The Memory Artists

by Jeffrey Moore

  “To live with him,” said Noel.

  Samira sighed. “Yeah. Then the film comes out—and the shit hits the fan. The film’s a mega-hit, critically at least, wins awards in Venice and Berlin, Stirling loses his mind, my father has a massive coronary.”

  “Are you serious? Your father had a heart attack?”

  “While watching the film.”

  “My God. And he … Is he better now?”

  “No, he died. I went back for the funeral, and my mother guilted me out the whole time, saying that I’d killed him, that the nude scene in the movie killed him. She’d walk around the house holding his shirts to her breast, weeping for hours. Especially when I was there to see it. Must be her Jewish blood. Anyway, it was a terrible time for me, I just had to get out of there. So I went back to Santa Monica.”

  “To Stirling.”

  “Yes, who was beginning to act strange.”

  “I … I read about that, about him giving names to his furniture and kitchen appliances. After the accident. What happened exactly?”

  “Well, he was a vegetarian, right? Which is fine. So was I, more or less. Except he became more and more radical, obsessive, evangelical. He’d take forever in the health-food stores, pestering the staff, peppering them with questions about the labels, the packaging materials, how and when the fruit was delivered to the store, carping about this and that, you name it. If the salesperson didn’t have an answer, there’d be hell to pay. Insults, threats to have him fired … The veins on his neck would just bulge. If the food was touching paper or Saran wrap, he wouldn’t buy it. He’d comb the racks with crystals that checked the ‘life force’ of foods, or with Geiger counters or ray-guns that buzzed and beeped. I’m not kidding. The man was insane. He was a raw-foodist. The only thing he’d eat was fruit and vegetables—but only if they’d been picked less than fifteen minutes before he ate them. Which cut down on his choices, n’est-ce pas? And he wouldn’t chop a vegetable, because it would destroy its ‘etheric field.’ Or eat out of pots and pans, because they were contaminated by ‘fleshy vibrations.’ So he nibbled on alfalfa sprouts, umeboshi plums, quinoa seeds ... He ended up looking like Gandhi after a fast. His big aspiration was to become a Breatharian.”

  “Which is …?”

  “People who fast and live on pure air. Anyway, if you ever confronted him about not eating he’d just say he was going through a ‘purge, a cleansing process.’ He’d faint from time to time—from protein deficiency, I guess. And then he had the big accident, crashing his Ferrari into a hairdressing salon, which I guess you read about.”

  “Is that how it happened? He passed out while driving? And how is he now?”

  “No idea. When he got out of the hospital I left him for good.”

  “Probably wise.”

  “Yeah, except I’ve not been lucky in my choice of men since then either. Norval included.”

  Noel jumped, at least on the inside, but strained not to show it. “So you … never went back to acting?”

  Samira shook her head. “No, I went back to Ithaca, to school, which my film money paid for more or less, without having to go back to Wendy’s.”

  “And did your mother ever … you know, chill? Did she realise your father’s death had nothing to do with you? Am I asking too many questions?”

  “No. It’s nice to get some. Especially after being with Norval. No, my mom’s still blaming me, tormenting me, living in the past. The house is like a museum, a shrine—with a stopped clock marking the time my father died. An Arabic tradition, she says. And she sold the restaurant.”

  Noel looked down, dolefully, at the floor. “That’s a shame, that’s so …” He let the sentence trail, the right word not coming. “So now you’re studying psychology? I mean, art therapy?”

  “Just started this year.”

  “Is that why you went to see Dr. Rhéaume after you were … drugged? She’s one of your teachers, right?”

  “Yeah. In fact, she and her husband—Dr. Ravens croft—were there that night. It was an Art Therapy party, a get-acquainted kind of thing.”

  Noel nodded. He’d been to one of those. “Charles Ravenscroft? He’s her husband? I didn’t know that. So what happened exactly? That’s a stupid question, you can’t remember.”

  “I really can’t, I just … blacked out. One minute I was drinking cranberry cocktails and the next I was feeling dizzy and disoriented, seeing everything in multiple images. And losing control of my movements.”

  “Was Dr. Rhéaume there when it happened? Did she know who could’ve done it, who could’ve spiked your drink?”

