Man Walks Into a Room, Page 4

  “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s much more, it goes on and on, see?” She gripped his wrist hard and he winced. “And what do you know about me? You want a test, here’s a test: tell me what the hell you know about me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She threw his hand down. “You don’t know. You don’t know!” she shouted, her voice breaking. “And the most awful part of it is that I still love you. I’ve lost you and yet you’re still here. To taunt me. Can you understand? Do you have any empathy at all for what it’s like?”

  A sob that seemed to come from someplace animal shook her body. Samson took her hand. He rubbed her knee and patted her back, but it only made her cry harder. He fluttered around her, searching for where to put his arms, placing a hand delicately around her waist, the other on her head, drawing her toward him until somehow he was holding her in his arms. He felt her tears against his neck, but her shaking subsided and her breath became steadier as he rocked her. He was surprised at how easily she fit herself against him, how warm and small her body felt.

  “When did I meet you?” he asked quietly.

  “It’s been almost ten years.”

  “You were only twenty-one?”

  “Yes. You were twenty-six.”

  “What did you like about me? In the beginning.”

  Anna pulled away and looked up at him, surprised. “You were—are—” She stumbled. “No one else was like you.”

  Samson was about to ask what he had liked about her, but he stopped himself, realizing how it would sound. He felt the warmth of her against him.

  “Was I any good in bed?”

  The question surprised him as much as it did Anna. She made a funny smile and lifted her chin. Up close her face lost all focus, and her mouth was warm and tasted of oranges.

  Samson lay in bed for a while longer after Anna left for work. The night before, they’d slept together for the third time, and when it was over an instant coolness had spread through his limbs, and he’d ransacked the dark for his underwear and T-shirt. He had wished to draw a boundary around himself, to make an island of his mortification so that it wouldn’t be sensed by the woman who had just made him groan with pleasure. She had lain still and narrow in the dark, but after a half hour passed in which they said nothing, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from touching her again, easing his fingers across her stomach and up to the swell of her breasts, feeling her body tense and arch beneath his hand.

  He got out of bed to go to the bathroom. He could still smell her on his body. Steam hung in the air from her shower, fogging the mirror. He traced his name with his finger then rubbed it out. His face was slowly beginning to cohere, the various features coming together to form a recognizable whole that no longer disturbed him when he saw it flash past in windows and mirrors. Hair was beginning to grow in around the red welt of scar tissue.

  He opened the closet and fingered the silk ties hanging neatly on pegs, the pressed linen shirts, the fine wool pants. He chose a gray suit and a yellow tie with a pattern of small birds. It took him a few tries but finally he managed a clumsy knot. He had gained back the weight he’d lost, and the clothes fit him perfectly, but he felt uneasy in them, an imposter. He decided to buy himself new clothes as soon as possible. He put on the Las Vegas baseball hat Anna had brought to the hospital. The scar was hideous, stapled like railroad tracks.

  Anna had left the newspaper on the counter. He flipped through it. An article about cloning caught his eye, and he read it in full, mesmerized. They had cloned a sheep, there were two of them now, and the question was, would they soon be able to clone humans?

  The dinner dishes were still on the kitchen table, as was the photo album Anna had brought out after dessert. It was open on the page they’d been looking at the night before—photographs of their honeymoon five years ago in Rio—when Samson had abruptly got up.

  “Where are you going?” Anna had asked.

  “For a walk.”

  “Are you all right? Do you want me to come?”

  “I just need some air,” he’d said.

  Anna nodded. “Take the dog.” Frank was already turning in excited circles at the door. Samson knew she’d said it because she was afraid he’d get lost or mugged.

  He didn’t go far; just around and around the block so many times that even Frank got bored. The pictures—dazzled shots on the beach, the two of them locked in embrace after embrace—kept flitting through his mind. For a minute, waiting for the light to change, he thought about not going back. It was a silly thought, but it was thrilling to think it.

  When he returned Anna was sitting on the couch watching a late-night talk show. She was smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Once in a while.”

  They watched a lithe, giggly, blond movie star joke with the talk show host about her years in high school as a fat slob.

  “You used to smoke,” she said, an afterthought.

  “I did?”

  “You quit when you started teaching. You were very sexy. You would take these deep drags.” She imitated him, pulling hard on the cigarette, squinting, exhaling out of the corner of her mouth. “There was a faded rectangle on the back right pocket of all your jeans.”

  Samson imagined himself on a glossy black motorcycle with a teardrop tank, a cigarette dangling between his lips. “Did I ever ride a motorcycle?”

  Anna looked at him strangely. “No.”

  She held her cigarette limpidly between two fingers. It surprised him how easily she handled things, how fluently she shared her life with the hundreds of objects that passed through her hands.

  “How’re you doing, Samson?” She drew her knees up to her chest and laid her head on them, looking at him.

  “I’m okay.” He smiled weakly. “How are you?”

