The Memory Artists (21 page)

For Norval, slumped on the sofa with his coat on, things could not have gone more wrong without loss of life. Was JJ a punishment, he wondered, for all the sins he’d committed? “You sure this crap is mind-altering?” he asked, while looking at his watch.

“Judge for yourself,” said JJ. “So what’s our second choice going to be?”

“Why don’t we toss everything into a blender,” said Norval, “pour in a quart of vodka?”

“Why don’t we start with the Heliotrope and move on to the Absinthe—a mix of poppy seed, Monk’s pepper, dog’s mercury and a legal derivative of wormwood. A bit like E—but better for you. And then to top things off, I’ll roll you a bone of my signature strain, the Yelleberry. Shall we start?”

“I’ll pass,” said Samira. “Drugs don’t … I mean, they can make me paranoid, more than I already am. How about you, Noel? Noel?”

“Pass.”

“Are you sure?” said JJ, while rolling three joints the size of toilet paper rolls. “This is primo stuff.The Yelleberry’s so resin-laden we’ll have to roll loose-logs, or else we won’t be able to draw through the goop. It may be best done through this.” From under the sofa, JJ produced a gas mask, circa First World War. “You’ll being seeing things, imagining things you never saw or imagined before.” He lit one with his father’s Zippo and offered it to Noel.

“I hallucinate enough as it is,” said Noel, shaking his head.

“The only side-effect with this first one, for some people at least, is a bit of stuttering,” JJ explained. “But for some reason only on the letter
m
. And because the paper’s dipped in deglycerinised liquorice, it may change the pitch of your voice. It’s never happened to me, mind you. For me, when I’m ripped on this stuff, I don’t say ‘yes,’ I say ‘yesh.’ And I don’t say ‘no,’ I say ‘noo’.”

Norval, after removing his coat, had fired up a pair of cigars over the fireplace and was about to inhale both through the customised Cartman gas mask. He lifted up the mask. “You say either, ripped or not, and you’re out of the club.”

“I don’t think you should do that much,” JJ warned.

Norval inhaled nearly half of each roll before slumping back onto the sofa, gas mask still over his face.

“Norval?” said Samira, smiling. “Are you all right?” When there was no response, her smile disappeared. “Nor?” Norval groped at his mask but couldn’t get it off. Samira reached over to help, prying it off.

Norval gazed at each member of the club with a spasmodic grin and bloodshot eyes. The heliotrope and wormwood, especially together, were almost immeasurably potent. “I
love
this club,” he slurred in a highpitched voice. “I love everybody. Especially you, JJ.”

“Hey, I love you too man—”

“Can I come back to-m-morrow?”

Norval, for the next half-hour, spoke in falsetto French about childhood games he played in Paris, a pet bunny named Mitsou, a sword made of tinfoil and, moving clockwise, his love for each person in the room. He then went to the bathroom, where everyone thought he was going to throw up.

Instead, he reappeared with a smile on his face. He had draped a stole of pink toilet paper round his shoulders and was beginning to perform fencing manoeuvres with a plunger. Abruptly, he then sat on the floor in a lotus position, insisted they were all in heaven, and fell asleep.

“He maxed out,” said JJ. “I warned him. Moderation is the best policy.”

Noel was feeling good from breathing in the ambient fumes. His mind was colourless and clear, his confidence at a high level. “Norval is a foe of moderation,” he said proudly, while gazing at his best friend. “A champion of excess. Which is one of the things I envy about him.”

Samira nodded. “I agree. The road of excess, as they say, leads to the palace of wisdom.” She had changed her mind, sampling two different blends. She too was feeling euphoric and shockingly clear-headed. She smiled at Noel, who suddenly looked extraordinarily handsome. She closed her eyes and was drifting off when a troubling sound infiltrated her brain. A voice from that night, the black-out night …

As JJ spoke to no one in particular, Noel’s gaze shifted from object to object in the smoke-filled room: from the brass bongs, like ancient oriental hookahs, to the rows of scented candles (bergamot and myrrh?), to the cigar-store Indian and stuffed cat. He glanced at Samira, who seemed in the midst of a blissful dream. He inhaled the mix of perfumes and mystic smoke, closed his eyes and watched the room transform itself into a grotto, its objects into beautiful statues. It was like a page from
The Count of Monte Cristo
, when Aladdin smokes hashish offered by Sinbad and the statues suddenly advance with
smiles of love, their throats bare, hair flowing like waves, holding him in a torturing grasp, delighting his senses as with a voluptuous kiss
…