  “Yeah, she and her husband were both there, just about to leave. In fact, they’re the ones who drove me home. But she hasn’t a clue who could’ve done it. She insisted I report it to the police. In fact, she took me there herself. She and Charles.”

  “So the police … Dr. Vorta also did some tests, right?”

  “Yeah, but only because he paid me. It was Norval’s idea. Vorta took blood and urine samples and then turned on a tape recorder for some article he’s writing. Then enlisted me in an amnesia study.”

  “It was GHB, right?”

  Samira nodded.

  “And were you … never mind.”

  “Raped? No, thank God. Or rather thanks to Dr. Rhéaume. I was in a back bedroom, don’t ask me how, and she came in—either to get her coat or say good night, I’m not sure which—and saw the guy scrambling out the window, onto a fire escape.”

  “Are you serious? Did she get a good look at him? Did she give the cops a description?”

  “It was pitch black in the room, and it all happened so fast. And she didn’t know what was going on. She may have thought I was making out with the guy.”

  “And you … don’t remember a thing.”

  “Just that one detail, about hearing that bit about ‘excess and the palace of wisdom.’”

  “Right.” Noel saw the line from Blake. “I wonder if we should try that same blend of herbs again, see if it triggers anything more.”

  “No, it’s probably nothing, I’m probably imagining things …”

  “I’ll talk to JJ about it. Because it did some strange things to me too.”

  “Nothing to lose.” Samira emptied her glass and stood up. “OK, time for my bath. Wow, my legs feel like rubber. Listen, Noel, are you sure it’s all right if I stay here? I mean, just for a couple more days?”

  “Stay as long as you want. There’s lots of room. And I think the world … I mean my mother thinks the world of you.”

  “Thanks, Noel. You’re a sweetheart. I wish I could fall in love with a sweetheart like you, I really …” She stopped, realising she’d said something stupid, something insulting, and not knowing how to take it back.

  Noel winced. The words stung. His lips began to move: a mumble rose to a gabble, the words tripping one another, his brain out of step with his tongue.

  “I’m sorry?” said Samira. “I didn’t quite catch—”

  An orangey orb distracted them both. JJ was peering round the door with a brattish boy’s grin, as if holding a water pistol behind his back. “Hope I’m not being a budinsky … Hey, are you guys into the shine, the giggle-water?” He held two large books under his arm, which he plunked down on the desk. After low-fiving Noel he gave Samira a long bear-hug. Overly long, it seemed to Noel.

  “Have I got news for you, my friend,” he said to Noel, with a wink and a wag of the head. “I found the clue—for the cure! In The Arabian Nights! Open sesame!” He feverishly opened the two volumes at various bookmarked pages, to which there clung the faint tang of peanut butter. Each had some underlining in pencil:

  Then he followed the highway leading to the neighbouring city and entering it, went to the perfumers’ bazaar, where he bought of one some rarely potent bhang …

  Nay, more, doth she not drug every night the cup she giveth him to drink before sleeptime, and put bhang into it?

  Now she had been drugged with bhang, but when she
awoke she remembered …

  And for the rest of the remedy she made a China dish of the daintiest sweetmeats that can be made, wherein she had put bhang …

  Then the Caliph crowned a cup, and put therein a piece of Cretan bhang … So he took it and drank it off, but hardly had it settled in his stomach when his head forewent his heels and he fell to the ground like one slain …

  “Cretan bhang!” said JJ, running his finger along the words, as if taking an impression from braille. “That’s got to be it!”

  Noel eyed JJ’s pudgy forefinger, then his popeyed face. “But bhang is … hashish.”

  “Exactly.”

  Noel nodded. “Thanks, JJ, but I … I’ve already ruled that out as a clue.”

  “Right. I’ll keep on looking. Oh, I almost forgot—your mom wants to see you. Sorry for barging in like this, eh?”

  “No problem.” Noel glanced at Samira, first at her beaming face, then downwards, at the fingers of her left hand. They were entwined with JJ’s. He closed his eyes. No, this cannot be happening … He heard voices and knew they were for him, but he heard them as a drowning man hears people on the shore. With a rigid grin and red face he stood there half blind, half deaf, watching their mouths move, filled with a desire to run fast and far.

