds elapse.
Barry thinking, He’s not going to let me in.
He puts his badge away, and as he takes a step back to kick the door in, the chain on the other side slides out, and a dead bolt turns.
Marcus Slade stands in the threshold.
“How can I help you?” Slade asks.
Barry walks past him, into a small, messy loft with large windows overlooking a shipyard, the bay, and the lights of Oakland beyond.
“Nice place,” Barry says as Slade closes the door.
Barry moves toward the kitchen table and picks up a sports almanac of the 1990s and then a huge volume entitled The SRC Green Book of 35-Year Historical Stock Charts.
“Little light reading?” he asks.
Slade looks nervous and annoyed. He has his hands thrust into the pockets of his green cardigan, and his eyes keep shifting back and forth, blinking at irregular intervals.
“What do you do, Mr. Slade?”
“I work for Ion Industries.”
“In what capacity?”
“Research and development. I’m an assistant to one of their lead scientists.”
“And what kind of stuff do you guys make?” Barry asks, perusing a stack of pages that were recently printed off from a website—historical winning lottery numbers by state.
Slade walks over and snatches the pages out of Barry’s hand.
“The nature of our work is protected under an NDA. Why are you here, Detective Sutton?”
“I’m investigating a murder.”
Slade straightens. “Who was killed?”
“Well, this is a weird one.” Barry looks into Slade’s eyes. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
“I’m not following.”
“I’m here about a murder that’s going to happen later tonight.”
Slade swallows, blinks. “What does this have to do with me?”
“It’ll happen at your place of work, and the victim’s name is Helena Smith. That’s your boss, right?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s also the woman I love.”
Slade is standing across from Barry, the kitchen table between them, his eyes gone wide. Barry points at the books. “So you have all this stuff memorized? Obviously, you can’t take them with you.”
Slade opens his mouth and closes it again. Then says, “I want you to leave.”
“It works, by the way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Your plan. It works like gangbusters. You become rich and famous. Unfortunately, what you do tonight causes the suffering of billions and the end of reality and time as we know it.”
“Who are you?”
“Just a cop from New York City.” He stares Slade down for ten long seconds.
“Get out.”
Barry doesn’t move. The only noise in the loft is the ragged sound of Slade’s accelerated breathing. Slade’s phone buzzes on the table. Barry glances down, sees a new text from “Helena Smith” appear on the home screen.
Sure. I can meet you in two hours. What’s the problem?
Barry finally starts for the door.
Three steps from it, he hears a click. And another. And another.
He turns around slowly and looks across the loft at Slade, who’s staring dumbfounded at the .357 revolver he would’ve killed Helena with in several hours. He looks up at Barry, who should be lying on the floor right now, bleeding out. Slade levels the gun on Barry and pulls the trigger, but it only dry-fires again.
“I broke in earlier today while you were at work,” Barry says. “Loaded the chambers with empty shell casings. I needed to see for myself what you were capable of.”
Slade looks in the direction of his bedroom.
“There are no live rounds in the house, Marcus. Well, that’s not exactly true.” Barry pulls his Glock from his shoulder holster. “My gun is full of them.”
* * *
The bar is in the Mission, a cozy, wood-paneled tavern called Monk’s Kettle, its windows steamed up on the inside against the cold and foggy night. Helena has told him about this place in at least three of their lifetimes.
Barry steps in out of the mist and runs his fingers through his hair, which has been flattened by the dampness.
It’s a Monday night, and late, so the place is nearly empty.
He spots her sitting at the far end of the bar, alone, hunched over a laptop. As he approaches, the nerves hit—far worse than he anticipated.
His mouth runs dry; his hands sweat.
She looks quite different from the dynamo he spent six lifetimes with. She’s wearing a gray sweater that a cat or dog has pulled a hundred little nits out of, smudged glasses, and even her hair is different—longer and pulled back into a utilitarian ponytail.
Watching her, it’s apparent that her obsession with the memory chair has fully consumed her, and it breaks his heart.
She doesn’t acknowledge him in any way as he climbs onto the seat beside hers.
He smells the beer on her breath, and beneath it, the subtler, elemental scent of his wife that he would know anywhere, out of a million people. He’s trying not to look at her, but the emotion of sitting beside her is almost too much. Last time he saw her face, he was nailing the lid onto her pine-box casket. And so he sits quietly beside her as she writes an email, thinking of all the lifetimes they shared.
The lovely moments.
The ugly ones.
The goodbyes, the deaths.
And the hellos, like this one.
Like the six times she came to him in that Portland shit-kicker bar when he was twenty-one years old, sidled up beside him, young, bright-eyed, beautiful, and fearless.
You look like you want to buy me a drink.
He smiles to himself, because she does not, in this moment, look remotely like she wants to buy a stranger a drink. She looks, well, like Helena—sunk deeply into her work and oblivious to the world.
The bartender comes over, Barry orders, and then he’s sitting with his beer, asking himself the question of the moment—What do you say to the bravest woman you’ve ever known, whom you lived a half dozen extraordinary lives with, whom you saved the world with, who saved you in every conceivable way, but who has no idea you even exist?
