Man Walks Into a Room (12 page)

“Your research, it’s in the desert?”

“Right. In Nevada.”

“What’s there?”

“Nothing—some scrub, squat buildings: brothels, casinos, and military bases. Cheap and no neighbors.”

And now he could almost believe that he really was in a movie, a character as cool and composed as Bogart, shocked by nothing. “Should I not ask questions? I guess what you do is legal.”

Ray laughed. “Very.”

“Don’t get me wrong, you seem very reputable.” Samson looked away, embarrassed. He had wanted to play Ray’s equal, for the doctor to feel that nothing was beyond him. Instead he had come out sounding naïve. “You seem like a good man, Ray. No neighbors, you were saying.”

“Thank you, yes. We have a lab out there, a pretty substantial facility dedicated to a single project.”

“Your project?”

“You could say. It’s something I’ve been working on for years. But there’s a whole team of us working together now. Science like this, at the level we’re working at, demands incredible cooperation. Experts pooling their knowledge.” He lifted the mug to his lips and swallowed, holding Samson’s gaze. When he spoke again his voice was low. “We’re out there engineering something truly fucking amazing. Getting inside the brain in a way that’s never happened before. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“And what is it, exactly? The project? I guess that’s the twenty-million-dollar question, right?”

“Hundred-million.”

“What?”

Ray smiled. “It’s a hundred-million-dollar question, and yes, you should be asking, and I’m going to tell you. A man doesn’t get a call to drop everything and come three thousand miles without getting a good answer why.”

“Good. Okay.” Samson bobbed his head, a little relieved though he wasn’t sure why. He felt Ray was on his side, and now he wanted very much to be on Ray’s. “Actually there wasn’t much to drop. I wasn’t doing anything in New York.”

“Then it’s convenient for both of us that I found you when I did. By the way, what I’d really like to do is talk about you. Because I’d say you’re now an unusual expert on the subject of memory. What did I say last night about your turning this into a vacation? I’m amending it. You’re not off the hook until you talk to me about what it’s like inside your head. We’ll say you owe me that.”

Samson happily raised his mug to toast, and knocked back the rest of the tea.

“What is this stuff anyway?”

“Thistle. Feel like a walk?”

The air was already warm, a late-winter morning in California where snow is something that happens when you shake a plastic globe, coming down over the Nativity. They passed driveways guarded by cameras, outdoor sculpture, topiary. A man driving a red convertible accelerated past them, his hand out the window to catch the breeze while the car stereo played Stevie Wonder,
“very superstitious.”

The next day Samson sat alone in the back of a cab, sweating. Heat was coming up off the asphalt, simmering under the sprawled city. They were crawling through midday traffic on the freeway, and he was scanning other cars for pimps and starlets. In his mind he played back the things Ray had told him, one piece at a time. In the monastic tradition the desert is a sacred place of simultaneous being and nothingness, Ray had said. A proving ground in which the sense of individuality is obliterated on the way to achieving a higher state. Samson thought about a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, something against which to measure the desolation. It was in a movie he once saw, a girl in cowboy boots chewing gum and scrounging for quarters to make the only sort of call the phone booth knew, the call of the long-lost and the missing. During which only the wind or stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier between silence and silence.

A woman with fuzzy blond hair in a ponytail wriggled in her seat in the car next to the taxi, singing along to the radio. When she looked over, Samson winked. The girl was embarrassed at first and so was he, but then she smiled and fluttered her fingers that ended in two-inch
pink nails. They rolled along at the same pace, glancing happily at each other and waving whenever they were realigned after one lane went faster than the other.

“Get her number,” the taxi driver encouraged him, grinning in the rearview mirror.

“I have a girlfriend,” Samson said, to avoid conversation and keep his eyes on the girl.

“Two girlfriends!” the driver said gleefully, and went back to the job he was now taking very seriously, of staying neck and neck with the girl’s car. When they came to the exit and had to turn off, it seemed everyone was a little sad, the girl, the driver, and Samson, who wondered what her name was; he should have at least called across the lanes to ask her name.

