The Memory Artists (2 page)

The professional writer-translator assigned to recount their story has combined “dramatic reconstructions” with interviews, laboratory notes and diary entries. These records have not been altered, even when unflattering to me personally; in the interests of science, and as a matter of historical record, I have considered it my duty to disguise nothing and suppress nothing. Because post-postmodernism is not my “bag” (my slang may not be current) and English not my “strong suit” (my mother tongues are French and German), I have made only minor revisions to the prose, excising weak or superfluous passages when sure that excision would improve, and bolstering the text with brief endnotes (keep a bookmark in page 299!).

And now the obvious question. Why
another
book on this scientific odyssey, at least the third in the past year? Everyone knows that a ground-breaking discovery in the field of memory was made under my enlightened auspices. Everyone knows that for this I was awarded a prestigious Scandinavian prize. Mere hours after my return from Europe, however, controversy began to swirl like fumes from a poisonous gas. Blinded, it would appear, by the demonry of a mythomaniacal “whistleblower,” three American newspapers, in serpentine fashion, have accused me of taking credit for a discovery I did not make—and of professional conduct tantamount to murder.

Now semi-retired, my glory days behind me, I wish neither to tarnish NB’s reputation (in his way, the young man was a genius) nor burnish my own. Before sinking, however, into that black pit of forgetfulness, the final amnesia, I wish to set the record straight—for my wife, for my daughter, and for the history of medicine.

ÉMILE VORTA, M.Litt., MD, PhD

Neuropsychologist and Professor Emeritus

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Quebec

Editor-in-Chief, Éditions Memento Vivere

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Chapter 1

“NB”

M
ost people want to learn how to remember more; for Noel Burun, the big task, the most burdensome, was to learn how to forget. Not only the painful things in life, which we all want wiped away, but things in general. For whenever Noel heard a voice or read a word, multicoloured shapes would form inside his head that served as markers or maps, helping him to recollect, in the minutest detail, an emotion, a mood, a tone of voice, the words themselves—of events that happened up to three decades ago.

Back in 1978, for example, when they came to tell him his father was dead, this is what lit up Noel’s nine-year-old brain:

A dry and crumbly voice like kitty litter … [turning into] a pockmarked strip of tarnished brass, which tapered swordlike, seemed to disappear, then reappeared as a blood-red pendulum. It began to sway, in brighter and brighter reds, blindingly, and then a change, another voice, a spongy yolk-yellow blob with throbbing burnt-rose rings. A louder, higher voice interrupted, a cruciform shape, cranberry at its nave, the lightness fading from the centre outwards so that the edges appeared pearl white. Another voice, brassy and belching like a bass trombone, and a streak of lightning, jagged-edged and barium yellow, split the sky of my brain in two. Slowly, the serrations melted away, the yellow disintegrating into pulsating steel, and it felt like a dagger had pierced my spine. Then the gravelly voice again from the man in front of me, the tarnished brass and then … silence, against a backdrop of Etch-A-Sketch grey. The “dead mood,” I used to call it, the lull before things returned to normal. I opened my eyes: my mother was speaking, her throat strangling each syllable. A black-suited man from Adventa Pharmaceuticals was trying to comfort her, while two moustachioed men in navy blue stared at me …
¹

Especially when he was younger and didn’t know how to stop them, these images could explode like endlessly exploding fireworks, triggering more and more colour patterns and memory clusters, carrying him so far adrift, so far into the back alleys of his universe that he had trouble following even the simplest conversation. Unless it was passive communication, like watching television, Noel needed to
absorb
a person’s voice, experience the distinct colours and shapes, before he could decipher the words themselves.

Not surprisingly, everyone thought Noel was off his head, and that was fine with him. His mother loved him, his father loved him, and because of the colours in his head he was able to miss more school than all his classmates combined. The images, moreover, had a practical purpose: although I’ve got little else going for me, Noel often thought, I’ve got a fantastic memory. Which sometimes comes in handy.

When he did go to school his classmates taunted him mercilessly (“It would’ve been better,” one of them confided, “if you’d never been born”), but eventually they got used to his vacant spells and fog. “Commander Noel” was on one of his “spacewalks.” His teachers, especially at first, would react with annoyance or sarcasm: “Is this, ahem, one of your convenient periods of mental unemployment, my dear Burun?” And everyone would laugh. When he told them, in private, about the colliding colours, they immediately suspected drug abuse: it sounded very much like LSD or mescaline or some newfangled hallucinogen. Was this a matter for the authorities? And so the rumours spread. The brains and dweebs avoided him, whereas people like Radar Nénon, the school’s first acid-popping punk, took a sudden liking to him. He’d finally found someone who saw stranger things than he did.

“Schizophrenics have abnormal colour perceptions,” one teacher told him, while another said that “It’s got to be aphasia or autism, one or the other.” The school nurse, a chronically irate Welsh widow, had another explanation: “You’ve got a definite defect, son. Deprived of oxygen in the womb perhaps—or dropped headfirst off the delivery table.” But it was none of the above, as he soon found out from a friend of his father’s, a renowned Montreal neurologist named Émile Vorta.

“Congratulations,” said the doctor with unaccountable good cheer, in French, after a mind-deadening battery of perception and memory tests. “You’re one in twenty thousand. You’re blessed—although sometimes you may feel cursed—with a complex sensitivity known as
synaesthesia
.”
²

Why is he so happy? Noel wondered, as the doctor shook his little hand. Because he can experiment on me like one of his chimpanzees?
³

“You’re the first male synaesthete I’ve met. Now, I want you to do something that will help us both a great deal. I want you to keep a diary. Do you know what a diary is?”

“Yes, I already keep one.”

“A diary is a book in which you write down things that happened to you during the day. Or the events of your past. Or in your dreams—”

“Once I dreamt I was walking through this gigantic crossword puzzle—”

“Or the colours and shapes you see in your head when people talk to you. And I’d like to see it at the end of every month. Do you understand?”

“Sometimes when people talk I wish I had a decoder ring—”

“Does anyone else in your family have anything like … what you have?”

Noel paused. “Why, is there a genetic component associated with this condition, Doctor?”

Dr. Vorta paused. There is more to this child than meets the eye. Seven years old! “As a matter of fact there is … as you say, a genetic component associated with this condition.”

“Well, my mom’s mom had some strange things in her head like me. Dad thought it was her brandy pudding. She made it triple-strength and one time I—”

“Very interesting. Yes, it’s most often passed on through the female side.”

“She was a witch. A good witch.”

“Was she really?”

“We got tons of letters from her from Scotland—with magic spells inside—except we can’t find them. When we moved we lost them. I met her once.”

“Did you really?”

“I pushed her rocking chair when nobody was sitting in it and she said that’s bad luck, ghosts come and sit in it.”

“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.’”