The Memorist

Chapter 68

Wednesday, April 30^th-9:15 p.m.

“You shouldn’t have phoned your father but at least there’s no possibility of anyone tracing the call if it went through the switchboard,” Sebastian said. “You can’t phone Malachai either. What if his hotel room phone is tapped? People other than us are desperate for what’s sitting next to you.”

One by one Sebastian lit the candles he’d brought upstairs, and as the room became brighter the scent of paraffin intensified, imbuing the air with an aroma that for Meer, harkened back to long-lost memories. He came and sat down next to her.

“Wouldn’t you kill for the chance to find the memory song and to finally remember the whole story behind all the fractured images that have been torturing you since you were a little girl?” he asked. The depth of sadness in his eyes was almost intolerable to look at.

He didn’t know her well enough to even guess at how far she’d go to quiet her memories. It was Nicolas he was thinking of, Nicolas in his hospital room, dissociated and disconnected, drawing the haunted face of some lost child and chanting the Jewish prayer for the dead.

“If I talked you through it, would you try to hypnotize me?” Meer asked.

“You don’t have to, I know how. When Rebecca wouldn’t let me bring a hypnotist in to see Nicolas, Dr. Alderman, a member of the Society, taught me.” He hesitated. “You’re kind to do this for me.”

“For Nicolas,” she corrected.

There was every reason for the session to be a success. Sebastian’s voice was a comfortable and comforting timbre and the instructions he gave were similar to those that Malachai used. The lighting was soft-thanks to the power outage and the candles-and there was no noise to distract her and prevent her from entering a deep stage of relaxation.

Except there was a vise on her consciousness keeping her in the reality of the hard-edged moment. After trying three times, Sebastian stopped. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said. “You’re not relaxing.”

Getting up from the couch, she went over to the piano where the flute rested on the velvet-cushioned seat glowing in the candle’s light.

“I’m sorry,” she said without taking her eyes off of it.

Sebastian walked into the bar area, opened the small refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine. “It’s still cold,” he said. He poured two glasses and brought one to her. “You have nothing to apologize for. Come, sit down with me. We have the flute. We’ll figure out the rest.”

As she sipped the wine, she stole looks across the room at the ancient bone instrument, as if willing it to give up its secret.

“Have you ever wondered what triggered Nicolas’s breakdown?”

“I have an idea, but there’s no way to know for sure.”

“You think he saw the child’s skull the gardener dug up at Steinhof?”

Sebastian nodded. “Nicolas was there…all the children were…playing outside. I think Rebecca believes so, too, but whenever I tried to talk to her about it she became irrationally defensive-as if because it happened on her turf it was her fault…” He stopped talking and looked off into the distance. Picking up the bottle, he refilled their glasses, and for a while they sat there in silence.

An hour later, Meer woke up still sitting on the couch. In her head was the music she’d been hearing all her life. She recognized the tune, as if she’d always known it. She opened her eyes and smiled, thinking that she was finally going to be able to play the song and then all this would be over. But in the few seconds between having her first conscious thought and opening her eyes, the memory of the music faded.

“You fell asleep,” Sebastian said from the table where he peeled an orange. “One minute you were sipping the wine, the next your eyes were closed.” He gestured to plates of cheese, bread, sliced meats and fruit. “I brought up some food. You must be hungry.”

She wasn’t but knew she needed to eat something so she managed half the orange and some cheese.

“For safety’s sake, even though it’s unlikely anyone was able to follow us, we should probably take turns sleeping,” he suggested.

“Well, I already had my nap. You go ahead.”

After Sebastian retired to the bedroom, Meer brought the flute over to the coffee table. As the hours passed, she sat vigil over the instrument. Finally, unable to resist, she examined it once more, scanning up and down the lines of engraved markings, not focusing on any one of them but visually playing with all the shapes.

Through the window, the full moon shone through the gap in the drapes onto her lap, onto the flute, casting the bone in a bluish light, making the incisions appear even deeper than they were. Shutting her eyes, she touched them with her fingertip. One after the next. Tactually discovering each shape.

