The Memory Painter: A Novel Read online

  TWENTY-TWO

  MARCH 2, 1982

  Michael woke up on his office floor, his body shivering. He tried to call out for help, but his voice sounded like the cry of a wounded animal.

  Diana came rushing into the office. “My God, what happened?”

  But her words had no meaning to Michael. He was consumed by Bjarni’s pain.

  She knelt beside him. Finn and Conrad hovered in the doorway, looking unsure about what they should do. Diana tried again. “Michael—listen to my voice. You just had a recall. Come back.”

  Michael saw her face and began to sob. “Garnissa?” He sat up and held her in a fierce embrace, “Garnissa.” He could not stop the pain rising within him, as he gasped for breath and tried to explain what had happened to her and their son.

  “Get me a blanket!” Diana shouted over him to Conrad and Finn. “Hurry!”

  Finn ran to the closet and returned with one they used for the sofa. Diana wrapped it around Michael and began rubbing his body, trying to warm him as he rambled on.

  Conrad watched in fascination and whispered to Finn, “What language is he speaking?”

  Finn was staring at Michael in shock. “Old Norse.”

  Diana kept working to warm Michael’s body and repeated the same thing again and again in an attempt to calm him. “Shhhh. It’s me. Diana. I’m right here.”

  But Michael could see Garnissa’s spirit shining in her and it only made him cry harder. His body was racked with cold—Greenland’s winter still clutched at his mind. He forced himself to take several deep breaths and struggled to assimilate the memories.

  Looking around in a daze, he saw the overturned chair and the files scattered on the floor. He must have passed out. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on feeling warm. The chill was just a memory.

  Diana reached out for his hands and held them in hers. “What happened? Who were you?”

  “Bjarni Herjólfsson.” He struggled to put his answer into English. “A Viking trader from Iceland.”

  Diana’s mouth dropped open. Finn, still looking stunned, sat down in the nearest chair.

  Conrad was the only one laughing. “Jesus, now you’re a Viking?”

  “Conrad, please.” Diana glared at him.

  But Conrad continued to taunt him. “Did you sail the seas, terrorizing villagers with Thor’s hammer?”

  Finn looked ready to implode. “Hey Yankee Doodle ass wipe, shut up.”

  “Why? Because I’m the only one not going psycho around here?”

  Diana ignored them both. “Who was Garnissa?” she asked Michael.

  “Here we go again.” Conrad leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. “The lovebirds through time. Can’t you see you’re creating a neurotic fantasy? None of this is real.”

  Finn jumped up. “Just because you can’t remember anything, don’t belittle what’s going on with the rest of us.” He pinned Conrad against the wall with one hand, their faces inches apart.

  But Conrad didn’t back down. “Take a look at yourself in the mirror, Finn—those sunglasses are ridiculous. And try taking a shower too, you stink.”

  Finn grew rigid as he stared into Conrad’s eyes. His grip tightened on Conrad’s neck, choking him. Conrad held his breath, refusing to cower.

  Diana grabbed Finn’s arm. “Finn! Stop! He can’t breathe.”

  Finn squeezed harder, ignoring Diana’s screams.

  Michael sat up. “Finn! That’s enough! Let him go!”

  Finn finally released him and Conrad bent over, wheezing.

  “Are you okay?” Diana rushed over to Conrad.

  Conrad backed away, looking at all of them with disgust. “I need a break from you people.” And he left.

  Finn sat down again. “Sorry, I…” He hugged himself.

  Diana went over and knelt beside him. “What is it? Talk to me.”

  Finn started shaking and broke down. “He’s lying. The bastard’s lying.”

  “What are you talking about?” Diana tried to get him to look at her, but he wouldn’t. “Please, tell me. What’s going on?”

  “It’s all fucked up. I can’t … I’m sorry.” Finn got up and ran out of the room without another word.

  Diana put her hand over her mouth, looking ready to cry herself. Michael reached out for her. He was still shaking from phantom hypothermia.

