BARRY

November 2, 2018

Barry Sutton pulls over into the fire lane at the main entrance of the Poe Building, an Art Deco tower glowing white in the illumination of its exterior sconces. He climbs out of his Crown Vic, rushes across the sidewalk, and pushes through the revolving door into the lobby.

The night watchman is standing by the bank of elevators, holding one open as Barry hurries toward him, his shoes echoing off the marble.

“What floor?” Barry asks as he steps into the elevator car.

“Forty-one. When you get up there, take a right and go all the way down the hall.”

“More cops will be here in a minute. Tell them I said to hang back until I give a signal.”

The elevator races upward, belying the age of the building around it, and Barry’s ears pop after a few seconds. When the doors finally part, he moves past a sign for a law firm. There’s a light on here and there, but the floor stands mostly dark. He runs along the carpet, passing silent offices, a conference room, a break room, a library. The hallway finally opens into a reception area that’s paired with the largest office.

In the dim light, the details are all in shades of gray. A sprawling mahogany desk buried under files and paperwork. A circular table covered in notepads and mugs of cold, bitter-smelling coffee. A wet bar stocked exclusively with bottles of Macallan Rare. A glowing aquarium that hums on the far side of the room and contains a small shark and several tropical fish.

As Barry approaches the French doors, he silences his phone and removes his shoes. Taking the handle, he eases the door open and slips out onto the terrace.

The surrounding skyscrapers of the Upper West Side look mystical in their luminous shrouds of fog. The noise of the city is loud and close—car horns ricocheting between the buildings and distant ambulances racing toward some other tragedy. The pinnacle of the Poe Building is less than fifty feet above—a crown of glass and steel and gothic masonry.

The woman sits fifteen feet away beside an eroding gargoyle, her back to Barry, her legs dangling over the edge.

He inches closer, the wet flagstones soaking through his socks. If he can get close enough without detection, he’ll drag her off the edge before she knows what—

“I smell your cologne,” she says without looking back.

He stops.

She looks back at him, says, “Another step and I’m gone.”

It’s difficult to tell in the ambient light, but she appears to be in the vicinity of forty. She wears a dark blazer and matching skirt, and she must have been sitting out here for a while, because her hair has been flattened by the mist.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Barry Sutton. I’m a detective in the Central Robbery Division of NYPD.”

“They sent someone from the Robbery—?”

“I happened to be closest. What’s your name?”

“Ann Voss Peters.”

“May I call you Ann?”

“Sure.”

“Is there anyone I can call for you?”

She shakes her head.

“I’m going to step over here so you don’t have to keep straining your neck to look at me.”

Barry moves away from her at an angle that also brings him to the parapet, eight feet down from where she’s sitting. He glances once over the edge, his insides contracting.

“All right, let’s hear it,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Aren’t you here to talk me off? Give it your best shot.”

He decided what he would say riding up in the elevator, recalling his suicide training. Now, squarely in the moment, he feels less confident. The only thing he’s sure of is that his feet are freezing.

“I know everything feels hopeless to you in this moment, but this is just a moment, and moments pass.”

Ann stares straight down the side of the building, four hundred feet to the street below, her palms flat against the stone that has been weathered by decades of acid rain. All she would have to do is push off. He suspects she’s walking herself through the motions, tiptoeing up to the thought of doing it. Amassing that final head of steam.

He notices she’s shivering.

“May I give you my jacket?” he asks.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to come any closer, Detective.”

“Why is that?”

“I have FMS.”

Barry resists the urge to run. Of course he’s heard of False Memory Syndrome, but he’s never known or met someone with the affliction. Never breathed the same air. He isn’t sure he should attempt to grab her now. Doesn’t even want to be this close. No, fuck that. If she moves to jump, he’ll try to save her, and if he contracts FMS in the process, so be it. That’s the risk you take becoming a cop.

“How long have you had it?” he asks.

“One morning, about a month ago, instead of my home in Middlebury, Vermont, I was suddenly in an apartment here in the city, with a stabbing pain in my head and a terrible nosebleed. At first, I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered…this life too. Here and now, I’m single, an investment banker, I live under my maiden name. But I have…”—she visibly braces herself against the emotion—“memories of my other life in Vermont. I was a mother to a nine-year-old boy named Sam. I ran a landscaping business with my husband, Joe Behrman. I was Ann Behrman. We were as happy as anyone has a right to be.”

“What does it feel like?” Barry asks, taking a clandestine step closer.

“What does what feel like?”

“Your false memories of this Vermont life.”

“I don’t just remember my wedding. I remember the fight over the design for the cake. I remember the smallest details of our home. Our son. Every moment of his birth. His laugh. The birthmark on his left cheek. His first day of school and how he didn’t want me to leave him. But when I try to picture Sam, he’s in black and white. There’s no color in his eyes. I tell myself they were blue. I only see black.

“All my memories from that life are in shades of gray, like film noir stills. They feel real, but they’re haunted, phantom memories.” She breaks down. “Everyone thinks FMS is just false memories of the big moments of your life, but what hurts so much more are the small ones. I don’t just remember my husband. I remember the smell of his breath in the morning when he rolled over and faced me in bed. How every time he got up before I did to brush his teeth, I knew he’d come back to bed and try to have sex. That’s the stuff that kills me. The tiniest, perfect details that make me know it happened.”

“What about this life?” Barry asks. “Isn’t it worth something to you?”

“Maybe some people get FMS and prefer their current memories to their false ones, but there’s nothing about this life I want. I’ve tried, for four long weeks. I can’t fake it anymore.” Tears carve trails through her eyeliner. “My son never existed. Do you get that? He’s just a beautiful misfire in my brain.”

Barry ventures another step toward her, but she catches him this time.

“Don’t come any closer.”

“You are not alone.”

“I am very fucking alone.”

“I’ve only known you a few minutes, and I will be devastated if you do this. Think about the people in your life who love you. Think how they’ll feel.”

“I tracked Joe down,” Ann says.

“Who?”

“My husband. He was living in a mansion out on Long Island. He acted like he didn’t recognize me, but I know he did. He had a whole other life. He was married—I don’t know to who. I don’t know if he had kids. He acted like I was crazy.”

“I’m sorry, Ann.”

“This hurts too much.”

“Look, I’ve been where you are. I’ve wanted to end everything. And I’m standing here right now telling you I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad I had the strength to ride it out. This low point isn’t the book of your life. It’s just a chapter.”

“What happened to you?”

“I lost my daughter. Life has broken my heart too.”

Ann looks at the incandescent skyline. “Do you have photos of her? Do you still talk with people about her?”

“Yes.”

“At least she once existed.”

There is simply nothing he can say to that.

Ann looks down through her legs again. She kicks off one of her pumps.

Watches it fall.

Then sends the other one plummeting after it.

“Ann, please.”

“In my previous life, my false life, Joe’s first wife, Franny, jumped from this building, from this ledge actually, fifteen years ago. She had clinical depression. I know he blamed himself. Before I left his house on Long Island, I told Joe I was going to jump from the Poe Building tonight, just like Franny. It sounds silly and desperate, but I hoped he’d show up here tonight and save me. Like he failed to do for her. At first, I thought you might be him, but he never wore cologne.” She smiles—wistful—then adds, “I’m thirsty.”

Barry glances through the French doors and the dark office, sees two patrolmen standing at the ready by the reception desk. He looks back at Ann. “Then why don’t you climb down from there, and we’ll walk inside together and get you a glass of water.”

“Would you bring it to me out here?”

“I can’t leave you.”

Her hands are shaking now, and he registers a sudden resolve in her eyes.

She looks at Barry. “This isn’t your fault,” she says. “It was always going to end this way.”

“Ann, no—”

“My son has been erased.”

And with a casual grace, she eases herself off the edge.

HELENA

October 22, 2007

Standing in the shower at six a.m., trying to wake up as the hot water sluices down her skin, Helena is struck with an intense sensation of having lived this exact moment before. It’s nothing new. Déjà vu has plagued her since her twenties. Besides, there’s nothing particularly special about this moment in the shower. She’s wondering if Mountainside Capital has reviewed her proposal yet. It’s been a week. She should’ve heard something by now. They should’ve at least called her in for a meeting if they were interested.

She brews a pot of coffee and makes her go-to breakfast—black beans, three eggs over-easy, drizzled with ketchup. Sits at the little table by the window, watching the sky fill with light over her neighborhood on the outskirts of San Jose.

She hasn’t had a day to do laundry in over a month, and the floor of her bedroom is practically carpeted in dirty clothes. She digs through the piles until she finds a T-shirt and a pair of jeans she isn’t totally ashamed to leave the house in.

The phone rings while she’s brushing her teeth. She spits, rinses, and catches the call on the fourth ring in her bedroom.

“How’s my girl?”

Her father’s voice always makes her smile.

“Hey, Dad.”

“I thought I’d missed you. I didn’t want to bother you at the lab.”

“No, it’s fine, what’s up?”

“Just thinking about you. Any word on your proposal?”

“Nothing yet.”

“I have a really good feeling it’s going to happen.”

“I don’t know. This is a tough town. Lots of competition. Lots of really smart people looking for money.”

“But not as smart as my girl.”

She can’t take any more of her father’s belief in her. Not on a morning like this, with the specter of failure looming large, sitting in a small, filthy bedroom of a blank-walled, undecorated house where she has not brought a single person in over a year.

