Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  “All of it?” Chefe asks and Luvo says, “All of it.”

  “How do we know you’ll do that?” asks Paula, and Chefe Carpenter looks up at all three of them, taking his eyes off the skull for the first time in several minutes, as if he is not sure who has spoken. He blinks his eyes once. “You can go now,” he says.

  Three blocks away Luvo says goodbye to the Finnish women, who hug him each in turn and give him their email addresses on little white cards, and one of the Paulas is crying softly to herself as they watch Luvo climb out of their rented camper van.

  Near the entrance to the Company Gardens is a little English bookshop. Luvo walks inside with his paper shopping bag full of money. He finds a paperback of Treasure Island and pays for it with a 1,000-rand note.

  Then he flags down a waterfront cab and tells the driver to take him to the Twelve Apostles Hotel. The driver gives him a look, and the woman at the desk at the hotel gives him the same look, but Luvo has cash and once he has paid she leads him down a hundred-meter-long cream-colored runner of carpet to a black door with the number 7 on it.

  The room is as clean and white as it was in Alma’s memory. Off the balcony jade-colored waves break onto a golden beach. In the bathroom tiny white tiles line the floor in diamond shapes. Crisp white towels hang on nickel-plated rods. There’s a big, spotless, white toilet. White fluffy bathmats sit on the floor. A single white orchid blooms in a rectangular vase on the toilet tank.

  Luvo takes a forty-five-minute shower. He is somewhere around fifteen years old and he has perhaps six months left to live. After his shower he lies on the perfect white sheets of the bed and watches the huge afternoon sky flow like liquid out the window. Rafts of gulls sail above the beach. He thinks of Alma’s memories, both those carried inside his head and the ones somewhere out in the city—Cabbage will have traded them away by now. He thinks of Alma’s memory of this place, of the movie about the fish, gliding out into the great blue. He sleeps.

  When he wakes, hours later, he stares awhile into cobalt squares of night out the windows and then he turns on his lamp and opens Treasure Island.

  I remember him as if it were yesterday, he reads, 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…

  THE GORGON

  It takes six weeks for a crew of six men to excavate the skeleton. They work in daylight only and park their cars two bends away from the easiest route and when they have to bring in the crane they do it at night. They bring it back to Cape Town in an unmarked truck. The dealer who buys it from Chefe Carpenter brings it to a blackmarket auction house in London. In London it is cleaned and prepared and varnished and mounted on a titanium brace. It sells at an anonymous cloak-and-dagger auction for 4.5 million dollars, the fourth-highest sum anyone has ever paid for a fossil. The skeleton travels from London on a container ship through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean to Shanghai. A week later it is installed by trained preparators on a pedestal in the lobby of a fifty-eight-story hotel.

  No fake vegetation, no color, just a polyvinyl acetate sprayed along the joints and a Plexiglas cube lowered down over it. Someone sets two big potted palms on either side but two days later the hotel’s owner asks for them to be taken away.

  PHEKO

  In late February Pheko goes to the post office behind the spaza shop and in his mailbox is a single envelope with his name on it. Inside is a check for almost 1.4 million rand. Pheko looks up. He can hear, all of a sudden, the blood trundling through his head. The ground swivels out from underneath him. Madame Gecelo, behind the counter, looks over at him and looks back at whatever form she is filling out. A bus with no windows passes. Dust rides up over the little post office.

  No one is looking. The floor steadies. Pheko peeks again into the envelope and reads the amount. He looks up. He looks back down.

  On the subject line the check says, Fossil Sale. Pheko locks his post office box and hangs his key around his neck and stands with his eyes closed awhile. When he gets home he shows Temba his two fists. Temba looks at him through his little eyeglasses, then looks back at the fists. He waits, thinking hard, then taps the right fist. Pheko smiles.

  “Try the other one.”

  “The other one?”

  Pheko nods.

  “You never say to try the other one.”

  “This time I say try the other one.”

  “This isn’t a trick?”

