The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [7]
This explains how, that morning at the breakfast table, Noel was able to recite the Byron poems in reverse order too; he had only to start his walk from the end (“.innocent is love whose heart … like beauty in walks She”).
After an article appeared in Psychology Today, stories by the dozen began appearing in newspapers and magazines.7 The phone began to ring as well. Everyone, it appeared, wanted a demonstration, a carnival show from Memory Boy. A researcher from the Johnny Carson Show, a woman named Laura Pratte, offered airfare and accommodation to Noel and his parents for a week in Burbank, California. A man from Princeton, a jittery classics professor, offered to pay Noel to appear at a plagiarism hearing at the university to corroborate his “photographic memory.” A detective sergeant from the Montreal Drug Squad asked if Noel could help in a case involving a wire tap of twins, only one of whom was guilty. A chess instructor from Chomedy offered to turn Noel into a grandmaster. And the late Manfredo Mastromonaco, on behalf of The Desert Inn in Las Vegas, offered Noel’s parents $5,000 a week for an eight-week summer run on stage with a magician (Manfredo himself). “I’ll turn your son into a memory bank!” Manfredo shouted into the line, more than once, hacking with cancerous laughter. It was a lot of money at the time.
But neither Noel nor his parents were interested in this sort of thing. Noel could memorise almost anything the doctors and journalists threw at him. He could recall a list of fifty random words in almost any language after only a few seconds of deliberation; he could recite the value of pi to a hundred places; he could memorise a deck of shuffled playing cards in under sixty seconds, eighteen decks in an hour, a 100-digit number after hearing it once at speed, a 500-digit number in an hour.8 He could do all these things, but he didn’t want to. He’d do poetry if asked, but nobody asked. Everything else bored or pained him, giving him a pulverising headache. “Why only poetry?” Dr. Vorta and his apprentices would ask, speculating that the sounds or rhythms acted as mnemonic aids. “Because poetry is the zenith of creativity,” Noel replied. “Nothing goes as deep in the blood and soul. Don’t ever forget that.”
As he grew older Noel discovered tricks that would help “switch off “ the synaesthetic engine: classical music (especially Liszt, Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov) would sometimes clear his mind or slow its activity; nibbling on zesty vegetables, like bitterroot or cherry pepper or betel nut, would often do the trick; fierce concentration would work too, albeit at the cost of a migraine that could last up to two days. And in the nineties, when he went on a series of antidepressants, Zoloft and Paxil among them, the coloured-hearing wasn’t as intense.
Despite these and other stopgaps and counteragents, it was difficult for Noel to take any course, or hold onto any job, that involved interacting with others. If it weren’t for a certain saviour in his life—someone who guided him, wrote letters of recommendation, hired him as a lab assistant, treated him as a son—Noel may have ended up in an asylum. This saviour was Dr. Émile Vorta.
Chapter 2
“NXB”
Norval Xavier Blaquière dreamed only two dreams. The first played back, with assorted detours and deviations, something that actually happened, in 1978. He was in his parents’ bedroom in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, hiding behind velvet curtains, planning to spring out at a carefully chosen moment. With both hands he clutched a broadsword made of tinfoil, like one he’d seen in Astérix le Gaulois. Maman, he knew, would be mad at him for not being in bed, and for wasting rolls of foil, but Papa would get the joke. Papa would laugh and start chasing him around the room.
His father was about to leave on a business trip; he had already said goodbye to his son and was now saying goodbye, ever so tenderly, to