Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,38

onto the bed and sits against the headboard next to Julia. Up close, she looks airbrushed, her skin too smooth, only beginning to suggest the wrinkles he saw at brunch two days ago.

“Why aren’t you watching your game?” she asks. The last time they sat on this bed together was the night she left him. Stared into his eyes and said, I’m sorry, but I can’t separate you from all this pain. “Honey. What’s wrong? You look like someone died.”

He hasn’t heard her call him honey in ages, and no he doesn’t feel like anyone died. He feels…an intense sense of disorientation and disconnect. Like his own body is an avatar for which he’s still getting a feel for the functionality.

“I’m fine.”

“Wow, you want to try that again, but more convincing this time?”

Is it possible that the loss he’s carried since Meghan’s death is bleeding from his soul through his eyes and into this impossible moment? That on some lower frequency, Julia senses that shift in him? Because the absence of tragedy is having an inverse, proportional effect on what he sees when he looks into her eyes. They astound him. Bright and present and clear. The eyes of the woman he fell in love with. And it hits him all over again—the ruinous power of grief.

Julia runs her fingers down the back of his neck, which puts a shiver through his spine and raises gooseflesh. He hasn’t been touched by his wife in a decade.

“What’s the matter? Something happen at work?”

Technically, his last day of work consisted of getting killed in a deprivation tank, and sent back into whatever this is, so…

“Yeah, actually.”

The sensory experience of it is what’s killing him. The smell of their room. The softness of Julia’s hands. All the things he’d forgotten. Everything he lost.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“Would you mind if I just lie here while you read?”

“Of course not.”

And so he rests his head on her lap. He has imagined this a thousand times, usually at three a.m., lying in bed in his Washington Heights apartment, caught in that wearisome handoff between intoxication and hangover, wondering—

What if his daughter had lived? What if his marriage had survived? What if everything had not derailed? What if…

This isn’t real.

This can’t be real.

The only sound in the room is the soft scratch of Julia turning the page every minute or so. His eyes are closed, he’s just breathing now, and as she runs her fingers through his hair the way she used to, he turns onto his side to hide the tears in his eyes.

Inside, he’s a quivering heap of protoplasm, and it takes a herculean effort to maintain his mental composure. The pure emotion is staggering, but Julia doesn’t seem to notice the handful of times his back heaves with a barely suppressed sob.

He was just reunited with his dead child.

He saw her, heard her voice, held her.

Now he’s somehow back in his old bedroom with Julia, and it’s too much to take.

A terrifying thought creeps in—What if this is just a psychotic break?

What if it all goes away?

What if I lose Meghan again?

Hyperventilating—

What if—

“Barry, you OK?”

Quit thinking.

Breathe.

“Yeah.”

Just breathe.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Go to sleep.

Don’t dream.

And see if all of this still exists in the morning.

* * *

He is woken early by light coming through the blinds. Finds himself lying beside Julia, still wearing his clothes from last night. He climbs out of bed without disturbing her and pads down the hallway to Meghan’s room. The door is closed. He cracks it open, peers inside. His daughter sleeps under a mound of blankets, and it is quiet enough in the house at this hour for him to hear her breathing.

She is alive. She is safe. She is right there.

He and Julia should be in a state of grief and shock, just getting back to their house after spending all night in the morgue. The image of Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise—has never left him, although his memory of it has taken on the same haunted complexion as the other false memories.

But there she is, and here he is, feeling more at home in this body with every passing second. That clipped line of memories of his other life is receding, as if he’s just woken from the longest, most horrific nightmare. An eleven-year-long nightmare.

That’s exactly what it is, he thinks—a nightmare. Because this is feeling more and more like his reality now.

He slips into