The Memory Artists

  “Endymion. ‘The spirit culls unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays through the old garden-ground of boyish days—’”

  “OK, OK. Now shut up and watch the film …”

  But Noel wasn’t listening. The letters of amaranth were strobing inside his brain, along with piggybacking words, phrases and paragraphs from distant times. It was like a mad librarian’s slide show and he decided to let it run. First came Aesop—each sentence helically cascading into the next, like slinky toys—which his mother had read to him when he was five:

  The Rose and the Amaranth

  Rose and Amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden, and the Amaranth said to her neighbour, “How I envy your beauty and sweet scent! No wonder you’re such a favourite with everyone.” But the Rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice, “Ah, my dear friend, I live but for a brief season: if no cruel hand pluck me from my stem, my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut; for they are undying.”

  Greatness carries its own penalties.

  Next came soft and rubbery words from Don Quixote, which he’d read in bed on the night of his fourteenth birthday:

  blond young maidens, none of whom seemed to be under fourteen or over eighteen, all clad in green, with their locks partly braided, partly flowing loose, but all of such bright gold as to vie with the sunbeams, and over them they wore garlands of jessamine, roses, honeysuckle, and amaranth …

  Noel opened his eyes, looked sideways at Norval, then forward at the cream-coloured subtitles of the Bergman film, which quickly dissolved into copper-coloured lines, imbricated like shingles, from Pinocchio. He was in his buffalo-wallpapered bedroom in 1973, wearing his favourite pair of clown-covered pyjamas, listening to his mother’s voice:

  The little donkey Pinocchio made his appearance in the middle of the circus. He had a new bridle of polished leather with brass buckles and studs, and two white camellias in his ears. His mane was divided and curled, and each curl was tied with bows of coloured ribbon. He had a girth of gold and silver round his body, and his tail was plaited with amaranth …

  Last, in a riverine double line, oscillating like a polygraph needle, came lambent sapphire letters from Noel’s most treasured book, The Arabian Nights:

  She stopped at a fruiterer’s shop and bought Shami apples and Osmani quinces and Omani peaches, and cucumbers of Nile growth, and Egyptian limes and Sultani oranges and citrons, and she stopped at an apothecary’s shop for tinctures of Aleppine jasmine and myrtle berry, oil of privet and camomile, blood-red anemone and pomegranate bloom, eglantine and amaranth …

  Minutes passed before the colour forms faded, the dead mood passed, and the black-and-white film images impinged on his brain.10 He’d seen Wild Strawberries before so wouldn’t have to ask Norval about the opening. And after the movie he might even describe these passages to Norval, who would understand and not criticise. Although everything else was fair game, he never made fun of his synaesthesia, never angered at his lapses of concentration. Why? Because he himself was trying to see this kind of thing—in experiments with Dr. Vorta. And because he knew Baudelaire and Rimbaud—Poe and Nabokov too—and thought his friend might one day become as great.

  When the film ended and the house lights went up, Noel readjusted the setting on his pager, slipped it back into his jacket’s inner pocket.

  “What was that?” asked Norval. “A gun?”

  Noel began to pull his jacket over a sleeveless T-shirt, his face crimsoning. “No, it’s a … beeper.”

  This gave Norval pause. “And that?” He pointed towards a tattoo on his friend’s upper arm. “Very nineties. Let’s have a look.”

  Reluctantly, Noel pulled his arm out of the sleeve, revealing a black bull’s head with silver horns between two red flags with black staves. The words HOLD FAST, in vermilion, arched over top. “McCleod crest.”

  “Your mother’s clan?” said Norval.

  Noel hesitated. Out of a fear of being called a mommy’s boy? He was used to that by now; it didn’t bother him a bit. He’d never thought about cutting the apron strings; they were never too tight. But some things are private. And he was tired of hearing that bloody Scottish twaddle every time his mother’s name came up. But maybe he’ll resist the urge just this once, to amaze me … “Yes.”

