The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [110]
April 16
Am starting to like the Bath Lady. A lot. Feel terrible for ever wanting to get her fired.
April 17
Beautiful sunny day. A real spring day. Sat out front listening to Arcade Fire and The Dears, over and over like a preteen. On Noel’s discman. JJ went back to his place & returned with a bag of equipment: knee pads, elbow pads, helmets. I thought he was going to invite me out but no such luck. He & Stella laughed like maniacs as they put it all on, to the sounds of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” on JJ’s ghetto blaster. Then they went out blading! I watched them from the living-room window, as they careened madly through puddles & slush holding hands & collapsing into each other’s arms.
The Bath Lady—Sancha, I should say—arrived as I was watching them & I asked her if she’d seen Noel around. She said no. She then said, out of the blue, that I should marry him (!?)
April 21
Semester over. Exams over. Fingers crossed.
April 22
Made couscous today—spent all day on it—& ended up eating it alone. JJ & Mrs. B went to a play at the Centaur and Noel, while timing something with a stop-watch downstairs, nerved on coffee & eyes blackly circled, said he wasn’t hungry. “Food dulls the senses,” he mumbled cyborgly, “and slows the mind.”
So after a few riveting games of solitaire, I took Mrs. B’s bicycle out & rode blindly round the neighbourhood like a backward six-year-old, arriving home in darkness, my clothes soaked in sweat.
April 23
Pelting rain outside, the wind playing some old instrument, like a crumhorn or sackbut or something, on the loose drainpipes. Shakespeare’s birthday today, maybe that’s why. I was going to ask Noel out to celebrate, but he zipped past me on his way out to his sacred “matinée” with Nor. (Naturally, he would never think of inviting me.) He mumbled something about “finding out Nor’s secret”, whatever that means.
While JJ & Stella were downstairs, roller-blading up & down the halls to Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride,” I was lying on Noel’s bed—don’t ask me why—when I got a flash, a memory flash! About what happened that night I was slipped the GHB. I was at a party all right, but not when I woke up. I was in a lab (!?!)
Chapter 17
Noel & Norval (II)
After King Lear, at a bistro across from the theatre, Noel sat at a table heaped with skeletal remains: chicken bones and mussel shells, potato skins and baguette heels, on and off the plate, a-swim in beer, wine, coffee, ketchup. On a saucer a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself. As he was sheepishly trying to draw the waitress’s attention to all this, someone approached the table. A busboy? No, a nondescript man with a laptop, who seemed to know Dr. Vorta. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he knew all about Noel’s coloured hearing, repeating things twice and three times. His pansy-purple voice stretched and unstretched like a trampoline, sprinkling gunpowder green on the higher notes.
After two or three minutes of one-way conversation, Noel spotted Norval coming out of the men’s room. From the opposite direction came a large man in Stygian black leather, who planted himself in Norval’s path. He had a spindly ponytail, unibrows, and a drooping moustache like a seal. An angry seal.
“You’re not going to move, I take it,” he heard Norval say.
“I never make way for assholes,” said the man in slithery squid-brown tentacles.
“No? I always do,” said Norval, stepping aside, allowing the man to pass.
The gentleman with the laptop, when he saw Norval heading his way, gathered up his things and fled, as if Vikings had landed.
Norval