The Memory Painter: A Novel (7 page)

“I was in the middle of scanning a program when you called. It needs babysitting.” She typed in a quick command. “This’ll just take a second.”

Bryan waited, content to watch her. He had so many memories of her brimming up inside of him, but instead of dwelling on them, he forced his mind to find the most socially acceptable question he could possibly ask. “What do you do?”

Linz focused on the monitor as her hands flew across the keyboard. “Give you a hint.” She motioned to her tattoo.

Bryan wasn’t sure what she was getting at. He took a guess. “A spiral?”

“A double helix.”

He choked on his drink. “You’re a scientist?”

“Geneticist.” Her computer beeped again. “I decipher code to determine how the brain makes memories.” She saw the expression on his face. “Your disbelief is noted.”

“No, it’s not that. I…” he floundered, grappling with the impossibility of it. What could he say?

Just then a gum-smacking waitress came over to take their order. “What’ll it be, kiddos?”

Linz debated. “I’ll have a glass of the claret.”

Bryan tapped his glass. “Another Stoli.”

“You got it.” The waitress sashayed off.

Linz typed one more command. Bryan studied her fingers.
She has Katarina’s hands.

Her computer beeped in response and she turned to Bryan, giving him her undivided attention. “So. What did you want to talk to me about?”

Bryan didn’t know where to start. He saw the hurt lurking in her eyes and realized she needed an apology. “First off, I’m sorry I ran out on you this morning. I’m not good with people.”

“No kidding.”

He ignored the jibe. “I don’t talk about myself, ever, but you deserve an explanation.” He took a deep breath, about to go out on a limb. “I did the painting after a dream I had. Well, kind of a dream.” He frowned. How to explain it? “Sometimes, I wake up, and there’s the canvas—done. It’s not painting. I don’t know what it is. Most of the time, I don’t even remember doing them.”

He didn’t go into the fact that the paintings had been a coping mechanism for years now, or that he had started painting when he was a young teenager at the height of his attacks. He called them attacks because that was what the dreams felt like, battering the wall of his consciousness, until sometimes he didn’t know reality from the dream. He had other names for them as well: visions, recalls, episodes, foreign memories. But no matter what words he used, it was all the same.

Linz stared at him, her eyebrows raised in disbelief. Bryan wondered if she realized he was telling her something no one else knew.

She prompted, “And in the dream?”

“A priest named Origenes watched his dearest friend and most loyal follower be executed. Her name was Juliana.”

“How do you know that?” Her eyes widened with shock. “How do you know her name? I never told you that. Why didn’t you say this before?”

He could see her working herself up, and he hadn’t even gotten started. “You know, I’m sorry. This was a bad idea.”

She touched his arm in apology. “Wait. I’m not accusing you. I just find this a little hard to believe. People don’t share the same dream.”

Her hand sent a quiver down his body. He moved his arm away, severing the connection. “Maybe people share the same dreams all the time and just don’t know it. If you hadn’t gone to my opening, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Linz sat back and chewed on her lip. “In my dream the priest said something to her when she died. What about yours?”

Bryan nodded with surprise and his chest constricted again. Origenes had never known if Juliana had heard him call out to her before she died—but she had.

Linz took a napkin and wrote on it, folded it up, and handed him the pen. “Write it down.”

Bryan did, and they exchanged napkins like contraband. He didn’t bother opening hers. He knew the same three words were written on each of them and that they were the words Origenes had called out right before the flames had devoured Juliana’s body.

Bryan searched her face, eager to see how she would react. “He said, ‘Go to God.’”

Linz stared at the napkin in her hands. “This is unbelievable.”

Bryan took an even bigger gamble and asked a question—in Greek. “
Do you speak Greek?
”

“No, I don’t speak Greek.” Then she froze.

I knew it.
Bryan sat back, amazed. “
You do speak Greek.
”

“Trust me, I think I’d know if I…” She trailed off. The waitress hovered with their drinks, listening to Bryan reproach Linz in Greek.

“
You understand me.
”

Linz couldn’t answer. She was dumbstruck.

