The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [54]
After JJ disappeared into his bedroom, the three guests stared at each other, slack-jawed. Norval shifted his gaze to the room’s walls, papered for the third or fourth time decades before, with outlined patterns coloured in here and there with wax crayon. Noel examined oddly positioned paintings—covering cracks or holes, he assumed—which depicted the innocence of children, the benevolence of the old, the purity of lovers, the cohesion of families. Samira was drawn to the room’s centrepiece: the large, weather-beaten cigar-store Indian, with a stuffed cat at its feet. The Indian, JJ revealed later, was his grandfather’s and the cat his grandmother’s. And the paintings were creations of his youth, he further explained, adding that he had been guided by numbers.
“This place is … amazing!” said Samira, struggling to find the right words. “It … smokes!”
Noel, glancing from object to object, was struggling to take it all in. There was a feeling in the house of everything coming apart at once. Norval thought he had entered a home for the crazed.
“It’s … it’s like a museum!” Samira exclaimed. “Look at this!” She pointed to an old clock with a golden face showing the phases of the moon and conjunctions of the planets. “And this!” Beside the clock was an antique spyglass of tarnished brass. “And this!” Everyone looked up at a chandelier above her, originally a gasolier that had been converted to electric light in the twenties. There were still gas jets and fittings all over the house, as if JJ planned to return to gas lighting if electricity didn’t catch on.
“Are we looking at a neurological deficit here?” asked Norval. “Is JJ crazed, permanently or periodically?”22
“Shh,” Samira whispered. “He’s a sweetheart. If you say one single word against him, one single sarcasm … well, I don’t know what I’ll do. Or not do. I think this place is fabulous.”
Norval screwed his heel into the floorboard, causing the wood to powder away. “It’s seen better days,” he said.
“So have you.”
Norval sniffed left and right. “What is that mephitic odour?” His nose led him to the defeated carpet and sagging sofa. “Bordello perfume and …”
“Dog piss?” Noel suggested.
“Formula?”
“K9P.”
“Shh,” whispered Samira again. “Come on, you guys, behave. He might hear you. What’s your problem anyway? Cleanliness is as bad as godliness. Hey, look at this.” Samira nodded towards a ceiling-high bookcase made of red bricks and particle board, with uneven rows of files and books. Large green albarellos served as bookends.
Norval and Samira began examining the spines. The top rows included Natural Alchemy, Medical Underground, Fringe Medicine, Metaphysical Medicine, Renegade Medicine, Clandestine Laboratories, Granddad’s Wonderful Book of Chemistry, Holistic Approach in Ancient Medicine, Necromancy for Dumbies, Acupuncture for Dumbies, Hypnosis for Salesmen, Colour Healing, Secrets of the Chinese Herbalists and Laughter Therapy Is No Joke. On the sagging middle shelves were volumes of Frontier Science and Psychology Tomorrow, piled corkscrew-wise, as well as joke anthologies, a shoebox of letters with a heart on top, a half-dozen books by Émile Vorta, and a scrapbook with the doctor’s name on the cover.
“God, no spine-faking here,” said Norval. “It’s all shit.”
“No, it’s not.” Samira pointed to the bottom shelf, which included works by Saint-Exupéry, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Antoine Galland, Ulrich Boner23 and John Creasey.
At the opposite end of the room, where Noel was now foraging, were higgledy-piggledy mounds of computer and electronic equipment of modest manufacture: not IBM or Mac or Toshiba, but Capital, Cicero,