“Press to Reset”

As a surprise, Barry had the button installed the day Renato moved in. The backlash against the devices had just begun. Barry knew they had become unfashionable. In some circles, they were even undesirable. Still, both he and Renato were intrigued. A Reset button seemed the perfect gift to celebrate a new life together.

Renato had been excited. Wary, but giddy. The installer was still at the house when Renato pulled Barry aside and said, “Are you sure? I mean, really sure?” They both knew there was no way to answer that question. When the installer left in the evening, after the all-day project, Renato and Barry stood at the wall and examined the engraved label next to an analog readout that could not, under any circumstances, be altered. It read:

RESETS REMAINING: 3.

“Do you think we’ll ever use it?”

The question sounded tentative, but Barry still remembered the sparkle in Renato’s eyes when he spoke, the way he sucked in a little air as he smiled, almost as if steeling himself for an adventure. Maybe he imagined a day far in the future — twenty years? Fifty? — when they would decide to press it, when they would agree it was time to start again, to do it all over, and to do it even better. It was a distant, pulse-quickening possibility.

Reset: Your Second Chance™. For years, the four-word phrase had been ubiquitous, a marketing campaign unlike any in history. “Your second chance” became a well-used everyday phrase. By the time the first Reset button was available to buy and install, the world clamored for one. No product had ever sold as quickly. Lured by the tantalizing promise that, with the push of a button, the slate—at least, a big chunk of it—could be wiped clean.

Barry and Renato had just begun together. Life was filled with opportunities and hope, not risk and regret. It was all but impossible to foresee a future in which a Reset button would need to be pressed even once, much less all three times. And yet, once installed it became an insurance policy. More than a faddish novelty, a Reset button was, for many—including Barry and Renato— a prudent life choice.

When they first discussed their own views on Reset, Renato had been concerned about ominous online chatter that centered around vibrations. A believable claim said the buttons gave off a low-frequency vibration that, with time, could cause permanent nerve damage. Barry countered by showing Renato multiple scientific papers that all concluded the “vibrationists” were nonsense.

The theories had seemed to spring out of nowhere and everywhere at once. In time, they proved to be the opening salvo from a faction opposed to the Reset button. The vibration claim launched a larger objection about the very nature of Resetting. Oppositionists pointed to the single circumstance of a child caught in the crossfire of a Reset. Because the button affected all organic life within a fifty-foot radius, it was not meant to be pushed without careful planning. In a rash moment, one man in Massachusetts had pressed his Reset, rewinding his life by five years. The existence of his four-year-old child was negated. The company behind Reset was acquitted, while the man was found guilty of murder, accused by the child’s mother, who waited five years for the otherwise oblivious man to catch up to her in time. The anti-Reset coalition became a powerful global political movement called Forward Only. Less than a decade after Reset debuted, Forward Only convinced nearly a third of Reset owners to deactivate their devices.

Barry and Renato knew the button came with risks. They had been such late adopters that many of their friends had already gravitated toward the Forward Only mindset that life should not be lived again under any circumstances. Unsure of what these friends might say, Barry and Renato covered their Reset with a nice reproduction of a Cezanne. On the wall next to the piano, they illuminated the painting with a pinpoint spotlight, one that would always remind them that — if they ever needed it or wanted it — the Reset button was there.

Twenty years went by. Then thirty. Forty. Most of the time, they forgot about the button. The thrill of its promise had dulled with time. That, by and large, was how Barry thought it should be.

Maybe, if he was going to be honest, the thought of it had entered his mind. Just at the corners, only a few times over the years. Here and there. Of course it had. There had been acrimonious arguments. There had been losses that neither thought they could endure. Barry and Renato had chosen to persist. They overcame. At least, that’s what he liked to believe. Barry had never, as far as he was aware, gotten to the point of pressing it. He wasn’t brave enough to move the faded Cezanne to find out. To some degree, Barry had even come to appreciate the arguments of Forward Only, even if he never ordered the thing deinstalled. He suspected his husband felt the same way. So, it was a surprise when Renato made the suggestion.

They had eaten dinner according to the diet Renato had researched, the combinations of food that might not make Barry feel any better but at least would not make him feel even worse. After, he had let Renato bathe him. For the first few months after his diagnosis, bathing had been an indignity he could scarcely suffer: the feel of Renato’s soapy hands between his legs, cleaning off the parts of his body he didn’t even like to think about. Watching Renato lather up and clean off his useless penis, feeling his husband’s fingers run across nipples that were his prime erogenous zone when Barry and Renato first met. They offered no sensation at all anymore.

