The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  He had not expected this, the waiting and wandering, the hot hours in a rented car. He began to park at road ends and follow footpaths into the fields. Blisters ballooned on his heels; he sweated through his shirts. But he knew this was the way to find her: he would have to walk the tracks that wound over the mountains. He would have to find a way to get his path to cross hers— she would not leave footprints this time, or wear a white dress, or give herself away.

  Each morning he set forth and tried to get himself lost. He fashioned a walking stick, bought a machete, tried to ignore trail-side signs in Swahili that might have warned of buffalo gorings or the prosecution of trespassers. Welts appeared on his calves, insect bites studded his forearms. His clothes shredded and tore; he hacked the sleeves off a coat and wore it through the woods like a postapocalyptic vest.

  After three weeks of day hikes he found himself on a thin track beneath cedars. It was nearly dark and he was completely lost. The track had taken him through so many turns he could not say which way was north or south; uphill might lead him out of the mountains or farther into them; he had no compass, no map. Impossible clusters of vines hung in nets from the trees. Unseen birds screamed at him from the canopy. He hiked on, laboring over the tight, overgrown trail.

  Soon it was dark and the sounds of night rose up around him. He took his headlamp from his pack and strapped it over his hat. Rain was misting over the leaves—large drops fell into the sub-story and dampened his shoulders. Before long he realized he’d lost the trail. He aimed his light in every direction—it revealed rotting logs, a shooting vine threaded around a trunk, great beards of moss hanging from the branches. A giant colony of ants was on the move, coursing along a column, overtaking a log.

  He was almost fifty years old, unemployed, separated from his wife, lost in the mountains of Tanzania. In the thin beam of his light he watched a water droplet slide into the body of a red flower. He thought about how in a few days its petals would fall to the forest floor and crumple, and wither, and eventually be incorporated into something else, tree bark, a berry, energy rifling through the limbs of a salamander. He plucked the flower from its stem, wrapped it carefully in a bandanna and stowed it in the top of his pack.

  He walked all that night, feeling his way, falling and staggering to his feet. When dawn came he could have been in the same place he’d been during the night—he had no way to know. Rain washed through the gaps in the canopy. He was drenched. Nearly everything he’d learned during his life was suddenly and perfectly useless. To walk, to find water, to look for a trail—these were the only ambitions that mattered. Part of him knew he should have been afraid. Part of him said, You do not belong in this place, you will die here.

  What had he been doing these past years? His memory burrowed backward: the feel of his leather desktop, the clink of silver on china, wine lists at balconied restaurants—this gave way to his youth, clay breaking thickly in his hands, triumph at finding a rare crinoid embedded in stone, fish vertebrae fossilized in a fragment of slate. He remembered seeing goats swept up in a deluge, bawling at the riverbanks. Hadn’t he learned anything, then? Why hadn’t that raw energy, that terrific confidence he felt leaping from the edge of a cliff, stayed with him? What if he died here, in this forest, alone? What would become of his bones? Would they crumple and fold into the earth, preserved as a riddle for some other species, hacking one day through stone, to solve? He hadn’t done enough with his life. He hadn’t seen that what he had in common with the world—with the trunks of trees and the marching columns of ants and green shoots corkscrewing up from the mud—was life: the first light that sent every living thing paddling forth into the world every day.

  He wouldn’t die—he couldn’t. He was, only now, remembering how to live. Something in him wanted to sing out, wanted to shout: I’m lost completely, lost utterly. The shingling, coarse bark of a tree, raindrops plunking on the leaves, the sound of a toad moaning a love song somewhere nearby: all of it seemed terribly beautiful to him.

  A single white moth, huge, the size of his hand, wandered by, veering between the vines. Ward moved forward.

