The Memory Painter

When a group of people moved aside, it offered Linz a glimpse of another painting nearby: the Palace of Versailles under construction. The detail in the sprawling image captured the transformation of King Louis XIII’s hunting lodge to Louis XIV’s opulent palace to perfection. Hundreds of workers had been painted in miniature, draining swamps, clearing trees, and expanding the building’s core. On the periphery, the geometric expanse of the gardens was beginning to take shape, with the king himself overseeing its design.

Overcome by the urge to see everything, Linz abandoned her friends. “I’m going to take a look around,” she murmured and wandered toward the first wall.

She lingered at the Versailles painting. The longer she stared at it, the more she was filled with a strange desire to be in seventeenth-century France. The painting was signed Louis Le Vau, and she wondered if he existed. She’d have to look him up when she got home.

Next, she moved to a rendering of Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, as it would have appeared in the fourteen hundreds. The artist had conjured a breathtaking vista thick with people in motion, in the midst of some kind of religious ceremony. Again, it was as if time had opened a portal so she could peer into the past. She bent down to study the signature. Instead of a name, it was a symbol of an eagle with a tiny feather in its claw.

The next canvas told another story, of a bedouin family on their way to lay offerings at the Treasury in Petra. The dawn light cast golden embers over the city, which was carved within a mountain. A young man stood high on a cliff, playing a wooden pan flute to the girl down below as she walked with her parents and her brothers. The girl was looking back at him, her head tilted upward with a smile. The moment had been captured so vividly; the song the boy played resonated in the paint.

Every painting was a masterpiece—even Linz could tell that. She assumed the artist must have traveled to each location in order to paint with such authenticity. But it wasn’t just their beauty—something about the images pulled at her, making her want to be alone with them in the room.

She turned the corner, where a freestanding wall had been erected to hold a single painting, the largest and most dramatic piece in the gallery. The moment she saw it, her thoughts vanished and she was suddenly standing on a mental precipice that was threatening to give way.

Minutes stretched to their breaking point. Every brushstroke screamed back at her. Somehow this artist had reached into her mind and captured something known only to her.