“I’m sorry you have to do this,” Barry had said to Renato at first, eyes wet from the shower or tears or both.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You would do it for me, so I do it for you,” his husband used to answer, his voice sweet with the last remaining hint of his native accent. “Why do you think we got married to begin with?”

“Because we both loved sex.” It was the truth. Barry remembered it all so plainly, as if months had gone by rather than almost half a century.

“Eh,” Renato shrugged. “Did you really think that was going to last forever?”

Renato, the pragmatist. Renato, the logician. Renato, the anti-romantic. That’s what had made him romantic, in a way. Despite the comings and goings, the stops and starts, the moments it all threatened to collapse, Renato’s sober-eyed view of life balanced Barry’s. It was why they worked.

Renato was not the kind to press the button. If Barry had suggested it, which he didn’t think he would ever do, Renato would have offered up arguments that were vehement, passionate and, above all, impeccably reasoned. Chief among them was the ultimate protest made by Forward Only — an argument based not in science or ethics, in philosophy or religion, though all of those were fundamental in one way or another to the movement. At its core, the argument was much simpler: A life lived again could never be lived the same way.

If the proposition were true, something that every expert in every field reasoned could well be so, the purpose of the Reset button might be moot. Whatever led someone to press the button — aging, impending death, loss, tragedy, or even a life so wonderful that it deserved to be lived again — could not be guaranteed to happen the second (or third) time around.

Despite Renato’s disapproval, despite Barry’s own objections, which had grown stronger with time, one or both of them had given in. At least one of them had broken down. One or the other, maybe both, had evaluated all the options of whatever situation had been in front of them, had pushed aside the Cezanne, and had made the decision. The proof was right there next to the button itself.

RESETS REMAINING: 1

Forty years had gone by. Forty years was a long time.

It was such a long time that the ten seconds worth of words were all but forgotten. If he were pressed, Barry could remember a tiny bit of it, and even that memory was fading.

The voice had been his. That much he knew.

After pressing the Reset button, the system prompted the user to record a ten-second audio message that would be replayed one time — replays were impossible — immediately after the reset had taken place. It was supposed to let them know the thing they needed to look out for, or more likely to avoid, this time around.

The disorientation of being reset was so great, most people reported not being able to remember a thing about the message. The system defeated its own purpose.

“Renato’s leaving.”

Those were the words Barry could recall with certainty.

Ten seconds. Not enough time to explain why Renato was leaving, where he was going, or what had sent him out the door. Leaving for good? Leaving for an hour? There was no way to know. The impermanent voice was the only artifact from the future. It was not enough. In those ten seconds, Barry remembered hearing the desperation of his own voice, but little else. They seemed to have avoided whatever it was they were supposed to avoid this time. If something had torn them apart the last time, it hadn’t happened again. Because they appeared to have navigated the unknown danger well enough, Barry had allowed himself to forget all about the message.

Counting the first, they had both made it through the last forty years three times now, and here they were … together. The dangers Forward Only was certain would doom any user hadn’t happened, at least not to them.

As difficult as it had been so long ago to avoid the marketing onslaught of Reset, it was impossible to avoid Forward Only and its dire warnings against the perils of Reset. In their view, the billionaire might wind up homeless. The genius might be a dullard. The couple whose love had soured might never find each other again. The child whose death was averted could still die a thousand different ways. A different calamity than the one they sought to avoid could befall the owner of a Reset button.

Renato often marveled that anyone they encountered, anywhere, might be living a second or third life. There was no way to tell. The Reset button offered no permanent balm against grief — death was still as much a part of life in the post-Reset world as before. But for anyone willing to risk the consequences, it did one thing and it did it well: Reset bought time.

Time. Renato wanted it for Barry most of all. There was almost none left.

After Barry had drenched himself in humiliation during his nightly shower, after Renato had turned the electric blanket to high despite the August heat and helped Barry slide into bed, they sat together in the bedroom they hadn’t shared in years. Renato smiled, and Barry recognized the impish eyes and jutting jawline that he still saw under sagging, mottled skin. He could look at Renato and know he was looking at an old man, but he only saw the handsome athlete that Renato hadn’t been in a long, long time. That didn’t matter to Barry. He wondered if Renato’s eyes worked the same way. Or did Renato see only this dying thing, this frail body wracked with three different cancers that shivered and shook under a blanket of heat?

Sometimes Barry saw and heard things that weren’t there, so he assumed that was happening when Renato said, “I think we should go ahead and press it.”  

He wrapped himself around Barry to stop the shaking. When the tremors subsided, Barry was able to answer: “Absolutely not.”

“Tell me, then,” Renato said in his voice that would forever betray his origin, “why did we get it to begin with?”

“We didn’t,” Barry reminded him. “I did. You don’t remember.”

