BARRY

April 16, 2019

Barry is sitting in a chair in the shade, looking out across a forest of saguaro at a desert catching morning light.

The sharp pain behind his eyes is mercifully retreating.

He was lying on the seventeenth floor of a building in Manhattan, bullets whizzing past and riddling his body and the blood rushing out of him as he pictured his daughter’s face.

Then a bullet struck his head and now he’s here.

“Barry.” He turns to look at the woman sitting beside him—short red hair, green eyes, Celtic paleness. Helena. “You’re bleeding.”

She hands him a napkin, which he holds to his nose to catch the blood.

“Talk to me, honey, she says. “This is new territory. Thirty-three years’ worth of dead memories coming at you. What’s going through your mind right now?”

“I don’t know. I was…it feels like I was just in that hotel.”

“Marcus Slade’s?”

“Yeah, I was shot. I was dying. I still feel the bullets hitting me. I was yelling at you to run. Then I was suddenly here. Like no time had passed at all. But my memories of that hotel feel dead now. Black and gray.”

“Do you feel more like the Barry from that timeline or this one?”

“That one. I have no idea where I am. The only familiar thing to me is you.”

“You’ll have the memories of this timeline soon.”

“A lot of them?”

“A lifetime of them. I’m not sure what to expect for you. It may be jarring.”

He looks at the range of brown mountains. The desert is flowering. Birds are singing. There is no wind, and the chill of the night lingers in the air.

“I’ve never seen this place before.”

“This is our home, Barry.”

He takes a moment to let that hit him.

“What’s today?”

“April 16, 2019. In the timeline where you died, I used a DARPA deprivation tank to go back thirty-three years to 1986. And then I lived my life all over again, right up to this moment, trying to find a way to stop today from happening.”

“What happens today?”

“After you died in Slade’s hotel, knowledge of the chair leaked to the public, and the world went insane. Today is the day that the world will remember all of it. Until now, you and I are the only ones who knew.”

“I feel…strange,” he says.

He lifts a glass of ice water from the table and drinks it down.

His hands begin to shake.

Helena notices, says, “If it gets bad, I have this.” She lifts a capped syringe off the table.

“What is it?”

“A sedative. Only if you need it.”

It starts like a summer storm.

Just a super-cooled drop of rain here and there.

The rumble of distant thunder.

Dry lightning sparking across the horizon.

The initial memory of this timeline finds him.

First time he ever saw Helena she climbed onto the barstool beside him in a dive bar in Portland, Oregon, and said, “You look like you want to buy me a drink.” It was late, he was drunk, and she was like no one he had met—early twenties but an old soul with the most brilliant mind he’d ever encountered. The instant familiarity of being in her presence felt, not just like he’d known her all his life but as if he were waking up for the first time. They bullshitted until last call, and then she took him back to the motel where she was staying and fucked him like it was the last day on Earth.

Another one—

They had been together several months, and he was already in love with her when she told him she could tell the future.

He said, “Bullshit.”

She said, “I’ll prove it one day.”

She didn’t make a big deal out of it. Said it in passing, almost like a joke, and he forgot all about her claim until December of 1990. They were watching the news one night, and she told him that next month the US would drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a mission called Operation Desert Storm.

There were other instances.

Walking into a theater to see The Silence of the Lambs, she told him the film would sweep the Oscars this time next year.

That spring, she sat him down in the small apartment they were living in, gave him a handheld tape recorder, and sang the chorus to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” two months before the song released. Then she recorded herself telling him that the governor of Arkansas would announce his candidacy for president of the United States by year’s end, and that he would win next year, defeating the incumbent and a strong third-party challenger.

They had been together almost two years when he demanded she tell him how she could possibly know these things. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. They were sitting at a bar in Seattle, watching the 1992 general election returns come in. And because of how she had gone about it—proving her bona fides before ever asking Barry to believe an insane story about a memory chair and a future they had already lived—he believed her, even when she told him he wouldn’t remember any of his past lives for another twenty-seven years, and that technology sufficient for her to build the chair wouldn’t exist for another fifteen.

“Are you OK?” Helena asks.

His focus is back in the moment, sitting on their concrete patio, watching a bee helicoptering around the remains of breakfast.

“It’s the weirdest feeling,” he says.

“Can you try to describe it?”

“It’s like…two separate people, two distinct consciousnesses, with vastly different histories and experiences, are merging inside of me.”

“Is one more dominant than the other?”

“No. At first I felt like the me who was shot in the hotel, but now I’m feeling equally at home in this reality.”

Remembering a lifetime in the span of sixty seconds is a hell of a thing.

He faces a tsunami of memories, but it’s the quiet moments that hit with the most force—

A snowy Christmas with Helena and her parents at their farmhouse in Boulder, Dorothy forgetting to put the turkey in the oven and everyone but Helena laughing it off, because she knew it was the beginning of her mother’s mental deterioration.

Their wedding in Aruba.

A trip, just the two of them, to Antarctica in the summer of 2001 to witness the migration of emperor penguins, which they would both come to see as the best moment of their life together—a respite from the ever-present race to fix the looming future.

Several bitter fights about having children and Helena’s insistence that they not bring a child into a world that would likely destroy itself in two decades.

The funerals of his mother, her mother, and most recently, her father.

The time she asked Barry if he wanted to know anything about his old life, and Barry saying that he didn’t want to know any reality but this one.

The first time she demonstrated the power of the chair.

Now the full arc of their time together is coming into focus.

They spent their lives constructing the memory chair in secret and trying to find a way to prevent the world from remembering how to build it. Although the chair had been used on countless occasions on prior timelines, the most “recent” use of the chair by Helena (in the DARPA lab) overrode all of the other false memory anniversary points. Which meant no one, not even Slade, would have knowledge of those prior timelines.

Until April 16, 2019.

Then, and only then, would the false memories of all that had happened come crashing down on everyone.

With a fortune amassed by 2001, they had an operational chair by 2007.

Once the chair was built, they spent a decade running experiments with it and imaging each other’s brains, studying neural activity at the moment a reality shift occurred and dead memories flooded in, searching for the accompanying neuron cascade of new information.

Their hope was to find a way to prevent dead memories from older timelines from flashing in without harming the brain. But all they accomplished was the recording of neural activity associated with dead memories. They made no progress toward finding a method of shielding the brain from those memories.

Barry looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, a completely different man from who he was just moments ago.

“We failed,” he says.

“Yeah.”

The other half of his duality, the one that lived every moment of this timeline, has just experienced the false memories of Meghan and Julia. His life as a detective in New York City. The death of his daughter, his divorce and descent into depression and regret. Meeting Slade and going back eleven years to save Meghan. Losing her a second time. Helena coming into his life. Their connection. His death in Slade’s hotel.

“You’re crying,” Helena says.

“It’s a lot.”

She reaches over, takes his hand in hers.

He says, “I finally remember it.”

“What?”

“Those handful of months in New York with you after I raided Slade’s hotel with Gwen the first time. I remember the end of that timeline, leaning down and kissing you as you floated in the deprivation tank, about to die. I was in love with you.”

“You were?”

“Madly.”

They’re quiet for a moment, looking out across the Sonoran desert, a landscape they have come to love together—so different from the lush, Pacific Northwest woods of his youth and the evergreen forests of Helena’s.

This has been a good place for them.

“We should look at the news,” Helena says.

“Let’s wait,” Barry says.

“What good will waiting do?”

“Let us live a little while longer with the hope that no one else remembered?”

“You know that’s not going to happen.”

“You always were the realist.”

Helena smiles, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

Barry rises from the chair and turns to face the back of their sprawling desert home. Built of rammed earth and expansive panes of glass, it blends seamlessly into its environment.

He heads inside through the kitchen, past the dining-room table, to the sitting area by the television. Lifting the remote, he hesitates as Helena’s barefooted steps move toward him across the cool tile.

She takes the remote out of his hand and presses the Power button.

The first thing he reads is a banner across the bottom of the screen.

MASS SUICIDES REPORTED ACROSS THE WORLD.

Helena lets out a pained sigh.

Cell-phone footage from a city street shows bodies bouncing off the pavement like some kind of horrific hailstorm.

Like Barry, the world just remembered the previous timeline when the chair’s existence became public knowledge. The attacks on New York City. WikiLeaks. Widespread usage of the chair across the globe.

Barry says, “Maybe it’ll all be OK. Maybe Slade was right. Maybe humanity will adapt and evolve to accept this.”

Helena turns the channel.

A frazzled-looking anchor is trying to maintain some vestige of professionalism. “Russia and China have just released a joint statement at the UN, accusing the United States of reality theft in an effort to prevent other nations from using the memory chair. They have vowed to rebuild the technology immediately and warned that any further use of the chair will be seen as an act of war. The US has not yet responded—”

She turns the channel again.

Another shell-shocked anchor: “In addition to the mass suicides, hospitals in all major cities are reporting an influx of patients suffering catatonia—a state of unresponsive stupor brought about by—”

The co-anchor cuts him off: “I’m sorry to interrupt you, David. The FAA is reporting…Jesus…Forty commercial jet crashes in United States airspace in the last fifteen—”

Helena turns off the television, drops the remote on the sofa, and walks into the foyer. Barry follows her to the front door, which she pulls open.

The view from the porch overlooks the gravel driveway and the gentle decline of the desert as it slopes for twelve miles toward the city of Tucson, shimmering like a mirage in the distance.

“It’s still so quiet,” she says. “Hard to believe everything is falling apart out there.”

The last thirty-three years of Barry’s existence is putting down roots in his mind, feeling more real with every breath. He isn’t the man he was in Slade’s hotel. He isn’t the man who spent the last twenty-four years with Helena, trying to save the world from experiencing this day. He’s, somehow, both of them.

He says, “There was a part of me that didn’t believe it would happen.”

“Yeah.”

Helena turns and embraces him with a sudden force that drives him back several steps toward the door.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“What?”

“This! My life! Go back to 1986, find you, convince you I’m not crazy. Amass a fortune. Build the chair. Try to prevent dead memories. Fail. Watch the world remember. Rinse, repeat. Are the rest of my many lives nothing more than trying to figure a way out of this inescapable loop?”

He looks down at her, framing her jaw in his hands. “I have an idea,” he says. “Let’s forget all of this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just be together today. Let’s just live.”

“We can’t. This is all happening. This is what is real.”

“I know, but we can wait until tonight for you to go back to ’86. We know what comes next. What has to happen. We don’t need to obsess over it. Let’s just be present for the time we have left together.”

---

They set off on their favorite hike through the desert to force themselves to stay away from the news.

The trail is one they’ve blazed over the years, right out the back of their house and up into the saguaro-covered hills.

Sweat is pouring out of Barry, but the exertion is exactly what he needed—something to burn through the surreal shock of the morning.

At midday, they top out on the rock outcropping several hundred feet above their house, which is practically invisible from this height, camouflaged against the floor of the desert.

Barry opens his backpack and takes out a liter of water. They pass it back and forth and try to catch their breath.

There is no movement anywhere.

The desert as silent as a cathedral.

Barry is thinking there’s something about the rock and the ancient cacti that suggests the frozen, timeless permanence of a dead memory.

He looks at Helena.

She pours a little water over her face and hands him the bottle.

“I could do this on my own next time,” she says.

“That’s what you’re sitting here thinking during our last hours together?”

She touches the side of his face. “For decades, you’ve shared the burden of the chair with me. You’ve known this day was coming, that it would probably mean the end of everything, and I’d have to go back to 1986 and try it all over again.”

“Helena—”

“You wanted kids, I didn’t. You sacrificed your interests to help me.”

“Those were all my choices.”

“Next time around, you could have a different life, without the knowledge of what’s coming. That’s all I’m saying. You could have the things you—”

“You want to do this without me?”

