Man Walks Into a Room, Page 2

  Weeks later, on the plane back to New York, Samson sat next to Anna, his head shaved and bandaged over the incision, the large envelope with his CT scans resting on his knees. He had lost twenty pounds, and the clothes he was wearing—the only things Anna could find in the cheap stores near the hospital—were unfashionable and didn’t fit properly. Out of the corner of his eye Samson saw that Anna was staring at him, but he was afraid if he spoke to her she might cry. He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else. When the plane began its descent into La Guardia, she covered his hand with her own, and as they touched down he looked at her hand, trying to make something of it. During the taxi ride through Queens, Samson pressed his forehead against the window and read the illuminated signs along the highway. When they crossed the Triboro Bridge and Manhattan rose against the night sky, Anna asked, “Do you remember?”

  “From the movies,” he said, and leaned forward to see.

  The benign astrocytoma they removed from his brain had been preserved on slides, and stored in the hospital’s pathology lab. The biopsy suggested that it had been slowly growing for months, maybe years, without effect. It was what they called a silent tumor, without the manifestation of symptoms that might have alerted anyone to its presence. Before the moment Samson had put down a book in his office at the university and closed his memory with it, there might have been small falters, moments when his memory lapsed into blackness before returning seconds later. But if these had happened there was no way of knowing now. All the while, the tumor had been forming itself in his mind like a nightmarish pearl. That late May afternoon, school just let out, the shouts of students floating in through the open windows, it had finally gained enough mass that its gradual exertion of pressure became too much. Between two words in a book Samson’s memory had vanished. Everything, save for his childhood, which days later in a hospital in Nevada he woke up remembering.

  At first he couldn’t even remember his own name. Still, there were things, like the taste of orange juice, that were familiar to him. He knew that the woman who stood by his bed in the red shirt was pretty, though he couldn’t think of plainer faces against which hers stood out. These early signs were promising, and as the doctors tested him it became clear that not only had he retained a sort of intrinsic memory of the world but, more remarkably, he was able to lay down new memories. He could remember everything that had happened after the operation. The doctors seemed puzzled by this, and during teaching rounds they paused for a long time in Samson’s room. They continued to inject him with glucose, but as the days passed it was clear his memory loss wasn’t an effect of the edema. His particular scenario—retrograde amnesia causing the loss of all specific memories prior to surgery, while the capacity to remember still functioned—was highly unusual. And while Samson seemed to have forgotten his entire autobiography, he nevertheless knew that the flowers on the night table were called amaryllis and that the woman who stood by his bed, Anna, had brought them for him. And it was in opening his eyes to those obscure white blooms a week after his operation that something like a fragment from a dream dislodged itself and floated up to the surface of his mind.

  It was the vivid color of the memory that startled him, a luminous blue. It was all around him, warm and smooth, and moving through it toward the glow of light he could hear muted sounds that seemed to come from a great, impassable distance. There was a felicity despite the slow pressure on his lungs that finally pushed him upward. He remembered that when his head broke through the surface of the water he’d been surprised by the chill of the air and the world that stood in perfect, microscopic clarity: the blades of grass, the night sky, the dripping faces of two boys illuminated by the pool lights. “Forty-three seconds!” one shouted, looking at his watch, then barreled down the diving board, leaped into the air, and clutched his knees, dropping into the water with a lucid splash.

  In the days following his operation, memories from his childhood continued to appear in his mind with unnerving precision. It was as if the apertures of his eyes, confused by the outside world, had been directed inward and begun to cast, like a camera obscura, perfect images on the whitewashed walls of his mind. The hairline cracks of a sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The sun falling through the leaves casting shadows on his fingers. His mother’s eyelashes. Anna had been overjoyed, squeezing his hand each time he described to her what he could remember. That’s what she was at first, this woman who sat day in and day out by his bed, whose thin wrists he could encircle with two fingers: an audience for his memories. And although it alarmed him that she knew, like an informed agent, many of the years and places of those memories, he continued to narrate them to her because he sensed that she could help him. Again and again he described his mother to her, in the hope that Anna might find her and bring her to him. When he asked why his mother wouldn’t come, she covered her mouth and looked away.

  “I love you,” she whispered, and in halting sentences she began to explain, weak with apology. He could not absorb everything she was trying to tell him. When she told him that his mother had died he felt it like the clean break of a bone and a sound came from him that he did not recognize. When he was too exhausted to weep any more he lay in silence, all his being drained to the flat line of the heart stilled.

  Anna remained hopeful, despite the doctors’ warning that these recollections of his childhood didn’t necessarily mean Samson would recover later memories. It sometimes happened like this, they said. As if the preservation of those early years was so crucial that they were kept under the protection of another faculty of the brain, so carefully guarded that they survived intact when, in a trauma to the brain, all other memories perished. And so it seemed to be with Samson, whose memories, beyond the age of twelve, faded away into the future like footsteps.

