The Memory Artists Part 24

March 24 Sunday dinner with Mom went fairly well, all things considered. No screaming, at least. We even talked like friends for a change-not exactly like we used to, but it's a start. On my way out the door, out of the blue, she hit me with an Arab proverb: "Never marry a man who dislikes his mother. He will end up disliking you."

April 2 Got sick today. A groggy kind of nauseous exhaustion. Maybe from school or from something Dr. Vorta gave me for one of his studies ... Noel & JJ were darlings the whole time. They both came up with "meals on wheels" & when I started to feel better they read poems or stories to me-Noel off the top of his head (a tale from The Arabian Nights about a sultan & his three sons), and JJ childhood poems from battered old books-nonsense poems which made me laugh, mostly out of seeing him in hysterics, wiping tears from his face.

April 3.

JJ is a dream. He just gave me a kit, a get-well present that must have cost a fortune. I was jumping up & down & hugging him in my bedroom when Noel walked by. But before we could show it to him, he ran right down to the bas.e.m.e.nt!

Anyway, when I offered to pay for it, JJ said Dr. Vorta owed him a favour-and gave it to him for nothing!! It's called a Neuro-Art Therapy Kit. It comes in a big binder which converts to an easel. Which I just opened up. There's a 12-pack of pastels & a CD with exercises for Memory & Attention, there's computer games & therapeutic drawing exercises for improving "traumatic brain injury, stroke, learning problems, sensory integration, Alzheimer's dementia, memory problems, visual spatial problems and sensory difficulties." What a sweetheart JJ is! Must remember to ask him to marry me.

April 4 JJ says he's developing a "revolutionary" new kind of cigarette, a healthy replacement for tobacco. But not to tell Noel.

April 7 Got a visit today at the lab from ... guess who? The alpha male, the uber-cool dandy lion of the boulevards, for whom the belles toil-Monsieur Blaquiere. Surprise, surprise. He didn't say anything terribly nasty. In fact, he said he heard I was sick and asked if I was feeling better. I tried to remain as nonchalant as he was, which was hard because my mind was as steady as a drunkard's p.i.s.s-line and my heart was doing backward somersaults and I ended up spilling Maxwell House all over my chest. But then, after he left, I was surprised at how I felt-I was actually relieved that he was gone!!

April 12 Incredibly, miraculously, Mrs. B seems back to normal! Like the magician's a.s.sistant who enters the casket and comes out the other side, transformed. She's smiling & joking & her short-term memory is back!! Most of the time, anyway. Everyone has played a role, says Noel, but warns there's still a long way to go.

The only problem now is ... Noel. He looks like he's been rolling around in a dingy dryer for weeks. His hands and clothes are stained with chemicals and he's haggard and gaunt, with bags under his eyes like bruises. As far as I can tell, he's stopped eating, except for soda biscuits-though I once caught him gorging and gobbling everything in the fridge like a famished dog. He's heading for a major crash, I'm almost sure. What's strange, eerie, is that with the lost pounds he's starting to look more and more like. . . Norval.

April 13 Noel seems in much better spirits. He's spending less time in the lab, & going out more. I wonder where? He could be seeing that American girl I saw him talking to at the lab, the synaesthete with the heart-shaped neckline. They laughed like hyenas together. And she kept flipping her hair back & letting her skirt hike up when she sat down. Or maybe he's out with the Bath Lady. Who the h.e.l.l cares?

April 14 Art therapy cla.s.ses going well. Getting straight A-minuses. After years of aimlessness, of turnstiling through bars and no-future jobs, I think I've finally found something I want to do! Am now using Mrs. B as a guinea pig. She's done six paintings so far & they're all superb! She's really talented & should have her own exhibition one day. If I had any initiative or willpower, which I don't, I'd try to arrange it. Is it possible that her memory disorder has made her more creative? In a great guest lecture last week, Dr. Vorta mentioned that this kind of thing-creative outbursts-was possible, that FTD (frontotemporal dementia) can have this effect. That damage to one side of the brain (the left) may liberate the other side. Or something like that.

Speaking of Vorta (who's getting a tad frisky, shall we say, in our lab sessions), I asked Stella about him, trying to find out if there was any truth to what Norval said, about Vorta having an affair with her, about him causing her husband's suicide. But she had nothing bad to say about him at all. On the contrary. She said he was a close friend of her husband's, practically a guardian angel to her son, a brilliant scientist, etc, etc. I should've let it go at that. But in my prying way I actually came out & asked her, point blank, if she had an affair with him. She laughed. And then said, with a wink: "Oh, he was after me all right. A very persistent man." While your husband was alive? I asked. "No, except for a bit of harmless flirting, it started long after that. But he stopped, very suddenly." Stella stopped here herself, which was probably a cue for me to mind my own business. Why did he stop? I asked. Stella paused, bit her lip. "Well, he came over to the house one evening, on some absurd man-like pretext, & handed me an envelope, which he insisted I open then & there. Which I did, feeling quite anxious, even frightened. Inside was a letter full of stiff, scientific-sounding phrases & a poem he composed himself ... It was a love letter. And, well, that was the end of that." Again Stella gave me a look, a discreet look that said "I've gone far enough." And? I said. Why was that the end of that? Stella again hesitated, looking me in the eye for several seconds, perhaps wondering if she could trust me. "I guess because, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't stop laughing ..." 46 46 April 16 Am starting to like the Bath Lady. A lot. Feel terrible terrible for ever wanting to get her fired. for ever wanting to get her fired.

