Memory Wall

Alma Konachek, a 74-year-old woman in Cape Town, South Africa, hears someone breaking into her home in the middle of the night. She investigates and finds that the intruder is gone but left the front door open. She jots down the words: “A man. Tall man in the yard” (2).

Later, Alma looks at the wall of her upstairs bedroom, covered in labels, diagrams, maps, and hundreds of cartridges the size of matchbooks. A machine marked “Property of Cape Town Memory Research Center” sits on the nightstand (2), connected to a helmet. A photo in the center of the wall shows a man walking in the surf. It’s her husband, Harold, she reminds herself. He’s been dead for over four years now.

Pheko has worked for the Konachecks for 15 years. He drives Alma to her appointment with Dr. Amnesty at the memory clinic. There, Alma reports that her memory is improving, only because she knows it’s what people want to hear. Nurses unscrew the ports in her skull and lock her head into place for memory extraction. 

Three years earlier, at her first visit with Dr. Amnesty, he’d explained that the procedure isn’t a cure for dementia, only a way to slow its progression. They remove memories she’s lost access to because of damaged neural pathways, and once they’re encoded on cartridges, she’s able to revisit them with the helmet, as if she’s reliving them. The first memory Alma revisits is a date with Harold when she was 24 and he took her to the fossil exhibit at the South African Museum.

Many doctors in Cape Town harvest memories for wealthy people. These memories are like drugs to nursing home residents who have little else to hold onto, but the cartridges have street value as well. 

One day, Alma’s accountant tells Pheko that Alma’s dementia has advanced too far, and he’ll be moving her to a 24-hour care home and selling her house. Pheko desperately wants to keep his job so he can provide for his son. The accountant says Pheko can stay on until the following Monday. He helps Alma to bed that night, as usual, and reads to her from a worn copy of Treasure Island. Afterward, he returns to his home in Khayelitsha, a neighborhood of shanties populated by refugees and the impoverished. He makes sure his son Temba had enough to eat that day and wore his glasses, then plays lovingly with him.

Roger Tshoni, a tall Black man with tobacco-stained teeth, breaks into Alma’s home in the middle of the night for the 12th time. He brings a memory-tapper named Luvo, a 15-year-old boy who has the necessary brain implants for viewing extracted memories. Alma always wakes up when they break in, but because of her confusion, Roger is able to keep her from calling the police. He cooks her eggs and questions her in the kitchen while Luvo looks through her memories upstairs.

Luvo doesn’t remember his life before a few months ago, nor does he know who installed ports in his skull. He suffers from chronic pain, either as a result of the poorly performed operation or the effects of viewing other people’s memories. He knows that a memory-tapper’s lifespan is only one or two years. By now, Luvo knows a great deal about Alma’s life from her memories. She hasn’t been kind to Pheko and was mad when Harold paid for Temba’s eye operation. Even at age seven, she was spoiled, entitled, and taught to adopt her mother’s racist beliefs.

On Tuesday, Pheko cleans Alma’s house in preparation for the estate agent. He thinks about how he could take valuables from the house to sell, and nobody would know or care. Nobody, that is, but him and God. Meanwhile, Luvo visits the South African Museum’s paleontology exhibit, specifically the gorgon skeleton, to get an idea of what Roger is trying to find in Alma’s memory. Harold’s obituary mentioned Alma’s claim that just before his death, Harold found a rare Permian fossil—a gorgonops longifrons—but she couldn’t remember the exact spot. Knowing it would sell for a fortune at auction, others tried to find it but failed. When Roger saw Alma at the memory clinic, however, he figured her extracted memory would reveal the fossil’s exact location. Seeing that Alma’s house is on the market, Roger and Luvo realize they’re running out of time.

An infectious illness is spreading through Khayelitsha and killing children. Information about the cause and treatment options is scarce and unreliable. On Friday morning, Pheko drops Temba off at Miss Amanda’s school before work. He keeps Alma company while potential buyers tour the house, then lets her watch her favorite memory, 4510, on repeat. He keeps it in a kitchen drawer so he can find it easily whenever she asks for it. 

Across town, Roger takes Luvo to see Chefe Carpenter, a wealthy man with an enormous fossil collection. Realizing that Roger is desperately in debt, Chefe pays very little for the fossil Roger is selling, which Luvo knows he stole from Harold’s cabinet.

That night, Luvo watches Alma’s memory of Pheko when he first came to work for her and Harold. Pheko was embarrassed that he couldn’t read, but Harold said he could learn and would do just fine. Luvo wonders what will happen to Pheko when the house sells. 