Barry takes a sip of beer and se
ts down the glass. The air feels electrically charged, like just before a storm. Questions avalanching through his mind—
Will you know me?
Will you believe me?
Will you love me?
Scared, exhilarated, senses heightening, heart thrumming, he turns finally to Helena, who, feeling his attention, looks over at him through those jade-green eyes.
And he says—
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could never have written this book without the infinite support of my partner in creativity and life (and sometimes crime) Jacque Ben-Zekry. Thank you for the thousand conversations (often sitting at our favorite bars) about this story and characters. Thank you for your patience when, at times, this book ruled our lives, and for your indispensable editorial contributions that made Recursion better in every way.
David Hale Smith, my ninja-cowboy-assassin literary agent, has been a tremendous advocate going on nine years. Brother, I’m so thankful to have you in my life.
And keeping it in the Inkwell Management family for a moment—high fives to Alexis Hurley, who is responsible for bringing my books to the wide world, to Nathaniel Jacks for your superb, fine-grain contract work, and Richard Pine for your steady hand on the Inkwell ship.
Angela Cheng Caplan and Joel VanderKloot—what can I say other than every writer should be so lucky as to have a team like you driving the battle tank through the madness of Hollywood.
I’ve been writing for a long time, and I have never had a better publishing experience than with the team at Crown. My editor, Julian Pavia, my publisher, Molly Stern, Maya Mavjee, Annsley Rosner, David Drake, Chris Brand, Angeline Rodriguez, and publicity extraordinaire, Dyana Messina, are simply the best of the best.
Double shout-out to Julian for challenging me to make this story every bit as big and surprising as it deserved to be. As the reader deserved it to be. Your commitment to beating this novel into submission matched mine, which is all a writer can ask from an editor. Recursion would be a shell of itself without your fearless editorial eye.
Wayne Brooks at Pan Macmillan in the UK—I’m over-the-moon to have you championing my work on the other side of the pond.
Rachelle Mandik did an exceptional copyediting job on the final manuscript.
Clifford Johnson, Ph.D., professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California, provided invaluable insight in the final stages of the manuscript. All mistakes, assumptions, and crazy theories are mine alone.
This was hands down the hardest book I’ve ever written, and I leaned more on friends than ever before when it came time to gather feedback. To say thank you to those priceless people who provided notes on Recursion, and to pay tribute to other friends and writers I greatly admire, some of their namesakes appear in the book as follows:
Barry Sutton = the inimitable Barry Eisler, who went above and beyond in his notes and helped me to drill down into the book’s theme in a moment when I needed his counsel most.
Ann Voss Peters = the lovely and talented Ann Voss Peterson, who has made so many of my books better with her thoughtful insights, in particular the motivations behind my characters.
Helena Smith = the British dynamo thriller writer, Helen Smith, who incidentally has the greatest Cards Against Humanity reading voice in the world.
Jee-woon Chercover = Sean Chercover, the greatest-smelling writer I personally know, and one of my favorite humans.
Marcus Slade = Marcus Sakey, my brainstorming brother who helped immeasurably at various milestones along the path of writing this book.
Amor Towles = Amor Towles, genius writer of A Gentleman in Moscow, my favorite book of the last five years.
Dr. Paul Wilson = the great Dr. F. Paul Wilson, titan of sci-fi and horror, and abstainer of snake wine.
Reed King = Reed Farrel Coleman, Long Island’s noir poet and the benevolent Godfather of the mystery community.
Marie Iden = Matt Iden, the D.C. novelist, admirer of BoJack (my dog), and perhaps the Washington Capitals’ greatest fan.
Joseph Hart = the brilliant sci-fi novelist and Lord of the northern Minnesota wilds, Joe Hart.
John Shaw = Johnny Motherfucking Shaw, owner of the greatest eyebrow in the known universe, and one of our finest crime writers.
Sheila Redling = Sheila Redling, the wonderful West Virginia writer and one of the funniest people I know.
Timoney Rodriguez = Timoney “cool, cool” Korbar, the only non-novelist in this group, but an amazing producer/creator in her own right, and an all-around uber-human.
Heartfelt thanks also to Jeroen ten Berge, Steve Konkoly, Chad Hodge, Olivia Vigrabs, Alison Dasho, and Suzanne Blue, for taking the time to give me feedback at various stages during the writing process.
Hugs and kisses to my luminous children—Aidan, Annslee, and Adeline. You are everything that inspires me.
And finally, around Christmas of 2012, Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu, two neuroscientists at MIT, implanted a false memory in the brain of a mouse. The general framework of Helena’s “memory chair” spring-boarded off their stunning achievement. I’m profoundly grateful to them, and to all scientists who have dedicated their lives to unraveling the beautiful mystery of our existence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BLAKE CROUCH is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include the New York Times bestseller Dark Matter and the internationally bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also co-created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He lives in Colorado.
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