The Memory Artists

  Dr. Vorta froze for two seconds before turning round, his eyes trained on the notebook. He had a cataract in one of them. “You found your father’s … Right, leave it with me.” He took the book from Noel’s hand, opened it up. “Your father was a brilliant neuropharmacologist, Noel. But remember, near the end, your father was not … a well man.” He perused the bleeding letters. “I’ll take a look, but these are probably just mad ravings …”

  After wincing at that last phrase, Noel slumped out of the office, mutely and meekly.

  In ten minutes he returned. “I can’t wait any longer!” he screamed at Dr. Vorta, barging in on his synaesthesia tests with a young patient. “I can’t wait for the approval of new drugs, I can’t wait for the clinical trials! My mother is dying! Don’t you understand that? I can’t be patient, I’m looking at infinity. This is not supposed to happen at her age. Soon she’ll forget who I am. Then she’ll forget to eat, to swallow, to breathe. She’s fifty-six and she’s sinking into a black freaking pit! She’s no longer the same person—she’s not a person at all! You’re her doctor and you’ve done nothing. The only thing you’ve ever done is write about her and put her in ‘promising’ drug experiments. But you put her in the placebo group! You wasted a year of her life!” Noel punctuated this last phrase by picking up a laurel-wreathed bust of Wagner and smashing it on the floor, which caused macaque monkeys in hidden cages to scurry and scream. He then began sweeping things off the doctor’s desk, looking for his father’s notes. “And don’t you ever call my father mad, do you hear me?”

  “Noel, do not touch anything on that desk. I’m warning you, you little …” He picked up the phone. “Madame Prévert? W4. Oui, c’est ça …”

  “And if this is a Farnsworth Musell test, what was that girl doing with her top off?”

  Dr. Vorta, after hanging up the phone and nervously stroking his chemically whitened beard, closed the curtain and informed his patient the test was over. He then instructed Noel to get out of his office and stay out, that if he ever came back there’d be a straitjacket and van waiting for him.16

  Chapter 9

  Norval & Samira

  Norval Blaquière lived in a converted millinery factory on rue de la Commune in Old Montreal, which he had turned into a kind of nineteenth-century salon. There were framed reproductions of Thomas Cooper Gotch’s Death the Bride, with a woman in a field of poppies; Henry A. Payne’s The Enchanted Sea, with drowned and drowning women; Rochegrosse’s Les Derniers jours de Babylone; Félicien Rops’ vampish Woman on a Rocking Horse. Others reflected Norval’s penchant for long-haired women: Millais’ liquid-locked Ophelia; Stanhope’s orange-haired prostitute in Thoughts of the Past; Henner’s La Lectrice, in which a naked Mary Magdalene reads from a book encircled by her flame-red curls; Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, the Keats heroine who holds a knight captive in her long tresses.

  “Why do you have these morbid pictures of women all over the place?” Samira asked, on her third day at the loft. “And what is it about women’s hair? A fetish?”

  “Long and loosened tresses are a symbol of a woman reverting to a state of nature. Like an animal’s mane …”

  “Oh, please …”

  “ … It was a powerful symbol in the nineteenth century—in a period of hats and chignons. Today, of course, hairdressers butcher and plastify women’s hair, which I’ll never understand. It should be a wilderness. Worse is shorn underarms and montes pubis. I trust you’ve not dared …”

  “Is that a picture of Astérix over there? With the sword? Why would you—”

  “Never mind.” Norval banished the question with a wave of the hand.

  “And who’s that guy in the photograph next to it, sitting on your bed? It’s the only picture of a man in the whole place, apart from Astérix. Is that you?”

  “No, it’s … Noel.”

  “Noel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Noel … never mind.”

  “Is he what? A crypto-homo? Am I?”

  “Is Noel related to you?”

  “Not even distantly.”

  “You’re almost like twins.”

