Man Walks Into a Room (21 page)

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 corners, 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.

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 where 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.

When he’d woken after the transfer Ray had been standing above him. Ray had asked him questions and he had tried to answer, and, groggy from the drugs, it had not at first occurred to him to be angry or even frightened, only stunned. He tried to communicate the vividness. He spoke in half-sentences, stuttering and grasping for words. Ray asked and he struggled to answer, but there was no way to describe it. He was having trouble speaking, and they recorded on a digital camera how he grabbed the doctor’s wrist, eyes wide, and said,
Who?
Someone had brought him back to the Bathhouse and, exhausted, he had fallen asleep, but the next day when he’d woken it was still there, bright and ready in his mind, the sound of countdown and the shattering explosion. It was there as he washed his face and dressed, and though he tried to push it aside and think of other things he could not.

He had gone to find Ray because he was ready to talk—he had questions of his own now—but when he got to the lab the receptionist told him the doctor was gone, he had left and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days. Samson had looked at her, bewildered, and she’d had to repeat herself, articulating each word so that he could not mistake what she’d said. When the confusion receded, he felt the first stab of agitation, beginning in his stomach and rising until it was full-blown, an angry heat burning in his face. He went back to his room and tried to think—it was just a memory, that was all, to be forgotten with the rest. Except not only could he not forget it, it had also unsettled other
memories, being five or six and seeing pictures of a leveled Hiroshima on TV, images that haunted his sleep so that he woke up screaming and his mother had to come and quiet him, pressing a wet cloth to his forehead. In the days that followed he asked her incessantly about the bomb, and though she tried to calm him, in her usual way she began to talk politics, about the arms race and the idiots in Washington and the threat of nuclear war. Later he timed how long it took to run from his room to her bed, a four-poster high enough off the ground that they could both hide under it.
Something smells in here,
she’d kept saying a few days later, but it was weeks before she found the sandwiches he’d hidden there, green with mold.