The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [103]
What I didn’t tell him is that I already have a hunch about the clue, based on the fact that Norval, JJ and I are all—quite likely—in love with Samira. There’s a similar triangle in “Prince Ahmed and Fairy Pari Banou,” in which the Sultan’s three sons—Ali, Houssain and Ahmed—are all in love with their father’s ward, Princess Nouronnihar. To determine who should be the bridegroom, the sultan sends them out to find “the most extraordinary things” they can. Whoever brings back the rarest object will win the hand of the princess. So, Ali finds an ivory tube with a glass that will show any object he wishes to see. Houssain finds a magic carpet that will transport him wherever he wants to go. Ahmed finds an artificial apple, the scent of which will cure any illness. As they display their gifts, Houssain, looking through the tube, sees the princess, apparently on the point of death. They all jump on his magic carpet and are whisked to her bedroom, where Ahmed uses his magic apple to revive her …
Now, Norval has a telescope, and he wrote about a “magic” telescope in his novel, so he’s Ali. I’m working on a cure, so I’m Ahmed. Which means that JJ has to be Houssain. I’ll have to ask him about a magic carpet …
March 17. Just read yesterday’s entry. Was I drunk? Of course I didn’t ask JJ about a magic carpet. Am I losing it? No, because today I realised something: that all this toil and quest is folly, that I will never succeed, that my mother, like all Alzheimer patients before her, will worsen and die.
March 18. Spent all morning, afternoon and part of the evening downstairs, poring over a quartet of translations of The Arabian Nights, stopping only when I could no longer see the words. What was I doing? An undoable jigsaw, with half the pieces missing, of a fucking polar bear in a snowstorm.
I stared at the wall and emptied my mind, waiting for … what? For a ghost to come and touch me? For Dad to whisper a clue in my ear from the beyond?
A knock on the door. Samira delivering me from madness and delusion with potent drink and her even more potent presence.
March 20. Feverish again, with burning eyes and ears and a tremor in my cheeks. I am in a bad way.
Haven’t seen JJ and Sam holding hands again, or signs of trysts or anything like that. Not that I’m looking, not that it matters. I wish them well.
March 23. Spent the last three days, every second, in my basement oubliette. Even slept there, dozing off and on like a sentinel drunk at his post. I don’t want to see anyone. Fever now blazing its way into my brain—at the convict hour between 4 and 5 I stepped outside, into a blizzard, hatless and bootless, in that unreal clarity that comes from a lack of sleep and sustenance, chanting “alkahest, alkahest …”
7:09 a.m. A ray of light has pierced the gloom. I finally found the clue. It wasn’t in Lane or Burton or Payne but in JJ’s edition, in Galland’s “The Sleeper and the Awakener”:
She went quickly to a druggist’s shop, and asked of him a drug often administered to men when diseased with forgetfulness. Without a word he ground up blossoms of Aleppine jasmine and Damascene nenuphar, bulbs of poet’s narcissus and rootstalks of curcuma, seeds of club moss and stems of amaranth …
March 26. Spent last three days checking out the phytochemical structures of each. Three, possibly four, may be worth a shot, particularly in combination: narcissus, which is already used in the AD palliative Galantamine; club moss (JJ’s qian ceng ta or Hyperzine A); curcuma (turmeric), whose polyphenols may protect the brain from lipid peroxidation and scavenge nitric oxide-based free radicals; and amaranth, whose stems and roots contains colloidal carbohydrates similar to those in apple pectin, which eliminate toxic metals that likely contribute to dementia. A desperate, pathetic long-shot—but what the hell. When combined, at least on paper, the chemical equations line up beautifully, almost a work of art.
March 29. A sea-change in Mom’s condition. She finished the crossword puzzle in the Globe and Mail—something she hasn