Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  “But then I say something and you turn around. And I can see there’s nothing there. I mean, nothing that belongs to me.”

  When he suggested that maybe he should move out, she didn’t argue.

  “What is it like, I wonder,” she finally said, “to be you?”

  “Like an astronaut,” he said, and in the dim light he thought he saw her vaguely smile.

  On the morning he left, she went out with Frank while he packed. When she came back he was sitting on the couch with his bag at his feet.

  “Isn’t there anything else?” she asked, the dog crouched between them like a small country. Samson looked down at the duffel that contained some clothes, the address book, his CT scans, now smudged with fingerprints. He scanned the living room. A burglar would find nothing here, would pocket only the pewter candlesticks to be thrown away later, found at dawn by the garbage collectors.

  “No. I can always come back later. If there’s something.” But then his eyes caught on the camera on the shelf. Anna took it down and handed it to him.

  “Take it.” He lifted it to his eye and found her through the lens. She stood patiently, like someone whose face is being felt by the blind, but when he pressed the shutter she flinched. “To remember me by,” she said, and smiled grimly. The dog rolled over as if he were dead.

  Lana had already left for the canned sunlight of California, and that night Samson slept alone in her bed. It was a relief to lie with no one next to him, to be staring at the ceiling in a room he didn’t have to try to remember. To be so alone, free to retreat further into the emptiness of his mind: it gave him goose bumps. There was also the thrill of sleeping in the bed of another woman. The pillows smelled of Lana’s shampoo, like a tropical drink. She’d left a note on the refrigerator telling him to make himself at home and reminding him to water the plants, which he did as tenderly as if he were feeding baby animals. “Cheaper than cats,” she’d said when she showed him around the apartment the week before. He’d told Anna that he’d run into one of his old students, and that she was leaving for L.A. and offered him her place. He watched Anna for any sign of recognition of Lana’s name, but her face displayed only a withdrawn sadness.

  The phone rang, and the machine picked up after a few rings. “Hi, you’ve reached Lana,” her voice spooled through the dark apartment. “I’m in California until May,” and then the flat note of distress, of modern longing.

  It was someone named T.J. He wanted her to call him when she got the message.

  “She’s in Los Angeles,” Samson said, picking up the phone as the boy began to soliloquize about where Lana was at this very moment.

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m subletting her place. While she’s gone.”

  “Oh,” again. “Well, give her the message.”

  Samson listened to the dial tone.

  People in the department had started to talk. “Who cares what they say?” Lana had said before she left, and Samson understood that she enjoyed being the subject of gossip, the alleged younger woman, though the truth was that nothing but conversation had taken place between them. Samson’s colleagues, who were willing to accept a brain tumor and amnesia, who sat on the coffee-stained chairs in the faculty room discussing the tragic loss of a brilliant mind, found his burgeoning friendship with a student unsettling. Plus there was the larger problem of what to do about his job.

  He avoided going to the department, but ran into other professors at the library, where he spent most of his time. Eventually the chair of the department, Marge Kallman, a Romanticist who wore pants suits and carried shapeless handbags, called him in for a meeting. She sat behind her desk and the light came in from behind, catching like a halo in the spun web of her blow-dried hair. She spoke highly of Samson’s work, praising his book on the American tradition whose spine she rubbed as she spoke. She eulogized his teaching skills and his popularity among the students, his ability to speak their language. The tone of her voice shifted smoothly when she arrived, inevitably, at his illness and she repeated again how aggrieved at his loss everyone was. Gently she told Samson that they felt they had no choice but to begin the search to hire another Twentieth-Century person to fill his position.

  Samson nodded encouragingly. He made it easy for her. He told her they could empty his office, he didn’t want anything. He asked only that Anna could keep living in their apartment, which was faculty housing, and that he retain his library privileges. Marge looked relieved, glad to have avoided a scene. Samson complimented her brooch, a gilt peacock with rhinestone tail feathers.

