The Memory Artists (13 page)

There was a young lady from France

Who hopped on a freight train by chance

The fireman fucked her

As did the conductor

While the brakeman shat in his pants.

For a second or two I thought a new neurological disorder was rearing its head: Tourette’s or something. She added, whispering behind her hand, that she’d heard it from her childhood friend “Rita.”

November 22. The dryer broke this afternoon, so I began hanging Mom’s things up on a makeshift clothes line in the basement. She appeared behind me and nearly gave me a coronary. She was very upset. She said I had stolen all her underclothes and was now washing them so as to give them to my girlfriend. I continued to hang up her clothes, including a white bra. “Who are you referring to, Mom? Which girlfriend would that be?” “Don’t you dare ask me the W questions!” she screamed. “Don’t ever ask me who, which, when or … where. You’re only trying to confuse me! You’ve been trying to confuse me for fifty goddamn years!”

Five minutes ago, when I went to say goodnight, Mom was posing before her full-length mirror, semi-dressed with her brush in her hand, standing like a statue. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was waiting for me to brush her hair.

December 18. This morning Mom received a postcard from Bermuda from Aunt Helen and Uncle Phil, with a postscript for me that said, “Keep up the good work, Noel. Really wish we could be there to give you a hand. Merry Christmas.”

December 21. Winter solstice. I always think of my grandmother as the seasons turn over, since she was the one who taught me about such things. Not only about the tilt of the earth, but how the seasons correspond to the four ages of man: spring lasts until 19, summer from 20 to 39, fall from 40 to 59, winter ever after. She also told me that each new season must be ushered in with a good stiff drink. Or drug.

December 24–25. Mom slept through Christmas eve and almost all of Christmas day. She was feeling “down” and didn’t feel like celebrating or opening gifts. To get her in the mood I put on The Twelve Days of Christmas, but she told me to turn it off after three French hens.

Placed half-consumed cookies and milk by the fireplace, hoping Mom would laugh (she didn’t seem to notice), and then tried to make shortbread. Followed her recipe
to the letter
, but the dough was friable and wouldn’t cohere, and it just expanded and melted, spilling over into the oven. When Mom saw me cleaning up it was the closest she got to a smile all day.

December 26. Was listening to A Child’s Christmas in Wales on headphones when a sound that didn’t belong made me jump. The fire alarm. At

4:10 a.m. I leapt down the stairs, where clouds of brown smoke were filling up the kitchen. On the stove, eggs had boiled black in the pan. And Mom asleep in her chair.

Don’t know how much longer I can carry on. I think I’ve reached the end, I’m incurably tired but can’t sleep, I’m starting to drink my Mom’s sherry by the bottle, Dr. Vorta’s drugs aren’t working, we’ve almost run out of money, Mom’s going to burn the house down …

I thought I could make her happy by coming home, but clearly haven’t. Maybe a nursing home would be better. I phoned Uncle Phil, who returned from Bermuda today, left a message. And a long e-mail.

December 27. Uncle Phil and Aunt Helen both e-mailed back, apologising for not being able to come up for a visit. They could put Mom on a waiting list at a home in Long Island if I liked. “A very good one,” said Aunt Helen. “Oyster Bay Manor, it’s called. Let me know.”

As I was changing the battery on the fire alarm, Uncle Phil phoned, saying that he had found a bed at the Babylon Beach House on Yacht Club Road. But it had to be filled this week. The cost: $780 a week. I said I would think about it, then called him back and said no. (We don’t have the money and I don’t want to do it anyway.) I explained to him that things were getting a lot better lately.

December 28. Phoned the Beaumont Health & Rehabilitative Centre in Outremont—$98 per day—therapy and medicines extra.

December 29. Did something rash this morning. After finding the top burners on the stove glowing red and a raw roast of lamb in the oven, I called Beaumont and told them we’re ready next time they have an opening. I’m running low on gas and patience. Can’t do anything more for her. With regard to her memory, I’m beginning to grasp the meaning of the word “irretrievable.” Time to let go. Besides, it could be six months or more before they have an opening.

At 5 on the nail they called back: they have an opening on January 2. In three days.

