The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [113]
“Spit it out, Noel.”
Noel drew a huge breath into his lungs, unsure of where he was going with this and why. “It’s just that everybody has at least one love in their life … or a memory of one. Samira has one, JJ has one, my mother has one, and I—”
“Well I don’t.”
“But … but no one could write Unmotivated Steps without having felt mad, blind love.”
“I was barely out of my teens when I wrote that drivel. And besides, it was a romantic parody.”
“The critics didn’t see it that way.”
“The critics? The critics praised the weakest parts of the weakest chapters, and were obtuse to everything else.”
Noel scratched at his beer label, recalling something he and Samira had talked about. “We … I have a theory about you—would you like to hear it?”
“No.”
“It’s not really a theory. It’s more like a feeling or hunch—it’s not a fully thought-out position—”
“Get on with it for Christ’s sake.”
“Your life has been … well, martyred to a single memory. Because of what happened to you as a child—when your mother cheated on your dad, when she left him for that rich old man—”
“My father was rich too.”
“You’ve been looking ever since for an antidote in affairs, an antidote to the pain of … well, losing your mother that day. But since you’re unconsciously seeking a mother rather than a mistress, all women disappoint you.”
Norval nodded. “Noel, something is impairing your reason, and I think I know what it is: sexual deprivation. A semen backlog is blockading your brain.”
“And because your mother was vulgar and faithless, you fear you’ve got a similar defect. You fear you’ve been genetically stained.”
“Genetically stained? Give your head a shake.”
“And so you’re incapable of refusing any woman whose attentions confirm that you’re … attractive and lovable.”
Norval nodded again, as if in agreement, as if finally seeing the light. “Interesting theory, Noel. Really interesting. It suffers from just one small drawback: it’s complete rubbish.”
“Hence your blend of snobbery and rebellion and your low opinion of women—which is due, at least in part, to your lifelong, unresolved quarrels with your mother.”
“Are you finished, Herr Doktor? Are you? Because if you are, I would like to interject here and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for having clarified my entire life.”
“Sometimes a little psychiatry—”
“Psychiatry? Psychiatry is the most spectacular error of twentiethcentury thought. It should be consigned, if it hasn’t been already, to history’s great intellectual shitpile. The twenty-first century will lump psychiatrists in with astrologers and witchdoctors. Do you want to know why? Because brain disorders are chemical. Our brain is just a piece of meat with chemicals and electrical charges and switches. Feeling and thinking and imagining—they’re just forms of information processing. Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain. Personality? It can be defined by the spaces between the brain cells—the synapses, which are distinct for each individual.”
“Then why do you work with Dr. Vorta, a trained psychiatrist?”
“Because he feeds me mind-altering drugs. And then pays me to feed him an endless stream of lies on which he bases an endless stream of articles which are endlessly dismissed.”49
“Come on, Norval, they’re hardly dismissed. He’s quoted all the time. And one of his books was a best-seller.”
“Which?”
“Smart Drugs.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Halcyon bought 75,000 copies of that … fable, and distributed them to doctors and pharmacists around the world. You want to know why? Because Vorta strongly recommended one of their drugs. Which is now one of their blockbuster drugs.”
“How do you know all this?”
“And he only recommended it because they offered him shares in one of their affiliates. A drug-investment house called Helvetia Capital Management.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because I’m writing an article, an exposé, on the mad doctor. I’m blowing the proverbial whistle.”
“Come on, Nor, be fair—”
“The