  “Would you believe I bought it in Las Vegas?”

  “I’ve been there,” Samson said, standing up.

  “Yes,” Marge Kallman said, signing forms.

  “The desert,” Samson added.

  It was Lavell’s favorite part of the story. “Why Nevada?” he asked, pacing like a detective along the circumference of a crime. He answered himself: “Because it’s perfect.” Because the desert is where you go when you find your brain scorched, blown-out, uninhabited. You go there for camouflage. Like a wild animal, you follow your instinct.

  He stopped seeing Lavell. There was nothing left to say to him, as there was nothing to say to Marge Kallman, or even Anna. He lay still in the subterranean dark of a strange apartment. He fumbled for the camera. He opened the back and flipped on the lamp and in an instant the exposed image of Anna was burned out of existence.

  He went to the library only to take out and return his books. He brought them home in stacks. He kept a ready supply of cash for the Chinese deliverymen that cycled the wrong way down the avenues the quicker to bring him a midnight pizza. He read widely, without a plan. He had no agenda. He favored books about astronomy and voyages in space, though he also liked biographies of movie stars or great leaders; without a past of his own, he was fascinated by those of other people. He read People magazine and sometimes Rolling Stone. He read about the end of the Cold War. He read all of the novels on the curriculum for his Contemporary Writers class, which he found on Lana’s shelves. He read about the life of John Glenn, the life of Yuri Gagarin, who traveled through space where only a dog had been. Carried out of the capsule when he floated back to earth, his body wasted by zero gravity.

  Anna called him to discuss insurance and bank accounts. Sometimes she called only wanting to hear his voice.

  “You okay?” Samson asked.

  “Yeah,” Anna said, though she sounded subdued.

  “How’s work?” he asked.

  “Okay. Fine, I guess.” Silence. “Is anything new? Anything you want to talk about?”

  He wracked his mind, thinking of something he might say to rescue them from another failed exchange. “I’m using the camera. I go on walks and take pictures.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s a good thing to do.”

  They arranged their finances. The medical bills had cut into their savings, and Anna’s salary from the social services agency wasn’t much. Samson took what little he needed, and left her the rest. He wanted her to be okay, and anyway he didn’t want the money. He wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

  She put Frank on, who panted sullenly into the phone.

  It was true that when he occasionally went out to wander the city he took the camera. He rolled a new film into the back, advanced. He took pictures of things that interested him, bridges, construction sites, wreckage, though he never developed them. He kept the yellow canisters of film in a plastic shopping bag. Lana’s neighbor, an astrologist named Kate whose clients came to see her during their lunch hours or late at night, thought he was a professional. He took a photograph of her with her collection of crystals and did not disabuse her. Once, when he came home late, she heard him unlocking the door and came out in a purple robe smelling of alcohol. She leaned close and pushed herself against him. She put her hand on his groin. He ducked out of her embrace muttering an apology, slipped into the apartment, and listened against the wall
, flushed with heat, until he heard her quietly shut her door. When he ran into her the next week, neither of them mentioned it. She told him that Mars and Jupiter were shifting signs while the Sun met Uranus, signaling new opportunities. On New Year’s Eve they made daiquiris and watched the ball drop on her little television. Kate lit candles all around the room and swayed to Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain.” She pulled Samson off the floor and he moved his hips and flapped his arms to the music. When she placed her wet mouth over his, he didn’t object. She pulled his buttocks into her and, tipsy on rum, he happily grinded against her as the crowd filed out of Times Square. The next morning he woke up in her bed with a splitting headache. Kate was still asleep and in the gritty light her flesh looked blue. He dressed and slipped out the door. He swallowed some aspirin and got his coat and camera. It had snowed a few days before, and now the sun was out, reflecting off of everything.