  Chapter 15

  Noel’s Diary (II)

  January 2, 2002. On a Sunday in winter when I was not yet 5, during a game of Remembrance, I told my father about the colliding colours I had in my brain and how hard it was to escape them. He called it a “collideorscape.” I liked the sound of this, and we used the code name for years. (It was from Finnegans Wake, I learned later.) I think of this now because I have begun to see my mother’s mind as a kind of kaleidoscope as well: the slanted mirrors inside her are reflecting pieces of her past and present—names, faces, events, dreams—which are rotated by some mysterious hand to make new patterns, new connections: her husband’s face appears with my name; our neighbour’s breast cancer becomes hers; her father returns to life; a dream is confused with reality … And then the kaleidoscope turns again, and the mirrors create yet another warped view of reality, yet another helter-skelter mosaic.

  January 7. Mom walked into the lab as I was kneeling on the floor, picking up pieces of a dropped Erlenmeyer. After looking this way and that, examining all the chemicals and apparatus, she bit her lip, obviously struggling with her emotions. Mom was never one to cry a lot, but now she’s doing it almost daily. But this time she kept her composure. She told me, quite sternly, that I was spending too much time in the lab, just as I did when I was a boy, just as my father used to do. She said at this rate I’d never find a girl, never get married.

  At bedtime, with this in mind, I recited a poem from the 1890s by Constance Naden, to see if Mom would laugh (she didn’t), and to see if she would remember reading it to me (she did):

  I was a youth of studious mind,

  Fair Science my mistress kind,

  Which held me with attraction chemic;

  No germs of Love attacked my heart,

  Secured as by Pasteurian art

  Against that fatal epidemic.

  When my daily task was o’er

  I dreamed of H2SO4

  Whilst stealing through my slumbers placid

  Came Iodine, with violet fumes

  And Sulphur, with its yellow blooms

  And whiffs of Hydrochloric Acid …

  After I told Mom the name of the poet for the second time, she said, That’s right, you just told me. I guess that little madman inside my head, Al Zeimer, needed to know again.

  After she fell asleep I returned to the lab, where I sat, head in hands, thinking about the little madman inside her, the turner of the kaleidoscope. Where did you come from? And why? A creaking sound, as if in answer, made me jump. In her white gossamer nightgown, Mom shimmered through the unlocked door like a ghost. She gave me a big kiss, thanked me for staying with her, said she loved me and would be lost without me. She then slipped away without another word.

  January 10. I was talking to Mom tonight, repeating something she had not remembered from five minutes before, and for some reason got close to her ear to say it, as if this would make the message stick. In mid-sentence I stopped, suddenly thinking of the “memory holes” from Orwell’s 1984, the slits or openings scattered throughout the rooms and corridors of all the buildings. You simply had to lift up a flap and drop an item in and it would be “whirled away on a current of warm air to enormous furnaces hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.” They were part of a scheme to control the past, to control all records and all human memories—so as to control the future. As I was speaking into Mom’s ear, I began to see her memory loss as a war inside her, a dystopian war with enemy soldiers rampaging through the ventricles of her brain, committing acts of sabotage, snipping this and torching that, controlling her by erasing or distorting her memories—so as to control her future. And I realised that my mission was to annihilate these enemy soldiers—with chemical warfare, biological warfare, whatever it takes.

  But do I have what it takes? The brains? The courage? For there is fear to conquer too, not of defeat—the odds are so absurdly stacked against me—or even the memory of past defeats, but of friendly fire, of killing the patient with the cure, of the death in ambush that lies in every pill.

  January 12. My mother’s decline can be measured in acrosses and downs. When she was well, hooked on crosswords in the Globe and Mail, she could do them by leaps and bounds, in unwavering ink capitals. Then I noticed the occasional phantom row—written in invisible ink I madly hoped—then more white squares than capitals, then an orphan word pencilled in here and there with many more around it erased, and finally nothing at all, the newspaper unopened ...

