The Memory Painter

Bryan ripped the paper to shreds. He didn’t want Alexander Pushkin’s memories. He had not yet recovered from remembering the lifetime of the priest in ancient Rome. Now he had the life of Russia’s greatest, most prolific poet in his head too, all within the span of a few days. He felt besieged.

Unable to stop himself, he grabbed the nearest paint tubes and started to defile the painting, yelling obscenities in Russian. He didn’t want to see Natalia, to love her, to feel her loss.

Repeated knocking at the door jarred Bryan from his rampage and saved him from destroying more paintings in the studio. He threw down the paint tubes, stormed over to the door, and whipped it open—screaming in Russian at the poor man standing there.

The pizza delivery guy took a step back. “Dude. Sorry, you order a pizza?”

Bryan stood there frozen, his mind blank.

The pizza guy tried again. “You order pizza? Speak-a-English? This number 401?”

Bryan shook his head in a daze. “Next door,” he whispered and closed the door.

He walked back into his studio, becoming aware of his surroundings. The shredded poem littered the floor. His hands and clothes were streaked with paint.

He picked up the scraps of paper, grabbed the painting and his keys. He needed to get out.

Outside his building, he passed by the dumpster, threw the painting and the poem into it, and kept going. God, he needed some normality. The past week had been intense. Sometimes the visions came in fragments, like reliving chapters from an autobiography, and other times a life came all at once like a tidal wave. Alexander Pushkin and Origenes Adamantius had both been tidal waves. It felt like drowning.

For the first time, real fear hit him. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep having these attacks and still function. What if he had one in public, what if he had one with Her.

There would be no way to explain it, and at some point he knew he wouldn’t be able to hide them anymore. The episodes were growing stronger and becoming more frequent.

Consumed by these thoughts, he was unsure of how long he had been walking until he found himself heading to the wharf. He passed by street vendors selling their wares to tourists, and a Haitian woman behind a makeshift table displaying silver rings called out to him.

“Hey, I have ring for you.”

Bryan turned and saw her holding it out to him.

“This one suit you,” she said, her smile a riddle, and put the ring in his hand. “It protect you from bad spirits.”

Bryan stared dumbfounded at the turquoise ring. It was almost identical to Pushkin’s talisman. The only difference was in the marbling of the stone.

“How much?” he asked, reaching for his wallet.

She wanted twenty. Bryan gave her the bill and slipped the ring on his finger. It felt as if it were made for him. Was it a sign? If so, he couldn’t imagine what the message might be.

As he walked on, he thought about the ethereal woman Alexander had seen moments before his death. This was not the first time she had materialized in the dreams of the people whose lifetimes Bryan had remembered. He wondered who she was and why she kept appearing. She looked like a picture he had once seen of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and this had been the real reason behind his visit to the Great Pyramid exhibit. He kept hoping to discover who she was.

Maybe he would try to paint her again. He had only attempted it once, years ago. With a sigh, he put his hands in his pockets—hands that should not belong to an artist but did—and for the thousandth time, he prayed for understanding.



SIX

Linz didn’t usually attend art openings. A hermit by nature, she preferred curling up with a good book or working on a new puzzle whenever she gave herself downtime from work. And she did attend the symphony. It was her one foray into the arts.

She enjoyed going regularly, at least monthly, and had been doing it for years. In college, she had been teased by acquaintances for blasting Beethoven instead of the Black Eyed Peas. It was just one more thing that made her feel out of step with her generation and added to her shyness. So attending a cocktail party to discuss the latest in art was definitely out of her comfort zone. But Derek and Penelope were her oldest and closest friends, and she had promised to come see their new gallery as soon as she got back to town. That had been three months ago. So she had feigned enthusiasm when she received an invitation to tonight’s event.

The Keller Sloane Gallery was high-end but modest and nestled on Newbury Street in one of Boston’s most famous districts. After four blocks of inching forward in traffic, Linz finally spotted the marquee and pulled her car up to the valet sign. Handing her keys over to the young attendant, she maneuvered through a crowd in cocktail attire outside the gallery with wine and cigarettes in hand. She felt out of place already.