Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  “It’s freezing in here,” he said, feeling goose bumps rise on his arms.

  “Goddamn polar,” said Ray.

  He went into the lab every day for them to study his brain. They put him in a chamber with Ping-Pong ball halves taped over his eyes, slathered conducting cream onto his scalp, and fit a helmet over his head. They closed the five-hundred-pound steel door and he sat alone in the dark, thinking. He listened to the instructions that came through the speakers. There was a certain thrill in being the subject of such intimate attention: to know that on the other side of the steel walls a team of scientists was tuned in, tracing the currents of his mind, the migrations of his thoughts across the hemispheres of his brain. Sometimes they came in to fix a loose electrode. They put their hands on his head like a benediction.

  Other days he inhaled something radioactive, then lay in the bowels of a machine that took pictures of the gamma radiation of positrons colliding with electrons as the substance moved through his cerebrum. Later they showed him the images, but though he studied them closely, he could find no sign of the empty field that he had returned to again and again for refuge since he had woken into his life. Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he’d briefly wondered if the emptiness he’d been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.

  When he wasn’t needed in the lab, he hiked in the hills behind the laboratory with a field guide, identifying plants and animal tracks, finding rocks scored by glaciers, each day going a little farther and marking his trail with stones. He didn’t know what had brought him to the desert the first time—or if it even had been the first time when the police picked him up, a man without a past walking half-dead in the noonday sun. Very likely he had arrived by accident, but if so, when the last stand of houses fell away and he found himself in such an expanse of emptiness, it must have relieved him to drift in a landscape that did not aggravate his mind but surpassed it in oblivion. He might have gone weak with gratitude to at last meet the scorched face of his own mind. Or maybe along with all memory his ego itself had been obliterated, so that he could no longer distinguish between himself and the world, and, reaching the desert, it was as if he passed clean into it. Maybe the look on his face the police officers had taken for blank was the ecstasy of absolute freedom, of becoming only weather. And then, just before he had dissolved into nothing, they had pulled him back by a thread, and he had woken again in the locked box of his mind, conscious of a clock on the wall that read 3:30.

  At night he sometimes visited Ray in his office. He would find the doctor staring at the computer, lost in thought. At all other times Ray was keenly aware, a man who’d always sensed he was more intelligent than the rest, who’d learned to direct what was happening around him almost imperceptibly. It pleased Samson to find him so unguarded; it made him feel closer to him. Once when he’d come in Ray had been silent for a long time, so long that Samson began to wonder whether he’d noticed him enter.

  “Ray?”

  The doctor turned. “Samson. Sorry, I’ll just finish up this e-mail. Letter to a colleague of mine in San Diego,” Ray said, fingers rattling across the keys. “Odd guy. Knows everything about the hippocampus. The world expert on the hippocampus. Knows more about a ridge located on the lateral ventricles of the brain than he does about his own kids.” He leaned back and hit a key with a pianist’s flourish. “There. Finished.” He motioned to the chair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down, Samson. I’m glad you came by. I was thinking about something this afternoon and you came to mind.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “The old thoughts. The whole subject of loneliness.”

  “What, you think I’m lonely?”

  “Are you?”

  Samson shrugged. Some jazz was playing low from Ray’s stereo, and it reminded him of Anna as he had come across her once, humming and swaying barefoot to a plaintive saxophone coming from the radio. He studied a paperweight on Ray’s desk, a starfish suspended in glass. “I suppose you don’t get very lonely,” he said, “what with so many people around you all the time, with the whole team working together.”

  “Me? I’ve been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse.”

  “Really? Because it always seems …” Ray looked at him, waiting. “Anyway, what about your wife? Didn’t you say you were married?”

  “When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you.”

  Samson hefted the paperweight and paused to think of how his great-uncle Max used to take him to the pool at the local Y, how he would tread water and float on his back while Max did leg lifts in the water, talking to him about love. He spoke to Samson as if he were an old crony, one of the liver-spotted survivors in to do a few asthmatic laps, to exert a last burst of prowess, a man withered by exposure to the elements. He had been barely twelve. Love, Max would say, his gnarled toes breaking the surface, love is the goal of the species. Not shtuping. Shtuping you can do anytime. It’s love that’s not so easy to find, lowering the left foot as the right floated up in a regiment of European bathhouse calisthenics.

  He put the paperweight down and looked at Ray. “I don’t know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?”

  “Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you’ve actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again. Only it doesn’t last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion—the hope you’d held on to all those years—has been shattered.”

