The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  “Do you know what this is about?”

  “He didn’t enlighten me.”

  Picking it up, she ripped it open and pulled out the contents.

  Unfolding the coarse yellowed paper she looked down on a little girl’s drawing done in gold, orange, red and brown crayons. The lines didn’t stay straight, didn’t meet at the corners, but still managed to represent a box. Not just any box but the illusory treasure chest she’d been morbidly fascinated with as a child. When her parents asked her why she kept drawing it over and over she didn’t know. When they asked where she’d seen it she could only tell them “before.”

  Then they asked what else she remembered from “before” and she told them. It was like a very bad dream, except she only had it when she was awake and it was always the same. She was in a forest, during a storm, being chased by a man trying to get the box away from her. In the background, mysterious music played like it did in movies. And sometimes when she came back to “now” as she called it, she was crying.

  The colorful details on the page her father had sent were just scribbles but they illustrated what she’d so clearly seen in her memory—dark polished wood with elaborate silver fittings and a large silver medallion engraved with birds, leaves, horns, flutes, harps and flourishes. Once she’d told her father that the strange music she heard in the bad daydream lived inside the box but she couldn’t ever keep it open long enough to hear the song all the way through.

  Rejecting what her father and Malachai believed, that the storm and the music and the chase were her past life memories, Meer had spent years trying to understand what she perceived as an affliction. The search eventually led to her getting a master’s in cognitive therapy along with a subspecialty in memory—and an acceptable explanation. Meer maintained she suffered false memories: as a young child either her unconscious had distorted actual events, or she’d confused her dreams with reality.

  “It’s just one of my old drawings,” she said with relief as she offered it to Malachai.

  His dark eyes widened slightly as he inspected it for a few seconds. Then he removed a paper clip in the upper right-hand corner, and examined a second sheet of paper. The clock ticked away the seconds as it had done for over a hundred and fifty years. “I think you missed this,” he finally said as he handed it to her.

  It was a tear sheet from an auction catalog. Under a block of text was a photograph of a dark wooden box with elaborate silver fittings and a large silver medallion engraved with birds, leaves, horns, flutes and harps and a cursive letter elaborately woven into the design—something a child would only see as flourishes but as an adult, Meer had no problem identifying as the letter B.

  “Well, now we know the box did exist,” she responded quickly in a dispassionate voice as she dropped the tear sheet on the table. “That means somehow, somewhere, I must have seen it before I had any cognitive memory of seeing it. Maybe my mother was looking through a book of antiques that included a photo of this box. Or it was in an auction. She used to take me with her to auctions all the time.” Meer shifted back in her chair, moving away from her drawing. Away from Malachai.

  There are dividing lines in everyone’s life. Meer knew the deepest depressions are the ones that define us, but the same way that the earth’s topography is easier to see from above, those lines are viewed most clearly from the distance of years. Only looking back can you pinpoint the moment a crack turned into a breach and a breach became a border. Meer was seven when she’d heard the strange music and told her parents about the box and the chase in the forest for the first time. Before, there had been no terror, and after, she was afraid of looking to the right or left for fear of seeing an oncoming disaster. Before, she hadn’t questioned the promises her parents made, and after, she knew none of their whispers that everything would be all right held any weight.

  “Don’t you realize this could be proof that you’ve been having past life memories all these years?” Malachai’s ebony eyes gleamed. He reached for the auction catalog tear sheet again, and as he did Meer glimpsed his shirt cuff peeking out of his handmade suit jacket, revealing a white-on-white MS monogram. This was a man educated at Oxford, who quoted Aristotle, Einstein and Carl Jung to her, who enjoyed showing off his collection of playing cards that dated back to the fifteenth century, who had written an important monograph on the psychology of Victorian England’s preoccupation with the occult. When he discussed regression it never suggested psychic parlors with ruby-beaded curtains; he imbued the concept of soul transmigration with a scientist’s gravitas, making it hard to dismiss his words as anything less than the truth. Nonetheless, she didn’t believe what he believed. Or what her father believed. When she was younger she’d wanted to, tried to, even had been willing to be their guinea pig, but they’d never proved their theories to her satisfaction. The leap of faith they’d required of her was too great. Like her mother, Meer was a pragmatist.

  “The description says the object is an early eighteenth-century gaming box that belonged to a woman named Antonie Brentano, who was a friend of Beethoven’s,” Malachai read aloud.

  A metallic taste filled her mouth and made her teeth hurt. Her shoulders tensed and her jaw muscles tightened. A ripple of shivering shook her. She heard something, far away. Distant but distinct. Deep in her back, where she’d broken her spine when she was nine years old, the fused vertebrae throbbed. Suddenly, she felt sick. And even though she was no longer a child, but a thirty-one-year-old woman, she wanted to get up and run away.

  She’d been running away that day too, trying to escape the haunting music that scared her because it always preceded the memory of that terrible chase through the forest. Her problem obsessed her parents. Had changed them into two strangers who argued about what kind of help she needed. The endless visits to various kinds of doctors kept her out of school, made her different and ruined the family’s plans.

