Samson stopped in front of the set of black volumes. Using both hands he pulled one down and opened it, surprised by its weight. He flipped through the pages of German words arranged in columns. A dictionary, that was all, a strict scholarly edition with the whole immoderate career of each word recorded in full. There was only the hint of an accent in Max’s speech, a faint harshness smoothed over like glass blunted by the sea.
A plaintive honk sounded outside, the taxi driver laying into the car horn. Samson replaced the book on the shelf. He began to move as if under command. The horn continued to blare as he went through the motions of helping his great-uncle back into his pajama top and robe. Max’s eyes fluttered and his breath caught and struggled for an instant like a drowsy child’s.
You?
On the wall the four views of the Italian city were obscured by darkness. The horn ceased now, a hush, the blessing of silence. A drop of saliva appeared at the corner of Max’s mouth. Did they take him out from time to time, Samson wondered, for air and light? Did they push him out into the courtyard once a day to feel the sun on his face, to hear the rustle of the leaves and the cooing of doves? Could it really have been he, Samson, who had brought Max to this place? He didn’t want to abandon him now, to let him drift alone and obscure toward death. He would have liked to care for Max, to see him through his final days, the two of them living together in a house somewhere where there would be time to talk—time, even, to remember.
The sky was a darkening blue through the window, that passing moment between day and night when the flatness suddenly falls away to reveal infinity. Samson’s heart thumped in his chest. His mind was racing and yet he was not aware of any thoughts, only a frenzied whir of consciousness.
He lifted Max in his arms. He was surprised by his lightness, as if his great-uncle had the hollow bones of a bird. Carefully he arranged him in the wheelchair and opened the door. As he hurried down the hall steering a slumbering Max toward a last breath of freedom, he half expected a voice to call out “Sammy Greene!” But a different attendant was on duty, a woman bent over a book who didn’t notice the fugitive pair as they silently sailed past.
Outside, the moon was high and bright. Samson slalomed Max down the handicap ramp. Slowly, as slowly as a heliotrope turning toward the light, the old man lifted his head. Cheers rose from the taxi’s stereo, a wave of ecstatic applause that broke over the empty street.
THEY DROVE ON through the night, their faces flashing in and out of the sodium light. The driver had asked no questions as Samson unloaded Max into the backseat. He seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation and only pulled his hood tighter over his head. Max was untroubled by the change of scene, accepting it without protest. He stared out the window as if it were a television, his robe fallen open on the seat.
When they pulled up in front of Samson’s old house the windows were dark. The garden was overgrown. The front steps that Samson had raced up and down innumerable times, moving through his life with the agile ease of a natural, a creature of instinct, now sagged dangerously. But there were signs of life—a car parked in the garage, a bicycle abandoned on the lawn—its new owners careless but alive enough to trample the grass and fill the garbage bins. The scene could not have been more banal. And yet his heart swelled.
He unloaded the wheelchair. Struggling with the handle, Max opened the door himself and dangled one foot out like a parachuter preparing to jump. Samson jogged around to catch him. Max had lost a slipper in the getaway, and the bare foot hovered above the asphalt like a pitiful question. Samson felt a stab of guilt for having torn him from his familiar surroundings. He lifted Max and held him aloft, the retired boxer with the skeleton of a bird. He lowered him gently into the chair and pulled the robe around him, knotting it at his waist.
Samson had begun to push the wheelchair across the street, staring at the vision of his past before him, when the taxi driver called him back to offer him a flashlight. It was sheathed in rubber, the kind of heavy-duty torch used in violent emergencies, during floods and blackouts, to shine light on terrible accidents, whose weight also recommended it for use as a club. Samson flicked it on. The beam was dull, and the moonlight alone was bright enough to see by, but he accepted it anyway, not wanting to refuse such an uncharacteristic act of charity.
The magnolia tree was around the back of the house. Samson vaulted the wheelchair off the bumpy front path and pushed it soundlessly through the grass. It didn’t occur to him to ring the doorbell, as he later told the police in the bright fluorescent station. What would he have said, a foul-smelling vagabond pushing a nonagenarian in a spattered robe? Hello, sorry to disturb. Don’t worry, I won’t harm you. Believe me, we have something in common. I grew up in this house. Seriously. A long time ago, yes. Oh, all kinds of stories! You’re too kind, really; a glass of milk sounds lovely. And could I trouble you for a shovel? Oh, nothing, just my mother, who I think I buried under that tree.
He made his way around the side of the house to the green mortuary behind, easing Max over the ruts of the trees, clutching under his arm the official flashlight of rescue missions. Reflected on the branches above he saw the light of a television coming from an upstairs window. Husband and wife, probably brushing up against each other in bed, the children safely down the hall, flushed with sleep.
When the white flowers of the magnolia tree suddenly came into view, his heart froze. The night was dark and complete, locked in a temperate stillness. Max’s face was set in the peaceful blank expression of the enlightened, his wheelchair glinting in the moonlight. Samson stood at attention. At a loss for an appropriate gesture, he brushed off his knees and got down on the ground. He began to crawl as if across a delicately frozen pond. There was a slightly sickening smell as he made his way around the tree, some base ripeness coming from the rotting magnolia flowers or the thick grass.
