The Memory Artists

by Jeffrey Moore

  “You don’t say? Well, we’ll have lots of time to talk about all that. I think we’ll be spending a lot of time together. Would you like that?”

  “Not really. She had two different shoes on—because she broke in her shoes one at a time, Mom said. And her tongue was black, from chewing charcoal biscuits—to stop her from farting, Dad said.”

  To Noel’s father, in the waiting room, Dr. Vorta ended his excited diagnosis with, “Congratulations, Henry. Your son’s in good company, very good company indeed. Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin all had synaesthesia, and so did Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Proust!”4

  A man of thwarted artistic ambitions, Mr. Burun beamed at the news. “You forgot Nabokov,” he added.

  “And the odd Nobel prize-winning scientist!”5

  “Émile, this calls for a drink.”

  Like complicitous schoolboys the two couldn’t stop grinning, or pumping each other’s hand, as though this were the greatest, the most promising thing on earth. Noel wasn’t smiling at all.

  “What is the highest form of art?” Mr. Burun asked his son the following evening, after dinner. “What is the ne plus ultra, the zenith of creative endeavour?” He would always talk this way to his son, even when he was in the crib. No baby talk. Not good for the child’s cerebral development.

  “Jack of hearts, jack of clubs,” was the reply. “Two of clubs, two of spades. Ten of hearts … four of diamonds. Your turn.”

  “Noel, I’ve asked you a question. What do you think the highest form of art is?”

  Noel looked up from the cards and slowly scrutinised each object in the room, as if the answer could be found in one of them. His gaze rested on their Zenith television console, whose portals were now locked, as they often were. “TV?” he replied.

  His father shook his head. “No, TV’s in the dungeon. There’s no art form below that. Because of it children no longer read. We must all curse its Faustian inventor, Vladimir Zworykin.”

  If he had understood this, Noel would have violently disagreed. He looked at the walls, at the stereo cabinet. “Painting?” he suggested. “Or maybe music?”

  “They’re up there, but they don’t have the most important thing. What do you think the most important thing is? When communicating something.”

  Noel knew the answer to this one. “Words.”

  “Exactly. So what combines words, images and music?”

  “Cartoons?”

  “True. What else?”

  “Movies?”

  “What else?”

  Noel paused, closed his eyes. “Poems?”

  “Dead on. At the top of the heap is poetry, at least as it used to be written. Nothing else goes as far, nothing goes as deep in the blood and soul. Shakespeare surpasses Beethoven because he had sound and meaning. Always remember that as you get older. Poetry is in the empyrean, TV is in the pit.”

  Noel nodded. “Poetry is in the empyrean, TV is in the pit,” he whispered to himself, remembering the words, not understanding the sentence. “It’s your turn,” he said.

  But his father’s mind was not on the game. “Scientists can talk about human nature, but only poets can free those feelings we keep in the pent heart.”

  “Your turn, Dad.”

  They were sitting cross-legged on the brown shag rug of their living room in Montreal’s Mile End, midway through the child’s game of “Remembrance.” You may know it: fifty-two cards are spread face down; you turn up two cards at random, put them in your pile if they match, turn them back down if they don’t. And remember where they were for next time. It was Noel’s very first card game, learned—and mastered—when he was three. He never tired of it.

  “Queen of spades,” said his father, turning over one of the cards. He scanned the sea of pirate ships, with black ensigns and blazing cannon. One of them he overturned. “Shite. I mean shoot. Nine of hearts.”

  “Nine of hearts,” Noel repeated, coolly turning over the same card. “And nine of diamonds …”

  While observing his son, Mr. Burun pulled hard on a meerschaum pipe with a sultan-head bowl, which he had bought in Turkey when younger and happier. “The mother of the Muses was the goddess of Memory,” he said, pursuing his theme, and he might as well have been speaking in Turkish.

  “Four of hearts and … four of clubs. Jack of diamonds, jack of spades …”

  “Mnemosyne was her name. The goddess of Memory.”

  “Nine of spades, nine of clubs …” Nim-oss-enee, the mother of the muses, the goddess of Memory, Noel repeated to himself, depositing the words in his electron vault, the combination encrypted in colours and shapes. Where’s all this heading? he wondered. “What’s a muse?” he asked, because he knew his father liked questions.

