Man Walks Into a Room (7 page)

While Anna was at work he wandered the city, riding the subway and getting off at random. He kept his eyes on the ground swabbed with old gum until the escalator spat him out into the hot, bright streets. He’d misplaced the map Anna had given him, the one she’d marked with points of interest, but if he got lost he walked until the city reorganized itself around him and he found himself somewhere he’d been before. There were certain places he always seemed to return to, squares or street corners, like refrains, points of convergence where the city doubled back on itself before escaping again around the corner.

It was high July, then August. The city perspired, water dripping down from rusty air-conditioning units, leaving dark circles on the street. Sometimes a bus would hurl past kicking up dirt that lodged in his eyes, buses whose signboards read
Limited
and never seemed to stop but rather sped past with their privileged, otherworldly passengers. Samson walked from the Upper West Side all the way down to the tip of Manhattan where he could see the Statue of Liberty through the greasy air. He picked his way along the West Side Highway, around the construction pits and piles of sand and rubber tubing, watching the gulls land on the rotting piers. If he found himself in a district of gritty neon storefronts he would go in and loiter in the cool air until the Korean or Pakistani shopkeeper eyed him and then he would pick up the nearest thing and bring it to the counter, dealing out his crumpled bills like milk money.

The city hurt to look at, all angles and glints of sun like shattered
glass. The trees were pitiful, anchored in concrete. The dogs seemed to accept this, and no matter how many times they passed the same tree they would act as if they’d never seen it before and mark it as their own. Sometimes Samson would take Frank along, who, unlike Anna, had forgiven him everything. When they caught each other’s eye, he felt that Frank understood him and did not feel it necessary to remind him of the many things they had once done together. Often Frank could not be bothered to go through the charade of fussing over the tree, and simply stopped to pee wherever he was. On these days he seemed to hold in disdain the other dogs that were slaves to the system.

One day Samson rode the Circle Line and caused a sensation among an outing of third graders when he took off his hat and showed them his scar. He told them he’d gotten it fighting forces of evil. They crowded around him and one fat boy gripped him around the knee. He told them he had jumped from a burning building, but later forgot and told them he’d jumped from a plane.

When it rained, puddles gathered in the gutter, water that was a chemical, acid green. At such times Anna, with her little sayings and the smell of her perfume and the hair bands she wore like rings on her fingers, was scratch, a blip, a stain on his anonymity.

He crossed Central Park littered with joggers and the shouts of children with miraculous ideas. He watched them in the playground, a small country governed by the ever-changing laws of games invented out of sticks and stones. They needed so little to get on. The distant city rose up through the trees.

He walked until he was exhausted and eventually he might sit on a bench. Once a man with a hood drawn around his face passed, pushing a supermarket cart stacked with unidentifiable things.
Sparesome-change?
he hissed, throwing out a glance like a gnawed bone and then, without stopping to see if Samson would dig a hand into his pocket, answered himself,
Gawblessyou,
as if he was playing a part, but without conviction. He expected nothing; perhaps he would not even have taken any change had Samson offered. As the man passed, almost brushing his knees, Samson saw the rinds of dirt under his fingernails
and his battered heels that poked out of the sneakers he wore like slippers. Samson did not remember seeing any homeless people in Los Altos, and he could not get used to them now, the woman who cried on Fifth Avenue, wearing nothing but a trash bag, the men who slept over the grates that blew warm, dirty air.

He thought: You come, you find a life ready-made, you just have to slip it on.

He watched people. Men and women hurrying home from work in possession of their own memories. They were a mystery to him, how easily they turned the corner, as if they could get home in their sleep.

At night, when Anna came home from work, she told him about the drifters who’d washed up in the agency, a three-hundred-pound black man who stalked the halls muttering about how he had to get out to feed the thousands of children he was convinced he’d fathered, or Ken from Japan who dove under tables for cover from imaginary bombings by Yakuza. Samson told her about his trip on the Circle Line or to the observatory deck of the Empire State Building, and for a moment they might have been the most ordinary couple in the world. But they weren’t, and there didn’t seem to be much point in pretending. He didn’t want to make Anna sad, but when he caught himself trying too hard to play the role of her husband he became disgusted with his failure and fraudulence and retreated deeper into himself.

Mostly he tended the blankness in the center of his mind. His memory had abandoned him, and though he had searched within himself all these weeks, he could find no desire to have it returned. If it came back now, he felt he would turn it away, and the knowledge of this renouncement, a small act of defiance, gave him a feeling of liberty. He told no one of his resolution. He wanted to explain it to Anna but he didn’t know how to, a covenant he had decided upon alone, a small, sharp rebellion against all that was beyond his control. Soon it became a secret so well hidden that even the doctors did not find it when they swept their searchlights across his mind.

The empty space was enormous, but he guarded its borders. Only when he lay in bed at night did he allow himself to cross it, the moon
scape that stretched from his twelfth year to the day he awoke in the hospital. He moved through it like the scientists he saw on TV trudging through the tundra in Gore-Tex parkas. He moved like a man who knew the danger, the seriousness, of his mission. He moved through it backward and swept away his footsteps.