April 17 Beautiful sunny day. A real spring day. Sat out front listening to Arcade Fire and The Dears, over and over like a preteen. On Noel's discman. JJ went back to his place & returned with a bag of equipment: knee pads, elbow pads, helmets. I thought he was going to invite me out but no such luck. He & Stella laughed like maniacs as they put it all on, to the sounds of Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" on JJ's ghetto blaster. Then they went out blading! I watched them from the living-room window, as they careened madly through puddles & slush holding hands & collapsing into each other's arms.

The Bath Lady-Sancha, I should say-arrived as I was watching them & I asked her if she'd seen Noel around. She said no. She then said, out of the blue, that I should marry him (!?) April 21 Semester over. Exams over. Fingers crossed.

April 22 Made couscous today-spent all day on it-& ended up eating it alone. JJ & Mrs. B went to a play at the Centaur and Noel, while timing something with a stop-watch downstairs, nerved on coffee & eyes blackly circled, said he wasn't hungry. "Food dulls the senses," he mumbled cyborgly, "and slows the mind."

So after a few riveting games of solitaire, I took Mrs. B's bicycle out & rode blindly round the neighbourhood like a backward six-year-old, arriving home in darkness, my clothes soaked in sweat.

April 23 Pelting rain outside, the wind playing some old instrument, like a crumhorn or sackbut or something, on the loose drainpipes. Shakespeare's birthday today, maybe that's why. I was going to ask Noel out to celebrate, but he zipped past me on his way out to his sacred "matinee" with Nor. (Naturally, he would never think of inviting me.) He mumbled something about "finding out Nor's secret", whatever that means.

While JJ & Stella were downstairs, roller-blading up & down the halls to Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," I was lying on Noel's bed-don't ask me why-when I got a flash, a memory flash! About what happened that night I was slipped the GHB. I was at a party all right, but not when I woke up. I was in a lab lab (!?!) (!?!)

Chapter 17.

Noel & Norval (II) After King Lear King Lear, at a bistro across from the theatre, Noel sat at a table heaped with skeletal remains: chicken bones and mussel sh.e.l.ls, potato skins and baguette heels, on and off the plate, a-swim in beer, wine, coffee, ketchup. On a saucer a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself. As he was sheepishly trying to draw the waitress's attention to all this, someone approached the table. A busboy? No, a nondescript man with a laptop, who seemed to know Dr. Vorta. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he knew all about Noel's coloured hearing, repeating things twice and three times. His pansy-purple voice stretched and unstretched like a trampoline, sprinkling gunpowder green on the higher notes.

After two or three minutes of one-way conversation, Noel spotted Norval coming out of the men's room. From the opposite direction came a large man in Stygian black leather, who planted himself in Norval's path. He had a spindly ponytail, unibrows, and a drooping moustache like a seal. An angry seal.

"You're not going to move, I take it," he heard Norval say.

"I never make way for a.s.sholes," said the man in slithery squid-brown tentacles.

"No? I always do," said Norval, stepping aside, allowing the man to pa.s.s.

The gentleman with the laptop, when he saw Norval heading his way, gathered up his things and fled, as if Vikings had landed.

Norval watched the man turn tail. "Who is is that guy, anyway? That ponce with the laptop and billowy trousers. Of the kind worn by pantalooned palace eunuchs. He's been pestering me for weeks." After a quick glance at the table, he summoned a waitress twenty yards away with a kingly head-jerk. that guy, anyway? That ponce with the laptop and billowy trousers. Of the kind worn by pantalooned palace eunuchs. He's been pestering me for weeks." After a quick glance at the table, he summoned a waitress twenty yards away with a kingly head-jerk.

"He's a ... ghostwriter, an as-told-to-ist. His name's Geoff something. He's doing something for Memento Vivere."

"Volta's vanity press? What's he doing? A hagiography for its editorin-chief?"

As the unsmiling waitress cleared the table, deftly emptying things into a bucket, Noel glanced at the gentleman in question. He was sitting at a table half-hidden by a pillar, pushing b.u.t.tons on a tiny machine. "He ... well, he asked me to keep it quiet."

