Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  “Were you just there?”

  “Came back last night so I’d be here to pick you up. Remind me: your first time in L.A.?”

  “I probably came once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I’ve been here.”

  “You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they’ve seen a part of the city before, exactly like this.” Ray turned into the driveway and removed a remote control from the glove compartment. The gates swung open and they started uphill.

  Samson loved the movies. He used to save his allowance and his mother would drop him off and pick him up at the theater because the only movies she liked were documentaries or epics, history revived on the silver screen. She would happily endure numbness and cramped legs for the glory of The Sorrow and the Pity or Spartacus seen straight through. His tastes were more catholic: he would see anything with a plot, with dialogue, with the flicker of twenty-four frames per second.

  “It’s the movies or déjà vu. The mind taking the same picture twice, a little seizure, a coup by the cameraman, carried away by his own aesthetic,” Ray said, glancing over at him. “Or maybe you actually have been here before. Maybe you have a damn good memory.” A joke. Samson snickered, then straightened up, surprised at himself.

  They drove up to a large house, a low-slung glass and stone contraption that skirted across the cliff.

  There was no wind now. Ray cut the motor.

  “You look tired. I’ll show you around and then you can get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” He opened the door and got out, lifting Samson’s bag easily from the backseat.

  The house backed up onto the cliff edge, and the living room ended in a wall of glass overlooking the city. They stood together, looking down at the valley.

  “It’s beautiful,” Samson said, feeling he could say such a thing to Ray, feeling it was what the doctor wanted, though he meant it all the same. It was beautiful, the ambition of it, the freehand interpretation of a city. From such a height, the knowledge of the small, simultaneous faraway was comforting: people dialing the operator, swallowing pills, breaking off romances, signing their names. Twelve million people inhabiting one of the most volatile places on earth, naturally disastrous, prone to flood and fire. Sharing wavelengths. Ten-four, you’re breaking up, come in.

  “Isn’t it, though? I remember when I first moved here. It was more than thirty years ago. The house didn’t look like this then. I had a wife and children. I used to get up in the middle of the night and stand here, looking out. I felt beneficent. I felt I could help people. Once someone called me, the wrong number. He thought I was a psychiatrist. Sometimes they do that, look you up in the phone book. He was threatening to kill himself and I spoke to him all night. He had a stutter and I listened. He wanted to know was I still there. We spoke for hours and sometimes we were silent, me looking out at the city and him at the street corner where he lived, he wouldn’t say where. I thought I could hear the ocean but maybe it was the air conditioner or the wind. When we finally hung up he said he’d changed his mind for the time being. The next few days I read all the obituaries, but he’d never told me his name. Deaths like that don’t make the papers anyway.”

  “Help them with what?”

  “What?”

  “What did you think you could help people with?”

  “I don’t know, really. I’m a doctor. I wanted to help people. I was idealistic. I didn’t look at it like a city. I felt I knew them. Intimately.”

  “The ones with a certain longing?”

  “A vague unhappiness, yes.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I woke up at night wondering about the safety of my own children. I would look in and see their little humped forms under the covers. Rising and falling. You have children?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Arthur didn’t say.”

  “What did Lavell say? I’ve been wondering. That you would fly me out here, based on what he told you.”

  “He said you were found senseless in the Mojave Desert; you had a craniotomy to remove a juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma; you have no memory except of your childhood, and though you are capable of making new memories, you display little or no desire to remember. Should I go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said you were highly intelligent and that you displayed an interest in the possibilities of science and technology. He told me about a fascinating scenario you described having to do with the future of cloning.”

  “That’s what you do?”

  “Cloning? God, no.” Ray grinned.

  Samson looked around the dark living room. The outlines of paintings loomed on the walls. There was nothing extraneous, only a minimal amount of furniture for sitting uncomfortably: the home of an obsessive-compulsive or a genius. It occurred to him suddenly, “What kind of doctor are you?,” wondering now if he had come all this way for a crackpot, the crazy rich. A Scientologist or a man with a degree purchased on TV.

  “Trained as a neurosurgeon, but now I only do research, neuro-science. Not much interaction with them anymore,” Ray said, making a gesture toward the valley.

  “Like Lavell.”

  Ray smiled. “Yes. A memory man.”

  “Where are they now, your wife and kids?”

  “My wife died of cancer more than fifteen years ago. The children are both married. Matthew lives in San Francisco, Jill in London. They have children of their own. They come for Christmas. Can I get you something to drink?” Samson nodded, and Ray went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. And did it really matter if he had purchased his degree on cable?

  “Feel free to take whatever you want from the kitchen. There’s not much; I told Larissa—the housekeeper—to buy some things, but I’ve been on my own peculiar diet for so many years that I think it threw her. I just found a package of cookies on the counter.”

  “What kind of diet?”

  “A sort of macrobiotic thing.”