“How’s the weather?” she asks to change the subject.

“Snowed last night. First of the season.”

“A lot?”

“Just an inch or two. But the mountains are white.”

She can picture them—the Front Range of the Rockies, the mountains of her childhood.

“How’s Mom?”

There’s the briefest pause.

“Your mother’s doing well.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“How’s Mom?”

She hears him exhale slowly. “We’ve had better days.”

“Is she OK?”

“Yes. She’s upstairs sleeping right now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Last night, we played gin rummy after dinner, like we always do. And she just…she didn’t know the rules anymore. Sat at the kitchen table, staring at her cards, tears running down her face. We’ve been playing together for thirty years.”

She hears his hand cover the receiver.

He’s crying, a thousand miles away.

“Dad, I’m coming home.”

“No, Helena.”

“You need my help.”

“We have good support here. We’re going to the doctor this afternoon. If you want to help your mother, get your funding and build your chair.”

She doesn’t want to tell him, but the chair is still years away. Light-years away. It’s a dream, a mirage.

Her eyes fill with tears. “You know I’m doing this for her.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

For a moment, they’re both quiet, trying to cry without the other knowing, and failing miserably. She wants nothing more than to tell him it’s going to happen, but that would be a lie.

“I’m going to call when I get home tonight,” she says.

“OK.”

“Please tell Mom I love her.”

“I will. But she already knows.”

---

Four hours later, deep in the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, Helena is examining the image of a mouse’s memory of being afraid—fluorescently illuminated neurons interconnected by a spiderweb of synapses—when the stranger appears in her office doorway. She looks over the top of her monitor at a man dressed in chinos and a white T-shirt, with a smile several shades too bright.

“Helena Smith?” he asks.

“Yes?”

“I’m Jee-woon Chercover. Do you have a minute to speak with me?”

“This is a secure lab. You’re not supposed to be down here.”

“I apologize for the intrusion, but I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

She could ask him to leave, or call security. But he doesn’t look threatening.

“OK,” she says, and it suddenly dawns on her that this man is bearing witness to the hoarder’s dream that is her office—windowless, cramped, painted-over cinder-block walls, everything only made more claustrophobic by the bankers’ boxes stacked three feet high and two deep around her desk, filled with thousands of abstracts and articles. “Sorry about the mess. Let me get you a chair.”

“I got it.”

Jee-woon drags a folding chair over and takes a seat across from her, his eyes passing over the walls, which are nearly covered in high-resolution images of mouse memories and the neuronal firings of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.

“What can I do for you?” she asks.

“My employer is very taken with the memory portraiture article you published in Neuron.”

“Does your employer have a name?”

“Well, that depends.”

“On…?”

“How this conversation goes.”

“Why would I even have a conversation with someone when I don’t know who they’re speaking for?”

“Because your Stanford money runs out in six weeks.”

She raises an eyebrow.

He says, “My boss pays me very well to know everything about the people he finds interesting.”

“You do realize what you just said is totally creepy, right?”

Reaching into his leather satchel, Jee-woon takes out a document in a navy binder.

Her proposal.

“Of course!” she says. “You’re with Mountainside Capital!”

“No. And they’re not going to fund you.”

“Then how did you get that?”

“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to fund you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this?” He tosses her grant proposal onto the wreckage of her desk. “Is timid. It’s just more of what you’ve been doing at Stanford the last three years. It’s not big-idea enough. You’re thirty-eight years old, which is like ninety in academia. One morning in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to wake up and realize your best days are behind you. That you wasted—”

“I think you should leave.”

“I don’t mean to insult you. If you don’t mind my saying, your problem is that you’re afraid to ask for what you really want.” It occurs to her that, for some reason, this stranger is trolling her. She knows she shouldn’t continue to engage, but she can’t help herself.

“And why am I afraid to ask for what I really want?”

“Because what you really want is bank-breaking. You don’t need seven figures. You need nine. Maybe ten. You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”

She stares at him across the desk. “I never mentioned human trials in that proposal.”

“What if I were to tell you that we will give you anything you ask for? No-limit funding. Would you be interested?”

Her heart is beating faster and faster.

Is this how it happens?

She thinks of the fifty-million-dollar chair she has dreamed of building since her mom started to forget life. Strangely, she never imagines it fully rendered, only as the technical drawings in the utility patent application she will one day file, entitled Immersive Platform for Projection of Long-Term, Explicit, Episodic Memories.

“Helena?”

“If I say yes, will you tell me who your boss is?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

He tells her.

As her jaw hits the desk, Jee-woon pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her over the bankers’ boxes.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”

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 arrives five minutes early to find Julia already seated at a table under an umbrella. They share a brief, fragile embrace, as if they’re both made of glass.

“It’s good to see you,” he says.

“I’m glad you wanted to come.”

They sit. A waiter swings by to take their drink orders.

“How’s Anthony?” Barry asks.

“Great. Busy with the redesign of the Lewis Building lobby. Your work’s good?”

He doesn’t tell her about the suicide he failed to stop the night before last. Instead, they make small talk until the coffee arrives.

It’s Sunday, and the brunch crowd is out in force. Every table in the vicinity seems to be a geyser of gregarious conversation and laughter, but they sip their coffees quietly in the shade.

Nothing and everything to say.

A butterfly flutters around Barry’s head until he gently brushes it away.

Sometimes, late in the night, he imagines elaborate conversations with Julia. Exchanges where he says everything that has been festering all these years in his heart—the pain, the anger, the love—and then listens as she does the same. A clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.

But in person, it never feels right. He can’t bring himself to say what’s in his heart, which always feels clenched and locked up, encased in scar tissue. The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

“I wonder what she’d be doing today,” Julia says.

“I hope she’d be sitting here with us.”

“I mean for work.”

“Ah. A lawyer of course.”

Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.

“She would argue about anything,” Julia says. “And she usually won.”

“We were pushovers.”

“One of us was.”

“Me?” he says with faux outrage.

“By five years old, she had you pegged as the weak link.”

“Remember the time she convinced us to let her practice backing up in the driveway—”

“Convinced you.”

“—and she drove my car through the garage door?”

Julia snorts a laugh. “She was so upset.”

“No, embarrassed.” For a half second, his mind’s eye conjures the memory. Or at least a piece of it. Meghan behind the wheel of his old Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle-clenched the steering wheel. “She was tenacious and smart and would’ve done something interesting with her life.” He finishes his coffee and pours another cup from the stainless-steel French press they’re sharing.

“It’s nice to talk about her,” Julia says.

“I’m glad I finally can.”

The waiter comes to take their food orders, and the butterfly returns, alighting on the surface of the table next to Barry’s still-folded napkin. Stretching its wings. Preening. He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.

As the food arrives, Barry imagines Meghan sitting at the table with them. The rough edges of adolescence sanded down. Her entire life ahead of her. He can’t see her face, no matter how hard he tries, only her hands, in constant motion as she talks, the same way her mother moves when she’s confident and excited about something.

He isn’t hungry, but he makes himself eat. It seems like there’s something on Julia’s mind, but she just picks at the remains of her frittata, and he takes a drink of water and another bite of his sandwich and stares at the river in the distance.

The Hudson comes from a pond in the Adirondacks called Lake Tear of the Clouds. They went there one summer when Meghan was eight or nine. Camped in the spruce trees. Watched the stars fall. Tried to wrap their minds around the notion that this tiny mountain lake was the source of the Hudson. It’s a memory he returns to almost obsessively.

“You look thoughtful,” Julia says.

“I was thinking of that trip we took to Lake Tear of the Clouds. Remember?”

“Of course. It took us two hours to get the tent up in a rainstorm.”

“I thought it was clear.”

She shakes her head. “No, we shivered in the tent all night and none of us slept.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes. That trip was the foundation of my never-again wilderness policy.”

“Right.”

“How could you forget that?”

“I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. He says finally, “Maybe watching shooting stars with my girls felt like a better memory.”

She tosses her napkin on her plate and leans back in her chair. “I went by our old house recently. Wow, it’s changed. You ever do that?”

“Every now and then.”

In actuality, he still drives past their old house anytime he has business in Jersey. He and Julia lost it in a foreclosure the year after Meghan died, and today it barely resembles the place they lived in. The trees are taller, fuller, greener. There’s an addition above the garage, and a young family lives there now. The entire façade has been redone in stone, new windows added. The driveway widened and repaved. The rope swing that used to hang from the oak tree was taken down years ago, but the initials he and Meghan once carved at the base of the trunk remain. He touched them last summer—having somehow decided that a cab ride to Jersey at two in the morning after a night out with Gwen and the rest of Central Robbery Division was a good idea. A Jersey City cop had arrived after the new owners called 911 to report a vagrant in their front yard. Though stumbling drunk, he wasn’t arrested. The cop knew of Barry, of what had happened to him. He called another taxi and helped Barry into the backseat. Paid the fare back to Manhattan in advance and sent him on his way.

The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders—a pleasing contrast. 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. It is late autumn in the city, one of the last good days of the year.

He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

The check comes and Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.

“Thank you, Barry.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

“Let’s not go a year again without seeing each other.” She raises her glass of ice water. “To our birthday girl.”

“To our birthday girl.” He can feel the cloud of grief coalescing in his chest, but he breathes through it, and when he speaks again his voice is almost normal. “Twenty-six years old.”