  “You need a doctor,” she said.

  “I’ll be fine.” His tone was final.

  They stared at each other for a long moment. “What the hell is happening to us?” she whispered.

  Michael couldn’t answer at first. “We’ll be okay,” he finally said, willing himself to believe it as he tried to reassure her. “I’m all right now.”

  “And Finn?”

  “Finn will be too,” he said, with more conviction than he felt. “We’re all just tired.”

  “I’ve never seen him like that.”

  “We’ll go see him in the morning.” He tried to stand, surprised at how weak he felt. He just wanted to go home and crawl into his bed and hold Diana in his arms. Losing her was still fresh in his mind.

  * * *

  Diana drove them home, understanding his need for silence. Michael kept his eyes closed the whole time. It took all his strength to get out of the car. His feet were lead weights as he climbed the stairs. Diana followed, her hand on his back for support. She unlocked the door for them and went inside.

  Michael collapsed on the bed and listened to her as she brushed her teeth and got ready for bed.

  “You know what’s most frustrating?” she said. “You’re being deluged with all of these memories, and so far I’ve remembered a Dutch woman who had babies and watched her husband paint all her life. The only thing I can do now is go to a convention in the Netherlands and not need a translator.”

  She crawled under the covers. Michael pulled her into his arms. There were several things he hoped she never remembered, like being burned alive in ancient Rome or her life in feudal Japan. And he never, ever wanted her to remember Garnissa. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what her fate had been in Tarr’s hands.

  He turned off the light and felt her relax against him.

  “Can you tell me about them? Bjarni and Garnissa?”

  Michael stared into the darkness, unsure of how much he should share. “Bjarni first saw her at this thing we called the ‘Great Assembly.’”

  Michael caught himself slipping into first person and focused on trying to stay detached from Bjarni. Diana either didn’t notice or was too tired to comment.

  He continued. “All the tradesmen would bring their eligible daughters to cook at their booths and show off their housekeeping skills. Garnissa was the best— Ouch.”

  Diana pinched his side. Her eyes were still closed, but a smile was on her face. “Give me a break. The best cooker?”

  “What? She was.”

  “Okay, He-Man. Was she pretty?”

  Michael thought about it. “Not by today’s standards.”

  He grabbed her hand to stop her from pinching him again and chuckled. One thing Michael had begun to see with these memories was how beauty was not fixed, but always changing, determined by a trinity of time, place, and perception. “What I mean is that female Vikings were a bit more masculine.” He tried to imagine all the women in the village and struggled to accurately describe what he saw. “They had broader noses, smaller eyes—or perhaps they were just more inset—and their bodies had stronger builds. It was a different kind of beauty.”

  “Okay, strong Viking women. Got it.”

  Michael laughed. “Bjarni swore on seeing her that she would be his wife. Usually marriage was a business contract between families, but Bjarni had been struck by inn mátki munr.”

  “Inn ma-what?” She yawned, tucking her hands under the covers.

  “The mighty passion,” Michael said with a soft voice.

  In response, Diana gave him a tender kiss where her head was resting, just below his neck.

&n
bsp; “And so he worked toward securing a handsal, a formal agreement with her father. At the time, eight ounces of silver was the minimum bride-price. Bjarni paid double in gold, plus a horse, a cow, and swords for every brother—”

  She pinched him again, harder this time.

  “Ouch! Stop pinching me. I’m just telling you like it was.”

  “But I can hear your smug smile.” She opened one eye and peeked at him. “A horse and a cow?”

  He rolled his eyes back at her and continued. “The morgen-gifu—the gift he gave her the morning after their wedding—was the most generous in all of Greenland.” Bjarni had given Garnissa clothing and jewelry that he had purchased through his trades, as well as livestock and the land he built their longhouse on, to ensure that she and their future children would have security after he was gone. Michael fought to keep his voice steady.

  “They married during their first year in Greenland and stayed with Bjarni’s father, Herjólfr, until they could build their own home. Garnissa became pregnant the next summer with their son, Anssonno.”