“No. I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life, no matter how many timelines I live. That’s why I found you in the first place. But this chair is my cross to bear.”

“You don’t need me.”

“That is not what I’m saying. Of course I need you. I need your love, I need your mind, your support, all of it. But I need you to know—”

“Helena, don’t.”

“Let me say this! It’s enough that I have to see the chair destroying the entire world. People throwing themselves off of buildings because of something I made. It’s another to see it ruin the life of the man I love.”

“Life with you isn’t a life ruined.”

“But you know this is all it can ever be. Stuck in this thirty-three-year loop, trying to find a way to stop this day from coming. All I’m saying is that if you want to just live your fucking life without the pressure of trying to keep the world intact, that’s OK.”

“Look at me.”

The water she dribbled on her face has beaded up on the layer of sunscreen. He stares into her emerald eyes, clear and bright in the sun.

“I don’t know how you do this, H. I don’t know how you carry this weight. But as long as it’s on your shoulders, it’s also on mine. We will find a way to solve this. If not in the next life, then the one after. And if not in that one, then the one—”

She kisses him on top of their mountain.

---

They’re a hundred yards from the house when the sound of a helicopter builds behind them, and then streaks across the early-afternoon sky.

Barry stops and watches it cruise toward Tucson.

“That’s a Black Hawk,” he says. “Wonder what’s going on in town.”

The chopper banks hard to the left and slows its groundspeed, now drifting back in their direction as it lowers from five hundred feet toward the ground.

Helena says, “They’re here for us.”

They take off sprinting toward the house, the Black Hawk now hovering seventy-five feet above the desert floor, the rotors roaring and swirling up a cloud of dust and sand, Barry close enough to see three pairs of legs hanging off each side of the open cabin above the skids.

The tip of Helena’s boot strikes a half-buried rock and she goes down hard on the trail. Barry grabs her under both arms and heaves her back onto her feet, blood now running down her right knee.

“Come on!” he screams.

They pass the saltwater pool and reach the patio where they had breakfast.

Thick ropes drop out of the Black Hawk like tentacles, the soldiers already descending them.

Barry slides open the rear door, and they rush through the kitchen and turn down the hallway. Through the windows that look out into the desert on the other side of the house, he sees a cluster of heavily armed and armored soldiers in desert camo jogging up through the landscaping in a tactical formation toward their front door.

Helena is ahead of him, limping from her fall.

They race past the home office and guestroom, and through another window, Barry glimpses the Black Hawk setting down on his driveway behind their cars.

They stop where the hall ends, and Helena presses against one of the rocks in the river-stone wall, which opens to reveal its secret utility as a hidden door.

She and Barry slip inside as the sound of a small explosion shudders through the house.

Then it’s just the two of them, gasping for breath in the pitch-black.

“They’re in the house,” Barry whispers.

“Can you hit the light?”

He feels around until his fingers graze the switch.

“You sure they won’t see it?”

“No, but I can’t do this in the dark.”

Barry flicks the switch. A single, unshaded bulb burns down from overhead. They’re standing in a kind of anteroom, barely larger than a kitchen pantry. The inner door is the basic size and shape of a standard door, except that it weighs six hundred pounds, is built of steel plates layered to a thickness of two inches, and when activated, shoots ten massive bolts into a jamb.

Helena is typing in the code on the keypad, and the footsteps of at least half a dozen soldiers are moving toward them down the hallway, Barry picturing them closing in on the river-stone terminus, the sound of whispered voices and boot-falls and jostling gear getting closer and closer.

A shouted voice from the far side of the house—probably in their master suite—echoes down the long hall.

“Clear on the east side!”

“Impossible. We saw them enter the house. Everyone check closets? Under beds?”

On the illuminated display, Barry watches as Helena keys in the last number.

The high-pitched whirring of internal gears becomes audible inside the anteroom, and possibly beyond, Barry and Helena holding each other’s stare as the ten bolts retract one by one like muffled gunshots.

A woman’s voice comes through the other side of the hidden door: “You hear that?”

“It came from inside this wall.”

He hears what sounds like hands running across the faux stones. Helena drags open the heavy door. Barry follows her across the threshold into another place of darkness, just as the hidden door cracks open.

A soldier shouts, “There’s something back here!”

Helena pulls the vault door closed, types the locking code into the keypad on this side, and the ten dead bolts shoot home again.

When she hits the lights, they reveal a claustrophobic metal staircase, spiraling thirty feet down into the earth.

The temperature drops as they descend.

The soldiers pound on the vault door.

“They’ll find a way through,” Barry says.

“Then let’s hurry.”

Three stories underground, the staircase ends at a doorway that leads into a two-thousand-square-foot lab, where they’ve spent most of their waking hours for the last fifteen years. It is, for all intents and purposes, a bunker, with a dedicated air recirculation and filtration system, stand-alone solar-powered electrical system, a galley and sleeping quarters, and food and water rations for one year.

“How’s your leg?” Barry asks.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She limps past the Eames lounge chair, which they retrofitted into a memory chair, and then a region of the lab they used for brain imaging, and their study of dead-memory processing.

Helena sits down at the terminal and uploads the memory-reactivation program they always keep idling in case of emergencies. Since she already mapped the memory of her first solo drive when she turned sixteen, she can go straight to the deprivation chamber.

“I thought we’d have more time today,” Barry says.

“Me too.”

A detonation above them shakes the floor and rattles the walls. Plaster dust rains down from the ceiling like fine snow.

Barry rushes back through the lab to the foot of the stairwell. The air is full of dust, but he doesn’t hear incoming voices or footsteps yet.

As he moves back into the lab, he sees Helena pulling off her shirt and sports bra, and then sliding her shorts down her legs.

She stands naked before him, strapping on the skullcap, her right leg bleeding, tears streaming down her face.

He goes to his wife and embraces her as another blast shakes the foundation of their subterranean lab.

“Don’t let them in here,” she says.

She wipes her eyes and kisses him, and then Barry helps her into the tank.

When she’s floating in the water, he looks down at her, says, “I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.”

“You won’t even recognize me.”

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

He closes the hatch and moves over to the terminal. It’s gone quiet for a moment, no sound but the humming of the servers.

He initiates the reactivation program and leans back in the chair, trying to wrap his mind around what comes next.

An earth-shaking blast cracks the walls and the concrete floor beneath his feet, Barry wondering if the Black Hawk dropped a bomb on their house.

Smoke is pouring through the vents, and the light panels are flickering, but the reactivation program continues to run.

He goes to the stairwell again—the only way in or out of the lab.

Now he hears voices above and sees beams of light swinging through the dust-choked smoke.

They’ve breached the vault door, their boots clanging down the metal steps.

Barry slams the door to the lab and turns the dead bolt. It’s just a metal fire door—they could probably kick it in.

He returns to the terminal and studies the readout of Helena’s vitals. She’s been flatlined now for several minutes.

Something hits the other side of the door.

Again.

And again.

A machine gun fires and another boot or shoulder or battering ram slams into the metal.

Miraculously, it holds.

“Come on,” Barry says.

He hears voices yelling in the stairwell and then a deafening blast that sets his ears ringing—a grenade or a charge.

A wall of smoke appears where the door had been, and a soldier steps through over the flattened door, pointing an automatic rifle at Barry.

Barry raises his arms over his head and rises slowly from the chair as more soldiers pour into the lab.

The screen at the terminal, which shows the status of the stimulators, flashes an alert—DMT RELEASE DETECTED.

Come on. Come on.

Inside the tank, Helena is dying, her brain dumping the last of the chemical that will fling her back three decades into a memory.

The lead soldier is coming toward Barry, screaming something that he can’t understand over the ringing in his—

---

Blood is dripping from his nose, melting little burgundy holes in the snow.

He looks around at the dark evergreens, their branches sagging under the weight of a recent storm.

He looks at Helena, her hair different from the last time he saw her, in their basement lab in the Sonoran desert. It’s now equal parts white and red. She’s wearing it long and pulled back into a ponytail, and her face looks somehow harder.

“What day is it?” he asks.

“April 16, 2019. Second timeline anniversary since I died in the tank at DARPA.”

They’re standing in snowshoes in a glade on a mountainside, overlooking a city on a plain, ten miles distant.

“That’s Denver,” Helena says. “We built our lab here so I could be close to my parents.” She looks at him. “Nothing yet?”

“It feels like I was in our home in Tucson literally seconds ago.”

“Sorry to say you just shifted from one shitty April 16, 2019, to another.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We failed again.”

Their first meeting at the Portland bar. For a second time. The claims of clairvoyance. He fell in love with her even faster, because she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

The memory rush is more intense this time.

Almost painful.

He collapses in the snow as the past twenty-nine years with Helena hit his brain like a train of memories.

They spent the decade before technology was sufficient to build the chair studying space-time, the nature of matter, dimensionality, and quantum entanglement. They learned everything they could about the physics of time, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

Then they explored methods of traveling back into memory without using the tank, searching for a faster way. But absent the sensory deprivation, all they accomplished was killing themselves again and again.

Next come the memories that break him.

Losing his mother again.

Fights with Helena over not having kids (that must have been infuriating for her the second time around).

The sex, the love, the beautiful love.

Moments of exhilaration from knowing they were the only two people in the world fighting to save it.

Moments of horror from the same realization, and the knowledge they were failing.

And then he’s fully merged. The Barry with memories of all timelines.

He looks at Helena. She sits beside him in the snow, staring a vertical mile down toward the city with the same thousand-yard stare she’s had for the last year, knowing this day was coming unless a miracle occurred.

Holding this new timeline up against the last, the change in Helena is disconcerting, this version of her a slight degradation from the previous iteration, most evident in the quieter moments.

Less patience.

More distance.

More anger.

More depression.

Harder.

What must that have been like for her, reliving a relationship from the beginning, with all the knowledge of its weaknesses and strengths, before it even started? How was she even able to connect with him? With his naïveté? It must have been like speaking to a child sometimes, because, though he’s technically still the same person, the perspective gap between who Barry was five minutes ago and who he is now with all of his memories is a yawning chasm. Only now is he truly himself.

He says, “I’m sorry, H.”

“For what?”

“It must have been maddening, living our relationship again.”

She almost smiles. “I did want to murder you on a semi-regular basis.”

“Were you bored?”

“Never.”

The air is heavy with the question.

“You don’t have to do it again,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“With me.”

She looks at him, hurt. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”

“That is not what I’m saying. Not at all.”

“It’s OK if you are.”

“I’m not.”

“Do you want to be with me again?” she asks.

“I love you.”

“That is not an answer.”

“I want to spend every life with you. I told you this last week,” he says.

“It’s different now that you have full memories of every timeline. Isn’t it?”

“I’m with you, Helena. We only scratched the surface on the physics of time. There’s so much more for us to learn.”

He feels his phone vibrate in the pocket of his parka. This last hike together to their favorite spot was worth it, but they should leave now. Return to civilization. Watch the world remember and then get the fuck out before the soldiers come for them, even though he’s doubtful he and Helena would be found so soon. They lived under new identities this time around.

Helena takes out her phone and unlocks the home screen.

She says, “Oh God.”

Struggling onto her feet, she takes off running in her snowshoes, moving awkwardly back down the trail.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“We have to go!”

“What’s wrong?” he shouts after her.

She shouts back, “I will leave you!”

He clambers up and takes off after her.

It’s a quarter mile downhill through the fir trees. His phone keeps buzzing—someone lighting him up with texts—and despite the massive footwear, he reaches the trailhead in less than five minutes, crashing into the hood of their Jeep, breathless and sweating through his winter gear.