  Ray stood up and walked to the window, and Samson marveled again at the starched clothes, the linen sleeves neatly cuffed at the elbows, the pants with razor creases, a man untouched by weather.

  “But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it’s pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

  “People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?”

  “Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known.”

  “But don’t you think that being alone is somehow”—Samson struggled for the right word—“I don’t know, good?” He thought of Anna dancing in her underwear, her T-shirt falling just at her hips. Anna looking out the window, on her face an expression he’d never seen, the trace of some part of her that remained unattainable. “That to love someone is one thing, but if it means giving up the part of you that’s alone and free—”

  “That’s just it!” Ray shouted. “How to be alone, to remain free, but not feel longing, not to feel imprisoned in oneself. That”—he stabbed the air with his index finger—“is what interests me.”

  Ray hurried over and pulled his chair next to Samson’s. He leaned in, his face so close that Samson felt the need to draw his head back to preserve the few inches that served as an unspoken barrier, a small margin of difference uncrossed except for intimacy. As much as he liked Ray, as much as he wanted to be p
ersonal with him, the sudden closeness set him on edge.

  “You’re such an unusual case,” Ray continued. If he noticed Samson’s discomfort, he didn’t let on. “Not just what happened to you, not just your condition, but your response to having lost your memory. You chose freedom. Instinctively you chose it. Just left it all behind and headed out into a new life.”

  “I had a tumor—”

  “Okay, sure, but afterward. You didn’t want it back. You just turned it all away. No ties binding you to anyone. It must have been—it must be—exhilarating. And now you’re dealing with the consequences. The loneliness. I know. From the beginning I could see it. That first day, when I picked you up at the airport, I could see it in your face.”

  Samson raised his fingers to his face, as if he could feel what secrets he had given away, things Ray had read in his expressions that he didn’t even know himself.

  Ray talked and he listened. The arid heat that dulled Samson’s own thoughts seemed to concentrate Ray’s into perfect, terse structures, purified of all excess. It was at once captivating and unnerving, the ease and grace with which he spoke, as if he had rehearsed it before, and yet there was nothing unspontaneous about it. If anything, Ray seemed gifted at being able to seize the moment. He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

  “The misery of other people is only an abstraction,” Ray insisted, “something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one’s own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.”

  “And mistreat each other, won’t they?”

  Ray nodded. “Horrendously.”

  The low jazz played on, and outside, the desert was Ray’s stage. When Samson finally left, stumbling back to the Bathhouse in the pitch-dark, he felt a little thrill in the pit of his stomach, a rising of goose bumps on his skin that was not only because of the fierceness of the stars and the chill in the air. Despite everything Ray had said, he felt the doctor understood him, and that he in turn had witnessed something like another man’s mind laid bare.

  SAMSON RAN THE hot water in the bathtub. The nights were still cold once the sun set, and he lowered himself an inch at a time into scalding water, each new level of submersion happening before he was ready, the water a hot itch, a small punishment to clear the way for comfort. The water dissolved the day’s sweat and dust. Silver bubbles like mercury formed on his skin, the skin taking on a green hue under the water, making it look rubbery and inhuman. Droplets of sweat beaded on his forehead. His whole body in, he squeezed his eyes shut and slipped his head under, and in the hot, muffled silence he could hear his waterlogged pulse. He stayed like that, holding his breath for as long as he could, and when his head broke the surface he blinked and gasped. He leaned forward and rubbed the steam on the mirror, and slowly his face began to take shape.

  It was a fine face, nothing unusual, only a little rugged from the sun; a face that no one would look away from in displeasure. He hadn’t shaved for a few days—he still found the habit awkward—but despite the shadow of growth it was still the face of a man who wouldn’t be averse to helping an old lady cross the street. Who, feeling her bulky handbag against his hip, might imagine making off with it only to discomfort himself with his proximity to the barbarians. A face not puffed out by drugs or heavy drinking, the healthy face of a thirty-seven-year-old (a birthday come and gone) who ate generously from the five food groups and exercised regularly, evidence being membership to the West Side Racquet Club and the profusion of grayish gym socks and nylon shorts with the built-in underwear perforated for air circulation that he had found in his bottom dresser drawer. There seemed to be a belief that one’s face reflected certain qualities of one’s inner life. He tried to come to terms with this now, to claim the face as his own. Since he first saw it in the hospital mirror, his face had been like someone who was following him, attempting an impression of himself.

