The Memory Painter: A Novel (2 page)

As if he could read her thoughts, the man turned and stared at her once more before disappearing into the next room. Linz hovered, unsure of what to do. She felt a strange compulsion to follow him, to reenter the galleries and pretend that she had not just wandered through the whole thing. But it wasn’t like she could just strike up a conversation about Nefertiti and ask for his number. She had never hit on anyone in her life, and she wasn’t about to start at the MFA. With a sense of reluctance, she dropped off the headset.

When she exited the museum, the world outside felt different somehow. Playing chess at the Square didn’t seem as appealing as it had five minutes ago, but she figured she would go anyway. Maybe focusing on a game would help still the strange flutter of her heart.

As she left, she couldn’t quite brush off the brief encounter with the man inside or the odd feeling that she was making a mistake by walking away.

*   *   *

Harvard Square was a postcard come to life, where people from all over the city gathered to play chess. Her opponent, an old man wearing a golfer’s hat, made his first move. Linz countered within seconds, listening to the quiet play from the other tables, and her pent-up tension gradually released. Within ten moves, she had won.

The old man grumbled and set up the board for another round. Linz won the next game too and he gave her a sharp look, obviously reassessing his assumption that the pretty girl would be any easy win.

What her opponent didn’t know was that she had been Junior Grandmaster at age fifteen, the most prestigious title awarded young players. As a child, she had pursued chess with an all-consuming passion and had only relaxed her obsession when she entered high school, where she took care to downplay her various talents in order to fit in. Most teenagers didn’t appreciate a know-it-all chess champion with a scholar’s mind beyond her years. It was only in college that she embraced her eccentricities and found the confidence to allow herself to openly excel. And when she began a fast track to earning her PhD in neurogenetics, she was no longer self-conscious that she was the smartest girl in the room because everyone was brilliant.

The old man moved on to another table with a disgruntled look.

“This table open?” someone asked.

Linz looked up and froze. It was the man from the museum—her man, the one she had almost followed.

Her mind racing, she computed the likelihood of this outcome given the variables. Impossible. In a city the size of Boston, the chances of their meeting at the museum and then running into each other at another random location was one in a billion, if not more. For the first time in her life, she had no idea what to say.

“You’re quite good,” he said, sitting opposite her.

In disbelief, she watched him reset the pieces. They were going to play chess. She and Mystery Man were going to play chess.

He must have followed her here. But within seconds she torpedoed that idea. She would have noticed him trailing her, plus he had been deep inside the museum when she had left.

“The old man you just beat usually likes to boast that he’s a top-ranked player in the Chess Federation,” he told her with a quizzical smile.

“You’ve played him before?” she asked with surprise, wishing he would look up and meet her eyes, but he kept them fixed on the board.

“I’ve been coming here every week for the last couple of months.”

The news came as a disappointment instead of a relief—he hadn’t followed her. This was bizarre chance, nothing more.

Linz decided she would postpone winning to extend their time together. However, within the first three moves, two things became apparent: he was an expert at chess, and her strategy to prolong the game wasn’t going to work.

They had completely different styles. He was lightning fast with his choices, mercurial even, while she was meditative. He won after six moves. Like her previous opponent had done with her, she had underestimated him.

Her ego thoroughly trampled, she vowed to annihilate him in the next round. “Again?” she asked sweetly.

He chuckled and nodded, studying her hands. His refusal to look at her was beginning to drive her crazy.

But then his eyes met hers. “Why were you at the exhibit?”

She stared back at him, her mouth suddenly dry. “My mother used to work there,” she blurted.

He waited, as if knowing there was more to the story. Somehow, his unwavering gaze pulled the truth from her.

“She died when I was only six months old. Sometimes I like to imagine she’s still alive and that we’ve lived a life together…” Linz trailed off. Although it had been muted by time, the ache of her mother’s loss had always remained, and she never spoke to anyone about those feelings. Today seemed to be the exception.

“What was her name?” he asked gently.

“Grace.” Linz could feel the lump rising in her throat and swallowed. “She was from England … she came here to help curate the Egyptian Art collection.”

Dr. George Reisner had led the longest-running and most successful excavation in Egypt from 1905 to 1942, a joint effort by the MFA and Harvard. It had resulted in Boston becoming home to one of the largest collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world. Linz had thought it quite fitting that the visiting exhibit centered around Egypt too.

“When I was growing up, I would sometimes go there alone and pretend she was still here … that I would round a corner and bump into her,” Linz confessed, astounded she was sharing something so intimate with a stranger.

But he only nodded and said nothing. There were no knee-jerk condolences or sympathetic remarks. He simply accepted and understood.

“Ready?” he asked softly.

Linz felt like he was talking about more than the game.

“Your move,” he said.

She blushed and looked at the board, trying to recapture her determination to win. But as the game progressed, she began to realize it was pointless. He was unlike any player she had ever encountered. Most people mastered chess by remembering thousands of essential patterns and potential plays, but he played with no pattern, creating new ideas as he went. It was impossible for her to get ahead of him. Still, she retaliated with every tactical position and forced move in her arsenal. She caught him smiling on several occasions after one of her plays.

This went on forever. Neither said a word, until finally he spoke, “It’s going to be a draw.”

Linz checked the board, unwilling to admit defeat. A draw was not a win. But after a moment, she saw he was right. It irritated her that he had seen it first.

“I’m here every Friday if you want a rematch.”

She glanced up at him, trying to see what he meant by that. Was he signaling that he wanted to see her again? Because she wasn’t quite sure what to make of this whole encounter. But he was staring at the board again. Maybe the attraction she was feeling was all in her head.

