The door to Dr. Hannibal Lecter's memory
palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can
be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit
spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of
the Topkaki museum.
Everywhere there exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to
memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression.
Spaces
devoted to Hannibal Lecter's earliest years differ from the other archives in
being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic
shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion,
greater snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flahses. Pleas and
screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But
the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.
The
palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal's student life. In his years
of confinement, he improued and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained
him for long periods while wardens denied him his books.
Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the
latch. Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither
left nor right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most
fragmentary.
We
will add to them what we learned elsewhere, in war records and police records,
from interviews and forensics and the mute postures of the dead. Robert
Lecter's letters, recently unearthed, may help us establish the vital
statistics of Hannibal, who altered dates freely to confound the authorities
and his chroniclers. By our efforts, we may watch as the beast within turns
from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.
"This is the harvest," she said,
smiling, putting her hand on his heart as she had done since he was thirteen
years old. And then she took her hand away, and the place on his chest felt
cold.
"Do you really return your books?"
"Yes."
"Then you can remember everything in the books."
"Everything important."
He rested his gloved hand lightly on the
brain. Obssessed with memory and the blank places in his own mind, he wished
that by touch he could read a dead man's dreams, that by force of will, he
could explore his own.
The
laboratory at night was a good place to think, the quiet broken only by the
clink of instruments and, rarely, the groan of a subject in an early stage of
dissection, when organs might still contain some air.
Hannibal
performed a meticulous partial dissection of the left side of the face, then
sketched the head, both the dissected side of the face and the untouched side
as well, for the anatomical illustrations that were part of his scholarship.
Now
he wanted to permanently store in his mind the muscular, neural, and venous
structures of the face. Sitting with his gloved hand on the head of his
subject, Hannibal went to the center of his own mind and into the foyer of his
memory palace. He elected for music in the corridors, a Bach string quartet,
and passed quickly through the Hall of Mathematics, through Chemistry, to a
room he'd adopted recently from the Carnavalet Museum and renamed the hall of
the Cranium. It took only a few minutes to store everything, associating anatomical details with the set arrangement of
displays in the Carnavalet, being careful not to put the venous blues of the
face against blues in the tapestries.
When he had finished in the Hall of the Cronium, the paused for a moment
in the Hall of Mathematics, near the entrance. It was one of the oldest parts
of the palace, in his mind. He wanted to treat himself to the feeling he got at
the age of seven when he understood the proof Mr. Jakov showed him. All of Mr.
Jakov's tutorial sesisons at the castle were stored there, but none of their
talks from the hunting lodge.
Everything from the hunting lodge was outside the memory palace, still
on the grounds, but in the dark sheds of his dreams, scorched black like the
hunting lodge, and to get there he would have to go outside. He would have to
cross the snow where the ripped pages of Huyghens's Treatise on Light blew
across Mr. Jakov's brains and blood, scattered and frozen to the snow.
In
these palace corridors, he could choose music or not, but in the sheds he could
not control the sound, a particular sound there could kill him.
He
emerged from the memory palace back into his mind, came back behind his eyes
and to his eighteen-year-old body, which sat beside the table in the anatomy
laboratory, his hand upon a brain.
He
sketched for another hour. In his finished sketch, the veins and nerves of the
dissected half of the face exactly reflected the subject on the table. The
unmarked side of the face did not resemble the subject at all. It was a face
from the sheds. It was the face of Vladis Grutas, though Hannibal only thought
of him as Blue-Eyes.
He
crossed the footbridge to the Ile de la Cité and rounded the cathedral. Sounds
of a choir practice came from Notre Dame.
Hannibal paused beneath the arches of the center entrance, looking at
the Last Judgement in relief on the arches and lintels above the door. He was
considering it for a display in his memory palace, to record a complex dissection
of the throat: There on the upper intel St. Michael held a pair of scales as
though he himself were conducting on autopsy. St.
Michael's scales were not unlike the hyoid bone, and he was overarched by the
Saints of the Mastoid Process. The lower lintel, where the damned were being
marched away in chains, would be the clavicle, and the succession of arches
would serve as the structural layers of the thorat, to a catechism easy to
remember,
stennohyoid omohyoid thyrohyoid
juuugular, amen.
by 
