Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,5

has been redone in stone, new windows added. The driveway widened and repaved. 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.

The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders—a pleasing contrast. 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. It is late autumn in the city, one of the last good days of the year.

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 check comes and Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.

“Thank you, Barry.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

“Let’s not go a year again without seeing each other.” She raises her glass of ice water. “To our birthday girl.”

“To our birthday girl.” He can feel the cloud of grief coalescing in his chest, but he breathes through it, and when he speaks again his voice is almost normal. “Twenty-six years old.”

* * *

After brunch, he walks to Central Park. 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 on him like a slowly lifting fog. He saw Julia once, in the wake of one such dream—an unexpected bump-in at the party of an old friend. To his surprise, he felt nothing as they chatted stiffly on the veranda. 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.

The trees in the park are peaking after a hard freeze several nights ago, the leaves all frost-burned into late autumn brilliance.

He finds a spot in the Ramble, takes off his shoes and socks, and leans back against a perfectly slanted tree. He pulls out his phone and tries to read the biography he’s been plodding through for nearly a year, but concentration is elusive.

Ann Voss Peters haunts him. The way she fell without a sound, her body rigid and upright. It took five seconds, and he didn’t look away when she hit the Lincoln Town Car, parked on the curb below.

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?

Red and orange leaves drift down through the sunlight, accumulating all around him in the dappled shade. From his vantage in the trees, he watches people walking the trails, moseying by the lake. Most are with others, but some are alone like him.

His phone pops a text from his friend Gwendoline Archer, leader of the