  “Not a trick.” Temba taps the left hand. Pheko opens it. “Your bus card?” says Temba. Pheko nods.

  “Your bus card?” repeats Temba.

  They stop in the market on the way to the station and buy swimming shorts, red for Pheko and light blue for Temba. Then they ride the Golden Arrow toward the city. Pheko carries the plastic shopping bag containing the swimming trunks in his right hand but will not let Temba see inside. It is a warm March day and the edges of Table Mountain are impossibly vivid against the sky.

  Pheko and Temba disembark at the Claremont stop and walk two blocks holding hands and enter a branch of the Standard Bank of South Africa two storefronts down from Virgin Active Fitness. Pheko opens an account and shows his identification and the clerk spends ten minutes typing various things into his computer and then he asks for an initial deposit. Pheko slides the check across.

  A manager shows up thirty seconds later and looks at the check and takes it back behind a glass-walled office. He speaks into a phone for maybe ten minutes.

  “What are we doing?” whispers Temba.

  “We’re hoping,” whispers Pheko.

  After what seems like an hour the manager comes back and smiles at Pheko and the bank deposits the check.

  Ten minutes later Temba and Pheko stand in the glaring, cloudless sunlight in front of the glass walls of Virgin Active Fitness. Above them they can see people on treadmills, toiling away, and straight ahead, down through the walls, through their own reflections, they can see the three indoor pools, swimmers toiling through lanes, lifeguards in chairs, and children shooting through the channels of the twisting green waterslide.

  At the entry Pheko gives the attendant a 1,000-rand note and she grumbles for a minute about change but passes some over and Pheko fills out a form on a clipboard and then they walk into a big locker room, lined with mahogany-fronted lockers, a few men here and there shaving or lacing tennis shoes or knotting ties and here comes Pheko with Temba trotting behind, adjusting his little eyeglasses with a happy incredulousness, and Temba chooses locker number 55 and they pull on their brand-new swim trunks, red for Pheko and light blue for Temba. Then they pass through a tile hallway lined with dripping showers and descend twelve steps and step through a glass door and into the roiling, chlorinated air of the indoor pools.

  Temba whispers something to himself that Pheko cannot hear. Lifeguards in red polo shirts sit in chairs. The slide gushes; the shouts of children echo off the ceiling.

  Pheko leads Temba up the long waterslide staircase, holding his little hand, the pools below growing smaller, the pink backs of the children in front of them wet with drops of water. Toward the top there is a short wait, each person in front of them climbing into place, then releasing, shooting down the slide, sweeping through the turns, and within a minute Pheko and Temba have climbed the last few steps and they stand together at the top of the waterslide.

  Pheko sits in the slide and lifts his son and sets him between his legs. Warm water rushes through their trunks and races down the slide and disappears beyond the first turn. Pheko takes off his son’s glasses and holds them in his fist.

  Temba looks back at him, his eyes naked. “It looks very fast, Paps.”

  “It sure does.”

  Pheko looks down the steep channel into the first turn and then over the wall to where the pool looks very, very far below, the swimmers like little drowsy bees, the pure sunlight pouring through the windows, the traffic gliding noiselessly past.

  He says, “Ready?
”

  “Ready,” says Temba.

  ALMA

  Alma sits in the community dining room in a yellow armchair. Her hair is short and silver and stiff. The clothes she is wearing are not hers; clothing seems to get mixed up in this place. Out the window to her left she can see a concrete wall, the top half of a flagpole, and a polygon of sky.

  The air smells of cooked cabbage. Fluorescent lights buzz softly in the ceiling. Nearby two women are trying to play rummy but they keep dropping the cards. Somewhere else in the building, perhaps the basement, someone might be howling. It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s only the air, whistling out of heating ducts.

  A ghost of a memory flits past Alma: there, then gone. A television at the front of the room shows a man with a microphone, shows a spinning wheel, shows an audience clapping.