---

After brunch, he walks to Central Park. The silence of his apartment feels like a threat on Meghan’s birthday, the last five of which have not gone well.

Seeing Julia always upends him. For a long time after their marriage ended, he thought he missed his ex. Thought he would never get over her. He would often dream of her and wake to the ache of her absence eating him alive. The dreams cut him deeply—half memory, half fantasy—because in them, she felt like the Julia of old. The smile. The unhesitating laugh. The lightness of being. She was the person who stole his heart again. All through the following morning, she’d be on his mind, the totality of that loss staring him down, unblinking, until the emotional hangover of the dream finally released its hold on him like a slowly lifting fog. He saw Julia once, in the wake of one such dream—an unexpected bump-in at the party of an old friend. To his surprise, he felt nothing as they chatted stiffly on the veranda. Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn’t want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreachable as the dead.

The trees in the park are peaking after a hard freeze several nights ago, the leaves all frost-burned into late autumn brilliance.

He finds a spot in the Ramble, takes off his shoes and socks, and leans back against a perfectly slanted tree. He pulls out his phone and tries to read the biography he’s been plodding through for nearly a year, but concentration is elusive.

Ann Voss Peters haunts him. The way she fell without a sound, her body rigid and upright. It took five seconds, and he didn’t look away when she hit the Lincoln Town Car, parked on the curb below.

When he isn’t replaying their conversation, he’s grappling with the fear. Pressure-checking his memories. Testing their fidelity. Wondering—

How would I know if one had changed? What would it feel like?

Red and orange leaves drift down through the sunlight, accumulating all around him in the dappled shade. From his vantage in the trees, he watches people walking the trails, moseying by the lake. Most are with others, but some are alone like him.

His phone pops a text from his friend Gwendoline Archer, leader of the Hercules Team, a counterterrorism SWAT unit in the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit.

He writes her back:

---

It’s a forty-minute walk to the bar near Gwen’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, whose only apparent virtue is its forty-five-year longevity. Prickly bartenders serve boring domestics on tap and not a single whiskey whose bottle you couldn’t buy in a store for under thirty bucks. The bathrooms are disgusting and still contain stocked condom dispensers. The jukebox plays ’70s and ’80s rock exclusively, and if no one feeds the box, there is no music.

Gwen is sitting at the far end of the bar, wearing biker shorts and a faded Brooklyn Marathon T-shirt, left-swiping on a dating app as Barry approaches.

He says, “I thought you gave up on that.”

“For a while, I gave up on your gender entirely, but my therapist is all the way up my ass to try again.”

She slides off the stool and embraces him, the faint smell of sweat from her ride combining with the remnants of body wash and deodorant, resulting in something like a salted caramel.

He says, “Thanks for checking in on me.”

“You shouldn’t be alone today.”

She’s fifteen years younger, in her mid-thirties, and at six feet, four inches, the tallest woman he knows personally. With short blond hair and Scandinavian features, she’s not beautiful exactly, but regal. Often severe without trying. He once told her she had resting monarch face.

They met and bonded during a bank robbery turned hostage situation a few years back. The next Christmas, they hooked up in one of the more embarrassing moments of Barry’s existence. It was one of the many NYPD holiday parties, and the night had gotten away from them both. He woke in her apartment at three in the morning with the room still spinning. His mistake was trying to sneak out when he wasn’t ready for consciousness. He threw up on the floor beside her bed, and was in the midst of trying to clean it up when Gwen woke and yelled at him, “I will clean up your puke in the morning, just go!” He remembers nothing of the sex, if they had it or attempted to, and he can only hope she shares the same merciful gap in her memory.

Regardless, neither of them has acknowledged it since.

The bartender arrives to take Barry’s order and deliver another Wild Turkey to Gwen. They drink and bullshit for a while, and as Barry finally registers the world beginning to loosen, Gwen says, “I heard you caught an FMS suicide Friday night.”

“Yeah.”

He fills her in on all the details.

“Be honest,” she says. “How freaked out are you?”

“Well, I did make myself an Internet expert on FMS yesterday.”

“And?”

“Eight months ago, the Centers for Disease Control identified sixty-four cases with similarities in the Northeast. In each case, a patient presented with complaints of acute false memories. Not just one or two. A fully imagined alternate history covering large swaths of their life up until that moment. Usually going back months or years. In some instances, decades.”

“So do they lose their memories of their real life?”

“No, they suddenly have two sets of memories. One true, one false. In some cases, patients felt like their memories and consciousness had moved from one life into another. In others, patients experienced a sudden ‘flash-in’ of false memories from a life they never lived.”

“What causes it?”

“Nobody knows. They haven’t identified a single physiological or neurological abnormality in those who are affected. The only symptoms are the false memories themselves. Oh, and about ten percent of people who get it kill themselves.”

“Jesus.”

“The number could be higher. Way higher. That’s the outcome of known cases.”

“Suicides are up this year in the five boroughs.”

Barry catches the bartender’s eye, gives the signal for another round.

Gwen asks, “Contagious?”

“I couldn’t find a definitive answer. The CDC hasn’t found a pathogen, so it doesn’t seem to be blood- or airborne. Yet. This article in The New England Journal of Medicine speculated that it actually spreads through a carrier’s social network.”

“Like Facebook? How is that even—”

“No, I mean when a person is infected with FMS, some of the people they know become infected. Their parents will share the same false memories, but to a lesser degree. Their brothers, sisters, close friends. There was this case study of a guy who woke up one day and had memories of an entirely different life. Being married to a different woman. Living in a different house, with different kids, working a different job. They reconstructed from his memory the guest list of his wedding—the one that he remembered, but never happened. They located thirteen from his list, and all of them also had memories of this wedding that never happened. Ever hear of something called the Mandela Effect?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

The next round comes. Barry drinks his shot of Old Grand-Dad and chases it with a Coors as the light through the front windows fades toward evening.

He says, “Apparently thousands of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he lived until 2013.”

“I have heard of this. It’s the whole Berenstain Bears thing.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You’re too old.”

“Fuck you.”

“There were these children’s books when I was a kid, and a lot of people remember them being called The Berenstein Bears, S-T-E-I-N, when it’s actually spelled Berenstain. S-T-A-I-N.”

“Weird.”

“Scary actually, since I remember Berenstein.” Gwen shoots her whiskey.

“Also—and no one’s sure if it’s related to FMS—instances of acute déjà vu are on the rise.”

“What does that mean?”

“People are struck, sometimes to a debilitating degree, with the sense that they’re living entire sequences of their lives over.”

“I get that sometimes.”

“Me too.”

Gwen says, “Didn’t your jumper say that her husband’s first wife had also thrown herself off the Poe Building?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. Just seems…unlikely.”

Barry looks at her. The bar is getting full and loud.

“What are you getting at?” he asks.

“Maybe she didn’t have False Memory Syndrome. Maybe this bitch was just crazy. Maybe don’t worry so much.”

---

Three hours later, he’s wasted in a different bar—a wood-paneled, beer-lover’s wet dream with the taxidermied heads of buffalo and deer protruding from the walls and a million taps lining the backlit shelves.

Gwen tries to take him to dinner, but the hostess sees him wavering on his feet in front of her podium and refuses them a table. Back outside, the city feels unmoored, and Barry is laser-focused on making the buildings not spin as Gwen holds him by his right arm, steering him down the street.

He suddenly realizes they’re standing on a street corner God-knows-where, speaking to a cop. Gwen is showing the patrolman her star and explaining that she’s trying to get Barry home but is afraid he’ll throw up in a cab.

Then they’re walking again, stumbling, the futuristic, nighttime brilliance of Times Square swirling like a bad carnival. He catches the time, 11:22 p.m., and wonders what black hole the last six hours fell into.

“I don’t wannagohome,” he says to no one.

Then he’s staring at a digital clock that reads 4:15. It feels like someone caved his skull in while he slept, and his tongue is as dry as a strip of leather. This isn’t his apartment. He’s lying on the sofa in Gwen’s living room.

He tries to go back and Scotch-tape the evening together but the pieces are shattered. He remembers Julia and the park. The first hour of the first bar with Gwen. But everything after is murky and tinged with regret.

His heart pounds in his ears. His mind races.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

Thinking about his father who died when he was young, and the enduring question—Did he know that I loved him?

And Meghan. Always Meghan.

When his daughter was a little girl, she was convinced a monster lived in the hope chest at the foot of her bed. It never crossed her mind in the daylight, but the moment the sun went down and he had tucked her in for the night, she would inevitably call out for him. And he’d hurry to her room and kneel beside her bed and remind her that everything seems scarier at night. It’s just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us.

How strange then, decades later and his life so far off the course he charted, to find himself alone on a couch in a friend’s apartment, attempting to assuage his fears with the same logic he used on his child all those years ago.

Everything will look better in the morning.

There will be hope again when the light returns.

The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.

And he shuts his eyes and comforts himself with the memory of the camping trip to Lake Tear of the Clouds. To that perfect moment.

In it, the stars were shining.

He’d stay there forever if he could.

HELENA

November 1, 2007

BARRY

November 5, 2018

NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

24TH PRECINCT, 151 W 100TH ST.

