The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [91]
“About my dreams? Nothing much. What’s your … take?”
“Well, people are always testing you, testing your memory, so that may explain the quiz shows. As for the maze, it may represent, I don’t know, your trying to escape your … problems.” Samira shrugged. “I’m no expert. I know that for the Egyptians the labyrinth represented creativity, or creation. A mysterious feminine power that brings life, and then as the queen of night or queen of darkness, the sleep of death … As you probably know.”
Noel turned these words over. When you find the exit, death is waiting. You’re dead on arrival. “I didn’t know that.”
Through a heating duct in the ceiling came a muffled sound: a gust of carolling laughter from JJ.
“Why don’t you just memorise everything? It’d be so much fun to walk around with Shakespeare’s entire works in your head, or Jane Austen’s or the Encyclopedia Britannica or twenty different languages. No?”
“There’s no room left. My brain’s crammed to bursting point. And besides, my problem has always been using the stuff I remember, making a synthesis, something new.”
“Do you remember everything that happens to you? Everything you read or hear?”
“No, I usually have to make an effort. Most of the stuff I’ve stored is from my childhood, when I tried to retain it with memory maps. Poems mostly, children’s stories … Or I else I sort of photograph it—if I concentrate the coloured letters or coloured voices will remain fixed in my mind forever … or quite a while. A lot of the stuff wasn’t hard to memorise— because I’d read certain stories or poems over and over again, or I asked my parents to read me the same stuff over and over again.”
“So it’s mostly just poems and children’s stories?”
“I’ve stored lots of data about Byron, because he’s an ancestor according to my dad, though not according to my mom, and also on chemistry and pharmacology. And now memory disorders. I don’t really try to memorise anything else, it just happens. Sometimes I feel like my brain is going to burst some day, like a vacuum cleaner bag. Memory dust flying all over the place.”
Samira laughed. “Time for a bag change, I guess. Or a lobotomy?”
Noel smiled bleakly. He’d once considered that. “As a kid I used to fantasize about finding some magical elixir to help me out, some nepenthean potion. Especially after my dad died.”
“Nepenthean potion?”
“It was used to induce forgetfulness, by the ancients. It’s mentioned in The Odyssey. And The Faerie Queene.”
“I’ll bet you know the lines.”
Noel closed his eyes, perused his portable photo-library. “No, not in the Odyssey. Nothing’s coming in.”
“And The Faerie Queene?”
Am I too tired? Noel wondered while reclosing his eyes. The downloaded letters were misty, like breath-fog writing. “Nepenthe … whereby all cares forepast Are washt away quite from their memorie.”
“How lovely. Continue. Do you mind?”
Yes, but I’ll do it for you, thought Noel. He squeezed his eyes shut. The coloured letters were now cock-eyed, chaotic, an alphabet soup of images:
“I’m a bit rusty, Sam, I … don’t often do this sort of thing. Anymore. And I’m not always a hundred per cent accurate.” He waited for the letters to realign themselves, concentrating until his head hurt. “Let’s see:
Nepenthe is a drinck of soverayne grace,
Devized by the Gods, for to asswage
Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace,
Which stirs up anguish and contentious rage:
Instead thereof sweet peace and quiet-age
It doth establish in the troubled mynd.”
Samira was leaning forward, her gleaming eyes mesmerized. She shook her head in disbelief. “That’s amazing, Noel. An amazing … gift. So the colours or shapes of the letters, or voices, or the mental maps you draw are there … always? Indestructible? Like an airplane’s black box?”
Noel rubbed his eyes. “More like a computer with more input than it was designed to process. Slow down, freeze, crash, reboot—my life in a nutshell.”
Silence gathered as Samira digested these last words. Her eyes focused on Noel’s, sharply, as if she could see into his skull and