Mister Memory Read online

  In truth, Petit doesn’t know to what level of detail the measurements are made, but in Ondine’s case the proportions of her facial features would have been useless.

  He reads the report again.

  Something in it does not ring true, and he soon realises what it is: hair colour. The Bertillon report mentions that Ondine has auburn hair. Ondine had auburn hair at the time of her arrest for the little fracas. The police report from this July, on the corpse found by the two gardiens in the studio of Marcel Després, states that the victim had auburn hair, but that brown roots were just starting to show. Ondine has auburn hair, yes, but she did not have dyed hair, at least as far as he knows. Could that have been missed in the Bertillon report? There is only one way to find out: he will have to ask around at the cabarets where she worked. Someone will know, but in a sense, he tells himself, it doesn’t matter. He knows what happened now. He just needs to prove it. It’s time to stop moping around the city like a lovelorn boy.

  He takes a bottle of brandy from the top shelf of the kitchen area in his rooms, and pours a large measure into his now empty wine glass.

  He rummages behind the books on his bookshelf, and pulls out a large amount of cash, and places half on the table. The rest he puts in his wallet. He takes out his gun, unloads it, checks it, loads it again, and finds the bulk of his ammunition: sixteen rounds in addition to the six in the gun. These extra he stands in their little cardboard packet on the table top, and then places his Sûreté identification next to it.

  He looks at everything he has. With these few things, he thinks dramatically, I have to change the world, or one small corner of it, anyway. I have to overturn something that everyone else believes to be true, even Marcel himself: that Marcel shot Ondine. And I have to uncover the involvement of one of the most powerful men in Paris and, therefore, in France.

  He takes a clean handkerchief and makes a small bundle of his tools. He undresses, till he is in his shorts, then tucks the bundle into the top of his sock and ties it around his calf, tightly, using the long laces from his old army boots that he has kept all this time. He always knew they would come in useful.

  He dresses again, in clean clothes.

  He stands briefly in front of the small mirror he uses to shave, the only one in his apartment. He barely recognises his face.

  It is not the one he has become used to seeing recently, one that is cowed and timid. The face before him now is the face he used to own, when he thought less, and did more. It’s the face he wore as a soldier on the eve of battle. A face that does not question every single thought and every single deed.

  Marie’s voice is gone now, something he doesn’t even notice. But it’s true: she has left his thoughts, for he is no longer remembering. The time to brood and remember is over. That is a gift he has, that everyone in the world has: the ability, when necessary, to forget. Almost everyone, that is.

  Petit heads out into the Parisian night.

  THE ART OF FORGETTING

  On Morel’s desk is an ever-growing pile of papers; they are the notes he has taken during and after every session with Marcel. As the months have gone by, this pile of papers has risen towards the ceiling of his little office at the back of the hospital. He has often worked far into the night to collect all his thoughts after a spell in Marcel’s tiny room.

  This evening, he stands looking at the work he has done so far. Once or twice, Raymond, the Chief Physician of the hospital, has asked him about his special case. It is an open secret that Morel is obsessing about something. The word is that Morel has found a man with perfect memory, and the word is also that Morel will not let it go until he has proved it for sure. Raymond is a younger man than Morel. He regards the old boy with a mixture of indifference and superiority. By and large, he allows the older doctor to do what he wants, because he will retire soon anyway, and in the meantime, he does little harm. Morel is smarter than Raymond believes, however, because Morel knows what the upstart Chief Physician thinks about him, but he does not care. All he cares about is his work and, as he stands looking at the pile of notes about Marcel, he lets out a faint sigh.

  In front of him is a sheet of paper on which he has been trying to organise his thoughts, because he has come to the conclusion that it will not suffice to write a paper about Després, it will have to be a short book. At least. Possibly a long one.