Linz checked her watch and was startled to see that two hours had flown by. She had plans tonight and she needed to head home and change. She gathered her purse and stood.

“Thanks for the game,” she said and held out her hand in goodbye, unable to explain her disappointment. Their strange meeting was about to end.

He stood too. Bowing his head, he took her hand and raised it to his lips. The slightest feather of his breath touched the skin at her wrist, and then her arm was once again dangling by her side.

“Until Friday, I hope,” he murmured.

She felt her heart flutter inexplicably again. “Until Friday,” she found herself saying.

As she walked away, she could feel his eyes on her the entire time, and it took all her willpower not to turn around and go back to ask him the one question she had meant to ask a hundred times during their game: she had never found out his name.

THREE

DAY 1—FEBRUARY 6, 1982

The reversal of our patients’ symptoms has been staggering. I do not want to present our findings until we have drawn absolutely conclusive results, but we are on the precipice of obtaining a cure for Alzheimer’s. Each patient shows a complete reversal of plaque formation as well as synaptic regeneration at levels far beyond our projections. However, it is the synaptic and glial cell activity that has been the most surprising.

One of the strangest side effects is that patients are recalling memories from early childhood and infancy. These are memories they had no recollection of, even prior to their illness. Are these memories real, and if so, why couldn’t they be accessed until now?

We find ourselves in uncharted territory and I cannot help but ask the question: if the drug is this effective on a damaged mind, what would be its effect on a healthy one?

This question consumes me and my impulse to try the drug has become too great. I have become my own case study and have taken several doses, reassuring myself that I am not the first scientist in history willing to use his body in an experiment.

I have not discussed what I have done with the team yet, let alone Diana. I am worried they will think I’ve lost my mind. I plan to tell them tomorrow and perform a series of sleep studies on myself.

I’ve decided to keep a journal of results with as much transparency as possible, to leave a trail behind so I can remember where I started and why I began. What’s happening to me now presents a truly unforeseen and confounding variable. My experiences are taking me beyond the scope of my imagination. I do not have answers. I am not even sure what the questions are.

MB

FOUR

Bryan stared at the chessboard and laughed. He had just met the most amazing woman—a woman who had gone to war with him for two hours and almost won—and he hadn’t even asked her name. Somehow it hadn’t felt necessary.

Her weakness, he could tell, was that she calculated to extremes instead of trusting her intuition. It didn’t matter if she could see twenty moves ahead if she couldn’t follow the thread in the game. Maybe one day he would talk her into playing blindfolded. Then she might be able to beat him.

He realized he was already assuming a future where they would meet again—because they would. He was sure of it.

Bryan had only been at the museum for a few minutes when he saw her. When he did, it was as if his world had stopped and then started again. He had taken those steps toward her involuntarily, needing to dissolve the space between them.

He had stood beside her, feigning interest in whatever she was looking at, waiting for her to notice him while his artist’s eye memorized every detail about her. She was tall, her body frail and delicate like a dancer, the blond flyaway curls on her head careless and fresh. On some level he felt as if he already knew her, and yet he didn’t know what to say. She was too lovely.

When she had looked at him, he had stared into her eyes, unable to look away as he recognized lifetimes hidden within them. And meeting her now, he knew without a doubt that the visions he had suffered since childhood were in fact memories. It was something he had tried to convince himself of all his life: that somehow his dreams were pieces of a past that belonged to his soul. Clinging to that belief had somehow helped him feel less insane. The people in his visions had actually lived, and he had found their lives chartered in history, but still he had always wondered if he was deluding himself—until now, because he couldn’t shake his sense of certainty that she had shared those lives with him.

Bryan had been too stunned to speak to her, so he’d left, or pretended to.

His only course had been to follow her, although he had felt like a fool, lurking thirty feet behind. What would he say if she turned around and noticed him? How could he explain his actions?

He had almost lost her on the T, but had relaxed after he realized her destination was Harvard Square. Now he had an excuse to be there.

Ever since he had returned to Boston three months ago, he found himself at Harvard Square playing chess at least once a week. His love for the game had come after he had remembered the life of Pedro Damiano, a Portuguese chess master who lived in the fifteen hundreds. Pedro had written the first manual on chess strategy to be embraced by the Western world, and after Bryan had remembered Damiano’s life, he had also inherited the man’s expertise for the game—including his joy for playing blindfolded.

Those memories had come five years ago; and wherever Bryan had lived since, he had always sought out a park where players congregated to play. Within a month of moving back to Boston, he knew all the regulars at Harvard Square. Only two were good enough for him to bother playing, although they could never beat him. They were both men, and the man she had played today was one of them. Bryan had observed the pair from afar and whistled softly to himself when she had won.

Now as he watched her head back to the T, he stood up, feeling rejuvenated. His decision to move back to his hometown was taking on a whole new dimension, and for the first time in ages he couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

Whistling a silly tune, he strolled for hours with no destination in mind, the cool breeze of Boston’s autumn enjoyment in itself. The wind danced and caught him, making him walk farther than he had planned, until he found himself standing across the street from the gallery that was hosting his show. He waited for the crosswalk to turn green.
I’ll go to the opening this evening,
he thought,
just for a few minutes. It’ll be fine.

He glanced at his watch and grimaced. The show was still a few hours away. Maybe he would grab a coffee and go browse the bookstore down the street. Then he could head to the gallery just as the doors were opening at five-thirty. He would pay the owners dutiful compliments about how wonderful the showroom looked, say hello to whoever happened to stop by early, and then be on his way. He assured himself the plan was sound. He could handle conversing with a handful of art lovers. People usually didn’t start turning up at these things until eight or nine.