Helena is already climbing in behind the wheel, and he scrambles into the passenger seat, still wearing the snowshoes as she cranks the engine and tears out of the otherwise empty parking lot, the tires spinning on the icy pavement.

“What the hell, Helena?”

“Look at your phone.”

He digs it out of his jacket.

Reads the first lines of an emergency text on the home screen:

Emergency Alert

“We should’ve seen this coming,” she says. “Remember their UN statement on the last timeline?”

“ ‘Any further use of the chair will be seen as an act of war.’ ”

Helena drives too fast through a sharp curve, the tires sliding on the snowpack, the ABS braking kicking in.

“If you wrap the Jeep around a tree, we’ll never—”

“I grew up here, I know how to fucking drive in snow.”

She guns it on a straightaway, densely packed fir trees rushing past on either side as they scream down the mountain.

“They have to attack us,” Helena says.

“Why do you say that?”

“For all the reasons we talked about when I was at DARPA. Everyone’s worst-case scenario is that one country sends someone back half a century and unwrites the existence of billions. They have to hit us with everything they’ve got and hope to destroy the chair before we use it.”

Helena turns on the radio and pulls out of the entrance to the state park. They’ve already descended a couple thousand feet, and the only snow on the ground consists of melting patches in the shade.

“—interrupt this program. This is a national emergency. Important instructions will follow.” The terrifying sound header of the Emergency Alert System blares inside the Jeep. “The following message is transmitted at the request of the US government. This is not a test. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has detected the launch of Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles. These missiles are expected to strike numerous targets on the North American continent within the next ten to fifteen minutes. This is an attack warning. I repeat. This is an attack warning. An attack warning means that an actual attack against this country has been detected and that protective action should be taken. All citizens should take cover immediately. Move to a basement or interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Stay away from windows. If outdoors or in a vehicle, head for shelter. If none is available, lie flat in a ditch or other depression.”

Helena accelerates to a hundred miles per hour on the country road, the foothills falling away behind them in the side and rearview mirrors.

Barry leans down and starts to unbuckle the straps that attach the snowshoes to his snow-encrusted hiking boots.

When they merge onto the interstate, Helena pushes the engine to its breaking point.

After a mile, they enter the outskirts of the city.

More and more cars are pulled over onto the shoulder, doors left open as drivers abandoned their vehicles in search of shelter.

Helena hits the brakes as the road becomes log-jammed across all lanes of traffic. Hordes of people are fleeing their cars, hopping the guardrail, and tumbling down an embankment that bottoms out at a stream running heavy and brown with snowmelt.

“Can you get through to the next exit?” Barry asks.

“I don’t know.”

Helena pushes on, dodging people and driving through a handful of open car doors, the front bumper of the Jeep ripping them off in order to pass. The exit ramp to their turnoff is impassable, so she maneuvers the Jeep up a steep, grassy hill and onto the shoulder, finally squeezing between a UPS truck and a convertible to reach the top of the overpass.

In contrast to the interstate, the avenue is practically empty, and she burns down the middle of it as another alert blares through the speakers.

Their lab is in Lakewood, a western suburb of Denver, in a redbrick building that used to be a firehouse.

They’re just over a mile away now, and Barry stares out the window, thinking how odd it is to see so little movement anywhere.

No other cars driving on the road.

Hardly any people out.

By his estimation, it’s been at least ten minutes since they heard the first emergency alert broadcast.

He looks over at Helena to say what he’s already said before, that he wants to do this again with her no matter what, when through her window, he glimpses the brightest light he has ever seen—an incandescent flower blooming on the eastern horizon near the cluster of downtown skyscrapers, so intense it burns his corneas as it overtakes the world.

Helena’s face becomes radiant, and everything in his field of vision, even the sky, is robbed of color, blanching into a brilliant, searing white.

He’s blind for five seconds, and when he can see again, everything happens at once.

All the glass in the Jeep exploding—

The pine trees in a park straight ahead bending so far sideways their tips touch the ground—

Structural debris from a disintegrated strip mall streaming across the road, blown by a furious wind—

A man pushing a shopping cart on the sidewalk flung fifty feet through the air—

And then their Jeep is flipping, the scrape of metal against pavement deafening as the shockwave blows them across the road, sparks flying into Barry’s face.

As the Jeep comes to rest against the curb, the noise of the blast arrives, and it is the loudest thing he has ever heard—world-ending loud, chest-crushing loud—and a single thought rips through his mind: the detonation sound wave reached them too quickly.

A matter of seconds.

They’re far too close to ground zero to survive very long.

Everything becomes still.

His ears are ringing.

His clothing singed all over with fire-ringed holes that are still eating through fabric.

A receipt in one of the cup holders has combusted.

Smoke pours through the vents.

The Jeep is resting on the passenger side, and he’s still buckled into the seat, at a sideways attitude to what’s left of the world. He cranes his neck to look up at Helena, who’s still strapped in behind the wheel, her head hanging motionless.

He calls her name, but he can’t even hear his own voice in his head.

Nothing but the vibration of his larynx.

He unbuckles his seat belt and turns painfully to face his wife.

Her eyes are closed and her face is bright red, the left side of it covered in glass-shrapnel from the window.

He reaches over and unbuckles her seat belt, and as she falls out of the seat onto him, her eyes open and she takes a sudden, gasping breath.

Her lips move, trying to say something, but she stops when she realizes neither of them can hear a thing. She lifts a hand turned red from second-degree burns and points at the glassless windshield.

Barry nods, and they climb through, struggling finally onto their feet to stand in the middle of the road, surrounded by devastation only fathomed in nightmares.

The sky is gone.

Trees turned to skeletons and molten leaves drifting down from them like fire-rain.

Helena is already stumbling up the road. As Barry hurries after her, he notices his hands for the first time since the blast. They’re the same color as Helena’s face, and already forming blisters from the white-hot flash of thermal radiation.

Reaching up to touch his face and head, he comes away with a clump of hair.

Oh Christ.

Panic hits.

He comes alongside Helena, who’s limp-jogging now over the pavement, which is covered in smoking debris.

It’s evening-dark, the sun invisible.

Pain is encroaching.

In his face, his hands, his eyes.

His hearing returns.

The sound of his footsteps.

Car alarms.

Someone scream-crying in the distance.

The god-awful silence of a stunned city.

They turn onto the next street, Barry figuring they’re still a half mile from the firehouse.

Helena stops suddenly, bends over, and vomits in the middle of the street.

He tries to put his hand on her back, but when his palm touches her jacket, he instinctively pulls it away in pain.

“I’m dying, Barry. You are too.”

She straightens, wipes her mouth.

Helena’s hair is falling out, and her breathing sounds ragged and painful.

Just like his.

“I think we can make it,” he says.

“We have to. Why would they hit Denver?”

“If they unleashed their full arsenal, they’re striking every major city in America, thousands of warheads, probably hoping they get lucky and take out the chair.”

“Maybe they did.”

They move on, closer to ground zero by the looks of the towering cloud of ash and fire, still roiling and pluming in the indeterminate distance.

They pass an overturned school bus, the yellow turned black, the glass blown out, voices crying from within.

Barry slows down and starts toward it, but Helena says, “The only way you can help them is for us to get home.”

He knows she’s right, but it takes everything in his power not to at least try to help, even with a word of comfort.

He says, “I wish we’d never lived to see a day like this.”

They jog past a burning tree with a motorcycle and its driver blown into the branches, thirty feet up.

Then a woman staggering hairless and naked in the middle of the street with her skin coming off like the bark of a birch tree and her eyes abnormally large and white, as if they’d expanded to absorb the horror all around her. But the truth is, she’s blind.

“Block it,” Helena says, crying. “We’re going to change this.”

Barry tastes blood in his mouth, pain slowly encompassing his world.

It feels like his insides are melting.

Another blast, this one much farther away, shakes the ground beneath them.

“There,” Helena says.

The firehouse lies straight ahead.

They’re standing in the midst of their neighborhood, and he barely noticed.

Because of the pain.

Mostly because it doesn’t look anything like their street.

Every house built of wood has been leveled, power lines toppled, trees blow-torched and stripped of every hint of green.

Vehicles have been strewn everywhere—some flipped onto their roofs, others on their sides, a few still burning.

It’s raining ash and fallout that will give them acute radiation poisoning if they’re still in this hellscape by nightfall.

The only movement anywhere is from blackened forms writhing on the ground.

In the street.

In the smoldering front yards of what once were homes.

Barry feels a surge of helpless nausea as he realizes these are people.

Their firehouse is still standing.

The windows are shattered-out, gaping-black eye sockets, and the redbrick has been turned the color of charcoal.

The pain in Barry’s face and hands is exquisite as they climb the steps to the entrance and move inside over the front door, which lies cracked and flattened across the foyer.

Even through the pain, the shock of seeing their home of twenty-one years like this is devastating.

Weak light filters in through the windows, revealing a place of utter ruin.

Most of the furniture has simply exploded.

The kitchen reeks of natural gas, and in the far corner of the building, smoke trickles through the open doorway to their bedroom, where the flickering of flames is visible on the walls.

As they rush through the house, Barry loses his balance in the archway between the dining and living room. He clutches the side of the archway to stop himself from falling and cries out in pain, leaving behind a handprint of blood and skin where he palmed the wall.

The access to their secure lab is another vault door, this time in the walk-in storage closet of what used to be the home office. The door itself is wired to the rest of the house, so using the keypad entry is out. Helena opens the flashlight app on her phone and sets the five-digit combination manually in the semidarkness.

She reaches for the wheel, but Barry says, “Let me.”

“It’s fine.”

“You still have to die in the tank.”

“Fair enough.”

He steps to the door and takes hold of the three-spoked handle, groaning with agony as he strains to crank the wheel. Nothing’s moving but the layers of skin he’s stripping away, and a horrifying thought occurs to him—what if the heat of the blast fused the innards of the door? A vision of their last day together—cooking slowly from thermal radiation in the burned-out husk of their home, unable to reach the chair, knowing that they failed. That when the next shift happened, if it ever did, they would either blink out of existence altogether or into a world of someone else’s making.

The wheel budges, then finally gives way.

The locks retract and the door swings open, exposing a spiral stairwell leading down into a lab that’s nearly identical to the one they built in the desert outside of Tucson. Only here, instead of digging into the earth, they lined the stone basement of the old firehouse with steel walls.

There’s no light.

Barry leaves part of his hand on the wheel as he pulls it away and follows Helena, corkscrewing down the stairs in the meager light of her phone’s sustained camera flash.

The lab is strangely silent.

No humming of the fans that cool the servers.

Or the heat pump that keeps the water in the deprivation tank at the steady temperature of human skin.

The phone light sweeps across the walls as they move toward the end of the server rack, where a power bank of lithium ion batteries is the only thing glowing in the lab.

Barry goes to a panel of switches on the wall that transfers power from the electrical grid to the batteries. He faces another moment of pure terror, because if the blast damaged the batteries or connectors to any of the equipment, this is all futile.

“Barry?” Helena says. “What are you waiting for?”

He flips the switches.

Overhead lights flicker on.

The servers begin to hum.

Helena is already easing down into the chair at the terminal, which has begun its boot-up sequence.

“The batteries will only give us thirty minutes of power,” she says.

“We have generators and plenty of gas.”

“Yeah, but it’ll take ages to reroute the power.”

He sheds his fire-burned parka and snow pants and takes the chair beside Helena, who’s already typing on the keypad as quickly as her scorched fingertips will let her, blood running out of the corners of her mouth and eyes.

As she begins to strip out of her winter clothes, Barry goes to the cabinet and takes the only remaining skullcap that has a full charge. He powers it on and places it carefully on top of his wife’s head, which is blistering over.

