The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [102]
As I was closing my curtains a frostbow appeared in the sky, only the second I’ve seen. Exactly like a rainbow, except that it’s a lustrous white. A good auspice? Before I could call out to my mother, or anyone else, it was gone.
March 14. Mom was in great spirits all day; I was quite sick. Not so much from the cold, but from tiredness, numbness. I could barely move. Mom kept asking what she could get me, did I need anything at the drugstore, did I want some chicken soup? In my bedroom, while JJ worked in the basement, we watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Mom shouted out some of the answers (most of them wrong). We then watched a similar show called Tip of Your Tongue, a low-budget satellite channel knock-off. The contestant chose History as his subject, and Mom knew some of the answers, which made her happy. Five minutes before the end, Samira appeared, and watched from the doorway, in a shaft of late afternoon sunlight. She smiled at my mother, and then at me, and the next time I looked she was gone.
4:20 a.m. Can’t sleep. Sam left coloured residue in my brain, like a comet trail, that’s been burning into my past. Not from her voice colours, but from something she was wearing: a diaphonous off-the-shoulder blouse of the darkest brown. In the light of the sun, mingled with the colour of her flesh, it took on this deep Rembrandtesque brown, with gold leaf and Roman ochre reflections … The colour of Coca-Cola, almost. A shade I first saw in the summer between kindergarten and first grade, when I mixed all my mom’s oil colours together on the stones of our patio. And saw for the second time in the Adirondacks, north of Ticonderoga, when I was with my father on one of his sales trips. He held me on his shoulders under a waterfall as the sun lit up a frothing stream of Coca-Cola...
He drowned in waters not ten minutes away.
March 15. For the past two weeks, after visiting my father’s grave, I’ve been thinking about a skein of “coincidences” that revolve around The Arabian Nights. I’ve tried to block them out—because they’re unscientific, illogical, superstitious—but they’ve been gnawing away at me like an unkept promise. One. It finally dawned on me where my crossword puzzle/exitless maze dreamscape comes from: from the frontispiece of the Sir Richard Burton translation. How could I not have made this connection before? Two. JJ has a copy of the Galland translation, which I’d never read before. Three. Even though it’s a sham, Norval mentions The Arabian Nights as an influence for his Alpha Bet. Four. Samira Darwish comes into my life. Five. At the cemetery, while gazing at my father’s tombstone, I calculated the time between my mom’s first suspicions of memory loss and the first signs of clear improvement: two years, 9 months. Or … 1001 days. This is courting madness, I know. JJ’s numerology and arcana have contaminated my brain. Still, if I push this one step further—and my dad, after all, said that irrational art and rational science should never be separated—perhaps number six will relate to the memory cure itself. That its ingredients, or the treasure map leading to them, will lie within the pages of The 1001 Nights.
After three tumblers of mulled wine (“plotty” my mom calls it), I recounted all this to JJ—he’s the only one I could think of that wouldn’t laugh—and he said YES, YES, YES!, jumping up and down and practically soiling himself. He then went to consult my Burton and Lane volumes (the ones that weren’t in my room he dragged down from the attic) and began to read them on my bed, scouring them for clues. Why he has to do this in my room, on my