The Painting Was on the Wrong Wall

Business trip, mid-range hotel, a lobby like a thousand lobbies. Except the moment the doors sighed open, recognition dropped on me like a net: the brown leather chairs, the smell of lilies and floor polish, the clock with Roman numerals, the painting of a harbour at dusk. I knew this room. Knew it with years of weight, though I had verifiably never been in that city.

I stood inside the door cataloguing the fit, piece by piece, and everything matched except one thing, and the one thing is the reason I am writing this. In my memory — and it behaved like memory, not imagination — the harbour painting hung to the right of the clock. It was hanging to the left. The wrongness of it was almost physical, like a picture hung crooked in your own home. Everything else: perfect. That: mirrored.

I am not proud of what I did next, but I did it. I asked the concierge whether the painting had always been on that wall. He was young and shrugging, but an older porter overheard and came across, pleased to be asked about the building. Oh no, he said. It hung on the other side of the clock for twenty-odd years. They moved it during the renovation — he counted on his fingers — four years ago, when the reception desk was widened.

Four years ago I had never left my home country. My passport is blunt on this point, and so is my bank account from that era.

So the room I 'remembered' was the room as it existed before I could possibly have seen it, accurate to the placement of a single frame. I checked out a day early. Everyone I tell this to focuses on the wrong part — how lovely, a past life, whatever. What keeps me up is smaller and worse: if that memory is in my head with four years of dust on it, whose was it first?