December 30. Mom’s been agitated all day. She knows something’s brewing, something cataclysmic. Ten minutes ago, at midnight, I opened her bedroom door to see if she had managed to calm down. A shaft of light crossed her sleeping form. I was about to close the door when I noticed something else, something scrawled on the tilted mirror of her dressing table. I tiptoed closer. There were two words, written in dark-red lipstick, the colour of drying blood: HELP ME.

December 31. Cancelled at Beaumont. It’ll be all right, I’ll find a way. For the first time in my life I feel clear. And unafraid. I know what I’ve got to do. At dawn I went downstairs, through the locked door, to my father.

Chapter 8

Henry & Noel Burun

B
y his late twenties, in Edinburgh, Noel’s father was a blazingly talented chemist. By his late thirties he was head of a pharmacology department in New York, with two dozen researchers working under him. When his company, the Swiss-based conglomerate Adventa, relocated from Long Island to a Montreal suburb for tax reasons, he was asked whether he would accept a transfer, at twice the pay. He would accept the transfer, he said, but at half the pay—as a drug rep. The company’s chief executive officer laughed, then recommended a psychiatrist, then threw up his hands. And thus Henry Burun ended up not combining chemicals for the betterment of the world, not devising new drugs to cure its maladies, but rather … selling them. A travelling pharmaceutical salesman. What does your father do? they’d ask Noel at school. My father sells drugs. And everyone would laugh.

At first Henry liked the new job, travelling from town to town in lower Quebec and upper New England, but eventually it ground him down trying to see doctors and pharmacists who had little time to see him. When he was granted his five minutes, he told the truth about the drugs—which ones were hyped, which ones had failed clinical trials, which ones had withdrawal problems or crippling side-effects. He was an abysmal salesman and he knew it. Which is why he drifted from company to company, let go in turn by Adventa, Pfizer, Merck Frosst and NovaPharm. So why didn’t he go back to the research lab, which would have rolled out the red carpet? Because he couldn’t take the
stress
, the responsibility for others, the pressure of producing the next Big Drug as patents for older ones were expiring and making shareholders nervous. The pressure to fudge clinical trials, to downplay side-effects. It was this pressure, along with sixty-hour work weeks, that gave him his longest nervous collapse ever, a dark six-month depression that nearly drove him to hanging himself from a beam in the basement. At least the salesman’s job allowed him to be
alone
most of the time, watching the world through a car window, numbing himself with the latest tranquillisers and anti depressants. With a wife and child he adored, he should have been in love with life. Instead, through some baffling process, some chemical disharmony, he became increasingly despondent, constantly seeking a reason to live.

“Did we kill Dad?” Noel asked his mother, after the crash was ruled vehicular suicide.

“No, Noel, we didn’t! Don’t ever think that!”

Suicides become vampires, the children told him at school. And suicidal parents, according to the Welsh nurse, will have children who are suicidal. “Did the world murder Dad?”

Mrs. Burun remained silent before rising from her chair and walking out of the room. “Did Dad leave because I was bad?” Noel wondered as he heard, from the kitchen, his mother’s sobs. Could there be a worse sound in the world? The living room walls suddenly appeared to be streaked; he realized he too was crying. His mother’s sobs, and father’s death, filled him with a bone-deep sadness he would feel, on and off, for the rest of his life. He would never ask these questions again, shutting them up with triple locks inside himself.

When Henry Burun returned from his sales trips, his son would be on the lookout, either from the front porch or, in winter, from behind the closed curtains of the living room, his nose pressed against the frost-covered pane. At the first sign of the silver-blue Chevy Impala or sunfire-red Pontiac Laurentian, he would explode out the door and down the walkway, once barefoot in snow, and his father would set down his bag and lift him high in the air, twirling him round, making him squeal with laughter.

Inside, he would follow his father’s trail of pipe fumes around the house, irresistibly, like a child of Hamelin. He was waiting for his father to give him his briefcase so he could do “the sorting.” Inside the worn Gladstone bag were pharmaceutical advertisements by the pound, blotters with pictures of internal organs and magical names of curatives, business cards from doctors and pharmacists, stacks of his own cards with the logo of his company (which, like the company car, would change almost every year); but the best thing by far were the samples, which usually came in blister-pack booklets. He would put them into piles: analgesics, heart medications, muscle relaxants, tranquillisers, antidepressants (usually empty, seals torn), vitamin pills, energy boosters … The complex medicinal smells never left him; they could be summoned years later by the drug name itself. Noel was not quite sure why this “sorting” had to be done, but he could do it happily for hours, memorising formulas, ingredients, dosages …