NEW YORK, NY 10025

* CHIEF OF POLICE

JOHN R. POOLE

* TELEPHONE
(212) 555-1811

[X] PRELIMINARY POLICE REPORT

[ ] SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT

CSRR

01457C

DATE

07/11/03

TIME

2130

DAY

FRI

LOCATION

2000 WEST 102ND

41ST FLOOR

NATURE OF REPORT

POLICE—NARRATIVE

---

Massively hungover and sitting at his desk in the field of cubicles, Barry reads the incident report for a third time. It’s making his brain itch in all the wrong ways, because it’s the exact opposite of what Ann Voss Peters said had happened between her husband and his first wife. She thought that Franny had jumped.

He sets the report aside, wakes his monitor, and logs into the New York State DMV database, his head throbbing behind his eyes.

His search for Joe and Franny Behrman turns up a last-known address of 6 Pinewood Lane in Montauk.

He should let this fall to the wayside. Forget about FMS and Ann Voss Peters and get on with the listing towers of paperwork and open case files that clutter his desk. There is no crime here to justify his time. Only…inconsistencies.

But the truth is—now he’s madly curious.

He’s been a detective for twenty-three years because he loves solving puzzles, and this one, this contradictory set of events, is whispering to him—a misalignment he feels a compulsion to put right.

He could get written up for driving his Crown Vic out to the end of Long Island on something that was decidedly not sanctioned, jurisdictional police business, and his head hurts too much to drive that far anyway.

So he pulls up the MTA website and studies the schedules.

There’s a train leaving Penn Station for Montauk in just under an hour.

HELENA

January 18, 2008–October 29, 2008

BARRY

November 5, 2018

In summer, the train would be standing room only, packed with Manhattanites heading for the Hamptons. But it is a cold November afternoon, the gun-gray clouds threatening the season’s first snow, and Barry has the coach car on the Long Island Railroad almost entirely to himself.

As he stares through the window, watching the lights of Brooklyn shrink away through the dirty glass, his eyes grow heavy.

When he wakes, night has fallen. The view out the window is now darkness, points of light, and his own reflection in the glass.

Montauk is the last stop on the line, and he steps off the train at a little before eight p.m. into a frigid rain sheeting down through the illumination of the streetlamps. He tightens the belt of his woolen trench coat and turns up the collar, his breath steaming in the chill. He walks alongside the tracks to the station house, which has been shuttered for the night, and climbs into the taxi he ordered from the train.

Most of downtown Montauk has been closed for the season. He was here once before, twenty years ago, with Julia and Meghan, on a crowded summer weekend when the streets and beaches were jammed with vacationers.

Pinewood Lane is a secluded, sand-dusted road, cracked and buckled by tree roots. A half mile in, the cab’s headlights strike a gated entrance, where a plaque with the Roman numeral “VI” is affixed to one of the stone pillars.

“Pull up to the box,” he tells the driver.

The car edges forward, Barry’s window humming down into the door.

He reaches out, presses the call button. He knows they’re home. Before he left New York, he called, pretending to be FedEx trying to schedule a late delivery.

A woman answers, “Behrman residence.”

“This is Detective Sutton with the New York Police Department. Is your husband at home, ma’am?”

“Is everything OK?”

“Yes. I need to speak with him.”

There’s a pause, followed by the sound of hushed conversation.

Then a man’s voice comes through the speaker. “This is Joe. What’s this regarding?”

“I’d rather tell you in person. And in private.”

“We were about to sit down to dinner.”

“I apologize for the intrusion, but I just took a train here from the city.”

The private drive is a one-laner that winds through stretches of grassland and forest on a gradual ascent toward a residence that’s perched atop a gentle bluff. From a distance, the house appears to be constructed entirely of glass, the interior glowing like an oasis in the night.

Barry pays the driver in cash, including an extra $20 to wait for him. Then he steps out into the rain and climbs the steps toward the entrance. The front door swings open as he reaches the stoop. Joe Behrman looks older than his driver’s license photograph, his hair now streaked with silver and carrying just enough weight in his sun-damaged face to make his jowls sag.

Franny has aged more gracefully.

For three long seconds, he’s unsure if they’re going to invite him in, but then Franny finally steps back, offers a forced smile, and ushers him into their home.

The open-concept space is a marvel of perfectly apportioned design and comfort. In daylight, he imagines the curtain of windows affords a spectacular view of the sea and surrounding forest preserve. The smell of something baking in the kitchen permeates the house and reminds Barry of what it was like to have things cooked from scratch instead of reheated in a microwave or brought to him in plastic bags by strangers.

Franny squeezes her husband’s hand, says, “I’ll keep everything in the warming drawer.” Then she turns to Barry. “May I take your coat?”

Joe leads Barry back into a study with glass on one wall and the rest covered in books. As they sit across from each other in the vicinity of a gas-log fireplace, Joe says, “I have to tell you, it’s a little unnerving to get an unannounced visit from a detective at dinnertime.”

“Sorry if I spooked you. You’re not in trouble or anything.”

Joe smiles. “You might have led with that.”

“I’ll get right to it. Fifteen years ago, your wife went up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building on the Upper West Side and—”

“She’s much better now. A completely different person.” A flicker of annoyance, or fear, crosses Joe’s face, which has taken on a measure of color. “Why are you here? Why are you in my house on what should be a peaceful night with my wife, digging up our past?”

“Three days ago, I was driving home, and a call came in over the radio for a 10-56A—that’s a suicide attempt. I responded and found a woman sitting out on the ledge on the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. She said she was suffering from FMS. You know what that is?”

“The false-memory thing.”

“She described to me this entire life that never happened. She had a husband and a son. They lived in Vermont. Ran a landscaping business together. She said his name was Joe. Joe Behrman.”

Joe becomes very still.

“Her name was Ann Voss Peters. She thought that Franny had jumped from the place where she was sitting. She told me she came here and spoke to you, but that you didn’t know her. The reason she had chosen that ledge was because she held out hope that you would come to her rescue, making up for your failure to save Franny. But obviously, Ann’s memory was flawed, because you did save Franny. I read the police report this afternoon.”

“What happened to Ann?”

“I wasn’t able to save her.”

Joe closes his eyes, opens them. “What do you want from me?” he asks, his voice just above a whisper.

“Did you know Ann Voss Peters?”

“No.”

“So how does Ann know you? How did she know your wife had gone up on that same ledge with the intention of committing suicide? Why did she believe she had been your wife? That the two of you had a boy named Sam?”

“I have no idea, but I would like you to leave now.”

“Mr. Behrman—”

“Please. I have answered your questions. I have done nothing wrong. Go.”

While he can’t begin to guess why, he is certain of one thing—Joe Behrman is lying.

Barry rises from the chair. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a business card, which he places on the table between the chairs. “If you change your mind, I hope you’ll call me.”

Joe doesn’t respond, doesn’t get up, doesn’t even look at Barry. He’s holding his hands in his lap—to stop them from trembling, Barry knows—and staring intently into the fire.

---

As Barry rides into Montauk, he checks the schedules on his MTA app. He should have just enough time to grab a bite and make the 9:50 p.m. back into the city.

The diner is nearly empty, and he slides onto a stool at the counter, still running on the adrenaline of his conversation with Joe.

Before his food comes, a man with a shaved head enters and claims one of the booths. Orders coffee and sits there reading something on his phone.

No.

Pretending to read something on his phone.

His eyes are too alert, and the bulge beneath his leather jacket suggests a shoulder holster. He has the concealed intensity of a cop or a soldier—eyes never still, always darting, always processing, even though his head never moves. It’s conditioning you can’t unlearn.

But he never looks at Barry.

You’re just being paranoid.

Barry is halfway through his huevos rancheros and thinking about Joe and Franny Behrman when a glint of pain flashes behind his eyes.

His nose begins to bleed, and as he catches the blood in a napkin, a completely different set of memories of the last three days crowds into his mind. He was driving home on Friday night, but no 10-56A ever came over the radio. He never rode up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. Never met Ann Voss Peters. Never watched her fall. Never looked at the police report regarding the attempted suicide of Franny Behrman. Never bought a train ticket to Montauk. Never interviewed Joe Behrman.

Considered from a certain perspective, he was just sitting in his recliner in his one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, watching a Knicks game, and now he’s suddenly in a Montauk diner with a bloody nose.

When he tries to look these alternate memories squarely in the eye, he finds that they carry a different feel from any memory he’s ever known. They’re lifeless and static, draped in hues of black and gray, just as Ann Voss Peters described.

Did I catch this from her?

His nose has stopped bleeding, but his hands have begun to shake. Throwing some money on the counter, he heads out into the night, trying to stay calm, but he’s reeling.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

He wonders if he’s going mad, if this is what it feels like to lose your mind.

It’s four blocks to the train station. There are no cars out, the town is dead, and as a creature of a city that never sleeps, he finds the silence of this off-season hamlet unnerving.

He leans against a streetlamp, waiting for the doors of the train to open, one of four people on the platform, including the man from the diner.

The rain striking his hands is turning to slush, his fingers are freezing, but he wants them that way.

The cold is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.

HELENA

October 31, 2008–March 14, 2009

BARRY

November 5–6, 2018

“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

Barry rouses from sleep, eyes opening, everything momentarily blurry and no idea for five disorienting seconds where he is. Then he registers the rocking motion of the train. Light poles streaking past through the window across the aisle. The face of the elderly conductor.

