Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  There were times when Samson himself felt the simmer of excitement: to be part of such an effort, at the frontier of science, moving among the people who would not only be remembered by history but whose work might alter the very nature of remembering and history. The days passed and he waited because he believed he was needed. Only much later, when it was already too late, would the terror of it occur to him: a future where memories could be hijacked, where the last, deepest region of privacy could be invaded and broadcast. Where memories could be loaded unwittingly into the mind of a man who has forgotten everything. Who else would make such a perfect host? Twenty-four years gone in an instant, creating a vacuum. It was this emptiness that Samson had first described to Lavell that had so interested Ray, keeping him up late after Lavell called him that October evening. It was the first time Ray had heard a loss of memory described like that, a tundra, a distance that could be crossed. But if Ray ever wrestled with the demons that waited at the end of his work, he never spoke of it. He only described the beauty of sharing, and his enthusiasm was intoxicating.

  And then? Ray asked. They were driving in the car with the top down. Once you’ve given up everything, do you dare to set down the first mark?

  Samson didn’t answer. He leaned his head on the back of the seat and closed his eyes and felt the wind and the sun moving across his face.

  THEY HAD BEEN walking three or four hours before they realized they were lost. Donald was thirsty and Samson was telling him about the possible discovery of water on Mars, reservoirs of liquid water hidden under the frozen surface. Donald perked up and started in about a property scheme on Mars, something he’d seen on the Web, a niece or a nephew had shown him, a company selling acreage. Martian Consulate, it was called, the only legal Martian property registry in existence on earth, $29.95 per square mile, he marveled, plus $3.25 shipping and handling. Donald sat down on a rock and kicked at the dust.

  “An investment. Not for us, but our children.” “You have kids?”

  “I’m saying symbolic-like,” Donald said. “Jesus, I’m goddamn parched. What I wouldn’t do for a glass of water, and I’m ready for dinner. Palmolive, take me away.”

  Samson shielded his eyes from the sun; he had a cheap pair of aviator sunglasses he’d bought at the Hillcrest drugstore, but the light was still harsh, flattening everything out and dulling the colors of the landscape, giving everything a uniform glare. Even the jagged rocks appeared flat and listless, rocks that had once been under the sea but now couldn’t be squeezed for a drop of water. He turned in a circle, trying to figure out the direction from which they’d come. They had been following a path but it had broken off at a certain point and they’d kept going, scraping their ankles on the scrub. Donald pulled his legs up, sitting Indian-style on the rock. He put his hands in the air, pinching his thumbs and forefingers together, and closed his eyes.

  “I’m going to have an out of body experience right now. One, two, three, om, and I’m out of my body and psychically transferred to a chaise longue by the pool. Drinking a spiked grapefruit juice.”

  Donald was panting quietly and his face was damp and flushed. Samson began to wonder whether it had been a good idea to bring him along after all. He should have considered the fact that Donald was in poor shape. On top of that, he had been so busy talking that he’d forgotten to mark the path with stones and arrows. But Donald had been adamant about coming along, insisting that he wanted to see a rattlesnake because he couldn’t spend a month in the desert and come back without a brush with a poisonous snake.

  “Didn’t work,” Donald announced. “I’m still here. Let’s take the shortcut back to the complex. The compound. The Clearwater Spa,” he said, enunciating each syllable as if he were recording a tape for English as a second language.

  “Hold on. I’m just trying to figure out—”

  Donald flashed him a look. “Don’t even tell me.”

  Samson turned in a circle, and the more he turned the more the landscape blended, merging into a single sweep of range. He stopped and looked up at the sky, checking the position of the sun. It was maybe four o’clock, the heat still oppressive with at least three hours to go until sunset, the hour when the Hillcrest population would come to a screeching halt, hands over their hearts that fluttered for the well-stocked arsenal of America.

  “I hate to say …”

  “I’m having palpitations.”

  “Let’s just be calm about this. We can’t have gotten that far.”

  They walked in single file with Samson at the lead and Donald puffing behind him. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, but he didn’t want to upset Donald any more than necessary. He thought wistfully of Frank, who would have peed periodically along the way and gotten them back in no time.

  Samson talked aimlessly in a cheerful voice, telling Donald everything he’d learned about Mars in an effort to divert him from his thirst and sore muscles with the prospect of extraplanetary real estate. He told him about the Polar Lander that had been programmed to slam into Mars at four hundred miles an hour, surviving damaged but intact enough that it could crawl around for a few days on the surface, checking for water vapor and recording Martian sounds and dragging its busted ligature around like a cripple. How the story ended with the Lander exploding in space due to poor calculations by NASA, where everyone then cried for days, especially the program manager, who knew the craft intimately, who thought of it as his own, having spent a year moving around it in paper booties, face mask, and gloves to keep his germs from getting on it and infecting Mars.

  “Fuck Mars,” Donald suddenly piped up from the rear. “If you want water just go to goddamn Vegas. You’ve never seen so much water in your life. You’ve got cascades, pools, fountains. You’ve got flowing and dripping. Water raining from hothouse plants making dew on plastic grottoes. A whole freakin’ ocean in front of Treasure Island, flaunting water like it’s flipping the bird at the desert.” Donald stopped and religiously gave the finger in each direction, as if it were some kind of Native American ritual.

