The Memory Artists (9 page)

His mother gazed at him vacantly.

“Heliodora Locke!” he shouted, unnecessarily, as if sheer volume would jog her memory. “You know,
The Bride and Three Bridegrooms
! You remember, Mom …”

Mrs. Burun had a look of fear on her face as her son encouraged her with broad facial expressions and charade-like gestures. “Remember? We
loved
that movie. It’s one of our favourites. Heliodora Locke, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes. Remember you used to tease me about being in love with … never mind.” Noel smiled, tried to hide his frustration. “That’s OK, Mom. Don’t worry about it. It’s not important. Couldn’t be less important, in fact …”

His mother’s expression gradually changed. “She found three men on the seashore. Shipwrecked. They were all unconscious.”

Noel’s features froze, his breathing stopped.

“She nursed them back to health, and they all fell in love with her.”

Noel stared at his mother, incredulously. And then launched himself into her arms, laughing, rocking back and forth on the bed. “Yes, Mom, that’s right. I
knew
you’d remember! This is good news,
very
good news.” Vorta’s drugs are kicking in, he said to himself. I
knew
this would be the right batch!

His mother began to stroke his hair, as she used to. And then out of the blue she said, “Your father … had a passion for family trees. But what you didn’t know, what I never told you, was that he was easily taken in. Despite his … brilliance.”

Noel tried to stop his heart from pounding, shocked at this new lucidity. “You mean … Byron’s really not my ancestor?”

His mother merely smiled. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, your father used to say.”

Why did she remember that line? Noel wondered. Because of the amaranth?
¹¹
His brain began to generate rows of coloured letters but with effort he shut the generator down. “I … I never heard him say that, Mom.”

“Your father was unhappy with the acknowledged legislators.”

Noel desperately wanted to hear more—she had never talked of his father’s unhappiness in this way—but his mother’s mind leapt abruptly to another subject. “I’ve got some stuff for Émile,” she said. “Can you take it to him, dear? You can read it if you like.”

Before he could reply, in the blink of an eye she fell asleep. For a moment he thought of waking her, of extending these precious moments, but he didn’t have the heart. She’d suffered from insomnia for weeks. So he ever so gently lifted her fingers from his hair, and kissed her on the forehead. On tiptoes he then crept towards her blue Olivetti Lettera (a gift from her husband that a computer would never replace) and picked up a sheaf of papers beside a well-thumbed thesaurus. There was a half-finished page still in the typewriter, barely readable. Must change the ribbon, he thought. Taking one last peek at his mother, Noel switched off the light, closed the door. In the hall, after selecting a key from a ring, he locked the door from the outside—his mother’s jailer!—as emotions rose to fill his throat and flood his eyes.

A sound from below distracted him. Someone was ringing the doorbell, piercingly and long, while pounding maniacally on the door. A picture quivered on the foyer wall. The cacophony of clangs and bangs continued for several minutes before a dead silence redescended on the house. At the top of the stairs he sat down and began to read his mother’s pages.

Chapter 6

Stella’s Diary (I)

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

—
Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Friday, 9 February 2001. A huge day, in the hugely negative sense. According to the doctor I have ‘mild cognitive impairment’. That doesn’t sound too bad at first, but let me put it another way: I’m in the first stage of ... Alzheimer’s Disease. The very names of certain diseases bring dread and AD is one of them. It’s a death sentence. A long and slow one.

Émile asked me to keep this journal while I still have ‘self-insight’ -i.e. the ability to recognise what’s happening to me. Later on, because of the deterioration in the cells in my temporal lobe, where insights are formed apparently, I won’t be able to do this. ‘Don’t forget to keep it every day,’ he told me.

Fine, I still have insight, but that’s more a curse than a blessing. Because I know the future and the future is this:

I can’t remember the term for it, which is why I drew it (I used to draw better).

Or if it’s not like being under the sword, it’s like the Ancient Mariner, but I can’t remember why. And I don’t want to bother poor Noel again.
I used to draw better than this
.

The sword of Damocles! (I just asked Noel.)

Thank God for Noel. And yet even with Noel here, life can be so terribly lonely. I don’t see my old colleagues any more. Or my friends. Because keeping up my end of the conversation can be a real battle sometimes. Too often I can’t remember the last thing said. I can remember rocking Noel in his crib thirty-two years ago, I can remember my husband proposing to me thirty-five years ago, but often I can’t remember what was said thirty-five seconds ago.

I seem forever on the verge of remembrance, like trying to recall a dream, when you get the faintest of glimpses before the whole thing evaporates.

And it’s so frustrating when I explain what’s wrong with me. No one really understands. My lapses, I mean. My friends say things like ‘We all forget things, Stella. We all lose our train of thought. It’s normal in this age of PIN numbers and passwords. There’s really nothing wrong with you.’ And I just nod, instead of saying ‘No no, that’s not it, that’s not it at all. It’s more than that, you see.’

Émile says I have ‘mild cognitive impairment’.
In conversations, just when you think of something relevant or clever or amusing to say, you forget some pertinent detail. And you lose your confidence. Or you’re afraid you’ve asked the same question and they’re tired of repeating themselves. And often you repeat something not because you’ve forgotten it, but because you can’t remember whether you said it or merely thought it.

Sometimes you just want to find a place to hide, a place to cry. What does an elephant do when its time has come? It walks alone into the jungle. Sometimes that’s what I feel like doing, assuming I could ever find a jungle.

Mild cognitive impairment, which is what I have, is the first sign of Alzheimer’s.
I’m in a no-woman’s land, in a strange place where I’m no longer the self-assured and knowledgeable person I once was. A history teacher, for God’s sake!

