Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

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

  “We’re going to get you some medicine,” Pheko says. “You just rest. You just hang on, little lamb.”

  DAWN

  Luvo is detaching himself from the remote device when he hears Roger say, from the stairwell, “Now, wait one minute.” Then something explodes downstairs. Every molecule in the upstairs bedroom feels as if it has been jolted awake. The windows rattle. The cartridges on the wall quiver. In the shuddering concussion afterward Luvo hears Roger fall down the stairs and exhale a single sob, as if expelling all of his remaining breath at once.

  Luvo sits paralyzed on the edge of the bed. The grandfather clock resumes its metronomic advance. Someone downstairs says something so quietly that Luvo cannot hear it. His gaze catches on a small, inexplicable watercolor of an airborne boat among the hundreds of papers on the wall in front of him, a sailboat gliding through clouds. He has seen it a hundred times before but has never actually looked at it. Sails straining, clouds floating happily past.

  Gradually the molecules in the air around Luvo seem to return to their former states. He hears no more from downstairs except the grandfather clock, banging away in the living room. Roger has been shot, he thinks. Someone has shot Roger. And Roger has the cartridge with the X on it in his shirt pocket.

  A low breeze drifts through the open window. The pages on Alma’s wall fan out in front of him like a flower, like a mind turned inside out.

  Luvo listens to the clock, counts to a hundred. He can still see Harold in the gravel beside the Land Cruiser, his face a mask, dust stuck to his eyes, saliva gleaming on his chin and throat.

  Eventually Luvo crawls across the floor and peers down the stairwell. Roger’s tall body is at the bottom, slumped over onto itself, folded almost in half. His hat is still on. His arms are crimped underneath him. A portion of his face is gone. A halo of blood has pooled around his head on the tile.

  Luvo lies back on the carpet, sees Alma’s immaculate room at the Twelve Apostles Hotel, sees a mountain range rush past the dusty windscreen of a truck. Sees Harold’s legs twitching beneath him in the gravel.

  What is there in Luvo’s life that makes sense? Dusk in the Karoo becomes dawn in Cape Town. What happened four years ago is relived twenty minutes ago. An old woman’s life becomes a young man’s. Memory-watcher meets memory-keeper.

  Luvo stands. He plucks cartridges off the wall and sticks them in his pockets. Forty, fifty of them. Once his pockets are full he moves toward the stairwell, but pauses and looks back. The little room, the spotless carpet, the washed window. On the bedspread a thousand identical roses intertwine. He takes the photograph of Harold walking out of the sea and slips it inside his shirt. He sets Cartridge 4510 in the center of the coverlet where someone might find it.

  Then he stands at the top of the stairwell, collecting himself. From the living room—from Roger—rises a smell of blood and gunpowder. An odor more grim and nauseating than Luvo expected.

  Luvo is about to walk down the stairs when the rape gate rattles and he hears a key slip into the deadbolt of the front door.

  CLOCK

  Perhaps the last thing in the world Pheko is prepared to see is a man facedown at the bottom of Alma’s stainless steel staircase lying in a puddle of blood.

  Temba is asleep again, a hot weight across his father’s back. Pheko is out of breath and sweating from carrying the boy up the hill. He sees the dead man first and then the blood but still it takes him several more seconds to absorb it all. Parallelograms of morning light fall through the balcony doors.

  Down the hallway, in the kitchen, Alma is sitting at the kitchen table, steadily turning the pages of a magazine. She is barefoot.

  The questions come too quickly to sort out. How did this man get in? Was he killed with a gun? Did Mrs. Alma do the killing? Where is the gun? Pheko feels the heat radiating off his son into his back. He wants suddenly for everything to go away. The whole world to go away.

  I should run, he thinks. I should not be here. Instead he carries his son over the body, stepping over the blood, past Alma in the kitchen. He continues out the back door of the kitchen and into the garden and sets the boy in a lounge chair and returns inside to retrieve the white chenille blanket off the foot of Alma’s bed and wraps the boy in it. Then inside again for Alma’s pill bottles. His hands shake as he tries to read the labels. He ends up choosing two types of antibiotic of which there are full bottles and crushing them together into a spoonful of honey. Alma does not look up from the pages as she turns them, one, then the next, then the next, her stare lost and unknowable and reptilian.