The second-degree burns on his face are entering the arena of excruciating. There’s morphine in the medical cabinet, calling to him, but there’s also no time.

“I’ll finish positioning the skullcap,” she says. “Just get the injection port.”

He grabs a port and turns it on, making sure the Bluetooth connection with the terminal is online.

In sharp contrast to her nuclear-sunburned hands, Helena’s forearms are creamy and smooth, protected from the initial flash by her parka and several layers of shirts and thermal underwear. It takes him several tries with his ruined fingers to thread the IV into her vein. He finally straps the port to her forearm and heads for the deprivation tank. The water is a degree and a half cooler than the ideal 98.6, but it will have to do.

He lifts the hatch and turns to face Helena, who’s stumbling toward him like a broken angel.

He knows he looks no prettier.

“I wish I could do this next part for you,” he says.

“It’s only going to hurt a little while longer,” she says, tears running down her face. “Besides, I deserve this.”

“That isn’t true.”

“You don’t have to walk this road with me again,” she says.

“I’ll walk it as many times as it takes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Completely.”

She grips the side of the tank and swings her leg over.

When her hands touch the water, she cries out.

“What is it?” Barry asks.

“The salt. Oh my God…”

“I’ll get the morphine.”

“No, it might fuck up the memory reactivation. Just hurry please.”

“OK. I’ll see you soon.”

He closes the hatch on his wife, floating in agony in the saltwater.

Rushing back to the terminal, he initiates the injection sequence. As the paralytic drug fires, he tries to sit down, but the pain is so all-encompassing he can’t stay still.

He heads through the lab and up the spiral staircase, through the office and the fire-bombed remnants of his and Helena’s home.

Back outside on the steps of the firehouse, it’s as dark as night and raining flecks of fire from the sky.

Barry descends the steps and walks out into the middle of the street.

A burning newspaper blows across the pavement.

On the other side of the road, a blackened figure lies in the fetal position, curled against the curb in its final resting place.

There is the whisper of hot wind.

Distant screaming and groans.

And nothing else.

It seems impossible that less than an hour ago, he was sitting in a snowy glade at ten thousand feet, overlooking Denver on a perfect spring afternoon.

We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves.

He can barely stand anymore.

His knees buckle; he collapses.

Sitting now in the middle of the street in front of the firehouse, watching the world burn and trying not to let the pain overwhelm him.

It’s been several minutes since he left the lab.

Helena is dying in the tank.

He’s dying out here.

He lies back on the pavement and stares up into the black sky at the fire raining down on him.

A bright rod of agony knifes through the back of his skull, and he registers a wave of relief, knowing that means the end is coming, that DMT is flooding Helena’s brain as she tunnels back into the memory of her walking toward a white-and-blue Chevy as a sixteen-year-old girl with her entire life ahead of her.

They will do all of it again, hopefully better next time.

And the motes of fire gradually fall slower and slower, until they’re suspended all around him in the air like a billion lightning bugs—

---

It’s cold and damp.

He smells the salt of the sea.

Hears waves lapping at rocks and bird cries carrying over open water.

His vision swings into focus.

There’s a ragged shoreline a hundred yards away, and mist hovers over the blue-gray water, obscuring the spruce trees in the distance, which stand along the shore like a line of haunted calligraphy.

The pain of his melting face is gone.

He’s sitting in a sea kayak in a wetsuit, a paddle across his lap, wiping blood from his nose and wondering where he is.

Where Helena is.

Why there are no memories of this timeline yet.

He was lying in the middle of the street in front of their firehouse in Denver just seconds ago, watching in agony as the sky rained fire.

Now he’s…wherever he is. His life feels like a dream, flitting from one reality to the next, memories becoming reality becoming nightmares. Everything real in the moment, but fleetingly so. Landscapes and emotions in a constant state of flux, and yet a twisted logic to it all—the way a dream makes sense only when you’re inside it.

He dips an oar into the water and pulls the kayak forward.

A sheltered cove slides into view, the island sweeping up gently for several hundred feet through a forest of dark spruce, interspersed with the white brushstrokes of birch trees.

On the lower flanks of the hill, a house sits on an expanse of emerald grass, surrounded by smaller buildings—two guesthouses, a gazebo, and down by the shore, a boathouse and pier.

He paddles into the cove, picking up speed as he approaches land, running the kayak ashore on a bed of crushed rocks. As he hauls himself awkwardly out of the cockpit, a single memory drops—sitting at that bar in Portland as Helena climbed onto the stool beside him for the third time in their odd, recursive existence.

“You look like you want to buy me a drink.”

How strange to hold three distinct memories of what is essentially the same moment in time.

He moves barefoot across the rocky shore and into the grass, bracing for the tidal wave of memories, but they’re late today.

The house is built on a stone foundation, the wood turned driftwood gray by decades of salt and sun and wind and punishing winters.

A massive dog comes bounding toward him through the yard. It’s a Scottish deerhound, the same color as the house’s weathered siding, and it greets Barry with slobbering affection, coming up on its hind legs to meet him eye to eye and lick his face.

Barry climbs the steps to the veranda, which boasts a commanding view of the cove and the sea beyond.

Opening the sliding-glass door, he steps into a warm living room built around a freestanding stone hearth that rises up through the heart of the house.

The small fire burning on the grate perfumes the interior with the scent of woodsmoke.

“Helena?”

No answer.

The house stands silent.

He moves through a French country kitchen with exposed beams and bench seating around a large island topped with butcher block.

Then down a long, dark corridor, feeling like a trespasser in someone else’s home. At the far end, he stops at the entrance to a cozily cluttered office. There’s a woodstove, a window overlooking the forest, and an old table in the center of the room sagging under stacks of books. A blackboard stands nearby, covered in incomprehensible equations and diagrams of what appear to be intricately forking timelines.

The memories arrive in a blink.

One moment nothing.

The next, he knows exactly where he is, the full trajectory of his life since Helena found him, and exactly what the equations on the blackboard mean.

Because he wrote them.

They’re extrapolations of the Schwarzschild solution, an equation that defines what the radius of an object must be, based upon its mass, in order to form a singularity. That singularity then forms an Einstein-Rosen wormhole that can, in theory, instantaneously connect far-flung regions of space, and even time.

Because his consciousnesses from the previous timelines are merging with his consciousness on this one, his perspective of their work during the last ten years is paradoxically and simultaneously brand-new and intimately familiar. He sees it, both with fresh eyes and a total loss of objectivity.

He spent much of this life studying black-hole physics. While Helena was right there with him in the beginning, these last five years, as April 16, 2019, drew closer with no breakthrough in range, she started to withdraw.

The knowledge that she would have to do this all over again simply broke her.

On the window glass overlooking the woods, the fundamental questions he wrote in black magic marker many years ago still taunt him, unanswered—

What is the Schwarzschild radius of a memory?

A wild notion…when we die, does the immense gravity of our collapsing memories create a micro black hole?

A wilder notion…does the memory-reactivation procedure—at the moment of death—then open a wormhole that connects our consciousness to an earlier version of ourselves?

He’s going to lose all of this knowledge. Not that it was ever really more than a theory—an attempt to pull back the curtain and understand why Helena’s chair did what it did. None of his knowledge means anything without scientific testing. Only in the last couple of years has it occurred to Barry that they should bring their equipment to the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and kill someone in the tank in the presence of the Large Hadron Collider particle detectors. If they could prove the appearance of the entrance to a micro wormhole at the moment someone died in the tank, and a wormhole exit at the moment their consciousness re-spawned in their body at an earlier point in time, they might begin to understand the true mechanics of memory return.

Helena hated the idea. She didn’t believe the knowledge payoff was worth the risk of their technology getting out in the wild again, which would almost certainly happen if they shared their knowledge of the chair with the scientific community at the LHC. Besides, it would take years to convince the powers-that-be to give them access to a particle detector, and years on top of that, plus teams of scientists to write algorithms and software to pull the physics data out of the system. At the end of the day, it was going to be far more difficult and time consuming to study the particle physics of the chair than it was to actually build the thing.

But time is what they have.

“Barry.”

He turns.

Helena stands in the doorway, and the shock of seeing this iteration of his wife, in contrast to the previous two, sounds an alarm inside of him. She looks like a disintegrating version of the woman he loves—too thin, her eyes dark and hollowed out, her orbital bones a touch too pronounced.

A memory takes hold—she tried to kill herself two years ago. The white scars running down her forearms are still visible. He found her in the old claw-foot tub in the windowed alcove with a view of the sea, the bathwater turned the color of wine. He remembers lifting her nearly lifeless, dripping body out of the water and setting her on the tile. Frantically wrapping her wrists in medical gauze just in time to stop the bleeding.

She almost died.

The hardest part was there was no one she could talk to. No psychiatrist with whom she could share the burden of her existence. She only had Barry, and the guilt of not being enough for her has been eating him away for years.

In this moment, staring at her in the doorway, he is overcome by his devotion to this woman.

He says, “You are the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

She holds up her phone. “The missiles launched ten minutes ago. We failed again.” She takes a sip from the glass of red wine in her hand.

“You shouldn’t be drinking that before you get in the tank.”

She polishes off the rest. “It’s just a nip to calm my nerves.”

It’s been hard between them. He can’t remember the last time he slept in her bed. The last time they had sex. The last time they laughed at something stupid. But he can’t begrudge her. For him, their relationship begins each iteration in that Portland bar, when he’s twenty-one and she’s twenty. They spend twenty-nine years together, and while each loop feels brand-new to him (until they reach this doomsday moment and gain memories of the prior timelines), from her perspective, she’s been with the same man for eighty-seven years, reliving, over and over, the same stretch of time from twenty to forty-nine years old.

Same fights.

Same fears.

Same dynamic.

Same…everything.

No real surprises.

Only now, in this brief moment, are they equals. Helena tried to explain before, but finally he understands, and this knowledge reminds him of something Slade said in his hotel lab, just before his death—Your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives.

Perhaps Slade had a point. You can’t truly understand yourself until you’ve lived many lives. Maybe the man wasn’t completely raving mad.

Helena steps into the room.

“You ready?” he asks.

“Can you fucking relax for a minute? Nobody’s sending a nuke into the coast of Maine. We’ll get Boston, New York, and Midwest fallout, but that’s hours away.”

They’ve fought about this exact moment—when it became clear in the last couple of years that they weren’t going to find a solution in this loop, Barry advocated for killing this timeline and sending Helena back before the world remembered its violent end on the previous timeline, and suffered a new one again on this one. But Helena argued that even the slightest chance no false memories would return was worth letting it play out. And more important, she wanted, if only for the briefest window of time, to be with the Barry who remembered all timelines and everything they’d been through together. If he was honest with himself, he wanted that too.

This is the only moment in the entirety of their shared existence when they can truly be together.

She comes over to the window and stands beside him.

With a finger, she begins to erase the writing on the glass.

“This was all a waste, huh?” she says.

“We should’ve gone to CERN.”

“And if your wormhole theory was proven right? Then what?”

“I stand by my belief that if we could understand how and why the chair is able to send our consciousness back into a memory, we would be in a better place to know how to stop the false memories.”

“You ever considered the possibility that it’s unknowable?”

“Are you losing hope?” he asks.

“Oh honey, it’s long gone. Aside from my own pain, every time I go back, I destroy the consciousness of that sixteen-year-old girl walking out to the truck into her first moment of real freedom. I’m killing her over and over and over. She has never gotten the chance to live her life. Because of Marcus Slade. Because of me.”

“Then let me carry the hope for both of us for a while.”

“You have been.”

“Let me keep carrying it.”

She looks at him. “You still believe we’ll find a way to fix this.”

“Yes.”

“When? The next iteration? The thirtieth?”

“It’s so strange,” he says.