  That afternoon she and her father had been in Central Park flying her kite. It had been winging its way higher into the sky than she’d ever imagined it could go when storm clouds suddenly rolled in, and with them came the awful, beautiful music.

  Letting go of the kite she took off, running wildly, trying to escape.

  Calling out for her, begging her to stop, her father ran after her, even managed to catch up to her and was only a moment away from pulling her to safety when a bike rider came around a bend too fast to stop. The impact sent Meer flying into the air and she landed on her back on rocks near the road.

  “Meer? Are you all right?” Malachai leaned toward her, pulling her out of her thoughts.

  “When I was a little girl, I used to sit here and think about all the other kids my father told me came to you for help and how they must have sat on this same chair and heard this same clock ticking and how they must have all gotten better because I never saw any of them in the waiting room. I thought you’d cured them all. I was sure you were going to make me better too.”

  Now on Malachai’s face, Meer saw sympathy. She much preferred his default expression: the arched eyebrows and aloof gaze of the objective observer. Compassion wasn’t what she wanted or deserved for succumbing to her old affliction. She knew how to fight the onslaught of an episode and keep it at bay. She knew her triggers and had avoided all of them. Yet, she could hear that old faraway music again…vague and indistinct, coming from beyond this room, this town house, this street, this city, from beyond this time. She felt the freezing anxiety that threatened to take her breath away and the terrible sadness that made her want to weep for something or someone lost to her now. It had been years since she’d been visited by this devil.

  Gripping the couch’s arm, she tried to focus on taking deep, even breaths and hold on to the present, but the mystery flooded back with ferociousness she was unprepared for. Not all the years of Malachai’s help or numerous hypnosis sessions or the scientific theories about pseudomemories that she adopted like a creed were a match for the enigma’s power.

  “Are you all
right?”

  “Fine,” she said, not wanting to admit—especially to herself—that the ghost of herself as a child had risen up and that the child’s secrets were sucking the present out of the air, making breathing laborious, and that the haunting fears that used to encircle her, reach out with their sharp claws, pick her up and fly her away to a distant dimension, were reclaiming her again.

  Malachai put a glass in her hand. Until she drank the water, she hadn’t known she was thirsty, and then she couldn’t drink enough. Finally, she placed the empty glass down beside the manila envelope and the drawing.

  “What’s real is now,” Malachai said in a familiar cadence. “What’s real is now.”

  Nodding, she concentrated on that. It was one of the prompts they’d worked out when she was just a little girl. What’s real is now. What’s real is now. She used the mantra to regulate her breathing. Shaking her head as if the motion would dislodge her memory, she pounded her fist into the palm of her hand. “I haven’t gone near a piano. I’m not writing music. I haven’t in twelve years. Why isn’t that enough?”

  “Meer, you are being too hard on yourself, this isn’t something that’s your fault. We come back in this life to work out what we didn’t complete in our past lives and no matter how much we wish we could avoid our karmic debt we—”

  Among his other talents, Malachai was an amateur magician who could turn a scarf into a white dove or a problem into a bouquet of possibilities but she wasn’t in the mood to hear him offer up his outrageous explanations.

  “No matter what’s happening, I’m not going back on medication again to live in that fog.” Her voice stretched as tight as the muscles in her long neck.

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  “The dreads are back,” she whispered, using the childhood name for the pervasive anxiety and terror she used to feel and the dissonant, conflicting chords she used to hear.

  Chapter 3

  Vienna, Austria

  Thursday, April 24th—5:15 p.m.

  For almost three hundred years experts had entered this same private viewing room to pore over treasures soon to be auctioned off. But how many of them had felt their hearts pounding as fast as Jeremy Logan’s was? Closing the door behind him, he turned the brass key in the lock and listened to the tumblers click into place. The inlaid parquet floor he crossed had been restored and the antique desk he sat at had been refurbished many times over but time hadn’t erased the pentimento of the important discoveries made here. Would his efforts today be added to that history?

  At sixty-five, Jeremy was not only the head of the Judaica department of the auction house but the man they called the Jewish Indiana Jones. Over the last thirty-five years he’d recovered hundreds of the thousands of Torahs and other religious artifacts hidden or stolen during World War II. Some he’d dug up like buried treasure, others he’d smuggled across the borders of Communist countries or secured through brokering deals with dangerous operatives who only cared about the money he offered. Even with all these finds to his credit, the one treasure he’d been searching for the longest still eluded him: the solution to his daughter’s distress.

  And now here was a possibility that he’d found a clue to that puzzle.

  In addition to the whist markers, cribbage board, checkers and chess pieces and playing cards that he could see inside the box, an X-ray of the rosewood gaming case had shown a one-inch-deep false bottom containing a rectangle of either thin cloth or thick paper that even with their sophisticated equipment the technicians hadn’t been able to identify. Now, secluded behind the locked door, Jeremy Logan was about to find out what it was.

