Man Walks Into a Room (6 page)

It was hot outside, and Samson was already sweating in his suit. He took off the jacket and held it crumpled at his side. When he got down to the subway platform it was a furnace, dead air trapped in subterranean vaults under the city, great generators of inner-city weather. He listened to the thunder of trains slamming in and out of the tunnels.

Inside the crowded metal car under the ultraviolet lights, the helpless passengers looked like a litter of baby mice. Samson found a seat next to a huge boy, the biggest boy he had ever seen, who was serenely explaining to an interested man just how he could break his arm in two places. Samson’s eyes came to rest on a girl hunched across the aisle who was chewing the polish off red nails, the kind of girl who looked like she hadn’t slept at home last night. If she looked up and caught him staring he would look away, but she kept her eyes on the floor. Samson watched her until the 116th Street stop and then she stood, glanced at him with a precise and practiced boredom, and got off. Samson closed his eyes and the train thundered on through the darkness.

He couldn’t help staring. He told this to Lavell, who quoted a famous photographer to the effect that staring is the best way to educate the eye. If someone referred to something Samson didn’t know about, he often didn’t ask. Later he might look it up. He was devoted to the information he could get from books or, even better, magazines. He filled his time reading everything he could get his hands on.

Lavell’s office was located in an almost forgotten hallway of the Neurology Institute, terminating in the dead end of a broom closet. On the way Samson passed a woman in a hospital gown and socks with rubber skids who mimicked with unnerving precision the expressions and gestures of anyone who passed. He tried to look away, but out of the corner of his eye saw her look away too, caricaturing his dismissal.

Lavell had been at the end of the hall for so many years that his room, though spacious, had a cramped feel. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were stacked with books. Every surface not taken up by papers was cluttered with medical paraphernalia. There were plastic models of the brain with removable hemispheres, a ceramic phrenology bust mapped with L. N. Fowler’s psychogeography: the regions of blandness, youthfulness, wit. A skeleton stood by the erasable whiteboard on which Lavell sometimes illustrated things for his patients. Scattered here and there were toys for children who came to him, locked in the anechoic chamber of autism.

“Who’s that woman?” Samson asked, sitting in the chair the doctor motioned to.

“Who?”

“In the hall, like she’s possessed.”

“Marietta? She has Tourette’s, a very severe case. It makes her tic like that. She has an overpowering impulse to mimic whatever she sees.” Lavell lifted a stubby finger and rubbed his eyebrow. “A colleague of mine, smart guy, wrote a case study of her. Whether the individual Marietta truly exists or if the impulses, so all-consuming, make her just a phantasmagoria of a person.” He listed the great ticquers of all time, enumerating them like Hall of Fame batters. He described an old medical book that began with the anonymous memoir “Confessions of a Ticquer.” “Have you considered writing anything yourself since your surgery? Keeping a journal, et cetera?”

Samson was aware of Lavell leading the discussion here and there, directing a flashlight on the empty mine shafts of his mind. But he enjoyed their talks; Lavell seemed to expect nothing from him. Samson felt he could say or do anything, could crouch on the chair and jerk around like a monkey, screech
Whoo! Whoo!,
and Lavell would not be moved to comment.

A tall Asian man with his hair standing on end opened the door of the office and squealed a quick-fire “Hi! How are you? Hi! How are you?”

“Fine,” Lavell replied curtly, and turning his attention back to
Samson, continued talking until the man softly shut the door and continued on his way.

“And how are
you?”
Lavell asked, leaning back in his chair.

“Oh, fine, I guess.”

“How are things with Anna?”

There was so much Samson wished to ask, for instance how many times a day did an average man of thirty-six masturbate, and how often did married couples have sex? He wanted to administer to Lavell a questionnaire about how a woman’s body worked, about what to do to make her scream and moan and throw flowers at his feet. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was too mortifying, especially as it seemed highly possible that the questions would be answered with textbook pictures, reducing the whole erotic mystery to a series of movements as academic as a square dance.

Lavell leaned back, waiting. His chair creaked.

We did it!
Samson wanted to shriek, but instead he coughed and answered, “With Anna? The same, really. She was upset the other night.”

“Yes?”

“She asked me if I had any empathy for her. For everything she’s going through right now.”

“Do you?”

“It’s sad. Sometimes she’ll get a certain expression on her face and it makes me feel awful. But I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m suppose to feel myself—it’s hard to even
begin
imagining what it’s like for her.”

“Interesting choice of words, empathy.”

“Why?”

“For exactly the reason you said. Empathy is the capacity to participate in, or vicariously experience, another’s feelings. In order to do that, you need to draw on the memory of having experienced something similar—the very thing that is
impossible
for you to do.”

“That’s true.”

Lavell raised his hands. “So what did you say to her?”

“I held her. She was crying so I put my arms around her.”

“Good choice,” Lavell said.

Eventually the discussion turned to his childhood, as it often did. The memories returned in no particular order. Why one memory declared itself at any given moment, he didn’t know. Knowing would mean understanding the order of the things.

And then their conversation surfaced again in the present, breaking up the sound of birds bickering in the trees outside, and apropos of nothing Lavell asked, “Do you know what it feels like to be in love?” The word seemed out of place between his fleshy lips. Samson thought of Jollie Lambird, which embarrassed him, and he looked down at his shoes that seemed too shiny.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What about Anna?”

“Look, it’s all a bit mystifying.”

“I should think so. One minute”—Lavell snapped his fingers—“and the next thing, you’re married. It would throw anyone.”

