old man into a warm, soft bed.
Live this perfect moment forever.
There could be worse fates.
And perhaps no better.
Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?
For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror.
Until Helena.
The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.
Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain.
That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
And he’s in the café again.
The waters of the Hudson turn blue and begin to flow. Color enters the sky, the faces of the customers, buildings, every surface. He feels the cool air of morning coming off the river into his face. He smells food. The world is suddenly vibrant, brimming with the sound of people laughing and talking all around him.
He’s breathing.
He’s blinking.
Smiling and crying.
And moving at last toward Julia.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD
BARRY
November 4, 2018
The café occupies a picturesque spot on the banks of the Hudson, in the shadow of the West Side Highway. Barry and Julia share a brief, fragile embrace.
“Are you OK?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you came.”
The waiter swings by to take their drink orders, and they make small talk until the coffee arrives.
It is a Sunday, the brunch crowd is out in force, and in the initial, awkward silence with Julia, Barry pressure-checks his memories.
His daughter died eleven years ago.
Julia divorced him soon after.
He has never met Marcus Slade or Ann Voss Peters.
Never traveled back into a memory to save Meghan.
False Memory Syndrome has never plagued the world.
Reality and time have never unraveled in the minds of billions.
And he has never laid eyes on Helena Smith. Their many lifetimes together spent trying to save the world from the effects of the chair have been banished to the wasteland of dead memory.
There is no question—he can feel it in his bones.
This timeline is the first, the original.
Barry looks across the table at Julia and says, “It’s really good to see you.”
They talk about Meghan, what they each imagine she’d be doing with her life, and it’s all Barry can do not to tell Julia that he actually knows. That he’s seen it firsthand in a distant, unreachable memory. That their daughter would have been more vital, more interesting, and kinder than any of their speculation could begin to do her memory justice.
As the food comes, he remembers Meghan sitting at the table with them. Swears he can almost feel her presence, like a phantom limb. And while it hurts, it doesn’t break him the way it once would have. The memory of his daughter hurts because he experienced a beautiful thing that has since gone away. Same as with Julia. Same as with all the loss he has ever experienced.
The last time he lived this moment with Julia, they reminisced about a family trip into the Adirondacks, to Lake Tear of the Clouds, the source of the Hudson.
And the butterfly that kept coming around made him think of Meghan.
Julia says, “You seem better.”
“I do?”
“Yeah.”
It is late autumn in the city, Barry thinking this reality is feeling more solid by the minute. No shifts threatening to upend everything.
He is questioning his memory of all the other timelines. Even Helena feels more like a fading fantasy than a woman he touched and loved.
What feels real in this moment isn’t his phantom memory of watching a shockwave vaporize the Upper West Side. What feels real are the sounds of the city, the people at the tables all around him, his ex-wife, the breath going in and out of his lungs.
For everyone but him, the past is a singular concept.
No conflicting histories.
No false memories.
The dead timelines of mayhem and destruction are his alone to remember.
When the check comes, Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.
“Thank you, Barry.”
He reaches across the table and takes hold of her hand, clocking the surprise in her eyes at this gesture of intimacy.
“I need to tell you