But I’m not mad yet either -- I can still think, I can still reason. What annoys me is the way Émile is starting to bypass me, giving all the details about my case, and all the eye contact, to my son. It’s infuriating. I’m going to say something to him next time. If I remember. I’d better write it on my hand.

13 February 2001. Fugaces labuntur anni.
¹²
How in heaven did I remember that, from my distant schooldays? I want to go back so badly, back to Aberdeen. I remember things that happened to me there better than things that happened here two weeks ago! Will Noel go with me, I wonder?

God, how I miss the things I used to have, the little things we take for granted. To be able to make small talk, to joke, to remember people’s names, to read a book or watch a movie without getting lost. To walk or drive without getting lost!

I can’t find my car keys, which has happened lots of times before, of course, but this time it feels different. This time I don’t think it’s a case of misplacing them, of not remembering where I left them. This time I have a feeling they’ve been stolen.

If Noel took them away, I must have really got lost, really gone far astray ... The mother who used to wonder where her son was now has a son who wonders where his mother is.

15 February. I wake up and my brain doesn’t seem to be wired right. I feel like looking in the Yellow Pages for a good electrician, one who knows what he’s doing, who won’t throw up his hands at the mess. ‘I can rewire it if you like, Mrs. Burun,’ he’d probably say, ‘or you can just wait for the fire.’ And then I start to panic, and get more muddled, and then pull the covers back over me and go back to sleep.

18 February. Noel and I were going through a box of mementos today and he showed me a card he made me years ago for Mother’s Day. It used the letters of MOTHER to make a poem or rhyme. I can’t find it now and I can’t remember what it said, but it was lovely. I’ve spent the past few hours, with pencil and eraser, writing an updated version. Here it is:

M is for the miseries of Menopause,

O is for the road to Oblivion,

T is for the Tailspin of ageing,

H is for the feeling of Helplessness,

E is for the feeling of Emptiness,

R is for my Rage over losing my Role of M O T H E R.

20 February. ‘The future is not something I’m dying to get to,’ I remember Noel saying when he was six or seven (and I laughed, seeing the dark humour). Now, I feel the opposite: the future is not something I’m in any hurry to get to. The future is not what it used to be.

The buy-out I signed allowed me to teach part time, which I’ve wanted for years, but I now know I’ll never be able to do that. I feel like I’ve spent my life climbing the rungs of a slide.

22 February. Alzheimerland is a foreign country. Time doesn’t move the same way here, calendars are fuzzy, the days and months shuffled like cards in a deck. And space is different too -- the land seems to wobble, the signposts shift. You stumble through mud or sand, through mines and traps. And it’s hard to talk to people here, to speak their language. It’s so hard to get used to -- it’s not like where I grew up.

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you went in? Entering the FORGETTERY, I used to call it. Or was it my husband who called it that? Anyway, we used to laugh but now I don’t find it so funny -- because that’s how we Alzheimerians spend our waking hours.

26 February. Is Alois Alzheimer spinning in his grave, I wonder, remembered only for a disease of forgetting? Do many Germans have this last name? Or has it died out, like Hitler’s?

2 March. Someone came over today. I don’t know who it was, although the face looked so familiar. I tried to pretend, but I don’t think I fooled anybody.

It leaves me angry and frustrated. And I’m afraid I take out my frustration and anger on poor Noel. What would I do without him? I’d be in a padded cell, that’s where I’d be.

My plan was to go back to teaching, part time,

I can see myself ending up in a nursing home, and the idea kills me (Freudian slip, I meant to say ‘fills me’) with pain and sadness. I don’t want to go. I pray my brain will hold out a little longer, until I’m dead ...

9 March. Everything inside so hollow, so grey and dry. My brain leaking memory and hope. So grey! I’m underwater, it feels like, in dark and blurry waters. Perhaps like those my husband saw, before he died.

13 March. Three days have gone by. I know this only because I saw the date on the newspaper (the only line I read these days). Three more days, cancelled days, gone without a trace. A trio of blank squares cut out of the calendar.

15 March. I’m watching too much television. That’s all I seem to do these days. I like shows like
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
Jeopardy, even though Noel can’t stand it. He thinks the questions are too easy. I used to agree with him, but now I’m starting to find that I can’t even answer the early questions. The answers just don’t come! There’s another quiz show I like but I can’t remember its name.

18 March. I came to sit here because I wanted to write something important but I can’t remember what it was. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two with a mind that feels like cake batter, looking down at the white letters on the keys, or up at ringed calendar days and not knowing why they’re ringed ...

Just remembered -- after watching some stupid quiz show on TV. It’s about this newspaper article I cut out. (I’m trying to read as much as I can, because Noel said it’s good for the brain, but I find TV easier and it’s probably too late now anyway.) In any case, I have it beside me now. It’s from The Gazette.

Mercy killer commits suicide

A man who pleaded guilty to suffocating his mother in what he claimed was a mercy killing has killed himself while out on day parole.

Noel Burun, 32, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of his mother, Stella Burun, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. He admitted placing a plastic bag over her head while the two were staying at the Château Frontenac in Quebec City on September 6, 2000.

Burun, sentenced to five years, was known to have attempted suicide twice after killing his mother.

On March 16, the National Parole Board granted Burun day parole, to be spent in a halfway house. He was also serving part of his sentence at the Philippe Pinel Institute, a Quebec government psychiatric hospital. A report issued by the board indicated Burun had difficulty in dealing with his mother’s death, experiencing ‘severe depression and recurrent nightmares’.