Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,48
his precinct. It’s a midnight kind of place with attitude, bad lighting, and no seating—just a bar that lines the perimeter of the restaurant, everyone standing, holding greasy paper plates with massive slices and giant cups of oversweetened soft drinks.
It’s Friday night and loud and perfect.
He considers a drink, but decides drinking alone post-signing-divorce-papers is too pathetic, and heads for his car instead. Drives the streets of his city feeling happy and emotional and overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of being alive. He hopes Julia is OK. He texted her after he signed the papers. Wrote that he was glad they were going to be friends, and he would always be there for her.
As he sits in traffic, he checks his phone again to see if she responded.
Now there’s a text from her:
Here for you always. That will never change.
His heart is full in a way it hasn’t been in as long as he can remember.
He looks up through the windshield. Traffic still isn’t moving, even though the light ahead is green. Cops are diverting cars away from the street ahead.
He rolls down his window and shouts to the nearest cop, “What’s going on?”
The man motions for him to move along.
Barry hits his grille lights and bloops his siren. That gets the young patrolman’s attention. He comes running over, all apologies. “Sorry, they got us closing down the street ahead. It’s pretty chaotic.”
“What happened?”
“Lady jumped off the building on the next block.”
“Which one?”
“That skyscraper right there.”
Barry looks up at a white Art Deco tower with a crown of glass and steel, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach.
“What floor?” he asks.
“I’m sorry?”
“What floor did she jump from?”
An ambulance screams past, lights and sirens blaring as it barrels through the intersection straight ahead.
“Forty-one. Looks like another FMS suicide.”
Barry pulls his car over to the curb and climbs out. He jogs across the street, flashing his badge at the patrolmen cordoning off the area.
He slows down as he approaches a circle of cops, EMTs, and firemen, all gathered around a black Lincoln Town Car whose roof has been spectacularly crushed.
Walking over, he had steeled himself to see the grotesque effects a four-hundred-foot fall wreaks on the human body, but Ann Voss Peters looks almost serene. The only visible external damage is a small trickle of blood from her ears and mouth. She landed on her back, and in such a way that the smashed roof of the Town Car appears to be cradling her. Her legs are crossed at her ankles, and her left arm is crossed over her chest and resting against her face, as if she’s merely sleeping.
An angel fallen from the sky.
* * *
It wasn’t that he’d forgotten. His remembrance of Hotel Memory, his death in the deprivation tank, and return to the night Meghan died was always there, on the outskirts of awareness—a bundle of grayed-out memories.
But there was also a dreamlike quality to the last eleven years. He was swept up in the minutiae of living, and with no tangible connection to the life he’d been ripped out of, it was all too easy to relegate what had happened to the deepest recesses of consciousness and memory.
But now, sitting in a café on the banks of the Hudson River with Julia and Meghan on the morning of his daughter’s twenty-sixth birthday, he has a blinding awareness of being in this moment for a second time. It all comes back to him in a rush of memory as clear as water. He and Julia sat at a table not far from this spot, imagining what Meghan would be doing if she were alive today. He had posited she would be a lawyer. They had laughed about that and reminisced about the time she drove his car through the garage door, before comparing memories of a family vacation to the headwaters of the Hudson.
Now his daughter is sitting across from him, and for the first time in a long while, he is floored by her presence. By the fact that she exists. The feeling is as strong as the early days of his return to the memory, when every second shone like a gift.
* * *
Barry shudders into consciousness at three in the morning, roused by a pounding in his apartment. He rolls out of bed, slowly emerging from a shroud of sleep as he staggers out of his room. Jim-Bob, his rescue, is barking fiercely at the door.
A glance through the peephole