Free Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr

named Cabbage. Cabbage calls a red-eyed teenager out from the trees to run them through a ramshackle memory machine. The transaction takes more than two hours. “Theyreal,” affirms the teenager finally, and Cabbage looks Luvo up and down before offering him 3,300 rand for the whole batch.
    Luvo studies the cartridges in the bottom of his backpack. Sixty-one of them. Pinpoints of a life. He asks the trader if he can buy the remote device, with its dirty-looking, warped headgear, but Cabbage only grins and shakes his head. “Costs more than you’ll ever have,” he says, and snaps his bag shut.
    Afterward Luvo walks back up through the Company Gardens to the South African Museum and stands in the fossil room with his money in his pocket. He gazes into every display case. Brachiopod, paper mussel, marsh clam. Horsetail, liverwort, seed fern.
    Outside a light rain starts to fall. A warder ambles through, announces to no one in particular that it’s closing time. Two tourists come through the door, glance about, and leave. Soon the room is empty. Luvo stands in front of the gorgon a long time. It’s a slender-headed skeleton, stalking something on its long legs, its huge canine incisors showing.
    At the street market in Greenmarket Square Luvo buys the following things: a kelly green duffel bag, nine loaves of white bread, a paint scraper, a hammer, a sack of oranges, four two-liter bottles of water, a polyester sleeping bag, and a puffy red parka that says
Kansas City Chiefs
across the back. When he’s done, he has 900 rand in his pocket, all the money left him in the world.
    B 478A
    Pheko gazes up into the darkness of his little house and listens to the rain rattle on the roof. Beside him Temba blinks his bigeyes, waiting for sleep to fall away. The boy’s fever has broken; he is slowly coming back into himself.
    Pheko is thinking about his cousin who says he might be able to find him work loading powdered cement into bags for shipping. He’s thinking about the fur of dead insects on the window screens, the tracks of ants marching along the floor. And he’s thinking about Alma.
    For six hours the police asked Pheko questions. He did not know where Temba had been taken; he hardly knew where he was. Then they released him. They let him keep the antibiotics, they even paid his train fare. After leaving her kitchen that morning with the police, Alma still turning the pages of that thick, five-year-old fashion magazine, he has not seen Alma again.
    All around the little house are things he has been given by Harold and Alma over the years, castoffs and hand-me-downs: a dented soup pot, a plastic comb, an enameled mug that says
Porter Properties Summer Picnic.
A dish towel, a plastic colander, a thermometer. How many hours had Pheko spent with Alma over the past twenty years? She is engraved into him; she is part of him.
    “I saw a boy,” Temba says. “He looked like an angel from church.”
    “In your dream?”
    “Maybe,” says Temba. “Maybe it was a dream.”
    S WARTBERG P ASS
    On the morning bus heading east from Cape Town there’s the impossible straightness of the N1 cutting across the desert all the way to the horizon.
The road is swallowed by the bus’s bigtinted windscreen like an infinite black ribbon. On either side of the N1, dry grasslands run away from the highway’s edges into sheaves of brown mountains. Everywhere there is light and stone and unimaginable distance.
    Luvo feels simultaneously frightened and awed. As far as he can remember, he has never been outside of Cape Town, though he has Alma’s memories riding along inside him, the bright blue coves of Mozambique, rain in Venice, a line of travelers in suits standing in a first-class queue in a Johannesburg train station.
    He pulls the photograph of Harold from his backpack. Harold, half-grinning, half-grimacing, walking out of the sea. He thinks of Roger, lying dead on the floor of Alma’s living room. He hears Chefe Carpenter say, “You owe