They drove up and down the streets at the edge of campus. He had Lana’s address on a piece of paper he’d kept in his wallet. He’d tried calling her from Ray’s house, but no one had answered. Probably she was in class, and he decided to go over anyway, figuring she might be back by the time he arrived. It was thrilling to know that these were the streets she walked down every day, her bag slung across her shoulder, punching up her hair from underneath so that it looked like she just got out of bed.

“Girlfriend number one?” the driver asked, pulling up to a beige condominium and craning around to look at Samson.

“Huh? Yeah,” Samson said, counting out the crisp bills Ray had given him.

The driver pretended to zipper his lips. “Good luck!” he sang, then screeched off, taking the secret they shared with him.

Samson knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment. When no one answered he tried the handle, which was unlocked.

“Hello?” he called, knocking again on the open door.

There was a couch along one wall, basket chairs, a blow-up dinosaur, and a junked television in the corner with wires sticking out of the back. A lone, gravel voice floated in from somewhere, and it took a
second before Samson realized it was the radio, the low vibrating hum of distance below the voice’s bottom register.

“Lana?”

There was no answer so he followed the sound of the radio to the bedroom. The blinds were drawn and the room was dark except for the glow of a computer screen. Someone was hunched in front of it, his back to Samson.

“Hello?”

The kid turned around and it took him longer than it should have to register another person there, as if he were trying to refocus, to shift from one parallel plane to the other.

“Oh, hi. You looking for Lana? She’ll be back—shit, what time is it?” He glanced at his wrist but there was no watch on it. “Back in, like, an hour.” A look of puzzlement crossed his face, something not necessarily local, solved in an instant as the features returned to slackness. He reached up and lowered the volume on a duct-taped radio, just enough so the words of the broadcast were still audible:
Normal aging of monkeys’ brains causes a twenty-eight percent decline of neurons.
He fingered his glasses and ran his hand through the back of his hair, matted down and stuck up, the troubled hair of an insomniac or day-sleeper. “Did she know you were coming?”

The interesting thing, Ray had said, is that when we are working with the brain, we are dealing with an intelligence far greater than our own.

“I’m a friend of hers from New York. I thought I’d surprise her.”

“Oh,” he nodded. “Well, I’m just working on this … thing.” The boy—he didn’t look much older than nineteen or twenty—swiveled the chair around and looked at the screen. He tapped a few keys and waited to see what happened, then turned back, distracted. “Yeah. You want to wait until she gets back? I’m Wingate, by the way.”

Samson shook the clammy hand and, when he introduced himself, Wingate brightened up and pushed some magazines off of a brown velvet chair that had little bald spots like a sick dog. Samson hadn’t heard of any of the magazines,
Nuts and Volts, Midnight Engineer.

“You have to send away for them. I know the guy who writes most of the stuff in
Volts.”
He flashed a grin. “So you’re Samson. Cool. Lana told me about you.”

The fact that Wingate knew about him was the only assurance Samson had that he’d come to the right place, because aside from some girl’s sneakers at the foot of the bed and a bottle of nail polish on the night table, there was nothing to suggest Lana had ever been here. He wondered what Lana had said about him.

Wingate chatted easily, rooting around in his hair as if he’d lost something there. He didn’t move to open the blinds or turn on a light, and so they sat in darkness, viscous bubbles floating across the computer screen like a lava lamp. He balled up his flannel shirt and threw it in the corner of the room. The radio piped up:
There are several hurtles before this therapy can be tried on humans.
Occasionally Wingate pricked up his ears, like a wild dog listening for the pack in the wind.

Wingate told him how he’d drifted down from Palo Alto a few months ago, had migrated beyond the range of hackers with silicon dust on their fingers. After he’d graduated from Stanford he’d stayed for a year trying to decide whether to do a Ph.D. He wrote code for his adviser and for an operating system called LINUX, and hung out in the back of the coffeehouse on campus with guys from small Balkan countries doing work in the Robotics Department or Symbolic Systems, figuring out how to model consciousness using game theory and Boolean logic, who saw the world in terms of binary equations, one or zero. These were guys who had spent a decade in the department, Wingate explained, who watched the tall, blond undergraduate girls like wildlife, who drove beat-up cars whose backseats were full of junk even though their work was intangible, virtual. They had a keen and scheming and slightly adolescent sense of humor only understood in their own circles. Maybe they had come from war-torn countries that sent their brightest to American universities, but now they would never return from California. Wingate had come from the suburbs of Chicago but he might as well have come from beyond the Iron
Curtain. He knew as soon as he got to Stanford—wandering dazed through the mission-style buildings, hiking in the foothills up to a massive radio telescope—that he had come as far as he would go.