  Norval sighed. “So we’ve been told. Which may be one of the reasons we clicked. The doppelgänger phenomenon, the search for the invisible twin, the demystification of narcissism …”

  Why does he speak like he’s lecturing? Samira wondered. “And the presage of imminent death?” And why am I sounding like the brownnosed student?

  “That too. Like matter and its double, anti-matter. You shake hands and you’re annihilated.”

  Samira smiled, then thought of a novel she’d been forced to read at school, and a line in an essay that got a checkmark in the margin. “Is your friendship like the one between Max and Emil in Hesse’s Demian? A bond that frees a person from other bonds and leads into a new dimension?”

  “No.”

  “Right. So is Noel your double, or your opposite? You’re different in so many ways.”

  “He’s left-handed, I’m right.”

  “Noel seems, well, anal retentive, whereas you seem …”

  “Anal explosive.”

  “And you two move so differently—”

  “Especially when he’s nervous. He gets so spasmodic you start looking for the strings. Remember when he met you?”

  “Yes, but … why did that make him nervous?”

  “Because he thought you were an actress he’s in love with.”

  Samira nodded slowly, lost in a maze of thoughts. “The poor actress, to look like me.”

  “Well, it’s true you look like hell, but when healthy I imagine you look almost average.”

  “Such flattery.”

  “Perhaps I did get carried away.”

  “You don’t like women, do you.”

  “Generally, I hold them in medium esteem.”

  “And men?”

  “Much lower.”

  “You’re a misanthrope, in other words.”

  “How can anyone not be? The human species, the evolution of the human species, was all a colossal mistake. Darwin must have realised that. Humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor around six million years ago—we share 98.7 per cent of the same genes. But the genes in our brain somehow evolved differently, giving us greater brain power. So what have we done with this brain power? We’ve used it for the pursuit of narcissism, to prove that we’re the only living things that matter in this world.”

  “But you’re … never mind.” You’re quite a narcissist yourself, she was about to say.

  “And this evolution, this development of the brain, has not gone well. In fact it’s been botched—the glitches, bugs, cross-wirings in the brain have given us things like depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s …”

  “And misanthropy?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what should we do? What can humans do with all this bad wiring? Should we dumb down, go back to living like chimps?”

  “That’s already happening.”

  “Think of all the great individuals, the geniuses in the world, the great scientific advances—”

  “Modern civilisation no longer produces great individuals, geniuses. Instead of forests with giant trees, we get scraggly saplings with roots no deeper than a thimble. If you doubt that, watch any awards show.”

  “How about John Lennon or Kurt Cobain or Marie Curie or Krzysztof Kie ´slowski or—”

  “We’re on the same path as the dinosaurs. Nature will have its revenge, and the sooner the better. The world is obscenely overpopulated. What we need, what Noel should concoct in his laboratory, is a pathogen that would destroy half the world’s population overnight.”

  “Only half? So as to save a race you detest?”

  Norval arched an eyebrow. “OK, all. And I shouldn’t say nature will have its revenge. Nothingness will have its revenge—a rogue black hole with the weight of ten million suns will take things back to that … that not-anything state that preceded the big bang.”
>
  “You don’t say. And have there ever been … exceptions to your general dislike of humanity? Noel, presumably?”

  Norval took a drag from his Arrow. “Correct.”

  “Does he teach Symbolist lit as well? Is that where you met him? At school?”

  “No. But I pulled strings to get him in. He lasted one course.”

  What is my role in this conversation? Samira asked herself. Prompter? “Why did he last only one course?”

  “He had trouble understanding the students’ questions.”

  “Does he have … qualifications, a degree?”

  “No, but he was accepted at MIT as a teenager by getting unheard-of marks in the entrance exams. And he was asked to attend McGill by the Dean of Sciences.”

  “But he didn’t graduate.”

  “No.”

  “So what do you two … share?”

  “The relief of being wordlessly understood. A companion mind.”

  “I mean, he seems so taciturn and unsure of himself and, I don’t know, unhappy, whereas you seem—”

  “He’s a Scot. Ipso facto, not of a sanguine nature. Like his father he’s got the black choler, the humour of despair. When he’s down he thinks the period will never end, when he’s up he thinks it will shortly end.”