  “A muse is something … someone who inspires you, in art, a guiding spirit. In Greek mythology there were nine of them, a band of lovely sisters.” Mr. Burun looked up to the ceiling, closed his eyes. “‘He is happy whom the Muses love,’ says Hesiod. ‘For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.’”

  Silence gathered as Noel stared. “Are you on something, Dad?”

  His father opened his eyes, set his pipe down in the ashtray. “So why was the goddess of Memory linked with artistic creation, you may well ask.”

  No, I wasn’t going to ask that, thought Noel. Let’s play.

  “Because for the Greeks creativity wasn’t associated with the idea of producing something new—as it is today. The artist built upon, or reworked, the great intellectual and cultural achievements of the past. So a great memory, you see, was considered a key part of creative activity— it gave the artist more material to draw upon, as well as a richer, more complex intellect. When James Joyce said ‘I invented nothing, but I forgot nothing either,’ I think he was referring to exactly this sort of thing.”

  Noel glanced at the bowl of his father’s pipe. Hydrous magnesium silicate, he recalled, H4Mg2Si3O10. “Ace of diamonds,” he said. “King of spades.”

  “Ah, a rare lapse from the memory artist. Ace of diamonds … ace of spades. Eight of diamonds … damn it, the king of hearts—the self-killing king, the suicide sovereign. Look, Noel, how he stabs himself in the side of his head.”

  “Eight of diamonds, eight of hearts.” The suicide sovereign? “Five of hearts, five of clubs …” There were now only a dozen cards left and Noel matched them all.

  “Well done, Noel, I’m proud of you. You’ve got the memory of your late grandmother. Now she would’ve given you a run for your money. You’re very lucky, lad—with a brain like yours, you’ll go far.”

  Mrs. Burun entered the room, hugging herself as if she were cold, and Noel launched himself into her arms. “I won, Mother! I’m like Nana when she was late and I’m going to go far!”

  “Yes you are, Noel dear.” His mother smiled. “You’re my little genius, aren’t you, you’re my …”

  He could listen to his mom’s voice forever, and his dad’s too. They didn’t confuse him like everyone else’s; they didn’t scramble his brainwaves. Years later, he was never able to understand why people complained about their parents. He always assumed everyone had parents like his: perfect and beautiful in every way.

  “We were talking about the importance of poetry,” his father explained, while tapping his pipe against a swan-shaped ashtray on which Noel had affixed a New York Islanders decal. “In this secular world, this spiritually dead world, poets are all we have left. Remember that, Noel. And remember you have an illustrious ancestor—a Burun from way back.”

  “Do you know what an ancestor is, Noel?” his mother asked while stroking his hair. He felt euphoric whenever his mother stroked his hair. As she spoke he saw blades of burnt-orange grass swaying gently in magenta mist.

  “Noel, did you hear me? Is your colour-wheel spinning?”

  “Yes, Mother, I … What did you say?”

  “I asked if you knew what
an ancestor was?”

  “It’s someone who lived before you. I mean, in your family.”

  “That’s right,” said his father. “And do you know who your great ancestor was?”

  “Well,” his mother began, “we don’t know for certain that—”

  “We’ve got the charts, the trees to prove it. A long line of melancholics, suicides, arsonists, incestuous paedophiles …”

  “Who’s my ancestor?” Noel asked.

  His father set down his pipe and paused for dramatic effect. “George Gordon. The Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale.”

  Noel nodded, mulled this over. He looked at his smiling father for a cue or clue, and then at his smiling mother. “But our last name is Burun.”

  “Burun is the ancient Scottish form of Byron,” his mother explained. “Ralph de Burun, who may be a distant relation of your father’s, is mentioned in Domesday.”

  Noel repeated the names slowly to himself, noting the coloured shapes of the letters. His mother was a history teacher, so she knew what she was talking about. “But who … who was he?”

  His father smiled. “Lord Byron? Merely the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.”

  “Well, perhaps one of the greatest,” said his mother. “Certainly the handsomest—as handsome as you, Noel dear. With the same lovely chestnut curls and steel blue eyes.”