  A path, the faintest trace of a trail, encroached on all sides, a narrow passage into the light. He found her parents’ house that night, stumbling through a long field of nettles. The house stood low and small, faintly illuminated and with smoke issuing from the chimney, a cottage out of a fairy tale. The walls were overgrown with vine and the tea fields had become wild, dark things, grown over with bougainvillea and thistle. But the place was tended to: there was a vegetable garden out back, fat pumpkins lolling in the soil and corn standing tall and tasseled on its stalks. The flames of two candles burned in a window. Behind the screen he saw a large oak table, wooden cabinets, a cluster of tomatoes on a countertop. He called her name but there was no reply.

  In the dying light of his headlamp he saw that the tea nursery had been slathered over with mud, from top to bottom, like a giant anthill. There was a sign nailed to the door. Darkroom, it said, in Naima’s hand.

  He dropped his pack and sat. He thought of her inside, lifting her negatives from one chemical bath to the next, raising them up and pinning them to a line to dry. All those moments, captured and doubled onto film, frozen, her own museum of natural history unfolding in front of her.

  Before long the first hem of light lifted over the trees and he looked out over the knitted vine and thistle, across the dark plantations stretched out in neat, arcing rows, to where the first rays of light fell across the hills. He heard the sounds of her moving inside—the scrape of a shoe over the floor, the muffled splash of poured liquid. The huge, warped crown of the sun showed above the horizon. Maybe, he thought, the words will come to me. Maybe when she walks out that door I’ll know precisely what to say. Maybe I’ll say I’m sorry, or I understand, or Thank you for sending the photos. Maybe we’ll watch the light wash the hills together.

  He reached into his pack and removed the flower, the delicate crumpled bell shape of its body, and held it carefully in his lap, waiting.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to Wendy Weil for her immediate and enduring enthusiasm; to Gillian Blake for making each of these stories stronger; to my parents and brothers, for everything; to Wendell Mayo and June Spence for lighting the way; to everybody who made time to read early versions of these stories, especially Lysley Tenorio, Al Heathcock, Melissa Fraterrigo, and Amy Quan Barry; to Neil Giordano for his invaluable help with the first story and to C. Michael Curtis for his with the second; to George Plimpton for his help with “The Caretaker”; to Hal and Jacque Eastman for their energy and example; to Mike Gawtry and Tyler Lund for being my field experts; to the Ohioana Library Association for its support, and finally to the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, without which many of these stories could not have been written. If you have extra money, give it to them.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Shauna, for her unswerving faith, her intelligence, and her love.

  Please turn the page for an excerpt from

  Anthony Doerr’s new book.

  MEMORY WALL

  By Anthony Doerr

  “Beautiful . . . Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly. The stories in Memory Wall shouldn’t work at all, and yet they do, spectacularly.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Doerr has returned with a second collection, one that signals his arrival as an important American voice. Memory Wall not only captivates from start to finish, it is the kind of book likely to restore your faith in the pleasures of storytelling.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “It’s fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. The stories in Memory Wall have such scope and depth that they hit as hard as novels three times their length. Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do.”

  —Dave Eggers,
author of Zeitoun and What Is the What

  Available everywhere in hardcover and ebook from Scribner.

  MEMORY WALL

  TALL MAN IN THE YARD

  Seventy-four-year-old Alma Konachek lives in Vredehoek, a suburb above Cape Town: a place of warm rains, bigwindowed lofts, and silent, predatory automobiles. Behind her garden, Table Mountain rises huge, green, and corrugated; beyond her kitchen balcony, a thousand city lights wink and gutter behind sheets of fog like candleflames.

  One night in November, at three in the morning, Alma wakes to hear the rape gate across her front door rattle open and someone enter her house. Her arms jerk; she spills a glass of water across the nightstand. A floorboard in the living room shrieks. She hears what might be breathing. Water drips onto the floor.

  Alma manages a whisper. “Hello?”

  A shadow flows across the hall. She hears the scrape of a shoe on the staircase, then nothing. Night air blows into the room—it smells of frangipani and charcoal. Alma presses a fist over her heart.