“What?”

“I walked into this room five minutes ago and had no idea what those equations meant. Then I suddenly had memories from this timeline and understood partial differential equations.” A fragment of conversation from another lifetime flickers in the neuronal structure of his brain. He says, “Remember what Marcus Slade said when we had him at gunpoint in his lab in that hotel?”

“You do realize, from my perspective, that was almost a hundred years and three timelines ago.”

“You told him that if the world ever knew of the chair’s existence, that knowledge could never be put back. Just what we’re fighting against now. Remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“And he said you’d been blinded by your limitations, that you still weren’t seeing everything, and that you never would unless you had traveled the way he had.”

“He was crazy.”

“That’s what I thought too. But the difference between you on that first timeline, and you now—it might be driving you mad, but you’ve mastered whole fields of science, lived entire lives the first Helena never would’ve dreamed of. You see the world in ways she never did. It’s the same with me. Who knows how many lives Slade lived, and what he learned? What if he really did figure some way out? Some loophole around the dead-memory problem? Something you’d need however-many-more of these loops to figure out for yourself? What if this whole time, we’ve been missing something crucial?”

“Like what?”

“I have no idea, but wouldn’t you like to ask Slade?”

“How do you propose we do that, Detective?”

“I don’t know, but we can’t just give up.”

“No, I can’t give up. You can tap out anytime you want and live your life in blissful ignorance that this day is coming.”

“You’ve really come to think so little of my presence in your life?”

She sighs. “Of course not.”

A paperweight rattles on the table behind them.

A crack spider-webs across the window glass.

The low rumble of a distant blast shudders through their bones.

“This is some kind of hell,” she says, dark. “Ready to come down to the lab and kill me again, darling?”

---

Barry is no longer in the subterranean lab on his and Helena’s island off the coast of Maine, but sitting instead at a familiar-looking desk in a familiar-looking room. His head hurts with a sensation he hasn’t experienced in some time—the behind-the-eyes-throbbing of a deep hangover.

He’s staring at a witness statement on a computer screen in front of him, and while there are no memories of this timeline yet, he’s realizing, with a mounting horror, that he’s on the fourth floor of the 24th Precinct of the NYPD.

West 100th Street.

Upper West Side.

Manhattan.

He’s worked here before. Not just in this building. On this floor. In this spot. And not a desk like this one. This exact desk. He even recognizes the ink stain from a ballpoint pen mishap.

He pulls out his phone, checks the home screen: April 16, 2019.

The fourth timeline anniversary of Helena dying in that DARPA lab.

What the hell?

He rises out of his chair—substantially heavier than he was in Maine, Colorado, and Arizona—and inside his jacket, he feels the heft of something he hasn’t worn in ages—a shoulder holster.

An eerie silence has overtaken the entire fourth floor of cubicles.

No one typing.

No one talking.

Just a stunned silence.

He looks over at the woman across from him—a cop he remembers, not from this timeline, but the original, before time was fractured by Helena’s chair. She’s a homicide detective named Sheila Redling, who played shortstop for their softball league. She had a wicked arm, and was the best drinker on the team. Blood is running out of Sheila’s nose and down her white blouse, and the look on her face is unquestionably that of a woman in a state of sheer terror.

The man in the next cubicle over has a bloody nose as well and tears running down his face.

A gunshot explodes the pin-drop silence on the other side of the floor, followed by gasps and shrieks rippling across the maze of cubicles.

There’s another shot, this one closer.

Someone screams, “What the fuck is happening? What the fuck is happening?”

After the third shot, Barry reaches into his jacket to pull his Glock, wondering if they’re under attack, but he can’t see any threats in his vicinity.

Just a sea of bewildered faces.

Shelia Redling stands suddenly, draws her weapon, puts the gun to her head, and fires.

As she drops to the floor, the man who shares a cubicle wall with her lunges out of his chair, grabs her gun from the pool of blood, and puts it into his mouth.

Barry screams, “No!”

As he fires and falls on top of Sheila, Barry realizes this all makes some terrible kind of sense. His memories of the previous timeline are with Helena on the coast of Maine, but these people were in the midst of a nuclear attack on New York City, where they all died or were in the throes of an awful death, after having just suffered the same fate in the previous timeline, where another nuclear attack had just happened.

Now the memories of this timeline break like a crashing wave.

He moved to New York in his early twenties and became a cop.

He married Julia.

Climbed the ranks of the NYPD to make detective in the Central Robbery Division.

He lived his original life all over again.

And it hits him like a shot to the kidneys—Helena never came to him in that Portland bar. He has never met her. Never heard from her. For some reason, she chose to live this timeline without him. He only knows her in dead memories.

He pulls out his cell phone to call her, trying to remember her number, and realizes that it can’t possibly be the same on this timeline. He has no way to contact her, and the helplessness of that knowledge is almost more than he can bear in this moment, thoughts tearing through his mind—

Does this mean she broke up with him?

Found someone else?

Finally had enough of living the same twenty-nine-year loop with the same man?

As more gunshots erupt around him and people start to flee the area, he thinks back to the last conversation he had with Helena at their home in Maine and his idea of finding Slade.

Stay focused on that. If the past lifetimes are any guide, you only have a limited amount of time before hell rains down on New York.

He shuts out the chaos and slides his chair toward his desk, waking his computer.

A Google search for “Marcus Slade” pulls up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing that Slade died of a drug overdose last Christmas.

Shit.

Next he searches “Jee-woon Chercover” and finds multiple hits. Chercover runs a VC firm on the Upper East Side called Apex Venture. Barry snaps a photo of the contact info off their website, grabs his keys, and rushes for the stairwell.

As he descends the stairs, he dials Apex.

“All circuits are busy, please try your call—”

He sprints through the ground-floor lobby, into the late afternoon, reaching the sidewalk of West 100th Street, short of breath, a new alert lighting up his phone’s home screen:

Emergency Alert

Jesus.

While he has memories of this timeline, his identity encompasses, fleetingly, all the lifetimes he’s ever lived. Unfortunately, that multi-timeline perspective will end when the missiles hit.

He wonders—what if this is all that’s left of his life?

Of everyone’s life?

A half hour of the same endless, repeating horror.

Some kind of hell.

Fifteen floors up, in a building across the street, a window breaks, glass showering the pavement, followed by a chair and then a man in a pinstripe suit.

He crashes headfirst through the roof of a car, whose alarm begins a piercing shriek.

People are running past Barry.

On the sidewalks.

In the streets.

More men and women plummeting out of skyscrapers, because they remember what it was like to die in a nuclear attack.

A civil defense siren begins to scream, and people are flooding out of the surrounding buildings like rats and pouring into an underground parking garage to take cover.

Barry jumps into his car and starts the engine. Apex is on the Upper East Side, just across the park, barely six long blocks from his current location.

He turns out into the street, but all he can do is creep along through the hordes of people.

Barry lays on his horn, veering finally onto Columbus, which is only slightly less mobbed.

He drives against traffic and turns right into the first alleyway he comes to, speeding in the shadows between apartment buildings.

He fires his light bar and sirens and muscles his way across two more streets filled with frantic, hysterical people.

Then he’s accelerating his Crown Vic down a walking path in Central Park, trying to call Apex again.

This time, the phone rings.

Please, please, please pick up.

And rings.

And rings.

There are too many people on the path ahead, so he veers off into North Meadow, ripping across baseball diamonds where he used to play.

“Hello?”

Barry slams on the brakes and brings his car to a stop in the middle of the field and puts the phone on speaker.

“Who is this?”

“Jee-woon Chercover. Is this Barry?”

“How’d you know?”

“I wondered if you’d call.”

Last time Barry interacted with Jee-woon, he and Helena had shot him in Slade’s lab as he lunged naked for a gun.

“Where are you right now?” Barry asks.

“My office on the thirtieth floor of my building. Looking out over the city. Waiting to die again, like all of us. Are you and Helena doing this?”

“We’ve been trying to stop it. I wanted to find Slade—”

“He died last year.”

“I know. So I need to ask you—when Helena and I found Slade at the hotel, he alluded to there being a way to undo dead memories. Some different way of traveling. Of using the memory chair.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line.

“You mean when you killed me.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened after—”

“Look, there’s no time. I need this information if you have it. I’ve been on a thirty-three-year loop with Helena trying to find some way to erase the world’s knowledge of the memory chair. Nothing’s working. That’s why we keep reaching this moment of apocalypse over and over. And it’s going to keep happening unless—”

“I can tell you this, and it’s all I know. Marcus did believe there was a way to reset a timeline, so there would be no dead memories. He even did it once.”

“How?”

“I don’t know the specifics. Look, I need to call my parents. Please fix this if you can. We’re all in hell.”

Jee-woon hangs up. Barry tosses his phone into the passenger seat and climbs out of the car. Sits down on the grass, rests his hands on his legs.

They’re shaking.

His entire body is.

On the next timeline, he won’t remember the conversation he just had with Jee-woon until April 16, 2019.

If there even is a next timeline.

A bird lands nearby and sits very still, looking at him.

The buildings of the Upper East Side rise above the perimeter of the park, and the noise of the city is much louder than it should be—gunshots, screams, the civil defense sirens, the sirens of fire engines, squad cars, ambulances—all blending into a discordant symphony.

A thought occurs.

A bad one.

What if Helena died in that four-year period between 1986 and 1990, before she was supposed to find him in Portland? Could the fate of reality itself really depend upon one person not getting randomly hit by a bus?

Or what if she decided not to do any of this? Just live her life and never build the chair and let the world destroy itself? It would be hard to blame her, but it would mean the next reality shift will be one of someone else’s choosing. Or no shift at all if the world successfully annihilates itself.

The buildings all around him and the open field and the trees glow the brightest white Barry has ever seen—even brighter than Denver.

There is no sound.

Already the brightness is waning, and in its place comes an inferno rushing toward him through the Upper East Side, the heat excruciatingly intense, but only for the half second it takes to burn through the nerve endings in Barry’s face.

In the distance, he sees people sprinting across the field, trying to outrun their final moment.

And he braces for the lava-colored wall of roiling fire and death to engulf him as it expands through Central Park, but the shockwave hits first, rocketing him over the meadow at an inconceivable rate of speed that’s slowing.

Slowing.

Slowing.

But not just him.

Everything.

He retains consciousness as this timeline decelerates to a standstill, leaving him suspended thirty feet off the ground and surrounded by the debris from the shockwave—pieces of glass and steel, a police car, melting-faced people.

The fireball is stopped a quarter mile away, halfway across the North Meadow, and the buildings all around him have been caught in the moment of vaporization—glass, furniture, contents, people, everything but the melting steel frames exploding out like a sneeze—and the immense death cloud rising above New York City from the point of impact is paused a mile into its ascent in the sky.

The world begins to lose color, and seeing everything frozen as the time bleeds out of it fires his mind with questions—

If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, where will all this matter go when this timeline ceases to exist? What’s happened to the matter of all the dead timelines they’ve left behind? Are they time-capsuled away in higher, unreachable dimensions? And if so, what is matter without time? Matter that doesn’t persist? What would that even look like?

He has one last realization before his consciousness is catapulted from this dying reality—this deceleration of time means that Helena might be alive somewhere, dying in the tank right this second in order to kill this timeline and begin another.

And a glimmer of joy rides through him at the possibility that she lives, and the hope that, in this next reality, even if only for a moment, he will be with her again.

---

Barry is lying in bed in the semidarkness of a cool room. Through an open window, he can hear a gentle rain falling. He checks his watch—9:30 p.m. Western European Time. Five hours ahead of Manhattan.

He looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, reading beside him in bed.

“It’s nine thirty,” he says.

