Man Walks Into a Room (26 page)

Samson checked out of the motel at dawn and walked to the bus station. Since the incident at the hospital he had felt on edge, expecting the police to show up outside his motel room at any moment. He briefly considered going back to L.A. to see Lana, but decided against it. He didn’t want to show up, depressed and stinking, to intrude on her and Winn, young and in love, with their whole lives ahead of them. Anyway, what could she do for him now? He thought about going back to California and finding his old street and the house he’d grown up in. He felt sure that it must have been where he was headed when they’d found him a year ago in the desert, and now it seemed right to finish that trip. But when he got to the bus station he lost his conviction and sat listlessly on the bench watching the buses groan to life, the sky snuffing out their headlights as it lightened. He put his head in his hands. His eyes stung from lack of sleep.

There was a dusty Greyhound going directly to Santa Cruz and while the driver was stretching his legs and making small talk in the station, a girl climbed up the steps and peered inside. There was no one on the bus yet and she came back out, looked around, and boarded again as quietly as a thief. She took a seat in the back by the window. When she leaned her head against the glass Samson caught his breath because her small heart-shaped face looked so much like Anna’s. He almost could believe that by some mistake in time it
was
Anna, aged eighteen or nineteen, having woken only an hour ago in her childhood bed and hurriedly walked through her house saying good-bye to the rooms one by one. There was so little he knew about his wife. He would have liked to call and hear her voice, but he didn’t know how to even begin explaining to her all that had happened and how he felt, and he knew it wasn’t fair to keep pulling her back when she seemed to
be finally getting on without him. He had left a message while he knew she was at work, explaining that he’d left Clearwater and was probably going to go back to California for a while. The last thing he wanted was for her to have to worry that he’d disappeared again.

A few more passengers followed and then the driver got on and started up the bus. As it coasted out of the lot Samson continued to watch the girl. He was overcome by a need to talk to her. Leaping up, he shouted for the bus to stop. The few people milling in the parking lot watched dumbly as he chased after it, stumbling and waving his arms. Coins fell from his pockets and skittered across the ground. He ran alongside it as it lumbered onto the road, pounding it with his fists, and even after it had come to a full stop, after it was clear that the driver had heard his cry and heeded, Samson continued to pummel the door like the madman he knew he was not, allowing himself the increasingly familiar pleasure of getting carried away.
Making an impression,
he thought to himself, feeling remarkably lucid as the driver slid open the door and stared down at him.

Slowly, theatrically, like a man twice his age, Samson lumbered up the steps. He handed the driver two crumpled twenties—he had no idea how much a ticket was—and the driver’s face curled into a scowl. Samson dismissed him with a glance and turned to the rows of seats. The five or six passengers stared at him. He paused at the top of the aisle, allowing them to take him in, to sniff out his suffering like a pack of wild dogs. What did he have to hide? Let them devour him. He met each gaze as he made his way toward the girl, clutching the seats like a wounded man. She was staring at him too, looking bewildered. He slid into the seat next to her, taking off his jacket and calmly arranging it on his lap. The girl turned her face back to the window. An unpleasant smell wafted in from somewhere and Samson realized it was his own, not suffering at all but plain B.O.
Nothing to be done about that now,
he thought, turning with a look of defiance to the driver standing at the top of the aisle. Their eyes met, and for a moment it seemed the whole bus held its breath.

“What?” the girl asked.

Samson hadn’t spoken, but he turned and faced the girl now.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“Okay.”

She turned back to the window, her hands folded in her lap. But her voice seemed to have settled things, because the driver got back behind the wheel shaking his head and nosed the bus onto the road. Slumped in their seats, the other passengers seemed to forget about Samson. But, because of his nearness, his smell—because he had singled her out among them—the girl could not ignore him. She pressed herself up against the window, but the more she looked away, the more he knew she was considering him. He wanted to talk, try things out on her, to rehearse with one who looked so much like a young vision of his wife.

