The Memory Artists (14 page)

In the first of a series of lectures, brief preludes to the experiments, his father spoke about the direct ancestor of chemistry: alchemy. And the most famous alchemist of all, Paracelsus the Great,
¹⁵
who was searching for the one prime element from which all the other elements derived:
alkahest.

Alkahest, alkahest …
Noel repeated to himself, over and over like a chant from
The Arabian Nights
. “What’s that?” he finally asked.

“This substance—if ever it were found—would be the philosophers’ stone of medicine, a cure for every human disease.”

“I want to find it!” said Noel. “We can work together on it, Dad, in our lab! We can discover it!”

“You must be very careful down here, Noel, especially when I’m away. Get to know all the properties of every chemical you own, or are able to make. Is that clear? If you make a compound that’s poisonous or explosive, you put the skull-and-crossbones label on it immediately. Do you promise? Noel, are you listening to me?”

“If I promise, can we make laughing gas and nitroglycerine?”

“Noel …”

“I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.”

In another lecture—the final one as it turned out—his father talked about art. “In some ways,” he explained, “chemistry can be seen as a marriage of science and art, an earth poetry, a sensory kaleidoscope of smells, tastes, colours, textures. Painters and sculptors have been drawn to it, and musicians in particular. Sir Edward Elgar dabbled in chemistry and Aleksandr Borodin
was
a chemist. He used to scribble musical notes all over the laboratory walls, absent-mindedly, while conducting his experiments. And then there were poet-chemists like Humphry Davy, who discovered sodium and potassium. His notebooks were filled with chemical experiments jumbled together with new lines of poems. He and Coleridge even planned to set up a laboratory together! And there’s Primo Levi, of course, who regarded chemistry as an art of weighing and separating, just like writing.”

In the basement laboratory Noel found the serenity and solitary happiness that he found nowhere else, except in books. When his father was away on business, Noel spent hours in the lab, in hookeydom, with Borodin’s
Polovtsian Dances
or Elgar’s
Pomp and Circumstance
playing on a portable record player as he dreamed about discovering things. He would gaze at the rows of chemicals on one side, and rows of books on the other—including
The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, Known by the Name of Paracelsus …

Noel began to learn the formula of every chemical he owned, every one he had made or ever could make. He memorised, photographically, every element of the periodic table pinned to the wall: their position on the chart and all their properties. He had only to say or see the letters of the element and its square would pop up. Take krypton. In Noel’s hippocampus the sound and letters formed a fibrous cinnamon teardrop shape, which stored the following properties: noble gas; symbol Kr; atomic number 36; atomic weight 83.80; cubic, face-centred crystal; gas at 20°C; electronic configuration [Ar]3d
^1
0
4s
²
p
⁶
. Or take lithium (as Noel would later): alkali metal; symbol Li; atomic number 3; atomic weight 6.941; cubic, bodycentred crystal; solid at 20°C; electronic configuration [He]2s
¹
…

In some of his reveries, sitting back in his father’s swivel chair, Noel would play games of chemical chess, with pieces cast in metal. The white and black pawns were usually Lead and Tin; the castles Iron and Chromium; the knights Mercury and Palladium; bishops Barium and Arsenic; queens Gold and Platinum; kings Silver and Titanium. “Who would win,” he asked his father, “in a fight between Lead and Mercury? Or Barium and Palladium? Or Gold and Silver? Which one’s more powerful? Who would destroy who, in a battle?”

Mr. Burun laughed. “Well, mercury would certainly eat up tin or lead. For the others, I guess you’d have to compare their densities. Gold, for example, is one of the heaviest metals, much heavier than silver. But it’s also the most malleable and ductile.”

“What … does that mean?”

“It’s the softest.”

“What’s the hardest?”

“Well, the two densest substances in the world are iridium and osmium.”

Noel’s eyes opened wide. From then on, his queens became Iridium and Osmium.

One fall day in 1979, on the third Monday of September, Noel sprinted home from school. There was something he was dying to check out: nitrogen iodide crystals, “explosive on concussion,” were drying on a blotter. He and his father, with the help of
Smith’s College Chemistry
, had spent the previous evening trying to make them. Did they get it right? he wondered. His father had warned him not to go near it until he got back from his trip, but Noel couldn’t wait.

He pushed his way through the torn screen door, ignored his mother’s greeting, leapt down the stairs three at a time. Would it work? Would it actually
work
?

Breathless, heart rate rocketing, he took a metal rod and “tickled” the raisin-black precipitate. Nothing. Was it a dud? Not yet dry? He tried again, with a little more force …

The result was an ear-splitting explosion and thick, reddish-purple clouds that expanded as if in slow motion, filling the room. Mrs. Burun, from upstairs in the kitchen, let out a scream before scrambling down the stairs. Panic-stricken, she pushed open the door and tried to see through the dense purple clouds. “Noel! Noel dear! Where are you? Are you all right?” She heard a faint noise on the other side of the room. Flapping at the air with both hands, she groped her way towards the sound. “Noel?” Her voice quivering, she strained to catch a glimpse of her son, fearing the worst. “Noel? Where are you?
Please
answer me, dear …”

“I’m over here, Mom. I’m cool, everything’s cool.”

Noel was sitting on the floor, his clothes and face blackened with smoke as in a Disney cartoon. He put his hand to his forehead and felt a warm patch of blood. When his mother finally reached him, he had a grin on his face. “I just need a styptic drug, Mom, a haemostatic agent. A bit of ammonium aluminium sulphate. Or maybe some tincture of iodine. Top shelf. I made them for situations just like this.”

