Mister Memory Read online

  ‘Everyone has moments of recollection like that. But let me ask you, would it be unusual to be able to remember every single moment of your entire life in such clarity and detail? Unusual? In all my days of working with the many aspects of memory I have never seen, nor even heard of such a case as this, of our Marcel, Le Mémoire.’

  Petit nods, showing penance, though by now he really hates this old goat. He also discovers that voice inside him is starting to speak more loudly again, demanding justice. Demanding that Petit, for God’s sake, does something.

  The photographer announces that he is ready, and asks the other gentlemen to step aside as he ducks under a black hood behind the wooden box that will capture Marcel’s likeness. There is a sudden energetic puff from the flash powder, held out towards Marcel at arm’s length by the photographer. Petit jumps, Morel wrinkles his nose at the smell of the burning powder, and Marcel remains motionless.

  ‘You make photographs of all your patients?’ asks Petit.

  ‘Not all of them, no,’ says Morel. ‘The more interesting ones. In Charcot’s day we used to make many more – particularly the hysterics – some of the things that occurred could not have been believed were they not witnessed by the human eye, or, failing that, captured on the photographic plate. It has become an important part of our work to catalogue the aspects of the insane. We are creating a photographic library of insanity here. Yes, I grant you, Marcel’s portrait will not display his mind to anyone else, but he is handsome enough to stand it, don’t you think? And I would like to record his being here in every way possible.’

  Morel turns to the photographer.

  ‘One more, perhaps, Monsieur Buguet?’

  Buguet, the photographer, nods and ducks under his hood again.

  Petit watches the tiny brass lever on the front of the box suddenly duck as Buguet depresses a lever, the flash burns with its messy puff, and the photograph is made.

  Marcel stares across the yard, he blinks.

  ‘I would have liked to have spoken to him,’ says Petit.

  ‘So would I,’ says Morel, ‘but it seems I will have to go on waiting for his next lucid moment. Can I escort you to the gate, Inspector?’

  Petit realises it is not really a gesture of politeness, and that he is being asked to leave. Suddenly, he grows angry.

  ‘Look, I don’t see why we should just let this man go free. He murdered someone! He killed his wife! There are dozens of witnesses. He himself admits to it! It’s not right, it does not represent French justice. It should not be allowed to stand.’

  Morel takes the young man gently by the elbow, nodding to the warder, who starts to help Marcel back into his cell.

  ‘Go free, you say,’ says Morel, not rudely, but with great gravity considering Petit’s choice of words. ‘Let me walk you to the gate. No, perhaps we’ll take a longer route; there are one or two things I would like to show you as we go.’

  So they walk, and the doctor points out this facility to the inspector, and that building, and chats away amiably about the running of the hospital and how things were in Charcot’s day, which Petit can already sense is, to Morel, a golden era, already long gone.

  They turn a corner into a small street of cobbles where more rows of cells await them, not quite as elegant as the row where Marcel is being kept.

  ‘Free, you said, I think,’ says Morel. ‘Go free? Do you think the man is free? I would argue the opposite is true – rarely have I seen a man more bound. Yes, he is locked in his cell and if he were to walk the grounds he would be unable to exit through the prison gate, but that is not the true way in which he is bound. I mean he is locked inside his mind. You saw him yourself – in what sense would you say he is free? Is he free to do anything he wishes? Is he free to be anything he wants to be?’

  Petit has calmed down a little since his outburst, and yet he wants to argue his case, and has seen a way to do it.

  ‘That may be so,’ he says, ‘but freedom is not the only question here. There is also the matter of punishment.’

  ‘Punishment? You think that is important?’

  ‘Of course punishment is important,’ snaps Petit, feeling nettled once more. ‘It is the contract that the criminal makes with society – he commits an act against the individual, which is the same as to commit an act against society, and in return he knows he must receive punishment. That is clear, and it is the reason that we have a clearly stated penal code, so that every malfeasant knows what he will be liable for if caught. We must teach him a lesson.’