She wore frayed brown corduroys and a yellow T-shirt that hung on her thin frame. Either they belonged to someone else or she had shrunk drastically from the person she once was. It looked like her last haircut had been done with a saw. She wore a crucifix on a string around her neck.

When Las Vegas dwindled then vanished behind them, she reached down and took a little book out of the backpack at her feet. It was well handled, the pages tattered and folded back.
The Holy Bible
was embossed in gold letters across the cover. The girl cupped the book protectively in her hands, carrying it toward the window light. Samson watched her read, her lips moving soundlessly. He wracked his brain, searching for something, anything, he might remember. He’d been a professor of literature, he must have known the New Testament as well as a Christian does, must have memorized the gory, fanatical deaths of each saint the way a fan knows the knockouts of every boxer, who by fire, who by water, who by a swift jab to the stomach causing internal bleeding.

“Is it any good?”

She turned to him, blinking through the strands of hair that fell unevenly across her face. He had to control the impulse to brush them away. She didn’t have the face of a believer; hers was too decidedly suspicious.

“The
Bible?”
she asked.

His ability to disconcert people was something he’d only recently been discovering, though he hadn’t been conscious at the time of his greatest, most compelling triumph—disappearing from New York and turning up in the desert without his memory. The shock factor must have been off the scale, and it was Anna alone who’d suffered it.

“The Bible, yes. Do you like it?”

She closed the book and turned to him. Apart from the shape of her face and her dark hair, up close she didn’t appear so similar to Anna after all. She had a broad, flat nose that gave her a look of impudence. But there was something—a fragility or perceptiveness maybe—that she shared with his wife.

“Like it? I don’t think that’s the point, really.” Her nostrils flared as she spoke and she turned and traced a few letters on the grimy window. She had long, thin, aristocratic-looking fingers, though the fingernails were blunt and dirty.

“What
is
the point?”

She looked at him through narrowed eyes, taking him in. She seemed to be struggling to decide whether she should change seats. The desert fled past through the window.

“Salvation. Redemption,” she finally said matter-of-factly. She lifted a slender, ecclesiastical finger to her mouth and delicately gnawed on a hangnail. “The glory of God. Guidance for the pilgrim’s soul.”

Not only were her fingernails grubby; her face looked dirty too. She probably hadn’t bathed for days. Samson wondered whether the smell was coming from her rather than him. Or possibly it was both of them, two smelly pilgrims at the back of the bus.

“Great. Read me something.”

“You’re serious?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t want salvation? Redemption? By all means. Give me glory. I’m starving for glory.”

“If you’re being sarcastic—”

“Who’s being sarcastic? I just nearly broke my neck running after the bus so I could talk to you. Whatever you want to tell me or read to me is fine. Pick one of your favorite parts. I’d like that. Okay?”

“Why’d you want to talk to me so badly?” She did nothing to disguise her distaste.

“You look like someone I know, that’s all. Don’t get nervous. I feel a little stupid about it now, so why don’t you just read me something from your book.”

“It’s not a book, it’s the Bible.”

“The
Holy
Bible,” Samson added, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.

A moment of silence.

“You really want me to?”

“I wouldn’t have asked.”

He heard her shuffle through the pages. “Okay, how about this? I read this when I was in India. It was like I’d suddenly woken up after being asleep for years.”

“Perfect.”

“My head was full of all this Hindu stuff, which was all well and good, except I hadn’t thought about Jesus since I was a kid and my Sunday school teacher told me Jesus was my only true friend. Which at the time—because I was young and hadn’t gone through spiritual bankruptcy yet—seemed mean.”

It was more than Samson had bargained for. The girl continued.

“Here it is. From the Gospel of Matthew:
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”
Samson thought he heard a tremor in her voice and opened his eyes. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, looking out the window, her finger still resting on the page.

“Yes. Rest unto your souls. It’s very nice. What were you doing in India?”

