The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [4]
Dr. Vorta paused. There is more to this child than meets the eye. Seven years old! “As a matter of fact there is … as you say, a genetic component associated with this condition.”
“Well, my mom’s mom had some strange things in her head like me. Dad thought it was her brandy pudding. She made it triple-strength and one time I—”
“Very interesting. Yes, it’s most often passed on through the female side.”
“She was a witch. A good witch.”
“Was she really?”
“We got tons of letters from her from Scotland—with magic spells inside—except we can’t find them. When we moved we lost them. I met her once.”
“Did you really?”
“I pushed her rocking chair when nobody was sitting in it and she said that’s bad luck, ghosts come and sit in it.”
“You don’t say? Well, we’ll have lots of time to talk about all that. I think we’ll be spending a lot of time together. Would you like that?”
“Not really. She had two different shoes on—because she broke in her shoes one at a time, Mom said. And her tongue was black, from chewing charcoal biscuits—to stop her from farting, Dad said.”
To Noel’s father, in the waiting room, Dr. Vorta ended his excited diagnosis with, “Congratulations, Henry. Your son’s in good company, very good company indeed. Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin all had synaesthesia, and so did Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Proust!”4
A man of thwarted artistic ambitions, Mr. Burun beamed at the news. “You forgot Nabokov,” he added.
“And the odd Nobel prize-winning scientist!”5
“Émile, this calls for a drink.”
Like complicitous schoolboys the two couldn’t stop grinning, or pumping each other’s hand, as though this were the greatest, the most promising thing on earth. Noel wasn’t smiling at all.
“What is the highest form of art?” Mr. Burun asked his son the following evening, after dinner. “What is the ne plus ultra, the zenith of creative endeavour?” He would always talk this way to his son, even when he was in the crib. No baby talk. Not good for the child’s cerebral development.
“Jack of hearts, jack of clubs,” was the reply. “Two of clubs, two of spades. Ten of hearts … four of diamonds. Your turn.”
“Noel, I’ve asked you a question. What do you think the highest form of art is?”
Noel looked up from the cards and slowly scrutinised each object in the room, as if the answer could be found in one of them. His gaze rested on their Zenith television console, whose portals were now locked, as they often were. “TV?” he replied.
His father shook his head. “No, TV’s in the dungeon. There’s no art form below that. Because of it children no longer read. We must all curse its Faustian inventor, Vladimir Zworykin.”
If he had understood this, Noel would have violently disagreed. He looked at the walls, at the stereo cabinet. “Painting?” he suggested. “Or maybe music?”
“They’re up there, but they don’t have the most important thing. What do you think the most important thing is? When communicating something.”
Noel knew the answer to this one. “Words.”
“Exactly. So what combines words, images and music?”
“Cartoons?”
“True. What else?”
“Movies?”
“What else?”
Noel paused, closed his eyes. “Poems?”
“Dead on. At the top of the heap is poetry, at least as it used to be written. Nothing else goes as far, nothing goes as deep in the blood and soul. Shakespeare surpasses Beethoven because he had sound and meaning. Always remember that as you get older. Poetry is in the empyrean, TV is in the pit.”
Noel nodded. “Poetry is in the empyrean, TV is in the pit,” he whispered to himself, remembering the words, not understanding the sentence. “It’s your turn,” he said.
But his father’s mind was not on the game. “Scientists can talk about human nature, but only poets can free those feelings we keep in the pent heart.”
“Your turn, Dad.”
They were sitting cross-legged on the brown shag rug of their living room in Montreal’s Mile End, midway through the child’s game of “Remembrance.” You may know it: fifty-two cards are spread face down; you turn up two cards at random, put them in your pile if they match, turn them back down if they don