  “Are you sure he’s OK? I mean, he looks …”

  “He needs a bit of sleep, that’s all.”

  “ … crushed, depressed, heading towards a crash. He’s got that dark look on his face. I’ve seen the symptoms before. He seems so … grave. In the three times I’ve seen him at the lab he’s not smiled once. Does he ever laugh? Does he have a sense of humour, is he witty?”

  “Noel couldn’t concoct something amusing to say given a month’s notice.”

  “Is he … all there? Mentally, I mean?”

  “Noel Burun? Are you kidding? Do you know his pedigree? Related on one side to Lord Byron himself, and on the other to a long line of Scots physicians. Noel’s superhuman, he can visualise things with painterly awareness, summon things you or I would never be able to summon given a hundred lifetimes, things never seen in the wildest visions of a witches’ Sabbath. Don’t be fooled by Noel—he has the mind and imagination of a master artist, or master scientist. He’s a fluke of fucking nature, a psychomnemonic wonder, with almost unhuman eidetic powers.”

  “I thought you said there weren’t any geniuses left.”

  “He’s the last. You should bear his children.”

  Samira laughed. “So does he belong to any, you know, organisations, like Mensa or …”

  “Mensa? You’ve got to be kidding. A self-congratulating club of wankers who don’t have the intelligence not to be a member. Games of three-dimensional Scrabble and a cup of Ovaltine—Noel’s beyond that crap. He’s in another dimension.”

  “What did you mean by ‘eidetic powers’?”

  “A photographic memory, preternaturally vivid and persistent. With self-generating links and catalytic images that spawn other memories, right back to his suckling hours. He’s a hypermnesiac—he doesn’t forget a goddamn thing. He’s like Proust, like Proust squared. He’s got a million megabytes of memory, a million emotions and sensations and images and God knows what else to draw on.17 He’s not there yet, but he’ll be a great writer one day, greater than Proust. Or perhaps a visionary artistpoet like Rossetti or Blake. Mark my words.”

  “I never know when you’re joking. Are you now?”

  “Never felt less inclined to. What’s the most important material for an artist?”

  “According to Proust? Memories?”

  “Infancy. Which most of us forget entirely. When a young child sees, for the first time, a rainbow in the mist of a crashing wave, a trompe l’oeil wheel turning backwards, a ‘ghostly galleon’ behind clouds, that is when a great poem or great painting or great symphony is born. On a subconscious level, naturally. So it becomes a question of finding, of recapturing that pure moment of pure sensation, that …”

  “So what’s stopping—”

  “… that vividness and anarchy of an infant’s vision. What I’m referring to is the infinity of childhood.”

  “The essence of innocence itself.”

  “When an infant sees the world he doesn’t fear it, he marvels at it. When he’s older it just fills him with anxiety, dread. Why? Because of death, an awareness of death. But Noel can still summon that primordial vision, those prelapsarian colours—if he sets his mind to it. It’s all there, intact, in Noel’s mental kitchen. If he breaks the shackles, he could be another Rousseau,18 for Christ’s sake.”

  “Rousseau? Great. The man who put all five of his children into foundling hospitals.”

  “Or Baudelaire, who thought that genius was no more than childhood recaptured at will, with an adult’s means to express it.”

  “Would another analogy be the music of our youth? Which we never forget? Because it’s the only music that ever really reached us, touched our soul? I mean, old people never listen to new music, they reject it all, they return perpetually to the music of their innocent, impressionable youth. Lullabies, children’s songs, teenage music. Is that the sort of thing we’re talking about?”

  Norval stubbed out his cigarette. “No.”

  Samira nodded. “Right. So what are the ‘shackles’ you mentioned? What’s stopping Noel from being a great artist?”

  “A weak motor and broken rudder. And like every failure he spends an hour worrying for every minute doing. But he’ll get there eventually.”

  “What does he worry about?”