  “Takes after his mother on that count,” said Mr. Burun as he walked over to a library wall with three divided bookcases, devoted to history, poetry and chemistry respectively. “Thank God.” He stepped upon a metal stool and from the middle case pulled out a slender, fawn-coloured volume. On the soft leather cover, The Romantic Poets was emblazoned in gold. “This was your grandmother’s, and her mother’s, published in Edinburgh in 1873. Take a look inside. It’s illustrated.”

  Neither parent was surprised to hear Noel recite all twenty poems by Byron at the breakfast table the next day, without the book, mispronouncing scores of words between mouthfuls of Count Chocula. This sort of thing had happened before, lots of times, the first when Noel was five, when he had become so wrapped up in his Children’s Treasury edition of The Arabian Nights that his mother threatened to take it away from him, worried he was spending too much time with it, “obsessing” over it, stubbornly refusing to read anything else. Terrified of losing his favourite book, which was almost his entire life at this point, Noel decided to stay up all night and memorise its fifty-two pages.

  How did he do it? Noel had two methods, one involving “photographs” of coloured letters, the other involving “maps,” which is the one he used here. As he explained later to Dr. Vorta, he “delivered the words like newspapers” in mental rows or sequences, along actual pathways—indoors and out—that he pictured in his mind:

  It’s like you’re taking a walk inside your head, like in a dream. You see yourself going on a trip, right? And you drop the words or sometimes big chunks of words at different spots. Like down the hall you come to a vent, right? So you put some words down the vent and then you come under a picture, so you put some words there, and then you come to the door, or the stairs or maybe a room. And you might go into the room. Like if it’s a living room, you put stuff under chairs, tables, lamps, or if it’s the kitchen you put words in the fridge or the oven or down the toaster … Or you could use the attic or crawlspace too, or you could go outside, on the sidewalk, or through fields or parks or parking lots, or gardens, and you could put words at certain trees or flowers, or down manholes, or at traffic lights or stores or churches … Every memory trip is different. And you just dump a bit here and a bit there and for some reason everything is clear, like a paper route when you just remember the houses, you don’t look at the numbers anymore … And at the end it’s always the same—I’m lying on my old bed in Babylon, or my new bed in Montreal, with Farquhar beside me—he’s a King Charles spaniel.6

  This explains how, that morning at the breakfast table, Noel was able to recite the Byron poems in reverse order too; he had only to start his walk from the end (“.innocent is love whose heart … like beauty in walks She”).

  After an article appeared in Psychology Today, stories by the dozen began appearing in newspapers and magazines.7 The phone began to ring as well. Everyone, it appeared, wanted a demonstration, a carnival show from Memory Boy. A researcher from the Johnny Carson Show, a woman named Laura Pratte, offered airfare and accommodation to Noel and his parents for a week in Burbank, California. A man from Princeton, a jittery classics professor, offered to pay Noel to appear at a plagiarism hearing at the university to corroborate his “photographic memory.” A detective sergeant from the Montreal Drug Squad asked if Noel could help in a case involving a wire tap of twins, only one of whom was guilty. A chess instructor from Chomedy offered to turn Noel into a grandmaster. And the late Manfredo Mastromonaco, on behalf of The Desert Inn in Las Vegas, offered Noel’s parents $5,000 a week for an eight-week summer run on stage with a magician (Manfredo himself). “I’ll turn your son into a memory bank!” Manfredo shouted into the line, more than once, hacking with cancerous laughter. It was a lot of money at the time.

  But neither Noel nor his parents were interested in this sort of thing. Noel could memorise almost anything the doctors and journalists threw at him. He could recall a list of fifty random words in almost any language after only a few seconds of deliberation; he could recite the value of pi to a hundred places; he could memorise a deck of shuffled playing cards in under sixty seconds, eighteen decks in an hour, a 100-digit number after hearing it once at speed, a 500-digit number in an hour.8 He could do all these things, but he didn’t want to. He’d do poetry if asked, but nobody asked. Everything else bored or pained him, giving him a pulverising headache. “Why only poetry?” Dr. Vorta and his apprentices would ask, speculating that the sounds or rhythms acted as mnemonic aids. “Because poetry is the zenith of creativity,” Noel replied. “Nothing goes as deep in the blood and soul. Don’t ever forget that.”

