The Memorist

Chapter 111

Friday, May 2^nd-1:30 p.m.

Sebastian’s ex-wife, Dr. Rebecca Kutcher, sat at her desk and frowned while she listened to Meer’s request and did her best not to stare at the nine men who stood respectfully by the window. Each member of the minyan, all in their funereal dark suits and yarmulkes, looked at the doctor with expressions that were so empathetic and kind, they disconcerted her.

“No,” Rebecca said when Meer finished. “Everything I’ve done has been to protect Nicolas from his father’s obsessions. Why would I agree to allow you to take strangers into my son’s room?”

“I know that what I’m suggesting sounds strange to you. It does even to me,” Meer said, trying to think of a way to win over this brittle woman.

Out the window, in the distance, the sun sparkled on the lake, its surface as smooth as a mirror.

“What do you believe in, Rebecca?”

“Science,” she answered with no hesitation.

“What about in the gap between where science stops and mystery begins?”

“What has this to do with my son?”

“Have you read any studies on binaural beats?”

Rebecca shook her head impatiently, and Meer knew her chance of winning this woman over was slight.

“There are prayers and mystic rituals going back thousands of years that effect change and help heal both spiritually and physically. They’re often words with meanings but they’re also sounds that have vibrations. And in the last fifty years there have been studies done that show different kinds of vibrations can affect consciousness.” Meer was losing Rebecca, she could see it in the other woman’s eyes. “I didn’t believe it either but I’ve experienced it…and it helped me. I was there, Rebecca. Where Nicolas is. All I’m asking is that you allow these men to go into your son’s room and chant with him.”

The boy didn’t look up when the men walked into his room. Nicolas sat drawing, a box of crayons at his elbow. The reds, yellows, bright blues and greens were all still in the container, their points sharp and intact. The ones he used, the grays and the browns, the blacks and the dull taupes, were scattered across on the tabletop, sad, worn-down stubs.

He was drawing yet another version of the boy in the dark passageway that was identical to the drawings Meer had seen the last time she’d been there. She’d traversed passageways like this one and had finally come out on the other side. Now she wanted to help Nicolas to come out the other side, too. For his sake. His sake alone. Even though Meer understood what had driven Sebastian, she knew she’d probably never be able to forgive him, but neither could she punish the boy for his father’s failures. Failures in both the present and in the faraway past.

Under his breath, the boy’s singsong words were barely audible but Meer’s father’s friends recognized what they were hearing. There was no signal, no instant when the decision was made. One moment there was just a thin childish whisper and then a single adult male voice joined in and then another joined in and another until nine voices combined with Nicolas’s and the minyan of ten was formed and together they all chanted.

Meer bowed her head, not sure she should watch. Now, not at the concert hall when all hell broke loose; not in Beethoven’s house when she realized where the flute was hidden; not at the graveyard when she buried her father’s ashes; but now, she felt for the first time in her life that she was in the presence of something sacred as the vibrations from the chanting resonated in the hospital room. Was this the sound of myriad pieces of broken, fragmented souls joining together at last?

Meer thought about the love her father had described to her: love that we pass on, that keeps us alive, that makes us weak and fallible when it is taken away and that gives us strength and peace when we realize it can’t ever really be taken away but exists always, just transformed.

When Meer had stood at her own father’s grave and heard this prayer circling around her, she’d thought of Nicolas and wondered if somehow in his past he’d been a father or grandfather or brother who’d been unable to complete the mourning process for a child. Who’d failed at gathering a minyan and making sure the proper prayers were said. A father or a grandfather or a brother who must have died or been killed, with this unfinished business of grief still on his mind.

Beside her, Rebecca sighed and Meer looked over to see tears and an expression of wonder on the woman’s face. The room was silent. The minyan had stopped their chanting. The Kaddish had been said. Nicolas was as quiet now as the others. He sat at his desk, staring down at his drawing, not frantically chanting or moving side to side or sketching. He was absolutely still.

Rebecca went to him, got down on her knees by his side. “Nicolas?” she whispered.

The little boy turned and looked at his mother. There was confusion but also something vitally alive in eyes that had been dead before. He was no longer a child disconnected from himself or the world. Yes, he was pale and looked fragile and would certainly need help but he could see what was in front of him for the first time in a long time and what he saw was his mother reaching out for him and as she gently held him, his hands moved to grip her arms.

Over her son’s head, Rebecca looked up at Meer.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then you can’t understand the depth of my thanks.”

Meer wondered what Nicolas would remember. What he’d be able to explain about the last six months of his life when he was older, when he was her age, when someone asked him what had happened to him. Would he remember the sensation of today’s vibrations in his body, in his blood, in his bones?

Her father would have loved to see what she’d just seen. He’d explain it using theories about the resilience of the human spirit and the human soul, and connect them to his ideas about binaural beats and what Pythagoras believed about reincarnation and mathematics, numbers, sounds and circular time.

With his irrepressible optimism her father would use all this as proof of what he’d always wanted her to understand about her own past and her future.

You see how simple it is? All you have to do-she could hear him say-is open yourself up to the cosmos as it lays itself before you. See it in all its mysterious dimensions. Without prejudice. Without assumption. There’s music waiting for you to write, sweetheart. All you ever needed was the key to open yourself to it. And that key is the wonder of the world. All the songs you could never remember but couldn’t forget? You can find them now.