  The doctor looks at Petit for a moment before answering.

  ‘Perhaps I might find some grounds on which to agree with you there,’ he says, after this pause, and just as Petit begins to smile, Morel adds, ‘but not for the reasons you imagine.’

  The smile drifts off Petit’s face.

  Morel steps forward again, and invites Petit to join him by the door of a cell. The number 34 is painted in dark grey upon its surface. A small glass window, so small that even a monkey could not have climbed through it, allows a dim view of the cell inside.

  ‘Please,’ says Morel, and waves his hand at the window.

  Bending down a little to the window, Petit peers inside, misjudging the distance and bumping his nose on the glass as he does so.

  He cups his hands over his brow to shield the light, and steps back suddenly as he sees a face three inches away on the other side of the glass.

  ‘Oh, he’s awake, is he? Let’s say hello.’

  Morel pulls out a large bunch of keys from his inside pocket, and fumbles one into the lock, pulling the door open, and allowing the patient inside to step out.

  ‘Good afternoon, Henri,’ he says, and the patient smiles, benignly yet uncertainly. ‘I am Dr Morel.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Dr Morel,’ he says. He wears the same drab garb as Marcel, like coarse pyjamas in grey. He seems a little bemused, but otherwise happy enough, and calm.

  ‘Henri, this is Inspector Petit. Why don’t you say hello?’

  ‘Hello, Inspector,’ says Henri, and holds out his hand.

  The two men shake.

  ‘Very good,’ says Morel. ‘Well, come along, Petit. We must be going. Henri, if you please . . .’

  Shutting Henri back in his cell, Petit wants to ask what had been the purpose of that introduction, but Morel is in full flow as they walk across the cobbles, turning the corner into an identical row. Petit has noted the way that Morel walks, with his out-turned feet and feeble hip-thrust. He is trying not to find it distracting, and focuses on what the doctor is telling him.

  ‘That man you just met, Henri, was a shoemaker. Some eight years ago, on his wedding day, in an insensible rage, he stabbed his father-in-law-to-be to death using a bradawl. He has been confined here ever since, which you would approve of no doubt though perhaps you would consider that things should be taken further.’

  Here Morel chops the edge of one hand on to the palm of the other and Petit winces at the obvious reference.

  ‘And yet in the eight years of his confinement, in fact, ever since he emerged from whatever came over him that day, he has shown not a single moment of violence, or even anger.

  ‘There are interesting matters to consider when we talk about crime and punishment. We might perhaps agree on some things, but I would challenge you on some points that you seem to hold very dear, especially when one is considering maladies de la mémoire, which is, I might add, the area I have applied myself to over the last ten years.’

  They turn another corner and still Petit finds no way to interrupt.

  ‘What is memory, Inspector? This is a question I have asked myself a thousand times over the years, so perhaps it is unfair to spring it upon you, cold, as it were. Let me give you the opinion of our philosophers. Memory is a series of moments, captured by the mind in rather the same way as Buguet just captured Marcel’s likeness. A crude analogy perhaps but the principle is good – the mind captures each moment of experience and records them in a vast a
rchive, somewhere in the brain. In fact, from various brain-damaged cases, we suspect that the storage is more complex than that, but for the sake of argument, imagine if you will a vast library of moments, all catalogued and filed and stamped and waiting.’

  Petit has no need to imagine that, having just left such a place this very afternoon in the basement of the Quai des Orfèvres. It comes to his mind now, and he’s aware enough to realise that he is performing the act of memory, there and then, just as the doctor is describing.

  ‘So, you recall something, and your mind draws it out from the thousands, no, we must surely at least say millions, of files in the archive. It is no wonder that for most of us, even those of us with good memories, this is an imperfect process. But lest you should say that perhaps not all incidents are stored as memories in this great filing cabinet of the mind in the first place, and that that is why our memories are imperfect, let me tell you about the work we have done with hypnotism here. Under hypnosis, all sorts of memories that the conscious patient had forgotten ever existed may be accessed once more. So it is fair to assume that everything is in there somewhere.’