  A fine face. If not that of a hero, then of a man who had the potential for passing the endurance tests and the grueling training needed before blastoff and moon walk. Though now the moon was nothing, he’d learned, provincial, and it was Mars that constantly made the news. Just recently he’d read in Time magazine that the Global Surveyor orbiting Mars had sighted gullies ending in fanlike deltas, suggesting a relatively recent water flow on the planet; water that had been on or near the surface only thousands, or even hundreds, of years ago, billions of years later than previous estimates. The news had been leaked to the press, and experts had talked on the condition they not be named. Nothing gushing or springing, they said, no rivers or hot springs, for goodness’ sake, just the possibility of liquid water. And where there is water there could be life, they said, speaking from their homes, their words later quoted under images of the red surface marked with tiny furrows, flow marks, traces.

  He had left New York barely a week ago, and already the city was receding, becoming another life that did not necessarily relate to what came before or after it. It was the thing he found most difficult to grasp: the sense of a continuum, where the world was not something that happened in shards, moments of illumination in the darkness of consciousness. Because it was not, despite what he’d said to Donald, that the twenty-four years between the last glimpse of childhood and waking under the hospital clock had been obliterated. On the contrary, they existed: empty, submerged in silence, filled with nothing but the distant thump of a pulse. There, there was only time—not as the waking-alive knew it, with a before and now and after, but time as endurance: here, here, here.

  The water had gone cool and the fog retreated to the far corners of the mirror, left in patches like wisps of cloud after inclement weather. He stood up and dripped, the water only reaching his calves, wading water, water the level of a baby pool or a mildly threatening flood.

  Donald’s small suitcase was on the floor by his bed, decorated with colored decals from a host of American and Canadian cities. Samson hadn’t seen the suitcase earlier and it almost brought tears to his eyes now, the unswerving optimism of the stickers, the pride and extroverted friendliness of the gesture. He half wished he had gone with Donald to Las Vegas and spent the night drinking tropical cocktails under a plastic palm tree, listening to him proudly recount his adventures in each city. If the stories were made up, if Donald had only bought the decals all at once, in a souvenir pack at a local gift shop, it hardly mattered. What mattered was listening to him. Somehow the stickers—reflective or transparent, illustrated with landmarks from Salt Lake City, Portland, Anchorage, Port Edwards, Phoenix—made him feel more compassionate toward Donald. It was as if he had come to Clearwater on a holiday. He thought about Donald’s eyes: careful eyes that took in more than they expressed, eyes incongruous with the impersonations and the real estate. It occurred to him that he hadn’t asked Donald what memory he was donating to science; what powerful and unforgettable image, what stream of neural firings to be used as the lab saw fit. He didn’t even know how much Donald knew about the whole Clearwater project; neither one of them had mentioned it. From what Ray had told Samson, they were currently recording one of Donald’s memories on a massive computer. The team had already created the technology to read and record the brain’s activity during the process of remembering, break the information down, then produce a map of its entire chemical and electromagnetic activity while experiencing the memory. What they were still working on was how to trigger another brain to perform the same functions—how to actually transfer a memory. Ray had asked Samson not to discuss what he’d been told; for all he knew, Donald knew nothing except that a memory of his was being recorded for the future.

  He walked outside and wa
ited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. If there was no moon, as there was not tonight, the stars went berserk, billions of them shuddering against the black. Sooner or later, in the corner of his eye, he would see a meteor streak past, hitting the atmosphere and burning up. A few months before, a meteor had lit up over the Yukon and pieces of black rock came down over Canada. A man, an ordinary layman, picked them up out of the snow, carbonaceous chondrite that he slipped in plastic kitchen Baggies and froze until the proper authorities could send someone to fetch them. Little hunks of the universe preserved next to deer meat in his freezer, until the snow melted and the UPS man could get through.

  He found the path that passed the laboratory before it began to ascend into the hills, winding past the dark outlines of rock formation. At the top were a busted couch and a few chairs, most likely dragged up there by some kids who used it as a hangout when the place was still abandoned. He took out a pocket flashlight and directed the weak beam on the star chart he’d bought in town: a plastic disk with a rotating cardboard center notched with the hours and months and a map of the constellations.

  He thought of the moment, during the last week of summer before the seventh grade, when he was lying on his back in the grass next to Jollie Lambird, moving his fingers toward her hand as she said, Taurus, Pegasus, Cassiopeia, knowing he could keep reaching as long as the list went on. When his fingers touched hers she whispered, What sign are you? His heart was pounding.