  “You name it. He worried the first time he had shit stains in his diapers. He then ground his teeth in his sleep so savagely it took three orthodontists to fix them. Now he worries about his weight. And his mind. Just like Byron, who had two fears, of getting fat and going mad— and who was sometimes both.”19

  Samira fell into a thoughtful silence. “Noel seems too … sensitive, too melancholic, to be able to …”

  “Melancholy’s good for art. Look at Proust. He wrote À la recherche du temps perdu while lying in bed, in a chronic state of depression.”

  “… to be able to deal with life. He seems monstrously sad—I think he’s the saddest man I’ve ever seen. Even the word ‘sad’ seems inadequate. There’s something broken in him, something completely shattered, crushed.”

  “As most geniuses are. They see the flaws, the deadly disorder in the machine.”

  “I have this feeling that if someone close to him dies, or if he’s rejected by a woman—”

  “He’s been rejected by women all his life. At first they find him cute and put up with his tongue-tied confusion and mind of many colours, but soon find him unmanageably weird. ‘Rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated’ is how Vorta describes him in a file I ... came across.”

  “Really? That’s not what I would’ve thought. I thought he’d be … well, oversensitive emotionally, dangerously oversensitive. Someone who would never get over, never forget a death or a rejection.”

  “Forget? Noel can’t forget anything, can’t block out anything. His memories haunt him forever. One of the things he can’t stop reliving, in lurid detail, is his father’s suicide.”

  “Oh, God …”

  “His wife was having an affair with Vorta. He found out, drove his car into a water-filled quarry.”

  “Are you serious? Is that what happened?”

  “It’s possible. Anyway, don’t think Noel’s problem is a woman or a broken heart. Oh, no. Noel never goes out with women.”

  Samira paused. “He prefers men?”

  “There may be the odd scuff mark on the closet door. But what I meant was that he doesn’t go out with women because he already has one. He’s already in love with a woman.”

  Samira nodded reflectively, but said nothing.

  “I might as well tell you,” said Norval. “The news will be out soon enough. Noel’s been living with a dark secret for years, ever since his father drowned himself. It invol
ves a Scotswoman of fabulous wealth and Deneuvean beauty.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “A perverse passion—with a Greek precedent.”

  “Not Oedipus Rex …”

  “And a French precedent as well. After his father died, Baudelaire and his mother lived together in what he admitted was a ‘period of passionate love,’ a ‘verdant paradise’ in which she was ‘solely and completely’ his own. It’s a bit like that for Noel and his mother.”

  “Are you making all this up?”

  “About Baudelaire? Absolutely not.”

  “About Noel.”

  “Shall we get started?”

  “Started?”

  “On The Alpha Bet.”

  At the breakfast table the following afternoon Samira asked, “Are you ever going to ask any questions about me? Like who I am, for example?”

  Norval didn’t look up from his mail, which included the Nillennium Club Newsletter. “Wasn’t on today’s planner, no.”

  Samira repressed a smile. “You’re incorrigible, mad. Not to mention a son of a bitch.”

  “You must know my mother.” Norval folded up the newsletter, emptied his third cup of espresso, then stood.

  “You must have some redeeming qualities,” said Samira.

  “No, none whatsoever.”

  “What does Noel see in you?”

  “Ask him. Listen, I’m off to the Schubert. Be back by four.”

  “The Schubert? The Piscine Schubert?” How out of character, she thought. “You swim?”

  “Daily. It’s a dress rehearsal.”

  “A dress rehearsal? For what, a play?”

  “Death. I plan to end my days in water.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I’ve heard there’s a clarity of memory that drowning people have. Which might relate to our first immersion—in amniotic fluid or the shock of baptism … not something you Arabs would ever feel, I suppose. Anyway, as you’re drowning it seems there’s this detonation of memories, crystal-clear memories from the first plunge to the last.”

  Samira shook her head. “I still can’t figure out when you’re kidding and when you’re not.” Or quoting from one of your lectures. “Isn’t air the final resting place of the soul?”