The Memory Artists (47 page)

In 2002, following allegations from an anonymous “whistleblower” that Dr. Vorta’s students wrote many of his articles, the Experimental Psychology Department of the University of Quebec conducted “a full investigation.” The unanimous conclusion, announced on November 4, 2002: “total exoneration.”

In 2003, a number of scientists, including Dr. Hyalmar Tjarnqvist of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, challenged some of Dr. Vorta’s discoveries, in particular his claim to have placed an artificial memory in Noel Burun’s hippocampus. Yolande Foisy, the Administrative Director of the Experimental Psychology Department and wife of Quebec’s former Health Minister, oversaw two investigations. The unanimous conclusion from the ad hoc panel: “complete endorsement and corroboration” of Dr. Vorta’s discoveries. His lab displayed “scientific rigour and exemplary laboratory practices” and “allegations to the contrary are unfounded.”

In December of that same year, after Dr. Vorta received his lifetime achievement award in Oslo, a University of Quebec colleague, Dr. Charles Ravenscroft, accused him of administering a substance (“Vortagon”) that induced Alzheimer’s disease in at least two patients: Stella Burun and Norval Blaquière. No proof of this accusation has yet been found.

That same month, with regard to the so-called “date-rape video” shot at the Experimental Psychology Laboratory, Dr. Vorta was charged with administering a noxious substance to commit an indictable offence. But not with rape or sexual assault, as there was no evidence to support either charge. At a disciplinary hearing of the Collège des médecins du Québec, Dr. Vorta denied any involvement, but could not explain away the DNA evidence linking him to the crime. At a pre-trial criminal hearing, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was committed to the Philippe Pinel Institute in February of 2004.

A subsequent investigation by the Association des neurologues du Québec absolved him. Norval Blaquière, who had shot the video with a hidden camera for his “private investigation” of Dr. Vorta, demonstrated that the two individuals in lab coats, one wearing Vorta’s coat, were actually Drs. Charles Ravenscroft and Isabelle Rhéaume. Their voices, in a barely audible exchange involving the words “excess” and “palace of wisdom,” were identified by Noel Burun.

A preliminary hearing revealed that the couple was attempting to avenge “past injustices”—including Dr. Ravenscroft’s dismissal—by planting false evidence. Before driving Samira Darwish to the police and then home, they evidently decided—impulsively, and at the husband’s instigation—to take her to Dr. Vorta’s lab to plant incriminating DNA evidence and microscopic fibres. As their attorney pointed out, however, the couple did not administer the date-rape drug (the offender has yet to be found), and they did rescue Samira from a potentially more serious crime. In a plea bargain, they each received 18 months of probation, a $5,000 fine and 150 hours of community service at two assisted-living facilities on the island of Montreal.

Stella Burun, who was destined for one of these facilities, made a full recovery and has returned to the classroom, teaching history at a Montreal Cégep. She is currently dating a younger colleague in the department who has been in love with her for years: a widower with a ten-year-old daughter. The couple plan to get married in Aberdeen, Scotland in the summer of 2006.

JJ Yelle’s retreat into boyhood ended when he met his ex-girlfriend at Montreal’s Greek Independence Day Parade. An ageing prostitute, she had just come out of detox—“as if waking up from a nightmare after hibernating in hell,” he remarked in an audio interview. They lived together for nine months but did not marry. After JJ helped her get back on her feet, financially and emotionally, she decided to go back to her biker boyfriend. Which did not unduly upset JJ, because he was then free to propose to Sancha Ribeiro, the Bath Lady. The couple now live on a hothouse farm in northern Vermont, where they are experimenting with a genetically modified hybrid of skunk cabbage and Oriental sassafras, a healthy replacement for tobacco. Projected income in 2006, including patent earnings and seed money from R.J. Reynolds: $6.2 million. JJ is currently negotiating to purchase Mount Royal Cemetery.