  January 14. Mom’s been up and down, mostly down, sinking as if from a slow leak. Over the past year, none of Vorta’s “smart” drugs—and none of mine—have stopped the plunge, including:

  Diphenylhydantoin (Dilantin)

  DMAE (DiMethylAminoEthanol)

  Lecithin/phosphatidylcholine

  Nimodipine (Nimotop)

  Piracetam (Nootropil)

  Selegiline/l-deprenyl

  Vasopressin (Diapid)

  Vincamine (Oxicebral)

  Vinpocetine (Cavinton)

  So will now try my own combinations, my own counterpoisons. But first I’ll have to make some domestic changes—it’s simply impossible to look after my mom and work in the lab at the same time.

  January 16, 3:20 a.m. Thermometer in the garden wavering around 20 below. And the power has been off for almost six hours. Put a thick Mennonite quilt on Mom, lit 3 candles and read silently as she slept. A story about Ra, the Egyptian sun god who loses his memory and lives forever in a senile haze …

  January 18. Some good news, finally. A message on the answering machine from Mrs. Holtzberger from Home Care, saying that my “application for a subsidised day nurse has been approved.” As for the “other issues,” they have all been “ironed out at a higher level.” By Dr. Vorta, as it turns out! How nice to have friends in high places. Phoned Sancha immediately to see if she was still available. She is. And seems happy to come back. She starts next week.

  January 23. In my mailbox at the Psych Dept there was an invitation to a party next week from Jean-Jacques Yelle, who works for Dr. Vorta. Oddly, it’s scheduled to begin at precisely “8:02.” Not sure what it’s all about exactly, but of course I won’t go. I’m too busy, I don’t know him that well, and I don’t function at parties.

  January 27. Am trying to get Mom to drink more coffee, instead of tea, because Dr. Vorta says there’s evidence it can prevent AD.40

  February 3. Decided to go to JJ’s party after all—at Norval’s command. And what an evening! JJ’s like a mad apothecary—he has all kinds of magic kits and alchemical philtres and mystical herbs. Legal, apparently. He’s quite a character—I thought Norval was going to smother him with a cushion at one point but I think he quite likes him. Samira
, I can tell, likes him too. Speaking of Samira, what can I say? She’s clever, charming, considerate, attractive. I dreamt about her all night long, I’m ashamed to admit, the same way I used to dream about Heliodora Locke … I’m sure Sam thinks I’m an idiot and feels sorry for me. But more later. Mom’s calling.

  Right. Two things I didn’t mention: (1) As incredible as it may sound, JJ’s place was hit by an arsonist (!?). While we were all there, the four of us, under the influence of various substances. Not too much damage luckily, apart from smoke and water, although JJ’s cigar-store Indian was burnt to a crisp. He’s now staying with us, temporarily. JJ, not the Indian. (2) I made a discovery— Norval hasn’t made love with Samira! Not yet, anyway. I’m going to do something, I have a plan involving the Bath Lady … But more later. Mom’s calling again.

  5:15 a.m. A radical downturn, a Lethean fall—Mom’s hit rock bottom. Wondering if she’ll ever resurface.

  February 8. Been working with JJ in the lab. As a partner. Because I need him, I need his kind of mind. With no disrespect intended, he’s a kind of idiot savant, a celestial idealist who’s playing with a different set of marbles, which is what this project requires. He lets his whims and instincts lead him. He makes the big leap, the mad leap. I’m a literalist, a rationalist, with no feel or flair or intuition. Even though I’ve got a great memory for facts, I miss things, obvious connections. I’m blind to the miracle.

  What’s more, JJ’s an angel of a man—kind, trusting, non-judgemental, always looking on the bright side (regarding my mom’s relapse, he said, “Sometimes a condition must worsen before bettering”). And he has a quality that means more to me than any other: loyalty. He’s set up a card table and computer beside my desk, so we share a lot of equipment. He usually talks all the time or whistles, but when he starts surfing or mixing herbal concoctions he shuts up. Sometimes there’ll be silence or near-silence for hours, apart from some occasional wind-breaking, or grunting if he’s on his headphones, after which we work together, compare notes … He’s interested in everything I do and I’m trying to learn from him, for he’s an unbiased, open-minded, knowledgeable man with a heart of Au.