  “That’s a beautiful name,” Diana said, and snuggled closer to him.

  Michael nodded, his mind full with the memory of their son. “He was a beautiful boy. They had a good life, up until the end.” Michael didn’t tell her that the end had come too soon, and with incredible violence. Instead he pictured their farm as if it were projected on his bedroom wall—he only wanted to see the laughter and love.

  Anssonno had been the light of his life, asking endless questions about the world. He had been at Bjarni’s side when his own father, Herjólfr, had died and helped him to shoulder his grief, as only a son could. And, growing up, Anssonno had sat by the fire at Aldar’s feet, just as Bjarni had hoped he would, and heard the old poet’s stories.

  The thought brought back the bitter knife that had killed his son and stabbed Michael’s heart once more. Anssonno was dead.

  He stroked Diana’s arm in the dark, the movement lulling her to sleep.

  “What happened that made you so sad?” Diana murmured.

  Michael shook his head, unable to speak the words.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and drifted off.

  Michael felt an unchecked tear slip down his cheek. He did not want to cry again—he feared he would never stop.

  Instead he recited the words silently in his head, I am here now. I’m here now. I’m here now, I’m here now while he listened to Diana’s breathing deepen. Waiting until he felt sure she was asleep, he took his journal out of the nightstand and began to write.

  DAY 25—MARCH 2, 1982

  I feel like Tarr is near me, along with d’Anthès and Kira. Are they the same man? If these are truly past life memories and my instincts are correct, one soul has tried to destroy me across time. Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but I cannot ignore the feeling. It lives in my bones.

  I am beginning to see a pattern and I find myself wondering if the laws of karma exist. Are souls destined to love or hate the same souls again and again? Or can we achieve some kind of resolution or enlightenment?

  If a tragedy is destined to be repeated, we need to figure out how to break the cycle. Until we do, I have to trust this gut feeling. The malevolence that has shadowed so many of my lives is coming for me again.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “There you are.” Linz’s voice jolted Bryan back to the present.

  Bryan was still standing in Conrad’s antique gallery. Within the span of a few minutes, he had just recalled moments of two lifetimes that were nearly a thousand years apart. They were the quickest visions he had ever experienced—it had felt like an electric shock.

  He stared at the stone trapped in the glass case and his eyesight blurred. Conrad had Garnissa’s vegvísir. How? He tried to focus on Linz and saw Conrad standing next to her, and again he felt the chill of Bjarni’s death. Now he wasn’t sure if it would be wise to expose his identity to Conrad. Maybe the explosion hadn’t been an accident—maybe Michael’s fear had come to pass. Bryan felt light-headed, like his legs were about to buckle.

  Linz saw the look on his face and rushed to his side. “Hey, are you okay?”

  Bryan couldn’t take his eyes off the vegvísir under the glass case. “I’m not feeling well. I have to go.”

  He staggered toward the door. Once he’d exited the room, the spinning subsided but he was still nauseous.

  Linz put her arm around him for support. “I’ll take you home.”

  “No, I’ll get a cab. I don’t want you to have to leave the party.”

  Conrad stepped forward. There was a hint of impatience in his voice. “I take it you’re Bryan.”

  “Sorry, Dad, I’m being rude. It’s just he … Bryan, this is my father.”

  Bryan was unable to look Conrad in the eye. He was going to be sick.

  “I hear interesting things about you, Bryan. Perhaps we’ll meet again when you’re more yourself.” He gave Linz a tender kiss on the forehead. “Drive safe, I’ll see you at the office.” He left them and went to talk to a few guests who had wandered into the foyer.

  Linz touched Bryan’s forehead. “God, your skin is like ice. Let’s go.”

  Conrad watched them holding hands as they headed out the front door.

  * * *

  Neither spoke much on the drive to Bryan’s apartment. He kept his eyes closed and hugged his body, trying to control the shivering.