  When the taxi pulled up to their apartment building, Samson got out while Anna paid the driver. He stood bewildered at his door, unable to absorb that this was the very street he had lived on for five years, that before that he had lived ten blocks south, before that downtown, and before that in California, and so on back through innumerable rooms with their qualities of light, their different views. His belief in his past life was polite: the kind one manufactures when in conversation with the faithful. And though he knew almost nothing about the woman walking toward him now, he wanted somehow to please her, or at least not to upset her any more than she already was.

  As Anna put the key in the lock, he could hear the sound of a dog’s excited whimpering and pawing at the other side of the door.

  “That’s Frank,” Anna said, fumbling with the lock. Samson saw that her hand was shaking and he was about to offer to help when the key slid into place and Anna pushed open the door. The dog jumped onto Samson, knocking him against the wall.

  “No, Frank, calm down,” she said, giving the dog a gentle tug on the collar. Frank turned around to lick her hand. She patted him on the head and he sat, obedient under her touch, peering at Samson with curiosity. Each stroke pulled the dog’s brow upward, widening his eyes and making his face appear comically surprised. Samson laughed and the dog shot out from under Anna’s hand and regaled him with snorts and a flurry of paws. He had an urge to grab the dog around the neck and bury his face in its soft ears, to curl up next to him.

  Anna switched on the lights and Samson and Frank followed her into the living room. Its walls were lined with hundreds of books. A few faded rugs covered the wooden floor, and the room was scattered with chairs and lamps that Anna was now turning on one by one. It was a pleasant room and looking around it Samson tried to connect it to the woman walking through it. It was like her somehow, it shared a certain coherence.

  When the room was completely lit—like a stage, Samson thought—she turned to face him. She had long, dark hair and a face that changed each time he looked at it. He’d overheard the doctors warning her not to expect anything of him, not to push him in the beginning to strain to remember. Not to look at him hopefully, expectantly,
as she now was. He glanced from her to the books, the windowsills filled with plants, and when he squeezed his eyes shut he felt something flap up like a pigeon into the skylight of his mind. He opened his eyes.

  “Did you read all these?” he asked. Anna’s eyes swept across the shelves.

  “You did,” she said.

  Later, during long afternoons at the library, Samson would read of miraculous cases in which sight is granted to the blind. As the bandages were removed, their families gathered around them awaiting the epiphany, so this is how it looks! But it never came because to see is not necessarily to perceive. The shapes the newly sighted registered had no currency with their brains, never conditioned to conceive of space. The colors had no bearing on the world they’d constructed out of time and sound. Reading these accounts—the bated breath, the sudden flow of light, followed by the confusion and failure of recognition—reminded Samson of his first days home. Anna, the rooms of the apartment, their things: he could see it all. But nothing yet had the weight of significance. Although the memories of his childhood were clear, they seemed marked by an otherworldly quality, so that now each thing seemed almost an archetype of itself, not yet trailed by a procession of associations and experiences.

  The second night Samson was home Anna was exhausted and fell asleep before him. He lay in the dark, breathing quietly so as not to wake her. There was a sound of cars driving through the rain and laughter from a television floating up from the floor below. He felt uneasy in their bed, but couldn’t think of someplace else he longed to be. Though he couldn’t remember the many years that had passed since his childhood, the bedroom he’d grown up in seemed part of a vanished world that had existed long ago. Despite his awkwardness and confusion, he felt not like a twelve-year-old but a man of thirty-six. It was only that he couldn’t remember how he’d become whoever he now was.

  He was grateful to finally be alone with his thoughts after the con fused days since the operation, the slow awakening from oblivion to the facts of his situation. There was so much he didn’t know—how his mother had died, whether he had been in love with Anna, whether he had been a good man—but he didn’t yet have the courage or even the means to ask. He didn’t yet know how to breach the distance between himself and another person in the form of a touch, a question.

  He turned on his side to face Anna, careful not to wake her. It was the first time he was able to really look at her, to study her without meeting her eyes that always seemed to want something. Although he was slowly beginning to understand his situation, he felt less as if he had forgotten time than as if time had forgotten him. That he’d fallen asleep in one life and somehow passed into this one along the axis of a consistent heartbeat, so that some memory of where he came from, of who he was, had stayed with him. Of all the things he had been asked to believe, the strangest of them was that the woman who slept beside him now was his wife.

  Looking at her, slack and humid in sleep, Samson tried to recognize her. He studied her bare arms and the bent of her fingers, then closed his eyes and searched for these things. He pressed the blackness for something of her that might be left lingering behind like perfume.

  He moved closer. He wanted to touch her in order to feel what he had been like. To step into the role of Samson Greene like a character in the movies who assumes the clothes and car, who steps into the shoes, of another man. As if with his palm on the curve of her waist, mimicking the gestures of Samson Greene, he could step into his past. There is such a thing as tactile memory, the sensation of cold, sharp, or smooth, and he wondered whether somewhere in him was not the feel of Anna.