"He's not doing that product-placement novel is he? For Vorta? In which everyone sits around drinking Maxwell House coffee?"

"I don't think so."

"Vorta's memoirs?"

"Something like that."

"Memoirs," said Norval, shaking his head. "The favourite genre of people who never had a memorable thought."

"Come on, Nor. There are lots of-"

"Has-beens with imaginations so barren they can't write fiction. And memories so barren they can't write the truth.

Noel again glanced over his shoulder. And got a better look at the machine the man was fiddling with: a mini-CD-R recorder.

"His fees must be as paltry as his writing skills," said Norval, "if he's working for that dwarfish quack."47 "Why has he been 'pestering' you?"

"He wants permission, for some reason, to publish a chapter of my novel. Which he'll never get. He was also hara.s.sing Sam last week. I think he's in love with her."

Noel furrowed his brow. "It was JJ who got him the job. After Vorta fired two other writers."

"For telling the truth? So this hack hiding behind the pillar is a last resort?"48 Here a woman, an underdressed platinum-haired woman with b.r.e.a.s.t.s padded to videogame dimensions, stopped at the table. When Norval rose, as if to embrace her, she began poking a finger into his chest, her voice rising from twenty to seventy decibels. As her anger grew her words became less and less comprehensible, almost a foreign tongue. She began to sob and moan as her body heaved. Norval observed her, with shocking unflappability. "Be back in a second," he said as he escorted the hysterical woman outside.

Noel watched the two through the window, as in a pantomime, as Norval evidently sorted things out. The woman was no longer crying; she was kissing his fingers. Noel shook his head. If she knew what acts those hands had committed, she might think twice before lifting them to her lips. She was now walking away-calmly, even contentedly by the way she glanced back at him. Why do women bother? Surely it's not a turn-on, surely the truism is not true: that women, and beautiful women in particular, are drawn to men who remain aloof from them, or wipe their shoes on them ...

Norval returned to the table with a dangling cigarette in his mouth and two drinks in one hand. "There should be a pound where you can leave people like that. With anaesthetists. And cages."

Noel wasn't listening. He was brooding over the same things he was brooding over when he arrived at the bar. Samira. Her love for Norval. Her attempts to understand him. Norval's feelings for her. Norval's capacity for love. He described the sentiment in his novel, realistically, poignantly. And Dowson's "Cynara," he had confessed, was on his Top Ten list. But how to approach all this? He took a sip of the beer that Norval had placed in front of him.

"I don't understand you," he said finally.

"In general, or with reference to some particular?"

"When you say you've never been in love."

Norval took a gulp of his Irish whiskey. "Which word escapes your understanding?"

"I don't understand the concept. I'm convinced you're lying. Are you?"

"Never felt less inclined to. Love exists for only one reason-to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. It may boil down to a chemical called oxytocin. Do you know it?"

"Well ... yes."

"I am thus unable to love one woman. But quite able-compelled, in fact-to love hundreds."

"When you say 'love,' you mean 'have s.e.x with.' But why hundreds? Why so many?"

"Because the best moments of a relationship occur at the beginning beginning, when you're deluded by infinite possibilities. The middle and end is a lemming-walk."

"But have you ever even reached the middle?"

Norval waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. "And because there comes a time in everyone's life when some serious arithmetic has to be done-comparing the sum of pleasures life has left to offer versus the sum of pain. And this comparison leads, at a certain age, for those that have the guts, to suicide. So before I get there I'll do the one thing that gives pleasure, while I still can."

Noel shook his head. He'd heard this sophistry before. "But it must be so ... unsatisfying. Not to get to that final stage. To commitment, marriage, a happy ending ..."

"Happy ending? Have you been paying attention? It's happy for me when the beginning and end are rolled up in the first encounter."

"... and the whole thrilling process of falling in love. Which is the closest most of us will come to glimpsing utopia."

"Oh, please. s.e.x and drugs give much better glimpses. Noel, you're a spectacularly easy faller-in-love, and what good has it done you? Let's put this romantic c.r.a.p to bed. The world is not like Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet, with random arrows flung by Cupid. Romantic love is a Darwinian trick that blinds us to each other's flaws. Falling in love. Falling implies that you were once at a stable position, at a higher point than before. I prefer the stabler, higher position."

"But didn't you say-at JJ's party-that you enjoyed falling? 'Savouring the aesthetics of descent' and all that?"

Norval arched an eyebrow while tapping redundantly on his cigarette. He was unused to logical ambush and surprised by its incidence. "I was ... we're talking about two different metaphors."

Noel smiled. "Maybe you've just been unlucky, Nor, the right dart hasn't hit you. Cupid shoots darts of lead and gold, remember, for false and true love. You've been getting lead, that's all. Don't give up hope."

Norval rolled his eyes. "Another hope fiend. The hope of true love is haunted by mortality."