  Like Michael, he now had Bjarni Herjólfsson’s entire life in his mind. He remembered Bjarni and Garnissa’s time together as if it had just happened. The fight to stay grounded in the present had never been harder.

  He took Linz’s hand and kissed it, saying something Aldar always said whenever he was about to start a poem, “From a dream I wake, a bearer of fate…”

  Linz glanced over at him in surprise. “What language is that?”

  “Old Norse.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded but didn’t pursue the matter. They drove the rest of the way in silence. Linz killed the engine when they arrived at his building. “I’ll help you up.”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  “I’m helping you,” she insisted. “You can barely walk.” He was too sick to argue. She kept her arm around him as they made their way to the elevator and up to his apartment.

  He fumbled as he tried to open the door. “I can take it from here.”

  “Let me just help you get inside.”

  Another wave of nausea hit him. Linz took the keys from him and opened the door. He still tried to protest. “Please, just go.”

  Ignoring his plea, she walked in—and stopped in her tracks. The storage boxes were scattered all over the place, their contents now strewn across the room.

  Linz could barely find a place to walk. “What the hell happened?”

  Bryan couldn’t answer and ran to the bathroom to be sick, leaving her alone to study the disaster. An old Super 8 projector had been set up like Bryan’s own Cinema Paradiso with film reels stacked around it. A massive collection of neuroscience books was piled on the sofa.

  Linz studied the titles with raised eyebrows: Developmental Neurobiology, Medical Physiology and Biophysics, Subcortical Visual Systems, and every issue of the International Journal of Neuroscience from its first publication in 1970 up until 1982. A pile of papers on the coffee table caught her eye—they were articles printed off the Internet on Medicor and her father. Linz reached for them. Why did he have these?

  Bryan returned, wiping his face with a towel, and looking a little better. “Sorry about the mess. I was going to…” He stopped when he saw what she had found.

  Linz stared at him. She was beginning to feel like she didn’t know him at all. “What’s all this?”

  “I can explain. I was just on the Internet researching…”

  “My father? Why?” she asked. Something strange was going on with Bryan and every fiber of her being told her to leave.

  “Wait, don’t get the wrong idea. I was researching Michael and Diana Ba
cker, and I found out your father knew them.”

  “Michael and Diana who?”

  Bryan sat down, a look of utter weariness on his face. “The couple from the wedding portrait. Your father knew them. There’s an article here with a picture of them together, just let me find it.”

  Linz now realized that all the boxes belonged to Michael and Diana. “You’re going through dead people’s things?”

  “Not technically,” he said, making more of a mess as he dug through the stack of papers. “I know it’s here.”

  Growing more unsettled by the minute, Linz watched Bryan tear the room apart as he looked for the article.

  He tried to explain things to her again as he searched. “Your father knew them. Diana and Michael were neuroscientists working with Alzheimer’s patients.” Linz started to open the door to leave. “Listen to me,” he pleaded, “I didn’t even know Conrad Jacobs was your father until tonight.” He looked at the Super 8 projector. “The film! He’s on the film. Don’t go. I can prove it.” He found the film he wanted instantly—it was obvious to Linz that he had viewed them all several times.

  “My father is on these people’s films?”

  Bryan threaded the tape through the projector. “These are Michael and Diana’s home movies.”

  “You watched their home movies?” she asked. Now she was beyond unnerved.

  “Yes,” Bryan admitted, exasperated. “I have to know who these people are, for my own sanity. I can’t get them out of my head. It’s different than the other times.”

  “I think it’s time we discussed just how many other times there have been,” she said, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. At first, she had been fascinated and amazed by their connection—was even starting to buy into the idea of reincarnation. But Bryan seemed trapped in a dream world, unable to get out, and she didn’t know if she wanted to join him there. “I thought we agreed you were going to drop all this stuff about that Diana woman,” she reminded him.

  “I’m sorry but I can’t. Just please sit down and watch the film.”

  “I don’t want to sit down.”

  “Fine, then stand.” He started the projector and turned off the light.