  Through the door walks a big woman in a white tank top and white jeans. In the light of the entryway her dark skin is almost invisible to Alma, so that it looks as if a white outfit has become animated and is walking toward her, white pants and a white top and white eyeballs floating. She walks straight toward Alma and begins emptying boxes onto the long table beside her.

  A nurse in a flowered smock behind Alma claps her hands together. “Time for fine arts class, everyone,” she says. “Anyone who would like to work with Miss Stigers can come over.”

  Several people start toward the table, one pushing a walker on wheels. The woman in white clothes is setting out buckets, plates, paints. She opens a big Tupperware bin. She looks over at Alma.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she says.

  Alma turns her head away. She keeps quiet. A few minutes later some others are laughing, holding up plaster-coated hands. The woman in white clothing sings quietly to herself as she tends to the residents’ various projects. Her voice rides beneath the din.

  Alma sits in her chair very stiffly. She is wearing a red sweater with a reindeer on it. She does not recognize it. Her hands, motionless on her lap, are cold and look to her like claws. As if they, too, might have once belonged to someone else.

  The woman sings in Xhosa. The song is sweet and slow. In a back room across town, inside a memory clinic in Green Point, a thousand cartridges containing Alma’s memories sit gathering dust. In her bedside drawer, among earplugs and vitamins and crumpled tissues, is the cartridge Pheko gave her when he came to see her, Cartridge 4510. Alma no longer remembers what it is or what it contains or even that it belongs to her.

  When the song is done a man at the table in a blue sweater breaks into applause with his plaster-coated hands. The piece of sky out Alma’s window is warm and purple. A jetliner tracks across it, winking a golden light.

  When Alma looks back, the woman in white is standing closer to her. “C’mon, sweetheart,” she says with that voice. A voice like warm oil. “Give this a try. You’ll like it.”

  The woman places a foil pie plate in front of Alma. There is newspaper over the tablecloth, Alma sees, and paint and silk flowers and little wooden hearts and snowmen scattered here and there in plastic bowls. The singing woman pours smooth, white plaster of Paris out of her Tupperware and into Alma’s pie plate, wiping it clean with a Popsicle stick.

  The plaster of Paris possesses a beautiful, creamy texture. One of the residents has spread it all over the tablecloth. Another has some in her hair. The woman in white has started a second song. Or perhaps she is singing the first song again, Alma cannot be sure. Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba, she sings. Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe.

  Alma raises her left hand. The plaster is wet and waiting. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”

  She thinks: I had somebody. But he left me here all by myself.

  Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba. Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe, sings the woman.

  Alma sinks her hand into the plaster.

  Procreate, Generate

  Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spiderweb is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering in Laramie, Wyoming.

  Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates. He and Imogene live in a single-story brick-and-cedar on five acres fifteen miles from town. Sage, most of it is, and cheatgrass, but they have a few cottonwoods in a dry creekbed, and a graveyard of abandoned tires Herb is trying to clear, and whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway in the early morning. Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full.

  In September of 2002, Imogene swallows her last birth control tablet and she and Herb go out to the driveway so she can crush the empty pill container with the flat edge of the wood maul. This excites Herb: the shards of plastic in the gravel, the taut cords in Imogene’s throat. He has been thinking about children all the time lately; he imagines himself coming home from class to find offspring on all the furniture.

  Over the next thirty mornings Herb and Imogene have sex twenty times. Each time, afterward, Imogene tilts her hips toward the ceiling and shuts her eyes and tries to imagine it as Herb described: vast schools of his sperm streaming through her cervix, crossing her uterus, scaling her fallopian tubes. In her imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.

  Then: sun at the windows. Herb makes toast. A zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.

  Nothing happens. One month, one period. Two months, two periods. After four months, on New Year’s Eve, wind hurling sleet across the driveway, Herb cries a bit.

  “I’m just getting the pill out of my system,” Imogene says. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”

  Then it’s 2003. Imogene begins to notice pregnant women everywhere. They clamber out of minivans at the Loaf ’N Jug; they hunker in Walmart aisles holding infant-sized pajamas to the light. A pregnant repairwoman services the office copier; a pregnant client spills orange juice in the conference room. What defects does Imogene have that these women do not?

