It was being a small part of a great effort, performing a role that couldn’t be filled by anyone else, that drew him into the project. It was Ray’s belief in the greater good, the larger picture. It was his unstinting acceptance of Samson, of who he was, not then but now.
He lay on his back and listened to Donald breathe and thought about his childhood and soon he was thinking about his mother. It was a loss that was almost too painful to consider, and he could only do it now, in the vaulted silence and stillness of the desert. It was as if he had been sleeping while she died, or worse, laughing his head off at a party. It had always been the two of them; it was as if he had closed his eyes and then, when he opened them, he was old and she was gone. As if she had taught him everything she could and this was the final lesson, the one that all the others had prepared him for. To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
He was lying on the floor of the southern Mojave Desert remembering his mother, and now tears were running down his face, his face that, though he had not known it, had given all of his loneliness away. Curled on the desert floor under the unjust stars, silently weeping for all he had forgotten and could not change, he let himself remember the only things he could. He was remembering and there was a chance that in New York, where the streetlamps would have already begun to fade against the gritty light, Anna was lying between the white sheets of their bed remembering him. There was a chance that in some cosmic equation a burden was added to your load each time you made for someone’s memory.
A mass of rock loomed up about a mile away, or maybe ten miles; it was difficult to judge the distances. And beyond that there were other rocks, buttes and flanks and sheer sandstone faces with secret lithologies, mountain ranges being born or dying, temporarily landlocked, unable to break off and drift into oceanic obscurity like parts of California.
His mother must have liked Anna, with her grace and giddy laugh, if you could make her laugh; the daughter she never had. It still surprised him when Anna knew things about his mother; things she had observed herself, but also details she couldn’t possibly have known and which he must have told her. How you could tell if his mother had been in a room because of the lingering scent of expensive perfume, the one luxury she said she would have even if she were destitute. How her politics were radical, and she liked to argue about them with anyone willing. How she took up causes and fought tooth and nail, organizing marches and night meetings from which she came back exhausted but elated, her eyes sparkling and a halo of stray frizz around her face giving her a mad look. How, before she went out on a date, she would poke her finger into a few stubby lipstick tubes and paint her lips, the combination of shades always producing the same bright red that left streaks on her teeth. How she was merciless in board games and made a show of beating his friends at chess, and appeared not to be watching the road when she was driving—checking her makeup in the mirror, searching under the seat for a token. How she rarely mentioned his father, though once or twice he found her on the floor reading a packet of old letters. That when she cried, tears would stream down her face and she would open her mouth but no sound would come out, as if she were surprised and unclear as to whose emotions had possessed her. That Anna knew these things about his mother made him feel bound, even indebted, to her.
He shivered in the cold and thought about curling up next to Donald to conserve body heat. But the old man’s spindly legs were sprawled as if he had been knocked down running, like a victim of lava preserved instantly in the stonework, a delicate and lasting thing, and Samson left him as he was. He was too cold to fall asleep, and he thought of the bonfire his great-uncle Max had made one Fourth of July on the beach, how he and his cousin had played a game of staying inside the circle of heat until they practically glowed and their eyes stung, and then turned and plunged themselves in the ocean. He fantasized about taking all the facts he knew of his life up until the age of twelve and, using a complex formula, mapping out his life exactly as it would later happen, multiplying out into the inevitable future. The whole life spread out like a model city. In the fantasy he could take his twelve-year-old self by hand—waking him up, the hand clammy with sleep—and walk him outside to see it, like a view from above: the small, faraway rest of his life. He wondered whether the boy would approve of it all: whether a respectful silence would come over him while he stood in awe, or whether he would in fact turn his head and look away in disappointment or disgust or even shame. Tears gathering in the corners of his eyes which he would angrily push away with a fist.
He woke a few hours later at dawn to the light breaking over the valley and the sound of a car passing in the distance. Donald was curled into a ball in the dust. Samson sat up and listened, then jogged in the direction of the noise. In a couple of minutes he found the blacktop. There was a speed limit sign sprayed with bullet holes. He stepped onto the road, walked to the middle, and stood on the faded broken yellow line, looking both ways down the length of paved gray to where the tarmac dipped and vanished in the haze. He stood there for a couple of hours until the sun was diffuse and white in the sky, and eventually he saw a car move slowly out of the distance. He watched it approach for a long time, like a movie with no plot, and when he could see the figure hunched behind the wheel he waved his arms.
He ran back through the scrub to where Donald was sleeping with his face in the dust, and gently nudged him awake. The old man rolled over, and when the sun hit his face he lay still for a minute, and then he said, “Who am I?” and opened one eye.
THEY WOULD COME to him and he would put his hands on their heads. He would feel their skulls through the tips of his fingers and then he would flatten his palms around the crown and call on the powers to heal them. When he was young, Ray told Samson, that’s how he wanted it to happen. That was before he spent nights in the anatomy lab, slumped in a chair with a headache from the formaldehyde, in the freezing basement of the medical school. There were students who hadn’t had time to dissect an arm or hand and so cut off the stump and took it back to their dorms wrapped in newspaper. Young apprentices lugging body parts through the night. The next day the sanitation men would find a slashed heart in a Dumpster and call the police department. But Ray had made friends with the night guard—he brought him a sandwich and coffee around midnight—and he let him in to work in the lab until his shift was over at dawn.
