Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  A stern-looking triage nurse approached wearing the sort of plastic clogs that can easily be washed clean of blood. He wondered whether he should tell her about the memory that had been swabbed onto his mind like bacteria onto a petri dish.

  “Have you checked in?”

  Samson stared at her, unresponsive.

  “Hello? I asked if you checked in yet?” she repeated, enunciating each syllable as if speaking to a foreigner or idiot. An image crossed Samson’s mind of her administering electric shocks.

  “We’ve come to the wrong place,” he said, grabbing Luke and pulling him back through the automatic doors.

  Outside, Luke rubbed his arm and shot a look at Samson.

  “We’d never get past her,” Samson explained.

  They shuffled around the perimeter of the hospital until they found the main entrance. Luke had calmed down but Samson didn’t trust it; chances were it was only the eye of the storm. On the taxi ride over, Luke had talked a blue streak, unfurling plans of attack that had, even in his own still potent high, struck Samson as far-fetched if not absurd. Still, he was aware that the unspoken pact he’d had with Luke almost from the beginning depended on a conspiracy of mutual indulgence, of humoring each other, and so he made no effort to check Luke’s enthusiasm. Sure, they might pose as visiting doctors from Finland, he agreed, or knock out a couple of janitors and take their uniforms.

  In the lobby was a small exhibition on skin grafts. Luke was immediately drawn to the display case. The charts, photos, and medical diagrams struck Samson as cruelly assembled to nauseate the layman, but Luke was fascinated. Samson went to get directions to the pathology lab, leaving the kid with his face pressed up against the case, a moist cloud of breath forming on the glass.

  Yet when he returned a few minutes later, Luke had disappeared. There was no sign of him except for the black fedora lying on the floor. Samson snatched it up and, figuring that Luke couldn’t have gotten too far, started down the hall. Not knowing what else to do with the hat, he put it on. It was too small, and finally he gave up trying to work it down and just let it ride high on his head, in the awkward yet rakish manner of the Orthodox Jews he’d watched swarming in frenzied, tropical activity through the diamond district of midtown Manhattan (they appeared to be concealing something large—a chicken! he thought freakishly—underneath). This sudden memory surprised him, and hurrying down the hall in pursuit of Luke, he felt a pang of longing for the irregular light of New York, brightness and sudden shade. But he abandoned the thought almost as soon as it came to him. Since leaving Clearwater he’d been desperately trying to avoid all thoughts not directly related to the present moment, aware that the quick deductions of memory would eventually send him crashing headlong into the one memory he wanted, more than anything, to avoid: a thousand men on the floor of the desert, blinking in dawn’s light.

  He scurried down the hall, hat perched atop his head, ducking around gurneys and the occasional patient in a wheelchair wearing the cotton gown that was the uniform of the ill, shapeless enough to fit the whole range of bodily humanity. Soon the long corridor gave way to other long, equally sterile stretches of corridor and Samson became disorientated. The sour chemical smell in the air, so archly inhuman, and the vile light that cast everything in a flat and sickly hue were enough to lend the place a tense, unnerving quality; it hardly needed the retarded child who suddenly appeared out of the wings, swiveling his head in some eternal effort to uncross his eyes, or the drooling old man with blue-veined legs who still looked somehow hopeful, as if misery were not his fate after all. These characters weighing in with the terminally suffering managed to tip the scales from merely unsettling to full-fledged nightmare. They were putting a serious damper on any happiness being drunk had afforded Samson.

  Luke was nowhere to be found but Samson decided to go on with the plan anyway—a plan in the loosest sense, meaning gaining possession of the tumor in any way possible, since they’d never settled on a strategy. There was a chance, admittedly slim, that Luke was now making his own way to the pathology lab on the seventh floor. Or that his movable fascination had discovered something new to attach itself to, something that would safely hold his attention until Samson had carried out the operation himself.

  He found the elevator and got in, a huge industrial car lined in metal. Shoving his hands in his jacket pockets, he discovered the last miniature bottle of liquor looted from the hotel, a booster shot of gin. He emptied it down his throat. An orderly got on at the third floor, pushing a patient in a gurney with the same detachment as the Chinese peddlers with their carts that Samson had seen in National Geographic. The patient was attached to an IV and looked gravely ill. Samson averted his eyes from her face, relieved when the doors slid open on the seventh floor.

  He hurried down the hall toward the sign for the pathology lab. When he got there a young nurse was sitting behind the desk, a pale-faced woman who looked like she could use a transfusion herself. He cavalierly struck up a conversation with her, as if she were a barmaid and not a medical professional with a direct phone line to Security. As they talked, a sense of calm confidence descended over him, a composure that stayed with him as, closing his fingers around her wrist, he declared that he needed to get into the lab. Somewhere in him was the new knowledge that he was capable of violent anger. The nurse pulled away and her eyes darted around in search of help, but if anyone else was on duty they were nowhere to be seen. He said nothing about being a visiting doctor from Finland; in fact he offered no explanation at all, just thrust and parried his way through the exchange with such overpowering force and stench of alcohol that the frightened woman, clearly believing she had a madman on her hands, surrendered and let him through.