  “The Israelites, can you believe,” Donald said, stumbling on a bush and hobbling like a gimp whenever Samson turned to look, because this was something he did—like reaching under his collar and rubbing his chest—when he was unnerved. “In the desert forty days and forty nights. What would you say, Sammy, if we went out into the desert, got lost, and came back prophets? I mean what did Jesus do besides camp in the desert a couple of months? Without the proper equipment back in the day, without tents and I don’t know what kind of gear, it was your basic miracle.” Donald stopped to catch his breath. “You a believer, Sammy? Myself, I’m half-Jewish so I’m torn about the Jesus issue.”

  “Uh-uh, can’t say that I am. My mother was Jewish and my father was who knows what. I got presents on Hanukkah.”

  “What do you know, together we make a whole Jew. You never knew your pop?”

  “No.”

  “Not that it’s my business, but that must have been tough. Growing up and all.”

  “It was okay.”

  They walked a few minutes more in silence, with only the dry rasp of the blackbrush and sage and creosote underfoot, grudging plants that could be harnessed for medicinal purposes, plants whose resins left fragrant traces on their fingers. There was an occasional nervous rustle in the scrub, lizards and small fry darting off to safety while carrion birds hung motionless in the sky.

  “Hey.”

  Samson turned around and looked at Donald, who had taken his shirt off and tucked it into the band of his shorts. Beneath the carpet of hair, his skin was pale.

  “You should put that shirt on. You’ll get burnt.”

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Donald said, ignoring the advice. “I don’t want to get misty-eyed or anything, especially considering our present circumstances, it being important to keep a positive attitude and so on. But I’ve been thinking that in case I don’t make it to cash in on the property, someone should be around to claim the profit.
So what would you say to my adopting you, Sammy? No father-son crap, just for pure legal purposes.”

  “Wow, I’m flattered, Donald. But isn’t there someone else you’d rather—”

  “Shut up and come to Papa,” he said, throwing open his arms and closing his eyes.

  An hour or two passed and eventually the light began to condense and the shadows crept out from under things and lengthened, leaning away as if they didn’t want to let go of the day. Samson’s head was beginning to throb and, when he tried to swallow, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The heat confused him and he began to panic, realizing that he might have taken Donald miles in the wrong direction. The view was unconsoling, each jagged hill as barren as the next and too steep to climb to get any perspective. Donald was struggling for breath and his face had turned scarlet. Samson thought about leaving him and trying to make it back himself, then leading an emergency team to Donald. But the thought of Donald slowly dehydrating alone, talking to himself while the buzzards hung motionless nearby, was too much to bear. He imagined them dying together, side by side, and was not unaware of the irony of having been found near here last May, as if he had received a vision and was walking toward his death.

  “Sammy, I don’t feel so good.”

  If they had to go, let them go beautifully. In a flash flood, the water coming not to save them but to carry them away, lifting their bodies and floating them out through the canyons. Otherwise, they would be preyed upon by scavengers and maggots, or—if they were lucky—baked clean by the heat, cauterized by sun and wind, preserved in shriveled forms with every drop of liquid evaporated. Ray said there were hundreds of old corpses found every year in the desert, mostly dumped homicides. A hand attached to nothing, found palm-up by the road.

  “Let’s stop for a while and rest. No use running ourselves to the ground. They’ll realize when we’re not at dinner that something’s happened and they’ll send people after us.” If they lasted as long as it took to be found, rangers from the Park Service spreading out and dividing the map into a grid, searchlights on their heads, burrowing through the night like miners.

  There was a moon that night, heavy and orange at first, turning paler as it rose. The air was cold and Donald cursed himself for not being a smoker after all, because then he would have carried matches and they could have made a fire, for warmth and smoke signals. He sat in the dirt, leaning against a rock and talking quickly. He licked his lips, flicking his tongue across the white, parched mouth, his eyes jerking around nervously. There was a sound in the scrub and he jumped.

  “What the heck?”

  “Jackrabbit, I think.”

  “Scared me half to death. I think that stuff they’re giving me at the lab is starting to get to me. Like I’m seeing things. You think there are bobcats?”

  “No,” Samson lied.

  “How do you know? Could be watching us right now with their beady yellow eyes.”

  “The field guide didn’t say.”

  “A friend of a friend got mauled by a bobcat. Wife could hardly identify him.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I’m not gonna make it, Sammy. Tell the lawyers I said the property is yours. I’ll write it in the dirt here with a stick.”

  “You’re going to make it. I’m telling you they’ll find us by tomorrow, maybe even tonight. And then you’ll be back at Clearwater, and soon enough you’ll be home. You know, I don’t even know where you live.”

  “I ask myself.” There was a faint slur in his words.

  “So where do you?”

  “They know me at a couple of places in Vegas. I come and they give me a room for free. Mostly I stay with my sister and her kids in Phoenix, but I don’t like to outstay my welcome. I have a van but it broke down last month. I sleep in the back when I’m on the road. Let me ask you a question, Sammy, because I feel like pontifying if you don’t mind.”