  Here, Morel playfully taps Petit on the forehead, and Petit finds himself really detesting the old doctor again. But Morel still isn’t finished. He takes a quick glance at his pocket watch as they turn another corner and he draws to his conclusion.

  ‘This makes what our Marcel can do even more extraordinary, if you think about it. He can go to any file, any memory at all, and recall it. A perfect memory, or so I hope to prove. So if memory consists of a series of moments, then where, in all that, is the self?’

  There is a pause, during which Petit manages to notice that they have returned back to the original street of cobbles, and says, ‘The self?’

  ‘Yes, the self. Who you are, my boy. Who you are. Let’s play a quick game – let’s ask what you would be if you had no memory. No memory at all. None whatsoever. Go on, think about it.’

  And Petit finds, much to his dislike, that he is. Without memory, he thinks, without memory . . .

  ‘Without memory, one could not do simple things,’ he begins, feeling his way into the argument.

  ‘Very good, go on.’

  ‘One could not find one’s way home. Or remember how to work. Or who your friends were. Or what your name was. Or—’

  ‘Yes!’ says Morel, his eyes sparkling. ‘Take it further!’

  Petit does. He quickly sees all the mundane things that could not be, and then, before he knows it, he has the sensation of tumbling down an abyss, into nothingness, for he understands that without memory . . .

  ‘We would be nothing. We could not learn, we could not do. We would be unable to function, to think, to reason. We would not know who our friends were, what we did five minutes previously. All higher functions would have to cease, we would merely breathe, perhaps eat, drink, but . . . no more than that. We would just be some sort of living machine. We would truly be nothing.’

  Morel stands and admires his pupil.

  ‘Very, very good,’ he says slowly. Then he turns. He pulls a key from his pocket, and while Petit is still wondering with horror at what he’s just been given to understand, Morel opens the door of a cell.

  A man steps out, and Petit suddenly realises they are standing at the door of the same cell, 34, of five minutes before.

  ‘Good morning, Henri,’ says Morel. ‘I am Dr Morel. This is Inspector Petit. Won’t you say hello?’

  Henri steps forward, smiling, and shakes Petit’s hand.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ he says, and as Petit looks into the man’s eyes, he can see Henri has no recollection whatsoever of having already met him. Or for that matter, the doctor.

  ‘Thank you, Henri,’ says Morel. ‘If you please . . .’

  Henri smiles and retreats into his cell.

  Petit stands, staring.

  ‘That wasn’t an act,’ he mumbles. He holds an arm out towards the door. ‘He had no idea who I was.’

  ‘Indeed. Henri suffers from a special kind of amnesia – he can remember everything up to his wedding day in a normal fashion. But since that awful event he has been unable to create new memories. He can remember for approximately two to three minutes. I allowed five minutes to pass as we walked, by which time I knew you would be a stranger to Henri, as indeed I am too. He seems barely to understand why he is here, or, at least, he has no reason to question it, but has no memory of the wedding day, or what he did. So I bring you again to your question of punishment. What point is there in punishing Henri? He has no consciousness of what he did. Therefore he can have no conscience about what he did. Therefore to punish him teaches him nothing. He has no responsibility for his actions. The only reason we might punish him, I agree with you, is for ourselves, for our own satisfaction, for our own sense of right and wrong. For our own pleasure. But it is, I assure you, meaningless, utterly meaningless, to Henri. To keep him amused we gave him a child’s puzzle. It takes him around three minutes to solve it each time. His entire waking life now consists of making and remaking that puzzle.’

  Petit does not know what to say.