  Now, he stares at the papers, gives another sigh, and rubs his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. He has not touched the notes tonight. He has not touched them in three weeks, in fact. Maybe he won’t ever touch them again, not unless he can include one final chapter. The chapter in which he, the noble physician, seeks and finds a cure for what ails Marcel Després. The chapter in which he discovers the art of forgetting, and teaches it to the man with the indelible memory, thus freeing him to live a normal life once more. Morel has come to the unalterable conclusion that in order to function as a normal human being, a balance is required, a balance of remembering and forgetting. Look at the murderous shoemaker, after all: without the ability to form new memories he lives trapped in some perpetual present, devoid of meaning. And look at Marcel: he is perhaps a little better off than the shoemaker, but really, all his problems stem from the fact that he lives permanently in the past, lost in labyrinths. And as he ponders these matters, the doctor realises something else, something about himself. Somewhere along the line, sitting in that cell, day after day, something has emerged from within Morel that has long lain dormant in him: the desire to care for a patient, even just one.

  This is what Morel has been working on these past three weeks, and it is to this that he now returns, to what should be the crowning achievement of the book, of his life’s work as an alienist. The art of forgetting.

  Together, they have been working on various avenues of thought, various ways in which forgetting might be accomplished. Marcel has applied himself fully and enthusiastically to the work. He can see how much it would benefit him to be freed, even a little, from the curse of perfection.

  At first, Morel wondered if what underlay the perfect memory was some deeply set need. Perhaps, from some childhood incident, Marcel had become programmed to be terrified of forgetting, and this in turn caused his mind to develop the unbelievable skill that it has. He dismisses this thought when he recalls that Marcel claims to have always had this memory, even in utero. But perhaps the theory itself is sound: that the mind’s desire to memorise everything is driven by the need not to forget. On this principle, the doctor provided Marcel one day with paper and pencils, and they spent several mornings having him write down every aspect of the murder that he possibly could. If these are written down, he reasons, maybe his brain will accept that they do not need to be remembered. To test this idea, Morel forced Marcel to restrict himself to the moments immediately before and during the event, but even then, it took four mornings to record everything. Morel was struck with the nagging fear that Marcel could go on writing for ever, and after four days he took the papers away. The next day, he returned and engaged Marcel in conversation about the murder, hoping for signs that his memory might be incomplete on some tiny aspect or other.

  It was not.

  Undeterred, Morel concluded that perhaps he should not have chosen this most dramatic event as the first for Marcel to attempt to forget. Anyone, any normal person, would have all these things etched on their remembrances for the rest of their days. What prevented Marcel from functioning normally was the day-to-day minutiae of life in which he was constantly trapped in memories within memories within memories. So they spent the next two afternoons having Marcel report everything he could about his first days in the asylum; including recording the number squares that Morel first set him as a challenge. That done, the doctor returned the next day and Marcel sadly rattled off a hundred numbers, a hundred numbers even Morel was starting to memorise.

  The doctor has come to the conclusion that the writing method is yielding no positive results whatsoever, and today he has decided to mo
ve matters on. There is, after all, a very powerful tool at his disposal, one he has used many times in the past. It’s just not a method he likes very much.

  Hypnotism is widely used in the chambers of the Salpêtrière. It was another of Charcot’s specialities when he was Chief Physician, and it was the one area in which Morel never quite saw eye to eye with the great man. He never voiced his concerns out loud, and Charcot himself seemed to be so far wrapped into the process and so enthused by its apparent successes that he never appeared to step back and look at what was going on. Morel did. He learned how to hypnotise patients too, of course. There were a hundred ways in which it could be done: passes with the hand; caresses with fingertips on the face or arms; the intent gaze of the alienist stabbing deep into the eyes of the patient and so on and so on. The patient’s eyes would become vague, or moisten, and eventually they would close as they entered the hypnotic state. With a well-practised patient, Charcot could merely tap the top of her head (and it was almost always a she in those days) and she would fall into the trance, as if struck by lightning.