Noel opened his eyes. His body felt soft and pliable, like Plasticine. And the carpet in front of him seemed to be moving, the cigar-store Indian advancing towards him—but now as an Indian princess, flanked by a cat-eyed maidservant! He rubbed his eyes, turned towards Samira, who was reclining on the divan like a beautiful houri. She was made of marble but her sensuous lips were pink, like the inside of a seashell … As JJ continued to speak, in a tongue that sounded like Arabic, Noel reclosed his eyes and re-entered the grotto.
Lips of stone turned to flame, breasts of ice became like heated lava, so that to Aladdin, yielding for the first time to the sway of the drug, love was a sorrow and voluptuousness a torture, as burning mouths were pressed to his thirsty lips … His senses yielded and he sank back breathless and exhausted beneath the kisses of these marble goddesses
…

Noel half-opened his eyes and watched Samira’s lips move … Was she seeing the same things? Were they on the same page? He looked to his right. The Indian princess had retransformed into the cigar-store Indian. And the feline maidservant? Noel was searching for her when a loud boxy voice distracted him.

“So that’s my idea!” said JJ excitedly. “We all write down our favourite poems of all time. A Hit Parade. And we’ll all—”

“How about a Shit Parade?” said Norval, adding a lunatic gunshot of a laugh. He then went entirely inert, regarding Samira with glazed immovable eyes, like the stuffed cat.

“We’ll each use a pen with different coloured ink and then—”

JJ’s sentence was never finished. First came the sound of a dog barking and then, from the back of the house, a crashing sound, the sound of splintering glass. Something metallic, with hissing smoke, came scuttling down the hall.

Samira let out a scream, a blood-red explosion in Noel’s head. “Fire! Over there! Look!” She sprang from the couch and pointed towards the bathroom, towards black smoke shooting out from under the door.

“Jesus Chrysler!” His eyes abulge, JJ dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a fire extinguisher. Another canister came hurtling down the hall. But this time nothing happened—no explosion, no fire. Noel and Samira watched it to the count of five heartbeats, not knowing what to do. Another smashing sound, another window breaking …

“Let’s get outta here!” Noel shook Norval by the shoulders. “Nor!”

Samira and JJ were now scrambling for the front door. “Where’s your phone?” Samira shouted.

JJ’s face was contorted with fear. “It’s … dead. My battery—” He dropped the fire extinguisher with a loud clang.

“Do you have a hose?” Samira shouted. “A garden hose!”

Norval, finally roused from his delirium, exploded into laughter as he watched JJ scurry out the door. The smoke from the bathroom was now getting thicker. Samira was waving her hands about, fighting through it, towards the kitchen faucets. Noel grabbed Norval, who was cackling hysterically, and dragged him by the arm towards the door. He took three coats off the rack. “Put one on! Give one to JJ!” Noel pushed Norval out the door then raced back into the kitchen. “Sam! Get a hose through that window! Tell JJ! And don’t come back in. Here, take this!”

Samira caught the coat in her arms. “You come too, Noel!” she cried, with fearfully roused eyes, before darting out the door.

Noel was trying to get the fire extinguisher to work when he heard JJ’s voice through the bathroom window. “My letters! Noel! The box with the heart! And my scrapbook! Do you remem—” The wooden Indian toppled onto the floor, split in two, each half bursting into flames. It blocked the front exit. Was there another way out? The smoke was getting thicker.

Noel stumbled towards the sofa, coughing and rubbing his eyes. He reached down blindly until his hand felt the gas mask. He put it on and groped towards the bookcase. He grabbed two items, trusting his visual memory, before heading into a hallway, towards the back of the house. He opened the first door on the right. JJ’s bedroom?

“Noel!” Samira screamed, a muffled sound in his ears. “Noel! Are you all right!” Water came bursting into the bathroom. Along with a hail of snowballs. “Noel!” she cried, her voice dripping with fear. She spun round to look for Norval. The last time she looked he’d been sitting in a snow bank, smiling stupidly, wearing two coats. “Norval!” she cried, hoping he would do something, go for help … “Norval!”

But Norval was no longer sitting in snow. He was in the back yard, peering through JJ’s bedroom window. A human form appeared in the semi-darkness, with a giant insect’s head. Noel was struggling to open the window. But it wouldn’t budge.