  A month later it snowed again. By evening there were three inches on the ground and Samson walked to Central Park where the Great Lawn shimmered in the moonlight, the snow not yet trampled by dogs. He walked under the white trees, snow crunching under his shoes. He came out on the south side of the park and walked down Broadway, toward the Day-Glo of Times Square. The bars were filled with people watching the Super Bowl, the windows fogged with heat. They cheered as he passed.

  From ten blocks away he could see the giant screen suspended above Forty-second Street. Neon saturated the air, hemorrhaging a hundred words a minute. The football players jogged soundlessly across the screen, the snow falling past them like ticker tape. Samson stood on the traffic island and watched them huddle and break, men who didn’t know their own strength, whose entire existence was dedicated to the laws of the field. He wanted to get down on his knees, to prostrate himself before them. When the game ended he couldn’t feel his frozen hands and feet.

  When he got back to the apartment the phone rang as he was stripping off his wet clothes. He thought of letting the machine pick up, but at the last second lifted the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Samson?” The call unsettled him; it disturbed his anonymity.

  “Yes?”

  “You watch the game?”

  Anna had given out his number before he asked her not to and sometimes people called. “Who is this? I’m sorry, maybe Anna didn’t tell you.”

  “You don’t know me. How are you, Samson?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t mind me calling so late, do you? I’m on the West Coast, it’s earlier here.”

  “Well, it’s not the best time. I just stepped in. It was snowing outside and I’m freezing. Who did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Dr. Malcolm, Ray Malcolm. Lavell and I have known each other for years. He told me about your case. Fascinating.”

  “Thank you.” Samson leaned his forehead against the window. The snow continued to come down, falling evenly over everything.

  “Well, look, Samson. I won’t keep you now. I just wanted to introduce myself. We don’t know each other yet, but I have a proposition for you. Something I think you might find interesting. Ever been to California?” His voice sounded crisp and pristine, as if it had just been taken out of a box.

  “I was born there.”

  “L.A.?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it would mean you coming out here for a while. Hold on a second, will you, Samson?”

  He heard the doctor put down the phone and then the muffled sound of voices.

  “Sorry about that. Someone just came to the house, so I better run. I’m eager to speak to you, though. What do you say I call you back in a few days? We’ll talk then?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Glad I got through to you. Stay out of the cold.” Ray Malcolm hung up.

  Samson stood by the window watching the flakes of snow, each an original, irreducible fact, fall through the lamplight. He briefly worried that the call had to do with his health, that the doctor had bad news about the tumor somehow regenerating. But the final battery of tests Lavell had performed two months before was supposed to have been conclusive. He pushed the thought out of his mind; if anything had come up, Lavell would have contacted him himself.

  He undressed and got into bed, and for a long time he lay awake, imagining that his resting body was broadcast above Times Square. He was so still that those who watched him below did not know he was alive until suddenly he stretched and rolled over in the dark.

  TWO

  FROM THE AIR there seems to be a system: recognizable designs, networks on the desert floor. Crosshatches of ridge and fissure. Lines that fan out from the source. The shadow of the airplane slips across basin and range. Frost forms between the plane’s double windows, each geometric crystal an argument for the stillborn beauty of pure math. Eventually the cut of a road appears, as deep as a fossil in shale. Unbound by destination, a road simply for the sake of moving, however slowly, through miles of nothing. Through the system. The first grid is the strangest, the geometry of better living etched onto the desert floor: identical houses of a planned community pleated around the nucleus of a swimming pool. One and then another, until the desert is paved under streets and scattered with countless pools like a deck of blue cards.

  Samson waited at the Information Desk at LAX for half an hour, watching the arrivals screen as it logged the landing of another incoming plane, another disaster averted. The pale passengers streaming down the ramp full of static cling, a look of relief and determination on their faces. Eventually he wandered over to the newsstand and paged through the glossy magazines—bare midriffs, numerology, diet tips. Periodically he glanced over at the Information Desk to check for Ray Malcolm.