  She reads on the internet that it takes couples, on average, one year to get pregnant. So. No problem. Plenty of time. She is only thirty-three years old, after all. Thirty-four in March.

  At Herb’s prompting, Imogene begins sticking a thermometer in her mouth every morning when she wakes up. He plots her temperatures on a sheet of graph paper. We want, he tells her, to time the ovulation spike. Each time they have sex, he draws a little X on their chart.

  Three more months, three more periods. Four more months, four more periods. Herb assaults Imogene’s peaking temperature with platoons of X’s. She lies in the bed with her toes pointed to the ceiling and Herb rummages around on top of her and grunts and the spermatozoa paddle forth.

  And nothing happens. Imogene cramps, finds blood, whispers into the phone, “I’m a fucking Swiss timepiece.”

  The university lets out. The brewer’s blackbirds return. The lark sparrows return. Imogene plods through the backyard filling her feeders. Not so long ago, she thinks, I’d be stoned in public for this. Herb would divorce me. Our crops would be razed. Shamans would stick garlic gloves into my reproductive tracts.

  In August, the biology department administrator, Sondra Juetten, gives birth to a girl. Herb and Imogene bring carnations to the hospital. The infant is shriveled and squinty and miraculous-looking. She wears a cotton hat. Her skull is crimped and oblong.

  Herb says, “We’re so excited for you, Sondra.”

  And he is excited, Imogene can see it; he bounces on his toes; he grins; he asks Sondra a series of questions about the umbilical cord.

  Imogene stands in the doorway a
nd asks herself if she is generous enough to be excited for Sondra, too. Nurses barge past. Drops of dried blood are spattered on the linoleum beside the hospital bed; they look like tiny brown sawblades. A nurse unwraps the infant and its diaphragm rises and falls beneath the thin basket of its ribs and its tiny body seems to Imogene like the distillation of a dozen generations, Sondra’s mother’s mother’s mother, an entire pedigree stripped into a single flame and stowed still burning inside the blue tributaries of veins pulsing beneath its skin.

  She thinks: Why not me?

  Wyoming tilts away from the sun. Goodbye, wood ducks. Goodbye, house wrens. Goodbye to the little yellow warbler who landed on the window feeder yesterday and winked at Imogene before continuing on. The abandoned tires freeze into the earth. The birds make their brutal migrations.

  “What about you two?” Herb’s brother asks. This is Thanksgiving, in Minnesota. Herb’s mother cocks her head, suddenly interested. Herb’s nephews clack their silverware against the table like drummers. “You guys thinking about kids?”

  Herb looks at Imogene. “Sure. You never know.”

  Imogene’s bite of pumpkin pie turns to cement in her mouth. Herb’s sister-in-law says, “Well, don’t wait too long. You don’t want to be rolling to flute recitals in a wheelchair.”

  There are other moments. Herb’s two-year-old nephew climbs uninvited into Imogene’s lap and hands her a book called Big Fish, Little Fish. “Biiig!” he says, turning the pages. “Biiiig fish!” He squirms against her chest; his scalp smells like a deep, cold lake in summer.

  A day later Herb tugs Imogene’s sleeve in the airport and points: There are twins by some newspaper machines with tow heads and overalls. Maybe three years old. They are jumping on the tips of their toes and singing about a tiny spider getting washed out of a waterspout and when they are done they clap and grin and sprint in circles around their mother.

  When Imogene was twenty-one, her parents were killed simultaneously when their Buick LeSabre skidded off Route 506 a mile from home and flipped into a ditch. There was no ice on the road surface and no coming traffic and her father’s Buick was in good repair. The police called it an accident. For two weeks Imogene and Herb stood in a variety of overheated, overdecorated living rooms holding Triscuits on little plates and then Imogene graduated from college and promptly moved to Morocco.