Her last life, she climbed into the deprivation chamber at approximately 4:35 p.m., Eastern, so they’re fast approaching the fifth timeline anniversary of 4/16/19.

In this moment, Barry’s perspective is of having lived a single lifetime. This one. Helena crashed through the door of his life when he was twenty-one in a Portland bar, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Of course, he knows all about their four past lives together. Their work. Their love. How it always ends with her dying in the deprivation chamber on April 16, 2019, when the world remembers the existence of the memory chair and all the horror it wrought. The previous timeline they spent apart. She stayed close to her parents in Boulder, built the chair herself, and used it to improve her mother’s quality of life once Alzheimer’s took hold. But she never made any progress on stopping the onslaught of dead memories, which she swears will find him any moment now. She doesn’t know what Barry did with his last life, and neither does he. Yet. In this one, they continued their pursuit of understanding how the brain processes dead memories, and delved further into studies of the particle physics surrounding use of the chair. They’ve even made a few contacts at CERN, whom they’re hoping to use on the next timeline.

But the truth is, as in the past iterations of their life, they’ve made no meaningful headway toward stopping what’s about to happen. They are only two people, and the problem they’re facing is enormously complex. Probably insurmountable.

Helena closes her book and looks over at Barry. The noise of the rain pattering on the shingles of their seventeenth-century manor house is perhaps his favorite sound in the world.

She says, “I’m afraid that when your memories of the last timeline come, you’re going to feel like I abandoned you. Like I betrayed you. I didn’t spend the last timeline with you, but it’s not because I didn’t love or need you. I hope you can hear that. I just wanted you to live a life without the end of the world looming, and I hope it was a good one. I hope you found love. I didn’t. Every day I missed you. Every day I needed you. I was more lonely than I’ve ever been in my many lives.”

“I’m sure you did what you needed to do. I know this is infinitely harder for you than it is for me.”

He looks at his watch as the time changes from 9:34 to 9:35.

She’s told him everything that will happen. The headache, the temporary loss of consciousness and control. How the world will immediately begin to implode. And yet there’s still a part of him that can’t quite believe it will happen. Not that he thinks Helena is lying. But it’s hard to imagine the troubles of the world could ever reach them here.

Barry feels a glint of pain behind his eyes.

Sharp and blinding.

He looks over at his wife. “I think it’s starting.”

---

By midnight, he is the Barry of many lifetimes, although the previous one, in New York City, is oddly the last to arrive. Perhaps because there are so many, the memories come more slowly than any of the previous anniversaries.

He breaks down crying in the kitchen with joy that Helena came back to him, and she sits on his lap at the small table and kisses his face and runs her fingers through his hair and tells him how sorry she is, promising that she will never leave him again.

“Holy shit,” Barry says. “I just remembered.”

“What?”

He looks up at Helena. “I was right. There’s a way out of this apocalyptic loop. Slade did know how to stop dead memories.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I looked Slade up in the final moments of the previous timeline. He died last Christmas, but I spoke to Jee-woon. He said Slade had gone back and started a new timeline that didn’t cause any dead memories at the anniversary point.”

“Oh my God, how?”

“Jee-woon didn’t know. He hung up on me, and then the world ended.”

A tea kettle whistles.

Helena goes to the range and takes it off the heat, then pours the boiling water over their tea-ball infusers.

“On the next timeline, until we reach the anniversary,” Barry says, “I won’t remember any of this. You have to carry this knowledge on with you.”

“I will.”

They stay up all night, and only when day breaks do they dare turn on the news. This is the longest they’ve ever let a timeline play out beyond the anniversary point. It seems as though every nuclear weapon on the planet has been fired, and every major city in the United States, Russia, and China hit. Even the metro areas of US allies were targeted, including London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. The closest strike to Helena and Barry was Glasgow, one hundred and eighty miles to the south. But they’re safe for the moment. The jet stream is taking fallout east into Scandinavia.

---

They head out at dawn through the backyard to put Helena in the deprivation chamber. They bought this property fifteen years ago and renovated every square inch. The house is more than three hundred years old, and from the surrounding fields, the view is of the North Sea, where it edges in around the peninsula at the Cromarty Firth, and in the opposite direction, the mountains of the northern Highlands.

It rained all night, everything dripping.

The sun is still below the sea, but the sky is filling with light. Despite the horrors on the news, it all feels shockingly normal. The sheep watching them from the pastures. The cold quiet. The smell of wet earth. Moss on the stone walls. Their footfalls on the gravel walking path.

They stop at the entrance to the guesthouse, which they transformed into their lab, both looking back at the home they poured their lives into, which they will never see again. Of all the places they’ve made their home together, of all the lifetimes, Barry has loved this one most.

“We have a plan, right?” he says.

“We do.”

“I’ll come down with you,” he says.

“No, why don’t you go look out over the fields until it’s done. You love that view.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. That’s how I want to leave you in this life.”

She kisses him.

He wipes her tears.

---

In the next life, Barry walks with Helena toward the stable. The night air is sweet, and the rolling hills surrounding their valley are shining under the stars.

“Still nothing?” she asks.

“No.”

They reach the door in the timber-frame barn and move inside, through a tack room, and then down a corridor of vacant stalls that haven’t housed horses in more than a decade.

The entryway is hidden behind a pair of sliding doors. Helena punches in the code, and they descend the spiral staircase into a soundproofed basement.

The cell is enclosed on two sides by stone walls, and the other two by sheets of ultrastrong glass pocked with ventilation holes. Inside the cell, there’s a toilet, a shower, a small table, and a bed, upon which lies Marcus Slade.

He closes the book he’s been reading and sits up, staring at his captors.

In this timeline, they made their home in the countryside of Marin County, thirty minutes north of San Francisco, in order to be close to Slade and prepare for this exact moment. They abducted him before he could overdose last Christmas, and brought him back to the ranch.

Slade woke up in this cell beneath the barn, where they’ve held him ever since.

Barry pulls a chair over to the glass and takes a seat.

Helena paces the perimeter of the cell.

Slade watches them.

They haven’t told him why he’s here. Not about the previous timelines or the memory chair. Nothing.

Slade rises from the end of the bed and approaches the glass. He stares down at Barry, wearing sweatpants and no shirt. His beard is unruly, his hair an unwashed tangle, eyes both fearful and angry.

As Barry watches him through the glass, he can’t help feeling pity for the man, despite what he did in older timelines. He has no idea why he’s here. Barry and Helena have promised him on multiple occasions that they have no intention of hurting him, but those assurances undoubtedly rang hollow.

If Barry is honest, he’s deeply uncomfortable with what they’re doing. But between Helena’s prescience and her building of the memory chair with its incredible capability, he trusts his wife implicitly. Even when she told him they needed to kidnap a man named Marcus Slade before he died of a drug overdose in his Dogpatch loft.

“What?” Slade asks. “Are you finally here to tell me why you’re doing this?”

“In a matter of moments,” Helena says, “you will understand everything.”

“What the fuck does that…”

Blood trickles out of Slade’s nose. He staggers back, gripping his temples, his face screwed up in pain, and now a stabbing, pulsating agony hits Barry behind the eyes, doubling him over in the chair.

The timeline anniversary has arrived, and both men groan as the prior lifetimes begin to catch up with them.

---

Now Slade is seated on the end of his bed. The fear is gone from his eyes. Even his body language has changed to reflect an inner confidence and poise that wasn’t there before.

He smiles, his head nodding.

“Barry,” he says. “Nice to see you again, Helena.”

Barry is reeling. It’s one thing to have been told what happened on all those other timelines, another entirely to own the memories of his dead daughter and of watching the world destroy itself again and again. Of dying in the middle of Central Park as a shockwave hit. He doesn’t remember the last timeline yet. Helena has told him that it took place in Scotland, which was apparently where he came up with this idea, but the memories are coming in as slowly as an IV drip.

Barry looks at Slade and says, “Do you remember your hotel in Manhattan?”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember the night you died there? What you said to Helena right before?”

“Might need a little refresh on that one.”

“You told her that the dead memories of older timelines could be undone if she knew how to travel the way you did.”

“Ah.” Slade smiles again. “You two have built your own chair.”

Helena says, “After you died in your hotel, DARPA came in and took everything. Things were OK at first, but on April 16, 2019, six timelines ago today, the technology broke out into the wild. There were memory chairs being used all over the world. The schematics were published on WikiLeaks. Reality began constantly shifting. I went back thirty-three years to start a new timeline, so I’d have a chance to find a way of stopping the dead memories. But they always come. The world always remembers the chair, no matter what we do.”

“So you’re looking for a way out of this loop? A reset?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because exactly what I told you would happen happened. Pandora’s box has been flung open. I don’t know how to close it.”

Slade goes to the sink, splashes water in his face.

He comes back over to the glass.

“How do we stop the dead memories?” she asks.

“You got me killed in one life. Abducted in another. So let me ask you—why would I help you?”

“Because maybe you still have a shred of decency?”

“Humanity deserves a chance to evolve beyond our prison of time. It deserves a chance at true progress. Your life’s work was the chair. Giving it to humanity was mine.”

Barry registers a wave of rage flooding through him.

“Marcus, listen to me,” he says. “There is no progress happening. Right now, the world is remembering the existence of the memory chair, and those dead memories will trigger a nuclear apocalypse.”

“Why?”

“Because our enemies think the US is altering history.”

“Know what that sounds like to me?” Slade asks. “Bullshit.”

Barry rises and moves toward the glass. “I’ve seen enough horror for a thousand lifetimes. Helena and I were nearly killed in Denver when the missiles hit. I watched New York City vaporize. Hundreds of millions of people have four distinct memory sets of dying in a nuclear holocaust.”

Helena looks at Barry and holds up her phone. “The alert just came through. I have to get to the lab.”

“Just wait a second,” Barry says.

“We’re too close to San Francisco. We’ve talked about this.”

Barry glares at Slade through the glass. “What is this special way of traveling?”

Slade takes a step back and eases down onto the end of the bed.

Barry says, “I have lived almost seventy years to ask you this, and you’re just going to stare at the floor?”

He feels Helena touch his shoulder. “I have to go.”

“Hang on.”

“I can’t. You know this. I love you. I’ll see you at the bottom of the world. We’ll keep after the micro wormholes. I guess it’s all we can do, right?”

Barry turns and kisses her. She hurries up the spiral staircase, her footfalls clanging on the metal steps.

Then it’s just Barry and Slade in the basement.

Barry pulls out his phone, shows Slade the emergency alert, advising of a ballistic missile threat inbound to multiple US targets.

Slade smiles. “Like I said, you killed me, abducted me, you’re probably lying to me right—”

“I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

“Prove it. Give me evidence that’s not a fake alert you could’ve sent to your phone. Let me see it with my own eyes or fuck off.”

“We don’t have time.”

“I have all the time in the world.”

Moving to the glass door in the cell, Barry takes out the key and unlocks the dead bolt.

“What?” Slade asks. “Think you can beat it out of me?”

Barry would certainly like nothing more than to bounce Slade’s skull off the stone wall until there is nothing left.

“Let’s go,” Barry says.

“Where?”

“We’ll watch the world end together.”

They head upstairs, past the stalls, out of the barn, and climb through the long grasses of a hill until they’re high above the ranch.

The moon is up, the countryside bright. To the west, several miles away, the dark sprawl of the Pacific is shimmering.

The lights of the Bay Area glitter to the south.

They sit in silence for a moment.

Then Barry asks, “What made you kill Helena in that first timeline?”

Slade sighs. “I was nothing. Nobody. I’d sleepwalked through life. And then I was presented with this…gift of an opportunity. To do it all over. Think what you will about me, but I didn’t keep the chair to myself.”

