Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  Pheko drives Alma home from the clinic with fifteen new cartridges in a paperboard box. She does not want to nap. She does not want the triangles of toast Pheko sets on a tray beside her chair. She wants only to sit in the upstairs bedroom, hunched mute and sagging in her armchair with the headgear of the remote device screwed into the ports in her head and occasional strands of drool leaking out of her mouth. Living less in this world than in some synthesized Technicolor past where forgotten moments come trundling up through cables.

  Every half hour or so, Pheko wipes her chin and slips one of the new cartridges into the machine. He enters the code and watches her eyes roll back. There are almost a thousand cartridges pinned to the wall in front of her; hundreds more lie in piles across the carpet.

  Around four the accountant’s BMW pulls up to the house. He enters without knocking, calls “Pheko” up the stairs. When Pheko comes down the accountant already has his briefcase open on the kitchen table and is writing something in a file folder. He’s wearing loafers without socks and a peacock-blue sweater that looks abundantly soft. His pen is silver. He says hello without looking up.

  Pheko greets him and puts on the coffeepot and stands away from the countertop, hands behind his back. Trying not to bend his neck in a show of sycophancy. The accountant’s pen whispers across the paper. Out the window mauve-colored clouds reef over the Atlantic.

  When the coffee is ready Pheko fills a mug and sets it beside the man’s briefcase. He continues to stand. The accountant writes for another minute. His breath whistles through his nose. Finally he looks up and says, “Is she upstairs?”

  Pheko nods.

  “Right. Look. Pheko. I got a call from that… physician today.” He gives Pheko a pained look and taps his pen against the table. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Three years. And not a lot of progress. Doc says we merely caught it too late. He says maybe we forestalled some of the decay, but now it’s over. The boulder’s too big to put brakes on it now, he said.”

  Upstairs Alma is quiet. Pheko looks at his shoetops. In his mind he sees a boulder crashing through trees. He sees his five-year-old son, Temba, at Miss Amanda’s school, ten miles away. What is Temba doing at this instant? Eating, perhaps. Playing soccer. Wearing his eyeglasses.

  “Mrs. Konachek requires twenty-four-hour care,” the accountant says. “It’s long overdue. You had to see this coming, Pheko.”

  Pheko clears his throat. “I take care of her. I come here seven days a week. Sunup to sundown. Many times I stay later. I cook, clean, do the shopping. She’s no trouble.”

  The accountant raises his eyebrows. “She’s plenty of trouble, Pheko, you know that. And you do a fine job. Fine job. But our time’s up. You saw her at the boma last month. Doc says she’ll forget how to eat. She’ll forget how to smile, how to speak, how to go to the toilet. Eventually she’ll probably forget how to swallow. Fucking terrible fate if you ask me. Who deserves that?”

  The wind in the palms in the garden makes a sound like rain. There is a creak from upstairs. Pheko fights to keep his hands motionless behind his back. He thinks: If only Mr. Konachek were here. He’d walk in from his study in a dusty canvas shirt, safety goggles pushed up over his forehead, his face looking like it had been boiled. He’d drink straight from the coffeepot and hang his big arm around Pheko’s shoulders and say, “You can’t fire Pheko! Pheko’s been with us for fifteen years! He has a little boy now! Come on now, hey?” Winks all around. Maybe a clap on the accountant’s back.

  But the study is dark. Harold Konachek has been dead for more than four years. Mrs. Alma is upstairs, hooked into her machine. The accountant slips his pen into a pocket and buckles the latches on his briefcase.

  “I could stay in the house, with my son,” tries Pheko. “We could sleep here.” Even to his own ears, the plea sounds small and hopeless.

  The accountant stands and flicks something invisible off the sleeve of his sweater. “The house goes on the market tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll deliver Mrs. Konachek to Suffolk Home next week. No need to pack things up while she’s still here; it’ll only frighten her. You can stay on till next Monday.”

  Then he takes his briefcase and leaves. Pheko listens to his car glide away. Alma starts calling from upstairs. The accountant’s coffee mug steams untouched.

  TREASURE ISLAND

  At sunset Pheko poaches a chicken breast and lays a stack of green beans beside it. Out the window flotillas of rainclouds gather over the Atlantic. Alma stares into her plate as if at some incomprehensible puzzle. Pheko says, “Doctor find some good ones this morning, Mrs. Alma?”

