Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

He spoke English as if each word were a tiny egg he had to deliver carefully through his teeth.

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.

“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.

riparian,

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

A little gold-lettered sign reads Twelve Apostles Hotel.

From upstairs winds a thin strand of cigarette smoke. The pendulum in the grandfather clock swings back and forth. Out the windows there is only a dim whiteness: fog. Everything seems irradiated with a meaning she is only now recognizing. My house, she thinks. I love my house.

“What’s the one permanent thing in the world?” he’s saying now. “Change! Incessant and relentless change. All these slopes, all this scree—see that huge slide there?—they’re all records of calamities. Our lives are like a fingersnap in all this.”

Inside Alma’s memory a thought rises so clearly it’s as if Luvo can see the sentence printed in the air in front of the windshield. She thinks: Our marriage is ending and all you can talk about is rocks.

The light is low, golden, and merciless. On the veld far below, the zinc rooftops of distant farmhouses reflect back the dying sun. Every shadow of every pebble seems impossibly stark.

His hands are huge and terrible. His beard is white. His teeth are the color of autumn leaves.

Temba glimpses strange outlines on the boy’s scalp,

concatenation.

Dr. Amnesty’s cartridges, the South African Museum, Harold’s fossils, Chefe Carpenter’s collection, Alma’s memory wall—weren’t they all ways of trying to defy erasure? What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?

“Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.”

“Nothing lasts,” Harold would say. “For a fossil to happen is a miracle. One in fifty million. The rest of us? We disappear into the grass, into beetles, into worms. Into ribbons of light.” It’s the rarest thing, Luvo thinks, that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.

Every second, walking those two hundred meters, is like leaping into very cold water, in that first instant when the body goes into shock, and everything you are, everything you call your life, disintegrates for an instant, and all you have around you is the water and the cold, your heart trying to send splinters through a block of ice.

After his shower he lies on the perfect white sheets of the bed and watches the huge afternoon sky flow like liquid out the window.

Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates.

A nurse unwraps the infant and its diaphragm rises and falls beneath the thin basket of its ribs and its tiny body seems to Imogene like the distillation of a dozen generations, Sondra’s mother’s mother’s mother, an entire pedigree stripped into a single flame and stowed still burning inside the blue tributaries of veins pulsing beneath its skin.

Wyoming tilts away from the sun. Goodbye, wood ducks. Goodbye, house wrens. Goodbye to the little yellow warbler who landed on the window feeder yesterday and winked at Imogene before continuing on. The abandoned tires freeze into the earth. The birds make their brutal migrations.

Then she is wheeled into an X-ray room where a nurse with peanut butter breath and Snoopy earrings drapes a lead apron over Imogene’s chest and asks her to remain completely motionless.

The phone rings six days later. The doctors have discussed the situation. Dual-factor infertility. Imogene gets three words: polycystic ovary syndrome. Herb gets two words: severe deficits. In motility, in density, in something else. Only three percent of his sperm are rated viable.

“No parents, no husband, no children,” a blind woman once told her. Her gaze was a vacuum. Imogene did not know where to look. “I am a tribe of one.”

the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary. That in every genealogy someone will always be last: last leaf on the family tree, last stone in the family plot.

Nothingness is the permanent thing. Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception.

“You never know,” Herb’s mother once told him, the skin beneath her eyes streaked with mascara, “all the things that go into making a marriage last. You never know what goes on behind closed doors.”

If there’s a sadness in this, Herb thinks, it’s about the embryos that don’t even make it three days, the ones that get discarded, lumpy and fragmented, rated unviable. Nucleated cells, wrapped in coronas like little suns. Little sons. Little daughters. Herb and Imogene, father and mother, the DNA already unzipped, paired, and zipped back up, proficiencies at piano playing and field hockey and public speaking predetermined. Pale eyes, veiny limbs, noses shaped like Herb’s. But not good enough. Not viable.

“The stars,” a junior high science teacher once told Herb, “are up there during the day, too.” And understanding that changed Herb’s life.

Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them?

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.

Her mother used to say seeds were links in a chain, not beginnings or endings, but she was wrong: Seeds are both beginnings and ends—they are a plant’s eggshell and its coffin.

The walls are bare plaster and the bed groans and the sheets smell like dust on a hot bulb.

And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there’s a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering Dear God how could you do this to me, I only whisper Amen which Pastor Jenks back home told me means I believe, and I lie with my eyelids closed clutching Mishap and inhaling his smell, which always smells to me like corn chips, and practice breathing in light and breathing out a color—light, green, light, yellow—like the counselor told me to do when the panic comes.

Every hour the thought floats to the surface: If we’re all going to end up happy together in Heaven then why does anyone wait? Every hour the Big Sadness hangs behind my ribs, sharp and gleaming, and it’s all I can do to keep breathing.

Mrs. Sabo gives me a little gold-toothed smile as if whatever was on the other end of her fishing line has just pulled her back into the present for a minute and in the silence I feel my mom is here, together with me, under the Lithuanian sunrise, both of us with decades left to live.

You put a cross on every headstone you make, but you think the only thing that happens to us when we die is that we turn into mud?

At the end the narrator says the tribe’s old language has a word for standing in the rain looking at the back of a person you love. She says it has another word for shooting an arrow into an animal poorly, so that it hurts the animal more than is necessary. To call a person this word, in the old language, the lady says, is the worst sort of curse you could imagine.

Memory becomes her enemy. Esther works on maintaining her attention only in the present; there is always the now—an endlessly adjusting smell of the wind, the shining of the stars, the deep five-call chirrup chirrup of the cicadas in the park. There is the now that is today falling into the now that is tonight: dusk on the rim of the Atlantic, the flicker of the movie screen, a submergence of memory, a tanker cleaving imperceptibly across the horizon.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.