A ball of white-hot light blossoms near the Golden Gate Bridge, illuminating the sky and the sea brighter than the brightest midday. So blinding Barry can’t help but look away. When he turns back, a shockwave is spreading across the bay and the Presidio, expanding toward the Financial District.

As a second warhead bursts over Palo Alto, Barry looks at Slade. “How many people do you think just died in that split-second flash? How many more will suffer an agonizing death from radiation poisoning over the next few hours if Helena doesn’t reset this timeline? What’s happening to San Francisco is happening all across America. To the major cities of our allies. And we’re unloading our arsenal on Russia and China. This is where your grand dream has taken us. And it’s the fifth time it’s happened. So how do you just sit there knowing the blood of all these people is on your hands? You aren’t helping humanity evolve, Marcus. You’re torturing us. There is no future for our species after this.”

Slade’s face is expressionless as he watches two towers of fire climb into the sky like torches. The light grids of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose have gone dark, but the cities smolder like the remains of a dying fire.

The concussive blast of the first warhead reaches them, and at this distance, it sounds like a cannon echoing off the hillsides. It makes the ground tremble beneath them.

Slade rubs his bare arms. “You have to go back to what happened first.”

“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”

“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”

“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”

“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering.”

“But you can’t map a dead memory.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You’ll probably fail, which means you’ll die. But it is possible.”

“How do you know?”

“Helena figured out how to do it on my oil rig.”

“That’s not true. If she had, we would’ve—”

Slade laughs. “Try to keep up here, Barry. How do you think I know it works? As soon as we discovered the technique, I used it. I went back into a dead memory and reset the timeline just before she figured it out.” He snaps his fingers. “And, poof, it erased her memories of the discovery. Hers and everyone else’s.”

“Why?”

“Because anyone who knew could do just what you’re proposing now. They could take the chair away from me, make it so it never existed.” He looks Barry in the eye, the firelight of burning cities glinting from his pupils. “I was nothing. A junkie. My life wasted. The chair made me into something special. Gave me a chance to do something that would change the course of history. I couldn’t risk all that.” He shakes his head, smiles. “And there’s a certain elegance to the solution, don’t you think? Using the discovery to erase itself.”

“What’s the event that started all of this?”

“I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”

“How do we—”

Another blink of light, a hundred miles to the south, lights up the entire sea.

“Go,” Slade says. “If you don’t make it to Helena before she dies in the tank, you won’t remember what I just told you until the next—”

And Barry is up and running, sprinting back down the hill toward the main house, digging his cell phone out of his pocket, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, finally dialing Helena’s number.

He holds the phone to his ear as he runs toward the lights of their home.

Ringing.

Ringing.

The sound wave from the second blast reaches him.

The phone still ringing.

Going to voicemail.

He throws it down as he reaches level ground, sweat stinging in his eyes, the house straight ahead.

Screaming, “Helena! Wait!”

The house is a massive country home built alongside a stream that meanders through the valley.

Barry runs up the porch steps and bursts through the front door, yelling Helena’s name as he races through the living room, knocking over an end table and spilling a glass of water that shatters on the tile.

Then down the east-wing corridor, past the master suite, toward the end of the hall, where the vault door to the lab has been left open.

“Helena, stop!”

He tears down the stairs toward the subterranean lab that houses the memory chair and deprivation tank. They have the answer. Or at least something to try that doesn’t require another thirty-three years. The look on Slade’s face, glowing in the light of distant nuclear fires, was not the look of a lying man, but of one who had suddenly come to terms with what he’d done. With the pain he was causing.

Barry comes off the last step into the lab. Helena is nowhere to be seen, which means she’s already in the deprivation chamber. The terminal screens support this, one of them flashing the message in red: DMT RELEASE DETECTED.

He reaches the deprivation chamber, puts his hands on the hatch to pull it open—

The world grinds to a halt.

The lab bleeds of color.

He’s screaming on the inside, he has to stop this from happening, they have the answer.

But he can’t move, can’t speak.

Helena is gone, and so is this reality.

---

He becomes aware of lying on his side in total darkness.

Sitting up, Barry’s movement triggers a panel of light above him, dim at first, then slowly brightening, warming into existence a small, windowless room containing the bed, a dresser, and a nightstand.

He throws back the blankets and climbs out of bed, unsteady on his feet.

Goes to the door and steps out into a sterile hallway. After fifty feet, it emerges onto a main artery that accesses this corridor and three others while also opening on the other side to a living space one floor below.

He sees a full kitchen.

Table tennis and pool tables.

And a large television with a woman’s face paused on the screen. He has some vague recognition of her face, but he can’t conjure her name. The entire history of his life lurks just below the surface, but he can’t quite grasp it.

“Hello?”

His voice echoes through the structure.

No answer.

He heads down the main hallway, passing a placard affixed to the wall beside the opening to the next corridor.

Wing 2—Level 2—Lab

And another.

Wing 1—Level 2—Offices

Then down some stairs and onto the main level.

There’s a gently sloping vestibule straight ahead that grows colder with every step, ending finally at a door that looks complex enough to seal a spacecraft.

A digital readout on the wall beside it displays real-time conditions on the other side:

His socked feet are freezing, and in here the wind carries the moaning quality of a deep-voiced ghost. He grasps the lever on the door, and following the visual instructions, forces it down and counterclockwise.

A series of locks release, the door free to swing on its hinges.

He pushes it open, and the coldest breath of air he has ever encountered blasts him in the face with a sensation beyond temperature. Like fingernails clawing away his skin. Instantly, he feels his nose hairs freezing, and when he draws breath, he chokes on the pain of it sliding down his esophagus.

Through the open hatch, he sees a walkway angling down from the station toward the icecap, the world cloaked in darkness and swirling with needles of snow that sting his face like shrapnel.

The visibility is less than a quarter mile, but by the light of the moon, he can just make out other structures in proximity. A series of large cylindrical tanks he suspects is a water-treatment plant. A swaying tower that’s either some sort of gantry or a drilling rig. A telescope, folded down against the storm. Vehicles of varying size on continuous tracks.

He can’t stand it anymore. He takes hold of the door with fingers already beginning to stiffen and forces it to close. The locks engage. The wind downshifts from a scream to that sustained and ghostly moan.

He walks out of the vestibule and under the lights of the pristine and seemingly empty station, his face burning as it reawakens from the slightest touch of frostbite.

In this moment, he is a man without memory, and the sense of being adrift in time is a crushing, existential horror. Like waking from a troubled sleep, when the lines between reality and dreams are still murky and you’re calling out to ghosts.

All he has is his first name, and an out-of-focus sense of himself.

At the seating area around the television, he sees an open DVD case and a remote control. He sits on one of the sofas, takes the controller, and presses Play.

On the screen, the woman is sitting exactly where he is, a blanket draped over her shoulders and a cup of tea steaming on the table in front of her.

She smiles at the camera and brushes a wisp of white hair out of her face, his heart kicking at the sight of her.

“This is weird.” She laughs nervously. “You should be watching this on April 16, 2019—our favorite day in history. Your consciousness and memories from the last timeline have just shifted over. Or should have. With each new iteration, your memories are coming in more slowly and erratically. Sometimes you miss entire lifetimes. So I made this video—first, to tell you not to be afraid, since you’re probably wondering why you’re in a research station in Antarctica. And secondly, because I want to say something to the Barry who remembers all timelines, who’s quite different from the one I’m living with now. So please, pause me until your memories arrive.”

He pauses the video.

It is so quiet here.

Nothing but the roar of the wind.

He goes to the kitchen, and as he brews a cup of coffee, a tightness forms in his chest.

There’s a storm of emotion on the horizon.

His head pounds at the base of his skull, and a nosebleed hits.

The Portland bar.

Helena.

Her slow revelation of who she was.

Buying this old research station at the turn of the millennium.

They refurbished it, then flew the chair and all its component parts down here on a privately chartered 737 that stuck a harrowing landing on the polar runway.

They brought a team of particle physicists with them whom they had apparently scoped out in a prior timeline, who had no concept of the true nature of their research. They drilled out 1.5 foot–diameter cores 8,000 feet deep into the polar cap and lowered highly sensitive light detectors more than a mile below the ice. The sensors were designed to detect neutrinos, one of the most enigmatic particles in the universe. Neutrinos carry no charge, rarely interact with normal matter, and typically emerge from (and therefore indicate) cosmic events such as supernovae, galactic cores, and black holes. When a neutrino hits an atom on Earth, it creates a particle called a muon, that’s moving faster than light in a solid, causing the ice to emit light. These light waves caused by muons passing through solid ice is what they looked for.

Barry’s theory, carried over from prior timelines, was that if micro black holes and wormholes were flashing in and out of existence when someone’s consciousness re-spawned in an earlier memory, these light detectors would register the light waves caused by muons caused by neutrinos ejecting from the black holes and smashing into the nucleus of earthbound atoms.

They got nowhere.

Discovered nothing.

The team of particle physicists went home.

Six lifetimes pursuing a deeper understanding of the memory chair, and all they had managed to do was postpone the inevitable.

He looks up at the screen, where Helena is frozen mid-gesture.

Now come the dead memories of prior timelines. Their lives in Arizona, Denver, on the rugged coast of Maine. His life without her in New York City, their life together in Scotland. But there are still holes. He has flashes of the last timeline near San Francisco, but it’s incomplete—he can’t remember the last days of it, when the world remembered.

He presses Play.

“So you’ve remembered? Good. The only way you’re watching this is because I’m gone.”

Tears release. It’s the weirdest sensation. While the Barry of this timeline knows she’s dead, simultaneously the Barrys of the prior timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her.

But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year.

“This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.”

She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.”

Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness.

“We have four years until doomsday.”

“Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?”

“We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.”

They are.

Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living.

Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too.

“It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.”

It’s true. He did.

“But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this—when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me—it tortures us. Because I’m locked in my moment, and you’re locked in yours.”

Barry wipes his eyes, the full emotional weight of the last two years with her, and the two months alone, pressing in on him. He only waited to experience this seventh timeline anniversary to see what it felt like to be a person with numerous histories. To fully understand himself. It’s one thing to be told you had a daughter. Another entirely to remember the sound of her laugh. The first seconds of holding her. The totality of all the moments is too much to bear.

“Don’t come back for me, Barry.”

He already did. The morning he rolled over and found her dead beside him, he used the chair to go back one month to be with her a little longer. Then when she died, he did it again. And again. Killed himself ten times in the tank to put off the great silence and loneliness of life without her in this place.

Helena says, “ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.”

The Barry on the screen is crying.

The Barry of this moment is crying.

“I would say it was worth it to accidentally build a world-destroying chair because it brought you into my life, but that’s probably bad form. If you wake up on April 16, 2019, and the world somehow doesn’t remember and implode, I hope you’ll go on without me and live an amazing life. Seek your happiness. You found it with me, which means it’s attainable. If the world remembers, we did what we could, and if you feel alone at the end, Barry, know that I’m with you. Maybe not in your moment. But I am in this one. My heart.”

She kisses the Barry beside her and blows a kiss at the camera.

The screen goes black.

He turns on the news, watches five seconds of a frantic BBC anchor reporting that the mainland of the United States has been hit by several thousand nuclear warheads, and then turns off the television.

---

Barry moves through the vestibule, toward the door that keeps him protected from the killing cold.

He’s with an ancient memory of Julia. In it, she’s young, and so is he. Meghan is there, and they’re camping at Lake Tear of the Clouds, high in the Adirondacks.

The moment feels close enough to touch. The smell of evergreens. The sound of his daughter’s voice. But the ache of the memory hangs like a black cloud in his chest.

Lately, he’s been reading the great philosophers and physicists. Plato to Aristotle. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s relativistic. One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue. Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end.

