Read Memory Wall: Stories for Free Online Page B

the house will be sold, Luvo thinks, and the cartridges will be returned to the doctor’s office, or sent along with Alma to whatever place they’re consigning her to, and this strange assortment of papers will be folded into a trash bag. The books and appliances and furniture will be sold off. Pheko will be sent home to his son.
    Luvo shivers. He thinks of Harold’s fossils downstairs, waiting in their cabinet. He can hear Chefe Carpenter’s voice as heshowed Luvo several smooth, heavy teeth that he said belonged to a mosasaur, hacked out of a chalk pit in Holland. “Science,” Chefe had said, “is always concerned with context. But what about beauty? What about love? What about feeling a deep humility at our place in time? Where’s the room for that?”
    “You find what you’re looking for,” Chefe had said to them before they left, “you know where to bring it.”
    Hope, belief. Failure or success. As soon as they stepped outside Chefe’s gate, Roger had lit a cigarette and started taking shaky, hungry pulls.
    Luvo stands in Alma’s upstairs bedroom in the middle of the night and hears Harold Konachek whispering as if from the grave:
We all swirl slowly down into the muck. We all go back to the mud. Until we rise again in ribbons of light.
    This wind, Luvo realizes, right now careering around Alma’s garden, has come to Cape Town every November that he can remember, and every November Alma can remember, and it will come next November, too, and the next, and on and on, for centuries to come, until everyone they have ever known and everyone they ever will know is gone.
    D OWNSTAIRS
    Three eggs steam on a towel in front of Alma. She cracks one open. Out the window the sky and ocean are very dark. The tall man with the huge hands is waving his fingers around in her kitchen. “Running out of time,” he says. “You and me together, old lady.”
    He begins stalking the kitchen, pacing back and forth. The balcony rails moan in the wind, or else it’s the wind moaning, or the wind and railing together, her ears unable to unbraid thetwo. The tall man raises a hand to the cigarette in his hatband and puts it between his lips, unlit. “You probably think you’re a hero,” he says. “Up there waving your sword against a big old army.”
    Roger waves an imaginary sword, slashing it through the air. Alma tries to ignore him, tries to focus on the warm egg in her fingers. She wishes she had some salt but does not see a shaker anywhere.
    “But you losing. You losing bad. You losing and you going to end up just like all them other old, rich junkies—you going to blitz out, zone out, drift away, feed yourself a steady stream of those memories. Until there’s nothing left of you at all. Aren’t you? You’re just a tube now, hey, Alma? Just a bleeding tube. Put something in the top and it drops right out the bottom.”
    In Alma’s hand is an egg she has evidently just peeled. She eats it slowly. In the face of the man in front of her something suppressed is flickering and showing itself, an anger, a lifelong contempt. Without turning her head she has the sense that out there in the darkness beyond her kitchen windows something terrible is advancing toward her.
    “And what about the houseboy?” the tall man is saying. She wishes he would stop talking. “From one angle it probably has the look of sacrifice. Oh, a good boy, fit, speaks English, disease-free, got himself a little piccanin, rides ten miles each way on the bus from the townships to the suburbs to make tea, water the garden, comb out her wigs. Fill the refrigerator. Clip her fingernails. Fold her old-lady underthings. Apartheid’s over and he’s doing women’s work. A saint. A servant. Am I right?”
    Two more eggs sit in front of Alma. Her heart is opening and closing very quickly in her chest. The tall black man is wearing his hat indoors. A sentence from
Treasure Island
comes back toher, as if from nowhere:
Their eyes burned in their heads; their