“May I see your ticket?” the old man asks in a courtly manner refined in another age. Barry rifles through his coat until he finds his phone in the bottom of an inner pocket. Opening the MTA app, he holds his ticket up so the conductor can scan the bar code.

“Thank you, Mr. Sutton. Sorry to wake you.”

As the conductor moves on to the next car, Barry notices four missed call notifications on his phone’s display screen—all from the same 934 area code.

And one voicemail.

He presses Play, brings the phone to his ear. “Hi, it’s Joe…Joe Behrman. Um…can you please call me as soon as you get this? I really need to talk to you.”

Barry immediately returns the call, and Joe answers before the second ring, “Detective Sutton?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“On the train back to New York.”

“You have to understand, I never thought anyone would find out. They promised me it would never happen.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was scared.” Joe is crying now. “Can you come back?”

“Joe. I’m on a train. But you can talk to me right now.”

For a moment, the man just breathes heavily into the phone. Barry thinks he hears a woman also crying in the background, but he isn’t sure.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Joe says. “I know that now. I had this great life with a beautiful son, but I couldn’t look myself in the mirror.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t there for her, and she jumped. I couldn’t forgive my—”

“Who jumped?”

“Franny.”

“What are you talking about? Franny didn’t jump. I just saw her at your house.”

Over the static-laced connection, Barry hears Joe breaking down.

“Joe, did you know Ann Voss Peters?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I was married to her.”

“What?”

“It’s my fault Ann jumped. I saw an ad in the classifieds. It said, ‘Would you like a do-over?’ There was a phone number and I called it. Ann told you she had False Memory Syndrome?”

“Correct.” And now I have it. “It sounds like you may have it too. They say it travels in social circles.”

Joe laughs, but the sound is full of regret and self-hatred. “FMS isn’t what people think it is.”

“You know what FMS is?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me.”

It becomes quiet over the line, and for a moment, Barry thinks he’s lost the signal.

“Joe, are you there? Did I lose you?”

“I’m here.”

“What is FMS?”

“It’s people like me, who’ve done what I did. And it’s only going to get worse.”

“Why?”

“I…” There’s a long pause. “I can’t explain. It’s insane. You need to go see for yourself.”

“How do I do that?”

“After I called that number, they interviewed me over the phone, and then took me to a hotel in Manhattan.”

“There are a lot of hotels in Manhattan, Joe.”

“Not like this one. You can’t just go there. They invite you. The only access is through an underground garage.”

“Do you know the street address?”

“It’s on East Fiftieth, between Lexington and Third. There’s an all-night diner on the same block.”

“Joe—”

“These are powerful people. Franny had a breakdown when she remembered, and they knew. They showed up. They threatened me.”

“Who are they?”

There’s no answer.

“Joe? Joe?”

He hung up.

Barry tries to call him back, but it goes straight to voicemail.

He looks out the window—nothing to see but darkness occasionally broken by the lights of a house or a station scrolling past.

He turns his focus toward those alternate memories that found him at the diner. They’re still there. They never happened, but they feel just as real as the rest of his memories, and he can’t square the paradox in his mind.

He looks around the car—he’s the sole passenger.

The only sound is the steady heartbeat of the train speeding along the track.

He touches the seat, runs his fingers across the fabric.

He opens his wallet and looks at his New York State driver’s license, and then his NYPD badge.

Taking a breath, he tells himself—You are Barry Sutton. You are on a train from Montauk to New York City. Your past is your past. It cannot change. What is real is this moment. The train. The coldness of the window glass. The rain streaking across the other side of it. And you. There is a logical explanation for your false memories, for whatever happened to Joe and Ann Voss Peters. To all of it. It’s just a puzzle to be solved. And you are very good at solving puzzles.

All that’s bullshit.

He’s never been more afraid in his life.

---

When he steps out of Penn Station, it’s after midnight. Snow is pouring out of a pink sky, an inch already collected on the streets.

He turns up his collar, raises his umbrella, and heads north from Thirty-Fourth.

The streets and sidewalks empty.

The snow dampening the noise of Manhattan to a rare hush.

Fifteen minutes of fast walking brings him to the intersection of Eighth Avenue and West Fiftieth, where he cuts east across the avenues, colder now that he’s walking into the storm, the umbrella tilted like a shield against the wind and snow.

He stops at Lexington to let three snowplows pass and stares at a red neon sign across the street:

McLachlan’s Restaurant

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Open 7 Days

24 Hours

Barry crosses, and then he’s standing under it, watching the snow fall through the red illumination and thinking this has to be the all-night diner Joe mentioned on the phone.

He’s been walking for nearly forty minutes, and he’s beginning to shiver, the snow soaking through his shoes. Beyond the restaurant, he passes an alcove where a homeless man sits muttering to himself and rocking back and forth, his arms wrapped around his legs. Then a bodega, a liquor store, a luxury women’s clothing store, and a bank—all shuttered for the night.

Near the end of the block, he stops at the entrance to a darkened driveway, which tunnels down into the subterranean space beneath a neo-gothic building wedged between two higher skyscrapers built of steel and glass.

Lowering his umbrella, he walks down the driveway, into the low-lit gloom below street level. After forty feet, it terminates at a garage door constructed of reinforced steel. There’s a keypad, and above it, a surveillance camera.

Well, shit. This would appear to be the end of the line for tonight. He’ll come back tomorrow, stake out the entrance, see if he can catch anyone coming or—

The sound of gears beginning to turn gives his heart a jolt. He looks back at the garage door, which is slowly lifting off the ground, light from the other side stretching across the pavement, already reaching the tips of Barry’s wet shoes.

Leave?

Stay?

This may not even be the right place.

The door is halfway up and still rising, and there’s no one on the other side.

He hesitates, then crosses the threshold into a modest, underground parking structure, occupied by a dozen vehicles.

His footsteps reverberate off the concrete as the halogen lights burn down from overhead.

He sees an elevator, and beside it, a door presumably leading to a stairwell.

The light above the elevator illuminates.

A bell dings.

Barry ducks behind a Lincoln MKX and watches through the tinted glass of the front passenger window as the elevator doors part.

Empty.

What the hell is this?

He shouldn’t be here. None of this has anything to do with his actual caseload, and no crime, as far as he can tell, has been committed. Technically, he’s trespassing.

Fuck it.

The walls inside are smooth, featureless metal, the elevator apparently controlled from an external source.

The doors close.

The elevator climbs.

His heart pounds.

Barry swallows twice to clear the pressure from his ears, and after thirty seconds, the car comes to a shuddering stop.

The first thing he hears, as the doors spread, is Miles Davis—one of the perfect slow songs off Kind of Blue—drifting on a lonesome echo through what appears to be the lobby of a hotel.

He steps off the elevator onto the marble floor. There’s dark, brooding woodwork everywhere. Leather couches, black lacquered chairs. A trace of cigar smoke in the air.

Something timeless about the space.

Straight ahead stands an unmanned reception desk with a backdrop of vintage mailboxes that would’ve been used in another era, and the letters HM emblazoned on the brick above it all.

He hears the fragile clink of ice cubes settling in glassware, and then voices drifting over from a bar that’s nestled against a curtain of windows. Two men, seated on leather-cushioned stools, are in conversation as a black-vested barkeep polishes glassware.

As Barry moves toward the bar, the smell of the cigar grows stronger, the air becoming hazy with smoke.

Barry climbs onto one of the stools and leans against the solid mahogany bar. Through the nearby windows, the buildings and lights of the city are shrouded in a whiteout.

The bartender comes over.

She’s beautiful—dark eyes and prematurely gray hair held up by chopsticks. Her name tag reads TONYA.

“What are you drinking?” Tonya asks.

“Could I get a whiskey?”

“Looking for anything in particular?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

She goes to pour his drink, and Barry glances at the men several seats down. They’re drinking bourbon from a half-empty bottle that’s sitting between them on the bar.

The one closest to him looks to be in his early seventies, with gray, thinning hair and an emaciation that suggests terminal illness. Smoke spirals up from the cigar in his hand, which smells like rain falling on a desert.

The other man is closer to Barry’s age—bland, clean-shaven face, tired eyes. He asks the older man, “How long have you been here, Amor?”

“About a week.”

“Have they given you a date yet?”

“Tomorrow actually.”

“No shit. Congratulations.”

They touch glasses.

“Nervous?” the young man asks.

“I mean, it’s on my mind what’s coming. But they do a really thorough job preparing you for everything.”

“Is it true—no anesthesia?”

“Unfortunately, yes. When’d you get here?”

“Yesterday.” Amor takes a puff off his cigar.

Tonya appears with a whiskey, which she sets on a napkin in front of Barry with HOTEL MEMORY embossed in gold on the paper.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do when you get back?” the younger man asks.

Barry sips the scotch—sherry, caramel, dried fruits, and alcohol.

“I have some ideas.” Amor raises his cigar hand. “No more of this.” He points at the whiskey. “Less of that. I used to be an architect, and there was this building I always regretted not pursuing. Could’ve been my magnum opus. You?”

“I’m not sure. I feel so guilty.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t this selfish?”

“These are our memories. No one else has a claim on them.” Amor polishes off the last of his whiskey. “I better hit the hay. Big day tomorrow.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Sliding off their respective stools, the men shake hands and wish each other luck. Barry watches them wander away from the bar to a bank of elevators.

When he turns back toward the bar, the bartender is facing him.