As if our choices, our fates, were locked from our first breath.

He studies the readout on the door:

But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.

---

It doesn’t matter what time it is. For the next six months, it’s always night.

The wind has died, but the temperature has plummeted to an eyelash-freezing eighty below zero. The research station stands half a mile away, the only smudge of manmade light in the vast polar desert.

There are no land features to speak of. From where he sits, there is nothing but a flat, white plain of wind-sculpted ice stretching off toward every horizon.

It seems impossible, sitting out here all alone in the perfect stillness, that the rest of the world is going to pieces. Stranger still that it’s all because of a chair accidentally created by the woman he loves.

She’s buried in the ice beside him, four feet down in a casket he built of pine scraps from the woodshop. He crafted a little marker from the best piece of oak he could find and carved a little epitaph in the wood—his only purpose these last two months.

Helena Gray Smith

Born July 19, 1970, Boulder, Colorado

Died February 14, 2019, E. Antarctica

A Brave, Beautiful Genius

Loved by Barry Sutton

Saver of Barry Sutton

He looks out across the icecap.

Not even a breath of wind.

Nothing moving.

A perfectly frozen world.

Like it’s outside of time.

Meteors streak the sky, and the Southern Lights have just begun to dance on the horizon—a flickering ribbon of green and yellow.

Barry peers over the edge of the hole beside Helena’s.

He takes a frigid breath, then slides a leg over the side and lowers himself below the surface of the plain.

His shoulders touch the sides, and there’s a space hollowed out between his hole and Helena’s so he can reach through and touch her pine-box casket.

It feels good to be near her again. Or what was once her.

The dimensions of his grave frame the night sky.

Looking into space from Antarctica feels like looking into space from space. On a night like this—no wind, no weather, no moon—the smear of the Milky Way looks more like a celestial fire, brimming with colors you’d never see from anyplace else on Earth.

Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago.

It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is.

But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.

He’s looking back, not just through space but through time.

He’s colder than he was hiking out to their gravesite, but not cold enough. He’s going to have to open his parka and remove some layers.

He sits up, pulls off the outer shell of his right glove, and digs into his pocket.

He takes out a flask of whiskey, kept somewhat warm by proximity to his body and the air trapped between layers of clothing. Out in the open, it’s more than cold enough to freeze solid inside of a minute.

Next, he takes out the bottle of oxy. It contains five 20 mg tablets, and if they don’t kill him outright, they’ll certainly put him into a deep slumber while the cold finishes him off.

He opens the bottle and dumps the pills into his mouth, rinsing them down with several swallows of ice-cold whiskey that still feels hot when it hits his stomach.

He’s been imagining this moment obsessively since Helena died.

The loneliness has been unbearable without her, and the world beyond has nothing left for him, should it even continue to exist. He no longer wants to know what will happen next.

He lies back in the grave, thinking he’ll wait to open his jacket until he feels the first effects of the drug, when a memory comes.

He thought he had them all, but now the last moments of the previous timeline flash in.

Slade saying—

“You have to go back to what happened first.”

“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”

“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”

“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”

“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering. I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”

Holy fuck.

He remembers racing down the hill, into the house, screaming her name. His hands frozen on the deprivation chamber hatch as the timeline ended.

What if Slade was right? What if those old timelines are still out there? Take his memory of Lake Tear of the Clouds. He could see the faces of Julia and Meghan clearly. He remembered their voices. What if he could restart a dead memory by the sheer force of his consciousness breathing life and fire into the gray?

Is there a chance it might also skid everyone else’s consciousness back onto that dead timeline as well?

And if he could return, not just to a prior timeline, but to the original, there would be no false memories from subsequent timelines, and none from earlier ones either.

Because there are no timelines that pre-date the original.

It’d be like none of this ever happened.

He already took the pills. Probably has a half hour, maybe longer, before the drug takes over.

He sits up in the grave, sharp-awake.

Thoughts racing.

Maybe Slade was lying, but isn’t staying here, killing himself next to Helena’s body as he drowns in the memory of her the same fetishizing of nostalgia he did with Meghan? Just another instance of longing for the unreachable past?

---

Back at the station, Barry grabs a skullcap and the tablet that remotely controls the terminal. He climbs onto the chair and lowers the MEG microscope onto the skullcap, which begins to hum softly.

He sprinted the half mile from Helena’s gravesite to the station, and figures he has ten to fifteen minutes before the oxy takes effect.

He’s lived the events of the original timeline several times over—Julia, Meghan, his daughter’s death, his divorce, his life as a cop in New York City. In his mind, the dead memories overlay one another, each lifetime manifesting in his mind’s eye as a gray, haunted tableau. But the older the timeline, the darker it becomes, like whiskey left in the cask. He finally circles the oldest timeline—darker than the moodiest film noir and carrying the palpable gravity of the original.

He wakes the tablet and opens a new file to record the memory.

He’s running out of time.

He doesn’t remember anything about November 5, 2018. It’s just a date in his head from Slade, and from a conversation he had with Helena many, many lifetimes ago.

But November 4 is Meghan’s birthday. He knows exactly where he was.

Barry presses Record and remembers.

When he’s finished, he waits for the program to calculate the memory’s synaptic number. It occurs to him that if the number comes back too low, he’ll have to dig into the software and disable the firewall, and that’s going to take more time than he has.

The tablet flashes a number.

121.

Just barely in the safe zone.

Barry affixes an injection port to his left forearm and loads the drug cocktail into the mechanism.

He keeps thinking he feels the first signs of oxy as he programs the memory-reactivation sequence at the terminal, but soon he’s naked and climbing into the tank.

Floating on his back in the water, he reaches up and pulls the hatch closed over the top of him.

His mind going in a thousand different directions.

This is going to fail and you’re just going to die in this tank.

Fuck the world, save Meghan.

Go back out there and die beside your wife like you’ve been intending for the last two months.

You have to keep trying. Helena would want this.

There’s a subtle vibration in his left forearm. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, wondering if it will be his last.

BARRY

The world stands as still as a painting—no movement, life, or color—and yet, he is aware of his own existence.

He can see only in the direction he’s facing, staring across an arrangement of tables west toward the river, the water almost black.

Everything is frozen.

Everything in shades of gray.

Straight ahead, a waiter—dark as a silhouette—carries a pitcher of ice water.

People occupy tables shaded by umbrellas, caught in moments of laughter, eating and drinking, holding napkins to their mouths. But there is no motion. They might as well be carvings on an urn.

Straight ahead, he sees Julia, already seated at their table. She’s waiting for him, paused in a pensive, anxious moment, and he registers a terrifying fear that she will forever be waiting.

This is nothing like returning to a memory on a live timeline. That is a process of slowly embodying yourself as the sensations of the memory wash over you. You come into action and energy.

Here, there is none.

And it occurs to him—I am finally in a moment of now.

Whatever he is or has become, Barry registers a freedom of movement he has never known. He is no longer in three-dimensional space, and he wonders if this is what Slade meant by—And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled. Was this how Slade experienced the universe?

Impossibly, he turns around inside of himself and stares back through…

He doesn’t know what it is exactly.

Not right away, at least.

He’s caught at the leading edge of something that reminds him of a time-lapsed star path, only it’s a part of him, as much an extension of his being as his arm or his mind, falling away and spiraling in on itself into a glowing, fractal-like form more beautiful and mysterious than anything in his experience. And he knows, on a level he cannot begin to explain, that this is his original worldline, and that it contains the breadth of his existence as formed by memory.

Every memory he has ever made.

Every memory that has made him.

But this is not his only worldline. Others branch off from this one, twisting and turning in on themselves through space-time.

He feels the worldline of memories where he saved Meghan from the hit-and-run.

A trio of minor worldlines, each of which ended in his death at Slade’s hotel.

The subsequent lifetimes he and Helena lived in their attempts to stave off the end of reality.

Even the branches he created in their last life in the Antarctic—spokelike radials of memory forming the ten times he died in the tank to be with her again.

But none of those matter anymore.

The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.

All anything is made of.

When the needle of his consciousness touches a memory, his life begins to play, and he finds himself in a frozen moment—

The smell of dead leaves and the cool bite of autumn in the city, sitting in the Ramble in Central Park, crying after signing his divorce papers.

Moving again—

Faster now—

Through more memories than he can count.

As numerous as stars—like staring across a universe that is him.

His mother’s funeral, looking down into her open casket, his hands on hers and the cool stiffness of them as he studies her face, thinking, That isn’t you….

Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise.

Finding her on the side of the road near their house.

Why these moments? he wonders.

Driving through the suburbs on a cold, dark night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Julia in the front passenger seat beside him, Meghan in the back, everyone quiet and content, watching Christmas lights through the windows—an exhale in the midst of life’s journey, between storms, where everything has settled into fleeting alignment.

Ripped away again, now hurtling through a tunnel whose walls of memory are rifling down on him.

Meghan behind the wheel of his Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle clutches the steering wheel.

Meghan’s grass-stained knees after a soccer game, six years old, her face ruddy and happy.

Meghan’s first wobbly steps in their Brooklyn studio.

What is the reality of this moment?

The first time he touches his daughter in a hospital room—his hand to the side of her tiny cheek.

Julia taking him by the hand, leading him into the bedroom of their first apartment, sitting him down and telling him she’s pregnant.

Am I in my final seconds in the deprivation tank in Antarctica, reviewing my life as it slips away?

Driving home after his first date with Julia and the weightless elation of hope that he might have found someone to love.

What if this is nothing more than the last electrical firings of my dying brain? Frantic neuronal activity bending my perception of reality and conjuring random memories?

Is this what everyone experiences at death?

The tunnel and the light?

This false heaven?

Does this mean I’ve failed to restart the original timeline and the world is finished?

Or am I outside of time, being pulled into the crushing black hole of my own memories?

His hands on his father’s casket and the stark realization that life is pain and always will be.

Fifteen years old, getting called into the principal’s office where his mom sits on the couch, crying, and he knows before they even tell him that something happened to his father.

The dry lips and trembling hands of the first girl he ever kissed in junior high.

His mother pushing a shopping cart through the coffee aisle of a grocery store and him trailing behind, a piece of stolen candy in his pocket.

Standing with his father one morning in the driveway of their house in Portland, Oregon, the birds gone quiet, everything still, and the air as cold as night. His father’s face watching the moment of totality is more impressive than the eclipse itself. How often do you witness your parents awestruck?

Lying in bed on the second floor of his grandparents’ nineteenth-century New Hampshire farmhouse as a summer storm sweeps in from the White Mountains, drenching the fields and the apple trees and pattering on the tin roof.

The time he crashed his bike and broke his arm when he was six.

Light coming through a window and the shadows of leaves dancing on the wall above a crib. It’s late afternoon—he doesn’t know how he knows this—and the tones of his mother’s singing drift through the walls into his nursery.

My first memory.

He can’t explain why, but it feels like the memory he’s been searching for his entire life, and the seductive gravity of nostalgia is pulling his consciousness in, because this isn’t just the quintessential memory of home, it is the safe and perfect moment—before life held any real pain.

Before he failed.

Before he lost people he loved.

Before he experienced waking to the fear that his best days were behind him.

He suspects he could slip his consciousness into this memory like an old man into a warm, soft bed.

Live this perfect moment forever.

There could be worse fates.

And perhaps no better.

Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?

For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror.

Until Helena.

The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain.

That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

And he’s in the café again.

The waters of the Hudson turn blue and begin to flow. Color enters the sky, the faces of the customers, buildings, every surface. He feels the cool air of morning coming off the river into his face. He smells food. The world is suddenly vibrant, brimming with the sound of people laughing and talking all around him.

He’s breathing.

He’s blinking.

Smiling and crying.

And moving at last toward Julia.