The Memorist

Chapter 67

Wednesday, April 30^th-8:45 p.m.

They were still studying the flute and its mysterious markings when the rain started to beat harder on the windows. The thunder was so loud the building vibrated with each new crack. Sebastian drew the drapes and returned to where Meer was sitting on the couch. And then the lights went out.

The darkness was immediate and complete. Meer was aware of Sebastian getting up; she heard him knock something over and curse under his breath, and then she smelled the distinct odor of sulphur.

Suddenly candlelight glowed, illuminating his face and the part of the room where he stood. Light from another time and place. It might have been the nineteenth century. This could be Archer Wells holding the candelabra. But it wasn’t, Meer reminded herself, as Sebastian walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver.

“No dial tone but this is a remote. It wouldn’t work in a power failure. I don’t know if there’s a wall phone in the suite. Did you notice?”

“No, but there’s usually one in the bathroom.”

He was gone for a few moments and then called out: “Yes, you’re right.”

She heard him dialing, talking in German, and then he returned.

“There’s a blackout in the whole area. None of the trams or subways are running either. Something to do with the storm. I’m going downstairs and get more candles.”

At the door, about to leave, he hesitated, walked back to her and sat down next to her. “You understand this has nothing to do with us. No one knows where we are, but don’t open the door for anyone, all right? I’ll take the key.”

Meer had a sudden memory of being in the dark like this with him before. Of him standing just this way in a doorway some other time. Of him asking for a different promise.

No, not him.

“You’re seeing a time before, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“And am I there?”

“No, not you.”

“But someone connected to me?”

“I’m not sure,” she equivocated.

“You don’t want to find out, do you?”

“No.” She realized it only as she said it. Realized more, too, but didn’t say it.

“Whoever he was he did something terrible to you, didn’t he? Did he hurt you? Is that why sometimes it seems as if just as you’re going to open to me you shut down?”

“Maybe,” she whispered.

“I’ve learned from your father and from Fremont Brecht that we’re here to do it right this time. We come back within the same circle of people and are given a chance to do it better. Not to make the same mistakes. I would never hurt you, Meer. Just the opposite. I want to help you and keep you safe.” He reached out and brushed her hair off her forehead in a tender gesture.

Her conflicting emotions warned her to stay away from him and at the same time to give in to him. When she did neither he gave her a heartbreaking half smile that surged through her.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. All right?”

She nodded.

While he was gone, Meer sat in the semidarkness. What she and Sebastian were experiencing was what her father had told her about. What ancient sages, followers of Pythagoras and Jung, early Christians, pagans and Kabbalists had identified as being connected to what was known as same soul consciousness. People are part of one great cosmic awareness, her father had tried to explain in different ways over the years. And souls who’d bonded in several lives over time and grown together through the millennia were eventually able to communicate with each other without words through that awareness. When she was old enough to understand it, she’d thought it was a hopeful concept. Even an amazing, magical idea. If it was true, the longing and loneliness plaguing so many people would be eradicated. But she never had truly believed it.

Putting the flute up to her lips, Meer tentatively blew a C note. The bone was so brittle and fragile-looking she was afraid it would shatter with the effort. The sound was awkward, trying but failing to become music. Again she played the note and waited but nothing in her rose up and presented itself. What had she expected? In her memory lurches Archer only wanted the flute if it could be delivered with the song. Without that the instrument was a curiosity, nothing more. Even with the song it might be nothing more.

The candelabra Sebastian had left on the table near the piano cast flickering shadows on the walls and in the half light Meer studied the flute.

One of her favorite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a melancholy nocturnal scene by Georges de la Tour, called The Penitent Magdalene. In it a slight, brown-haired woman, her face turned away, sat in a darkened room where a single candle burned, its image reflected in an ornately framed mirror, drenching her in its mystical light. There were castoff pearls on the table and gold necklaces and bracelets dropped on the floor. In her lap, her hands clasped a skull.

In this candlelight, the flute in Meer’s hands took on the same mysterious color and portentous glow as the human bone in the painting.

Studying the hundreds of black markings engraved into the cylinder, she struggled to find just one that was familiar, but none were. Whether they were a long-lost language of ancient hieroglyphics or meaningless symbols, she didn’t know or remember from any of her memory surges. But she did remember how it felt in her hands before…somewhere in time when she’d first touched this slim bone, when she stole it from an urn hanging on a tree by the side of a sacred river in a land she couldn’t even name.

The object measured six inches long and was less than two inches around: too small to be Devadas’s ulna or radius, femur or tibia, but it could be a piece of any of them.

Devadas?

Across all the years, she’d suddenly and inexplicably remembered the name of the man who had once held her in his arms, and it was as familiar as the elusive music she’d been almost hearing since she was a child.

She whispered it out loud: “Devadas.”

Closing her eyes, Meer struggled to remember more of the memory surge that had presented itself to Margaux in Beethoven’s house in Baden that had something to do with a burial scene and this bone, but there was only the chaos of thousands of gossamer cobwebs connecting one time to another. Somewhere at the center of the perplexity was the certainty that the marks were ciphers that translated into the memory song.

Casper Neidermier and Rudolph Toller were right about that. Beethoven was right too.

Meer needed to call her father. These were manmade marks: an archaic alphabet of sound. Maybe he’d know something about them. Maybe they were connected to the Gematria, the reading of the Hebraic words and letters translated into mystical numbers, a holy language that he’d been studying most of his life.