“What is this place, Tonya?” he asks, but his mouth feels odd and his words emerge with a sluggish clumsiness.

“Sir, you’re not looking so well.”

He feels something loosen behind his eyes.

An untethering.

He looks at his drink. He looks at Tonya.

“Vince will help you to a room,” she says.

Barry steps down off the stool, swaying slightly on his feet, and turns to meet the dead-eyed stare of the man from the diner. Around his neck is an ornate tattoo of a woman’s hands strangling the life out of him.

Barry reaches for his gun, but it’s like moving through syrup, and Vince’s hands are already inside his coat, deftly unsnapping the shoulder holster that secures his service weapon, and slipping the gun down the back of his jeans. He digs Barry’s phone out of his pocket, tosses it to Tonya.

“I’m NYPD,” Barry slurs.

“So was I.”

“What is this place?”

“You’re about to find out.”

The wooziness is intensifying.

Vince grabs Barry by the arm and leads him away from the bar toward the bank of elevators beyond the reception desk. He calls the elevator and drags Barry inside.

Then Barry is stumbling through a hotel corridor as the world melts around him.

He weaves down the soft red carpeting, passing sconces made of old lamps that cast an antique light on the wainscoting between the doors.

1414 is projected onto the door by a light in the opposite wall that moves the number in the pattern of a slow figure eight around the peephole.

Vince lets them inside and steers Barry toward the expansive four-poster, shoving him onto the bed, where Barry curls up in the fetal position.

Fading fast and thinking, You fucked up now, didn’t you?

The door to the room slams shut.

He’s alone, unable to move.

The lights of the snowbound city bleed through the sheer curtain at the wall of windows, and the last thing he sees before losing consciousness are the ornamented chevrons of the Chrysler Building, glowing like jewels in the storm.

---

His mouth is dry.

Left arm sore.

The surroundings crystallizing into focus.

Barry is reclined in a leather chair—black, elegant, ultramodern—to which he’s also been strapped. His ankles, his wrists, one across his waist, another over his chest. There’s an IV port in his left forearm—hence the pain—and a metal cart beside his chair, out of which runs the plastic tube that’s plugged into his bloodstream.

The wall facing him is lined with a computer terminal and an assortment of medical equipment, including (and to his considerable alarm) a crash cart. Tucked away in an alcove on the far side of the room, he sees a smooth, white object with tubes and wires running into it, which looks like a giant egg.

A man Barry has never seen before is seated on a stool beside him. He has a long, wild beard, stark blue eyes that radiate intelligence, and an uncomfortable intensity.

Barry opens his mouth, but he’s still too drowsy to form words.

“Still feeling groggy?”

Barry nods.

The man touches a button on the cart beside the chair. Barry watches as a clear liquid pushes through the IV line into his arm. The room brightens. He feels instantly alert, as if he just mainlined a shot of espresso, and with the awareness comes fear.

“Better?” the man asks.

Barry tries to move his head, but it has been immobilized. He can’t even turn a millimeter in either direction.

“I’m a cop,” Barry says.

“I know. I know quite a lot about you, Detective Sutton, including the fact that you are a very lucky man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of your past, I’ve decided not to kill you.”

Is that a good thing? Or is this man just toying with him?

“Who are you?” Barry asks.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m about to give you the greatest gift of your life. The greatest gift a person could ever hope to receive. If you don’t mind,” he says, the courtesy paradoxically alarming, “I have a few questions before we get started.”

Barry is growing more alert by the minute, the confusion fading as his last piece of memory returns—stumbling down the hotel corridor and into Room 1414.

The man asks, “Did you go to the home of Joe and Franny Behrman in an official capacity?”

“How’d you know I went there?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No. I was satisfying my own curiosity.”

“Did any of your colleagues or superiors know about your trip to Montauk?”

“No one did.”

“Did you discuss with anyone your interest in Ann Voss Peters and Joe Behrman?”

Though he spoke to Gwen about FMS on Sunday, he feels confident in his assumption that no one could possibly know about their conversation.

So he lies. “No.”

Barry has the tracking software activated on his phone. He has no idea how long he’s been unconscious, but assuming it’s still early Tuesday morning, his absence from work won’t be noticed until late afternoon. In theory, hours from now. He has no appointments scheduled. No drink or dinner plans. It could be several days before his absence pings on anyone’s radar.

“People will come looking for me,” Barry says.

“They’ll never find you.”

Barry breathes in slowly, steeling himself against the rising panic. He needs to convince this man to release him, with nothing but words and logic.

Barry says, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what any of this is about. But if you release me now, you will never hear from me again. I swear to you.”

The man slides off the stool and moves across the room to the computer terminal. Standing before an immense monitor, he types on a keyboard. After a moment, Barry hears whatever apparatus is attached to his head begin to make a barely discernible whirring, like the wings of a mosquito.

“What is this?” Barry asks again, his heart rate ticking up a notch, fear occluding his better thinking. “What do you want with me?”

“I want you to tell me about the last time you saw your daughter alive.”

In a pure and blinding rage, Barry strains against the leather straps, struggling with everything he has to disengage his head from whatever is holding it in place. The leather creaks. His head doesn’t budge. Sweat beads on his face and runs down into his eyes with a salty burn he is powerless to wipe away.

“I’ll kill you,” Barry says.

The man leans forward, inches away, a blue-flame coldness in his eyes. Barry smells his expensive cologne, the toasted sourness of coffee on his breath.

“I’m not trying to taunt you,” the man says. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Fuck you.”

“You came to my hotel.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure you told Joe Behrman exactly what to say to lure me here.”

“Tell you what—let’s make this choice as straightforward as possible. You answer honestly when I ask a question, or you’ll die where you sit.”

Trapped in this chair, Barry has no choice but to play along, to keep staying alive until he sees an opening, a chance, no matter how small, to get free.

“Fine.”

The man lifts his head to the ceiling and says, “Computer, start session.”

An automated, feminine voice responds, New session beginning now.

The man looks into Barry’s eyes.

“Now, tell me about the last time you saw your daughter alive, and don’t leave out a single detail.”

HELENA

March 29, 2009–June 20, 2009

BARRY

November 6, 2018

Strapped into a chair in a waking nightmare, Barry says, “It was October twenty-fifth. Eleven years ago.”

“What’s the first thing you remember when you think of it?” the man asks. “The most potent image or feeling?”

Barry is caught in the strangest juxtaposition of emotion. He wants to break this man in half, but the thought of Meghan that night is on the verge of breaking him.

He answers in monotone, “Finding her body.”

“I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. Not after she was gone. Before.”

“The last time I spoke to her.”

“That’s what I want you to talk about.”

Barry stares across the room, gritting his teeth.

“Please continue, Detective Sutton.”

“I’m sitting in my chair in my living room, watching the World Series.”

“Do you remember who was playing?”

“Red Sox and Rockies. Game two. The Sox had won the first game. They would take the series in four straight.”

“Who were you rooting for?”

“I didn’t really care. I guess I wanted to see the Rockies tie it up, keep the series interesting. Why are you doing this to me? What purpose does—”

“So you’re sitting in your chair…”

“I’m probably drinking a beer.”

“Would Julia have been watching with you?”

Jesus. He knows her name.

“No. I think she was watching TV in our bedroom. We’d already eaten dinner.”

“As a family?”

“I don’t remember. Probably.” Barry is suddenly aware of a pressure in his chest, the intensity of which is nearly crushing. He says, “I haven’t talked about that night in years.”

The man just sits there on his stool, running his fingers through his beard and coolly studying him, waiting for Barry to push on.

“I see Meghan coming out of the hallway. I don’t remember for sure what she was wearing, but for some reason, I see her in this pair of jeans and a turquoise sweater she always wore.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Ten days shy of sixteen. And she stops in front of the coffee table—I know this happened for sure—and she’s standing between me and the television with her hands on her hips and this quasi-severe look on her face.”

Tears fill in at the edges of his eyes.

“It’s still incredibly emotional for you,” the man says. “This is good.”

“Please,” Barry says. “Don’t make me do this.”

“Continue.”

Barry takes a breath, blindly groping for some handhold of emotional balance.

He says finally, “It was the last time I would look into my daughter’s eyes. And I didn’t know it. I kept trying to look around her to see the television.”

He doesn’t want to cry in front of this man. Jesus, anything but that.

“Continue.”

“She asked if she could go to DQ. She usually went there a couple of nights a week to do her homework, hang out with friends. I went through the standard questioning. Did your mother say it was OK? No, she had come to me instead. Is your homework finished? No, but part of the reason she wanted to go was to meet up with Mindy, her lab partner in biology, to discuss a project they were working on. Who else was going to be there? A list of names, most of which I knew. I remember checking my watch—it was eight thirty and still in the early innings of the game—and I told her she could go, but that I wanted her home no later than ten. She made her arguments for eleven. I said, ‘No, it’s a school night, you know your curfew,’ and then she let it go and headed for the door.

“I remember calling out to her just before she left, telling her I loved her.”

Tears release, his body shaking with emotion, but the straps hold him tight against the chair.

Barry says, “The truth is, I don’t know if I called out to her. I think probably I didn’t, that I simply went back to watching the game and didn’t think of her again until ten p.m. had come and gone, and I wondered why she wasn’t home yet.”

The man says, “Computer, stop session.” And then: “Thank you, Barry.”