Samson pictured Anna as he had seen her this morning, hovering above him. “She’s lovely. Beautiful and kind and what’s not to like? But why her and not someone else?”

“A decision you made, we have to assume, based on experiences with other women before you met Anna.”

“But who is she? I wake up in the middle of the night and she’s lying next to me. Sometimes she holds her breath when she sleeps. Her head hits the pillow and in a minute she’s asleep and then suddenly she stops breathing. Like she’s just jumped into a freezing lake. Like the sudden revelations of her self-conscious—”

“Her unconscious.”

“Her unconscious, as if it’s shocked her. Sometimes I want to pound her on the back to get her to start inhaling again, but just when I think she’s going to turn blue the breathing starts up as if she never stopped, as if she weren’t this close.” Samson held up two fingers with an inch between them.

“Close to what?”

“That place just beyond everything she knows for sure. The same place I woke up in.”

“You had a cerebral lesion. Don’t you think there is a logic—a terrible logic—to your amnesia? The tumor destroyed—”

“I know, I know. A little to the left or right and I might not have remembered how to go to the bathroom. I might have existed in some eternal moment, with no memory of the minute that’s just passed. I might have lost my ability to feel. I’m lucky, sure. What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost … negligible. It’s true that there’s grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny, sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?”

“You were saying that Anna stops breathing when she’s asleep. How at those times you think she’s ‘this close’ to something. To what?”

“Oblivion, I guess. Where I was when they found me in Nevada. And now I’ve come back from it and can never be the same again.”

“What was it like, this oblivion?”

Samson shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Do you ever think there might be people who would envy you?”

“They’d have to be crazy.”

“Okay, how about this: if you could have your memory back right now, would you take it?”

“Hey, whose side are you on?” Samson asked. To change the subject he told Lavell about the article on cloning he’d read that morning in the paper. As a boy, he’d always been drawn to science, to the discovery of miraculous things, the race for knowledge about the earth, human beings, the sky. It fascinated him now too, the idea that perhaps in fifty, a hundred years they could clone everyone at birth. “An extra,” he said, “in case something tragic should happen.”

Lavell raised an eyebrow.

“Seriously. They could keep the Extra on some kind of farm out in the middle of nowhere, just letting him get exercise and fresh air so he’ll be ready if he receives the call to duty. And then one day the call
comes through—there’s been a plane crash, or cancer, or a skiing accident.” Samson thought for a second. “Anything but a suicide, because a suicide would mean it’s a no go, the Original wanted out and so that’s that.”

“The call comes through.”

“Yes, and now we have a problem, right, because the Extra doesn’t know anything about the Original’s life. All right, so maybe he’s been reading about his life in installments they give him every month on the farm. Still, he doesn’t know the intimate things.”

“The little names the Original whispered to his wife.”

“That sort of thing. So the cloning project looks like it’s going to be a total failure, but then what do the scientists do?”

He held Lavell’s gaze a beat like a performer, a stand-up, drumroll please.

“They develop a way to slide out the Original’s memory like a safe-deposit box and pop it into the Extra. The whole thing, life experiences, all of them. And there you go. No one could tell this guy from the Original except for the fact that he doesn’t have the same physical scars.” Samson sat back and folded his arms over his chest. He was pleased with the idea, pleased with the sudden ease of talking when the subject wasn’t himself.

“An interesting proposal. Actually I know a doctor who’s working on something like that. Not the cloning but the memory part. Transferring memories from one mind to another and so forth. A long shot if you ask me. But getting back to your scenario, I wonder, for argument’s sake, what would happen in a case like yours where the Original’s memory is damaged?”

Samson thought for a minute. “In such a case I, the Original, would be forced to relinquish my role as key player, and the Extra would step forward and have his day.”

“To lose your memory would be to forfeit your position as the Original.”

“Right.”

The door of Lavell’s office creaked opened and the gregarious
Asian man poked his head in. His face broke into a broad grin when he saw them and he seemed about to say something but thought better of it and closed the door.

“He sings two Lionel Richie songs over and over,” Lavell said. “Ask him to sing ‘Say You, Say Me’ when you leave.”

On the way out Samson passed Marietta, who was watching television in the lounge, regurgitating the histrionics of a soap opera in her endless pantomime. The Asian man didn’t want to sing “Say You, Say Me,” but he belted out “Hello” instead, in a quivery falsetto accompanied by hand gestures:
Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

THE DAYS PASSED.
Each day Anna tore off yesterday’s page from the calendar, and later Samson retrieved the page from the garbage. Eventually he might tie the pages in bunches like letters.

After he’d worn a pair of corduroys he found at the back of the closet for a week straight, Anna offered to take him shopping. She sat patiently on the wooden gym bench in the sports store while Samson paced the rows of gleaming white sneakers, looking for the style he wanted.

“I found it,” he said, bringing over an electric-blue suede sneaker. Anna wrinkled her nose. “I want them,” he insisted.

“You’ll look ridiculous.”

“Everyone has them.”

“Who’s everyone?”

“Look around,” Samson said over his shoulder, bringing the shoe
over to the sales assistant who raised his eyebrows when Samson asked him to measure his foot.

“You’ve got pretty big feet,” the assistant announced, adjusting the sliding ruler.

“They’re huge,” said Samson.

He wore the new sneakers home, carrying the old shoes in the box, and refused to take them off all evening. He wore them around in his bathrobe, breaking them in. They were the only ones in the whole store, he told Anna, that weren’t ugly.