The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [46]
“You don’t say. And have there ever been … exceptions to your general dislike of humanity? Noel, presumably?”
Norval took a drag from his Arrow. “Correct.”
“Does he teach Symbolist lit as well? Is that where you met him? At school?”
“No. But I pulled strings to get him in. He lasted one course.”
What is my role in this conversation? Samira asked herself. Prompter? “Why did he last only one course?”
“He had trouble understanding the students’ questions.”
“Does he have … qualifications, a degree?”
“No, but he was accepted at MIT as a teenager by getting unheard-of marks in the entrance exams. And he was asked to attend McGill by the Dean of Sciences.”
“But he didn’t graduate.”
“No.”
“So what do you two … share?”
“The relief of being wordlessly understood. A companion mind.”
“I mean, he seems so taciturn and unsure of himself and, I don’t know, unhappy, whereas you seem—”
“He’s a Scot. Ipso facto, not of a sanguine nature. Like his father he’s got the black choler, the humour of despair. When he’s down he thinks the period will never end, when he’s up he thinks it will shortly end.”
“Are you sure he’s OK? I mean, he looks …”
“He needs a bit of sleep, that’s all.”
“ … crushed, depressed, heading towards a crash. He’s got that dark look on his face. I’ve seen the symptoms before. He seems so … grave. In the three times I’ve seen him at the lab he’s not smiled once. Does he ever laugh? Does he have a sense of humour, is he witty?”
“Noel couldn’t concoct something amusing to say given a month’s notice.”
“Is he … all there? Mentally, I mean?”
“Noel Burun? Are you kidding? Do you know his pedigree? Related on one side to Lord Byron himself, and on the other to a long line of Scots physicians. Noel’s superhuman, he can visualise things with painterly awareness, summon things you or I would never be able to summon given a hundred lifetimes, things never seen in the wildest visions of a witches’ Sabbath. Don’t be fooled by Noel—he has the mind and imagination of a master artist, or master scientist. He’s a fluke of fucking nature, a psychomnemonic wonder, with almost unhuman eidetic powers.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any geniuses left.”
“He’s the last. You should bear his children.”
Samira laughed. “So does he belong to any, you know, organisations, like Mensa or …”
“Mensa? You’ve got to be kidding. A self-congratulating club of wankers who don’t have the intelligence not to be a member. Games of three-dimensional Scrabble and a cup of Ovaltine—Noel’s beyond that crap. He’s in another dimension.”
“What did you mean by ‘eidetic powers’?”
“A photographic memory, preternaturally vivid and persistent. With self-generating links and catalytic images that spawn other memories, right back to his suckling hours. He’s a hypermnesiac—he doesn’t forget a goddamn thing. He’s like Proust, like Proust squared. He’s got a million megabytes of memory, a million emotions and sensations and images and God knows what else to draw on.17 He’s not there yet, but he’ll be a great writer one day, greater than Proust. Or perhaps a visionary artistpoet like Rossetti or Blake. Mark my words.”
“I never know when you’re joking. Are you now?”
“Never felt less inclined to. What’s the most important material for an artist?”
“According to Proust? Memories?”
“Infancy. Which most of us forget entirely. When a young child sees, for the first time, a rainbow in the mist of a crashing wave, a trompe l’oeil wheel turning backwards, a ‘ghostly galleon’ behind clouds, that is when a great poem or great painting or great symphony is born. On a subconscious level, naturally. So it becomes a question of finding, of recapturing that pure moment of pure sensation, that …”
“So what’s stopping—”
“… that vividness and anarchy of an infant’s vision. What I’m referring to is the infinity of childhood.”
“The essence of innocence itself.”
“When an infant sees the world he doesn’t fear it, he marvels at it. When he’s older