The Memory Painter

Bryan stared at the chessboard and laughed. He had just met the most amazing woman—a woman who had gone to war with him for two hours and almost won—and he hadn’t even asked her name. Somehow it hadn’t felt necessary.

Her weakness, he could tell, was that she calculated to extremes instead of trusting her intuition. It didn’t matter if she could see twenty moves ahead if she couldn’t follow the thread in the game. Maybe one day he would talk her into playing blindfolded. Then she might be able to beat him.

He realized he was already assuming a future where they would meet again—because they would. He was sure of it.

Bryan had only been at the museum for a few minutes when he saw her. When he did, it was as if his world had stopped and then started again. He had taken those steps toward her involuntarily, needing to dissolve the space between them.

He had stood beside her, feigning interest in whatever she was looking at, waiting for her to notice him while his artist’s eye memorized every detail about her. She was tall, her body frail and delicate like a dancer, the blond flyaway curls on her head careless and fresh. On some level he felt as if he already knew her, and yet he didn’t know what to say. She was too lovely.

When she had looked at him, he had stared into her eyes, unable to look away as he recognized lifetimes hidden within them. And meeting her now, he knew without a doubt that the visions he had suffered since childhood were in fact memories. It was something he had tried to convince himself of all his life: that somehow his dreams were pieces of a past that belonged to his soul. Clinging to that belief had somehow helped him feel less insane. The people in his visions had actually lived, and he had found their lives chartered in history, but still he had always wondered if he was deluding himself—until now, because he couldn’t shake his sense of certainty that she had shared those lives with him.

Bryan had been too stunned to speak to her, so he’d left, or pretended to.

His only course had been to follow her, although he had felt like a fool, lurking thirty feet behind. What would he say if she turned around and noticed him? How could he explain his actions?

He had almost lost her on the T, but had relaxed after he realized her destination was Harvard Square. Now he had an excuse to be there.

Ever since he had returned to Boston three months ago, he found himself at Harvard Square playing chess at least once a week. His love for the game had come after he had remembered the life of Pedro Damiano, a Portuguese chess master who lived in the fifteen hundreds. Pedro had written the first manual on chess strategy to be embraced by the Western world, and after Bryan had remembered Damiano’s life, he had also inherited the man’s expertise for the game—including his joy for playing blindfolded.

Those memories had come five years ago; and wherever Bryan had lived since, he had always sought out a park where players congregated to play. Within a month of moving back to Boston, he knew all the regulars at Harvard Square. Only two were good enough for him to bother playing, although they could never beat him. They were both men, and the man she had played today was one of them. Bryan had observed the pair from afar and whistled softly to himself when she had won.