Bryan insisted, “
You do. I can’t believe it.
”

The waitress plopped their drinks down. “One wine, one Stoli.”

Utterly perplexed, Linz looked up at the woman. “Did you understand anything he just said?”

“Not a clue, honey.” The waitress popped her bubble at them and left.

Linz nodded and took a big drink from her glass. Bryan remained quiet, giving her a moment to process everything.

He switched to English. “See?” he said gently. “You understand me. You understand what I’m saying.”

“But that isn’t possible. I don’t speak Greek.” She reached for her drink again.

“I didn’t either. Until I had our dream. They spoke in Greek.”

Linz shook her head. “But they were two separate dreams by two separate people. And mine was in English.”

Bryan placed their two cocktail napkins side by side to make his point. “Maybe you just remembered it in English.”

“It was in English.”

“
Was it?
” he asked again in Greek.

“Would you stop? A person just can’t become fluent in another language at a bar!” She put her head in her hands.

“I think you’ve been fluent for a long time and didn’t know it.” Bryan reached out and held her other hand to comfort her. “The same thing happened to me.”

Linz’s eyes grew bright, emotions churning inside her. She gently tugged her hand away and stood up, finishing her wine in one gulp. “Let’s go. I need to see something in Greek.”

*   *   *

They took a cab to the Central Library in Copley Square. Linz stood at a bookshelf labeled “Languages–Greek,” and read
Zorba the Greek
by Nikos Kazantzakis. Bryan pretended to read it over her shoulder, but in reality he was distracted by her scent. Strange, how memories could have their own fragrance.

Linz turned to him and pointed at the page, shouting like an excited kid, “Would you look at this?”

Bryan startled with a laugh and leaned close to whisper in her ear. “You’re yelling.”

“I’m not yell—” She looked around, realizing people had begun to stare, and dropped her voice. “How can you be so calm?”

“Because this isn’t new for me.”

Linz grabbed a handful of books and headed to a reading table. “Well it is to me. Do you enjoy disrupting my world? I share dreams with strangers. Now I understand Greek. What else?”

“Well…” Bryan hesitated. Maybe now was not the time to lay more on her. He didn’t want her to implode at a public library.

“How in the world did you know I’d understand Greek?”

Bryan wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t know. A hunch?”

Linz got an odd look on her face. “What if…?” She went to the library computer and typed in a search, mumbling to herself. “I can’t believe I never thought to look.” She backed away in shock. “Wow.”

Bryan took her place at the monitor and saw the search results. “Whoa,” he agreed.

He followed Linz to the Theology Section and watched as she searched the rows until she found what she was looking for.

“Guess we didn’t have a hunch about this,” she said, showing him the title:
Origenes Adamantius, His Life and Times.
“The priest really existed.”

Bryan kept silent as he studied the rows of books. He already knew Origenes had lived. He also knew all the priest’s works by heart, in their original language, but it was always interesting to hear what history had to say.

Linz gathered more books. With Bryan’s help, they hailed a cab and headed back to her place. Neither said a word in the car. The windows were down, and the Turkish cabdriver had a classical song from his homeland playing. Bryan turned his face to embrace the wind, marveling at how luminous Boston appeared at night. Finally, he had found someone who could possibly understand his world, and yet he hesitated to reveal it to her. He wanted to hold Linz’s hand, to revel in their connection. But he knew that she was still reeling from their discoveries. Even Bryan was having trouble grasping her ability to speak Greek, that this was something she shared with him. He had no idea what it meant, or where they should go from here.

Perhaps they could start with dinner and movie, or another battle at chess. Bryan chuckled at the thought.

“What?” Linz looked over at him.

“Just thinking about the future,” he said. She looked away quickly and he smiled to himself, beginning to grow accustomed to her reserve. He found it endearing, and a challenge. They were more alike than she knew. One day, he hoped, she would let him in.

*   *   *

When they arrived at her place, Linz had mixed feelings. Part of her just wanted to be alone, to forget this whole evening, to forget the Greek swimming in her head, to forget Bryan’s relentless gaze. Maybe she liked it better before when he wouldn’t meet her eyes because now he was staring at her like he knew her thoughts. She looked away and grimaced at the stack of library books.… What the hell was she doing with all of these books?