  “Thirsty,” she says.

  “Just a moment, Mrs. Alma,” says Pheko. In the garden he sticks the spoon in Temba’s mouth and makes sure the boy swallows it down and then he goes back into the kitchen and pockets the antibiotics and listens to Alma snap the pages forward awhile, and puts on the coffeepot, and when he is sure he will be able to speak clearly he pulls his telephone from his pocket and calls the police.

  BOY FALLING FROM THE SKY

  Temba is looking into the shifting, inarticulate shapes of Alma’s backyard leaves when a boy falls from the sky. He crashes into some hedges and clambers out onto the grass and places his head in the center of the morning sun and peers down at Temba with a corona of light spilling out around his head.

  “Temba?” the silhouette says. His voice is hoarse and unsteady. His ears glow pink where the sunlight passes through them. He speaks in English. “Are you Temba?”

  “My glasses,” says Temba. The garden is a sea of black and white. The face in front of him shifts and a sudden avalanche of light pierces Temba’s eyes. Something bubbles inside his gut. His tongue tastes of the sweet, sticky medicine his father spooned into his mouth.

  Now hands are putting on Temba’s glasses for him. Temba squints up, blinking.

  “My paps works here.”

  “I know.” The boy is whispering. Fear travels through his voice.

  Temba tries whispering, too. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Me either.”

  Temba’s eyesight comes back to him. Big palms and rosebushes and a cabbage tree loom against the garden wall. He tries to make out the boy standing over him against the backdrop of the sun. He has smooth brown skin and a wool cap over his lightly felted head. He reaches down and tugs the blanket up around Temba’s shoulders.

  “My body is sick,” says Temba.

  “Shhh,” whispers the boy. He takes off his hat and presses three fingers against his temple as if reining in a headache. Temba glimpses strange outlines on the boy’s scalp, but then the boy puts his cap back on and sniffs and glances nervously toward the house.

  “I’m Temba. I live at B478A, Site C, Khayelitsha.”

  “Okay, Temba. You should rest now.”

  Temba looks toward the house. Its sleek profile looms up above the hedges, cut with silver windowframes and chrome balcony railings.

  “I’ll rest now,” he says.

  “Good,” whispers the boy with the smooth skin and the glowing ears. Then he takes five quick steps across the backyard and leaps up between the trunks of two palms and scales the garden wall and is gone.

  THE DAYS FOLLOWING

  Harold’s dying face, Roger’s crumpled frame, and the filmy eyes of Temba all rotate through Luvo’s thoughts like some appalling picture show. Death succeeding death in relentless concatenation.

  He spends the rest of Sunday hiding inside the labyrinthine paths of the Company Gardens, crouched among the leaves. Squirrels run here and there; city workers string Christmas lights through a lane of oaks. Are people looking for him? Are the police?

  Monday Luvo crouches in the alley outside a chophouse watching the news on a bar television through an open window. It takes several hours before he sees it: An elderly woman has shot an intruder in Vredehoek. A reporter stands on Alma’s street, a few houses away, and talks into a microphone. In the background a stripe of
red-and-yellow police tape stretches across the road. The reporter says nothing about Alma’s dementia, nothing about Pheko or Temba, nothing about accomplices. The whole report lasts perhaps twenty-five seconds.

  He does not return to Roger’s apartment. No one comes for him. No Roger shaking him awake in the night, hustling him into a taxi. No Pheko come to demand answers. No ghosts of Harold or Alma. Tuesday morning Luvo rides a bus up to Derry Street and walks up onto the slopes of Table Mountain, through the sleek, hushed houses of Vredehoek. There is a blue van in front of Alma’s house and the garage door is open. The garage is absolutely empty. No Mercedes, no realty sign. No lights. The police tape is still there. As he stands beside the gutter a moment a dark-skinned woman passes behind a window pushing a vacuum cleaner.

  That afternoon he sells Alma’s memory cartridges to a trader named Cabbage. Cabbage calls a red-eyed teenager out from the trees to run them through a ramshackle memory machine. The transaction takes more than two hours. “They real,” affirms the teenager finally, and Cabbage looks Luvo up and down before offering him 3,300 rand for the whole batch.