Samson had no idea what Wingate was talking about. He seemed a being returned from the future, already evolved, and Samson felt his stomach drop when it dawned on him this was the company Lana was keeping.

“I grew up near there,” he said, interrupting Wingate’s monologue. He wanted to ask Wingate things, like what the hell was LINUX and what were people like from the other side of the Iron Curtain? He wanted to ask him what, exactly, was the nature of his relationship with Lana. At the very least, he wanted to hear the names of the familiar streets of his childhood, to sketch out a map and identify landmarks.

Instead he said, “I was Lana’s professor at Columbia.”

Wingate nodded but seemed unimpressed. He jumped up and twisted the volume on the radio. He leaned in, his hand resting on the box.
And now it’s time for Laotian Community Radio. Remember: keep your mind open and your radio tuned to the left.

“Damn. I thought it was going to be something else.”

They listened to the first few minutes of a man talking in heavily accented English about flooding along the Mekong and then Wingate switched off the power. The gooey bubbles slid across the computer screen, doing a convincing imitation of weight and mass.

“What happened to your radio?”

Wingate picked up the battered box and opened the battery hatch as if the answer were hidden there. “It’s just an old transistor I unpacked and put back together again. I wanted to see if I could pick up this pirate station out of Pasadena.” The kind of kid, Samson thought, who takes everything apart to see how it’s wired. Who starts out by leaving pennies to be flattened on the railroad tracks and ends up controlling push-button bombs.

“This guy beams his signal to a hundred-and-eighty-foot antenna planted on the roof of his house, and then it gets picked up, amplified,
and rebroadcast over FM. On a vacant frequency, right under the nose of the FCC. They busted him and he just packed up and moved his transmitter down the street.”

“What does he say on the air? It seems a lot of effort to go to.”

Wingate shrugged. “He’s an anarchist. A guy who will go that far to make a point. There are plenty of people doing it; you can order transmitter kits easy off the Web. There’s a kid in Florida sending out advice fourteen hours a day on how to blow things up. He’s a freak but mostly you’ve got people who want to chip away at corporate control, anticapitalists who want to shake up the media conglomerates from beneath. People who live for open systems.”

In the desert the hippies camp out at the hot springs, Ray had said. They splash around nude while the high-voltage wires audibly crackle overhead, driving power across the valley. While the military empties rounds of M-16s in the dirt. In the desert there’s the military and the anarchists like a perfect equation, like scales of judgment. The rest are there biding their time: the Confederate Mexican Army hiding out like Ché in Bolivia, waiting to take back California by guerrilla tactics, the Japanese American arm of Yakuza packing paint guns for flash drills, skinheads staging mock rallies in the shadow of the Panamints. Loners waiting out the apocalypse.

Wingate turned around and began punching the keys on his computer, searching for something on the Web, a site he wanted to show Samson, while Samson imagined a delicate network of light and glass, shimmering and transparent, crossing and spinning out, trying to become infinite. Once, when he was a kid, he had taken a ball of string and taped it to the walls length by length, turning the tiny vestibule between rooms into a human trap that his mother had blithely walked into.

He stared at the back of Wingate’s matted hair and for an instant his mind froze and he felt he could not remember how he’d arrived in the dark bedroom, or who Wingate was, or how he’d come to know him. Loudly, as if he himself were trying to transmit his voice through vacuum tubes, Samson explained that he knew next to nothing about
computers. The most he could do was find call numbers on library terminals. He hadn’t even turned on the computer he’d found in his office at Columbia. It was a question of he couldn’t find the switch.