Linz paid for the cab. “Care for some light reading?” she asked Bryan. She tried to pass it off as a joke but failed.

With a silent yes, Bryan took the books and got out, letting her lead the way.

When she opened the door, Bryan went to sit on the floor and piled all the books on the coffee table. “I think you got all of them,” he teased and picked one up from the top of the stack and began to leaf through it.

Linz studied him again. There was something about his startling blue eyes, his disheveled hair. They hadn’t even known each other for forty-eight hours, but it didn’t matter. She was sure a connection existed. She could feel it, although the logical side of her brain rebelled at the thought.

He glanced up at her and smiled, and when she replied her voice sounded faint. “I’ll just go get us some wine.”

She escaped to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle. In her mind, she began to make a crazy plan. She would seduce him tonight and they would have sex. She would allow herself one uninhibited “night with the eccentric artist.” It would be a first on all fronts but at this point Linz didn’t care. She needed to get him out of her system so she could get back to real life.

Her last fling had been two years ago with a fellow student at Stanford, a biochemist named Greg who had been nice, safe, and boring. She had called it quits when checking the spectrometer had become more stimulating than a romantic tryst. Before Greg it had been Todd, the prequel to nice, safe, and boring. Both were good guys with four-letter names, friends who had morphed into something else for a time. Linz had tried to convince herself that she felt more for them than she did, and went along with being a couple until they tried to pour cement into the idea. Then she would end it. The truth was she preferred solitude. Her work had always been her passion. And having a one-night stand with Bryan would not interrupt her life at all.

Feeling more in control, she returned to the living room with the wine. Bryan was still immersed in the book.

“Anything?” she asked, sitting a few feet away from him.

“Origenes lived in the third century. He was one of the church’s most controversial teachers, considered a scholar of his time.” He handed the book to her and grabbed another, moving away to sit on the couch. His smile was gone, replaced by a solemn, strained look.

Linz grimaced to herself. So much for the grand plan. Now he was acting like they were at a funeral. With a sigh of resignation, she opened a book and began to read.

*   *   *

An hour later, Linz and Bryan had both skimmed the majority of the books and the bottle of wine was gone. Reading about Origenes’ life, Bryan had grown angry—at what history had gotten wrong, at what had been left out, at the memories he was stuck with forever. After a while he had stopped reading, only pretending to by turning the pages.

“He believed in reincarnation,” Linz noted as she scanned the text. “A doctrine the Church struck down in 553 AD, three hundred years after his death.” She looked up at Bryan with surprise. “So reincarnation was once a Christian belief?”

Bryan hedged. “He taught it, but who knows.”

“It says here he was imprisoned and burned at the stake.”

“No,” he corrected, unable to stop the edge in his voice. “He was tortured, pilloried, and bound by his limbs to a block for three days. He died a week later from the injuries.” He stood up and wandered over to Linz’s sand garden. “The man who ordered his death was named Septimus. He had a certain hatred for all Christians, but despised Origenes the most. The priest’s end was … savage.”

“Septimus,” Linz whispered with a shudder. “Yes, that was his name.” She sat still for a long time, trying to process this new information. “You remember his death like I did hers.”

He kept his back to her, staring at her garden and nodded to the rake. “May I?” At her consent, he took off his shoes and stepped into the sand, talking while he drew. “When I was a little kid, I had vivid dreams … nightmares. I sleepwalked, talked … even had narcolepsy for a while. Then, when I was seven my brain flipped a switch and I recalled an entire lifetime.”

Linz looked astounded. “You remembered his entire life?”

Bryan nodded, letting her assume he meant Origenes. He didn’t tell her that it had been Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, a Persian historian who was born in the ninth century. A scholar of unequaled acumen, Tabari wrote
The History of the Prophets and Kings
, a detailed account of Muslim and Middle Eastern history spanning the time of Muhammad to the present. Tabari then went on to write
The Commentary of the Qur’an
, which he had memorized at the age of seven. Now, Bryan had the Qur’an memorized too.