  Luvo studies the cartridges in the bottom of his backpack. Sixty-one of them. Pinpoints of a life. He asks the trader if he can buy the remote device, with its dirty-looking, warped headgear, but Cabbage only grins and shakes his head. “Costs more than you’ll ever have,” he says, and snaps his bag shut.

  Afterward Luvo walks back up through the Company Gardens to the South African Museum and stands in the fossil room with his money in his pocket. He gazes into every display case. Brachiopod, paper mussel, marsh clam. Horsetail, liverwort, seed fern.

  Outside a light rain starts to fall. A warder ambles through, announces to no one in particular that it’s closing time. Two tourists come through the door, glance about, and leave. Soon the room is empty. Luvo stands in front of the gorgon a long time. It’s a slender-headed skeleton, stalking something on its long legs, its huge canine incisors showing.

  At the street market in Greenmarket Square Luvo buys the following things: a kelly green duffel bag, nine loaves of white bread, a paint scraper, a hammer, a sack of oranges, four two-liter bottles of water, a polyester sleeping bag, and a puffy red parka that says Kansas City Chiefs across the back. When he’s done, he has 900 rand in his pocket, all the money left him in the world.

  B478A

  Pheko gazes up into the darkness of his little house and listens to the rain rattle on the roof. Beside him Temba blinks his big eyes, waiting for sleep to fall away. The boy’s fever has broken; he is slowly coming back into himself.

  Pheko is thinking about his cousin who says he might be able to find him work loading powdered cement into bags for shipping. He’s thinking about the fur of dead insects on the window screens, the tracks of ants marching along the floor. And he’s thinking about Alma.

  For six hours the police asked Pheko questions. He did not know where Temba had been taken; he hardly knew where he was. Then they released him. They let him keep the antibiotics, they even paid his train fare. After leaving her kitchen that morning with the police, Alma still turning the pages of that thick, five-year-old fashion magazine, he has not seen Alma again.

  All around the little house are things he has been given by Harold and Alma over the years, castoffs and hand-me-downs: a dented soup pot, a plastic comb, an enameled mug that says Porter Properties Summer Picnic. A dish towel, a plastic colander, a thermometer. How many hours had Pheko spent with Alma over the past twenty years? She is engraved into him; she is part of him.

  “I saw a boy,” Temba says. “He looked like an angel from church.”

  “In your dream?”

  “Maybe,” says Temba. “Maybe it was a dream.”

  SWARTBERG PASS

  On the morning bus heading east from Cape Town there’s the impossible straightness of the N1 cutting across the desert all the way to the horizon. The road is swallowed by the bus’s big tinted windscreen like an infinite black ribbon. On either side of the N1, dry grasslands run away from the highway’s edges into sheaves of brown mountains. Everywhere there is light and stone and unimaginable distance.

  Luvo feels simultaneously frightened and awed. As far as he can remember, he has never been outside of Cape Town, though he has Alma’s memories riding along inside him, the bright blue coves of Mozambique, rain in Venice, a line of travelers in suits standing in a first-class queue in a Johannesburg train station.

  He pulls the photograph of Harold from his backpack. Harold, half-grinning, half-grimacing, walking out of the sea. He thinks of Roger, lying dead on the floor of Alma’s living room. He hears Chefe Carpenter say, “You owe money, don’t you?”

  It’s afternoon when Luvo clambers off at the intersection for Prince Albert Road. A gas station and a few aluminum trailers huddle under a brass-colored sun. Black eagles trace slow ovals a half-mile above the road. Three friendly-looking women sit beneath a vinyl umbrella and sell cheese and marmalade and sticky rolls. “It’s warm,” they tease. “Take off your hat.” Luvo shakes his head. He chews a roll and waits with his duffel bag. It’s nearly dusk before a Bantu sales representative in a rented Honda slows for him.

  “Where you going?”

  “The Swartberg.”

  “You mean over the Swartberg?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The driver reaches across and pushes the door open. Luvo climbs in. They turn southeast. The sun goes down in a wash of orange and moonlight spills onto the Karoo.

  The pavement ends. The man drives the last hour through the badlands in silence, with the startled eyes of bat-eared foxes reflecting now and then in the high beams and a vast spread of stars keeping pace above and curtains of dust floating up behind the rear tires.