  He could smell her now, a faintly sweet smell. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed, the outline of her breasts pressed against her cotton shirt. How many times had his fingers absently brushed across them, so that she had never pulled away in surprise? If he reached for her now without waking her, would her body submit to his hand or would it sense, somewhere deep in its own history of a thousand touches, the difference in this one? The intelligent body turning over on its side, away from him, unforgiving. They had not touched each other often at the hospital or since they’d come home. He hadn’t reached for her and she must have felt how his body was strict and uneasy with her. He was more comfortable petting the dog. When she had begun to change her clothes before bed, he’d been embarrassed when she looked up and caught him staring. In the dim room the sight of her pale body had shocked him.

  If he could memorize her now, tomorrow he could look at her remembering. Anna wanted that. He began with her face, the arch of her brows. How did they go? An image came to him of his mother, the way her eyebrows rose when she was surprised. He remembered a box of puppets he had played with as a child. He imagined threads attached to Anna’s brow, her shoulders, elbows, fingers. If she moved now how would it be, if she got up and walked to the window? As she stood in the shadows of the streetlamps he would tug up the string attached to her right wrist until it brushed her cheek, collapse the string attached to the top of her head, lowering her face into her raised hand. His own hand hovered above her now and the desire to touch her body was so powerful he felt it might suffocate him. He began to float his palm down, but just before it reached her Anna rolled into him and nestled her head against his chest. Startled, he froze, his hand stalled in the air above the empty mattress.

  His arm still raised, he slid off the edge of the bed. He felt foolish and ashamed and when he found that the bedroom door was shut, it seemed as if the room was closing in on him. He felt an overpowering desire to be outside. He turned the handle and slipped into the living room, his heart pumping as he moved toward the front door.

  There was a noise in the kitchen and he halted, frozen in place. The dog turned the corner, his tags jingling. Frank cocked his head and looked at him.

  “Shhh,” Samson whispered.

  Frank hurried over, turned around, and sat at Samson’s feet. They remained like that for a moment, both facing the door. Samson leaned down and petted him.

  “Hey, fella.” Frank breathed in his face.

  Samson switched on a lamp. The living room was littered with crumpled cocktail napkins and plastic cups from the homecoming party Anna had thrown that afternoon. She hadn’t told Samson about it until the bell rang and people started filing in, complete strangers for all he knew, hugging him and pumping his hand, lining up to greet him while he sat pasty-faced in an armchair like some kind of demented Santa. Everyone seemed to hope to be the one he remembered, as if winning his recognition were a million-dollar sweepstakes.

  Right away it was obvious that the party was ill conceived. A group of people stood uncomfortably by the crackers and cheese. A few kids hovered near their parents, nervous smiles plastered across their faces as if they’d been told they were being brought to see a sick man who should not, at all costs, be reminded that he was dying. Not only did Samson recognize no one, he also couldn’t seem to recall anyone’s name even after they’d introduced themselves, and so during the brief two hours of the party people took to announcing their names in loud voices before they spoke to him, as if he were not only amnesiac but deaf too. At first, once he understood that these friendly people hoped to share something with him, Samson had tried to be as cooperative as possible, smiling and holding a child on his lap. But soon the clamor of voices became too much and he began to feel overwhelmed and dizzy. The party came to a grim end when Samson locked himself in the bathroom and whispered to the kid who kept rattling the door to please go pee elsewhere because he was feeling sick.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna had whispered through the door once everyone had left, “I’m so very sorry.” Samson had unlocked the door and when he saw her eyes fill with tears he felt she might break if he didn’t take her in his arms.

  Now he walked around the empty living room, examining its contents as one might if left alone in a stranger’s house. There was a photograph of him on the shelf, sitting on a low stone wall with a flash of red leaves behind him. He pic
ked it up and searched his face for clues about what he had been thinking when the shutter clicked. He remembered how while watching a television show at the age of three, he’d been shocked when he’d caught sight of himself on the screen, sitting Indian-style on the floor with the other kids in the studio audience. The camera zoomed in on his face. He’d never told anyone about it. It was something he felt sure had happened; he had been in two places at the same time, and for many years he was faintly aware of the presence of that other self carrying on somewhere. But he never again came across any proof of it again, and with time the belief in his other self dwindled away like an imaginary friend, until he forgot about him altogether.

  He lifted one photograph after the next, studying them. He found it was easiest if he thought of the man in them not as himself but a stranger. This wasn’t difficult since he still hadn’t gotten used to his own face. When he passed his reflection in the mirror he was overcome by a wave of nausea, the primitive reflex of an animal whose instinct suddenly fails him. He didn’t know what he expected to see. His mind had not yet formed an image of himself.

  He felt sick and nervous, and hurried back around the room turning all the photographs facedown. He began pacing around the cramped space as if he were the wild boy raised by wolves that he’d read about as a child, whose first night indoors was spent in panic, looking for a way out. He dragged his fingers across the spines of the books; there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Their orderliness disturbed him, and he pulled a few off the shelf at random. Not satisfied, he grabbed whole armfuls. Things fluttered down that had been lodged between the pages, movie stubs and newspaper clippings and a postcard with a lighthouse on the front.