He leans forward and wipes the tears from Barry’s face with the back of his hand.

“What was the point of all that?” Barry asks, broken. “That was worse than any physical torture.”

“I’ll show you.”

The man taps a button on the medical cart.

Barry glances at the tube in his arm as a stream of clear liquid rushes into his vein.

HELENA

June 20, 2009

BARRY

November 6, 2018

His eyes open, but he sees nothing. His sense of time is gone. Years could have passed. Or seconds. He blinks, but nothing changes. He wonders, Am I dead? Draws in a breath, his chest expanding, then lets it out. When he lifts his arm, he hears water moving and feels something sliding down the surface of his skin.

He realizes he’s floating on his back, with no effort, in a pool of water that is the exact temperature of his skin. When he’s motionless, he can’t sense it, and even as he becomes still again, he’s struck by the sensation of his body having no end and no beginning.

No…there is one sensation. Something has been affixed to his left forearm.

Reaching over with his right hand, he touches what feels like a hard plastic case. An inch wide, maybe four inches long. He tries to pull it off, but it’s either been glued to or embedded in his skin.

“Barry.” It’s the voice of the man from before. The one who was sitting on the stool making him talk about Meghan as Barry was strapped to that chair.

“Where am I? What’s happening?”

“I need you to calm down. Just breathe.”

“Am I dead?”

“Would I be telling you to breathe if you were? You aren’t dead, and where you are is irrelevant at this point.”

Barry reaches a hand straight up out of the water, his fingers touching a surface two feet above his face. He searches for a lever, a button, something to open whatever he’s been placed inside, but the walls are smooth and seamless.

He feels a slight vibration in the device on his forearm, reaches over to touch it again, but nothing happens. His right arm will no longer move.

He tries to lift his left—nothing.

Then his legs, his head, his fingers.

He can’t even blink, and when he tries to speak, his lips refuse to part.

“What you’re experiencing is a paralytic agent,” the man says from somewhere in the darkness above. “That was the vibration you just felt—the device injecting the drug. Unfortunately, we need to keep you conscious. I won’t lie to you, Barry. The next few moments are going to be very uncomfortable.”

Terror swallows him—the most profound fear he has ever known. His eyes are locked open, and he keeps trying to move—arms, legs, fingers, anything—but nothing responds. He might as well be trying to control a single strand of hair. And that’s all before the real horror hits: he is unable to contract his diaphragm.

Which means he can’t draw breath.

A maelstrom of panic washes over him, and finally pain, everything distilling down to a second-by-second escalation of the desperate need to inhale oxygen. But he is locked out of the controls of his own body. He cannot cry out or flail or beg for his life, which he would be more than willing to do if he could only speak.

“You’ve probably realized by now that you no longer have the ability to breathe. This isn’t sadism, Barry. I promise you that. It will all be over soon.”

He can only lie in the utter darkness, listening to the screaming of his mind and the torrent of racing thoughts while the sole sound is the thunderous pounding of his heart as it beats faster and faster.

The device on his forearm vibrates again.

Now a white-hot pain courses through his veins, and that jackhammer thudding of his heart responds instantly to whatever was just blasted into his bloodstream.

Slowing.

Slowing.

Slowing.

And then he no longer hears or feels it beating.

The silence of wherever he is becomes complete.

In this moment, he knows that blood is no longer circulating in his body.

I cannot breathe and my heart has stopped beating. I’m dead. Clinically dead. So how am I still thinking? How am I aware? How long will this last? How bad will the pain get? Is this really the end of me?

“I just stopped your heart, Barry. Please listen. You have to maintain focus during the next few moments, or we will lose you. If you make it to the other side, remember what I did for you. Don’t let it happen this time. You can change it.”

Explosions of color detonate in Barry’s oxygen- and blood-starved brain—a light show for a dead man, each flash closer and brighter than the one before.

Until all he sees is a blinding whiteness that is already beginning to fade through shades of gray toward black, and he knows what lies at the end of that spectrum—unbeing. But maybe an end to the pain. To this brutal thirst for air. He’s ready for it. Ready for anything that makes this stop.

And then he smells something. It’s odd, because it conjures an emotional response he can’t quite name, but which carries the ache of nostalgia. It takes a moment, but he realizes it’s what his house used to smell like after he and Julia and Meghan had finished dinner. In particular, Julia’s meatloaf and roasted carrots and potatoes. Next he catches the scent of yeast and malt and barley. Beer, but not just any beer. The Rolling Rocks he used to drink out of those green bottles.

Other smells emerge and merge in an aroma more complex than any wine. It’s one he would recognize anywhere—the house in Jersey City he once lived in with his ex-wife and his dead daughter.

The smell of home.

Suddenly, he tastes the beer and the constant presence in his mouth of the cigarettes he used to smoke.

His brain fires an image that cuts through the dying whiteout—blurry and fuzzy at the edges, but quickly sharpening into focus. A television. And on the screen, a baseball game. The image in his mind’s eye as clear as sight, gray-scale at first, but then color bleeding into everything he sees.

Fenway Park.

The green grass under the burn of the stadium lights.

The crowd.

The players.

The red clay of the pitcher’s mound and Curt Schilling standing there with his hand in his glove, staring down Todd Helton at the plate.

It’s as if a memory is being built before him. First the foundation of smell and taste. Then the scaffolding of visuals. Next comes an overlay of touch as he feels, actually feels, the cool softness of the leather chair he’s sitting in, his feet propped up on the extended footrest, his head turning, and a hand—his hand—reaching for the bottle of Rolling Rock resting on a coaster on the table beside the chair.

As he touches the bottle, he can feel the cold wetness of the condensation on the green glass, and as he brings it to his lips and tilts it back, the taste and the smell overwhelm him with the power of actuality. Not of a mere memory, but an event that is happening now.

And he is keenly aware, not just of the memory itself, but of his perspective of the memory. It is unlike any recollection he has ever experienced, because he is in it, peering through the eyes of his younger self and watching the movie of his old life unfold before him as a fully immersed observer.

The pain of dying has become a dim and distant star, and now he begins to hear sounds, just brushstrokes at first, muffled and indistinct, but slowly gaining in volume and clarity, as if someone were slowing turning up the dials.

The announcers on the television.

A telephone ringing in their house.

Footsteps moving down the hardwood floor of the hallway.

And then Meghan is standing in front of him. He’s staring up into her face, and her mouth is moving, and he hears her voice—too faint, too distant to make out any specific words, only to hear that familiar tone that has been quietly fading in his memory for eleven years.

She is beautiful. She is vital. Standing in front of the television, blocking the screen, with her backpack slung over one shoulder, blue jeans, a turquoise sweater, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

This is too intense. Worse than the torture of asphyxiating and equally out of his control, because this is not a memory he is retrieving of his own volition. It’s somehow being projected for him, against his will, and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

He wants out of his memory, but he can’t leave. All senses are fully engaged. Everything as clear and vivid as existence. Except he has no control. He can do nothing but stare through the eyes of his eleven-years-younger self and listen to the last conversation he ever had with his daughter, feeling the vibration of his larynx, and then the movement of his mouth and lips forming words.

“You talked to Mom about this?” His voice doesn’t sound strange at all. It feels and sounds exactly the way it does when he speaks.

“No, I came to you.”

“Is your homework done?”

“No, that’s why I want to go.”

Barry feels his younger self leaning to see around Meghan as Todd Helton gets a piece of the next pitch. The third-base runner scores, but it’s a groundout for Helton.

“Dad, you’re not even listening to me.”

“I am listening to you.”

Now he’s looking at her again.

“Mindy is my lab partner, and we have this thing due next Wednesday.”

“For what?”

“Biology.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Oh my God, it’s me, Mindy, maybe Jacob, definitely Kevin and Sarah.”

Now he watches himself lift his left arm to glance at his watch—one he will lose when he moves out of this house ten months from now in the wake of Meghan’s death and the explosive decompression of his marriage.

It’s a hair past 8:30 p.m.

“So can I go?”

Say no.

Younger Barry watches the next Rockies player walking to the plate.

Say no!

“You’ll be back no later than ten?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven is for weekends, you know that.”

“Ten thirty.”

“OK, forget it.”

“Fine, ten fifteen.”

“Are you kidding me with this?”

“It takes ten minutes to walk there. Unless you want to drive me.” Wow. He had repressed this moment because it was too painful. She had suggested he drive her, and he had refused. If he had, she would still be alive.

Yes! Drive her! Drive her, you idiot!

“Honey, I’m watching the game.”

“So ten thirty then?”

He feels his lips curling up in a smile, remembers acutely the long-lost feeling of losing a negotiation with his daughter. The annoyance, but also the pride that he was raising a woman of grit, who knew her own mind and fought for the things she wanted. Remembered hoping she would carry that fire into her adult life.

“Fine.” Meghan starts for the door. “But not a minute later. I have your word?”

Stop her.

Stop her!

“Yes, Dad.” Her last words. Now he remembers. Yes, Dad.

Barry’s younger self is staring at the television again, watching Brad Hawpe rifle a ball straight up the middle. He can hear Meghan’s footsteps moving away from him, and he’s screaming inside, but nothing’s happening. It’s as if he’s inhabiting a body over which he exerts no control.