  As he grew older Noel discovered tricks that would help “switch off “ the synaesthetic engine: classical music (especially Liszt, Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov) would sometimes clear his mind or slow its activity; nibbling on zesty vegetables, like bitterroot or cherry pepper or betel nut, would often do the trick; fierce concentration would work too, albeit at the cost of a migraine that could last up to two days. And in the nineties, when he went on a series of antidepressants, Zoloft and Paxil among them, the coloured-hearing wasn’t as intense.

  Despite these and other stopgaps and counteragents, it was difficult for Noel to take any course, or hold onto any job, that involved interacting with others. If it weren’t for a certain saviour in his life—someone who guided him, wrote letters of recommendation, hired him as a lab assistant, treated him as a son—Noel may have ended up in an asylum. This saviour was Dr. Émile Vorta.

  Chapter 2

  “NXB”

  Norval Xavier Blaquière dreamed only two dreams. The first played back, with assorted detours and deviations, something that actually happened, in 1978. He was in his parents’ bedroom in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, hiding behind velvet curtains, planning to spring out at a carefully chosen moment. With both hands he clutched a broadsword made of tinfoil, like one he’d seen in Astérix le Gaulois. Maman, he knew, would be mad at him for not being in bed, and for wasting rolls of foil, but Papa would get the joke. Papa would laugh and start chasing him around the room.

  His father was about to leave on a business trip; he had already said goodbye to his son and was now saying goodbye, ever so tenderly, to his wife. When she suddenly melted into tears, Norval was so surprised that he forgot to spring out of the curtains and prevent his father, at sword point, from leaving. He had never seen his mother cry.

  Spellbound, Norval watched his mother sob as his father walked out of the room. Was he going away forever? Was that a tear running down Papa’s cheek? After the door closed behind him, Norval watched his mother primp in the mirror for a few seconds, t
hen walk to a window overlooking a courtyard. She flicked the light switch on and off, waited a few moments, then smiled at the sounds of a key turning in the back door below. It’s Papa! Norval thought. He’s coming back! They’re playing a game! When he walks in the room I will jump out from behind the curtains and say the line from the movie that will make him laugh! He listened to the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.

  And then watched, in bewilderment, as a man with a black shirt and suit entered the bedroom. A gangster? His mother ran to him, threw herself into his arms and kissed him all over while … unbuttoning his shirt! He was an older man with a paunch and white tufts of hair on his back. Snorting like a bull, he ripped off his mother’s diaphanous night-gown. As they wrestled on the marriage bed, Norval tiptoed out of the room unseen and crawled back into bed. He put his face deep into his pillow, which got wetter and wetter. When he finally raised his head, gasping for breath, he remembered that he had left his sword behind the curtains.

  Twenty-four years later in Montreal, Norval awoke with the repugnant mental image of a hairy back, enlarged as if under a microscope: a wasteland of gnarled and niggardly grey trees, filth-encrusted furrows, sewerish sweat and mountainous moles. He groggily opened his eyes and saw, directly in front of him, more hair: blonde female pubic hair. Further down, inches from his groin, were ears riddled with ornamental buckshot, and a nose run through with a trio of silver rings.

  But this wasn’t the strangest part of the tableau. Standing menacingly before him, in a frozen caricature of an angry man, was … an angry man. With a Fu Manchu moustache, a spindly plume of hair sprouting out the back of his head, and unibrowed eyes narrowed into angry slits. A jealous boyfriend? Before Norval could inquire, the man said something in impenetrable joual, with the intonation of a death curse, before clomping out of the room with Harley boots.

  Norval smiled. With diamond-cutter caution he then extracted himself from the woman’s limbs and rooted around for his clothes amidst overflowing ashtrays, guttered candles, scattered pills, powders and dead bottles of wine. One by one he located his bone-white cotton boxers, heraldic-crested socks, alabaster linen shirt with Byron collar, taupe suede trousers, black nappa ankle boots, digital camera and journal. He looked at himself in the mirror, seemingly in approval, brushed back his long wavy chestnut locks. What’s her name again? Some New-Age creation like Rhapsody or Revery or Radiance? It started with an r; otherwise he wouldn’t be here.