The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [41]
“If I promise, can we make laughing gas and nitroglycerine?”
“Noel …”
“I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.”
In another lecture—the final one as it turned out—his father talked about art. “In some ways,” he explained, “chemistry can be seen as a marriage of science and art, an earth poetry, a sensory kaleidoscope of smells, tastes, colours, textures. Painters and sculptors have been drawn to it, and musicians in particular. Sir Edward Elgar dabbled in chemistry and Aleksandr Borodin was a chemist. He used to scribble musical notes all over the laboratory walls, absent-mindedly, while conducting his experiments. And then there were poet-chemists like Humphry Davy, who discovered sodium and potassium. His notebooks were filled with chemical experiments jumbled together with new lines of poems. He and Coleridge even planned to set up a laboratory together! And there’s Primo Levi, of course, who regarded chemistry as an art of weighing and separating, just like writing.”
In the basement laboratory Noel found the serenity and solitary happiness that he found nowhere else, except in books. When his father was away on business, Noel spent hours in the lab, in hookeydom, with Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances or Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance playing on a portable record player as he dreamed about discovering things. He would gaze at the rows of chemicals on one side, and rows of books on the other—including The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, Known by the Name of Paracelsus …
Noel began to learn the formula of every chemical he owned, every one he had made or ever could make. He memorised, photographically, every element of the periodic table pinned to the wall: their position on the chart and all their properties. He had only to say or see the letters of the element and its square would pop up. Take krypton. In Noel’s hippocampus the sound and letters formed a fibrous cinnamon teardrop shape, which stored the following properties: noble gas; symbol Kr; atomic number 36; atomic weight 83.80; cubic, face-centred crystal; gas at 20°C; electronic configuration [Ar]3d104s2p6. Or take lithium (as Noel would later): alkali metal; symbol Li; atomic number 3; atomic weight 6.941; cubic, bodycentred crystal; solid at 20°C; electronic configuration [He]2s1 …
In some of his reveries, sitting back in his father’s swivel chair, Noel would play games of chemical chess, with pieces cast in metal. The white and black pawns were usually Lead and Tin; the castles Iron and Chromium; the knights Mercury and Palladium; bishops Barium and Arsenic; queens Gold and Platinum; kings Silver and Titanium. “Who would win,” he asked his father, “in a fight between Lead and Mercury? Or Barium and Palladium? Or Gold and Silver? Which one’s more powerful? Who would destroy who, in a battle?”
Mr. Burun laughed. “Well, mercury would certainly eat up tin or lead. For the others, I guess you’d have to compare their densities. Gold, for example, is one of the heaviest metals, much heavier than silver. But it’s also the most malleable and ductile.”
“What … does that mean?”
“It’s the softest.”
“What’s the hardest?”
“Well, the two densest substances in the world are iridium and osmium.”
Noel’s eyes opened wide. From then on, his queens became Iridium and Osmium.
One fall day in 1979, on the third Monday of September, Noel sprinted home from school. There was something he was dying to check out: nitrogen iodide crystals, “explosive on concussion,” were drying on a blotter. He and his father, with the help of Smith’s College Chemistry, had spent the previous evening trying to make them. Did they get it right? he wondered. His father had warned him not to go near it until he got back from his trip, but Noel couldn’t wait.
He pushed his way through the torn screen door, ignored his mother’s