Man Walks Into a Room (25 page)

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, but 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.

“What? I don’t know what you’re saying, Sammy. You’re talking gibberish.”

Samson exploded. “For God’s sake, Donald, do you realize what they’re doing there? Do you have even the slightest notion?”

There was silence and when Donald answered a gulf had opened between them. “Like I told you, I don’t ask questions. I have a job, I do it. They tell me not to talk, I don’t talk. Understand?”

The television flickered. Somewhere in the far north of Canada there would be snow, falling soundlessly over the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Arctic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that,
Samson wondered, and how was one to use such information except as proof that the world was too much to bear? He felt disappointed and foolish for calling, and wondered what to say to Donald. He hadn’t expected that Donald would fail to understand, that he would be unable to help—though help with what, Samson didn’t know anymore. This was a man whose head he’d been inside, a man who was now inside his head. He knew that as the detonation collapsed, Donald had felt a bolt of love for a girl with red hair.

The weatherman gestured north, in the direction of Canada.

“Where is Newfoundland?” Samson quietly asked aloud. “Do people know without maps where Newfoundland is?”

Donald’s voice softened. “Sammy, you’re a good kid. Go home to your wife. A thousand bucks she misses you. Probably she’s waiting for you right now. It’s not too late for you, Sammy. Do me a favor and go home.”

“The memory you gave them, I know what it is. All those soldiers, their heads blown back.” His voiced cracked. “Blood in their eyes, knocked onto the desert floor—”

“Look, I didn’t know,” Donald cut him off, his voice lowered. “It was too late when they told me. I wouldn’t have cared except that it was you. Like my own son, Sammy. A man does what he has to do, but if I woulda known … Look, all I can say is that it’s something between us. Intimate like, you understand? You carrying in your head something that happened to me when I was a kid. They told me never to talk about it and then one day they ask me to talk. I needed the money so I did. If I’d known, it woulda been a different story. But I didn’t, you gotta believe that. Who woulda guessed that such a thing was possible?”

Samson felt himself getting dizzy.

“It was an amazing thing, Sammy, you gotta understand. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That it scared the living shit outta me, but it was amazing.”

He could hear Donald saying something else but it didn’t matter anymore what, because then and there it occurred to him that maybe the emptiness he’d been living with all this time hadn’t really been
emptiness at all, but loneliness gone unrecognized. How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? A single mark had been made, another person’s memory imposed onto his mind, and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking. He sank to his knees.

“Sammy? I said, are you there?”

It was as if a match had been struck, throwing light on just how dark it was.

HE STOPPED SLEEPING.
He was exhausted but he wanted to remain alert, aware of everything. He felt as if he’d finally been returned to himself. The memory that had been loaded into his mind had broken the spell he’d been under since he’d woken from the operation. It was as if he had lived the past year in a trance.
A fugue state,
he had once heard Lavell say to describe the condition he’d been found in, ignorant of even his own name. Fugue, like fog or fugitive. Like music at a funeral.

He felt foolish, realizing how readily he had allowed himself to be indoctrinated by Ray, how hungrily he had consumed whatever scraps the doctor had thrown him. He had trusted him because he was the only one who seemed to find some beauty, some worth, in his condition. Not the victim of a meaningless tragedy but a man who had somehow been chosen. Samson realized that he knew almost nothing
about him. The only proof that he’d known Ray at all was the memory that, unless he deliberately avoided it, kept erupting in his head. It was a relationship struck up in a moment, forged on a proving ground where whatever took place was supposed to be without consequences beyond the scope of the experiment. Ray wasn’t a bad man, only a man misled by his visions, one who’d forsaken all culpability in favor of the purchase of a distant, uncertain thing.