  Beyond the balcony windows, moonlit pieces of clouds drift over the city. Spilled water creeps toward her bedroom door.

  “Who’s there? Is someone there?”

  The grandfather clock in the living room pounds through the seconds. Alma’s pulse booms in her ears. Her bedroom seems to be rotating very slowly.

  “Harold?” Alma remembers that Harold is dead but she cannot help herself. “Harold?”

  Another footstep from the second floor, another protest from a floorboard. What might be a minute passes. Maybe she hears someone descend the staircase. It takes her another full minute to summon the courage to shuffle into the living room.

  Her front door is wide open. The traffic light at the top of the street flashes yellow, yellow, yellow. The leaves are hushed, the houses dark. She heaves the rape gate shut, slams the door, sets the bolt, and peers out the window lattice. Within twenty seconds she is at the hall table, fumbling with a pen.

  A man, she writes. Tall man in the yard.

  MEMORY WALL

  Alma stands barefoot and wigless in the upstairs bedroom with a flashlight. The clock down in the living room ticks and ticks, winding up the night. A moment ago Alma was, she is certain, doing something very important. Something life-and-death. But now she cannot remember what it was.

  The one window is ajar. The guest bed is neatly made, the coverlet smooth. On the nightstand sits a machine the size of a microwave oven, marked Property of Cape Town Memory Research Center. Three cables spiraling off it connect to something that looks vaguely like a bicycle helmet.

  The wall in front of Alma is smothered with scraps of paper. Diagrams, maps, ragged sheets swarming with scribbles. Shining among the papers are hundreds of plastic cartridges, each the size of a matchbook, engraved with a four-digit number and pinned to the wall through a single hole.

  The beam of Alma’s flashlight settles on a color photograph of a man walking out of the sea. She fingers its edges. The man’s pants are rolled to the knees; his expression is part grimace, part grin. Cold water. Across the photo, in handwriting she knows to be hers, is the name Harold. She knows this man. She can close her eyes and recall the pink flesh of his gums, the folds in his throat, his big-knuckled hands. He was her husband.

  Around the photo, the scraps of paper and plastic cartridges build outward in crowded, overlapping layers, anchored with pushpins and chewing gum and penny nails. She sees to-do lists, jottings, drawings of what might be prehistoric beasts or monsters. She reads: You can trust Pheko. And Taking Polly’s Coca-Cola. A flyer says: Porter Properties. There are stranger phrases: dinocephalians, late Permian, massive vertebrate graveyard. Some sheets of paper are blank; others reveal a flurry of cross-outs and erasures. On a half-page ripped from a brochure, one phrase is shakily and repeatedly underlined: Memories are located not inside the cells but in the extracellular space.

  Some of the cartridges have her handwriting on them, too, printed below the numbers. Museum. Funeral. Party at Hattie’s.

  Alma blinks. She has no memory of writing on little cartridges or tearing out pages of books and tacking things to the wall.

  She sits on the floor in her nightgown, legs straight out. A gust rushes through the window and the scraps of paper come alive, dancing, tugging at their pins. Loose pages eddy across the carpet. The cartridges rattle lightly.

  Near the center of the wall, her flashlight beam again finds the photograph of a man walking out of the sea. Part grimace, part grin. That’s Harold, she thinks. He was my husband. He died. Years ago. Of course.

  Out the window, beyond the crowns of the palms, beyond the city lights, the ocean is washed in moonlight, then shadow. Moonlight, then shadow. A helicopter ticks past. The palms flutter.

  Alma looks down. There is a slip of paper in her hand. A man, it says. Tall man in the yard.

  DR. AMNESTY

  Pheko is driving the Mercedes. Apartment towers reflect the morning sun. Sedans purr at stoplights. Six different times Alma squints out at the signs whisking past and asks him where they are going.

  “We’re driving to see the doctor, Mrs. Alma.”