His younger self isn’t even watching Meghan as she moves toward the door. Only cares about the game, and he doesn’t know he just looked into his daughter’s eyes for the last time, that he could stop this from happening with a word.

He hears the front door open and slam shut.

Then she’s gone, walking away from her house, from him, to her death. And he’s sitting in a recliner watching a baseball game.

The pain of not being able to breathe has left him. He has no sense of floating in that warm water or of his heart lodged dormant in his chest. Nothing matters but this excruciating memory he is being forced to endure for reasons beyond his comprehension and the fact that his daughter has just left his house for the last—

His left pinkie moves.

Or rather, he is aware of having moved it. Of the action being a result of his intention.

He tries again. The entire hand moves.

He extends one arm, then the other.

He blinks. Takes a breath.

He opens his mouth and makes a sound like a grunt—guttural and meaningless—but he made it.

What does this mean? Before, he was experiencing the memory as an observer scrolls through a read-only file. Like watching a movie. Now he can move and make sound and interact with his environment, and every second, he is feeling more in control of this body.

Reaching down, he lowers the recliner’s footrest. Then he’s standing, looking around this house he lived in more than a decade ago and marveling at how exquisitely real it is.

Moving across the living room, he stops in front of the mirror beside the front door and studies his reflection in the glass. His hair is thicker and back to the color of sand, devoid of the silver, which, over the last few years, has been claiming more and more real estate on his thinning head of hair.

His jawline is sharp. No sagging jowls. No puffy bags under his eyes or gin blossoms on the side of his nose, and he realizes he let his body go to absolute shit since Meghan’s death.

He looks at the door. The door his daughter just walked out of.

What the hell is happening? He was in a hotel in Manhattan, being killed in some kind of deprivation tank.

Is this real?

Is this happening?

It can’t be, and yet it feels exactly like living.

He opens the door and steps out into the autumn evening.

If this isn’t real, it’s torture of the worst possible kind. But what if what the man said to him was true? I’m about to give you the greatest gift of your life. The greatest gift a person could ever hope to receive.

Barry slams back into the moment. Those are questions for later. Right now, he is standing on the front porch of his house, listening to the leaves of the oak tree in his front yard twittering in a gentle breeze that also moves the rope swing. By all appearances, it is, impossibly, October 25, 2007, the night his daughter was killed in a hit-and-run. She never made it to Dairy Queen to meet up with her friends, which means this tragedy will happen in the next ten minutes.

And she already has a two-minute head start.

He isn’t wearing shoes, but he’s wasted enough time already.

Pulling the front door to the house closed, he steps down into the lawn, leaves crunching under his bare feet, and heads off into the night.

HELENA

June 20, 2009

BARRY

October 25, 2007

The windows of neighboring houses seem to flicker from the illumination of television screens inside, and there’s no one out except Barry, who’s running down the middle of a street that is empty and plastered with fallen leaves from the oaks that line the block. He feels stronger than he has in ages. There’s no pain in his left knee from the ill-advised slide across home plate during a softball game in Central Park that will not happen for another five years. And he’s so much lighter on his feet, by thirty pounds at least.

A half mile in the distance, he sees the glow of restaurants and motel signs, Dairy Queen among them. He detects something in the left front pocket of his jeans. Slowing to a fast walk, he reaches in and pulls out a first-generation iPhone whose screensaver is a photo of Meghan crossing the finish line at a cross-country meet.

It takes four attempts to unlock it, and then he scrolls contacts until he finds Meghan, calling her as he begins to jog again.

It rings once.

Voicemail.

He calls again.

Voicemail again.

And he’s running down the broken sidewalk past a collection of old buildings that will gentrify into loft space, a coffee shop, and a distillery in the coming decade. But for now, they loom dark and abandoned.

Several hundred yards away, he sees a figure emerge from the darkness of this undeveloped area and into the well-lit outer edge of the business district.

Turquoise sweater. Ponytail.

He shouts his daughter’s name. She doesn’t look back, and he’s sprinting now, running as hard as he’s ever run in his life, screaming her name between gulps of air, even as he wonders—

Is any of this real? How many times has he fantasized about this moment? Being given a shot at preventing her death…

“Meghan!” She’s fifty yards ahead of him now, and he’s close enough to see that she’s talking on her phone, oblivious.

Tires squeal somewhere behind him. He glances back at fast-approaching headlights and registers the growl of a revving engine. The restaurant Meghan never reached is in the distance, on the opposite side of the street, and now she takes a step into the road to cross.

“Meghan! Meghan! Meghan!”

Three feet into the street, she stops and looks back in Barry’s direction, the phone still held to her ear. He’s close enough now to see the pure confusion on her face, the noise of the approaching car right on his heels.

A black Mustang blurs past at sixty miles per hour, the car streaking down the middle of the street and weaving across the centerline.

And then it’s gone.

Meghan is still by the curb.

Barry reaches her, out of breath, his legs burning from the half-mile sprint.

She lowers her phone. “Dad? What are you doing?”

He looks up and down the road. It’s just the two of them standing in the yellow light of an overhanging streetlamp, no cars coming, and quiet enough to hear dead leaves scraping across the pavement.

Was that Mustang the car that hit her eleven years ago, which is also, impossibly, tonight? Did he just stop it from happening?

Meghan says, “You’re not wearing shoes.”

He hugs her fiercely, still gasping for air, but there are sobs mixing in now, and he can’t hold them back. It’s too much. Her smell. Her voice. The sheer presence of her.

“What happened?” Meghan asked. “Why are you here? Why are you crying?”

“That car…it would’ve…”

“Jesus, Dad, I’m fine.”

If this isn’t real, it’s the cruelest thing a person could ever do to him, because this doesn’t feel like some virtual-reality experience or whatever that man subjected him to. This feels real. This is living. You don’t come back from this.

He looks at her, touches her face, vital and perfect in the streetlight.

“Are you real?” he asks.

“Are you drunk?” she asks.

“No, I was…”

“What?”

“I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Because, because that’s what fathers do. They worry about their daughters.”

“Well, here I am.” She smiles uncomfortably, clearly and rightly questioning his sanity in this moment. “Safe and sound.”

He thinks about the night he found her, not far from where they’re standing. He had been calling her for an hour, and her phone just kept ringing before going to voicemail. It was while walking down this street that he’d seen the cracked screen of her phone lighting up where it had been dropped in the middle of the road. And then he’d found her body, broken and sprawled in the shadows beyond the sidewalk, the trauma indicating she’d been thrown a great distance after having been struck at a high rate of speed.

It’s a memory that will never leave him, but which now possesses a gray and fading quality, just like the false memory that plagued him in that Montauk diner. Has he somehow changed what happened? That can’t possibly be.

Meghan looks up at him for a long moment. Not annoyed anymore. Kind. Concerned. He keeps wiping his eyes, trying not to cry, and she seems simultaneously freaked out and moved.

She says, “It’s OK if you cry. Sarah’s dad gets emotional about everything.”

“I’m very proud of you.”

“I know.” And then, “Dad, my friends are waiting on me.”

“OK.”

“But I’ll see you later?” she asks.

“Definitely.”

“We still going to the movies this weekend? For our date?”

“Yes, of course.” He doesn’t want her to go. He could hold her in his arms for a solid week and it wouldn’t be enough. But he says, “Please be careful tonight.”

She turns away and continues walking up the street. He calls her name. She looks back.

“I love you, Meghan.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

And he stands there trembling and trying to understand what just happened, watching her move away from him and then across the street, and then into Dairy Queen, where she joins her friends at a table by the window.

Footsteps approach from behind.

Barry turns, sees a man dressed in black coming toward him. Even from a distance, he looks vaguely familiar, and as he draws near, the full recognition hits. He’s the man from the diner, Vince, who escorted him to the room after he’d been drugged in the hotel bar. The one with the neck tattoo, except he doesn’t have it anymore. Or yet. Now, he has a full head of hair, a leaner build. And looks ten years younger.

Barry instinctively backs away, but Vince holds up his hands in a show of peace.

They face each other on the empty sidewalk under the streetlamp.

“What’s happening to me?” Barry asks.

“I know you’re confused and disoriented, but that won’t last. I’m here to fulfill the final piece of my employment contract. Are you getting it yet?”

“Getting what?”

“What my boss did for you.”

“This is real?”

“This is real.”

“How?”

“You’re with your daughter again, and she’s alive. Does it matter? You won’t see me after tonight, but I have to tell you something. There are ground rules, and they’re simple. Don’t try to game the larger system with your knowledge of what’s to come. Just live your life again. Live it a little better. And tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.”

“What if I want to go back?”

“The technology that brought you here hasn’t even been invented yet.”

Vince turns to go.

“How do I thank him for this?” Barry asks, his eyes filling with tears again.

“Right now, in 2018, he’s looking in on you and your family. Hopefully, he’s seeing that you made the most of this chance. That you’re happy. That your daughter is well. And most importantly, that you kept your mouth shut and played by the rules I just explained to you. That’s how you can thank him.”

“What do you mean, ‘Right now, in 2018’?”

He shrugs. “Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

Barry tries to let that sink in, but it’s too much to process. “You went back too, huh?”

“A bit further than you. I’ve been reliving my life for three years already.”

“Why?”

“I messed up when I was a cop. Got in business with the wrong people. I own a fly-fishing shop now, and life is beautiful. Good luck with your second chance.”

Vince turns away and walks off into the night.