Man Walks Into a Room (4 page)

He felt sick and nervous, and hurried back around the room turning all the photographs facedown. He began pacing around the cramped space as if he were the wild boy raised by wolves that he’d read about as a child, whose first night indoors was spent in panic, looking for a way out. He dragged his fingers across the spines of the books; there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Their orderliness disturbed him, and he pulled a few off the shelf at random. Not satisfied, he grabbed whole armfuls. Things fluttered down that had been lodged between the pages, movie stubs and newspaper clippings and a postcard with a lighthouse on the front.

He turned the postcard over.
August 18, 1994. Dear Anna, Today I finished the last page, and now I am thinking of you.
That was all he’d written. He must have put down his pen and looked out at the water, and then placed the card between the pages of his book and forgotten about it. He felt a sudden fury, that the man he used to be could so easily trail off in midsentence, that he could forget to finish a letter to his wife with impunity. A man who could go away and come back, who could write home or not, who could leave off from the page and disappear into the afternoon—and nothing would be held against him. A man who was not a freak, who was loved and recognized by dogs and
children alike. He ripped the card into pieces and heaved open the window. He was surprised to feel hot tears on his face. He leaned out as far as he could and opened his hand, and as the shredded bits of the lighthouse fell through the air he stuffed his knuckles in his mouth and howled, a cry so high-pitched that it was almost soundless.

He watched the bits of paper settle on the sidewalk below. A woman hurrying on her way somewhere stopped and looked up. Samson leaned back into the shadows. The forgetting was beyond his control; it was said and done now, and even if he’d wanted to he could not wish the lost time back. It angered him to have so little choice in his own fate—to go to sleep in the liberty of childhood and wake up twenty-four years later in a life he had nothing to do with, surrounded by people who expected him to be someone he felt he’d never been.

When he returned to the bed, Anna had moved back to her own side. Looking at her in the dim light of the streetlamp, he was struck by her beauty. He lay down and closed his eyes. With sleep came forgetfulness. He felt at home there.

HIS DAYS WERE FILLED
with doctor appointments and tests. There were more CT scans and MRIs. By now he knew the ritual and would wait in his lead apron scanning the pages of
People
magazine until the technician came for him. He recognized a few of the celebrities, an old Mick Jagger, a fat Liz Taylor.

“Oh, she’s been through a lot since you last heard about her,” the nurse joked when she found him studying her picture. He liked these magazines as he had liked comic books as a boy: he wanted to trade them and collect them all. He liked the bits of ephemera and the tales of celebrity lives that he picked up in their pages, and liked, also, to employ this knowledge to surprise people with his quickness. Once, when he called a prissy friend of Anna’s a slave to Martha Stewart, she started to exclaim that it was all a hoax, that he was playing dumb and
really could remember, and he had to race through his stack of magazines to show her the special issue on America’s richest women.

Everyone in the Neurology Institute liked Samson, and for a little while he was himself a kind of minor celebrity, a one-in-a-million case. He was an easy patient, even-tempered and obedient, shuffling through the tests and swallowing what they gave him. Once as he lay still in the claustrophobic tunnel of the MRI machine, listening to the light FM they piped through his earphones, he felt—a feeling he couldn’t yet articulate—the absurdity of his situation. He had no trouble completing the cognitive tasks the neurologists set for him and they concluded that his sense of language, his ability to understand abstract concepts, his intellect itself, remained remarkably intact. They determined that though he had no remembrance of the last twenty-four years, he still had the mind of an intelligent adult. Using primitive sketches drawn on the backs of loose paper, they demonstrated to Samson and Anna how the mind doesn’t store knowledge it learns about the world chronologically, the way it does experiences. Samson could formulate ideas with such facility partly because his factual, or semantic, memories hadn’t been wholly destroyed. The result was a peculiar inventiveness in his way of thinking, his tendency to make connections between remote things as if unimpeded by the banal standards of habit. It was a side effect of his loss of memory, a creativity that sprung from an advanced mind experiencing the world as a novelty.

For it was the simplest tests he always failed:
Where did you go to college? In what year did you marry your wife?,
to which he looked at them helplessly, hurt by their insistence. Time and again they made him recite the events of the days and now weeks since his surgery, tracing the line back until it dropped off into darkness.

It was a long, unyielding darkness, a lengthy pause that could not be counted in years. And just when it seemed that it might be interminable, it ended and Samson emerged again on the other side in the sharp, unforgettable light of childhood.

HE HAD GROWN UP
in California, in Los Altos, not far from the Pacific. As a child he’d often driven to the ocean with his mother. There was a spot they liked a few miles north of Half Moon Bay. They would pick their way down the steep cliff path that ran between the brush and aloe, then walk along the water. Samson would run ahead and crouch down to examine a shell or stone like an archaeologist of past waves. Often they took their dog, a little black dog, with them. She ran alongside Samson and buried her nose in whatever he stopped to look at, or else she hung back, keeping pace with his mother. Afterward they would drive back in the late-afternoon light, Samson lying in the backseat with the warm, sandy dog while the trees and sky flashed past the open window.

