The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [78]
Noel took two quick gulps of tea. “I just help him out with his research. And certain memory experiments. Part time. Whenever I can. He’s very understanding, very flexible.”
“That’s good, since you already have a full-time job. Your mom. So is that what you took … I mean, what did you study at school?”
“Chemistry, biology, poetry, art history, music. A hodgepodge that led nowhere. I worked as assistant editor of a poetry magazine that couldn’t pay me. Then, out of the blue, Dr. Vorta got me a summer job with Pfizer—as a lab technician. He personally recommended me, even though I had no qualifications. Then he helped me get into McGill, and eventually hired me as a research assistant.”
“You studied medicine?”
Noel nodded before swallowing. “For two years. Then I got interested in experimental chemistry, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, that kind of thing. I guess because of my dad.”
“Did you graduate?” She watched Noel shake his head, his mouth full again. Has he eaten in the last week? “It wasn’t up your alley?”
Noel swallowed, broke the yolk on his second egg with his fork. “No, I liked it, I found it quite easy. It’s just memorisation, really. And as for lectures and interacting with my fellow students and stuff, I’d learn to control my … You see, I didn’t start university until I was in my late twenties, and by that time I’d learned to control, more or less, my problems. Inside my head. But I … you know, had other problems.”
“Such as?”
“Well … Mom started having her problems, the ones inside her head, and I couldn’t really do both, deal with both. So I quit school and moved in with her. I have no regrets, mind you—none whatsoever. It was no great sacrifice. I wouldn’t have made much of a doctor anyway. Or pharmacologist or neuropathologist or whatever.”
“I think you would have. It’s never too late.”
Noel took a sip of his Scottish Breakfast Tea. He was feeling better than he had in months. And the words, uncharacteristically, flowed. “My father always wanted me to be one. A writer or doctor or preferably both. He liked to remind me how many great writers were also doctors, or were first drawn to medicine. He had great respect for people like that, and for the Renaissance ideal of excelling at both science and art.”
“Which authors were drawn to medicine?”
“Maugham, Chekhov, Joyce, Keats, Smollett, Goldsmith, Céline, Hoffmann, Duhamel, Campion … I could go on and on.”
Samira laughed. “Do. I’m curious.”
“Oliver Wendell Holmes, A.J. Cronin, Arthur Schnitzler, Aldous Huxley, Ethan Canin,Walter Percy, Robert Bridges, Leonid Tsypkin, Sihan Seyhi, Nérée Beauchemin, Moacyr Scliar, John McCrae, Josephine Bell, James Bridie, Fernando Namora, Alfred Döblin, Georg Büchner, C. Louis Leipoldt, Heinrich Stilling, Lenrie Peters, Guimarães Rosa, Yusuf Idris, Dannie Abse, Hans Carossa, Francesco Redi, F.R. Kreutzwald, Jacques Grevin, Enrique Gonzalez Martinez, Saul Tchernichowsky, Justinus Kerner, Gottfried Benn, T’ao Hung-ching, Firishtah, Nahmanides, Nicander, Empedocles and scores of other Greeks and Romans … The list goes on and on.”
Samira burst out laughing. “You forgot an Iraqi.”
“Mazloom?”
“Very good.”
“My father always regretted not being among them, so I suppose that’s why he encouraged me to try.”
“Norval mentioned that your father … died when you were young?”
“Yeah, he drowned himself when I was nine.” When I was 3,639 days old, Noel nearly specified. “I’ve often thought of doing the same.”
Just like Norval! “You’re not serious, are you?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s stopped you?”
“My mother.”
“Thank God for mothers. So do you know what your father … what prompted him or …”
Noel’s features, until now stoical, revealed pain. “It’s a mystery. A dark curtain that falls from nowhere. I sometimes get it myself. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, not entirely. All I know is that he used to have these heavy, oppressive dark periods. ‘The black dragon paying me a visit,’ he once said. Sometimes for days on end he’d hole up in his office in the basement. But the curtain would always