  It was the willingness with which the patients submitted to the procedure that first unsettled Morel, though he thought little of it at the time and did nothing about it at all. Perhaps unsettled is putting it too strongly, perhaps it’s enough to say that a seed was placed deep in his mind which one day would start to emerge. And the results were spectacular: Charcot could have the women enter all sorts of hysterical states through hypnosis, holding out the prospect that hypnotism could be used to control these states when they emerged unwillingly.

  Unwillingly, willingly, Morel began to think, which is which? Is there any difference? And then again, the fact that hypnotism appeared to be possible with birds such as cockerels and doves seemed to rule out any possibility of collusion between the patient and doctor, that the patient could be acting out what the doctor hoped to see, even on an unconscious level. And unconsciousness could apply to either doctor or patient. Or both.

  Morel had watched time and again as Charcot stood behind a lady seated on a chair, placed his fingertips on the tops of her eyelids, and began to speak to her so intently and softly that within moments she was under the spell. And what was the alternative? What other ways were they developing to cure these women of their hysterical attacks? There was the Holtz-Carré machine; but it soon grew tiresome watching the warders strap a struggling woman, naked, to the arms of the chair so that the discharge from the great spinning wheel could be applied to her body in various places. Yes, they left the room docile and meek, but perhaps that was nothing more than exhaustion. Electrostatic baths were little better.

  Hypnotism seemed to offer clean painless solutions. Yes, it had been twice refuted by the Académie des Sciences, but that was when it still reeked of Mesmerism, the mystical connotations of the pre-scientific ramblings of its creator Anton Mesmer still clinging to it. Attraction fluids, animal magnetism, remote metalloscopy. Such things were surely best left outside the gates of the hospital and confined to the salons of rich ladies with idle speculations to indulge. Charcot’s paper of 1882 began to rewrite the map, and then came the epic battle of Charcot, in Paris, versus Bernheim, in Nancy. The questions of two great themes, sex and crime, were investigated. Could a woman be forced to submit to a sexual liaison under hypnosis, and if she did so, was this rape? Did it not in fact mean that she was willing all along? And could a man be forced to commit a murder while in a hypnotic trance? In Nancy, Bernheim had his patients commit all sorts of heinous acts in an effort to find the limit of behaviour under hypnosis. They would eat offal, they would eat refuse, even human excreta. He could have them striptease, unknowingly. And then came the ‘laboratory crimes’, in which a series of ‘murders’ were committed using unloaded pistols, fake arsenic and more. And still the hypnotised patients did everything that was bid of them. All the while, dissenting voices started to ask not only about the morality of such experiments, but also about the matter of complicity. Were these people, no matter how depraved the act they committed, actually willing to do these things, and the supposed state of hypnotism merely gave them licence to do so?

  These dissenting voices entered Morel’s head, though he said nothing till after Charcot had retired, and even then, very little, for the new man, Raymond, seemed not to hold great store by the practice.

  For all this, Morel is able to hypnotise patients. He has done it many times, and he still believes, when you strip away all the over-the-top and extravagant nonsense that Charcot and particularly Bernheim got up to, there is a quiet, subtle useful avenue of experimentation that only hypnotism can offer. Thus he has decided to see if Marcel can be hypnotised into forgetting.

  He places himself in front of his patient late one winter’s afternoon and explains what he is going to do. He will put Marcel into a hypnotic state; this will take some time, he explains, but once there, he will begin to talk to Marcel’s mind, to the deepest part of his mind, and he will suggest that one particular memory is forgotten, erased, removed for good. They discuss what this should be.

  ‘You have something in mind, Marcel?’

  Marcel thinks for a bit.

  ‘Shall we start with something small?’

  Morel nods. That seems sensible.

  ‘Then make me forget the name of that policeman. The inspector.’

  Morel considers this. Very well, he thinks. He can see no harm in that, he can see no way in which that might cause anything detrimental to happen. And if it does, he can always remind Marcel of the name. A good and simple test, straightforward.