  Taking off his oatmeal-colored cardigan sweater, he threw it on the chair and pushed up the sleeves of his navy turtleneck. He plucked his reading glasses out of his tousled salt-and-pepper hair, settled them on the bridge of his nose and examined the box. Now that he knew what he was looking for and was using a magnifying glass, Jeremy could see that behind the letter B, there was a constellation etched faintly into the background. This was the only aspect of the box that Meer had never included in her drawings. Studying it, Jeremy was astonished to realize he was looking at the Phoenix constellation, named after the ancient mystical bird that symbolized reincarnation. Along with Malachai Samuels, he’d always thought reincarnation was at the heart of his daughter’s crisis, maintaining that she was haunted by bleeds from a previous and troubled life.

  He passionately believed in reincarnation and that circles of souls reincarnate with each other over time, which both makes it more difficult to come into contact with people we’ve had problems with before and easier when we reconnect with those we’ve loved. Family, friends, lovers and those you work with were all part of your soul group; he wished that he could convince Meer to have faith in those around her, to lean on him and Malachai and let them help her find her karmic way. But she was as stubborn a nonbeliever as he was a believer.

  He picked up the box, which, like a recalcitrant child, had held on to its secret for all these weeks, and laid it on its back on a felt pad. Inlaid circles of various sizes, carved from different kinds of rare fruitwoods, were set in a random pattern.

  The expert he’d met with yesterday in Prague had shown him a similar chest made by the same designer in 1802. It had looked equally enigmatic—a puzzle without a solution—until he’d pointed out the Taurus constellation etched into that box top’s medallion and demonstrated how, when the circles on the bottom were manipulated to match the star pattern, the hidden drawer opened. As if by magic.

  Judiciously, Jeremy worked the circles on the Brentano box, as it was referred to in the auction catalog. The first glided easily into place. By nature impatient, Jeremy struggled to go slowly, moving on to the next circle and then the next. He’d been studying the Kabbalah for the last twenty-four years and one of the most important lessons he’d learned was that his impatience resulted from his not being able to tolerate what the present moment had to offer. In the Kabbalah, every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has several layers of meaning. In life, he had learned, every moment did, too. And in every past life.

  Taking a deep breath, Jeremy moved the last piece into place and heard a tiny mechanical click as the box’s false bottom slid open. What had been impenetrable before was offered up without quarrel now and as he looked down on a folded sheet of paper that had likely been hidden there for almost two hundred years he was both exalted and, suddenly, frightened.

  Chapter 4

  New York City

  Thursday, April 24th—11:34 a.m.

  The intercom buzzed to life and Special Agent Lucian Glass frowned at the interruption as he looked over to check the building’s closed-circuit monitor. People thought nothing of ringing random apartments to get into the building because they didn’t want to search for their own keys, were trying to leave takeout menus on every welcome mat or were hoping to get in so they could roam the halls and look for unlocked doors. Even in New York it was surprising how many people were burgled due to simple negligence. But this time Lucian recognized the heavyset man standing in the vestibule peering up into the camera.

  The rented fourth-floor studio was sparsely decorated with a battered card table and four chairs but overwhelmed with surveillance equipment, and while Lucian walked his way through it all to reach the intercom, Douglas Comley, his supervisor and the bureau’s Director of the Art Crime Team, or ACT as they all referred to it, pressed the buzzer again.

  Within seconds of activating the downstairs door, the droning stopped and Lucian went back to what he had been doing before: listening to Malachai Samuels’ cultivated voice broadcasting from the Phoenix Foundation, across the street, via a state-of-the-art ultradirectional microphone. Since last summer, the FBI, Interpol and the Italian carabinieri had been investigating the so-called reincarnationist in an effort to prove he’d masterminded an international robbery that resulted in the brutal deaths of three adults and the kidnapping of one child. The stolen objects, a
set of precious stones, were purported to be the legendary memory tools dating back to the Indus Valley in 2000 B.C.E. There was no question Malachai Samuels was obsessed to the point of fanaticism with finding absolute proof of reincarnation, proof he might have hoped the stones would yield, but neither Lucian’s team nor Interpol had yet been able to conclusively tie him to the crime. Half of the stones had been recovered by the NYPD and returned to the Italian government but the other half were still missing. Lucian believed Malachai either had the walnut-sized rubies, sapphires and emeralds in his possession or knew where they were. All they needed was for him to slip up, just once.

  “I think seeing the photograph triggered the music.” Malachai was speaking. “As for what happens next—that’s your choice. You can cross the threshold or turn away.”

  “You mean go to Vienna and see this thing?” the woman asked in a frightened voice.

  Lucian had only seen her in a blur for a few seconds—jean-clad legs and leather jacket that looked supple even from across the street, perfect posture and wavy auburn hair framing her face—before she opened the door to the maisonette and vanished inside, but in that short time he’d sensed both her strength and loneliness. If he were going to paint wind, he’d choose this woman to stand in for the invisible power.

  For nine months, Lucian had been listening to Malachai’s conversations and phone calls and reading his e-mails. He’d heard dozens of children embark on strange journeys without leaving the Foundation’s nineteenth century Upper West Side building. Astonishingly, they arrived in distress and left soothed. But the woman in the office today wasn’t a child and the conversation was different from any Lucian had heard before.

  “I’ve accepted the mystery of my memories,” Meer Logan’s tremulous voice whispered over the electronic equipment.