He remembered these scenes clearly. At first they came to him one by one, small moments out of time like snapshots. Soon he began to
string the individual memories together, but as he placed one after the next a wealth of new memories would well up between the two. Every day his childhood multiplied, grew more complex with the addition of shadows, objects, angles, expressions. If he unearthed a blue chair it had to be sat on, and quickly he remembered his mother peeling apples in it, or the dog ramming her paws between the legs to retrieve a tennis ball. With this sudden whirl of motion, the succession of still images began to move and gained momentum. He found he could run through the years then stop on a moment at random like a single image in a stereoscope. His bicycle leaning against the side of the house, a crown of rust around the bell, the rubber foot on the kickstand scratched from use. The wooden rungs of his jungle gym eaten green by rot, the drab canvas tent sagging under the weight of water. The covers of books he had read over and over with the crazed perseverance of a record-breaker. The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

He remembered playing handball with two boys against the garage door. They took turns swatting the rubber ball with their palms and each thud it made against the garage left a greasy smudge on the paint. He figured that if they could hit every spot on the garage door then it would be a uniform smudge, and so his mother might not notice or care. The hot July sun was on his neck. He aimed at the corners, higher and lower than he normally would have, and soon the boys began to yell at him for throwing away his shots. As a joke he threw the ball at the back of one boy’s legs. The boy threw it back harder, pelting Samson in the stomach. He doubled over in theatrical pain, but as the boys approached him he uncurled and dashed past them to the hose. He turned it on with a flick of the wrist and as the warm, lazy water made its way through the green coil the boys began to back down the driveway. The water came just in time, and putting his thumb over the
nozzle to increase the power of the spray, Samson aimed at them. He watched them disappear down the street shouting, the skin of their backs showing through their wet T-shirts, the water dripping down their legs leaving a trail on the dull asphalt. He spent the rest of the summer running from the boys with their water guns and buckets, running barefoot through the prickly grass, scrambling over fences, jogging through backyards, looking for the nearest pool he could leap into in order to rob them of the pleasure of soaking him first.

In his memory he was often running. He sailed past the houses on his street lined with dusty eucalyptus trees, past the Shreiners’ tennis court where Mr. Shreiner lunged to return the endless rounds the ball machine steadily fired at him, past the Reids’ gazebo strung with wisteria, the school yard, the rise of foothills. He flew past his mother, who lay in a lawn chair with a book folded on her lap. Sometimes it was at top speed so that he could feel the hard ground explode in his shins with each step and his lungs gasping for breath, and other times it was a leisurely jog, a pace he felt he could keep up forever, that might take him across the county, across the state line, or down to Los Angeles.
Where are you running to?
his mother would ask as he clattered down the stairs, punching his arms into the sleeves of his T-shirt. But already he was out the door into the marathon summer.

If he wasn’t running or playing with the two boys he was completely still. Sometimes, exhausted, he would lie on his back for hours wherever he had stopped, reading whatever was within reach.
What happened to you?
his mother would say, coming home from work to find him lying on the kitchen floor, a carton of orange juice still open on the counter. And either he would keep reading or he’d roll over and hug her ankles then leap up and dash past her, over to the neighbor’s pool or past Jollie Lambird’s house, whom he’d had a crush on since the second grade, to see if just now she was on her way out the door. It was like this, running through his twelfth summer, that Samson’s memories disappeared midstep into the void.

At first the doctors listened carefully as he recounted these memories. But within a week or two, once his case had been discussed and mar
veled at in grand rounds, it was filed away and the doctors seemed to lose interest. He was given over to the care of a neurologist called Dr. Lavell. A colleague of Lavell’s in Las Vegas, a woman he had done his residency with, had called him about Samson a few days after the surgery. In their first meeting Lavell attached electrodes to Samson’s head and asked him to answer questions while watching his brain waves peak across a screen.

“What can you tell from all that?” Samson asked after Lavell had completed the tests.

“That you’re a thinking man.”

“Anything else?”

“In your case, not too much. We already knew we had a highly functional mind on our hands.”

Lavell turned back to look at the screen. Finally he said, “But it’s pretty, no?” They both watched in silence.

“You know what I was thinking just then?” Samson asked.

“Tell me.”

“I was thinking, what if you could make out exactly what was going on in someone’s mind just by watching those spikes?”

“The thoughts themselves? Now
that
would be something.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t get many volunteers. Too intrusive.”

“I’d say. Only the very bold. Or the exhibitionists,” Lavell said.

Samson grinned. From then on he came in to see Lavell once a week.

Samson was highly observant, nervously absorbing everything around him. He looked to others for signs of how he should act, and because he liked and respected Arthur Lavell, Samson watched him with particular care. Lavell was in his mid-sixties, bald except for a chaplet of unruly gray curls that reached his collar. His face was fleshy, as if his features were under the reign of some greater force of gravity pulling down the jowls and stretching the nostrils. There were dark pouches under his eyes. He had stubby fingers and one of them was cinched by a wedding ring that looked more like an artifact stuck on his finger than the symbol of any committed passion. Lavell wasn’t the sort of man easily associated with passions; he had the phlegmatic
movements of a bottom feeder. Samson had been told that over the years Lavell had spent more and more time in the research laboratory, and was known around the institute for his brilliant mind. An ambulatory thinker, he often walked out of meetings or grand rounds in pursuit of an idea. Sometimes he laughed aloud when no one else did, or fell asleep in his seat. But although Lavell was polite to everyone, and popular among the residents, he seemed not to reciprocate their feelings. Samson sensed he was somewhat ambivalent about people, more loyal to the organ of the brain than the personality it produced. Perhaps this is why as the years went on he had practiced medicine less and spent more time in the laboratory, drawn out only by the most interesting cases.