Meer sat like that for a long time, listening to the occasional sound of a car whooshing down the rainy street, touching her treasure, trying not to think, sleepy, almost dozing…

Her finger moved around and around one shape. Sleep…easy, dreamless, quiet sleep was at the center of the circle she touched. Once more around and Meer was certain she’d find the end of the dream and finally be able to rest. Everyone would be able to rest. Not just her. Not just now. Everyone. For all time. Around and around. One circle. Another circle. Three. Four. Five. Six circles. Another. Another. Nine. Ten. Ten circles. One inside the next.

Meer looked down. Her finger was tracing a deeply engraved circle close to the mouthpiece. It wasn’t just a simple circle but several tiny carved circles, a series of tight concentric circles, ten in all.

She remembered this symbol. Had seen it before. But where?

Playing the memory game, she went through an exercise of seeing the circles in her mind, then widening out as if she was stepping back and saw them on a gray metal disk and then widened out again and again and finally was in her mother’s antique store twenty-five years ago.

The elderly man with the droopy white mustache, gold-tipped walking stick and heavy German accent showed Pauline Logan a clock he wanted her to buy from him.

“Clocks like this were only made for a hundred years,” the man said. “Music clocks, they were called. Very entertaining. Very popular. So popular even master composers wrote music for them. Listen if you will. This piece is very lovely. Beethoven wrote it just for these clocks.”

The music that emanated from that ancient timepiece was Meer’s introduction to classical music; the first piece that wedged its way into her consciousness. Every day for as many months as the clock was in the store, Meer would sit and watch the minutes move forward while she waited for the clock to play its magic music on the hour. It was the only antique in the store that she’d cared about and had cried bitterly when it was sold. As recompense, her mother had offered to give her piano lessons so she could learn to play the music herself. But she hadn’t been able to play the Beethoven piece and she never stopped missing her clock. And it had been her clock. She’d learned every inch of it: the face, the steel flutes, the casing, the inner workings and the maker’s mark engraved on the back of the face.

The same mark she was looking at now.

Ten concentric circles.

And exactly like that maker’s mark there were small perpendicular lines marking these circles, too. Little nicks. Meer was sure, even though it had been so long ago, that they were in the same places; certain that everything about these circles on the ancient bone flute was identical to those on the back of the clock that had introduced her to music so long ago: to Beethoven’s music.

It happened instantly, without warning, without the cold embrace she was used to. There was no sense of time flattening out or turning over on itself. She simply knew how to find the memory song. In her mind’s eye she performed the magic: cut the symbol of ten circles in half and, as if they were made of string, laid them out horizontally into ten straight lines.

Ten lines with small marks on them in various places. Not an arbitrary abstract design but a perfect musical staff, and on each of the lines were marks that she now understood as notes.

C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-G#-D#-A#-E#.

She studied the familiar musical sequence and so many different things she’d read, and her father had told her, and her teachers at Juilliard had taught, all coalesced. This was the Circle of Fifths Pythagoras had identified over 2500 years before, tying harmonic relationships to the human energy system. The fifth was also the interval found in most sacred music and said to harmonize human energy. Pythagoras had used music compositions based on this interval to heal illness, to effect mood changes. It was said that through exploring his past lives he’d discovered a constant: a universal life form inhabiting and connecting all living things: vibration. Everything, he said, from a grain of sand to the stars, was in a state of constant vibration.

As if she was reaching out into that collective unconscious that her father always talked about, and plucking the information like a grape from a cluster, she understood that these twelve notes that Devadas’s brother, Rasul, had engraved on the bone flute were his memory song in honor of a truncated life. A song he wrote to soothe the young girl Ohana, who had brought him her lover’s bone, whose heart had been cut down the middle and separated into before there was tragedy, and after. A song to help Ohana remember that before there was a death there had been a life, and before that life a death and that there would be a life after this death too. The circles would continue on without end and everyone who was once connected would be connected again.