“Hmm? Oh, you know. What does anyone do in India? Stay at ashrams, read the Upanishads. Try to track down some guru that someone told you is
the one.
Hanging out in Varanasi on the ghats of the Ganges, watching the cremations. Breathing in the smell of sandalwood and burning flesh. Have you ever smelled burning human flesh?”

He paused and pretended to wrack his mind though he was pretty
sure that even with full memory capacity he wouldn’t have had to hesitate.

“No, I don’t believe I have.”

Despite her initial air of suspicion she was surprisingly willing to talk, a practiced wayfarer who seemed to understand another’s longing for conversation.

“It’s sort of acrid and almost sweet,” she explained. “They bring the body down wrapped in gold paper. And everyone’s happy because a soul is being set free, you know, throwing these pretty flowers, and the boatman takes what’s left of the body, takes the ashes out to the middle of the river. And maybe fifteen or twenty feet downriver, someone is squatting in the water washing clothes or brushing their teeth. For them, there’s no distinction between life and death; it’s just one unbroken circle. And you’re sitting there thinking, is that safe? Aren’t they going to catch some awful disease? And then you go back to the room you share with like ten other people and you get into your little dirty bed and cry, because you realize you’re probably never going to be that spiritually enlightened that you stop caring about germs and disease and just trust in the power of Brahman. Because you grew up in America in a nice clean house with parents that tried to shelter you but ended up fucking you up, and you’ll always be branded with that. And no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to wrap yourself into those yoga positions that even the beggars on the street can do, their legs tucked up behind their heads.”

“Because you’re American.”

“And totally inflexible. And so you just sit in your bed and cry, and pretty soon you realize you’ve been in India for, like, more than a year, and you’re totally exhausted and sick of curry and all the filth in the streets and you’re lonely as hell.”

“And suddenly it seems like having Jesus as your one true friend is not such a bad idea.”

The girl turned to him, surprised. “Are you a Christian?”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“Bankrupt.”

She nodded sympathetically.

“So you got on a plane and came back?” he asked.

“Eventually, but it took a while. I had to get used to the idea that it wasn’t going to work out. I’d dropped out of college, sold all my stuff to get enough money together for the trip. My parents loved that. And socially I’d pretty much burned my bridges back home. The only friends I really had were the people I was hanging out with in India, and looking back now I can say that most of them didn’t have it all there.” She tapped a finger to her head. “I used to listen to the radio a lot on a little shortwave my father once gave me. Usually I could get World Service or Voice of America, but I also liked listening to the local stations. Sitars and stuff. There were these soap operas that were in some sort of Hindi, but just the sound of these people swooning and carrying on like that, you know, was fascinating. And one day I was flipping through the stations and I found one, an American voice, and he was talking about God.”

“About Jesus Christ,” Samson added helpfully. It hadn’t taken much to get her going, and he didn’t want her to clam up now. There was something tentative about her, as if she might cease at any moment, extinguished like a nervous flame.

“He called him Christ Our Savior. I sank to the floor and listened. The man, this preacher, had the most beautiful voice. Very intimate, like he was only talking to me. He leads a group, the Calvary Chapel, and he read from the Book of Job. I listened until he went off the air. By the end I was really crying hard and the next day I went out and found a Bible. I listened to that program every day for three weeks straight and then I came home.”

“Home?”

She looked out the window, squinting her eyes against the harsh light. “Brookline, Massachusetts.” He could almost hear the greenness of the place in her voice, the grief-stricken autumns and the sweet smell of fresh grass in summer, a place as far from where they now were as India. “My parents were basically horrified. They hardly recognized me. When they picked me up at the airport my mother just cried and cried. She said I looked like one of those starving children on
television. You know, the ones you see while comfortably watching the six o’clock news with a martini? But it wasn’t like she was hurrying to embrace me, or anything. I think she was afraid she might catch something. So I hugged her myself and told her she was a child of God. And that made her cry harder.”