The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [15]
“No, I’m fine, really quite … fine.”
“We’re early,” said Norval, eyeing his pocket watch. “I think I’ll go back out for a smoke.”
“How is … Samira?”
Norval tossed his spent match onto the floor and took a long haul. “See for yourself, tomorrow night. She meets the criteria.”
“For what? Seduction?”
“For Vorta’s amnesia study.”
“So the police did send her …” He stopped speaking because no one was listening; Norval was already halfway up the aisle.
Noel rummaged in his coat pocket, withdrew his mother’s pager and set it to “vibrate.” He leaned back, gazed at the theatre’s gold-sequined roof and papier-mâché Ionic pillars, letting his mind run every which way.
A yellowish voice invaded his thoughts. “Are you smoking?” asked a man with a glabrous body and scalp, twice, but Noel saw only pullulating worms the colour of burnt butter. Negative words, judging by his shaking head and disapproving finger. The man continued down the aisle, his great pate flashing as he walked in and out of the theatre’s spotlights. When he sat down Noel’s attention was drawn to the theatre’s crimson curtains, which were slowly beginning to part.
Over the past year or so, these “Tuesday Matinée Classics” had become a ritual, or near-ritual. The two men first met at this very theatre, in fact, and Noel was now sitting in the very same seat. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point had been playing, he recalled, with Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette and Harrison Ford and … well, he could name the entire cast— he could still see the credits. There were only three people in the audience, one of them asleep. An ice-storm was about to occur outside.
“Piece of crap, that,” was the first thing Norval had said, in French, after the movie ended. They were riding up an escalator and Norval had turned around, from his higher vantage, to say this.
The colours in Noel’s head distracted him—but not overwhelmingly, as most new voices did. It was almost a cross between his father’s voice and his grandmother’s. Glimmering, seesawing lattices of emerald green and Tyrian purple. Very pleasant, very familiar.
“I said that was a piece of crap,” Norval repeated, this time in English.
Noel concentrated on the stranger’s face. Very familiar as well. He’d seen the man twice before, coming out of Dr. Vorta’s lab. A man of acid and steel. “Uh, yes, I agree. Piece of crap. I … I could hear you snoring.”
When they reached the top of the moving stairs they paused, unawkwardly staring at each other in silence, neither of them in any hurry to part. It was not a wary, mutual sizing-up; it was more bewilderment at how much they resembled each other. Like standing before a mirror almost. Their hair was exactly the same length and shade of rich auburn, and it curled over their temples in exactly the same way. They had the same straight nose, the same cleft chin, the same full lips, the same blue-grey eyes that stared intently from pale, almost feminine faces. Their expressions, though, were quite different: Norval exuded confidence and cleverness, Noel diffidence and dimness. And Norval, at six foot one, was taller than Noel by three inches, and slimmer, and more athletic-looking—a strong swimmer and archer, he was flat of belly and broad of shoulder. Noel, round of belly and sloping of shoulder, could get portly if he didn’t starve himself, and his athleticism was restricted to moving chessmen and the pages of books. Norval spoke somewhat prosily, with sententious precision; Noel spoke in trailing sentences, in lurching stops-and-starts. And although they were the same age, thirty-three, Norval looked forty-three. His face was marked by the ravages of cigarettes, chemicals and coronary nutrition, which seemed only to increase his attractiveness to women; Noel was a vigilant vitaminiser who abused no substance whatsoever, which seemed to decrease his attractiveness to women. He had made love to a total of two women in his life and loved each monogamously, undyingly; Norval had made love to over two hundred, detachedly, including his two half-sisters.
It was this