The Memory Artists (30 page)

“Are your dreams as wild? As colourful?”

“Not at all. They’re in black and white most of the time, and usually involve quiz shows or labyrinths ... And I usually wake up with this wish to be transported on my mattress back to my bedroom in Babylon …” Noel’s mind, vibrant and viatic, began to travel but he forced it to stop, pressing his hands against his temples. “In high school, in Montreal, everybody wanted me to go on this quiz show called
Reach for The Top
. But I refused and everybody was furious with me for the rest of the year, the principal most of all. Especially when our school didn’t make it past the first round …”

Samira laughed. “I remember that show. So you’re still dealing with high school trauma. Still trying to find a way out of the maze.”

My mind is a maze, thought Noel. With no exits but only entrances into more mazes. A Gordian knot of coils and loops and convolutions. “Maybe.”

“What does Dr Vorta have to say about all that?”

“About my dreams? Nothing much. What’s your … take?”

“Well, people are always testing you, testing your memory, so that may explain the quiz shows. As for the maze, it may represent, I don’t know, your trying to escape your … problems.” Samira shrugged. “I’m no expert. I know that for the Egyptians the labyrinth represented creativity, or creation. A mysterious feminine power that brings life, and then as the queen of night or queen of darkness, the sleep of death … As you probably know.”

Noel turned these words over. When you find the exit, death is waiting. You’re dead on arrival. “I didn’t know that.”

Through a heating duct in the ceiling came a muffled sound: a gust of carolling laughter from JJ.

“Why don’t you just memorise
everything
? It’d be so much fun to walk around with Shakespeare’s entire works in your head, or Jane Austen’s or the
Encyclopedia Britannica
or twenty different languages. No?”

“There’s no room left. My brain’s crammed to bursting point. And besides, my problem has always been
using
the stuff I remember, making a synthesis, something new.”

“Do you remember
everything
that happens to you? Everything you read or hear?”

“No, I usually have to make an effort. Most of the stuff I’ve stored is from my childhood, when I tried to retain it with memory maps. Poems mostly, children’s stories … Or I else I sort of photograph it—if I concentrate the coloured letters or coloured voices will remain fixed in my mind forever … or quite a while. A lot of the stuff wasn’t hard to memorise— because I’d read certain stories or poems over and over again, or I asked my parents to read me the same stuff over and over again.”

“So it’s mostly just poems and children’s stories?”

“I’ve stored lots of data about Byron, because he’s an ancestor according to my dad, though not according to my mom, and also on chemistry and pharmacology. And now memory disorders. I don’t really
try
to memorise anything else, it just happens. Sometimes I feel like my brain is going to burst some day, like a vacuum cleaner bag. Memory dust flying all over the place.”

Samira laughed. “Time for a bag change, I guess. Or a lobotomy?”

Noel smiled bleakly. He’d once considered that. “As a kid I used to fantasize about finding some magical elixir to help me out, some nepenthean potion. Especially after my dad died.”

“Nepenthean potion?”

“It was used to induce forgetfulness, by the ancients. It’s mentioned in
The Odyssey
. And
The Faerie Queene
.”

“I’ll bet you know the lines.”

Noel closed his eyes, perused his portable photo-library. “No, not in the
Odyssey
. Nothing’s coming in.”

“And
The Faerie Queene
?”

Am I too tired? Noel wondered while reclosing his eyes. The downloaded letters were misty, like breath-fog writing. “
Nepenthe … whereby all cares forepast Are washt away quite from their memorie
.”

“How lovely. Continue. Do you mind?”

Yes, but I’ll do it for you, thought Noel. He squeezed his eyes shut. The coloured letters were now cock-eyed, chaotic, an alphabet soup of images:

“I’m a bit rusty, Sam, I … don’t often do this sort of thing. Anymore. And I’m not always a hundred per cent accurate.” He waited for the letters to realign themselves, concentrating until his head hurt. “Let’s see:

Nepenthe is a drinck of soverayne grace,

Devized by the Gods, for to asswage

Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace,

Which stirs up anguish and contentious rage:

Instead thereof sweet peace and quiet-age

It doth establish in the troubled mynd.”

Samira was leaning forward, her gleaming eyes mesmerized. She shook her head in disbelief. “That’s amazing, Noel. An amazing … gift. So the colours or shapes of the letters, or voices, or the mental maps you draw are there … always? Indestructible? Like an airplane’s black box?”

Noel rubbed his eyes. “More like a computer with more input than it was designed to process. Slow down, freeze, crash, reboot—my life in a nutshell.”

Silence gathered as Samira digested these last words. Her eyes focused on Noel’s, sharply, as if she could see into his skull and was panged by what was there.

“That can’t be easy,” she said finally. “Especially when you store memories you’d rather get rid of. Dark and oppressive memories …”

“Like the day I learned my father killed himself. When his boss and two cops came to the door. I replay that day, the colours and shapes, over in my brain almost every day. And some traumatic things that happened to me in school as well. But I’m hardly alone in that respect. That’s what psychiatrists are for. For people who can’t forget.”

“Is that why people are depressed? Because they can’t forget? Or have a hard time forgetting?”

“It’s hard to say which came first. Are people depressed because they can’t forget, can’t properly process and digest things? Or is it that they can’t properly process and digest because they’re depressed?”

“But thinking about bad things all the time, having unwanted memories continually coming to the surface—that leads to depression. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Right? What they used to call shell shock?”

“You know as much as I do.”

“I just learned that last week, in my art-therapy class. Have you ever tried to paint, by the way? As an outlet, a way of exorcising the demons of the past? Or write?”

