Recursion

by Blake Crouch

“I don’t just remember my wedding. I remember the fight over the design for the cake. I remember the smallest details of our home. Our son. Every moment of his birth. His laugh. The birthmark on his left cheek. His first day of school and how he didn’t want me to leave him. But when I try to picture Sam, he’s in black and white. There’s no color in his eyes. I tell myself they were blue. I only see black. “All my memories from that life are in shades of gray, like film noir stills. They feel real, but they’re haunted, phantom memories.” She breaks down. “Everyone thinks FMS is just false memories of the big moments of your life, but what hurts so much more are the small ones. I don’t just remember my husband. I remember the smell of his breath in the morning when he rolled over and faced me in bed. How every time he got up before I did to brush his teeth, I knew he’d come back to bed and try to have sex. That’s the stuff that kills me. The tiniest, perfect details that make me know it happened.”

I can’t fake it anymore.” Tears carve trails through her eyeliner. “My son never existed. Do you get that? He’s just a beautiful misfire in my brain.”

She thinks of the fifty-million-dollar chair she has dreamed of building since her mom started to forget life. Strangely, she never imagines it fully rendered, only as the technical drawings in the utility patent application she will one day file, entitled Immersive Platform for Projection of Long-Term, Explicit, Episodic Memories.

Sometimes, late in the night, he imagines elaborate conversations with Julia. Exchanges where he says everything that has been festering all these years in his heart—the pain, the anger, the love—and then listens as she does the same. A clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.

The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

the butterfly returns, alighting on the surface of the table next to Barry’s still-folded napkin. Stretching its wings. Preening. He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.

“How could you forget that?” “I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. He says finally, “Maybe watching shooting stars with my girls felt like a better memory.”

The rope swing that used to hang from the oak tree was taken down years ago, but the initials he and Meghan once carved at the base of the trunk remain. He touched them last summer—having somehow decided that a cab ride to Jersey at two in the morning after a night out with Gwen and the rest of Central Robbery Division was a good idea. A Jersey City cop had arrived after the new owners called 911 to report a vagrant in their front yard. Though stumbling drunk, he wasn’t arrested. The cop knew of Barry, of what had happened to him. He called another taxi and helped Barry into the backseat. Paid the fare back to Manhattan in advance and sent him on his way.

He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster.

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

The silence of his apartment feels like a threat on Meghan’s birthday, the last five of which have not gone well. Seeing Julia always upends him. For a long time after their marriage ended, he thought he missed his ex. Thought he would never get over her. He would often dream of her and wake to the ache of her absence eating him alive. The dreams cut him deeply—half memory, half fantasy—because in them, she felt like the Julia of old. The smile. The unhesitating laugh. The lightness of being. She was the person who stole his heart again. All through the following morning, she’d be on his mind, the totality of that loss staring him down, unblinking, until the emotional hangover of the dream finally released its hold

Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn’t want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreachable as the dead.

When he isn’t replaying their conversation, he’s grappling with the fear. Pressure-checking his memories. Testing their fidelity. Wondering— How would I know if one had changed? What would it feel like?

“Eight months ago, the Centers for Disease Control identified sixty-four cases with similarities in the Northeast. In each case, a patient presented with complaints of acute false memories. Not just one or two. A fully imagined alternate history covering large swaths of their life up until that moment. Usually going back months or years. In some instances, decades.”

they suddenly have two sets of memories. One true, one false. In some cases, patients felt like their memories and consciousness had moved from one life into another. In others, patients experienced a sudden ‘flash-in’ of false memories from a life they never lived.”

They haven’t identified a single physiological or neurological abnormality in those who are affected. The only symptoms are the false memories themselves. Oh, and about ten percent of people who get it kill themselves.”

CDC hasn’t found a pathogen, so it doesn’t seem to be blood- or airborne. Yet. This article in The New England Journal of Medicine speculated that it actually spreads through a carrier’s social network.” “Like Facebook? How is that even—” “No, I mean when a person is infected with FMS, some of the people they know become infected. Their parents will share the same false memories, but to a lesser degree. Their brothers, sisters, close friends.

“Also—and no one’s sure if it’s related to FMS—instances of acute déjà vu are on the rise.” “What does that mean?” “People are struck, sometimes to a debilitating degree, with the sense that they’re living entire sequences of their lives over.”

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

he’d hurry to her room and kneel beside her bed and remind her that everything seems scarier at night. It’s just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us.

Everything will look better in the morning. There will be hope again when the light returns. The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.

His beard is unkempt, his dark hair wild and blowing in the wind. He is wearing a pair of blue jeans and a faded sweatshirt, and he is unmistakably Marcus Slade—inventor, philanthropist, business magnate, founder of more groundbreaking technology companies than she can name, touching sectors as diverse as cloud computing, transportation, space, and AI. He is one of the world’s richest, most influential citizens. A high-school dropout. And only thirty-four years old.

“Welcome to Fawkes Station.” “Fawkes?” “As in Guy Fawkes—remember, remember the fifth of November?” “Oh. Right. Because memory?” “Because disrupting the status quo is kind of my thing. You must be cold, let’s get you inside.” They’re moving now, heading toward a five-story superstructure on the far side of the platform.

“Because inside your head is a technology that could alter humanity.” “How so?” “What’s more precious than our memories?” he asks. “They define us and form our identities.”

She says, “Just so you know, my primary goal is to help people. I want to find a way to save memories for deteriorating brains that can no longer retrieve them. A time capsule for core memories.”

In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion—a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’être. What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationships and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.

Barry reads the incident report for a third time. It’s making his brain itch in all the wrong ways, because it’s the exact opposite of what Ann Voss Peters said had happened between her husband and his first wife. She thought that Franny had jumped.

tagging and cataloging the neuron clusters connected to a particular memory, and then reconstructing a digital model of the brain that allows them to track memories and map them out.

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.”

“If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.”

Slade nods, says, “ ‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’ ” Helena laughs with surprise. “So you’ve read John Locke.”

using neuroscience to pierce the veil of perception—to see reality as it truly is.” “Which is, by definition, impossible. No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.” Slade just smiles.

“So how does Ann know you? How did she know your wife had gone up on that same ledge with the intention of committing suicide? Why did she believe she had been your wife? That the two of you had a boy named Sam?” “I have no idea, but I would like you to leave now.” “Mr. Behrman—” “Please. I have answered your questions. I have done nothing wrong. Go.” While he can’t begin to guess why, he is certain of one thing—Joe Behrman is lying.

Barry is halfway through his huevos rancheros and thinking about Joe and Franny Behrman when a glint of pain flashes behind his eyes. His nose begins to bleed, and as he catches the blood in a napkin, a completely different set of memories of the last three days crowds into his mind. He was driving home on Friday night, but no 10-56A ever came over the radio. He never rode up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. Never met Ann Voss Peters. Never watched her fall. Never looked at the police report regarding the attempted suicide of Franny Behrman. Never bought a train ticket to Montauk. Never interviewed Joe Behrman.

When he tries to look these alternate memories squarely in the eye, he finds that they carry a different feel from any memory he’s ever known. They’re lifeless and static, draped in hues of black and gray, just as Ann Voss Peters described.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

“I love your passion, and I want to destroy this disease too. But first, I want: Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.” The exact title of her dream patent application from years ago, the one she hasn’t filed yet.

“The more stress the human body endures during reactivation, the more intense their experience of the memory. Buried deep inside our brain is a rice-size gland called the pineal, which plays a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. You’ve heard of it?” “It’s one of the most potent psychedelics known to man.” “In tiny doses, released into our brains at night, DMT is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. A going-out-of-business sale. It’s the reason people see things when they die, such as racing through a tunnel toward a light, or their entire life flashing before their eyes. To have an immersive, dreamlike memory, we need bigger dreams. Or, if you will, a lot more DMT.”

Slade smiles, dark. “When the procedure is perfected? Absolutely. Then, and only then, you can bring your mother to the rig, and use all of my equipment and all of your knowledge to map and save her memories.” “Marcus, please—” “Then, and only then.” “She’s running out of time.” “So get to work.”

For a moment, the man just breathes heavily into the phone. Barry thinks he hears a woman also crying in the background, but he isn’t sure. “I shouldn’t have done it,” Joe says. “I know that now. I had this great life with a beautiful son, but I couldn’t look myself in the mirror.”

“I was married to her.” “What?” “It’s my fault Ann jumped. I saw an ad in the classifieds. It said, ‘Would you like a do-over?’ There was a phone number and I called it. Ann told you she had False Memory Syndrome?” “Correct.” And now I have it. “It sounds like you may have it too. They say it travels in social circles.” Joe laughs, but the sound is full of regret and self-hatred. “FMS isn’t what people think it is.”

“What is FMS?” “It’s people like me, who’ve done what I did. And it’s only going to get worse.”

“These are powerful people. Franny had a breakdown when she remembered, and they knew. They showed up. They threatened me.”

Taking a breath, he tells himself—You are Barry Sutton. You are on a train from Montauk to New York City. Your past is your past. It cannot change. What is real is this moment. The train. The coldness of the window glass. The rain streaking across the other side of it. And you. There is a logical explanation for your false memories, for whatever happened to Joe and Ann Voss Peters. To all of it. It’s just a puzzle to be solved. And you are very good at solving puzzles.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m about to give you the greatest gift of your life. The greatest gift a person could ever hope to receive. If you don’t mind,” he says, the courtesy paradoxically alarming, “I have a few questions before we get started.”

An automated, feminine voice responds, New session beginning now. The man looks into Barry’s eyes. “Now, tell me about the last time you saw your daughter alive, and don’t leave out a single detail.”

The last two members of Infrastructure left yesterday, before the storm’s arrival. Her people didn’t just object to Slade’s new directive to “put people in a deprivation tank and stop their heart.” With the exception of her and Sergei, they resigned en masse and demanded to be returned to the mainland immediately. Whenever she feels guilty for staying, she thinks of her mom and others like her, but it’s a small consolation. Besides, she’s pretty sure Slade wouldn’t let her leave regardless.

“I see Meghan coming out of the hallway. I don’t remember for sure what she was wearing, but for some reason, I see her in this pair of jeans and a turquoise sweater she always wore.” “How old is your daughter?” “Ten days shy of sixteen. And she stops in front of the coffee table—I know this happened for sure—and she’s standing between me and the television with her hands on her hips and this quasi-severe look on her face.” Tears fill in at the edges of his eyes. “It’s still incredibly emotional for you,” the man says. “This is good.” “Please,” Barry says. “Don’t make me do this.” “Continue.” Barry takes a breath, blindly groping for some handhold of emotional balance. He says finally, “It was the last time I would look into my daughter’s eyes. And I didn’t know it. I kept trying to look around her to see the television.”