The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [101]
Didn’t see Samira today.
March 8. In between quiz shows, a trailer for the movie about Iris Murdoch came on and Mom said, Shh! It’s about AD and I want to hear it! Clearly, Mom’s getting better. But which drug is responsible? Is it the Hyperzine A, the qian ceng ta, that JJ’s been slipping into Mom’s tea?
March 9. Have hardly seen Samira at all. We had one great evening together, but that’s about it. We pass each other in the house, but nothing more. She’s usually out the entire day. At school, or with Norval?
March 10. At two in the morning, when I was sure everyone was asleep, I played my tape of Samira’s movie, all the way through. I wanted to check out something. There are colours in her voice, subtle gradations, that I’ve never heard in real life, only on film. They’re velvety and haloed with trivalent vanadium, and I realise now they occur only in her scenes with Stirling Trevanne. They’re the sounds of love.
March 11. Watched another quiz show tonight—Mom and I for the first half, then joined for two minutes by … Samira. She said I should try to be a contestant, that I’d be really good, that I could win some money to keep the house going, and that she’d be really proud of me. She then vanished for the rest of the evening.
March 12. Saw Sam again today—for a few seconds. She looked angry and barely acknowledged me. I’d gone to see Dr. Vorta to give him a copy of my lab notes, which include JJ’s concoctions, and on my way out, he introduced me to a fellow synaesthete, a woman from Chicago named Kelly. (I’d seen her several months before, when I blew up in Dr. Vorta’s office, but she didn’t seem to remember me, or my voice, which goes to show all synaesthetes aren’t alike.) Anyway, we talked for a while, laughed a lot, and that’s when Samira suddenly emerged and walked right by us without saying a word.
Kelly and I went for a coffee at Café Apollinaire and started talking about American and Canadian accents. She said that Jane Mackay, the British painter, could tell the difference between the two because “the Canadian accent is more yellow.” We then compared our alphabets and Arabic numerals. Like me, she assigns a sex to letters and numbers—although hers are quite different and much more detailed.42 We agreed on the top five most frequent consonant sounds (n, t, d, s, l), but not on their colours. Or on the colours of the days of the week. We disagreed on every one (including her “Ruby Tuesday”) except for Wednesday, blue. And the only letter we agreed on was O (white—nearly 50% of synaesthetes see O as white). Anyway, we had a great time. She has a laugh that shimmers, like a credit-card hologram, with bursts of mango orange and cornflower blue.
When Kelly began talking about Dr. Vorta and how much she admired him, I asked her about that time in his office, when I barged in on a spectrograph test, when I saw her half undressed. She said it was all very innocent—while waiting for him she simply decided to change out of her work clothes, because she was going blading later on with her boyfriend …
I walked her to the Champs de Mars métro and was going to ask her if he was still her boyfriend but didn’t because that’s an adolescent question. What is one supposed to say? Are you attached? Are your affections engaged? “Shall we go for a drink?” I almost said, but I almost say things much more often than I say them. The words just wouldn’t come out, stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. “Bye,” I bleated. I then decided to walk all the way home, perhaps to punish myself, which took a good hour. Five minutes in and freezing rain came down in squally gusts. I was shellacked and