The Memory Painter

The color drained from Barbara’s face, and Bryan realized he had just spoken to her as Michael. It was something he had said to her verbatim during their last fight.

“The way you said my name just now…” she was clearly battling a ghost. “Since when am I Barbara? I thought my title was Mom.”

Bryan turned back to the clock and began to fiddle with it. Neither spoke for several minutes.

“It doesn’t work,” she announced unnecessarily. “But it was so beautiful I had to buy it. The man said it was French and very old.”

Bryan opened the back to look inside at the mechanism that made it tick. “It is old, but it’s not French. It’s Dutch.”

“How do you know that?”

Because I built it in the seventeenth century. How the hell his mother found it at a flea market was beyond him. But she had done that all his life: found objects he could identify from his past. It was one of her talents.

In this particular lifetime, Bryan had been Christiaan Huygens. His father, Constantijn, was a poet and composer—friend to Descartes, Rembrandt, and many others. Christiaan’s mother had died when he was eleven after giving birth to his sister, and his father had never recovered from the loss. Constantijn hadn’t known how to relate to his children, and when Descartes recognized Christiaan’s budding genius, he suggested that Christiaan be sent to school in Leiden.

Christiaan excelled and he soon surpassed his teachers. He wrote the first book on probability theory and hypothesized a law of motion, which Isaac Newton would later reformulate. His quest to understand mechanics led him into every field … mathematics, physics, astronomy. He proposed that light was made of waves and discovered centrifugal force. A master in optics, he also created a refracting telescope, which he used to speculate that Saturn had rings and to detect its first moon, Titan.

But Christiaan’s greatest passion was time. And when he designed the pendulum clock, the most precise timekeeper of its day, he helped the world to capture it.

Christiaan had sent the clock that Bryan was holding to his father as a gift just before the old man died. Bryan still couldn’t believe that Barbara had found it. Had she been Constantijn? No … she couldn’t be. He forced himself to focus and he stared deep into her eyes, actively seeking the recognition.

Attempting to place a person in the past was something he generally tried to avoid, but in moments like these he couldn’t resist the impulse. He had learned how to recognize someone’s spirit by honing his thoughts in on them and connecting with them through their eyes. On a rare occasion a recognition would come without his trying, especially if he was angry or upset, but usually it took immense concentration. Barbara stared back at him with her eyebrows raised, clearly baffled by the silent exchange.