Memory Wall. Anthony Doerr

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 ports 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.

      On cartridge 5015 a seven-year-old Alma demands that her nanny hand over a newly opened bottle of Coca-Cola. When the nanny hesitates, grimacing, Alma threatens to have her fired. The nanny hands over the bottle. A moment later Alma’s mother appears, furious, dragging Alma into the corner of a bedroom. “Never, ever drink from anything one of the servants has put her lips on first!” Alma’s mother shouts. Her face contorts; her little teeth flash. Luvo can feel his stomach twist.

      On cartridge 9136 seventy-year-old Alma attends her husband’s funeral service. A few dozen white-skinned people stand beneath chandeliers, engulfing roasted apricot halves. Alma’s meticulous little houseman Pheko picks his way through them wearing a white shirt and black tie. He has a toddler in eyeglasses with him; the child winds himself around the man’s left leg like a vine. Pheko presents Alma with a jar of honey, a single blue bow tied around the lid.

      “I’m sorry,” he says, and he looks it. Alma holds up the honey. The lights of a chandelier are momentarily trapped inside. “You didn’t need to come,” she says, and sets the jar down on a table.

      Luvo can smell the nauseating thickness of perfume in the funeral home, can see the anxiety in Pheko’s eyes, can feel Alma’s unsteadiness in his own legs. Then he is snatched out of the scene, as if by invisible cords, and he becomes himself again, shivering lightly, a low ache draining through his jaw, sitting on the edge of the bed in Alma’s guest room.

      Soon it’s the hour before dawn. The rain has let up. Roger is standing beside him, exhaling cigarette smoke out the open bedroom window, gazing down into the backyard garden.

      “Anything?”

      Luvo shakes his head. His brain feels heavy, explosive. The lifespan for a memory-tapper, Luvo has heard, is one or two years. Infections, convulsions, seizures. Some days he can feel blood vessels warping around the columns installed in his brain, can feel the neurons tearing and biting as they try to weave through the obstructions.

      Roger looks gray, almost sick. He runs a shaky hand across the front pockets of his shirt.

      “Nothing in the desert? Nothing in a Land Cruiser with her husband?