  “Ay, yer daft aboot her, yer right radge. Och weel …”

  Nimbus clouds had gathered outside—noctilucent plumbago and Mars-violet nimbostrati, Noel remarked—as Norval was about to hail a cab. But at the last second, as one came sharking to a halt, he changed his mind, waving it on its way. From the pocket of his greatcoat he extracted a fresh pack of Mohawk Arrows. Plain, heavies.

  “How is it,” he said, piercing the cellophane with his thumbnail, “that I have not received a single invitation to your Outremont manor? We’ve known each other, what, six months?”

  “We met at the theatre on the sixth of March, 2001. So that would make it ten months, one week, one day. Do you remember, it was just before rain, an ice-storm as it turned out …”

  “I have no recollection of the weather.”

  “… and we saw Zabriskie Point—”

  “Or the film. The question is, why have I never been allowed into your house? I have waited at your door like a dunce, I have rung your ding-dong bell, but not once have I been admitted. What are you hiding? A crystal meth lab in the cellar? A lunatic mother, chained in the attic?”

  Noel winced. “Not exactly, no.”

  Norval paused to light his cigarette. “Is it true what they say?” His words sent a vapour trail into Noel’s nostrils.

  “What do they say?” said Noel, sputtering, flapping his hand.

  “That your mother’s beautiful, extraordinarily well preserved for a woman of …”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “Fifty-six. And that she has a passing resemblance—nay, a striking resemblance—to Catherine Deneuve. Or is it Charlotte Rampling?”

  “Maybe a bit of both.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Mrs. Burun.”

  “Her first name.”

  “Stella.”

  Norval nodded, ruminating. “I’ve also heard that the reason you’ve never had a girlfriend is that you’re blindly, unnaturally in love with the woman.”

  Noel smiled bleakly. “Who’s been telling you all this?” Surely not Dr. Vorta …

  “In the last week, how often have you seen her with her clothes off?”

  Noel sighed. “Often enough.”

  “Brilliant. I knew it. I knew there was some dark …”

  Here Noel tuned out. Samira had crept back into his brain. There was something irresistible about her. Her voice, for example. A good sign! Low and rich, a trifle husky, it caused indigo diamonds with blue-tinged halos, like the rings of Saturn, to revolve inside his head … And her incredible eyes, twinkling with irony, the colour of … what would you call it? The human eye, he knew better than most, can distinguish some ten million colours, so there obviously aren’t names for all of them. Nor in his own lexicon of two thousand colours was there a name for that shade. It was a complex hybrid: Roman umber certainly, but with lurking black opal and smoky topaz and a tinge of …

  “Noel, I seem to be talking to myself here.”

  “Amaranth!”

  “Yes, but we’ve moved on from that subject.”

  “Sorry, what’s the new subject?”

  Norval sighed. He had a theory, which he now repeated, that the only woman Noel would ever be able to make love to would be someone very close, someone he had known for a very long time, someone he trusted with his life, someone whose voice didn’t vandalize his thoughts.

  “ … to conclude,” said Norval, “in this house from which I am barred, are you acting upon Oedipal impulses? Are you sharing an incestuous bed? Are you in diabolical love with your mother?”

  Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive: mother’s love for her child, and chil
d’s love for mother. “Well, on some nights we do end up sharing a bed … And I do love her, more than anyone else in the world. Don’t you yours?”

  “Leave my mother out of it. She’s a sack of excrement. Answer the question.”

  “I’m suspicious about why you’re asking it. Are you yourself, by any chance, hiding some dark secret? A homoerotic adventure? Sex with a minor? Sex with a student? An incestuous relationship of your own?”

  “Homoerotic adventure? At boarding school every form of transgressive sex was openly indulged, from mutual masturbation and circle jerks to sadomasochism and gang sodomy. Sex with a minor? Every boy of good looks, myself included, had a female name and was recognised as a public prostitute. Sex with a student? In the last five years, I’ve not got through a single semester without bedding fewer than three students. Incest? My father remarried, had two girls. Before either had reached their teens, I’d slept with them both. For Claire, the eldest, it was the first—and last—orgasm of her life. She married a book critic.”

