The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [40]
“By the way, Dad,” Noel said after a Greek goddess quiz, “I’ve decided what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like you. I want the same job as you.”
His father was working at his Comoy’s pipe, tamping down the black Latakia with his middle finger and testing its draw by sucking loudly on it. “Not a good choice, lad. If you want to work with drugs, work in a lab, work in research. It’s more creative. I couldn’t do it, but maybe you can.”
The next day Noel wrote Santa for a chemistry set. In June. Nothing else was on the list, just a chemistry set. If he could have a chemistry set Noel promised to be good until he retired. It was the most magical thing he could imagine and he had trouble sleeping for the next six months.
With the first light of Christmas Day, after lying awake all night, Noel raced downstairs, barely noticing Santa’s half-eaten cookies on the mantel or the stocking his mother had made for him, crammed to bursting point. His eyes were directed elsewhere, and they spotted it immediately. Under the tree, unwrapped, was a shiny radium-white metal box with hinges and a clasp, and THE A.C. GILBERT CO. embossed in red across the top. His heart was dancing in his breast, a joyful rumba, as he raised the lid. “Open sesame,” he whispered.
Inside, embedded in styrofoam, were rows of cubic jars with red and white labels that proclaimed their contents in bold black capitals: NICKEL AMMONIUM SULPHATE (an elegant triple-barrelled name!), TANNIC ACID (dangerous sounding), PHENOLPHTHALEIN (which his father admitted to sprinkling on his chemistry teacher’s sandwiches to cause diarrhoea), MAGNESIUM CARBONATE, COBALT CHLORIDE, POTASSIUM NITRATE (the same chemical, his father explained, administered in army barracks and monasteries to prevent “hard-ons,” something Noel had not yet felt), SODIUM SILICATE, ZINC OXIDE, AMMONIUM CHLORIDE (the famous Sal Ammoniac of the Arabian alchemists!), COPPER SULPHATE, MANGANESE DIOXIDE, POTASSIUM PERMANGANATE, CHROME ALUM, COCHINEAL (a red dye, his father explained, obtained from the crushed bodies of female cochineal insects), and the two most boring-sounding chemicals in the whole world: BORAX and LOGWOOD.
Over the next month or so, Mr. Burun set up a laboratory in the basement for his son, in a locked room his mother once called “the black dungeon,” her husband’s refuge when his moods swung low and dark. There he showed Noel mercury (a slippery, magical substance that seemed to defy physical laws), phosphorus (which burst into fire if exposed to air), potassium (which burst into fire if exposed to water), magnesium (which would burn under water), the “Acids” (the noble triumvirate of nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric, “to be treated with respect”). He showed Noel how to make invisible ink, which would appear only when the paper was held over a flame; he showed him how to make a slow-burning fuse, and gunpowder (five parts potassium nitrate, one part sulphur, one part charcoal), and a burnt-orange pyramid with potassium dichromate which, after you lit it, would writhe up like a charmed snake.
In the first of a series of lectures, brief preludes to the experiments, his father spoke about the direct ancestor of chemistry: alchemy. And the most famous alchemist of all, Paracelsus the Great,15 who was searching for the one prime element from which all the other elements derived: alkahest.
Alkahest, alkahest … Noel repeated to himself, over and over like a chant from The Arabian Nights. “What’s that?” he finally asked.
“This substance—if ever it were found—would be the philosophers’ stone of medicine, a cure for every human disease.”
“I want to find it!” said Noel. “We can work together on it, Dad, in our lab! We can discover it!”
“You must be very careful down here, Noel, especially when I’m away.