"Children help you get around that."

"Children? Children are instruments of torture. I share Byron's view: 'No virtue yet, except starvation, could stop that worst of vices- propagation.'"

Noel had tuned out completely; he was thinking of Samira, of what it would be like to have a child with her ...

"Have you flown recently?" Norval continued. "Babies should not be allowed on board. Can't they be Fed-Exed? Or doped and put in cages with the pets? Noel? Are you with me?"

Noel was not. "Yes, I ... I was just thinking." The idea of fathering Samira's child was not the only thing that held his thoughts; he had a burning question for Norval, one that he'd been planning to ask since he first sat down. How best to phrase it? He had asked the same question of JJ, who had answered no; he had asked a similar question of Sam, who had also answered no. How would Norval respond? Seconds pa.s.sed before his lips stopped moving. "Norval, what letter ... are you ... in love with Samira?" At least this was what he intended to say, more or less. The first part of the question was faint and garbled, the last spoken at quadruple speed. Sweat surged from all pores and red fire burned on his cheeks.

"Was that English? Are you all right, Noel? In violent fevers, I'm told, people have been known to talk in ancient tongues."

"Are you in love with Samira?"

Norval held a freshly lit cigarette over an ashtray, seemed to examine the bent b.u.t.ts left by his predecessors. He then noticed his friend's expression and for a second softened. "No, I'm not."

Noel heard the words over the thundering of his heart. And yet felt not an ounce of relief! What difference does it make whether he is or not? What difference does it make to me me? A p.a.w.n in love with a queen. Tin in love with Iridium. She probably has enough suitors to fill an iPod. "But what I don't ... you know, understand is ... It's just that everybody ... or almost everybody ..."

"Spit it out, Noel."

Noel drew a huge breath into his lungs, unsure of where he was going with this and why. "It's just that everybody has at least one love in their life ... or a memory of one. Samira has one, JJ has one, my mother has one, and I-"

"Well I I don't." don't."

"But ... but no one could write Unmotivated Steps Unmotivated Steps without having felt mad, blind love." without having felt mad, blind love."

"I was barely out of my teens when I wrote that drivel. And besides, it was a romantic parody."

"The critics didn't see it that way."

"The critics critics? The critics praised the weakest parts of the weakest chapters, and were obtuse to everything else."

Noel scratched at his beer label, recalling something he and Samira had talked about. "We ... I have a theory about you-would you like to hear it?"

"No."

"It's not really a theory. It's more like a feeling or hunch-it's not a fully thought-out position-"

"Get on with it for Christ's sake."

"Your life has been ... well, martyred to a single memory. Because of what happened to you as a child-when your mother cheated on your dad, when she left him for that rich old man-"

"My father was rich too."

"You've been looking ever since for an antidote in affairs, an antidote to the pain of ... well, losing your mother that day. But since you're unconsciously seeking a mother rather than a mistress, all women disappoint you."

Norval nodded. "Noel, something is impairing your reason, and I think I know what it is: s.e.xual deprivation. A s.e.m.e.n backlog is blockading your brain."

"And because your mother was vulgar and faithless, you fear you've got a similar defect. You fear you've been genetically stained."

"Genetically stained? Give your head a shake." Give your head a shake."

"And so you're incapable of refusing any woman whose attentions confirm that you're ... attractive and lovable."

Norval nodded again, as if in agreement, as if finally seeing the light. "Interesting theory, Noel. Really interesting. It suffers from just one small drawback: it's complete rubbish."

"Hence your blend of sn.o.bbery and rebellion and your low opinion of women-which is due, at least in part, to your lifelong, unresolved quarrels with your mother."

"Are you finished, Herr Doktor? Are you? Because if you are, I would like to interject here and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for having clarified my entire life."

"Sometimes a little psychiatry-"

"Psychiatry? Psychiatry is the most spectacular error of twentiethcentury thought. It should be consigned, if it hasn't been already, to history's great intellectual s.h.i.tpile. The twenty-first century will lump psychiatrists in with astrologers and witchdoctors. Do you want to know why? Because brain disorders are Psychiatry is the most spectacular error of twentiethcentury thought. It should be consigned, if it hasn't been already, to history's great intellectual s.h.i.tpile. The twenty-first century will lump psychiatrists in with astrologers and witchdoctors. Do you want to know why? Because brain disorders are chemical chemical. Our brain is just a piece of meat with chemicals and electrical charges and switches. Feeling and thinking and imagining-they're just forms of information processing. Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological physiological events in the tissues of the brain. Personality? It can be defined by events in the tissues of the brain. Personality? It can be defined by the s.p.a.ces between the brain cells the s.p.a.ces between the brain cells-the synapses, which are distinct for each individual."

"Then why do you work with Dr. Vorta, a trained psychiatrist?"