The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [3]
Especially when he was younger and didn’t know how to stop them, these images could explode like endlessly exploding fireworks, triggering more and more colour patterns and memory clusters, carrying him so far adrift, so far into the back alleys of his universe that he had trouble following even the simplest conversation. Unless it was passive communication, like watching television, Noel needed to absorb a person’s voice, experience the distinct colours and shapes, before he could decipher the words themselves.
Not surprisingly, everyone thought Noel was off his head, and that was fine with him. His mother loved him, his father loved him, and because of the colours in his head he was able to miss more school than all his classmates combined. The images, moreover, had a practical purpose: although I’ve got little else going for me, Noel often thought, I’ve got a fantastic memory. Which sometimes comes in handy.
When he did go to school his classmates taunted him mercilessly (“It would’ve been better,” one of them confided, “if you’d never been born”), but eventually they got used to his vacant spells and fog. “Commander Noel” was on one of his “spacewalks.” His teachers, especially at first, would react with annoyance or sarcasm: “Is this, ahem, one of your convenient periods of mental unemployment, my dear Burun?” And everyone would laugh. When he told them, in private, about the colliding colours, they immediately suspected drug abuse: it sounded very much like LSD or mescaline or some newfangled hallucinogen. Was this a matter for the authorities? And so the rumours spread. The brains and dweebs avoided him, whereas people like Radar Nénon, the school’s first acid-popping punk, took a sudden liking to him. He’d finally found someone who saw stranger things than he did.
“Schizophrenics have abnormal colour perceptions,” one teacher told him, while another said that “It’s got to be aphasia or autism, one or the other.” The school nurse, a chronically irate Welsh widow, had another explanation: “You’ve got a definite defect, son. Deprived of oxygen in the womb perhaps—or dropped headfirst off the delivery table.” But it was none of the above, as he soon found out from a friend of his father’s, a renowned Montreal neurologist named Émile Vorta.
“Congratulations,” said the doctor with unaccountable good cheer, in French, after a mind-deadening battery of perception and memory tests. “You’re one in twenty thousand. You’re blessed—although sometimes you may feel cursed—with a complex sensitivity known as synaesthesia.”2
Why is he so happy? Noel wondered, as the doctor shook his little hand. Because he can experiment on me like one of his chimpanzees?3
“You’re the first male synaesthete I’ve met. Now, I want you to do something that will help us both a great deal. I want you to keep a diary. Do you know what a diary is?”
“Yes, I already keep one.”
“A diary is a book in which you write down things that happened to you during the day. Or the events of your past. Or in your dreams—”
“Once I dreamt I was walking through this gigantic crossword puzzle—”
“Or the colours and shapes you see in your head when people talk to you. And I’d like to see it at the end of every month. Do you understand?”
“Sometimes when people talk I wish I had a decoder ring—”
“Does anyone else in your family have anything like … what you have?”
Noel paused. “Why, is there a genetic component associated with this condition, Doctor?