  It was like the well-organized scene of a horrendous and bloody accident. The counters were splattered with brownish stains, and everywhere were numbered jars and buckets filled with yellow-red clots: human clots, bits of flesh, fatty and bloody bits. Irregular growths. The smell of formalin hung heavily in the air, and there was a faint hum like a washing machine. Samson’s stomach lurched and for a moment his determination faltered.

  The nurse followed him in. She seemed to pick up on his hesitation, and took it as an opportunity to try to regain control. She would quickly show him around, she told him, but then he would have to leave. He watched as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and felt around in a bucket of colored liquid, her eyes cast upward at the ceiling, until she came up with a rubbery, misshapen thing she claimed was a breast. Gross tissue, she called it, the technical term for not yet drawn and quartered, pickled and stained, and slapped, to the thickness of a single cell, onto a slide.

  Samson’s queasiness retreated, replaced by engrossing fascination. Drunk, as if in a dream, he demanded that they make their way through the specimens. The nurse floundered and he hissed a few threatening terms until she hurried back to the counter and held aloft a gallbladder stone pinched between tweezers. She haltingly described the process whereby the gross tissue was reduced to a mere shadow of itself on a slide, like a fingerprint, a calligraphic blot, to be examined under a powerful lens for signs of carcinoma. She opened the closet doors to reveal row upon row of little drawers filled with numbered slides, endless rounds of human misery and reprieve: malignant, benign, malignant, benign.

  “Nurse,” he began, adding an edge of special pleading to his voice.

  She turned to him, this pale woman in a starched white coat, and said, “I’m not a nurse.”

  He looked at her.

  “Then what are you?”

  “A lab technician,” she said, and all at once he decided to do away with all civilities and cut to the point. In a loud and commanding voice he demanded back the gross tissue that a year ago had been cut away from his brain.

  She backed up against the counter. “We don’t keep it that long,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean you don’t keep it? Why don’t you keep it?”

  “The tissue disintegrates.
We throw it away after a few weeks. We keep a small piece in paraffin. And the slides, those we keep. Those we keep, basically, forever.”

  Samson struggled with the idea of his tumor disposed with the rest of the hospital’s bloody trash, bone chips and butchery, used syringes and cruddy bandages. There had been some sober part of him that had known all along that it would be so. But there were the slides—he vaguely remembered them now—and he would have to content himself with those. The technician began to edge toward the door but Samson stepped forward to block her.

  “I want my slides.” Until now it had been mostly fun and games. She had complied with his wish to be shown the spectacle of human pulp, trying to avoid an incident. Most likely she, like the woman at the motel reception desk, had had routine experience with lunatics. “Give me my slides,” he repeated.

  She had wet, black pupils, the eyes of a small woodsy animal. Her teeth were large. When her mouth was at ease the front teeth strayed rabbitlike below the upper lip.

  “I can’t,” she said, the lip quivering.

  “But you can,” he assured her, placing his hand on the wall by her head and leaning in to blast his eighty-proof breath in her face. “They belong to me.”

  She pulled back and cringed, her eyelids fluttering. She glanced skittishly over his shoulder at the computer.

  “That’s it,” he encouraged. “Let’s look it up.”

  He pulled her by the elbow and they shuffled across the room. She tapped a key and the battered terminal came to life.

  “What’s your name?”

  He told her. She still had her latex gloves on. His name appeared on the screen. Lot number 66589037. Juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma. Left temporal lobe.

  “That’s me. Come on.” He led her by the wrist to the closets plastered with orange biohazard stickers. Methodically, almost lazily, she opened the metal drawers and shuffled through the slides. She must have hoped someone would come in and deliver her from the ordeal. Samson bore down on her and she crumpled. She picked out the right slides and handed them over.

  There were six of them. He lifted them to the light. Each had three identical half-moons with a small dot beneath. Eighteen shavings, stained fuchsia, one cell thick, of the lump with which all of this began, removed a year ago from his brain. He might as well have captured the Rosetta stone, he was so moved by the secrets the slivered tissue con tained. He would have liked to examine them under the microscope right then, but knew it would be pushing his luck. He pocketed the slides and lifted the trembling technician to her feet. He looked deep into her black, woodland eyes. “Brava,” he whispered, and then he turned and hurried out the door, switching off the lights on his way out, plunging the lab, the technician, and all the gross tissue into darkness.

  A minute later he was waiting in front of the elevator when Luke came tearing around a corner, flapping one arm and clutching a plastic model of a brain with the other. He skidded to a stop in front of Samson, looking sheepish. Samson clapped a hand over Luke’s mouth and when the elevator doors slid open they stumbled in.

  It was light out when they left the hospital. Luke fell asleep in the taxi, holding his knees like a baby, the plastic brain with removable hemispheres lolling on the seat beside him. Luke’s hair was damp with sweat, and his face looked sickly. Outside the window, the marquees were shabby in the daylight. Some letters were burned-out, letters that would eventually end up scrambled in a dump like an abandoned game of Scrabble. Samson fingered the slides in his pocket, anxiously turning to look out the back window where he half expected to see the police in pursuit.

