Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  Pheko can feel Temba’s sweat soaking through the towel around him. The boy’s cheeks are the color of dishwater. “Temba,” Pheko whispers. Once the boy raises his face weakly and Pheko can see the wobbling pinpoints of the light towers reflected in the sheen of his eyes.

  THAT SAME HOUR

  Roger and Luvo enter Alma Konachek’s house in the earliest hours of Sunday morning. Alma doesn’t wake. Her breathing sounds steadily from the bedroom. Roger wonders if perhaps the houseboy has given her a sedative.

  Luvo tromps upstairs. Roger opens the refrigerator and closes it; he contemplates stepping out into the garden to smoke a cigarette. He feels, very keenly tonight, that he is almost out of time. Down below the balcony, somewhere past the fog, Cape Town sleeps.

  Absently, for no reason, Roger opens the drawer beside the dishwasher. He has stood in this kitchen on seventeen different nights but has never before opened this drawer. Inside Roger can see butane lighters, coins, a box of staples. And a single beige polymer cartridge, identical to the hundreds upstairs.

  Roger picks up the cartridge and holds it to the window. Number 4510.

  “Kid,” Roger calls, raising his voice to the ceiling. “Kid.” Luvo does not reply. Roger walks upstairs and waits. The boy is hooked into the machine. His torso seems to vibrate lightly. After another minute the machine sighs, and Luvo’s eyes flit open. The boy sits back and grinds his palms into his eyesockets. Roger holds up the new cartridge.

  “Look at this.” There is a shakiness in Roger’s voice that surprises them both.

  Luvo reaches and takes it. “Have I seen this before?”

  CARTRIDGE 4510

  Alma is in a movie theater with Harold. They are perhaps thirty years old. The movie is about scuba divers. Onscreen, white birds with forked tails soar above a beach. Light touches the tops of breaking waves. Alma and Harold sit side by side, Alma in a bright green dress, green shoes, green plastic earrings, Harold in an expensive brown shirt. The side of Harold’s knee presses against the side of Alma’s. Luvo can feel a dim electricity traveling between them.

  Now the camera slips underwater. Rainbows of fish flit across the screen. Reefs scroll past. Alma’s heart does its steady work.

  The memory jerks forward; Alma and Harold are in a cab, Alma’s camera bag on the bench seat between them. They travel through a place that looks to Luvo like Camps Bay. Everything out the windows is vague; it is as if, for Alma, there is nothing to look at all. There is only feeling, only anticipation, only her young husband beside her.

  In another breath they are climbing the steps of a regal, cream-colored hotel, backed by moonlit cliffs. Gulls soar everywhere. A little gold-lettered sign reads Twelve Apostles Hotel. Inside the lobby a willowy woman in a white shirt and white pants with a gold belt buckle gives them a key on a brass chain; they pad down a series of hallways.

  In the hotel room Alma lets out a succession of bright, genuine laughs. She gulps wine. Everything is pristine; two spotless windows, a wide white bed, richly ruffled lampshades. Harold switches on a music player and takes off his shoes and dances clumsily in his socks. Out the windows, range after range of spotlit waves fold over onto a beach.

  After what might be a few minutes Harold leaps the balcony railing and takes off his shirt and socks. “Come with me,” he calls, and Alma takes her camera bag and follows him down onto the beach. Alma laughs as Harold charges into the wavebreak. He splashes around a bit, grinning hugely. “Freezing!” he shouts. As he walks out of the water, Alma raises her camera, and takes a photograph.

  If they say anything more to one another, it is not remembered, not recorded on the cartridge. In the memory Harold makes love to Alma twice. Luvo feels he should leave, should yank out the cartridge, send himself back into Alma’s house in Vredehoek, but the room is so clean, the sheets are so cool beneath Alma’s back. Everything is soft; everything seems to vibrate with possibility. Alma tastes the sea on Harold’s skin. She feels his big-knuckled hands hold onto her ribs, his fingertips touch the knobs of her spine.

