The Memory Artists (15 page)

In bed, several hours later, Noel leafed through each of them. The first summarised three years of work on a process that someone had patented a few days before his father had applied for a patent. The second outlined three more years of work on a drug for Parkinson’s—a blockbuster, as it turned out—that only his company profited from. And the third dealt with his attempts to create drugs that would both reduce the swelling of certain cerebral cells in dementia patients, and eliminate abnormal inclusions called Pick bodies. Tucked inside were a sheaf of letters to and from the U.S. Submission & Patent Office, along with a page from a spiral notepad, the ink of its scrawled message weeping freely:

A. Borodin’s work on aldehydes

B. Beauty is the lodestar—a cure must be beautiful

The following day, after some faxing and photocopying, Noel went to see Dr. Vorta. For some advice, and some under-the-counter drugs.

“
Einen Moment, bitte
,” said the doctor, while pressing buttons on a spectrophotometer.

“Did you get my fax? Can you get them for me?”

After glancing at his Swiss watch, which rivalled Greenwich in exactitude, Dr. Vorta noted the readout on the display. “Noel, they’ll put me in jail if I get you all those drugs on your list. Just be patient, will you? Have you brought your journal? And your mother’s?
Danke schön
.”

“
Bitte sehr
.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a very interesting patient—”

“Look what I found. Some of my father’s notes. On aldehydes. And Pick bodies. He may have been on to something big.”

Dr. Vorta froze for two seconds before turning round, his eyes trained on the notebook. He had a cataract in one of them. “You found your father’s … Right, leave it with me.” He took the book from Noel’s hand, opened it up. “Your father was a brilliant neuropharmacologist, Noel. But remember, near the end, your father was not … a well man.” He perused the bleeding letters. “I’ll take a look, but these are probably just mad ravings …”

After wincing at that last phrase, Noel slumped out of the office, mutely and meekly.

In ten minutes he returned. “I can’t wait any longer!” he screamed at Dr. Vorta, barging in on his synaesthesia tests with a young patient. “I can’t wait for the approval of new drugs, I can’t wait for the clinical trials! My mother is dying! Don’t you understand that? I can’t be patient, I’m looking at infinity. This is not supposed to happen at her age. Soon she’ll forget who I am. Then she’ll forget to eat, to swallow, to breathe. She’s fifty-six and she’s sinking into a black freaking pit! She’s no longer the same person—she’s not a person at all! You’re her doctor and you’ve done nothing. The only thing you’ve ever done is write about her and put her in ‘promising’ drug experiments. But you put her in the
placebo
group! You wasted a year of her life!” Noel punctuated this last phrase by picking up a laurel-wreathed bust of Wagner and smashing it on the floor, which caused macaque monkeys in hidden cages to scurry and scream. He then began sweeping things off the doctor’s desk, looking for his father’s notes. “And don’t you
ever
call my father mad, do you hear me?”

“Noel, do
not
touch anything on that desk. I’m warning you, you little …” He picked up the phone. “
Madame Prévert
?
W
4.
Oui, c’est ça
…”

“And if this is a Farnsworth Musell test, what was that girl doing with her top off?”

Dr. Vorta, after hanging up the phone and nervously stroking his chemically whitened beard, closed the curtain and informed his patient the test was over. He then instructed Noel to get out of his office and stay out, that if he ever came back there’d be a straitjacket and van waiting for him.
¹⁶

Chapter 9

Norval & Samira

N
orval Blaquière lived in a converted millinery factory on rue de la Commune in Old Montreal, which he had turned into a kind of nineteenth-century salon. There were framed reproductions of Thomas Cooper Gotch’s
Death the Bride
, with a woman in a field of poppies; Henry A. Payne’s
The Enchanted Sea
, with drowned and drowning women; Rochegrosse’s
Les Derniers jours de Babylone
; Félicien Rops’ vampish
Woman on a Rocking Horse
. Others reflected Norval’s penchant for long-haired women: Millais’ liquid-locked
Ophelia
; Stanhope’s orange-haired prostitute in
Thoughts of the Past
; Henner’s
La Lectrice
, in which a naked Mary Magdalene reads from a book encircled by her flame-red curls; Waterhouse’s
La Belle Dame sans Merci
, the Keats heroine who holds a knight captive in her long tresses.

