Memory Wall. Anthony Doerr
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every hour.” She looks at Pheko then, though not quite directly at him. As if a guest floats behind him and to his left. Fog seeps through the garden. The trees disappear. The lounge chairs disappear. “Don’t you think?”
Pheko closes his eyes, opens them.
“Are you happy?”
“Me, Mrs. Alma?”
“You should have a family.”
“I do have a family. Remember? I have a son. He is five years old now.”
“Five years old,” says Alma.
“His name is Temba.”
“I see.” She drives her spoon into what’s left of the oatmeal and lets go and watches its handle slowly fall down to touch the rim of the bowl. “Come with me.”
Pheko follows her up the stairs into the guest bedroom. For a full minute she stands beside him, both of them facing her wall of papers and cartridges. She crouches, moving here and there along the wall. Her lips move silently. On the wall in front of Pheko is a postcard of a little island ringed by a turquoise sea. Two years ago Alma worked every day on this wall, posting things, concentrating. How many meals did Pheko bring her up in this room?
She reaches for the photo of Harold and fingers its corner a moment. “Sometimes,” she says, “I have trouble remembering things.”
Behind her, out the window, the fog cycles and cycles. The sky is invisible. The neighbor’s rooftops are gone. The garden is gone. Everything is white. “I know, Mrs. Alma,” Pheko says.
VAPOR LIGHTS
It’s 9:30 p.m. and the wind is shrieking against the ten thousand haphazard houses in Site C. As soon as he walks in the door, Pheko can tell by the way Miss Amanda has her lips pinched under her teeth that Temba has become ill. A foot away, he can feel the heat radiating off the boy’s body. “Little lamb,” whispers Pheko.
The queue at the twenty-four-hour clinic is already long, longer than Pheko has ever seen it. Mothers and children sit on upturned onion crates or sleep on blankets. Behind them a bus-length mural depicts Jesus stretching supernaturally long arms across a wall. Dried leaves and plastic bags scuttle down the road.
Two separate times over the next few hours Pheko has to get out of line because Temba has soiled his clothes. He cleans his son, wraps him in a towel, and returns to wait outside the clinic. The vapor lights on their towers above Site C rock back and forth like some aggregation of distant moons. Scraps of paper and skeins of dust fly through the air beneath them.
By 2 a.m. Pheko and Temba are still nowhere near the front of the line. Every hour or so a bleary nurse walks up and down the queue and says, in Xhosa, how grateful she is for everybody’s patience. The clinic, she says, is waiting for antibiotics.
Pheko can feel Temba’s sweat soaking through the towel around him. The boy’s cheeks are the color of dishwater. “Temba,” Pheko whispers. Once the boy raises his face weakly and Pheko can see the wobbling pinpoints of the light towers reflected in the sheen of his eyes.
THAT SAME HOUR
Roger and Luvo enter Alma Konachek’s house in the earliest hours of Sunday morning. Alma doesn’t wake. Her breathing sounds steadily from the bedroom. Roger wonders if perhaps the houseboy has given her a sedative.
Luvo tromps upstairs. Roger opens the refrigerator and closes it; he contemplates stepping out into the garden to smoke a cigarette. He feels, very keenly tonight, that he is almost out of time. Down below the balcony, somewhere past the fog, Cape Town sleeps.
Absently, for no reason, Roger opens the drawer beside the dishwasher. He has stood in this kitchen on seventeen different nights but has never before opened this drawer. Inside Roger can see butane lighters, coins, a box of staples. And a single beige polymer cartridge, identical to the hundreds upstairs.
Roger picks up the cartridge and holds it to the window. Number 4510.
“Kid,” Roger calls, raising his voice to the ceiling. “Kid.” Luvo does not reply. Roger walks upstairs and waits. The boy is hooked into the machine. His torso seems to vibrate lightly. After another minute the machine sighs, and Luvo’s eyes flit open. The boy sits back and grinds his palms into his eyesockets. Roger holds up the new cartridge.
“Look at this.” There is a shakiness in Roger’s voice that surprises them both.
Luvo reaches and takes it. “Have I seen this before?”
CARTRIDGE 4510
Alma is in a movie theater with Harold. They are perhaps thirty years old. The movie is about scuba divers. Onscreen, white birds with forked tails soar above a beach. Light touches the tops of breaking waves. Alma and Harold sit side by side, Alma in a bright green dress, green shoes, green plastic earrings, Harold in an expensive brown shirt. The side of Harold’s knee presses against the side of Alma’s. Luvo can feel a dim electricity traveling between them.
Now the camera slips underwater. Rainbows of fish flit across the screen. Reefs scroll past. Alma’s heart does its steady work.
The memory jerks forward; Alma and Harold are in a cab, Alma’s camera bag on the bench seat between them. They travel through a place that looks to Luvo like Camps Bay. Everything out the windows is vague; it is as if, for Alma, there is nothing to look at all. There is only feeling, only anticipation, only her young husband beside her.
In another breath they are climbing the steps of a regal, cream-colored hotel, backed by moonlit cliffs. Gulls soar everywhere. A little gold-lettered sign reads Twelve Apostles Hotel. Inside the lobby a willowy woman in a white shirt and white pants with a gold belt buckle gives them a key on a brass chain; they pad down a series of hallways.
In the hotel room Alma lets out a succession of bright, genuine laughs. She gulps wine. Everything is pristine; two spotless windows, a wide white bed, richly ruffled lampshades. Harold switches on a music player and takes off his shoes and dances clumsily in his socks. Out the windows, range after range of spotlit waves fold over onto a beach.
After what might be a few minutes Harold leaps the balcony railing and takes off his shirt and socks. “Come with me,” he calls, and Alma takes her camera bag and follows him down onto the beach. Alma laughs as Harold charges into the wave-break. He splashes around a bit, grinning hugely. “Freezing!” he shouts. As he walks out of the water, Alma raises her camera, and takes a photograph.
If they say anything more to one another, it is not remembered, not recorded on the cartridge. In the memory Harold makes love to Alma twice. Luvo feels he should leave, should yank out the cartridge, send himself back into Alma’s house in Vredehoek, but the room is so clean, the sheets are so cool beneath Alma’s back. Everything is soft; everything seems to vibrate with possibility. Alma tastes the sea on Harold’s skin. She feels his big-knuckled hands hold onto her ribs, his fingertips touch the knobs of her spine.
Near the end of the memory Alma closes her eyes and seems to slip underwater, as if back into the film at the moviehouse, watching a huge black urchin wave its spines, noticing how the water is not silent but full of soft clicks, and soon the pastels of coral are scrolling past her vision, and little slashes of needlefish are dodging her fingers, and Harold’s body seems not to be on top of hers at all, but drifting instead beside her; they are swimming together, floating slowly away from the reef toward a place where the sea floor falls away and the bottom is too far away to see, and there is only light filtering into deep water, bottomless water, and Alma’s blood seems to swell out to the very edges of her skin.
SUNDAY, 4 A.M.
Alma sits up in bed. From the ceiling comes the unmistakable sounds of footfalls. On her nightstand there is a glass of water, its bottom daubed with miniature bubbles. Beside it is a hardcover book. Though its jacket is missing and