The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [11]
Samira had a roller-coaster sensation inside her stomach, as if the elevator cables were stretching like rubber and about to launch them into space. “Very good.”
“I see we’re both going to the ninth floor. You’re seeing Dr. Vorta?”
She shook her head. “Dr. Rhéaume.”
“You’re one of her students?”
Samira grabbed onto the handrail for support. “Yes. But that’s not why I’m seeing her.” Why did I add that last bit? she wondered as the elevator stopped and the doors opened.
With a lordly flourish, Norval invited her to exit. “What’s your name, by the way?”
From the hall she watched the doors rumble shut. “Must I tell you?”
“Yes. Your first name. Is it … Zubaydah? Gulbeyaz? Nefertiti?”
Samira half-smiled, shook her head after each name.
“Scheherazade?”
Her smile widened. “This could go on forever. It’s Samira.”
“Beginning with an s?”
Samira looked ceilingward. “Uh, yes, Samira begins with an s.”
“Perfect. S is what I require. Come. I’ve a few things to attend to with Dr. Vorta, to whom I’ll introduce you. Then we’re going for lunch. No, this is the right way—the open door on the left.”
As they approached it Samira glimpsed a fluted wooden pedestal on a grey filing cabinet, which supported a plastic human head divided into numbered sections. Two men stood on either side of it, as if engaging it in conversation. Amidst a faint smell of carbolic acid and monkey stool.
“Look, there’s old man Vorta now—the one with the vulturine face. My name’s Norval Blaquière, by the way. You may have heard of me.”
Hours later, she wasn’t sure how many, Samira was horizontal, high atop a loft in the Old Port, on a miraculously soft and silk-sheeted bed. She looked up through a skylight at a torn web of clouds, sideways at the frost-blue ribbon of the Saint Lawrence, and down at what looked like an art gallery from another century.
Rows of paintings adorned the walls, late nineteenth-century paintings in a decor that combined Regency and debased Gothic with elements of pure fancy. An archery target was suspended from the ceiling at one end of the immense living room, while an extravagant candle chandelier, the biggest Samira had ever seen, hung from the other. There was a curving staircase with wrought-iron balustrade, a fireplace with a Gothic slate mantel, wainscotted walls of fog-grey, and herringbone floors of Brazilian mahogany. In the corner farthest from her was a moonstone-blue staircase that went nowhere. It just stopped, as in a Surrealist dreamscape, four or five feet from the ceiling.
“Norval?” Samira called out. “Norval?” Her prince had abandoned her. “Why did I go to lunch with him?” she asked herself, while watching a ceiling fan, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, spin languorously. “Because I was starving. Fine. But why did I come back to his place?”
She closed her eyes and tried to replay things on the dark screen of her eyelids. Today was no problem. She remembered everything: meeting Norval in the elevator, then Dr. Vorta and … this guy who looked like Norval’s brother. Noel? Who just stood and gawked, without saying a word … She remembered descending in the elevator with this same man, then waiting for Norval in a sushi restaurant across the street; she remembered arriving at his place and asking if she could go to sleep. But why was she so sleepy? Because Dr. Vorta had given her something—a sedative? Yes, today was clear—today she remembered everything. It was last week she had trouble with. She was at a party of some sort, at a shooting-gallery or squat in Mile End that belonged to a friend of a friend’s … No, it wasn’t that party, it was another one, in Villeray, something to do with school. But then things went black and murky and monstrous, like Loch Ness.
Where’s my knapsack? She opened her eyes and saw it lying beside her on a ledge, under a telescope tripod. She opened it, checked the contents, then pulled out a diary. Looking for a clue, she flipped through its pages. Nothing. No entries since the party. She now wrote:
Memoirs of an amnesiac. January (or maybe