  ‘Such is the case of the amnesiac. But amnesiacs are, to be honest, common enough. I have had to create a new term for Després – the hypermnesiac; he suffers, and I truly believe the word suffers is appropriate, from too much memory. That is why he is ill. And as for punishing him, I would ask you to consider the view of our philosophers, namely this: all that we are is an assembly of a sequence of memories. And if they are merely a sequence of individual, discrete events, then how can we create a single continuous self from them? And if there is no continuity of the self, then how can we be held responsible for our actions of five years ago, or six months ago, or even, for that matter, this morning?’

  Morel has brought Petit to the gate, and shakes him warmly by the hand.

  ‘Thank you for visiting us today. I take it to be a great honour in speaking with you about such matters.’

  Still somewhat in a daze, his head full of glimpses of ideas, and therefore of worlds, that have never occurred to him before, Petit returns the handshake.

  But Morel is not finished.

  ‘I trust that you remember that the police have no jurisdiction within the walls of the hospital. As it happens, I can have you prevented from returning here. I hope you would be so good as not to put me to that trouble?’

  Petit nods, opens his mouth, but before he knows what he wants to say, he finds himself in the boulevard again, his feet carrying him home, and a voice nagging in his ear, telling him he has failed.

  IN THE RUE SAINT-ANDRÉ-DES-ARTS

  The days go by. Petit completes his third week of his own particular punishment in the archives in the basement of the Quai des Orfèvres, a cold and damp place even in the height of the summer, where the sight of rats is not uncommon. The old archivist, Gilbert, has actually managed to allocate some petty cash to feed the local stray cats to encourage their loyalty, a poor attempt to keep the rats at bay, but easier on the budget of the Sûreté than calling the rat catcher.

  One more week, Petit tells himself, and he can be free of these pointless attempts to recover information lost nearly thirty years ago, before he was born, ancient history. Just so many forgotten memories.

  One day, after work, he’s walking home down the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and finds that he has put himself in a café opposite the fine archway that leads into the Cour du Commerce, the place where Marcel shot Ondine.

  His conversation with that crazy doctor from Salpêtrière has not left him. He finds, annoyingly, that his mind keeps returning to it, whether he wants it to or not, and actually, come to mention it, he would prefer it not to. Before his visit to the hospital, he understood things very well. Criminals are bad and should be punished. Cops are, well, perhaps not always good, he knows that already, but as a collective force they are there to restore order, to solve crimes, to bring the guilty before the judges for punishment. But more than once, Petit
discovers that he is thinking about Morel’s philosophers, the ones who claim that there can be no self if all we are is merely a sequence of fragmentary moments held by memory. He knows that this is poppycock, or, at least, he very much wants it to be, but time and again in the last week he has been troubled by the disturbing notion that he understands nothing at all. He feels as if he has grown up in a small and simple house, and has now been shown a glimpse through a door to entire rooms that he never knew existed, rooms that are strange, challenging and infinitely more complex than the rooms of his childhood. He feels somewhat bewildered and he doesn’t enjoy the sensation in the least.

  He orders a bock and while he waits for the cool beer to arrive, decides that the philosophers can go to hell. Whether they’re right or not is unimportant – they don’t have to wrestle with crimes and criminals and judges, and these are simply practical matters with practical solutions. And murderers go to the guillotine. Or at least, they should.

  It’s as the waitress brings his beer and he takes a first sip that he finds he’s looking down the Cour du Commerce, and remembers the visit he made to Després’s studio, and into his head, for no apparent reason at all, comes a memory, something that was tucked away in everything Morel said about Marcel.

  Morel said it was the Préfecture’s decision to have Marcel moved to the hospital. Petit had assumed the decision was down to the examining magistrate, this being the first case of insanity that he’d come across in his eighteen months’ service.

  The next day, he hunts down Drouot and asks him, and Drouot confirms that the decision is taken by the Préfecture.

  ‘In the case of the insane, confinement to an asylum is by request of the family; where the party has no family, then confinement is at the discretion of the Préfecture.’

  ‘Not the examining magistrate?’

  ‘No, it would have been taken out of his hands.’

  ‘Even if the insane party is accused of a crime? Of murder?’