  The car vibrates beneath them. Soon there is no traffic in either direction. Great walls of stone rear up, darker than the sky. They come around a turn and a rectangular brown sign, its top half pocked from a shotgun blast, reads Swartbergpas. Luvo thinks: Harold and Alma saw this same sign. Before Harold died they drove right past this spot.

  Fifteen minutes later the Honda is climbing past one of the road’s countless switchbacks when Luvo says, “Please stop the car here.”

  The man slows. “Stop?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You sick?”

  “No, sir.”

  The little car shudders as it idles. Luvo unclips his seat belt. The man blinks at him in the darkness. “You’re getting out here?”

  “Yes, sir. Just below the top.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ag, it gets cold up here. It snows up here. You ever seen snow?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Snow is terrible cold.” The man tugs at his collar. He seems about to asphyxiate with the strangeness of Luvo’s request.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can’t let you out here.”

  Luvo stays silent.

  “Any chance I can talk you out of this?”

  “No, sir.”

  Luvo takes his big duffel and four bottles of water from the backseat and steps out into the darkness. The man looks at him a full half-minute before pulling off. It’s warm in the moonlight but Luvo stands shivering for a moment, holding his things, and then walks to the edge of the road and peers over the retaining wall into the shadows below. He finds a thin path, cut into the slope, and hikes maybe two hundred meters north of the road, pausing every now and then to watch the twin red taillights of the salesman’s Honda as it eases up the switchbacks high above him toward the top of the pass.

  Luvo finds a lumpy, level area of dry grass and rocks roughly the size of Alma Konachek’s upstairs bedroom. He unrolls his sleeping bag and urinates and looks out over the starlit talus below, running mile after mile down onto the plains of the Karoo far beneath him.

  He takes a drink of water and climbs into his sleeping bag and tries to swallow back his fear. The rocks on the ground are still warm from the sun. The stars are
bright and impossibly numerous. The longer he looks into a patch of sky, the more stars emerge within it. Range upon range of suns burning out beyond the power of his vision.

  No cars show themselves on the road. No airplanes cross the sky. The wind makes the only sound. What’s out here? Millipedes. Buzzards. Snakes. Warthogs, ostriches, bushbuck. Farther off, on the northern tablelands: jackals, wild dogs, leopards. A last few rhinos.

  FIRST DAY

  Dawn finds Luvo warm and bareheaded inside his sleeping bag with a breeze washing over the ports in his scalp. A truck grinds up the switchbacks of the road in the distance, Happy Chips painted across its side.

  He sits up. Around his sleeping bag are rocks, and beyond his little level spot of grasses are more rocks. The slopes below him and above him are littered with rocks in every size, pressed half into the earth like grave markers. Beyond them cliffs have calved off slabs the size of houses. Indeed, there seem to be sandstone and limestone blocks everywhere, an infinity of rocks.

  The Happy Chips truck disappears around another hairpin. No souls, only a few spindly trees—only boulders and distances. On its pedestal at the museum, the gorgon had seemed huge, big as a dinosaur, but out here the scale of things feels new. What was a dinosaur compared to cliffs like these? Without turning his head Luvo can see ten thousand rocks in which a gorgon might be hidden.

  Why did he think he could find a fossil out here? A fifteen-year-old boy who knows only adventure novels and an old woman’s memories? Who has never found a fossil in his life?

  Luvo eats two pieces of bread and walks slow circles around his sleeping bag, turning over stones with his toes. Splotches of lichen grow on some, pale oranges and grays, and the rocks include grains of color, too, striations of black, flecks of silver. They are lovely but they contain nothing that looks like the fossils in the museum, in Harold’s cabinet, in Alma’s memories.

  All that first day Luvo makes wider and wider circles around his little camp, carrying a bottle of water, watching his shadow slip across the hillsides. Clouds drift above the mountain range at the horizon and their shadows drag across the farms far below. Luvo remembers Harold talking to Alma about time. Younger was “higher in the rocks.” Things that were old were deep. But what is higher and lower here? This is a wilderness of rocks. And every single stone Luvo turns over is plain and carries no trace of bone.