  The doctor? Alma rubs her eyes, unsure. She tries to fill her lungs. She fidgets with her wig. The tires squeal as the Mercedes climbs the ramps of a parking garage.

  Dr. Amnesty’s staircase is stainless steel and bordered with ferns. Here’s the bulletproof door, the street address stenciled in the corner. It’s familiar to Alma in the way a house from childhood would be familiar. As if she has doubled in size in the meantime.

  They are buzzed into a waiting room. Pheko drums his finger-tips on his knee. Four chairs down, two well-dressed women sit beside a fish tank, one a few decades younger than the other. Both have fat pearls studded through each earlobe. Alma thinks: Pheko is the only black person in the building. For a moment she cannot remember what she is doing here. But this leather on the chair, the blue gravel in the saltwater aquarium—it is the memory clinic. Of course. Dr. Amnesty. In Green Point.

  After a few minutes Alma is escorted to a padded chair overlaid with crinkly paper. It’s all familiar now: the cardboard pouch of rubber gloves, the plastic plate for her earrings, two electrodes beneath her blouse. They lift off her wig, rub a cold gel onto her scalp. The television panel shows sand dunes, then dandelions, then bamboo.

  Amnesty. A ridiculous surname. What does it mean? A pardon? A reprieve? But more permanent than a reprieve, isn’t it? Amnesty is for wrongdoings. For someone who has done something wrong. She will ask Pheko to look it up when they get home. Or maybe she will remember to look it up herself.

  The nurse is talking.

  “And the remote stimulator is working well? Do you feel any improvements?”

  “Improvements?” She thinks so. Things do seem to be improving. “Things are sharper,” Alma says. She believes this is the sort of thing she is supposed to say. New pathways are being forged. She is remembering how to remember. This is what they want to hear.

  The nurse murmurs. Feet whisper across the floor. Invisible machinery hums. Alma can feel, numbly, the rubber caps being twisted out of the ports in her skull and four screws being threaded simultaneously into place. There is a note in her hand: Pheko is in the waiting room. Pheko will drive Mrs. Alma home after her session. Of course.

  A door with a small, circular window in it opens. A pale man in green scrubs sweeps past, smelling of chewing gum. Alma thinks: There are other padded chairs in this place, other rooms like this one, with other machines prying the lids off other addled brains. Ferreting inside them for memories, engraving those memories into little square cartridges. Attempting to fight off oblivion.

  Her head is locked into place. Aluminum blinds clack against the window. In the lulls between breaths, she can hear traffic sighing past.

  The helmet comes down.

  THREE YEARS BEFORE, BRIEFLY

  Memories aren’t stored as changes to molecules inside brain cells,” Dr. Amnesty told Alma during her
first appointment, three years ago. She had been on his waiting list for ten months. Dr. Amnesty had straw-colored hair, nearly translucent skin, and invisible eyebrows. He spoke English as if each word were a tiny egg he had to deliver carefully through his teeth.

  “This is what they thought forever but they were wrong. The truth is that the substrate of old memories is located not inside the cells but in the extracellular space. Here at the clinic we target those spaces, stain them, and inscribe them into electronic models. In the hopes of teaching damaged neurons to make proper replacements. Forging new pathways. Re-remembering.

  “Do you understand?”

  Alma didn’t. Not really. For months, ever since Harold’s death, she had been forgetting things: forgetting to pay Pheko, forgetting to eat breakfast, forgetting what the numbers in her checkbook meant. She’d go to the garden with the pruners and arrive there a minute later without them. She’d find her hairdryer in a kitchen cupboard, car keys in the tea tin. She’d rummage through her mind for a noun and come up empty-handed: Casserole? Carpet? Cashmere?

  Two doctors had already diagnosed the dementia. Alma would have preferred amnesia: a quicker, less cruel erasure. This was a corrosion, a slow leak. Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working for Porter Properties, too many houses and buyers and sellers to count—spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?