  “Lonely.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to rub her ankle along the little ridges left by the elastic of her sock.

  “You feel so far away.”

  Samson nodded.

  “Do you feel that way too?” she asked.

  “Far? No. I don’t know how to explain it. Like I’m …”

  “What?”

  “Present. In myself.”

  “But you’re not you.”

  “I feel like I am.”

  Her face contorted and he thought she might cry.

  “Please,” she whispered, rocking her knees. “It could still come back. It has to come back.”

  “Anna—”

  “No. Don’t say anything.”

  He put his hands on her knees and gently held them still.

  “You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits,” she said. “The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized.” Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she were reading subtitles. “I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We’d have to reinvent ourselves every minute.” Her voice was soft, and Samson felt she wasn’t speaking to him but to the man in the photographs.

  She exhaled and dropped the cigarette into a glass, where it fizzled, and as she got up to brush her teeth she leaned in close and breathy as a nightclub and kissed his neck. The feel of her lips stayed as he watched the blond movie star leap up and show the audience the cheerleading routine she still remembered because though she had been fat she’d still been a cheerleader. The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.

  Samson washed the dishes, walked Frank, then headed out to an appointment with Dr. Lavell at eleven. It was half past nine, and though he had time to spare he found himself hustling up Broadway anyway, keeping pace with the crowd. He was drawn to the window displays but felt it would be awkward to stop and look, to disturb the flow by standing still and forcing peopl
e to move around him. He tried to mimic the sense of purpose of these people bound for destinations, who could, at any moment, draw up an itinerary of their futures, who received curt instructions from the tiny telephones they listened to like walkie-talkies.

  It was hot outside, and Samson was already sweating in his suit. He took off the jacket and held it crumpled at his side. When he got down to the subway platform it was a furnace, dead air trapped in subterranean vaults under the city, great generators of inner-city weather. He listened to the thunder of trains slamming in and out of the tunnels.

  Inside the crowded metal car under the ultraviolet lights, the helpless passengers looked like a litter of baby mice. Samson found a seat next to a huge boy, the biggest boy he had ever seen, who was serenely explaining to an interested man just how he could break his arm in two places. Samson’s eyes came to rest on a girl hunched across the aisle who was chewing the polish off red nails, the kind of girl who looked like she hadn’t slept at home last night. If she looked up and caught him staring he would look away, but she kept her eyes on the floor. Samson watched her until the 116th Street stop and then she stood, glanced at him with a precise and practiced boredom, and got off. Samson closed his eyes and the train thundered on through the darkness.

  He couldn’t help staring. He told this to Lavell, who quoted a famous photographer to the effect that staring is the best way to educate the eye. If someone referred to something Samson didn’t know about, he often didn’t ask. Later he might look it up. He was devoted to the information he could get from books or, even better, magazines. He filled his time reading everything he could get his hands on.

  Lavell’s office was located in an almost forgotten hallway of the Neurology Institute, terminating in the dead end of a broom closet. On the way Samson passed a woman in a hospital gown and socks with rubber skids who mimicked with unnerving precision the expressions and gestures of anyone who passed. He tried to look away, but out of the corner of his eye saw her look away too, caricaturing his dismissal.

  Lavell had been at the end of the hall for so many years that his room, though spacious, had a cramped feel. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were stacked with books. Every surface not taken up by papers was cluttered with medical paraphernalia. There were plastic models of the brain with removable hemispheres, a ceramic phrenology bust mapped with L. N. Fowler’s psychogeography: the regions of blandness, youthfulness, wit. A skeleton stood by the erasable whiteboard on which Lavell sometimes illustrated things for his patients. Scattered here and there were toys for children who came to him, locked in the anechoic chamber of autism.

  “Who’s that woman?” Samson asked, sitting in the chair the doctor motioned to.

  “Who?”

  “In the hall, like she’s possessed.”

  “Marietta? She has Tourette’s, a very severe case. It makes her tic like that. She has an overpowering impulse to mimic whatever she sees.” Lavell lifted a stubby finger and rubbed his eyebrow. “A colleague of mine, smart guy, wrote a case study of her. Whether the individual Marietta truly exists or if the impulses, so all-consuming, make her just a phantasmagoria of a person.” He listed the great ticquers of all time, enumerating them like Hall of Fame batters. He described an old medical book that began with the anonymous memoir “Confessions of a Ticquer.” “Have you considered writing anything yourself since your surgery? Keeping a journal, et cetera?”

  Samson was aware of Lavell leading the discussion here and there, directing a flashlight on the empty mine shafts of his mind. But he enjoyed their talks; Lavell seemed to expect nothing from him. Samson felt he could say or do anything, could crouch on the chair and jerk around like a monkey, screech Whoo! Whoo!, and Lavell would not be moved to comment.

  A tall Asian man with his hair standing on end opened the door of the office and squealed a quick-fire “Hi! How are you? Hi! How are you?”