  Near the end of the memory Alma closes her eyes and seems to slip underwater, as if back into the film at the moviehouse, watching a huge black urchin wave its spines, noticing how the water is not silent but full of soft clicks, and soon the pastels of coral are scrolling past her vision, and little slashes of needlefish are dodging her fingers, and Harold’s body seems not to be on top of hers at all, but drifting instead beside her; they are swimming together, floating slowly away from the reef toward a place where the sea floor falls away and the bottom is too far away to see, and there is only light filtering into deep water, bottomless water, and Alma’s blood seems to swell out to the very edges of her skin.

  SUNDAY, 4 A.M.

  Alma sits up in bed. From the ceiling comes the unmistakable sounds of footfalls. On her nightstand there is a glass of water, its bottom daubed with miniature bubbles. Beside it is a hardcover book. Though its jacket is missing and half the binding is torn away, the title appears sparkling and whole in her mind. Treasure Island. Of course.

  From the ceiling comes another creak. Someone is in my house, Alma thinks, and then some still-functional junction in her brain coughs up an image of a man. His teeth are orange. His nose looks like a small brown gourd. His trousers are khaki and stained and a tear in the left shoulder of his shirt shows his darker skin beneath. A faded jaguar winds up the underside of his wrist.

  Alma jerks herself onto her feet. A demon, she thinks, a burglar, a tall man in the yard.

  She hurries across the kitchen into the study and opens the heavy, two-handled drawer at the bottom of Harold’s fossil cabinet. A drawer she has not opened in years. Toward the bottom, beneath a stack of paleontology magazines, is a cigar box upholstered with pale orange linen. Even before she finds it, she is certain it is there. Indeed, her mind feels particularly clear. Oiled. Operable. You are Alma, she thinks. I am Alma.

  She retrieves the box, sets it on the desk that once was Harold’s and opens it. Inside is a nine-millimeter handgun.

  She stares at it a moment before picking it up. Blunt and colorless and new-looking. Harold used to carry it in his glove compartment. She does not know how to tell if it is loaded.

  Alma carries the gun in her left hand through the kitchen to the living room and sits in the silver armchair that offers her a view up the stairwell. She does not turn on any lights. Her heart flutters in her chest like a moth.

  From upstairs winds a thin strand of cigarette smoke. The pendulum in the grandfather clock swings back and forth. Out the windows there is only a dim whiteness: fog. Everything seems irradiated with a meaning she is only now recognizing. My house, she thinks. I love my house.

  If Alma keeps her eyes straight ahead, and does not look to her right or left, it is possible to believe Harold is about to settle into the matching chair beside her, the lamp and table between them. She can just sense the weight of his body shifting over there, can smell something like rock powder in his clothes, can perceive the scarcely perceptible gravitational tug one body exerts upon another. She has so much to say to him.

  She sits. She waits. She tries to remember.

  LEAVING THE QUEUE

  At 4:30 a.m. Pheko and Temba are still twenty or so people from the clinic entrance. Temba is sleeping steadily now, his arms and legs limp, his big eyelids sealing him off from the world. The wind has settled down. Clouds of gnats materialize above the shacks. Pheko squats against the wall with his son in his lap. The boy looks emptied out, his cheeks depressed, the tendons in his throat showing.

  Above them the painted Jesus stretches his implausibly long arms. The light towers have been switched off and a dull orange glow reflects off the undersides of the clouds.

  My last day of work, Pheko thinks. Today the accountant will pay me. A second thought succeeds that one: Mrs. Alma has antibiotics. He is surprised he did not think of this sooner. She has piles of them. How many times has Pheko refreshed the little army of orange pill bottles sta
nding in her bathroom cupboard?

  Bats cut silent loops above the shanty rooftops. A little girl beside them unleashes a chain of coughs. Pheko can feel the dust on his face, can taste the earth in his molars. After another minute he lifts his sleeping son and abandons their place in the queue and carries the boy down through the noiseless streets to the bus station.

  HAROLD

  “Maybe it’s something the houseboy didn’t want her to see?” murmurs Roger. “Something that made her upset?”

  Luvo waits for the memory to fade. He studies Alma’s wall in the dimness. Treasure Island. Gorgonops longifrons. Porter Properties. “That’s not it,” he says. On the wall in front of them float countless iterations of Alma Konachek: a seven-year-old sitting cross-legged on the floor; a brisk, thirty-year-old estate agent; a bald old lady. An entitled woman, a lover, a wife.

