Anthony Doerr - Memory Wall

After a few more minutes, he can hear Alma calling. He walks upstairs, sits her back down, and pushes in the same cartridge again.

Friday Roger shepherds Luvo up a sidewalk in front of a different house than Alma Konachek’s, on the opposite side of the city. The house is wrapped by a twelve-foot stucco wall with broken bottles embedded in the top. Nine or ten eucalyptus trees stand waving above it.

Roger carries a plastic sack in one hand with something heavy inside. At a gate he looks up at a security camera in a tinted bubble and holds up the sack. After perhaps ten minutes a woman shows them through without a word. Two perfumed collies trot behind her.

The house is small and walled with glass. The woman seats them in an open room with a large fireplace. Above the fireplace is a fossil of what looks like a smashed, winged crocodile spiraling out of a piece of polished slate. All around the room, Luvo realizes, are dozens more fossils, hung from pillars, on pedestals, arrayed in a backlit case. Some of them are massive. He can see a coiled shell as big as a manhole cover, and a cross-section of petrified wood mounted on a door, and what looks like an elephant tusk cradled in golden braces.

A moment later a man comes in and leans over the collies and scratches them behind the ears. Roger and Luvo stand. The man is barefoot and wears slacks rolled up to the ankles and a soft-looking shirt that is unbuttoned. A great upfold of fat is piled up against the back of his skull and a single gold bracelet is looped around his right wrist. His fingernails gleam as if polished. He looks up from the dogs and sits in a leather armchair and yawns hugely.

“Hello,” he says, and nods at them both.

“This is Chefe Carpenter,” Roger says, though it’s not clear if he is saying this to Luvo or not. Nobody shakes hands. Roger and Luvo sit.

“Your son?”

Roger shakes his head. The woman reappears with a black mug and Chefe takes it and does not offer Luvo or Roger anything. Chefe drinks the contents of the mug in three swallows, then sets the mug down and grimaces and cracks some bones in his back and rolls his neck and finally says, “You have something?”

To Luvo’s surprise Roger produces from the plastic sack a fossil Luvo recognizes. Roger has taken it from Harold’s cabinet. This one contains the impressions of a seed fern, three fronds pressed almost parallel into it, nearly white against the darker stone. Looking at it in Roger’s hands makes Luvo want to run his hands across the leaves.

Chefe Carpenter looks at it for perhaps four or five seconds but does not get up from his armchair or reach out to take it.

“I can give you five hundred rand.”

Roger lets out a forced, unctuous laugh.

“Come now,” Chefe says. “In the sunroom right now I have a hundred of these. What can I sell these for? What else do you have?”

“Nothing right now.”

“But where is this big one you’re working on?”

“It’s coming.”

Chefe reaches down for his mug and peers inside and sets it back on the floor. “You owe money, don’t you? Men are coming to collect money from you, aren’t they?” He glances over with a soft look at Luvo, then looks back. “You have a long way to go to repay your debt, don’t you?”

Roger says, “I’m working on the big one.”

“Five hundred rand,” Chefe says.

Roger gives a defeated nod. “Now,” Chefe says, and stands up, and his big, shiny face brightens, as if a cloud has moved away from the sun. “Shall I show the boy the collection?”

There are blanks on Alma’s wall, Luvo is learning, omissions and gaps. Even if he reorganized her whole project, arranged her life in a chronological line, first memory to last, Alma’s history running in a little beige file down the stairs and around the living room, what would he learn? There’d still be breaks in time, failure in his understanding, months beyond his reach. Who is to say a cartridge even exists that contains the moments before Harold’s death?

Friday night he decides to abandon his left-to-right method. Whatever order once existed in the arrangement of these cartridges has since been shuffled out of it. It’s a museum arranged by a madwoman. He starts watching any cartridge that for some unnameable reason stands out to him from the disarray pinned to the wall. On one cartridge nine-or ten-year-old Alma lies back in a bed full of pillows while her father reads her a chapter from Treasure Island; on another a doctor tells a much older Alma that she probably will not be able to have children. On a third Alma has written Harold and Pheko. Luvo runs it through the remote device twice. In the memory Alma asks Pheko to move several crates of books into Harold’s study and arrange them alphabetically on his shelves. “By author,” she says.

Pheko is very young; he must be newly hired. He looks as if he is barely older than Luvo is now. He wears an ironed white shirt and his eyes seem to fill with dread as he concentrates on her instructions.

“Yes, madam,” he says several times. Alma disappears. When she returns, what might be an hour later, Harold in tow, Pheko has put practically every book on the shelves in Harold’s office upside-down. Alma walks very close to the shelves. She tilts a couple of titles toward her, then sets them back down. “Well, these aren’t in any kind of order at all,” she says.

Confusion ripples through Pheko’s face. Harold laughs.

Alma looks back to the bookshelves. “The boy can’t read,” she says.

Luvo cannot turn Alma’s head to look at Pheko; Pheko is a ghost, a smudge outside her field of vision. But he can hear Harold behind her, his voice still smiling. He says, “Not to worry, Pheko. Everything can be learned. You’ll do fine here.”

The memory dims; Luvo unscrews the headgear and hangs the little beige cartridge back on the nail from which he plucked it. Out in the garden the palms clatter in the wind. Soon the house will be sold, Luvo thinks, and the cartridges will be returned to the doctor’s office, or sent along with Alma to whatever place they’re consigning her to, and this strange assortment of papers will be folded into a trash bag. The books and appliances and furniture will be sold off. Pheko will be sent home to his son.

Luvo shivers. He thinks of Harold’s fossils downstairs, waiting in their cabinet. He can hear Chefe Carpenter’s voice as he showed Luvo several smooth, heavy teeth that he said belonged to a mosasaur, hacked out of a chalk pit in Holland. “Science,” Chefe had said, “is always concerned with context. But what about beauty? What about love? What about feeling a deep humility at our place in time? Where’s the room for that?”

“You find what you’re looking for,” Chefe had said to them before they left, “you know where to bring it.”

Hope, belief. Failure or success. As soon as they stepped outside Chefe’s gate, Roger had lit a cigarette and started taking shaky, hungry pulls.

Luvo stands in Alma’s upstairs bedroom in the middle of the night and hears Harold Konachek whispering as if from the grave: We all swirl slowly down into the muck. We all go back to the mud. Until we rise again in ribbons of light.

This wind, Luvo realizes, right now careering around Alma’s garden, has come to Cape Town every November that he can remember, and every November Alma can remember, and it will come next November, too, and the next, and on and on, for centuries to come, until everyone they have ever known and everyone they ever will know is gone.

Three eggs steam on a towel in front of Alma. She cracks one open. Out the window the sky and ocean are very dark. The tall man with the huge hands is waving his fingers around in her kitchen. “Running out of time,” he says. “You and me together, old lady.”