The Memory Artists (36 page)

“Why has he been ‘pestering’ you?”

“He wants permission, for some reason, to publish a chapter of my novel. Which he’ll never get. He was also harassing Sam last week. I think he’s in love with her.”

Noel furrowed his brow. “It was JJ who got him the job. After Vorta fired two other writers.”

“For telling the truth? So this hack hiding behind the pillar is a last resort?”
⁴⁸

Here a woman, an underdressed platinum-haired woman with breasts padded to videogame dimensions, stopped at the table. When Norval rose, as if to embrace her, she began poking a finger into his chest, her voice rising from twenty to seventy decibels. As her anger grew her words became less and less comprehensible, almost a foreign tongue. She began to sob and moan as her body heaved. Norval observed her, with shocking unflappability. “Be back in a second,” he said as he escorted the hysterical woman outside.

Noel watched the two through the window, as in a pantomime, as Norval evidently sorted things out. The woman was no longer crying; she was kissing his fingers. Noel shook his head. If she knew what acts those hands had committed, she might think twice before lifting them to her lips. She was now walking away—calmly, even contentedly by the way she glanced back at him. Why do women bother? Surely it’s not a turn-on, surely the truism is not true: that women, and beautiful women in particular, are drawn to men who remain aloof from them, or wipe their shoes on them …

Norval returned to the table with a dangling cigarette in his mouth and two drinks in one hand. “There should be a pound where you can leave people like that. With anaesthetists. And cages.”

Noel wasn’t listening. He was brooding over the same things he was brooding over when he arrived at the bar. Samira. Her love for Norval. Her attempts to understand him. Norval’s feelings for her. Norval’s capacity for love. He described the sentiment in his novel, realistically, poignantly. And Dowson’s “Cynara,” he had confessed, was on his Top Ten list. But how to approach all this? He took a sip of the beer that Norval had placed in front of him.

“I don’t understand you,” he said finally.

“In general, or with reference to some particular?”

“When you say you’ve never been in love.”

Norval took a gulp of his Irish whiskey. “Which word escapes your understanding?”

“I don’t understand the concept. I’m convinced you’re lying. Are you?”

“Never felt less inclined to. Love exists for only one reason—to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. It may boil down to a chemical called oxytocin. Do you know it?”

“Well … yes.”

“I am thus unable to love one woman. But quite able—compelled, in fact—to love hundreds.”

“When you say ‘love,’ you mean ‘have sex with.’ But why hundreds? Why so many?”

“Because the best moments of a relationship occur at the
beginning
, when you’re deluded by infinite possibilities. The middle and end is a lemming-walk.”

“But have you ever even reached the middle?”

Norval waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. “And because there comes a time in everyone’s life when some serious arithmetic has to be done—comparing the sum of pleasures life has left to offer versus the sum of pain. And this comparison leads, at a certain age, for those that have the guts, to suicide. So before I get there I’ll do the one thing that gives pleasure, while I still can.”

Noel shook his head. He’d heard this sophistry before. “But it must be so … unsatisfying. Not to get to that final stage. To commitment, marriage, a happy ending …”

“Happy ending? Have you been paying attention? It’s happy for me when the beginning and end are rolled up in the first encounter.”

“… and the whole thrilling process of falling in love. Which is the closest most of us will come to glimpsing utopia.”

“Oh, please. Sex and drugs give much better glimpses. Noel, you’re a spectacularly easy faller-in-love, and what good has it done you? Let’s put this romantic crap to bed. The world is not like
Romeo and Juliet
, with random arrows flung by Cupid. Romantic love is a Darwinian trick that blinds us to each other’s flaws. Falling in love. Falling implies that you were once at a stable position, at a higher point than before. I prefer the stabler, higher position.”

“But didn’t you say—at JJ’s party—that you enjoyed falling? ‘Savouring the aesthetics of descent’ and all that?”

Norval arched an eyebrow while tapping redundantly on his cigarette. He was unused to logical ambush and surprised by its incidence. “I was … we’re talking about two different metaphors.”