  Samson wondered if organic meals spun in the blender were responsible for Ray’s ageless appearance. He looked—especially now, in his own house—fortified against disaster. Samson remembered a boy he once knew, a friend of his, who had a brother with no immune system. He had to wear a plastic suit, like a bubble, all the time so that no germs could reach him. They kept him in a hospital in San Francisco and once he went with his friend to see the brother, called Duke. The mother drove them and during the car ride they crouched in the backseat and shot at passing cars with empty water guns. When they got to the hospital Duke was waiting. He had been told they were coming, and he had a huge, bucktooth grin on his face behind the plastic helmet. His mother hugged him through the heavy synthetic fabric. Duke just closed his eyes. Samson couldn’t tell if this kid liked it or not, if maybe he was so used to not being touched in the bubble that even the mother’s hug was awkward and a little threatening, like the affection of a huge dog. She brought him a few presents and after he ripped them open they all played together. Whenever anyone bumped into him there was the rustle of synthetic material or the strange, inhuman knock of something hitting hard plastic. When it was time to leave, Duke stood in the hallway waving to them with a grin and sad eyes, watching them walk away.

  When he looked up, Ray was watching him curiously. A telephone rang somewhere in the house, and when Ray switched on a lamp the bulb made a faint pop and flared. He walked down the hallway, and Samson heard him pick up the receiver and talk quietly. He felt the strangeness of being there in Los Angeles, in Ray’s house, on the other end of the phone calls he’d received over the past month. Macrobiotic: eat simple grain-based food and you experience a reversal of health deterioration. He’d read about it in a health magazine. In the macrobiotic view, disease starts as fatigue and ends as cancer or mental illness. Grains, the one universal fact all our ancestors shared. Not all seeds are grains.

  Ray came back into the room. “So what do you say we talk in the morning?
Like I said, no strings attached as far as the plane ticket is concerned. If nothing else you can turn it into a sun-and-sea vacation. Fuck, take the convertible. Go to the beach.” The occasional curse that flecked Ray’s speech was like the last surviving vice of a reformed man; a vague hint of immorality that made him seem less holy, more human.

  “I don’t know if I know how to drive.”

  “Right, of course. Well, we can call a cab.”

  Samson followed Ray up the wide, flat stairs suspended from the ceiling by steel rods. The guest room was at the end of the hall and looked out over the side of the house, onto a swimming pool with dead leaves floating on the surface.

  “Here’s the bathroom,” Ray was saying. “There should be towels.” He flipped on the light.

  Samson nodded and smiled. He felt a little rush of tenderness for Ray Malcolm and had to suppress the urge to grasp him in a hug.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m glad to have you here, Samson. You sleep well and I’ll see you at breakfast. Wake you at eight?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good then. Good night.” Ray began to shut the door.

  “Ray?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering, that first night you called me? After the football game, remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you call me from here?”

  “I think I did, yes.”

  “Someone came over, remember? Was it someone else who lost his memory?”

  “No. Actually it was a guy who has a memory that interests me. Something pretty extraordinary.”

  “Oh.”

  “Get some sleep. Don’t worry, we’ll talk.”

  Samson took a shower and air-dusted himself with the talcum powder he found in the medicine cabinet. He towel-dried his hair—it was longish by now, falling in his eyes so that he often had to wing it back. He felt along his scalp for the scar.

  He read Rolling Stone cover-to-cover and then turned off the light. He didn’t exactly know what he was doing here, in this strange house overlooking Los Angeles. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come. But there was something about Ray Malcolm’s voice that comforted him, and it seemed he had nothing anymore to lose.

  Right now Lana was perhaps driving on the highway, making her way around an exit ramp. Getting on or off, switching directions, listening to the radio and singing to herself. Anna was probably asleep. Frank was breathing in the dark. There was a certain comfort to the idea that all these things were happening at once.

  SAMSON WAS STARING out the window at the half-empty swimming pool when Ray knocked at eight. He had always wanted a pool, and when he was six he’d gotten the idea of digging one in the backyard. I’m digging a pool, he told his mother. She looked up from her magazine, her face shaded by a straw hat. Wonderful, she’d said. I’ll change into my suit.

  “Take your time,” Ray said.

  In daylight the house looked older, shabbier than it had the night before. The white paint was peeling and water-stained on the outside.

  “I built it in 1970. It was very modern at the time,” Ray explained, carrying a pot of herbal tea and a bowl of fruit. Samson followed him out onto the slate patio. There was a table and a few lawn chairs, the kind with plastic straps that leave leg welts.

  “I hired a well-known architect, mostly forgotten now. The house appeared in magazines, et cetera. My wife had to fight him over everything. He wanted to suspend the children’s bedrooms from ropes. They would come down by a system of pulleys. A two-year-old and four-year-old, like Tarzans.”

  A lawn mower hummed in the distance.

  “I’d bought the property four, five years before and we’d been living in the ranch house that came on it. The house of a television sitcom. The plan was to demolish it and build this as soon as we had the money, so we didn’t allow ourselves to get too comfortable. Funny, though, when we moved into the new house, the feeling stayed. We lived here like honeymooners.”

  Samson realized what all along the house had reminded him of. Ray had knocked down the house of a television sitcom and built a movie set in its place.

  “It’s beautiful, it really is. But it doesn’t seem very comfortable for a family.”