  And in the center Harold walks perpetually out of the sea. His name printed below it in shaky handwriting. A photograph taken on the very night when Harold and Alma seemed to reach the peak of everything they could be. Alma had placed that picture in the center on purpose, Luvo is sure of it, before her endless rearranging had defaced the original logic of her project. The one thing she wouldn’t move.

  The photograph is faded, slightly curled at the edges. It must be forty years old, thinks Luvo. He reaches out and takes it from the wall.

  Before he feels it, he knows it will be there. The photograph is slightly heavier than it should be. Two strips of tape cross over its back; something has been fixed underneath.

  “What’s that?” asks Roger.

  Luvo carefully lifts away the tape so as not to tear the photograph. Beneath is a cartridge. It looks like the others, except it has a black X drawn across it.

  He and Roger stare at it a moment. Then Luvo slides it into the machine. The house peels away in slow, deciduous waves.

  Alma is riding beside Harold in a dusty truck: Harold’s Land Cruiser. Harold holds the steering wheel with his left hand, his face sunburned red, his right hand trailing out the open window. The road is untarred and rough. On both sides grassy fields sweep upward into crumbled mountainsides.

  Harold is talking, his words washing in and out of Alma’s attention. “What’s the one permanent thing in the world?” he’s saying now. “Change! Incessant and relentless change. All these slopes, all this scree—see that huge slide there?—they’re all records of calamities. Our lives are like a fingersnap in all this.” Harold shakes his head in genuine wonderment. He swoops his hand back and forth in the air out the window.

  Inside Alma’s memory a thought rises so clearly it’s as if Luvo can see the sentence printed in the air in front of the windshield. She thinks: Our marriage is ending and all you can talk about is rocks.

  Occasional farm cottages rush past, white walls with red roofs; derelict windpumps; sun-ravaged sheep pens; everything tiny against the backdrop of the peaks growing ever larger beyond the hood ornament. The sky is a swirl of cloud and light.

  Time compresses; Luvo feels jolted forward. One moment a rampart of cliffs ahead glows chalk-white, flickering lightly as if composed of flames. A moment later Alma and Harold are in among the rocks, the Land Cruiser ascending long switchbacks. The road is composed of rust-colored gravel, bordered now and then by uneven walls of rock. Sheer drops open off the left, then right sides. A sign reads, Swartbergpas.

  Inside Alma, Luvo can feel something large coming to a head. It’s rising, frothing inside her. Heat prickles her under her blouse; Harold downshifts as the truck climbs through a nearly impossible series of hairpin turns. The valley floor with its quilting of farm fields looks a thousand miles below.

  At some point Harold stops at a pullout surrounded by rockfall. He produces sandwiches from an aluminum cooler. He eats ravenously; Alma’s sandwich sits untouched on the dash. “Just going to have a poke around,” Harold says, and does not wait for a reply. From the back of the Land Cruiser he takes a jug of water and his ebony walking stick with the elephant on the handle and climbs over the drystone retaining wall and disappears.

  Alma sits, bites back anger. Wind plays in the grasses on both sides of the road. Clouds drag across the ridgetops. No cars pass.

  She’d tried. Hadn’t she? She’d tried to get excited about fossils. She’d just spent three days with Harold in a game lodge outside Beaufort West: a cramped row of rooms encircled by rocks and wind, ticks on her pant legs, a lone ant paddling slow circles atop her tea. Lightning storms scoured the horizon. Scorpions patrolled the kitchenette. Harold would leave at dawn and Alma would sit in a fold-up chair outside their room with a mystery novel in her lap and the desolation of the Karoo shimmering in all directions.

  A glitter, a madness. The Big Empty, people in Cape Town called the Karoo, and now she saw why.

  She and Harold had not been talking, not sleeping in the same bed. Now they were driving over this pass toward the coast to spend a night in a real hotel, a place with air-conditioning and white wine in silver buckets. She would tell him how she felt. She would tell him she had reached a certain threshold. The prospect of it made her feel simultaneously lethargic and exhilarated.

  The sun lapses across the ridgelines. Shadows swing across the road. Time skids and ripples. Luvo begins to feel nauseous, as if he and Alma and the Land Cruiser are teetering on the edge of a cliff, as if the whole road is about to slough off the mountain and plunge into oblivion. Alma whispers to herself about snakes, about lions. She whispers, “Hurry up, goddamn it, Harold.”