His mother put her arms around him, squeezed him with all her might while faintly sobbing. She then examined his face and saw that his eyebrows had been blown off. “Whatever it is you did,
don’t
do it again! No more explosives. If you don’t promise, I’m going to make your father get rid of this lab forever. Toss everything into the trash bin. Do you understand? Noel, I’m talking to you!”

Noel promised, but he had his fingers crossed, and his toes crossed for good measure. And he wasn’t really sorry; his only regret about the explosion was that he couldn’t tell his father what had happened, about their success in making
Nitrogen Iodide
. For Henry Burun had left that morning on a two-week business trip: the first week in upstate New York, the second visiting his brother in Long Island. So Noel wrote his father a letter, care of Uncle Phil:

Dear Dad,

You’ll never guess what happened. We did it!! It worked, just like you said it would, Dad, we made the NH
₃
NI
₃
. I tickled the precipitate just like you said, with the brass rod, and a huge bang went off in my
left
right ear. It’s still ringing! There were humongous reddish-purple clouds and a funny smell like chalk dust and sulphur and iodine. All three blotters went off! There are holes all over the blotters! The time is now 7:30 and my ears have been ringing since 12:30! It’s driving me nuts! My face was all black too and I have no eyebrows! Mom was really mad but she cooled down a bit. I didn’t tell her about our surprise for her. I finished painting the lab walls white like you said and it looks pretty cool. I miss you, Dad.

Your son, Noel

Noel’s letter arrived but his father never read it. For around the time Noel was tickling the nitrogen iodide crystals, his father was in a water-filled quarry south of Lake Placid, in his Pontiac, slowly sinking to the bottom.

After another all-nighter, as the sun rose for the first time in 2002, Noel was sitting at his usual position atop the staircase, head bowed. He had been playing back these and other memories for almost an hour. He opened his eyes and stared down at the door leading to the basement. The wood had been wallpapered over and the doorknob removed. That door led to another door, which he had avoided opening for years. He stood up. It’s time, he said, to open it.

The lab was still there, its flasks and test tubes shadowed in dust, its walls shaggy with cobwebs. On the table were rubber gloves, a small pair handshaking a larger pair, and on a door hook were two yellowing lab coats, a child’s resting on the back of an adult’s. His father’s brown leather medical bag, an heirloom from
his
father, was sitting on the floor, locked.

Noel had ranted and raved whenever his mother tried to throw anything out, so she eventually locked the door and left things more or less as they were. But he himself had never been able to enter the room; the pain went through him like a spear.

He examined the labels on the chemical jars, which he and his father had brushed with hot liquid paraffin. With a pale pink J-cloth he affectionately dusted off each bottle, turning them round in his hand, holding them up to the light. In the laundry room he filled up a yellow plastic pail with steaming hot water, threw in some Clorox and Cheer, put on his father’s black rubber gloves. With three different brushes he scrubbed test tubes, beakers and Florence flasks; pipettes, funnels and Erlenmeyer flasks; graduated cylinders and eyedroppers; pinch-cocks, crucible tongs and rubber stoppers ... He cleaned his Bunsen burner and retort stands and clamps with acetone, and his laminated Periodic Table with Windex. He put order back into drawers, swept the floor. He removed cobwebs from the walls, and dust from the top of books. He saw three scuttling spiders but, as his father would have wanted, left each in peace.

It’s time to do something more, something more serious, he said to himself. Beyond plying his mother with brain nutrients and memory boosters, or blendering up cocktails with over-the-counter drugs. The prescription medicines, like rivastigmine and galantamine, weren’t doing much—apart from giving her nausea, insomnia and nightmares.
Unless a cure is discovered soon, your mother will be dead in five years …
Yes, it’s time to do something more. If he couldn’t get the newest drugs because they were unapproved or unaffordable, he would simply make them himself … Well, maybe not simply. “With my memory, I’ll restore hers,” he whispered to himself. “I
will
save her.” With his head bent and eyes closed, he clutched the battered wood desk with both hands.

When he opened his eyes he saw the robin’s-egg blue of the cement floor beneath the table. The paint was faded and peeling and poxed by chemical spills. As he was trying, impossibly, to remember which caustic compounds had caused which stains, he was distracted by the sight of his father’s leather bag. He reached down for it, ran his finger through a layer of dust. And then tried the lock, which yielded with a minimum of fiddling.

Inside was a tiny red three-ring binder, with My Experiments written on the cover. He opened it to the first page:

Exp. # 1

Pour a little Citric Acid solution (lemon juice) in a glass. Stick the point of a toothpick in the juice. Write a secret invisible message with the juice. Heat the message (with an iron). It should appear brown.

Exp. # 2

Take red cabbage pickled in Acetic Acid (vinegar) and add some ammonium hydroxide (Clorox). The juice will go all through all sorts of colours, from red to all kinds of purple colours, to turquoise and blue and then green.

Exp. # 3

Hold a red rose over burning Sulphur so that the SO
₂
bleaches it white. Dip into water and the colour is miraculously restored !

There were other notebooks as well, in zip-locked bags. His dad’s diaries? With his vision blurring, Noel pulled out three identical binders, all black, one with the insignia of the first drug company his father had worked for in Scotland: Meridian. The most recent one, dated two months before he died, had these entries on its last page: