The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [43]
He examined the labels on the chemical jars, which he and his father had brushed with hot liquid paraffin. With a pale pink J-cloth he affectionately dusted off each bottle, turning them round in his hand, holding them up to the light. In the laundry room he filled up a yellow plastic pail with steaming hot water, threw in some Clorox and Cheer, put on his father’s black rubber gloves. With three different brushes he scrubbed test tubes, beakers and Florence flasks; pipettes, funnels and Erlenmeyer flasks; graduated cylinders and eyedroppers; pinch-cocks, crucible tongs and rubber stoppers ... He cleaned his Bunsen burner and retort stands and clamps with acetone, and his laminated Periodic Table with Windex. He put order back into drawers, swept the floor. He removed cobwebs from the walls, and dust from the top of books. He saw three scuttling spiders but, as his father would have wanted, left each in peace.
It’s time to do something more, something more serious, he said to himself. Beyond plying his mother with brain nutrients and memory boosters, or blendering up cocktails with over-the-counter drugs. The prescription medicines, like rivastigmine and galantamine, weren’t doing much—apart from giving her nausea, insomnia and nightmares. Unless a cure is discovered soon, your mother will be dead in five years … Yes, it’s time to do something more. If he couldn’t get the newest drugs because they were unapproved or unaffordable, he would simply make them himself … Well, maybe not simply. “With my memory, I’ll restore hers,” he whispered to himself. “I will save her.” With his head bent and eyes closed, he clutched the battered wood desk with both hands.
When he opened his eyes he saw the robin’s-egg blue of the cement floor beneath the table. The paint was faded and peeling and poxed by chemical spills. As he was trying, impossibly, to remember which caustic compounds had caused which stains, he was distracted by the sight of his father’s leather bag. He reached down for it, ran his finger through a layer of dust. And then tried the lock, which yielded with a minimum of fiddling.
Inside was a tiny red three-ring binder, with My Experiments written on the cover. He opened it to the first page:
Exp. # 1
Pour a little Citric Acid solution (lemon juice) in a glass. Stick the point of a toothpick in the juice. Write a secret invisible message with the juice. Heat the message (with an iron). It should appear brown.
Exp. # 2
Take red cabbage pickled in Acetic Acid (vinegar) and add some ammonium hydroxide (Clorox). The juice will go all through all sorts of colours, from red to all kinds of purple colours, to turquoise and blue and then green.
Exp. # 3
Hold a red rose over burning Sulphur so that the SO2 bleaches it white. Dip into water and the colour is miraculously restored !
There were other notebooks as well, in zip-locked bags. His dad’s diaries? With his vision blurring, Noel pulled out three identical binders, all black, one with the insignia of the first drug company his father had worked for in Scotland: Meridian. The most recent one, dated two months before he died, had these entries on its last page:
In bed, several hours later, Noel leafed through each of them. The first summarised three years of work on a process that someone had patented a few days before his father had applied for a patent. The second outlined three more years of work on a drug for Parkinson’s—a blockbuster, as it turned out—that only his company profited from. And the third dealt with his attempts to create drugs that would both reduce the swelling of certain cerebral cells in dementia patients, and eliminate abnormal inclusions called Pick bodies. Tucked inside were a sheaf of letters to and from the U.S. Submission & Patent Office, along with a page from a spiral notepad, the ink of its scrawled message weeping freely:
A. Borodin’s work