  Noel laughed. “You’re making all this up, it sounds too … too Byronic to be true.”

  A new cigarette appeared magically between Norval’s fingers, which he lit with its predecessor. “I shit you not. The point is that you, not I, are hiding something.”

  Noel sighed, bit his lip. “I’m not really hiding … I mean, the thing is … I suppose I should have … well, explained things a long time ago. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come back to the house and see for yourself?”

  “A Highland welcome at last. Grr-and. I’m dying to see the … the sink of iniquity and mère fatale. Not to mention the alchemist’s den. In which I suspect you’ve been doing a bit of designing, synthesising—”

  “I have, actually. But as for the house, I should warn you that—”

  “Put that thing in the trunk of a cab.” He nodded towards Noel’s mother’s bike, which had collapsed against its pole, front wheel upturned and handlebars askew. “En route, I’ll tell you more about the latest member of The Alpha Bet.”

  Noel’s expression darkened. “Did you take advantage of her?”

  “What was that expression? Something from your mother’s era, I believe?”

  “Did you have sex with Samira?”

  Norval inhaled nearly a third of his Arrow and sent a volcanic cloud of smoke and vapour up towards a crippled maple, its limbs scarred or shorn by ice-storms. “Hardly. When we arrived at the loft she was practically sleepwalking. In fact, we should probably stop there on our way, see if she’s sentient. Do you mind if she tags along?”

  I couldn’t possibly have them over, thought Noel, I’ll make a complete stooge of myself … “No, I don’t mind at all if she, Samira, tags along. But on second thought, it might be better if we … if we met at my place a bit later. In a couple hours or so. I’ve got some things to … take care of.”

  Norval eyed his friend suspiciously. “When I ring your bell you’d better answer it. And don’t even think about disturbing any of the sordid evidence.”

  “See you in a couple hours?”

  “Taxi!” was the reply.

  Chapter 5

  “SB”

  When Noel arrived home he turned off his pager connected to the alarm, punched in letters on the digital lock, unfastened dead bolts. From the inside, the door had been disguised not to look like a door, blending seamlessly with the wall. He had forty-five seconds to deactivate the alarm, which was halfway down the hall.

  “Mother! Everything all right?” He pushed buttons on the alarm, and was about to run upstairs to her bedroom when he heard a noise from the family room.

  “Is that you, dear?” his mother replied with a mild Scots burr. “Dinner’s almost ready!”

  “Be right there, Mom.” He expelled a sigh of relief and made his way to the end of the hall, under the new fire alarm, past the new fire extinguisher case, towards the new bathroom. He was already sweating: every time he entered the house he felt like he was on a long baker’s shovel, slipping into the oven. He looked at the thermostat, turned it down to 80. A red nightlight below it was still shining; he stooped to flick it off. Shouldn’t waste electricity, we’re bleeding money by the bucket.

  On the bathroom door was a large sketch, with the identifying word TOILET. Inside, next to the item in question, were aluminum handrails and knurled grab bars. The handrails were anchored into studs and not drywall, as the manufacturer suggested. Noel eyed the bright yellow padded toilet seat, whose lid had been removed. On the floor was a broken seat-raiser with arms, awaiting repairs. On the wall beside the toilet were instructions:

  1. Lift up skirt/pull down pants, etc.

  2. Sit down on yellow seat.

  3. Relax.

  4. Wait for egress.

  5. Use toilet paper. ↓

  6. Push green flushing lever. →

  Noel followed the instructions to the letter, including using the pink toilet paper and pressing the lever with a FLUSH decal on it. He stood up and looked in the mirror, on which another sign had been pasted:

  1. Take toothbrush. ↓

  2. Put paste on brush. →

  3. Brush your top teeth. ↑

  4. Brush your lower teeth.↓

  5. Rinse mouth with water.↓

  Noel washed his hands, walked out of the bathroom and down the hall. Along the way, he looked for signs that everything was all right.