In the kitchen, Roger talks to Alma, his anger and fear apparent. Since Alma won’t understand or remember, he admits that he had the surgery performed on Luvo after finding him living as an orphan in the Company Gardens public park. Alma, suddenly seeing a demon in front of her, tells Roger that she knows who he really is. In her dreams that night, the gorgon skeleton from the museum comes to life and hunts her.

On Saturday, Alma is surprisingly lucid. She talks to Pheko about her work as a real estate agent and asks about his family. She brings him to her memory wall but seems to forget why. Outside, a storm rolls in and fog shrouds everything in white. 

Pheko goes home to find Temba is sick with the infection that’s been spreading. The line at the 24-hour clinic is longer than ever due to an antibiotic shortage, and by 2:00 a.m., they’re still far from the front. Back at Alma’s, Roger happens upon cartridge 4510 in the kitchen. Luvo watches the memory of Alma and Harold, around age 30, spending a night at the Twelve Apostles Hotel, happy and in love. Their patio leads to the beach, and Alma takes a photograph of Harold in the surf—the photo that is now in the center of Alma’s memory wall. Behind that photo, Luvo finds a cartridge with an X on it.

Alma wakes up, still more lucid than usual, and senses that Roger is in the upstairs room. She retrieves Harold’s gun and waits for Roger to descend. At 4:30 a.m., Pheko remembers that Alma has plenty of antibiotics at home and gets out of line to take Temba there.

The X-marked memory cartridge shows Alma riding with Harold through the arid Karoo region, resenting his obsession with fossils and planning to end the marriage. He goes for a quick look around near a sign for Swartbergpas but doesn’t return for hours. When he does, he tells Alma he’s found what he believes to be the biggest fossilized gorgon ever seen. Then he collapses and dies.

Roger heads downstairs with the memory cartridge he’s been so desperate to find. Luvo hears a gun go off and a body fall. He finds Roger dead at the bottom of the stairs. Luvo pockets 40 or 50 memory cartridges and the photo of Harold walking in the surf. He’s about to leave when he hears someone unlocking the front door. Pheko carries Temba into the house and finds Roger’s body. Alma is sitting calmly in the kitchen looking at a magazine. Pheko ignores both and focuses on finding medicine for Temba. Then he calls the police. Luvo escapes by jumping from the upstairs window.

Police question Pheko for six hours about Roger’s death, but eventually, they release him and even let him keep the antibiotics bottles. In the following days, Temba’s fever breaks.

Over time, Luvo’s fear that the police are looking for him fades. He sells Alma’s memory cartridges to a trader and uses the money to buy food and equipment for a fossil hunt. He reaches the Swartberg Pass by bus rides and hitchhiking and spends his first night in the desolate badlands in a sleeping bag. In the daylight, the vast open spaces, enormous cliffs, and thousands of rocks make Luvo wonder how he can possibly find the fossil. He works outward in concentric circles from his camp. At night, he dreams Alma’s memories. Eventually, he senses the collective memories of the land’s ancestral inhabitants.

On the fifth day, Luvo remembers that Harold didn’t have his walking stick when he returned to the Land Cruiser and concludes he may have left it behind as a marker. This gives him enough hope to keep looking, and on the seventh day, Luvo finds the walking stick and the 10-foot-long fossil. He breaks the skull free from the surrounding rock with a hammer and drags it to the road on his sleeping bag. 

Three Finnish women on a road trip offer him and his fossil a ride back to Cape Town. They even go with him to see Chefe Carpenter, who offers Luvo 1.4 million rand—in US dollars, about $76,600 today—for the skull and the location of the full fossil. Luvo takes what Chefe can give him in cash, 30,000 rand, and tells Chefe to send the rest to Pheko.

Luvo’s first purchase is a paperback copy of Treasure Island and his next is a stay at the Twelve Apostles Hotel, in the same room where Alma and Harold stayed in Alma’s favorite memory. Chefe excavates the rest of the gorgon skeleton, which a black-market auction house in London sells for $4.5 million—about 82.2 million rand—to a high-rise hotel in Shanghai. 

Pheko gets a check in the mail for nearly 1.4 million rand. After depositing the check into a new bank account, he takes Temba to swim at Virgin Active Fitness’s three lavish pools with the giant waterslide. Alma is in the 24-hour care home and barely recognizes herself. She knows nothing about the cartridge marked 4510 in her nightstand, which Pheko brought for her. She senses that she had somebody once, but he left her alone. Coaxed by staff to participate in the group craft activity, Alma pushes her palm into the plaster.