  Marcel seems strangely excited. Morel conceals his own feelings as he sets to work with the passes in front of his patient’s eyes, causing them, after a period of time, to close. After a while longer of gentle speech, Morel satisfies himself that Marcel is ‘asleep’. He makes the suggestion to Marcel that the name Petit will leave his mind for ever, at once, and he does all this with such self-confidence and such conviction, while Marcel seems totally enraptured, that it is all the more distressing, that despite their best efforts and the small scale of the task they have selected, that the method of hypnotic forgetting appears to have failed utterly.

  A NIGHT IN PIGALLE

  There are days, Petit has come to realise, when you merely exist. These are not necessarily bad days, merely days when your senses are closed. You see little, you smell little, you taste almost nothing. Sounds impact upon you but cause no effect and leave no trace. You move through your world, doing what must be done, without awareness. You work, you walk. You talk to people who ask something of you, you say a couple of words to the man who sells you your newspaper, but when the end of the day arrives, you might suddenly sit down on the edge of your bed, and wonderingly say to yourself ‘hah!’ as you realise that you missed the entire day. Or perhaps you might go to sleep, still without realising anything at all.

  Many days have been like that for Petit. He watches as his mind does something it has been doing a lot of lately: that is to say, it makes a connection. Without his bidding or intention, new ideas and thoughts keep rising to the surface of his consciousness. This time he makes a comparison between himself and Marcel. Marcel is trapped because he thinks too much, he cannot free himself from a cyclical whirl of memory, whereas he, Petit, is trapped because he doesn’t think at all.

  Or it would be closer to say he didn’t. Now he is like a sleeper of some fabulous story, emerging from his cave and rubbing his eyes as if for the first time. If he thought little before, he now sees that when Marie died he forced himself to think even less. But the water in a spring cannot be dammed up for ever, and now he is paying the price for it; his new thoughts gush from the darkness and burst across the meadow of his mind.

  If there are days when your life passes without you taking any active part in it, then Petit has come to see that there are also days when every whisper of sound has meaning, when every glance from a stranger has import, when every tiny detail of life suddenly seems vital, and not only
that, seems connected to every other detail, so that you perceive the world as a web winding around you and off in all directions, with you as its protagonist.

  Today, this evening, is such a time. That is why, without any logical reason for it, Petit has prepared himself for flight, if need be. Before the night is out he will learn that he was right to do so.

  It is late already: seven o’clock. Early for an evening in the city of Paris, but late, given how much he has to accomplish.

  He makes his way first from his apartment, down to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and crosses over into the Cour du Commerce. Everything is usual, everything is normal; life goes on in the cour just as if Marcel had never blasted five rounds into his wife, which Petit thinks is as it should be, because it never happened. These diners in Le Procope, the coal boy on the corner, the rag-and-bone man picking through the gutters, they should all act just as they are, as if a murder never happened up there on the sixth floor. But, Petit tells himself, a murder did happen, just not the one that people think. That’s what he has come to prove. To start with, he is going to use a piece of mental evidence, something that Marcel himself offered up, from the detail of his memory.

  He marches through the porch of the house, not even glancing at the concierge who is whining away at some poor unfortunate tenant about boot marks on the floorboards.

  ‘Hey!’ she cries out, as Petit passes. ‘What do you think— You there!’

  Petit takes no notice. The miserable concierge starts to hobble after him, but by then he is already two flights of stairs ahead of her.

  When he reaches the door to the apartment that was Marcel and Ondine’s he does not knock. He tries the handle and finds it locked. He can hear the concierge making progress up the stairwell and that is enough to cause him to act. As before at Baraduc’s studio, he shoves the sole of his boot against the lock with a short stabbing motion. The door flies open and he marches in to find a middle-aged couple jumping out of their skins. After a moment’s pause, they immediately begin shouting at him and make threats of violence, which they are unlikely to carry out.