  “Good ones?” She blinks. The grandfather clock in the living room ticks. The room flickers with a rich, silvery light. Pheko is a pair of eyeballs, a smell like soap.

  “Old ones,” Alma says.

  He helps her into her nightgown and squirts a cylinder of toothpaste onto her toothbrush. Then her pills. Two white. Two gold. Alma clambers into bed muttering questions.

  Wind-borne rain starts a gentle patter on the windows. “Okay, Mrs. Alma,” Pheko says. He pulls the quilt up to her throat. “I got to go home.” His hand is on the lamp. His telephone is vibrating in his pocket.

  “Harold,” Alma says. “Read to me.”

  “I’m Pheko, Mrs. Alma.”

  Alma shakes her head. “Goddammit.”

  “You’ve torn your book all apart, Mrs. Alma.”

  “I have? I have not. Someone else did that.”

  A breath. A sigh. On the dresser, three lustrous wigs sit atop featureless porcelain heads. “Ten minutes,” Pheko says. Alma lays back, bald, glazed, a withered child. Pheko sits in the bedside chair and takes Treasure Island off the nightstand. Pages fall out when he opens it.

  He reads the first paragraphs from memory. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man…

  One more page and Alma is asleep.

  B478A

  Pheko catches the 9:20 Golden Arrow to Khayelitsha. He is a little man in black trousers and a red cable-knit sweater. In the bus seat, his shoes barely touch the floor. Gated compounds and walls of bougainvillea and little bistros lit with colored bulbs slide past. At Hanny Street the bus pauses outside Virgin Active Fitness, where three indoor pools smolder with aquamarine light, a last few swimmers toiling through the lanes, an elephantine waterslide disgorging water in the corner.

  The bus fills with township girls: office cleaners, waitresses, laundresses, women who go by one name in Cape Town and another in the townships, housekeepers called Sylvia or Alice about to become mothers called Malili or Momtolo.

  Drizzle streaks the windows. Voices murmur in Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana. The gaps between streetlights lengthen; soon Pheko can see only the upflung penumbras of billboard spotlights here and there in the dark. Drink Opa. Report Cable Thieves. Wear a Condom.

  Khayelitsha is thirty square miles of shanties made of aluminum and cinder blocks and sackcloth and car doors. At the century’s turn it was home to half a million people—now it’s four times bigger. War refugees, water refugees, HIV refugees. Unemployment might be as high as sixty percent. A thousand haphazard light towers stand over the shacks like limbless trees. Women carry babies or plastic bags or vegetables or ten-gallon water jugs along the roadsides. Men wobble past on bicycles. Dogs wander.

  Pheko gets off at Site C and hurries along a line of shanties in the rain. Windchimes tinkle. A goat picks its way through puddles. Torpid men perch on fenders of gutted taxis or upended fruit crates or beneath ragged tarps. Someone a few alleys over lights a firework and it blooms and fades over the rooftops.

  B478A is a pale green shed with a sandy floor and a light blue door. Three treadless tires hold the roof in place. Bars seal off the two windows. Temba is inside, still awake, animated, whispering, nearly jumping up and down in place. He wears a T-shirt several sizes too large; his little eyeglasses bounce on his nose.

  “Paps,”
he says, “Paps, you’re twenty-one minutes late! Paps, Boginkosi caught three cats today, can you believe it? Paps, can you make paraffin from plastic bags?”

  Pheko sits on the bed and waits for his vision to adjust to the dimness. The walls are papered with faded supermarket circulars. Dish soap for R1.99. Juice two for one. Yesterday’s laundry hangs from the ceiling. A rust-red stove stands propped on bricks in the corner. Two metal-and-plastic folding chairs complete the furniture.

  Outside the rain sifts down through the vapor lights and makes a slow, lulling clatter on the roof. Insects creep in, seeking refuge; gnats and millipedes and big, glistening flies. Twin veins of ants flow across the floor and braid into channels under the stove. Moths flutter at the window screens. Pheko hears the accountant’s voice in his ear: You had to see this coming. He sees his silver pen flashing in the light of Alma’s kitchen.