With the dog there didn’t seem any reason to mark the spot. The magnolia was enough, a reminder each spring with its first bloom, a white and rising echo. But a person? Surely the resting place of a human being demanded some form of memorial, however modest. He held the flashlight with one hand and felt along the ground with the other. He made a full circle around the trunk but found nothing, and was about to give up when the dim beam of light caught on something inscribed in the bark. He brought his face closer. Carved in bold, deep strokes were her initials: B.S.G. No dates or epigrams, just the undecorated facts, and all at once he understood that she had asked this of him—at some point before she died, her mind sharply focused by the pain, she had asked him to bury her in her own backyard, without ceremony, released from the extravagance of death. To bury her in a familiar place, under the magnolia, which—of course, how could he have forgotten?—had always been her favorite tree. A place where, should a man who looked like Cary Grant in a bright white suit ever come looking for her, he could find her.
Max was elsewhere, his face tipped skyward like a child’s in a snowstorm.
Samson took out the slides and lined them up in the grass. Using both hands he began to dig a hole, and when it was sufficiently deep he dropped them in and covered them with dirt. He felt exhaustion seeping in. He laid his head down in the grass, flattening his body against the ground. He tried to imagine the sensation of being dead. To remain unmoving under the magnolia tree through days and nights, washed by the rains until he himself turned to weather. He imagined himself settled in for the long haul, his mother beneath him, above him the breathing black dome of sky.
Somewhere many miles away, in the heart of the desert, a man was recording memories, preserving them as another desert air once preserved scrolls of parchment. Creating a vast library of human memory, and so that that library should not be lost—so that it should not combust in fire or vanish into dust and light—he was learning how to inscribe those memories in the one place they were ensured survival: in the minds of other people. A purely scientific project, but off the record he would say that he believed he had found the key to human co
mpassion. To step into another man’s skin. He would say he believed he had found a way to inspire empathy, a sense of cosmic belonging, that at some near point in the future human beings could be immunized against alienation as they were once vaccinated for smallpox, polio. Yes, he was aware of the dangers. But what knowledge cannot be used for greater stupidities, for greater evils, he would ask, and if we allowed such fears to stop us, where would we be? Human knowledge advances regardless, pulled forward by its own inevitable momentum. Either you ride its crest or someone else does. This man, a doctor, was doing what he had to do.
And somewhere maybe someone else was forgetting everything he ever knew, giving up the ghost of an old life, entering a new emptiness. A man halfway through his life, putting his book facedown on the desk, turning a corner, and disappearing into the future. And the doctor would learn of this man. When the time was right, he would call him. And the man who forgot everything, even his own wife, would come. Knowledge was seductive and emptiness was perishable, and he couldn’t stop his mind from filling again, the way a can left outside fills with rain. The man wanted, again, to be worthy, and so he would surrender himself up, and the transferred memory would come through, shattering the silence forever. And then the man would open his eyes, shell-shocked and betrayed.
In a room near the beach, there was a girl waiting to be baptized in the ocean. Standing by the window, her tapered fingers obscuring her face as she moved her lips, preparing to enter the future under a different name. And between that beach and Las Vegas, in some desert town, there was a man near the end of his life, who when he went would leave behind nothing but a memory and a plot of useless land in his name.
And somewhere, too, was Anna.
Samson’s cheek was pressed against the grass as if he had fallen from the sky. The idea of ever getting up again seemed absurd. The flashlight lying at his side was still on, a dim ray of accidental light grazing Max’s bare foot. It was like a little devotional scene, a tragedy happened and passed and the quiet setting in now, lit up by the flashlight used to rescue. It seemed that in time they would be washed by weather, found years from now by a boy who had lost a ball, running through a future landscape, the rusted wheelchair still intact, and a skull in the grass that showed signs of having been split open and broken into long ago.
He closed his eyes. Sounds that had only been at the furthest margin of his consciousness, the pinpricks of each moving leaf and the ocean rush of a distant car, made a point of themselves, each a tiny argument against nothingness. It was the world minutely insisting on itself, making it impossible for Samson to believe that this was all a dream outside of time, that when he opened his eyes again he would be lying in bed next to Anna, that he would wake up with a gasp, a sudden rush of air filling his lungs, and reach out and press her body against his, saying forgive me.
And then there was a sound he thought was in his own head until it became too loud to ignore, a sound steadily rising. It took a few moments for him to register the words but then he did. Something from deep within him rose up to meet the familiar song—
Start spreading the news! I’m leaving today! I’m gonna be a part of it!
It was Max, singing what must have been one of their songs, making it clear that he understood where they were, that they had come to pay their respects, to remember, and, Max’s song implied, to rejoice.
If I can make it there! I’ll make it anywhere! he yelped, belting out the notes as best he could. Samson half expected him to start beating his arms or pumping his hips in a flurry of Silver Motion, but Max only rocked slightly as he sang, hammering the air with one hand as if hit ting a cymbal. Rapidly he moved toward the finale until finally, hailing glory, he arrived—
It’s! Up! To! You! New! York! New Yoooork!