Noel smiled. “Maybe you’ve just been unlucky, Nor, the right dart hasn’t hit you. Cupid shoots darts of lead and gold, remember, for false and true love. You’ve been getting lead, that’s all. Don’t give up hope.”

Norval rolled his eyes. “Another hope fiend. The hope of true love is haunted by mortality.”

“Children help you get around that.”

“Children? Children are instruments of torture. I share Byron’s view: ‘No virtue yet, except starvation, could stop that worst of vices— propagation.’”

Noel had tuned out completely; he was thinking of Samira, of what it would be like to have a child with her …

“Have you flown recently?” Norval continued. “Babies should not be allowed on board. Can’t they be Fed-Exed? Or doped and put in cages with the pets? Noel? Are you with me?”

Noel was not. “Yes, I … I was just thinking.” The idea of fathering Samira’s child was not the only thing that held his thoughts; he had a burning question for Norval, one that he’d been planning to ask since he first sat down. How best to phrase it? He had asked the same question of JJ, who had answered no; he had asked a similar question of Sam, who had also answered no. How would Norval respond? Seconds passed before his lips stopped moving. “Norval, what letter … are you … in love with Samira?” At least this was what he intended to say, more or less. The first part of the question was faint and garbled, the last spoken at quadruple speed. Sweat surged from all pores and red fire burned on his cheeks.

“Was that English? Are you all right, Noel? In violent fevers, I’m told, people have been known to talk in ancient tongues.”

“Are you in love with Samira?”

Norval held a freshly lit cigarette over an ashtray, seemed to examine the bent butts left by his predecessors. He then noticed his friend’s expression and for a second softened. “No, I’m not.”

Noel heard the words over the thundering of his heart. And yet felt not an ounce of relief! What difference does it make whether he is or not? What difference does it make to
me
? A pawn in love with a queen. Tin in love with Iridium. She probably has enough suitors to fill an iPod. “But what I don’t … you know, understand is … It’s just that everybody … or almost everybody …”

“Spit it out, Noel.”

Noel drew a huge breath into his lungs, unsure of where he was going with this and why. “It’s just that everybody has at least one love in their life … or a memory of one. Samira has one, JJ has one, my mother has one, and I—”

“Well
I
don’t.”

“But … but no one could write
Unmotivated Steps
without having felt mad, blind love.”

“I was barely out of my teens when I wrote that drivel. And besides, it was a romantic parody.”

“The critics didn’t see it that way.”

“The
critics
? The critics praised the weakest parts of the weakest chapters, and were obtuse to everything else.”

Noel scratched at his beer label, recalling something he and Samira had talked about. “We … I have a theory about you—would you like to hear it?”

“No.”

“It’s not really a theory. It’s more like a feeling or hunch—it’s not a fully thought-out position—”

“Get on with it for Christ’s sake.”

“Your life has been … well, martyred to a single memory. Because of what happened to you as a child—when your mother cheated on your dad, when she left him for that rich old man—”

“My father was rich too.”

“You’ve been looking ever since for an antidote in affairs, an antidote to the pain of … well, losing your mother that day. But since you’re unconsciously seeking a mother rather than a mistress, all women disappoint you.”

Norval nodded. “Noel, something is impairing your reason, and I think I know what it is: sexual deprivation. A semen backlog is blockading your brain.”

“And because your mother was vulgar and faithless, you fear you’ve got a similar defect. You fear you’ve been genetically stained.”

“
Genetically stained?
Give your head a shake.”

“And so you’re incapable of refusing any woman whose attentions confirm that you’re … attractive and lovable.”

Norval nodded again, as if in agreement, as if finally seeing the light. “Interesting theory, Noel. Really interesting. It suffers from just one small drawback: it’s complete rubbish.”

“Hence your blend of snobbery and rebellion and your low opinion of women—which is due, at least in part, to your lifelong, unresolved quarrels with your mother.”