“I just wanted to know if you did,” he said, covering his lie or his faulty memory. “But that doesn’t answer the question: “Why?”

“In case.”

“And in case has happened, hasn’t it? Twice.”

“We’ll never know about the first time.”

“No,” he sighed, acknowledging the inherent limitation of the Reset. If it were pressed just once, there was a good chance at least some of the reason for resetting would never be forgotten, courtesy of those ten seconds of audio. Pressing it again would, by definition, obliterate recollection of the first time. The reason Barry and Renato had made the first press was unknowable. Measured in linear terms (which almost no one did anymore, not even Forward Only), as many as eighty or ninety years could have passed since then. One lifetime had been usurped by a second lifetime. All they were certain of is that they had made it this far.

Renato’s leaving.

Two words, recorded with digital clarity — but they were shaky, like a crystalline phone call made by someone on an outdoor jog. Barry thought it sounded as if he had been moving around, agitated. He sounded desperate. He wished he had listened more closely, had been clear-headed enough to pay attention.

Renato’s leaving.

Across time, he thought he might also have heard, “Don’t do that again.” Don’t do what?

Maybe it didn’t matter.

As it did for everyone who went back, all memory of the future was erased. Every piece of knowledge about the future-past was wiped clean. The brain and its emotions — every accumulated feeling and belief — was reset to the way it was at the moment of installation.

For everyone who went back, all memory of the future was erased. Every piece of knowledge about the past was wiped clean from the mind. The brain and its emotions — every accumulated feeling and belief — was reset to the way it was at the moment of installation. The only proof were those words, RESETS REMAINING: 1.

How many times their friends or family or neighbors or coworkers had done the same thing was impossible to say, because those people moved on along their current timeline. Whether the Resetters, in some other parallel reality, also persisted was a question many had pondered and no one had answered. All anyone knew for sure in this chaotic silly string of existences was what happened to them, what their own experiences told them, what they saw and heard and felt and dreamed, the good and terrible and saintly and evil things they did in their own lives.

All Barry knew, was that forty years had led him here, to this night.

In this bed.

With this man.

In this body.

Decaying, diseased, failing, flailing, hopeless, helpless. This was what he had become.

Renato saw it, too. He wept when he felt the sagging flesh of his husband, resented the cancerous cells that had multiplied out of control, regretted whatever it was one or both of them had done to lead them here.

There was one more chance — one last chance, one final chance — and practical, pragmatic Renato wanted to take it.

“But we know what happened this time,” Renato said at last.

“This,” Barry said, wishing he could sleep, or do more than sleep, so he would not have to face this choice.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” Renato said, his voice as full of desire for the impossible as Barry had ever heard it, “if we did it all over again? Start over at — what were we? Thirty-four?”

“Thirty-three,” Barry corrected. “For you, at least. Thirty-five for me. Didn’t that seem old?”

“I remember once you told me you thought you had peaked,” Renato said, with a sweetness in his voice that almost sounded like a giggle. “I can’t even imagine that, with everything you had in front of you.”

“But I didn’t know it. I thought the best was already past,” Barry said, voice weak. “Then I met you. I had given up at that point, you know.”

“Yes. You’ve told me,” Renato said, allowing a tiny irritation in his voice because being irritated at each other — just a little bit — was the way they liked to be. Barry thought it showed that they each wanted the other to strive a little bit harder, to be a little bit better, not because they had lofty or unachievable expectations, but because they believed in endless, limitless possibility. Renato sighed, not wistfully, and said, “You thought you’d never meet anyone. Blah, blah, blah. Then Gia and Samuel invited you to the party.” Renato stood to give Barry the full view of him. “And you met me. Young, dashing, glamorous me.”

“Well,” Barry said, coughing within a laugh, “you were young.”

Renato stuck out his tongue. “You’re a very mean person.” He sat back on the bed and kissed Barry on the forehead. “I was young, though, wasn’t I? And think of all the things we hadn’t done then. Hadn’t even conceived of doing. What’s the one thing you liked best?”

“One?”

“Just one. Tell me only one.”

Barry leaned back and shut his eyes.

Renato’s leaving.

“Let’s not do this, okay?” Barry frowned. “It’s morbid.”

“That’s not how I meant it.”

“I know. But, still — ”

“Pretend we’re going to press the button.”

“Renato, please.”

“Indulge me,” Renato said, pulling up the rolling armchair so he could keep his husband’s hand warm. “Pretend I’m going to go press it right now. And there’s one thing you want to tell yourself absolutely to do. One thing to be sure to do.”

Barry grunted. “I don’t know. What do you mean? Like, go to that hotel in Switzerland?”

