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Chefe drinks the contents of the mug in three swallows, then sets the mug down and grimaces and cracks some bones in his back and rolls his neck and finally says, “You have something?”
    To Luvo’s surprise Roger produces from the plastic sack a fossil Luvo recognizes. Roger has taken it from Harold’s cabinet. This one contains the impressions of a seed fern, three fronds pressed almost parallel into it, nearly white against the darker stone. Looking at it in Roger’s hands makes Luvo want to run his hands across the leaves.
    Chefe Carpenter looks at it for perhaps four or five seconds but does not get up from his armchair or reach out to take it.
    “I can give you five hundred rand.”
    Roger lets out a forced, unctuous laugh.
    “Come now,” Chefe says. “In the sunroom right now I have a hundred of these. What can I sell these for? What else do you have?”
    “Nothing right now.”
    “But where is this big one you’re working on?”
    “It’s coming.”
    Chefe reaches down for his mug and peers inside and sets it back on the floor. “You owe money, don’t you? Men are coming to collect money from you, aren’t they?” He glances over with a soft look at Luvo, then looks back. “You have a long way to go to repay your debt, don’t you?”
    Roger says, “I’m working on the big one.”
    “Five hundred rand,” Chefe says.
    Roger gives a defeated nod. “Now,” Chefe says, and stands up, and his big, shiny face brightens, as if a cloud has moved away from the sun. “Shall I show the boy the collection?”
    U PSTAIRS
    There are blanks on Alma’s wall, Luvo is learning, omissions and gaps. Even if he reorganized her whole project, arranged her life in a chronological line, first memory to last, Alma’s history running in a little beige file down the stairs and around the living room, what would he learn? There’d still be breaks in time, failure in his understanding, months beyond his reach. Who is to say a cartridge even exists that contains the moments before Harold’s death?
    Friday night he decides to abandon his left-to-right method. Whatever order once existed in the arrangement of these cartridges has since been shuffled out of it. It’s a museum arranged by a madwoman. He starts watching any cartridge that for some unnameable reason stands out to him from the disarray pinned to the wall. On one cartridge nine- or ten-year-old Alma lies back in a bed full of pillows while her father reads her a chapter from
Treasure Island
; on another a doctor tells a much older Alma that she probably will not be able to have children. On a third Alma has written
Harold and Pheko.
Luvoruns it through the remote device twice. In the memory Alma asks Pheko to move several crates of books into Harold’s study and arrange them alphabetically on his shelves. “By author,” she says.
    Pheko is very young; he must be newly hired. He looks as if he is barely older than Luvo is now. He wears an ironed white shirt and his eyes seem to fill with dread as he concentrates on her instructions.
    “Yes, madam,” he says several times. Alma disappears. When she returns, what might be an hour later, Harold in tow, Pheko has put practically every book on the shelves in Harold’s office upside-down. Alma walks very close to the shelves. She tilts a couple of titles toward her, then sets them back down. “Well, these aren’t in any kind of order at all,” she says.
    Confusion ripples through Pheko’s face. Harold laughs.
    Alma looks back to the bookshelves. “The boy can’t read,” she says.
    Luvo cannot turn Alma’s head to look at Pheko; Pheko is a ghost, a smudge outside her field of vision. But he can hear Harold behind her, his voice still smiling. He says, “Not to worry, Pheko. Everything can be learned. You’ll do fine here.”
    The memory dims; Luvo unscrews the headgear and hangs the little beige cartridge back on the nail from which he plucked it. Out in the garden the palms clatter in the wind. Soon