  When they arrived at the Mirage he gently shook Luke awake. The kid looked at him long and hard as if he were a stranger, and then he stumbled out of the taxi, making it clear he didn’t want to be followed. Samson watched him disappear through the brass-rimmed doors, clutching the brain. A flash of his reflection in the glass, and then he was gone. Samson felt a pang of something, perhaps regret. He could already see the ugly scene at the hospital for what it had been: a pathetic, last-ditch effort to regain control of his life. He turned to the taxi driver.

  “The Four Palms.”

  “The what?” The driver had the nostrils of a bull.

  “The Four Palms,” he repeated, his voice strange to his own ears.

  Back in his motel room, the message light on the phone was still unlit. The television was working again, the meteorologist saying, Just find a friend and move to higher ground, as if he were delivering the gospel. Smiling and saying, Now, let’s take you into Wednesday, marching through days of the week, across the map of America, and into the bright future.

  Samson passed out on the bed. When he woke his head was throbbing. He felt sick to his stomach. Going over the events of the night before, he tried to straighten out what exactly had happened. He found his tan windbreaker crumpled on the floor and reached into the pocket. The slides were there. He held them up to the light. He brought them close to his face and looked through each half-moon with the drifting star. How did this happen? he wondered. It was the simplest thought, the most basic, and he thought it again, pacing now. How did this happen, all this? He realized that all he knew about Luke was that his father was a lawyer who had never been to Burma, that the guy was an asshole to the kid, who didn’t yet know the ways in which this would shape his life. Samson didn’t even know Luke’s last name. But that was just the beginning of all he didn’t know. That was only brushing the surface of his vast ignorance.

  He monitored the forecasts, minute-by-minute updates that made it impossible to trust even the bluest sky when the weather team, armed with photographic proof, predicted rain. Most weather mattered so little, really. It was a subject that came up only when there was nothing left to say, and this made it hard to believe that the steady flow of information was not encoded with a more profound message. Hunched on the unmade bed, Samson considered the possibility that the meteorologists were actually disseminating classified information in code. Moisture coming in from the south, the weatherman said. But who was trying to reach whom? Or maybe these were not signals between people after all, but something much greater, a sign emanating from a cosmic source, a power of goodness whose chosen envoy was a satellite coasting soundlessly above in its vigil over the planet. The message, if one could make it out, being only this: ALLISWELL-ALLISWELLALLISWELL.

  When the phone rang he froze. For an instant he wondered if it was Ray. When he had gone to withdraw cash from his bank account the day before, he’d discovered that Ray had deposited the promised sum of money. It made Samson feel cheap, as if he’d been bought. It also increased his paranoia that his movements were being tracked. But in a flash he understood that it couldn’t possibly be Ray calling. The doctor was no longer interested in him. Ray wanted believers, and Samson had deserted.

  It could only be Donald. He lunged across the room, nearly knocking the phone off the night table.

  “Hello?”

  “Calm down.”

  “Donald? Is that you? Where the hell—”

  “First thing, don’t ever do that again. You’d think from the sound of those messages you were being held at gunpoint. Against your will, Sammy, with fingernails torn out one by one. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “What took so long?”

  “What do you think, I check my messages every second? I got things to do. Plus, why do I have voice mail? Limited accessibility. If I wanted to be reached twenty-four hours a day I’d get a cell phone. Walk around with the thing strapped on, getting fucking microwaved to death by all the people trying to reach me. Where are you?”

  “The Four Palms Motel.”

  “The what?”

  “The Four Palms.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Samson looked around the room. What few clothes he had were strewn across the floor. The sheets had been tugged off the bottom of the bed as if a struggle had taken place. The maid hadn’t been in all week.

  “It’s not the Flamingo, bu
t it’s all right. Listen—”

  “Stark raving. I had to hold the phone a foot away.” Donald coughed into the receiver. “What is that in the background? You have people there?”

  “It’s the weather.”

  “What are you listening to the weather for? It’s three hundred and sixty days of sunshine a year, Sammy. Like paradise. It’s not the fastest-growing city for nothing.”

  “So they say.”

  “Who says? People don’t know this. If they knew, there wouldn’t be a single acre left. I got in early. We got in early. Don’t think your old pop forgot.” The thought of Donald’s little barren plot of Zion almost brought tears to Samson’s eyes.

  “Donald, I need to see you. Where are you?”

  “Like Twenty Questions. You wouldn’t last a minute with some of the types I know. Curiosity ate the cat, Sammy. I’m in Barstow, if you have to know.”

  “What are you doing in Barstow?”

  “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Sorry.” Samson made a fist then flexed. He picked up the phone and paced between the beds. “I’m sorry, right now it’s all a little much. Things happened. I left Clearwater. You have no idea the state I’ve been in.”

  “You’ll adjust. Who wants to be stuck in that joint longer than necessary? Sure it was nice, but a little dull for my taste. The only thing was the meals. I told my niece, we ate like kings. Like kings, I told her. And the toilet paper, every time, folded like new.”

  Silence.

  “Killed the cat,” Samson said softly, stalled between the unmade beds, having gone as far as the telephone cord would reach, like a man performing at breathtaking heights with only a rope around his waist.