  “Did you eat, Temba?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I ate! I ate! Miss Amanda had samp and beans.”

  “And did you wear your glasses today?”

  “I wore them.”

  “Temba.”

  “I wore them, Paps. See?” He points with two fingers to his face.

  Pheko slips off his shoes. “Okay, little lamb. I believe you. Now choose a hand.” He holds out two fists. Temba stands barefoot in his overlarge jersey, blinking his brown eyes behind his glasses.

  Eventually he chooses left. Pheko shakes his head and smiles and reveals an empty palm.

  “Nothing.”

  “Next time,” says Pheko. Temba coughs, wipes his nose. He seems to swallow back a familiar disappointment.

  “Now take off your glasses and give me one of your barnacle attacks,” says Pheko, and Temba stows his glasses atop the stove and leaps onto his father, wrapping his legs around Pheko’s ribs. They roll across the bed. Temba squeezes his father around the neck and back.

  Pheko rears up, makes exaggerated strides around the little shed while the boy clings to him. “Paps,” Temba says, talking into his father’s chest. “What was in the other hand? What did you have this time?”

  “Can’t tell you,” says Pheko. He pretends to try to shake off the boy’s grip. “You got to guess right next time.”

  Pheko stomps around the house. The boy hangs on. His forehead is a stone against Pheko’s sternum. His hair smells like dust, pencil shavings, and smoke. Rain murmurs against the roof.

  TALL MAN IN THE YARD

  Monday night Roger Tshoni brings the quiet little memory-tapper named Luvo with him up into the posh suburb of Vredehoek and breaks, for the twelfth time, into Alma Konachek’s house. Roger has white hair and a white beard and a nose like a large brown gourd. His teeth are orange. He gives off a reek of cheap tobacco. The band of his straw hat has Ma Horse printed three times around the circumference.

  Each time Roger has picked the lock on the rape gate, Alma has woken up. He thinks it might have to do with an alarm but he has not seen any alarms inside the house. Roger has given up trying to hide anyway. Tonight he hardly bothers to keep quiet. He waits in the doorway, counting to fifteen, then leads the boy inside.

  Sometimes she threatens to call the police. Sometimes she calls him Harold. Sometimes something worse: boy. Or kaffir. Or darkie. As in, Get to work, boy. Or: Goddammit, boy. Sometimes she stares right through him with her empty eyes as if he were made of smoke. If he frightens her he simply walks away and smokes a cigarette in the garden and breaks back in through the kitchen door.

  Tonight Roger and Luvo stand in the living room a moment, both of them wet with rain, looking out at the city through the glass balcony doors, a few red lights blinking among ten thousand amber ones. They wipe their shoes; they listen as Alma mutters to herself in the bedroom down the hall. The ocean beyond the waterfront is an invisible blackness in the rain.

  “Like an owl, this lady,” whispers Roger.

  The boy named Luvo takes off his wool cap and scratches between the four ports installed in his head and climbs the stairs. Roger crosses into the kitchen, takes three eggs from the refrigerator, and sets them in a pot to boil. Before long Alma comes shambling out from the bedroom, barefoot, bald, no bigger than a girl.

  Roger’s hands whisper across his shirtfront, find an unlit cigarette tucked into his hatband, and return to his pockets. It’s his hands, he has learned, more than anything else, that terrify her. Long hands. Brown hands.

  “You’re—” hisses Alma.

  “Roger. You call me Harold sometimes.”

  She drags a wrist across her nose. “I have a gun.”

  “You don’t. You couldn’t shoot me anyway. Come, sit.” Alma looks at him, confounded. But after a moment she sits. The blue ring of flame on her cooktop casts the only light. Down in the city the pinpoints of automobile lights dilate and dissolve as they travel between raindrops on the windowglass.

  The house feels close around Roger tonight, with its ratcheting grandfather clock and spotless sofas and the big display cabinet in the study. He wants desperately to light his cigarette.

  “You got some new cartridges today from your doctor, didn’t you, Alma? I saw that little houseboy of yours drive you down to Green Point.”

  Alma keeps silent. The eggs rattle in their pot. She looks as if time has stopped inside her: rope-veined, birdlike, expressionless. A single blue artery pulses crosswise above her right ear. The four rubber caps are seated tightly against her scalp.