Sometimes in summer, on rural routes in Quebec and New England, Noel would wait with his father in doctors’ and veterinarians’ offices in towns like Lacolle and Bury, Killington and Brattleboro, Ossipee and Rindge. Other times, with the car doors locked and radio on, he would memorise baseball stats on cards that his father had bought to help him pass the time. It didn’t matter how long it took—Noel would wait forever. When his father returned he would quiz Noel on batting averages and RBIs and ERAs. Baseball is a mathematician’s dream, his father told him, and a poet’s too. Or it used to be. “Like every other sport, it’s now a venal business circling the drain.”

There were other quizzes too as they drove, an attempt by Mr. Burun to get his son to memorise worthwhile things. Famous quotations, for example, or the names of the classical compositions as they came up on the radio, or the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, or the meaning of obscure words (especially ones that would make him laugh, like
callipygian
or
steatopygic
or
merkin
), or the names of two hundred phobias, including three of his father’s: kakorrphiaphobia (fear of failure), hypegiaphobia (responsibility) and lyssophobia (madness).

“By the way, Dad,” Noel said after a Greek goddess quiz, “I’ve decided what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like you. I want the same job as you.”

His father was working at his Comoy’s pipe, tamping down the black Latakia with his middle finger and testing its draw by sucking loudly on it. “Not a good choice, lad. If you want to work with drugs, work in a lab, work in research. It’s more creative. I couldn’t do it, but maybe you can.”

The next day Noel wrote Santa for a chemistry set. In June. Nothing else was on the list, just a chemistry set. If he could have a chemistry set Noel promised to be good until he retired. It was the most magical thing he could imagine and he had trouble sleeping for the next six months.

With the first light of Christmas Day, after lying awake all night, Noel raced downstairs, barely noticing Santa’s half-eaten cookies on the mantel or the stocking his mother had made for him, crammed to bursting point. His eyes were directed elsewhere, and they spotted it immediately. Under the tree, unwrapped, was a shiny radium-white metal box with hinges and a clasp, and THE A.C. GILBERT CO. embossed in red across the top. His heart was dancing in his breast, a joyful rumba, as he raised the lid. “Open sesame,” he whispered.

Inside, embedded in styrofoam, were rows of cubic jars with red and white labels that proclaimed their contents in bold black capitals: N
ICKEL
A
MMONIUM
S
ULPHATE
(an elegant triple-barrelled name!), T
ANNIC
A
CID
(dangerous sounding), P
HENOLPHTHALEIN
(which his father admitted to sprinkling on his chemistry teacher’s sandwiches to cause diarrhoea), M
AGNESIUM
C
ARBONATE
, C
OBALT
C
HLORIDE
, P
OTASSIUM
N
ITRATE
(the same chemical, his father explained, administered in army barracks and monasteries to prevent “hard-ons,” something Noel had not yet felt), S
ODIUM
S
ILICATE
, Z
INC
O
XIDE
, A
MMONIUM
C
HLORIDE
(the famous Sal Ammoniac of the Arabian alchemists!), C
OPPER
S
ULPHATE
, M
ANGANESE
D
IOXIDE
, P
OTASSIUM
P
ERMANGANATE
, C
HROME
A
LUM
, C
OCHINEAL
(a red dye, his father explained, obtained from the crushed bodies of female cochineal insects), and the two most boring-sounding chemicals in the whole world: B
ORAX
and L
OGWOOD
.

Over the next month or so, Mr. Burun set up a laboratory in the basement for his son, in a locked room his mother once called “the black dungeon,” her husband’s refuge when his moods swung low and dark. There he showed Noel mercury (a slippery, magical substance that seemed to defy physical laws), phosphorus (which burst into fire if exposed to air), potassium (which burst into fire if exposed to water), magnesium (which would burn
under
water), the “Acids” (the noble triumvirate of nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric, “to be treated with respect”). He showed Noel how to make invisible ink, which would appear only when the paper was held over a flame; he showed him how to make a slow-burning fuse, and gunpowder (five parts potassium nitrate, one part sulphur, one part charcoal), and a burnt-orange pyramid with potassium dichromate which, after you lit it, would writhe up like a charmed snake.