  “True.” Ray leaned back in his chair, a man who had built a house—an empire—and this allowed him the magnanimity to admit his mistakes. “I ought to sell it, I’m hardly here. But at least when I get back it’s waiting. This is where my children grew up. There are memories.”

  “Seems like maybe it’s a burden to keep.”

  Ray bobbed the tea bag around and fished it out of the pot. He looked up at Samson. “The memories or the house?”

  “Both.”

  “It’s unforgiving. You have to move through it at right angles. But I feel a great deal of warmth for this house. Like a woman you loved who spurned you for years, to whom you feel a certain gratitude because you realize she gave shape to your life.”

  Samson looked out at the view. He wondered if there had been another woman, before Anna, someone he had loved who had refused him. If so, her mark had been lost along with everything else. He shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun.

  “Your research, it’s in the desert?”

  “Right. In Nevada.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Nothing—some scrub, squat buildings: brothels, casinos, and military bases. Cheap and no neighbors.”

  And now he could almost believe that he really was in a movie, a character as cool and composed as Bogart, shocked by nothing. “Should I not ask questions? I guess what you do is legal.”

  Ray laughed. “Very.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, you seem very reputable.” Samson looked away, embarrassed. He had wanted to play Ray’s equal, for the doctor to feel that nothing was beyond him. Instead he had come out sounding naïve. “You seem like a good man, Ray. No neighbors, you were saying.”

  “Thank you, yes. We have a lab out there, a pretty substantial facility dedicated to a single project.”

  “Your project?”

  “You could say. It’s something I’ve been working on for years. But there’s a whole team of us working together now. Science like this, at the level we’re working at, demands incredible cooperation. Experts pooling their knowledge.” He lifted the mug to his lips and swallowed, holding Samson’s gaze. When he spoke again his voice was low. “We’re out there engineering something truly fucking amazing. Getting inside the brain in a way that’s never happened before. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  “And what is it, exactly? The project? I guess that’s the twenty-million-dollar question, right?”

  “Hundred-million.”

  “What?”

  Ray smiled. “It’s a hundred-million-dollar question, and yes, you should be asking, and I’m going to tell you. A man doesn’t get a call to drop everything and come three thousand miles without getting a good answer why.”

  “Good. Okay.” Samson bobbed his head, a little relieved though he wasn’t sure why. He felt Ray was on his side, and now he wanted very much to be on Ray’s. “Actually there wasn’t much to drop. I wasn’t doing anything in New York.”

  “Then it’s convenient for both of us that I found you when I did. By the way, what I’d really like to do is talk about you. Because I’d say you’re now an unusual expert on the subject of memory. What did I say last night about your turning this into a vacation? I’m amending it. You’re not off the hook until you talk to me about what it’s like inside your head. We’ll say you owe me that.”

  Samson happily raised his mug to toast, and knocked back the rest of the tea.

  “What is this stuff anyway?”

  “Thistle. Feel like a walk?”

  The air was already warm, a late-winter morning in California where snow is something that happens when you shake a plastic globe, coming down over the Nativity. They passed driveways guarded by cameras, outdoor sculpture, topiary. A man driving a red convertible accelerated past them, his h
and out the window to catch the breeze while the car stereo played Stevie Wonder, “very superstitious.”

  The next day Samson sat alone in the back of a cab, sweating. Heat was coming up off the asphalt, simmering under the sprawled city. They were crawling through midday traffic on the freeway, and he was scanning other cars for pimps and starlets. In his mind he played back the things Ray had told him, one piece at a time. In the monastic tradition the desert is a sacred place of simultaneous being and nothingness, Ray had said. A proving ground in which the sense of individuality is obliterated on the way to achieving a higher state. Samson thought about a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, something against which to measure the desolation. It was in a movie he once saw, a girl in cowboy boots chewing gum and scrounging for quarters to make the only sort of call the phone booth knew, the call of the long-lost and the missing. During which only the wind or stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier between silence and silence.

  A woman with fuzzy blond hair in a ponytail wriggled in her seat in the car next to the taxi, singing along to the radio. When she looked over, Samson winked. The girl was embarrassed at first and so was he, but then she smiled and fluttered her fingers that ended in two-inch pink nails. They rolled along at the same pace, glancing happily at each other and waving whenever they were realigned after one lane went faster than the other.

  “Get her number,” the taxi driver encouraged him, grinning in the rearview mirror.

  “I have a girlfriend,” Samson said, to avoid conversation and keep his eyes on the girl.

  “Two girlfriends!” the driver said gleefully, and went back to the job he was now taking very seriously, of staying neck and neck with the girl’s car. When they came to the exit and had to turn off, it seemed everyone was a little sad, the girl, the driver, and Samson, who wondered what her name was; he should have at least called across the lanes to ask her name.

  They drove up and down the streets at the edge of campus. He had Lana’s address on a piece of paper he’d kept in his wallet. He’d tried calling her from Ray’s house, but no one had answered. Probably she was in class, and he decided to go over anyway, figuring she might be back by the time he arrived. It was thrilling to know that these were the streets she walked down every day, her bag slung across her shoulder, punching up her hair from underneath so that it looked like she just got out of bed.