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