The first time Ray had opened a skull, sawing along the cranial suture line, he had gone weak in the knees. He had cut the brain loose from the spinal cord and held it in his hands. The gray matter was not gray at all but a dull brown. At five in the morning he stumbled back to his car and drove home. The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child’s. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hairy web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart pumping blood through her arteries. It terrified him how easily these systems could fail her. He sat down on the bed and laid his hands on her head, the palms over her crown of shiny black hair. She turned and looked at him, and for a moment she seemed not to recognize his face.
Ray and Samson were walking together after dinner; it was part of Ray’s regimen, a leisurely walk after meals. Not far, just down to the entrance gate and back, with the mountains bruised by the dying light and the first bats wheeling out. There were moments when, listening to Ray, Samson felt he understood how people took up with cults, deciding to give up everything to follow one charismatic leader, sleeping in vans, selling literature on street cor
ners, and dancing with bells. Chanting and keeping a picture of the leader in their pockets, a balding man with tinted glasses, arm raised in absolution ever hovering above their heads, a man who spoke to their masses through a microphone held close to his lips, using the reverb to increase the drama. How they went to work for this man, bringing back money from selling crafts they had made with their teeth and toes, complicated things made out of raffia. There were times, when Ray was on a roll, that he seemed touched by a certain light, and Samson could almost understand how people with families, two-door garages, and good jobs might turn it all over to the leader and follow him down to a tropical forest to set up a town with a bland, ominous name. He had read about this; such things actually happened.
A week had passed since Samson and Donald had gotten lost in the desert and been rescued by Ray. Ray had gone out to find them, trawling the road until he saw Samson’s thin figure step out onto the blacktop. Donald had been silent as they drove back to the lab, clutching a plastic bottle of water in his lap that he swigged from every few minutes, wincing like it was whiskey. His face was streaked with dirt, and he had the subdued and chastened look of a person who has just had a brush with death. He stayed on at Clearwater a few days more to finish up whatever they needed from him at the lab, looking haggard and obviously in pain whenever he coughed. When he finally left on a clear blue Friday at the very end of April, Donald assured Samson that he would know everything was fine as long as Samson didn’t hear from any lawyers. If he happened to suddenly kick the bucket, Samson would know right away because he’d have to come and claim the land deed. Samson told him he was talking nonsense but Donald just crushed him to his chest in an embrace surprisingly strong for his weakened state.
“Atta boy. Do me a favor, Sammy, I’m just thinking. Make sure my sister doesn’t bury me in one of those rock garden cemeteries filled with geriatrics. Now that I’m on the subject, I’m thinking cremation. Very natural-like, ashes scattered to the four winds. You think you can arrange that?”
“You’re being morbid,” Samson said into Donald’s Hawaiian shirt.
“You’re my next of kin, Sammy. Who else if not you?”
Donald released him from the bear hug and dragged the little, happy suitcase down the path and stuffed it into the taxi, then saluted Samson and bowed in four directions. Samson stood on the steps of the Bathhouse feeling miserable, holding Donald’s dog-eared business card with an address in Phoenix and a voice mail number on it, watching the taxi bounce down the dusty road and turn out onto the blacktop.
Begin again with nothing, or almost nothing, and still one must begin. And what Samson felt for the first time since he had woken in the hospital was the desire to finish what he had started. It’s not that Ray had lulled him into acquiescence; there were reasons he agreed to volunteer for the final part of the experiment. For one thing, Ray’s request flattered him and made him feel slightly extraordinary: a small part of history, going where no man had gone before. And he knew, with the same sad regret that perhaps accompanies a child’s first forgetting, that new memories—memories of all that had happened since he awoke in the hospital—had already begun to encroach on the emptiness in his mind: he was losing it by day, by acre. But in the end, he agreed mostly because he’d already decided not to turn back: to carry their conversations through to the end.
They were still years from being able to actually transfer a whole memory from one brain to another, but Ray explained that even at this early date they could transfer something primitive. Maybe it would only be static fragments or the vertiginous sense of remembering a memory that belonged to someone else. When Ray finally asked him outright if he would volunteer to accept the first transfer, however poor or incomplete, they both knew the question was already redundant.
You’ll do it? Ray asked, the whole desert leaning in to accept the inevitable reply. Yes, Samson answered, yes.
At one point or another it simply became the obvious end to his time in the desert. It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as a hinge, a pivot between two lives. Or not: maybe enough time would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.