  “Pontificating.”

  “Like I said.” Donald’s tongue fluttered across his lips. “Because let’s just accept the fact that these might be our last, you know, together. And what I want to know is, what makes you happy, Sammy? Tell your old pop now, because I gen-u-inely want to know.”

  Somewhere the flap of wings, a desert owl or a raven or some other bird the amateur ornithologist would know by name, followed by a trail of facts and statistics. Very possibly cooing in her ear, his wife’s ear, with the authentic spotted-owl noise.

  “I’d have to think. It’s not something that, you know, on the spur of the moment. To compose a list.”

  “All right, I’ll go first. A beautiful pair of tits, simple. Let’s actually talk about this. Seeing Vegas lit up at night, coming down from Hoover Dam. I’ll warm you up. It doesn’t have to be big. I mean the small pleasures, the late show of the Folies-Bergère. The sound of my wife’s—Helen’s—voice. C’mon, your old pop’s last wish.” Donald was making an effort, but his voice was thin and tired.

  “You’re being dramatic, but okay.” Samson gathered some pebbles and aimed at a rusty can. “Let me think.” A few moments passed with only the pathetic sound of the rocks hitting the metal, while Samson meditated on the subject. He thought of the first few days after the operation, when everything he’d looked at had startled and moved him. He thought of New York, of Frank and Anna, of the endless walks he’d taken trying to absorb the city and circumstances of his new life. He thought of his childhood.

  “What, your Alzheimer’s kicking in?” Donald slapped his forehead. “That you can’t think of what makes you happy? Because it’s beginning to depress me.”

  “Okay, okay. There’s Jollie Lambird, for a start.”

  “Jollie what? Is this person, place, or thing?”

  “Girl.”

  “Now we’re talking.”

  “Mostly it’s things from my childhood. Fishing with my great-uncle Max. Playing baseball with a couple of friends out in the field near my house. The summers. I was a happy kid, for the most part. Which one was Helen?”

  “The second.”

  “The long story?”

  “That’s the one.” Donald was breathing heavily.

  “We have time, why don’t you tell it?”

  “Lemme catch my breath, Sammy. Tell me about Jollie. Sounds like a French girl. I like the French. Very free people. The women go topless.”

  “This is when I was in the seventh grade, a girl who was twelve. Her chest probably as flat as mine.”

  “Sounds precious,” Donald said. “Next.” “It’s always tits with you.”

  “It’s tits with every guy! Stop any guy on the street and he’ll tell you it’s tits. Tits tits tits! And sometimes ass. And always pussy. That you don’t know this disturbs me. You’re like a kid, Sammy. Somebody’s gotta teach you a thing or two. If we get outta here alive, first thing is I’m getting you a whore. The best whore in the whole goddamn state of Nevada. Because it’s embarrassing. If you were my own kid—which technically you are because I said so—I’d be embarrassed.” Donald shook his head. “Repeat after me: Tits, pussy, ass! Tits, pussy—ass! Titspussya—”

  “Shut up,” Samson said, struggling not to laugh. He pelted the can with a stone, sending it skittering across the ground.

  “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t try to teach you.”

  Samson waited for him to go on, but Donald only closed his eyes and lay still in an exhausted slump.

  “There are other things too,” Samson offered. “If you still want to know, there was a beach near where I grew up—my mother and I used to go there. That would be one.”

  They sat in silence.

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate,” Donald said, “all those memories, gone.” He coughed and didn’t move to cover his mouth. “That you can’t remember, it’s tragic. If I could, the memories I would give you. I had enough good times for two people. More than two. What do I need them for now?”

  Samson looked at his face, but his eyes were still closed and his expression gave away no
thing.

  “Donald?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask you? The stuff they’re working on at Clearwater, how much do you know? Did Ray explain it to you?”

  “I got a decent idea.” Donald stretched out on the ground. “But what do I know about science? I go in and I do a job, I don’t ask too many questions. You on the other hand, you ask questions.”

  “You just asked me …” Samson said, but Donald was already asleep, breathing with some difficulty, making epiglottal sounds.

  The moon lit up the dead wood of yuccas that wouldn’t rot, worn smooth like bones. A couple of coyotes howled, and Samson tried to think of them as dogs, related many times removed from Frank, who was sleeping with his head on his paws at the foot of Anna’s bed. Donald was sleeping with his arms around the rock he’d leaned against and claimed as his own, the way the shipwrecked cling to a shred of timber. An old man with terrible lungs in the autumn of his life, a dark, sad season that might be sped up drastically unless something, some intervention, happened soon.

  He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything. The mountains and the stunted trees and the blazing, palpable stars and the coyotes and the power lines and the overpowering smell of sage. He knew that somewhere close there were trails: footpaths left by the Paiutes or Shoshones, forty-niners’ wagon trails, threads the field mice had worn down in the grass on their way to bitter water. Tracks which, if he could find them, would lead him through the mountains and out of the state into a greener country. But he was too tired to look any more.