“Are you finished, Herr Doktor? Are you? Because if you are, I would like to interject here and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for having clarified my entire life.”

“Sometimes a little psychiatry—”

“
Psychiatry?
Psychiatry is the most spectacular error of twentiethcentury thought. It should be consigned, if it hasn’t been already, to history’s great intellectual shitpile. The twenty-first century will lump psychiatrists in with astrologers and witchdoctors. Do you want to know why? Because brain disorders are
chemical
. Our brain is just a piece of meat with chemicals and electrical charges and switches. Feeling and thinking and imagining—they’re just forms of information processing. Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on
physiological
events in the tissues of the brain. Personality? It can be defined by
the spaces between the brain cells
—the synapses, which are distinct for each individual.”

“Then why do you work with Dr. Vorta, a trained psychiatrist?”

“Because he feeds me mind-altering drugs. And then pays me to feed him an endless stream of lies on which he bases an endless stream of articles which are endlessly dismissed.”
⁴⁹

“Come on, Norval, they’re hardly dismissed. He’s quoted all the time. And one of his books was a best-seller.”

“Which?”

“
Smart Drugs
.”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding. Halcyon bought 75,000 copies of that … fable, and distributed them to doctors and pharmacists around the world. You want to know why? Because Vorta
strongly
recommended one of their drugs. Which is now one of their blockbuster drugs.”

“How do you know all this?”

“And he only recommended it because they offered him shares in one of their affiliates. A drug-investment house called Helvetia Capital Management.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I’m writing an article, an exposé, on the mad doctor. I’m blowing the proverbial whistle.”

“Come on, Nor, be fair—”

“The man’s lost it, his circuitry’s fried. He’ll be checked in any day now, mark my words.”

“He’s a brilliant researcher, highly regarded around the world! A man who studied under Dr. Penfield, for Christ’s sake! Who’s sacrificed most of his life working on memory disorders, on cures for—”

“We need a cure for men like him. For doctors who misdiagnose and murder in the name of research and academic advancement. Why do you defend him? Why so loyal? Why can’t you see through the bastard? It doesn’t take X-ray vision.”

Noel sighed. “Because he was my father’s closest friend and because—”

“He was a
business acquaintance
, who bought drugs from him. And didn’t charge for his sessions with you, because he was
exploiting
you for his experiments. Yes, he got you a job in the lab—so he could use your research and ideas to write articles under his name. You shouldn’t be prostituting your genius to a thieving little midget like him.”

“He … he guided my research, structured the articles, got them published. And he also got me jobs in two other labs, don’t forget—when no one else would hire me, when I didn’t have any experience or credentials. And he wasn’t exploiting me. He was interested in me. He has a sincere love of science—and of the arts too, just like my father. He’s devoted his entire life to helping mankind.”

“Any nurse with a bedpan has done more for mankind. Volta’s patients are valuable to him only as subjects for some new fundable experiment, some new scientific paper. He wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to sacrifice human life—animal life goes without saying—for the sake of adding one more particle, one more article, to the great dunghill of fudged research and published irrelevancies.”

“What are you … I can’t believe you said that. About sacrificing human life. How can you possibly think that? I just … don’t understand what you have against him. Why can’t you leave him alone? He’s an old man, getting frailer and frailer—”

“So are Nazi war criminals.”

“
Nazi war criminals?
Norval, you are a master of hyperbole, of shockart. What has he done that could remotely compare?”

“At Buchenwald they experimented on living human beings—to study the effects of artificially induced diseases.”

“I repeat: what has he done that could remotely compare? Where do you get all this … rot?”

Norval paused before speaking, something he rarely did. Was he about to betray a secret? Surely there was no truth to any of this. Noel’s breathing stopped as he waited for an answer.

“From his wife and daughter,” said Norval.

Noel closed his eyes. “
His wife and daughter?
Be real. His wife has an agenda, and a divorce lawyer. And his daughter despises him because he stopped her from seeing you!”