That May morning he woke early to the sound of rain plinking against the roof, and within minutes it was coming down like a landslide. He stumbled out of bed and opened the door. Outside, the light was metallic, and flashes of lightning cracked across the sky strobing the desert. The thunder hit the mountains and came rolling back as an echo. The rain came down faster than the ground could absorb it, and gullies formed, swiftly carrying the water to reservoirs deep below the surface. Samson thought of the kids who had been diving in some underground pools a hundred miles north and never surfaced, the girlfriend of one crying as the rescuers dove deeper and deeper but never found the bottom. Then the rain stopped as quickly as it had begun. The sun came out and the puddles reflected the sky like mercury, and for a moment the shocked desert stood still.
An hour later Samson was lying in the dark fully wired. The drugs they had given him had begun to seep into his bloodstream, though he couldn’t tell if his thoughts were getting more vivid or growing vague. From time to time Ray’s voice came through the headset telling him they were almost ready, asking how he was feeling, chatting about the weather outside. The voice sounded more distant each time, as if it had to travel an ever-greater distance to reach him, and the words lost their meanings before Samson stopped hearing them altogether. It felt like his mind was loosening its hold on him, letting him go, and some part of him objected to this, a minor part that wanted to cry out in protest against such abandonment. But the rest of him felt warm and drowsy, content to give in as his mind receded. It was like dreaming awake: the desert, a road, a car moving through so much space.
And then, out of the jumble of images: Anna’s face. Pale and luminescent, with the little scar above the lip, a lip that rose a little higher on the right side when she spoke, that had been perpetually chapped all winter. A face he had chosen out of so many others to look upon, to stare at for years. To watch in work or sleep, in sickness and in health, though nothing could come of such a vigil but care and wonder. Tremendous joy washed over him. If he could have, if he had still been able to find his limbs and move them, he would have gotten down on his knees. It was a moment of startling clarity, and then his mind fell into a confusion that did not end until the explosion blasted everything away.
THREE
HE WOKE TO the light, sunlight so flat and bright it had to be fake, so at odds was it with the Weather Channel talking nonstop about rain. A few seconds passed before he remembered where he was. When he did, a wave of desperation broke over him. The TV screen hovered on the current temperature in the Las Vegas area, and then the meteorologist came on, pointing to squalls and jet streams, palpitating Florida and the Leeward Islands on the satellite image behind him. Samson held his head in his hand and squeezed his eyes. He got up, drew the blinds, and staggered to the bathroom. His face looked gray in the mirror, the eyes glassy and ringed with dark circles. He noted this deterioration of his looks with a faint relief, if only because it was some proof that he hadn’t imagined everything.
He’d been staying in a motel in Las Vegas for two or three days waiting for the phone to ring, keeping the Weather Channel on at all hours because the steadiness of the information comforted him. If he turned it off he was immediately seized with panic, forced to fight for air and pace the room pleading aloud to calm himself. He was flooded with a loneliness that was spectacular, unbearable.
Half an hour passed during which he stared blankly at the TV. Eventually he fell back into a fitful, violent sleep, the weather reports absorbed into his unconscious so that his dreams were filled with wind and rain. Prepare to get wet, the meteorologist warned, we’re talking about an inch of rain or more, though the storm was nowhere near Las Vegas, where the average yearly rainfall was a scant four inches. It was elsewhere, in hurricane country w
here the houses were built on stilts. What the Weather Channel delivered was a steady clairvoyance and this: the news of other people’s disasters.
When he’d arrived in Las Vegas he’d gone into all the hotels Donald had mentioned—the Sands, the Flamingo, Caesars Palace—but no one there had ever heard of Donald Selwyn, not even the tight-lipped managers who came out of their back offices to relieve the staff when Samson remained insistent. After that he started leaving messages on Donald’s voice mail, waiting for the three rings followed by a sound like a wind machine, as if he had recorded his outgoing message while clinging to a cliff during a storm. “This is Donald,” it said as severe head winds blew through the background, “you know what to do.” He pleaded with Donald to call him back, calling again and again until the recorded words began to haunt him, as if Donald were secretly trying to communicate something under dangerous conditions. You know what to do, and then the dull beep that Samson listened to a dozen times until finally he started shrieking about the bomb going off in his head.
It was there in the center of his mind, the memory Ray had transferred; there was no way to get around it. The images were uncannily familiar, as if he had experienced them himself, though he knew he hadn’t, and this made them more frightening still. He could recall the heat beating down in the desert, and the sweat pooling on his skin under the fatigues. He felt the boredom and the dull apprehension of waiting, breathing in the dust and trying to move as little as possible. He could see the tanned faces of the other boys, their profiles flickering in the sun. And then the reluctant rising before dawn, the coolness of the floor and the longing to get back into bed, though he was already shuffling along in a line of bodies toward the showers. The metallic taste of the desert in his mouth. Stepping under the flow of water, his heart began to beat faster, blood coursing through his veins. No breakfast, not even a tin cup of coffee, though there were plenty of cigarettes to go around, their tips glowing in the back of the trucks. He saw and felt it all as if the memory were his own, but it wasn’t, damn it, and this is what drove him insane, more insane, even, than the blast whose force and heat seemed almost engineered to drive to madness anyone it didn’t kill.
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