“Why do you have these morbid pictures of women all over the place?” Samira asked, on her third day at the loft. “And what is it about women’s hair? A fetish?”

“Long and loosened tresses are a symbol of a woman reverting to a state of nature. Like an animal’s mane …”

“Oh, please …”

“ … It was a powerful symbol in the nineteenth century—in a period of hats and chignons. Today, of course, hairdressers butcher and plastify women’s hair, which I’ll never understand. It should be a wilderness. Worse is shorn underarms and montes pubis. I trust you’ve not dared …”

“Is that a picture of Astérix over there? With the sword? Why would you—”

“Never mind.” Norval banished the question with a wave of the hand.

“And who’s that guy in the photograph next to it, sitting on your bed? It’s the only picture of a man in the whole place, apart from Astérix. Is that you?”

“No, it’s … Noel.”

“Noel?”

“Yes.”

“Is Noel … never mind.”

“Is he what? A crypto-homo? Am I?”

“Is Noel related to you?”

“Not even distantly.”

“You’re almost like twins.”

Norval sighed. “So we’ve been told. Which may be one of the reasons we clicked. The doppelgänger phenomenon, the search for the invisible twin, the demystification of narcissism …”

Why does he speak like he’s lecturing? Samira wondered. “And the presage of imminent death?” And why am I sounding like the brownnosed student?

“That too. Like matter and its double, anti-matter. You shake hands and you’re annihilated.”

Samira smiled, then thought of a novel she’d been forced to read at school, and a line in an essay that got a checkmark in the margin. “Is your friendship like the one between Max and Emil in Hesse’s
Demian
? A bond that frees a person from other bonds and leads into a new dimension?”

“No.”

“Right. So is Noel your double, or your opposite? You’re different in so many ways.”

“He’s left-handed, I’m right.”

“Noel seems, well, anal retentive, whereas you seem …”

“Anal explosive.”

“And you two move so differently—”

“Especially when he’s nervous. He gets so spasmodic you start looking for the strings. Remember when he met you?”

“Yes, but … why did that make him nervous?”

“Because he thought you were an actress he’s in love with.”

Samira nodded slowly, lost in a maze of thoughts. “The poor actress, to look like me.”

“Well, it’s true you look like hell, but when healthy I imagine you look almost average.”

“Such flattery.”

“Perhaps I did get carried away.”

“You don’t like women, do you.”

“Generally, I hold them in medium esteem.”

“And men?”

“Much lower.”

“You’re a misanthrope, in other words.”

“How can anyone not be? The human species, the evolution of the human species, was all a colossal mistake. Darwin must have realised that. Humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor around six million years ago—we share 98.7 per cent of the same genes. But the genes in
our
brain somehow evolved differently, giving us greater brain power. So what have we done with this brain power? We’ve used it for the pursuit of narcissism, to prove that we’re the only living things that matter in this world.”

“But you’re … never mind.” You’re quite a narcissist yourself, she was about to say.

“And this evolution, this development of the brain, has not gone well. In fact it’s been botched—the glitches, bugs, cross-wirings in the brain have given us things like depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s …”

“And misanthropy?”

“Yes.”

“So what should we do? What can humans do with all this bad wiring? Should we dumb down, go back to living like chimps?”

“That’s already happening.”

“Think of all the great individuals, the geniuses in the world, the great scientific advances—”

“Modern civilisation no longer produces great individuals, geniuses. Instead of forests with giant trees, we get scraggly saplings with roots no deeper than a thimble. If you doubt that, watch any awards show.”

“How about John Lennon or Kurt Cobain or Marie Curie or Krzysztof Kie ´slowski or—”

“We’re on the same path as the dinosaurs. Nature will have its revenge, and the sooner the better. The world is obscenely overpopulated. What we need, what Noel should concoct in his laboratory, is a pathogen that would destroy half the world’s population overnight.”

“Only half? So as to save a race you detest?”

Norval arched an eyebrow. “OK, all. And I shouldn’t say
nature
will have its revenge. Nothingness will have its revenge—a rogue black hole with the weight of ten million suns will take things back to that … that not-anything state that preceded the big bang.”