  But he does not come back. Another hour passes. Not a single car comes over the pass in either direction. Alma’s sandwich disappears. She urinates beside the Land Cruiser. It’s nearly dusk before Harold clambers back over the wall. Something is wrong with his face. His forehead is crimson. His words come fast, quick convoluted strings of them, as if he is hacking them out.

  “Alma, Alma, Alma,” he’s saying. Spittle flies from his lips. He has found, he said, the remains of a Gorgonops longifrons on a ledge halfway down the escarpment. It is toothy, bent, big as a lion. Its long, curved claws are still in place; its entire skull is present, its skeleton fully articulated. It is, he believes, the biggest fossilized gorgon ever found. The holotype.

  His breathing seems only to pick up pace. “Are you okay?” asks Alma, and Harold says, “No,” and a second later, “I just need to sit for a moment.”

  Then he wraps his arms across his chest, leans against the side of the Land Cruiser, and slides into the dust.

  “Harold?” shrieks Alma. A slick of foamy, blood-flecked saliva spills down the side of her husband’s throat. Already dust begins to cling to the wet surfaces of his eyeballs.

  The light is low, golden, and merciless. On the veld far below, the zinc rooftops of distant farmhouses reflect back the dying sun. Every shadow of every pebble seems impossibly stark. A tiny rockslide starts beneath Alma’s ribs. She turns Harold over; she opens the rear door. She screams her husband’s name over and over.

  When the memory stimulator finally spits out the cartridge, Luvo feels as if he has been gone for days. Patches of rust-colored light float through his vision. He can still feel the monotonous, back-and-forth motion of the Land Cruiser in his body. He can still hear the wind, see the silhouettes of ridgelines in his peripheral vision, feel the gravity of the heights. Roger looks at him; he flicks a cigarette out the open window into the garden. Strands of fog pull through the backyard trees.

  “Well?” he says.

  Luvo tries to raise his head but it feels as if his skull will shatter.

  “That was it,” he says. “The one you’ve been looking for.”

  TALL MAN IN THE YARD

  Alma is thirsty. She would like someone to bring her some orange juice. She runs her tongue across the backs of her teeth. Harold is here. Isn’t Harold in the chair beside her? Can’t she hear his breathing on the other side of the lamp?

  There are footfalls on the stairs. Alma raises her eyes. She is almost giddy with fe
ar. The gun in her left hand smells faintly of oil.

  Birds are passing over the house now, a great flock, harrying across the sky like souls. She can hear the beating of their wings.

  The pendulum in the grandfather clock swings left, swings right. The traffic light at the top of the street sends its serial glow through the windows.

  The fog splits. City lights wink between the garden palms. The ocean beyond is a vast, curved shield. It seems to boom outward toward her like a loudspeaker, a great loudspeaker of reflected starlight.

  First there is the man’s right shoe: laceless, a narrow maw between the toe and sole. Then the left shoe. Dark socks. Unhemmed trouser legs.

  Alma tries to scream but only a faint, animal sound comes out of her mouth. A man who is not Harold is coming down the stairs and his shoes are dirty and his hands are out and he is opening his mouth to speak in one of those languages she never needed to learn.

  His hands are huge and terrible. His beard is white. His teeth are the color of autumn leaves.

  His hat says Ma Horse, Ma Horse, Ma Horse.

  VIRGIN ACTIVE FITNESS

  The bus grinds to a halt in Claremont and Temba sits up and looks out bleary-eyed and silent at Virgin Active Fitness, not yet open for the day. His gaze tracks the still-lit, unpopulated swimming pools through his eyeglasses. Submerged lights radiating out through green water.

  The bus lurches forward again. Looking up through the window, the boy watches the darkness drain out of the sky. The first rays of sun break the horizon and flow across the east-facing valleys of Table Mountain. Fat tufts of fog slide down from the summit.

  A woman in the aisle stands with her back very straight and peers down into a paperback book.

  “Paps?” Temba says. “My body feels loose.”

  His father’s arm closes around his shoulders. “Loose?”

  The boy’s eyes shut. “Loose,” he murmurs.