Noel gazed up at the window again, watched the snow falling …
the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling
… See? There I go again, he thought. I’m capable only of remembering other people’s descriptions of nature, other people’s expressions of emotion. I’m like Christian in
Cyrano
, who never learned the language of sentiment, who had to get someone else to express …

“Uh, Noel?” For a second she was worried; he seemed on the verge of a seizure or something. “Noel?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry, it’s … I was just … it’s something you’ll have to get used to, I’m afraid. Norval says it looks like I’m noddingoff on heroin. But it’s not as bad as it looks. What were you saying?”

“I asked if you’ve ever tried to write or paint or compose …”

“All of the above. Lots of times. But when I finally come up with something, I realise it’s something dredged from memory, recovered from … the black box.”

“But why is Norval so convinced that one day you’ll—”

“Norval doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I belong to a certain class of people who never accomplish anything, it’s as simple as that. Who try to make beautiful things, or beautiful discoveries, but can’t. Every line I write conjures up other lines, better lines, from other writers. Every image I paint, or song I write, conjures up better images from better painters, better music from better composers. Every scientific ‘discovery’ I make has already been discovered. So I decided long ago to stop beating at doors I’ll never enter.”

Samira felt another tug—or stab—at the heartstrings as the seconds ticked by. It wasn’t so much his words as his look of sadness. She waited until Noel lifted his gaze from the floor, which took a while.

“You can do anything, Noel, if you want it bad enough.”

Desire is creation. If you could measure desire, you could foretell achievement
. His father told him that. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Can’t you combine the things in your memory, creatively, or use them as a base or … I don’t know, influence? I know you can. Don’t ever give up.”

Noel’s mind raced back to a certain game of Remembrance, when his father expressed this same thing …

“Noel? Can’t you combine things, combine imagination with memory?”

“No, I can’t even do that. I have trouble making new patterns, new combinations. My mind’s a museum, a library—not a debating hall, not a crucible.”

“Maybe you just need encouragement or someone to …” She let her sentence trail as she watched Noel’s expression cloud over, darken. “Noel?”

“Yes?”

“I know Norval’s your best friend, but I was wondering if you had someone else to… if you had a girlfriend, or if you go out with … you know, girls, women. I know that sounds stupid …”

The question caught Noel off guard, and it took him a while to frame a coherent reply. “Well, I really haven’t had time for women … I’ve spent most of my free time in labs and libraries. And now my mom takes up most of my time. And besides, women aren’t really … never mind.”

“Aren’t really what? Your cup of tea?”

“No. I mean yes, they are … my cup of tea. It’s just that I can’t really get close to anybody, I’m sort of blocked. I have trouble expressing … One psychologist suggested I take ecstasy.”

Samira laughed. “You’re joking. What for?”

“In his words, for ‘heightened emotional responsiveness, lowering of defensive barriers, openness and sense of closeness to others.’”

“Did it work?”

“No, but I continue to take it—four times a year, every equinox. Any more than that and the drug’s a total waste.”

“And has it helped with your relationships? With women?”

“No, women aren’t really … I seem to have this anti-talent for attracting them, the Midas touch in reverse.”

“I have a similar talent—for attracting the wrong men. But you’ll find someone with the right chemistry, I know it. Sometimes it’s just a question of patience. And luck.”

Noel closed his eyes as he spoke: “
Tendency to brood, emotional numbness, general confusion
.” He reopened his eyes. “The words of another doctor. No woman can handle that, no woman will ever take me on. Plus I’m always going overboard, head over heels, whenever I meet the woman of my dreams. It scares women off. And if I don’t know the woman that well, I have to concentrate so hard that I usually end up with a horrendous migraine. Scintillating scotoma. I’m afraid I’m quite hopeless. Women generally think I’m retarded.”

As I first did, thought Samira. “Scintillating scrotoma?”

“Scotoma. Migraine aura—I see this brilliantly lit image, a kind of throbbing, zigzagging line.”

“And you get this when you make love?”

“Most of the time, yeah. I also get it when I meet someone … special, for the first time. A woman, I mean.”

“Did you get it with me?”

“Well … yes. So now I’m into abstinence,
coitus nonexistus
. It’s a lot less complicated.”

“Join the club. I’m on the sexual wagon too. Be right back.”

As he waited a half-dozen lines, all flattering, swirled through Noel’s intoxicated brain.
You are a vision of loveliness
was one;
I find it impossible not to gaze at you with uncivil persistency
was another, which he’d heard Norval use to good effect. Norval. The great satrap with his twenty-six concubines. Wonder what letter’s next for His Serene Highness …

“You are a vision of uncivil persistency,” Noel mumbled when Samira returned, holding an unlit cigarette between her fingers.

“I’m sorry?”

Noel shook his addled head. “Nothing. You … you look lovely, Sam.”

She regarded him with raised brows. “You tell one more lie, Noel, and you’ll turn to stone.”

Noel opened a drawer beneath the lab bench and pulled out a tarnished lighter, which he’d refuelled but never used. His hand trembled like a compass needle as he held a flame under Samira’s cigarette. Should I ask if Norval is past
S
? No, don’t be an idiot. Relax, take a deep breath … He raised and closed the lighter’s lid, stared at its faded insignia, a tegulated AP. His father’s final employer.

“Thanks,” said Samira, with a puzzled expression.

Far things felt near.“When I was young I … no, never mind.”

“What? Tell me.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll probably laugh but I used to dream about meeting an Arab woman like you. An Arab princess, actually. Probably because my favourite book of all time was … well, this one here.” With his cheeks afire and heart beating louder than his breathing, he nodded towards a volume of
The Thousand and One Nights.
“Do you speak Arabic?” he blurted into the vacuum of silence.