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 something, Julia.”

He looks out at the Hudson. The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders. Tourist boats go up and down the river. The noise of traffic is ceaseless on the highway above. The sky crisscrossed with the fading contrails of a thousand jets.

“I was angry with you for a long time.”

“I know,” she says.

“I thought you left me because of Meghan.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It was too much to keep breathing the same air as you in those dark days.”

He shakes his head. “I think that if you and I could go back to before she died, even if we could somehow prevent it, you still would have gone your way, and I would’ve gone mine. I think we were meant to be together for a time. Perhaps losing Meghan shortened the life-span of us, but even if she had lived, we’d still be apart in this moment.”

“You really believe that?”

“I do, and I’m sorry I held on to the anger. I’m sorry I only see this now. We had so many perfect moments, and for a long time, I couldn’t appreciate them. I could only look back in regret. This is what I wanted to tell you: I wouldn’t change anything. I’m glad you came into my life when you did. I’m glad for the time we had. I’m glad for Meghan, and that she came from the two of us. That she couldn’t have come from any other two people. I wouldn’t take back a second of any of it.”

She wipes away a tear. “All these years, I thought you wished you’d never met me. I thought you blamed me for ruining your life.”

“I was just hurting.”

She squeezes his hand. “I’m sorry we weren’t the ones for each other, Barry. You’re right about that, and I’m sorry for everything else.”

BARRY

November 5, 2018

The loft is on the third floor of a converted warehouse in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, an old shipbuilding neighborhood on the bay.

Barry parks his rental car three blocks away and walks to the entrance of the building.

The fog is so dense it softens the edges of the city, laying a gray primer on everything and diffusing the globes of illumination from the streetlights, turning them into ethereal orbs. It reminds him, in some ways, of the color palette of a dead memory, but he likes the anonymity it provides.

A woman heading out for the evening opens the front door. He slips by her and into the lobby, heading up two flights of stairs and then down a long hallway toward Unit 7.

He knocks, waits.

No one answers.

He knocks again, harder this time, and after a moment, a man’s soft voice bleeds through the door.

“Who is it?”

“Detective Sutton.” Barry steps back and holds his badge to the peephole. “Could I speak with you?”

“What is it regarding?”

“Just open the door, please.”

Five seconds elapse.

Barry thinking, He’s not going to let me in.

He puts his badge away, and as he takes a step back to kick the door in, the chain on the other side slides out, and a dead bolt turns.

Marcus Slade stands in the threshold.

“How can I help you?” Slade asks.

Barry walks past him, into a small, messy loft with large windows overlooking a shipyard, the bay, and the lights of Oakland beyond.

“Nice place,” Barry says as Slade closes the door.

Barry moves toward the kitchen table and picks up a sports almanac of the 1990s and then a huge volume entitled The SRC Green Book of 35-Year Historical Stock Charts.

“Little light reading?” he asks.

Slade looks nervous and annoyed. He has his hands thrust into the pockets of his green cardigan, and his eyes keep shifting back and forth, blinking at irregular intervals.

“What do you do, Mr. Slade?”

“I work for Ion Industries.”

“In what capacity?”

“Research and development. I’m an assistant to one of their lead scientists.”

“And what kind of stuff do you guys make?” Barry asks, perusing a stack of pages that were recently printed off from a website—historical winning lottery numbers by state.

Slade walks over and snatches the pages out of Barry’s hand.

“The nature of our work is protected under an NDA. Why are you here, Detective Sutton?”

“I’m investigating a murder.”

Slade straightens. “Who was killed?”

“Well, this is a weird one.” Barry looks into Slade’s eyes. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m here about a murder that’s going to happen later tonight.”

Slade swallows, blinks. “What does this have to do with me?”

“It’ll happen at your place of work, and the victim’s name is Helena Smith. That’s your boss, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s also the woman I love.”

Slade is standing across from Barry, the kitchen table between them, his eyes gone wide. Barry points at the books. “So you have all this stuff memorized? Obviously, you can’t take them with you.”

Slade opens his mouth and closes it again. Then says, “I want you to leave.”

“It works, by the way.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“Your plan. It works like gangbusters. You become rich and famous. Unfortunately, what you do tonight causes the suffering of billions and the end of reality and time as we know it.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a cop from New York City.” He stares Slade down for ten long seconds.

“Get out.”

Barry doesn’t move. The only noise in the loft is the ragged sound of Slade’s accelerated breathing. Slade’s phone buzzes on the table. Barry glances down, sees a new text from “Helena Smith” appear on the home screen.

Barry finally starts for the door.

Three steps from it, he hears a click. And another. And another.

He turns around slowly and looks across the loft at Slade, who’s staring dumbfounded at the .357 revolver he would’ve killed Helena with in several hours. He looks up at Barry, who should be lying on the floor right now, bleeding out. Slade levels the gun on Barry and pulls the trigger, but it only dry-fires again.

“I broke in earlier today while you were at work,” Barry says. “Loaded the chambers with empty shell casings. I needed to see for myself what you were capable of.”

Slade looks in the direction of his bedroom.

“There are no live rounds in the house, Marcus. Well, that’s not exactly true.” Barry pulls his Glock from his shoulder holster. “My gun is full of them.”

The bar is in the Mission, a cozy, wood-paneled tavern called Monk’s Kettle, its windows steamed up on the inside against the cold and foggy night. Helena has told him about this place in at least three of their lifetimes.

Barry steps in out of the mist and runs his fingers through his hair, which has been flattened by the dampness.

It’s a Monday night, and late, so the place is nearly empty.

He spots her sitting at the far end of the bar, alone, hunched over a laptop. As he approaches, the nerves hit—far worse than he anticipated.

His mouth runs dry; his hands sweat.

She looks quite different from the dynamo he spent six lifetimes with. She’s wearing a gray sweater that a cat or dog has pulled a hundred little nits out of, smudged glasses, and even her hair is different—longer and pulled back into a utilitarian ponytail.

Watching her, it’s apparent that her obsession with the memory chair has fully consumed her, and it breaks his heart.

She doesn’t acknowledge him in any way as he climbs onto the seat beside hers.

He smells the beer on her breath, and beneath it, the subtler, elemental scent of his wife that he would know anywhere, out of a million people. He’s trying not to look at her, but the emotion of sitting beside her is almost too much. Last time he saw her face, he was nailing the lid onto her pine-box casket. And so he sits quietly beside her as she writes an email, thinking of all the lifetimes they shared.

The lovely moments.

The ugly ones.

The goodbyes, the deaths.

And the hellos, like this one.

Like the six times she came to him in that Portland shit-kicker bar when he was twenty-one years old, sidled up beside him, young, bright-eyed, beautiful, and fearless.

You look like you want to buy me a drink.

He smiles to himself, because she does not, in this moment, look remotely like she wants to buy a stranger a drink. She looks, well, like Helena—sunk deeply into her work and oblivious to the world.

The bartender comes over, Barry orders, and then he’s sitting with his beer, asking himself the question of the moment—What do you say to the bravest woman you’ve ever known, whom you lived a half dozen extraordinary lives with, whom you saved the world with, who saved you in every conceivable way, but who has no idea you even exist?

Barry takes a sip of beer and sets down the glass. The air feels electrically charged, like just before a storm. Questions avalanching through his mind—

Will you know me?

Will you believe me?

Will you love me?

Scared, exhilarated, senses heightening, heart thrumming, he turns finally to Helena, who, feeling his attention, looks over at him through those jade-green eyes.

And he says—