“You don’t say. And have there ever been … exceptions to your general dislike of humanity? Noel, presumably?”

Norval took a drag from his Arrow. “Correct.”

“Does he teach Symbolist lit as well? Is that where you met him? At school?”

“No. But I pulled strings to get him in. He lasted one course.”

What is my role in this conversation? Samira asked herself. Prompter? “Why did he last only one course?”

“He had trouble understanding the students’ questions.”

“Does he have … qualifications, a degree?”

“No, but he was accepted at MIT as a teenager by getting unheard-of marks in the entrance exams. And he was
asked
to attend McGill by the Dean of Sciences.”

“But he didn’t graduate.”

“No.”

“So what do you two … share?”

“The relief of being wordlessly understood. A companion mind.”

“I mean, he seems so taciturn and unsure of himself and, I don’t know, unhappy, whereas you seem—”

“He’s a Scot. Ipso facto, not of a sanguine nature. Like his father he’s got the black choler, the humour of despair. When he’s down he thinks the period will never end, when he’s up he thinks it will shortly end.”

“Are you sure he’s OK? I mean, he looks …”

“He needs a bit of sleep, that’s all.”

“ … crushed, depressed, heading towards a crash. He’s got that dark look on his face. I’ve seen the symptoms before. He seems so … grave. In the three times I’ve seen him at the lab he’s not smiled once. Does he ever laugh? Does he have a sense of humour, is he witty?”

“Noel couldn’t concoct something amusing to say given a month’s notice.”

“Is he … all there? Mentally, I mean?”

“Noel Burun? Are you kidding? Do you know his pedigree? Related on one side to Lord Byron himself, and on the other to a long line of Scots physicians. Noel’s superhuman, he can visualise things with painterly awareness, summon things you or I would never be able to summon given a hundred lifetimes, things never seen in the wildest visions of a witches’ Sabbath. Don’t be fooled by Noel—he has the mind and imagination of a master artist, or master scientist. He’s a fluke of fucking nature, a psychomnemonic wonder, with almost unhuman eidetic powers.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any geniuses left.”

“He’s the last. You should bear his children.”

Samira laughed. “So does he belong to any, you know, organisations, like Mensa or …”

“Mensa? You’ve
got
to be kidding. A self-congratulating club of wankers who don’t have the intelligence not to be a member. Games of three-dimensional Scrabble and a cup of Ovaltine—Noel’s beyond that crap. He’s in another dimension.”

“What did you mean by ‘eidetic powers’?”

“A photographic memory, preternaturally vivid and persistent. With self-generating links and catalytic images that spawn other memories, right back to his suckling hours. He’s a
hypermnesiac
—he doesn’t forget a goddamn thing. He’s like Proust, like Proust squared. He’s got a million megabytes of memory, a million emotions and sensations and images and God knows what else to draw on.
¹⁷
He’s not there yet, but he’ll be a great writer one day, greater than Proust. Or perhaps a visionary artistpoet like Rossetti or Blake. Mark my words.”

“I never know when you’re joking. Are you now?”

“Never felt less inclined to. What’s the most important material for an artist?”

“According to Proust? Memories?”

“Infancy. Which most of us forget entirely. When a young child sees, for the first time, a rainbow in the mist of a crashing wave, a
trompe l’oeil
wheel turning backwards, a ‘ghostly galleon’ behind clouds,
that
is when a great poem or great painting or great symphony is born. On a subconscious level, naturally. So it becomes a question of finding, of recapturing that pure moment of pure sensation, that …”

“So what’s stopping—”

“… that vividness and anarchy of an infant’s vision. What I’m referring to is the
infinity
of childhood.”

“The essence of innocence itself.”

“When an infant sees the world he doesn’t fear it, he
marvels
at it. When he’s older it just fills him with anxiety, dread. Why? Because of death, an awareness of death. But Noel can still summon that primordial vision, those prelapsarian colours—if he sets his mind to it. It’s all there, intact, in Noel’s mental kitchen. If he breaks the shackles, he could be another Rousseau,
¹⁸
for Christ’s sake.”