Norval Blaquière never got to
Z
, never got beyond
S
. Nor did he get beyond the first round of
Tip of Your Tongue
. After completing his twenty-six Sunday school classes at the university chapel, and releasing his “exposé” on Dr. Vorta, Norval was hospitalised in early 2004 for short-term memory loss and brain-tumour-like symptoms, thought to be the result of ingesting experimental psychotropic drugs over an extended period—among them methaqualone (which produces excessive dreaming and amnesia), chloral hydrate and Vortagon, an applicationless drug suspected of triggering Alzheimer’s disease. Norval’s memory lapses were first noted by Noel Burun in a journal entry from October 24, 2003:

“What the Christ are you talking about?” said Norval. And I could see by the look in his eye—I’d seen the same in my mother’s—that he really couldn’t remember. “What alphabet?”

After checking himself out of the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu in the spring of 2004, Norval journeyed to Hucknall in Nottinghamshire, where he stayed briefly at Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B. On a cloudless Saturday in mid-April, his body was found on the north shore of Byron’s lake at Newstead Abbey, where Teresa had drowned herself twelve years before.

Since November 2005, when Amaranthine-1001 received FDA approval, Noel Burun has declined all interviews, public honours and scientific awards. He has also declined credit for the compound, attributing its discovery to a research team composed of Henry Burun (now deceased), Norval Blaquière (now deceased), Jean-Jacques Yelle and Samira Darwish. Patent and other monies are therefore to be split four ways, with the estate portions going to Norval’s mother and Henry Burun’s widow.

With regard to Noel Burun’s synaesthesia, it was not eradicated by Dr. Vorta but rather reduced to a hyper-mild form, one that no longer warps his communications with strangers. His memory, accordingly, was reduced to a fraction of its former potency. Despite suffering acute— vein-openingly acute—despair over his looted inner world, he has come to accept this disease of ordinariness as a trade-off.

While Noel Burun and Samira Darwish have jealously guarded their privacy, there are unconfirmed reports that the couple lived briefly on the southwest coast of Long Island, and in the fabled city of al-Hillah, where Samira did the groundwork for a community/arts centre. There are also unconfirmed reports that their baby girl is a synaesthete.

Notes

1
This entry from NB’s adult diary (05/05/91) first appeared in my
Curiosités mnémoniques
(Montréal: Memento Vivere, 1993, p. 27). Seemingly sunk without a trace, the book, thanks to discerning praise from several scientists, slowly grew to a recognition it has never forfeited. Reproduced below, from the book’s twelfth impression, is NB’s colour chart.

2
Synaesthesia (following definitions by Fleurnoy 1895, Vernon 1930, Marks 1975, Cytowic 1989, Vorta 1990) is a condition in which one type of sensory stimulation evokes the sensation of another. In NB’s type, sound triggers the perception of vivid colour; like Vladimir Nabokov and many others, NB also perceives written letters in colours. In North America, female synaesthetes predominate in a ratio of 5:1 and left-handed synaesthetes (like NB) at 4:1. Synaesthesia is also reported by those who have used hallucinogenic drugs, such as lysergic acid diethylamide or mescaline, as we shall see.

3
I have never used chimpanzees in my research.

4
There is no evidence to suggest that Proust was a synaesthete, nor do I recall ever mentioning him (possibly a misread word in NB’s diary). Be that as it may, we can add two painters to the list, Kandinsky and Hockney, as well as French composer Olivier Messiaen and (perhaps) the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eistenstein and Japanese poet Basho¯ . No two synaesthetes, of course, see the same sound colours: to Rimsky-Korsakov the key of F# major appeared green, to Scriabin it appeared violet. (The score of the latter’s
Prometheus
incorporates multicoloured lights.) Rimbaud’s synaesthesia (“I invented the colours of the vowels!—
A
black,
E
white,
I
red,
O
blue,
U
green— I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant,” he says in
Une saison en enfer,
“Délires II: Alchimie du Verbe”) was enhanced by hashish and absinthe. As for Baudelaire, he alludes to his synaesthesia in the poem
Correspondances
: “Like drawn-out echoes, which from a distance/Merge into a deep and shadowy unity/As vast as night, as vast as light,/Scents, colours and sounds harmonize.” And in
Flowers of Evil
he declares, immortally: “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.”

5
Physicist Richard Feynman among them, who declared: “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahke and Emde’s book, with light tan
j
’s, slightly violet-bluish
n
’s and dark brown
x
’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”