Man Walks Into a Room (24 page)

It was four in the morning by the time they had gotten through it all. The room was littered with crumpled sheets of hotel stationery and the tiny bottles of booze they’d found in the minifridge. One of Samson’s sneakers was dangling from the light fixture where he had tossed it to emphasize a point. They’d covered all the facts three or four times over. There had been moments of exhaustion and many deep troughs of silence, but these had only fueled greater, more florid streaks of language. Luke, with his constant interjections and insatiable, almost fanatical need for clarification, was as inexhaustible as Samson. “Total annihilation!” he’d shouted whenever they’d arrived at a cul-de-sac in the story.

When they finally emerged on the other side of the confusion, Luke announced that he had a plan.

“The tumor,” he declared.

Samson realized it was meant to be a crucial revelation but it was too terse, too general for him to grasp the kid’s meaning.

“Go on.”

“The pilo—”

“Pilocytic astrocytoma.”

“Removed, on the fourteenth of May, in the year 2000, at the University Medical Center of …” Here the kid raised his eyebrows and spread his hands palm-up. “Where?”

“We know this, Las Vegas.”

“Exactly. Las Vegas.” Luke dug around for his shirt and jacket. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“To the medical center!” Luke howled, frustrated with Samson’s slowness to catch on.

“And why would we do that?”

“To get the tumor back!”

Samson was not quite so robustly drunk as he had been earlier, and a slight, almost metallic hint of sobriety made him hesitate before speaking. But after a moment he concluded that he had no recourse but to cooperate with Luke. For one thing, he had already led him too far down the road of excess to turn back now, with all of the disappointment and feelings of betrayal that that would certainly incur in him. He didn’t want to shatter the magnificent, glassy shine of the kid’s belief, his utter conviction, in the inevitability of
coming to understand.
To raise one’s hand in the prime of one’s life and admit that one understands nothing, or worse, to understand and still remain powerless, was a bitter and bleak thing, and more than he could bear to shove the kid’s nose in. Not now, at the height of their revelries.

But his unwillingness to let Luke down was not the only reason he’d willingly participate in whatever harebrained scheme the kid had concocted. Maybe it was an effect of the alcohol. Or a dawning sentimentalism that gave him a taste for grand gestures. But whatever the reason, going to claim the tumor,
his
tumor, from its clinical storage in the hospital made
sense
to Samson. Luke was right: it was what needed to be done. He would go and take it back because it stood for all he’d lost, because it
belonged
to him.

He wouldn’t simply allow things to happen to him anymore. He was alive, and for the first time since he’d woken out of the slumber of his past life, he felt it. It was not that he was painfully aware of each moment, as he had been upon waking from the operation. It seemed to
him now that it was probably only the dying who saw the world with such precise and formal clarity as that, knowing it was already lost to them. No, this was something different, as if at some point in the hazy bacchanal of the night he had been handed back his life. A moment of reprieve, his heart bursting with a high-spirited hope, hammering its percussion in his chest.

It was past four
A.M.
by the time they hailed a taxi from the line waiting in front of the hotel. In a distant precinct of his mind Samson registered that Luke was drunker than he’d thought. The kid’s behavior had become more exuberant, downright flashy since they’d come downstairs. Samson made no real effort to calm him except to try and stay his hand as he peeled dollars off the bulging roll in his pocket, giving the damp, crinkled bills to passing strangers as if they were worthless as rupees.

“Save it. We might need it later,” Samson whispered.

“Right,” Luke agreed, retrieving a five he had just tucked into a cocktail waitress’s belt.

The taxi deposited them in the parking lot of the emergency room. There was a man going through the automatic doors clutching his chest, but otherwise nothing suggested any crisis. The handful of people sitting in rows of vinyl seats and gazing up at the mounted televisions looked so profoundly bored they might have been taken for stunt doubles waiting to stand in for the bereaved. It was an unsettling change after the casino, and Luke and Samson stood bewildered in the glare of the fluorescent lights. Luke straightened his hat. It occurred to Samson that this is where he must have been brought after the police picked him up in the desert. He wondered whether, locked in oblivion, he had not felt relief to have his fate taken out of his own hands. Whether he had not lain down quite willingly in the gurney, closing his eyes and surrendering without protest all claims to cogency, no longer caring to understand at all.

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.