The Memory Palace Read Online Free

them hidden somewhere. I flipped through the coffee-stained pages. The book had the same faint odor of stale smoke and mildew that her letters had. I turned to her last few entries. Two weeks before the paramedics picked her up from the Community Women’s Shelter, my mother wrote:
Magma: Hot liquid rock can be three shapes: spherical, spiral or a rod. It flows out like lava or cools underground.
    They had told me at the shelter that when they called 911 that day, she couldn’t stop vomiting and her stomach was distended as if she were about to give birth. “That Norma, she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” one woman had said to me on the phone. “She is one stubborn lady.” She had been sick for months, but wouldn’t see a doctor. Finally, the day the ambulance came to take her to the hospital, the women at the shelter convinced her to go.
    In her diary, my mother wrote:
If lava reaches Earth’s surface it turns into igneous rock. Basalt: dark gray rock forms when magma cools into a solid
. My mother had been studying geology. I turned back the pages. Before geology, she had reread all of Edgar Allan Poe. Before that she had turned to the stars:
Recently, Ihad a dream of a cataclysm. Was not prepared for study of the planets, which has fevered my imagination once again.
    Before I left for Cleveland I had been studying geology too. I was in the middle of a book about Nicolaus Steno, the seventeenth century Danish anatomist, whom some call the grandfather of geology. Steno was fascinated by what the oceans hid and left behind. I had read about how one day, in 1666, young Steno was in an anatomical theater in Florence, Italy, dissecting the head of a shark. It wasn’t just any shark but a great white. The shark was a wonder, and Steno’s patron, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, wanted to know what was inside. This was the time when wonder and scientific inquiry were intricately entwined—when collectors collected the rare and the mysterious, the miraculous and mundane, from the bounty that explorers brought back to Europe from the New World.
    When Steno peered into the monster’s mouth he noticed that the shark’s teeth resembled the little stones people called “tongue stones,” or glossopetrae, the mysterious stones Pliny the Elder said fell from the heavens on dark and moonless nights, what the church said were miracle stones left from Noah’s Great Flood. Steno’s mind leapt from shark to sea to a question that plagued him for the rest of his life: why are seashells found on mountaintops? Even his scientific colleagues thought the fossils were signs from God. Nicolaus Steno laid the foundation for reading the archival history of the earth: How crystals are formed, how land erodes and sediment is made over time. How over centuries, seashells become fossils embedded deep inside the bedrock of mountains.
    My mother would have liked Nicolaus Steno. She’d marvel at the way his mind flew from one thought to another, uncovering the truth about ancient seas, how he learned to read the memory of a landscape, one layer at a time. The earth is also a palimpsest—its history scraped away time and time again. If my mother were well enough, I would tell her this. She’d light up a cigarette, pour herself a cup of black coffee, and get out her colored pens. Then she’d draw a giant chart with a detailed geological timeline, revealing the stratification of the earth.

    That Tuesday night I met my sister, Natalia, at the airport. I spotted her cherry-red coat in the thick throng of hurried holiday travelers. She lugged a huge suitcase behind her, walking a fast clip in high black boots. Like me, it had been close to seventeen years since she had last seen our mother, but my sister had made the painful decision never to write to her. When I had called her about our mother dying, I didn’t know whether or not she would come. Her last vision of our mother was a nightmare, indelible in her mind. I was