The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [6]
“Noel, did you hear me? Is your colour-wheel spinning?”
“Yes, Mother, I … What did you say?”
“I asked if you knew what an ancestor was?”
“It’s someone who lived before you. I mean, in your family.”
“That’s right,” said his father. “And do you know who your great ancestor was?”
“Well,” his mother began, “we don’t know for certain that—”
“We’ve got the charts, the trees to prove it. A long line of melancholics, suicides, arsonists, incestuous paedophiles …”
“Who’s my ancestor?” Noel asked.
His father set down his pipe and paused for dramatic effect. “George Gordon. The Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale.”
Noel nodded, mulled this over. He looked at his smiling father for a cue or clue, and then at his smiling mother. “But our last name is Burun.”
“Burun is the ancient Scottish form of Byron,” his mother explained. “Ralph de Burun, who may be a distant relation of your father’s, is mentioned in Domesday.”
Noel repeated the names slowly to himself, noting the coloured shapes of the letters. His mother was a history teacher, so she knew what she was talking about. “But who … who was he?”
His father smiled. “Lord Byron? Merely the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.”
“Well, perhaps one of the greatest,” said his mother. “Certainly the handsomest—as handsome as you, Noel dear. With the same lovely chestnut curls and steel blue eyes.”
“Takes after his mother on that count,” said Mr. Burun as he walked over to a library wall with three divided bookcases, devoted to history, poetry and chemistry respectively. “Thank God.” He stepped upon a metal stool and from the middle case pulled out a slender, fawn-coloured volume. On the soft leather cover, The Romantic Poets was emblazoned in gold. “This was your grandmother’s, and her mother’s, published in Edinburgh in 1873. Take a look inside. It’s illustrated.”
Neither parent was surprised to hear Noel recite all twenty poems by Byron at the breakfast table the next day, without the book, mispronouncing scores of words between mouthfuls of Count Chocula. This sort of thing had happened before, lots of times, the first when Noel was five, when he had become so wrapped up in his Children’s Treasury edition of The Arabian Nights that his mother threatened to take it away from him, worried he was spending too much time with it, “obsessing” over it, stubbornly refusing to read anything else. Terrified of losing his favourite book, which was almost his entire life at this point, Noel decided to stay up all night and memorise its fifty-two pages.
How did he do it? Noel had two methods, one involving “photographs” of coloured letters, the other involving “maps,” which is the one he used here. As he explained later to Dr. Vorta, he “delivered the words like newspapers” in mental rows or sequences, along actual pathways—indoors and out—that he pictured in his mind:
It’s like you’re taking a walk inside your head, like in a dream. You see yourself going on a trip, right? And you drop the words or sometimes big chunks of words at different spots. Like down the hall you come to a vent, right? So you put some words down the vent and then you come under a picture, so you put some words there, and then you come to the door, or the stairs or maybe a room. And you might go into the room. Like if it’s a living room, you put stuff under chairs, tables, lamps, or if it’s the kitchen you put words in the fridge or the oven or down the toaster … Or you could use the attic or crawlspace too, or you could go outside, on the sidewalk, or through fields or parks or parking lots, or gardens, and you could put words at certain trees or flowers, or down manholes, or at traffic lights or stores or churches … Every memory trip is different. And you just dump a bit here and a bit there and for some reason everything is clear, like a paper route when you just remember the houses, you don’t look at the numbers anymore … And at the