But the song didn’t end there, for Max started again from the top, his voice unstoppable, rising from deep within, loud enough that it awakened the neighbor’s dog that began to bark, and the lights came on in the upstairs window of the house, and the new owners peered anxiously out, so loud that Samson feared Max might have a heart attack, that sheer volume alone would be the cause of his death as he went out in a last blast of life.
But it was not so. The performance ended as suddenly as it had begun and Max continued to rock to and fro as the dog barked steadily on, as tears of joy filled Samson’s eyes, and a police siren sounded its approach.
FOUR
April 2002
HE STOOD WAITING on the corner. He had arrived early, and now he glanced down at his watch and saw that it was past two o’clock. The air was cool and he shivered in his sweater. It had rained earlier and the sidewalk was wet.
When he looked up again she was walking toward him, a small figure in a light green coat. He had not seen her for a year, and his heart thumped in his chest. A few feet away from him she stopped, her face calm and still, pale in its frame of dark hair. He had often imagined the moment, had given it weather and latitude and a scripted exchange, but now all of that scattered, replaced by the irrepressible singularity of happening.
He smiled and stepped toward her.
Anna, he said.
They walked along Amsterdam Avenue. She had given up their apartment and was living elsewhere, but they had decided to meet in their old neighborhood just the same. It felt like a long time ago that they had lived there, and he was surprised to find nothing changed.
You look good.
You too.
They laughed, relieved that the first nervous moments had passed. They walked slowly, passing familiar shops and restaurants they had probably eaten in together more times than either of them could remember.
Are you hungry? she asked. They stopped in front of a small Italian place with a blue striped awning. Through the window they saw the diners inside, a couple sitting by the window, a man talking as a woman lifted her glass of wine. They stood on the sidewalk and looked at the menu, and for a moment they might have been such a couple. They might have gone in and taken a table, with time enough to talk about what to eat and drink, to discuss what they had read in the morning paper. Lifting the wineglass, moving onto more obscure topics, the climate in Norway, the conversation following the natural path of their joined effort. A couple with years of conversation between them so that now a single word stood in for vast themes, and small noises were sufficient to communicate subtleties of mood, and after all the talking they could lapse again into the mutual silence that was the foundation of their life together, at ease, the only sound being the clink of silverware against the plates.
But they were not such a couple, and so they turned away from the restaurant and walked on. The sun came in and out from behind the clouds. They headed east toward the park, moving side by side under the trees. The first green buds had already come out on the black branches. Conversation came slowly, the words they had planned to say replaced by the things they said. She had left her job and gone back to school. He was living in California, working in a library, renting a small house not far from the ocean.
You should come visit sometime.
Many times he had imagined it, walking with her along the beach or showing her the view from Windy Top. But he knew now with certainty that it would not happen, and he felt the hope gently part from him like an escaped balloon floating up into the afternoon.
They walked for a long time, and then they stopped and sat on a bench. The clouds had gathered and turned dark, but neither of them moved to leave. The things they spoke of were of little importance. He had not imagined that it would be this way; he had thought that there would be many difficult things to explain and feelings to confess. But it was not so, and he realized now that he was glad for this, to sit and talk of things of little importance, as if they had all of the time in the world. He had imagined telling her that he loved her, but now he realized the declaration would sound flat, a wrong note struck in a simple song. To say it would be to disturb the care and stillness of what was unspoken between them.
The rain began in heavy drops.
Here, he said, offering her his sweater. Put it over your head.
She shook her head.
You’ll get wet.
So will you.
They rose and walked without hurrying. It was coming down hard now; the air held the smell of earth. When they reached the street she turned to face him. Her hair was wet and a drop of water ran down her temple. He took her in his arms and for a long while they stood like that, the taxis splashing past in the street. Then she stepped back, arms hanging at her sides. Her face shone in the muted light.
Take care, she said.
There was so much he had not asked her, and something in him wanted to call out to hold her back. But the moment had gotten ahead of him, and he had no power to strain against it.
You too.
She nodded and her smile was soft. Then she turned to go. He watched her green coat disappear into the distance. The wind picked up and the traffic lights changed. He put his hands into his pockets, and with his face tilted down against the rain he walked away, a man with a past like any other.
EPILOGUE
I USED TO walk down stairs and imagine myself falling and breaking my teeth. I actually pictured this, the hapless tumble and the blood in my mouth. On the subway platform I imagined the violent push that would come from behind and saw my body flung onto the tracks. If Samson were five minutes late to meet me I would start reciting catastrophes like the rosary. Whenever he took a plane flight I pictured the crash, rescue men pausing to lean against each other among the charred remains. It never occurred to me to mention these thoughts to anybody. It was a reflex, a protective measure as banal as knocking on wood. When Samson didn’t come home that first night, I felt surprisingly composed; I’d been rehearsing for this my whole life. And yet when it was all over—once they’d found him in the desert and he had the operation, once I’d brought him home and it became clear that the person I’d known wasn’t coming back—I felt disappointed to discover that I had survived. The disaster I’d always feared had finally come to pass and still I was standing, so how could I go on in the old way?
Man Walks Into a Room Page 23