The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [59]
“It’s PR parody—and self-parody. It’s postmodernism squared. And those are real quotes—I didn’t make them up!”
“It … it works,” said Samira, tentatively. “I like it.”
“I learned lots of things in my creative writing course. Like how you should use similes whenever you can. Because critics and jury members like them. I’ve got thousands: ‘… like a vine clinging to a dead tree,’ ‘… like being shaven by a drunken barber,’ ‘… like broken kites in an attic …’”
“OK,” said Norval, “we get the—”
“‘… like an idle race car,’ ‘… like an asterisk for a missing footnote,’ ‘… like birds entering the mouths of crocodiles and cleaning their teeth,’ et cetera, et cetera. I’ve got them all on floppies, in alphabetical order. I just have to find the bits that go before.”
So far, Noel had not understood everything. Not only because of his aural visions, but because Samira’s presence made him dumbstruck, his lips numb and stuck. Whenever her eyes—those midnight eyes of the East!—gleamed into his he could feel his legs soften and melt like a cheap candle. Inside he was a mess too, his ears taking pictures his mind couldn’t develop. He mimed attention.
“But you know what? The book flopping was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I know now that I’m no writer. But I had to give it a shot, you know what I mean? I still do it as a hobby. But now I’ve found something I really enjoy. That I’m good at. And can make money at.”
“I’m afraid to ask,” said Norval, “what that might be.”
“CAM.”
“Right.”
“But I seem to be fielding all the questions!” said JJ. “What are you guys up to these days? Who wants to start? Put up your hand.”
“Norval,” said Samira, “why don’t you tell JJ about your latest project. Your performance art.”
“Why don’t you?” said Norval.
“All right. Norval has set himself the challenge, the considerable artistic challenge, of making love to twenty-six women in twenty-six weeks. In alphabetical order.”
“Get out of town!” said JJ. “You scurvy knave! Hey, I might be able to get you a condom sponsor. How far have you got? On target?”
“Ahead of schedule, actually,” said Norval. “I started in the middle of last semester, so I just went through my student lists.”
JJ nodded. “But isn’t that against … regulations? And ethics?”
“That’s the point. The guiding theme of French Symbolism is that objectivity, particularly in morals, is a sham. Morality is devised by human beings with no ground or sanction in reason or nature.”
“But aren’t morals there to prevent people from hurting each other, hurting themselves, or to prevent us from falling—”
“No one was ever hurt by a fall—it’s the halt at the end that does all the damage. In fact, since the invention of sky-diving and bungee and BASE-jumping, free-falling has become a sport, a kind of suicide practice, where you can savour the aesthetics of descent. Metaphorically, that’s what I’m doing.”
JJ scratched his head. “I guess that makes sense. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to take on the alphabet project myself, but it’d take me a bit longer than twenty-six weeks. In fact, unless I paid for it, I don’t think twentysix years would be enough. I’ve never been much of a horndog, a babe magnet. But isn’t anyone, you know, protesting? Isn’t the word getting around?”
“Yeah, some asshole informed the Head of Women’s Studies.”25
“Oh dear. But … why alphabetical? Why so many?”
“Because,” said Samira, “it’s worth twenty-six grand. And because he’s like one of those characters in Greek mythology—half goat.”
“The alphabetical order allows me to explain to my collaborators,” said Norval, “after they fall in love or clamour for an encore, that it was a limited run, a one-night-only performance. It gets me off the hook, in other words.”
“And because of his sex addiction,” said Samira, “Sir Thunderpants would be doing this kind of thing anyway. Might as well get paid for it.”26
“You’re a sex addict?” asked JJ, staring