Memory Wall: Stories Read Online Free PDF

the hills looked the same.”
    Interest slackened. People assumed the fossil was unrecoverable. Then, several years later, Roger saw Alma Konachek leaving a memory clinic in Green Point with her houseboy. And he started following them around town.
    “Gorgonops longifrons,”
Roger told Luvo a month ago, on the first night he brought the boy to Alma’s house. Luvo has engraved the name into his memory.
    “A big, nasty predator from the Permian. If it’s a complete skeleton, it’s worth forty or fifty million rand. World’s gone crazy for this stuff. Movie stars, financiers. Last year a triceratops skull sold to some Chinaman at an auction for thirty-four million American dollars.”
    Luvo looks up from the display case. Footfalls echo through the gallery. Knots of tourists mill here and there. The gorgon skeleton the museum has on a granite pedestal is the same one Harold showed Alma fifty years before. Its head is flat-sided; its jaw brims with teeth. Its claws look capable of great violence.
    The plaque below the gorgon reads
Great Karoo, Upper Permian, 260 million years ago.
Luvo stands in front of the skeleton a long time. He hears Harold’s voice, whispering to Alma through the dark hallways of her memory:
These were our ancestors, too.
    Luvo thinks: We are all intermediaries. He thinks: So this is what Roger is after. This incomprehensibly old thing.
    W EDNESDAY N IGHT , T HURSDAY N IGHT
    When Luvo wakes, Roger is standing over him. It’s after midnight and he is back inside Roger’s apartment. The shock of coming into his own, tampered head is searing. Roger squats on his haunches, inhales from a cigarette, and glances at his watch with a displeased expression.
    “You went out.”
    “I went to the museum. I fell asleep.”
    “Am I going to have to start locking you in?”
    “Locking me in?”
    Roger sits on the chair above Luvo, sets his hat on table, and looks at his half-smoked cigarette with a displeased expression.
    “Someone put a realty sign in front of her house today.”
    Luvo presses his fingertips into his temples.
    “They’re selling the old lady’s house.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? ’Cause she’s lost her mind.”
    Spotlights shine on the tanned legs of the Crown Beer woman. Below her leaves blot and unblot the cadmium-colored lights of the Cape Flats. Dim figures move now and then through the trees. The neighborhood seethes. The tip of Roger’s cigarette flares and fades.
    “So we’re done? We’re done going over there?”
    Roger looks at him. “Done? No. Not yet. We’ve got to hurry up.” Again he glances at his wristwatch.
    An hour later they’re back inside Alma Konachek’s house. Luvo sits on the bed in Alma’s upstairs bedroom and studies the wall in front of him and tries to concentrate. In the center, a young man walks out of the sea, trousers rolled to his knees. Around the man orbit lines from books, postcards, photos, misspelled names, grocery lists underscored with adozen hesitant pencil strokes. Trips. Company parties.
Treasure Island
.
    Each cartridge on Alma’s wall becomes a little brazier, burning in the darkness. Luvo wanders between them, gradually exploring the labyrinth of her history. Maybe, he thinks, at the beginning, before the disease had done its worst, the wall offered Alma a measure of control over what was happening to her. Maybe she could hang a cartridge on a nail and find it a day or two later and feel her brain successfully recall the same memory again—a new pathway forged through the dusklight.
    When it worked, it must have been like descending into a pitch-black cellar for a jar of preserves, and finding the jar waiting there, cool and heavy, so she could bring it up the bowed and dusty stairs into the light of the kitchen. For a while it must have worked for Alma, anyway; it must have helped her believe she could fend off her inevitable erasure.
    It has not worked as well for Roger and Luvo. Luvo does not know how to turn the wall to his ends;