  She frowns slightly. “Who are you?”

  Roger doesn’t answer. He shuts off the burner and lifts out the three steaming eggs with a slotted spoon.

  “I am Alma,” Alma says.

  “I know it,” Roger says.

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Do you?” He places the eggs on a dishtowel in front of her. A dozen times now over the past month they’ve done this, sat at her kitchen table in the middle of the night, Roger and Alma, tall black man, elderly white woman, the lights of Trafalgar Park and the railway yards and the waterfront strewn below. A tableau not quite of this world. What does it mean, Roger wonders distantly, that the countless failures of his life have funneled him into this exact circumstance?

  “Eat up now,” he says.

  Alma gives him a dubious look. But moments later she takes an egg and cracks it on the surface of the table and begins to peel it.

  THE ORDER OF THINGS

  Things don’t run in order. There is no A to B to C to D. All the cartridges are the same size, the same redundant beige. Yet some take place decades ago and others take place last year. They vary in intensity, too: Some pull Luvo into them and hold him for fifteen or twenty seconds; others wrench him into Alma’s past and keep him there for half an hour. Moments stretch; months vanish during a breath. He comes up gasping, as if he has been submerged underwater; he feels catapulted back into his own mind.

  Sometimes, when Luvo comes back into himself, Roger is standing beside him, an unlit cigarette fixed in the vertex of his lips, staring into Alma’s cryptic wall of papers and postcards and cartridges as if waiting for some essential explanation to rise up out of it.

  Other times the house is noiseless, and there’s only the wind sighing through the open window, and the papers fluttering on the wall, and a hundred questions winding through Luvo’s head.

  Luvo believes he is somewhere around fifteen years old. He has very few memories of his own: none of his parents, no sense of who might have installed four ports in his skull and set him adrift among the ten thousand orphans of Cape Town. No memories of how or why. He knows how to read; he can speak English and Xhosa; he knows Cape Town summers are hot and windy and winters are cool and blue. But he cannot say how he might have learned such things.

  His recent history is one of pain: headaches, backaches, bone aches. Twinges fire deep inside his neck; migraines blow in like storms. The holes in his scalp itch and leak a clear fluid; they are not nearly as symmetrical as the por
ts he has seen on Alma Konachek’s head.

  Roger says he found Luvo in the Company Gardens, though Luvo has no memory of this. Lately he sleeps in Roger’s apartment. A dozen times now, the older man has kicked Luvo awake in the middle of the night; he hustles Luvo into a taxi and they climb from the waterfront into Vredehoek and Roger picks two locks and lets them into the elegant white house on the hill.

  Luvo is working from left to right across the upstairs bedroom, from the stairwell toward the window. By now, over a dozen nights, he has eavesdropped on perhaps five hundred of Alma’s memories. There are hundreds more cartridges to go, some standing in towers on the carpet, far more pinned to the wall. The numbers engraved into their ends correspond with no chronology Luvo can discover.

  But he feels as if he is working gradually, clumsily, toward the center of something. Or, if not toward, then away, as if he is stepping inch by inch away from a painting made of thousands of tiny dots. Any day now the picture will resolve itself; any day now some fundamental truth of Alma’s life will come into focus.

  Already he knows plenty. He knows that Alma as a girl was obsessed with islands: mutineers, shipwrecks, the last members of tribes, castaways fixing their eyes on empty horizons. He knows that she and Harold worked in the same property office for decades, and that she has owned three silver Mercedes sedans, each one for twelve years. He knows Alma designed this house with an architect from Johannesburg, chose paint colors and doorknobs and faucets from catalogs, hung prints with a level and a tape measure. He knows she and Harold went to concerts, bought clothes at Gardens Centre, traveled to a city called Venice. He knows that the day after Harold retired he bought a used Land Cruiser and a nine-millimeter Crusader handgun and started driving out on fossil-hunting trips into a huge, arid region east of Cape Town called the Great Karoo.

  He also knows Alma is not especially kind to her houseman Pheko. He knows that Pheko has a little son named Temba, and that Alma’s husband paid for an eye operation the boy needed when he was born, and that Alma got very angry about this when she found out.