  “Fine,” Lavell replied curtly, and turning his attention back to Samson, continued talking until the man softly shut the door and continued on his way.

  “And how are you?” Lavell asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “Oh, fine, I guess.”

  “How are things with Anna?”

  There was so much Samson wished to ask, for instance how many times a day did an average man of thirty-six masturbate, and how often did married couples have sex? He wanted to administer to Lavell a questionnaire about how a woman’s body worked, about what to do to make her scream and moan and throw flowers at his feet. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was too mortifying, especially as it seemed highly possible that the questions would be answered with textbook pictures, reducing the whole erotic mystery to a series of movements as academic as a square dance.

  Lavell leaned back, waiting. His chair creaked.

  We did it! Samson wanted to shriek, but instead he coughed and answered, “With Anna? The same, really. She was upset the other night.”

  “Yes?”

  “She asked me if I had any empathy for her. For everything she’s going through right now.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s sad. Sometimes she’ll get a certain expression on her face and it makes me feel awful. But I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m suppose to feel myself—it’s hard to even begin imagining what it’s like for her.”

  “Interesting choice of words, empathy.”

  “Why?”

  “For exactly the reason you said. Empathy is the capacity to participate in, or vicariously experience, another’s feelings. In order to do that, you need to draw on the memory of having experienced something similar—the very thing that is impossible for you to do.”

  “That’s true.”

  Lavell raised his hands. “So what did you say to her?”

  “I held her. She was crying so I put my arms around her.”

  “Good choice,” Lavell said.

  Eventually the discussion turned to his childhood, as it often did. The memories returned in no particular order. Why one memory declared itself at any given moment, he didn’t know. Knowing would mean understanding the order of the things.

  And then their conversation surfaced again in the present, breaking up the sound of birds bickering in the trees outside, and apropos of nothing Lavell asked, “Do you know what it feels like to be in love?” The word seemed out of place between his fleshy lips. Samson thought of Jollie Lambird, which embarrassed him, and he looked down at his shoes that seemed too shiny.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What about Anna?”

  “Look, it’s all a bit mystifying.”

  “I should think so. One minute”—Lavell snapped his fingers—“and the next thing, you’re married. It would throw anyone.”

  Samson pictured Anna as he had seen her this morning, hovering above him. “She’s lovely. Beautiful and kind and what’s not to like? But why her and not someone else?”

  “A decision you made, we have to assume, based on experiences with other women before you met Anna.”

  “But who is she? I wake up in the middle of the night and she’s lying next to me. Sometimes she holds her breath when she sleeps. Her head hits the pillow and in a minute she’s asleep and then suddenly she stops breathing. Like she’s just jumped into a freezing lake. Like the sudden revelations of her self-conscious—”

  “Her unconscious.”

  “Her unconscious, as if it’s shocked her. Sometimes I want to pound her on the back to get her to start inhaling again, but just when I think she’s going to turn blue the breathing starts up as if she never stopped, as if she weren’t this close.” Samson held up two fingers with an inch between them.

  “Close to what?”

  “That place just beyond everything she knows for sure. The same place I woke up in.”

  “You had a cerebral lesion. Don’t you think there is a logic—a terrible logic—to your amnesia? The tumor destroyed—”

  “I know, I know. A little to the left or right and I
might not have remembered how to go to the bathroom. I might have existed in some eternal moment, with no memory of the minute that’s just passed. I might have lost my ability to feel. I’m lucky, sure. What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost … negligible. It’s true that there’s grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny, sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?”

  “You were saying that Anna stops breathing when she’s asleep. How at those times you think she’s ‘this close’ to something. To what?”

  “Oblivion, I guess. Where I was when they found me in Nevada. And now I’ve come back from it and can never be the same again.”

  “What was it like, this oblivion?”

  Samson shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you ever think there might be people who would envy you?”

  “They’d have to be crazy.”

  “Okay, how about this: if you could have your memory back right now, would you take it?”

  “Hey, whose side are you on?” Samson asked. To change the subject he told Lavell about the article on cloning he’d read that morning in the paper. As a boy, he’d always been drawn to science, to the discovery of miraculous things, the race for knowledge about the earth, human beings, the sky. It fascinated him now too, the idea that perhaps in fifty, a hundred years they could clone everyone at birth. “An extra,” he said, “in case something tragic should happen.”

  Lavell raised an eyebrow.

  “Seriously. They could keep the Extra on some kind of farm out in the middle of nowhere, just letting him get exercise and fresh air so he’ll be ready if he receives the call to duty. And then one day the call comes through—there’s been a plane crash, or cancer, or a skiing accident.” Samson thought for a second. “Anything but a suicide, because a suicide would mean it’s a no go, the Original wanted out and so that’s that.”

  “The call comes through.”

  “Yes, and now we have a problem, right, because the Extra doesn’t know anything about the Original’s life. All right, so maybe he’s been reading about his life in installments they give him every month on the farm. Still, he doesn’t know the intimate things.”