Norval looked left, right, behind him. He clawed the snow out of a wheel barrow with his bare hands, picked it up and heaved it at the window. It came bouncing back at him. He heaved it again. Same result, except this time the glass cracked, in a jagged slant across the bottom. “Noel!” he thundered. Long seconds passed before he saw a foot kicking at the cracked window pane, at the anti-theft window that JJ had nailed shut. Black smoke began to curl up from the crack. Norval pounded at the window until his fists were red with blood.

Samira arrived as Noel’s head and shoulders were protruding from the shattered window. “They’ll be cut to pieces!” she muttered, as Norval dislodged a jagged shard of glass with his bare hand, grabbed Noel by the underarms and pulled, and pulled again, until he lost his footing and tumbled backwards into a flowerbed of snow. Still wearing his gas mask, Noel squeezed out of the window, this time with Samira’s help, and fell into Norval’s outstretched arms.

Huffing and puffing, JJ came zig-zagging over with double handfuls of snow and ice-coated, frou-frouing fat-pants. But before he reached his friends the lights inside the house flickered and fizzed, then dipped and died. In the darkness he lost his footing, not far from where Norval had lost his. He went down hard, in a belly-landing on a frozen puddle. The first thing he saw when he lifted his chin, on moonlit snow splattered with blood, was a scrapbook and a box of love letters.

Chapter 11

Noel & JJ

R
imsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
was starting as Noel placed a fake log on the fire. Lounging in Mr. Burun’s La-Z-Boy, wearing a burgundy bathrobe that was risibly undersized, JJ observed him while cracking nuts and sipping camomile tea.

“Hey Noel, why did Handel get rid of his chickens? Because they kept saying ‘Bach, Bach, Bach’.”

For the last hour JJ had been trying to laugh, to self-treat with joketherapy, to counteract an urge to cry. He put his sock feet on the ottoman, pointed them towards the fire, wiggled his wet toes.

“I wish I could say, ‘And then the alarm clock rang—it had all been a dream!’ Oh well, that’s the way the mop flops, I guess. No sense being a droopy drawers. Thanks for letting me stay here, Noel. But it’ll just be for one night. Cross my heart. I’ll go back home tomorrow—it’s really not that bad. I’ll have the place shipshape in no time.”

By now JJ’s voice was back to normal inside Noel’s head; the boxy shapes and crayola colours were no longer a train wreck of collapsing rectangles but rather children’s shiny stackable blocks. “JJ, you can stay here as long as you want. Your place is uninhabitable.”

“Really just the one room. Or two.”

Images of the bathroom paraded before Noel’s eyes. All that was left were the exoskeletal remains of the bathtub, hand dryer and urinal. In an inch of water. “There’s smoke and water damage everywhere. And your bedroom window’s smashed, which means the place will be freezing.” He pictured the orange garbage bag that Samira had stapled to the window frame.

JJ cracked another walnut. “I love your nuts, Noel.”

Noel remained silent, wondering if this was more joke therapy.

“I’ve been racking my brains,” JJ continued, scratching his copper hair with the nutcracker. “I still can’t figure out who would’ve done it. Did you hear Nor’s theory?”

“Yeah.”

“He said it was the Head of Women’s Studies, who was out to get him.”

“I think that was a joke.”

“Oh.”

“You’re sure you’ve got no enemies?”

JJ paused to reflect for three or four seconds, which for him was a lot. “Well, the cemetery’s been trying to get rid of me for years. But they’ve got lawyers working on that. Arson’s hardly their style.”

“You don’t think it was bikers?”

JJ slurped his camomile tea. “It’s possible, I guess.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t let us call the police? Or fire department?”

“Well, I’ve got a few electrical … illegalities, and some stuff the cops would hassle me about, even though it’s legal. Which reminds me—I lost some of my best kits in the fire. And flood. Along with my journal for Dr. Vorta.”

Noel’s photographic memory conjured up scores of red magic-marker letters scrawled like hieroglyphs on the boxes. “So what else went up in smoke? What were those flashes and strange smells from the bathroom? What was that from?”

“Cheese.”

“Cheese? You keep cheese in your bathroom?”

“Cheese powder, which explodes in those aluminum packets. I had a carton of Kraft Dinner. Six dozen boxes. E-bay auction. Got a wicked deal. Ten cents a box.”

Noel was trying to hide a smile, but when JJ began to giggle, Noel exploded, laughing for longer than he had in months.