  He was reading Rolling Stone when he heard his name over the loudspeaker among the ranks of the missing, jet-lagged foreigners, jilted lovers called back at the last instant, lost children calling from courtesy phones: “Mr. Greene, Mr. Samson Greene, please report to the Airport Information Desk.” He leaned around the rack and saw a man who matched the description Ray Malcolm had given of himself. It was not yet too late to turn and walk out the sliding doors. The doctor scouted the crowd. Samson turned a few more pages, brought the magazine up to the cashier and paid, then walked toward him like a hunted man surrendering. When he saw Samson a slow smile settled over Ray’s face.

  “Terrible traffic. I thought maybe you’d given up on me,” he said, reaching out his hand now, the voice crisp as it had sounded on the phone, the hand rough and papery.

  “Dr. Malcolm.”

  “Call me Ray.”

  Ray Malcolm gave the impression of agelessness. He had a full head of white hair and tan, leathery skin surprisingly unwrinkled, except around the eyes where it had creased into deep crow’s-feet. He was small, even shrunken, yet he moved with a springy elasticity, as if he had the joints of a younger man. He was dressed in fine linen slacks and a button-down shirt, with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up to reveal a chunky silver watch, the kind worn by scuba divers, waterproof at a thousand feet. Samson guessed him to be about sixty-five, though he wouldn’t have been shocked if Ray turned out to be fifty or eighty. He was the kind of man people looked at twice, deciding whether or not to stare. What are the criteria for gaping? Samson wondered. Extremes: tremendous beauty or prizewinning ugliness; deformities; violent or noisy behavior. All rash, obvious reasons to gawk. But the great candidates for stares seemed more subtle, those that quietly, diplomatically challenge the authority of the norm. So it was with Ray, who now picked up Samson’s bag and glided him along, steering him toward the parking lot with gentle nudges like a Seeing Eye dog. Out on the highway, he maneuvered the white convertible with the same assurance and skill, deep in his bucket seat.

  They didn’t talk at first. Ray had wired him the money for the flight, but it was understood that there were no obligations. He could still change his mind and step out of the car at the next red light. Ray would be disappointed but he wouldn’t try to stop
him. It was understood that he had no interest in coercion. Everything was aboveboard with Ray; he wanted volunteerism, he said, people who understood the magnitude of the project. He wanted believers. People who would drop everything to go out to the desert.

  Samson wasn’t sure why he’d come. After Ray had called the second time, Samson had spoken to Lavell, who said that he was a brilliant man, that his work was pushing the boundaries of science. Samson liked the sound of Ray’s voice and the excited urgency of the phone calls. He was a doctor, some kind of research, that’s all he’d said—that he wanted Samson’s help.

  They accelerated past long-necked palm trees and pastel houses with grilles on the windows. The roar of the wind made it difficult to speak. Ray shifted smoothly, a little ring with a cloudy blue stone on his pinkie. Samson stayed put for the time being, his thumb hooked on the seat belt across his chest. One hand on the tattered envelope in his lap with the CT and PET scans Ray had asked him to bring, the magnetic resonance images of his brain.

  The sun was starting to set and the corroded orange light reflected off the cars. They turned off the freeway and began to wind up through the hills, the car murmuring as Ray nosed it around hairpin turns, past the lawns like Astroturf, the darkened windows of mansions, past cedar gates, cars, boats, motorcycles, flying saucers for all one knew, hibernating under canvas. It was mid-March. The air was warm and smelled of eucalyptus and Samson inhaled deeply the scent of his childhood. Eucalyptus and the faint brine of the Pacific. A strange sadness crept into some corner of him. The light was just beginning to turn thin and dusky, the floodlights of a Mexican-tile house coming on too early, a paranoid precaution against the night.

  “What a fucking city,” Ray marveled as they rounded a bend and the view cleared so that they could see the glitter of lights coming on in the valley. “No matter how many times I see it, it always amazes me. Especially coming back from the desert.”