  “Hi Mom, how are things?”

  “Not so good.”

  “But … what are you doing?”

  Books were scattered over the rush matting of the family room, and one bookcase had capsized. His mother was sitting cross-legged on a Persian carpet, two open books on her lap. “I can never remember where we keep it,” she said.

  “Keep what?”

  “You know.”

  “The money?”

  His mother nodded.

  “Mom, we don’t hide our money anymore. I did it as a kid, remember? Because you did it as a kid.”

  “It’s in one of these books but I can’t remember which one. My entire fortune.”

  “No, it’s not—”

  “Yes it is, I just never told you.”

  “Mom, we don’t have a fortune. Not anymore. What little money we do have is kept in a bank. Would you like to go and make a withdrawal? Would you like me to go?”

  “It was him.”

  “Him who?”

  “Our neighbour. Fred.”

  “Fred? Mr. Pickett? In Babylon? The president of the Long Island Parrot Society?”

  “He stole our money. I never liked him.”

  “Mom, Mr. Pickett died in 1988. I think I know where the money is. Do you remember? I used to keep it in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the ‘LOOK—MOUKE’ volume. Because ‘mouke’ used to mean ‘money’. I’ll tell you what. You keep looking and I’ll check the dictionary, OK?”

  Noel walked over to the twenty-volume set, opened up the appropriate volume and, after making sure he wasn’t being watched, took out his wallet, removed a wad of cash, stuffed it between the pages.

  “Mom, I’ve found it! You were right!” He handed the volume to his mother, who smiled as she extracted the money and clutched it to her breast.

  “I want to go to the bank,” she said. “Now. And put this in my account.”

  “Good idea. But do you want me to do it for you? I’m going there anyway.”

  She counted the money and handed half to her son.

  “Why don’t you watch TV until I get back?” said Noel.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? Is the set broken?”

  “Yes.”

  Noel walked over and pushed in a plastic square. The box warmed to life. “No, it’s not, Mom. Look.”

  “The shows are different now. They’re … broken. I can’t understand what’s going on. It’s all too much nowadays. The world goes too fast. And too far. What did your father call it?”

  Here we go again, thought Noel. “Call what?”
>
  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. You’re just hiding it from me. As usual.”

  “I am not hiding anything.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “‘Poetry is in the empyrean, TV in the pit’?”

  “Not that one.”

  “‘A TV is the Devil’s workshop’?”

  “No. You know … I can never remember the name for anything in English. I can’t think of the English for the thing. For anything.”

  “What is it in French?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I’ll be right back, Mom, just going to the bank. Don’t let anyone in while I’m gone. Do you promise?”

  “I know what’s going on. Don’t think I don’t.”

  “Nothing’s going on, Mom.”

  “You don’t really want me here. I know money’s tight. You don’t have to draw me a map.”

  After relocking the door, but not resetting the alarm or taking his pager, Noel walked four blocks to Prince de Tyr, a Lebanese slow-food on rue Laurier. While waiting to place his order he perspired prolifically under his down parka. I should’ve set the digital lock too, he said to himself, and reset the alarm, and taken … “Le numéro deux, s’il vous plaît. Je reviens tout de suite.”

  Through discoloured snow and honking traffic, Noel made his way to and from a florist’s across the street—barely, as a black SUV the size of a destroyer nearly ripped off his ear with its wing mirror. Stop signs for Montrealers are mere suggestions, he reflected inside the restaurant while massaging his right temple. He then worried about his mother for forty-five minutes to Arabic music.

  On the way back he invented omens. If the light ahead stayed green, his mother would get better, if he saw a black car, she wouldn’t … When he awkwardly opened the front door, his arms full of food and flowers, he sensed something different inside the house, something untoward. For he had seen a black car, and the light had changed to red.

  “Mom! I’m back, I’ve got food! Phoenician food!”

  “In here, dear!”

  Noel walked into the living room. “I got menu number two, your favourite! Falalfel, baba ghanoush, stuffed vine leaves …”