“When we got upgraded to the Ambassador Suite. Yes. That would be a good one. Or, maybe, don’t take a cruise. Whatever you do: do not take a cruise.”

“You said the one thing I liked, not the thing we both hated.”

“All right. Bad example. Maybe: Go to that little bridge near the waterfall in Oregon and just let yourself get wet. Remember? We were so irritated when it happened, but now that’s all I think about when I look back on that — how being wet and cold and standing there with you while the sun was rising was the one thing I would want to do again most of all.”

“Really? That’s the one thing?” Barry’s voice sounded disbelieving.

“Maybe.”

“Not: Get a dog?”

“Well, of course, get a dog. Yes. Or two. And don’t worry about them scratching up the wood floors. They give it character.”

“Oh, but if I had tried to tell you that then, you would have thrown me out.”

And in that moment, Renato thought of the time he threw Barry out, the one time. The time they almost didn’t make it. In the chair next to Barry’s bed, he gripped the hand of his dying husband as hard as he dared and wished that had never happened.

Maybe the memory was ingrained in some tiny molecule that traveled from Renato’s brain through his nerve endings into his hand and transferred itself to Barry, who felt it travel up into his mind’s eye at the same moment, and together they looked at each other and wished that day, that week, that year, had never happened.

But it had.

Renato’s leaving.

And if they had it to do all over again, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it couldn’t. Because if they started again, if they went all the way back to the first day Renato moved into Barry’s house and made it their home, if they began from that beginning the way a conductor demands of an orchestra, one of them might hit a wrong note. The tune might not come out right again. And if that happened, there would be no way to go back one more time and start all over.

This was the chance. The last one. The only one.

“No,” Renato said, his voice quieted to a whisper. He pressed his face to his husband’s and listened to the shallow breaths of an old, fading man. “No, I would not kick you out. That’s what I would tell myself. That’s what I would say. The one thing I would need to know for the next time: Do not, under any circumstances, for any reason, let go of this man. Not when you are angry. Not when you hate him. Not when you wish you had never met him. Because you’ll do that, you know. You’ll do all of that. And much more. Much worse. But no matter what — do not ever, ever, ever let him go. ‘Promise me that,’ I would tell myself. ‘Promise me you will remember.’”

The space between their cheeks became wet and warm. Renato held on to Barry and kissed him on the mouth, not in the way they used to — they could never kiss each other like that again, even if they wanted, even if they tried. It would always be different. Passion had been replaced by something much deeper, unnamable, unknowable.

After a long, long time that way, Barry stirred and moved his head away so he could see Renato as fully as his fading eyes would allow.

“All right,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“Is it what you want, too?”

Barry remained still. He wondered how many more times he would breathe. He wondered how much longer this would take. He would not mind returning to a time before he knew this kind of pain was possible, when his young mind was incapable of imagining a moment such as this, a confused mind trapped inside a worthless body, almost past the point of remembering what it used to be like.

Renato could go downstairs and, in an instant, everything would be different again. They would listen to Renato’s recording — an instruction of hope, or a dire warning, either was possible, both were advisable — and then they would do their best to forget. To plow ahead. To start over again. Maybe this day would never come. Or maybe there would be a worse one. The possibilities were limitless. Using the Reset seemed such a good idea.

Then again — no, Barry would give Renato this satisfaction. He would not second-guess the choice. There were so many ways to go wrong, and there were so many ways to go right. They would just have to wait and see.

“Yes,” Barry said, and he thought he believed it.

“Yes?”

Barry nodded. But Renato did not move.

“I said yes,” Barry repeated. “Go downstairs. Press it.”

“Tell me,” Renato said. “Are you sure?”

Barry turned his head toward his husband, smiled and said, “No. But who is?”

“If I leave you right now, it will only be a minute. It won’t take long.”

“I know.”

“If I let go, you’ll be all right.”

“I know. I will.”

Renato unclasped his hand, stood, and took a deep breath. “This will be for us.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

Renato took tiny, careful steps out of the room, keeping his gaze on Barry until he reached the door. Barry smiled.

Renato’s leaving.

Alone in the room, Barry looked at the ceiling, widened his eyes, and was sure he saw the vast oblivion he longed to find. He had held out as long as he could, as long as he dared. Now that he was alone, he was ready. He focused his mind on breaching the barrier.

Renato knew he had almost no time at all. He thought of what he might say when he pressed the button. He was ready — he would make sure both he and Barry knew what to look out for the next time around, how to be prepared. He could not delay.

At the bottom of the stairs, Renato crossed the living room. He approached the Cezanne, lifted it out of the way, and reached for the button, ready to speak.

#