NOT AN ASTRONAUT
but an English professor. He should have guessed. It was the natural destiny of a book-hungry child, and yet somehow the sheer accumulation of knowledge it must have required unnerved him a little and he stayed away from the university until late August. Passing the iron gates one day, he finally approached a guard and asked for directions to the English Department. It was still vacation and other than the maintenance men and a few permanently roosting graduate students, the campus was deserted. When he found his way to his office he was surprised to see his name on the door and a note saying he was on medical leave. He felt disappointed, like an eager student who had dropped by on the off chance that the professor was puttering around the office in golf togs.

The office was hot and dust hung in the air. Posters for conferences in Berlin, Basel, and Salamanca hung on the walls, all of them
with Samson’s name listed among the speakers. Books lay open, facedown on the desk. He picked one up and flipped through the pages and in the margins he recognized his own neat handwriting. He closed it quickly and returned it to its place like a piece of evidence.

There was a knock on the door and for a moment Samson sat dumbfounded, wondering if he could hide somewhere.

“Who is it?”

The door opened and a girl poked her head around it. “Professor Greene?”

“Uh, yes?”

“I saw you going up the stairs. I wasn’t sure if …” She slipped inside and closed the door behind her, clutching her bag to her chest. She looked at Samson, waiting. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Samson looked back helplessly.

“It’s okay, I didn’t expect you to. I’m Lana? Lana Porter? I was in your Contemporary Writers class?”

She was tall and lanky, with jet-black hair cut across her forehead and just below her ears like a pageboy. She wore a tiny diamond stud in her nose. She seemed frenetic, the sort of girl who has to eat constantly to maintain her metabolism.

“People have been saying all kinds of things. I didn’t know what to believe.”

Her gaze fluttered across him then jumped back to the scar on his head. She studied it shamelessly, and for a few seconds it kept her still.

“What did they say?” he asked.

There was something refreshingly obvious about her, not only because she was tall and her angled lines refused to blur into the background of furniture but because of her straightforwardness, as yet unsocialized by a profusion of apologies.

“That you were a vegetable.”

“I see.”

“I didn’t believe it. It would have been too awful.” Lana took a few steps toward the desk and sank into a chair, making up for this move toward restfulness by sliding her feet in circles across the floor as if to preserve the possibility of a sudden movement in any direction.

“Is it terrible? To lose your memory, I mean. I guess that’s a dumb question. I can tell you now—now that the class is over and you can’t remember it anyway—that every time I asked a question in class I wondered afterward whether you would think it was stupid.” She paused. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“It’s okay, people seem to.”

“What?”

“Seem to tell me things. It’s odd, but since all of this happened, the people who used to know me seem to want to confess things. They want to explain how things were between us. They get very honest. There’s a look of relief on their faces as they admit things.”

“You can’t really blame people. Think how weird it is to see you.”

“I know. It must be strange not to be recognized. I’m sorry.”

“You look the same except for that—” She thrust her chin upward, gesturing at his scar. “But as soon as you open your mouth you can tell something’s different. It’s eerie.”

“I
feel
eerie,” he said.

He looked at her and she looked back, waiting.

“You do construction work on the side?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your shorts. With the little loop for a hammer and all those pockets for, I don’t know, wrenches.”

“Very funny. It’s called
style.”
She grinned. “That was a pretty good imitation of your old self, though.”

“Was it?” He narrowed his eyes at her and smiled back. “Lana Porter. Sounds like a movie star.”

“You’re thinking of Lana Turner.”

“Oh.” She crossed her legs, and he looked up, wondering if she had noticed him looking at them. “So you used to call me Professor Greene?”

“No. I used to call you Samson.”

“But when you knocked just now, you called me—”

“I was being polite.”

He looked at her, this electric girl, and wondered what exactly it was about her he should have remembered.

She had a breezy way of talking that put him at ease. She didn’t wait for him to struggle to find the right questions, but instead told him about her summer break, what little of it she had, since she had to take a couple of classes in order to spend the next semester at the film school at UCLA and still graduate on time. How she’d been assigned “The Swimmer” again in one of her literature classes—when he looked confused she explained that it was a story he’d taught in class—and how the other night, curled up in her bed, the only place she could read anything, she’d finished the last page and started crying. She told him about how she’d cried a lot since coming to New York two years ago, from Cleveland, Ohio. She cried through the whole first week, when the pay phones on the street swallowed her quarters and left her with the flat, senseless dial tone, a sound she believed—according to a theory she was forming about the city’s volume—came from other parts of the city, from the electrocardiograms of dead people. She cried when she passed the skinny guitar players underground who also played the drums with their feet for a hat full of change and a couple of dollar bills. And she cried when they handed her back her Columbia ID with the photograph they’d taken of a girl who’d been crying because she couldn’t ever go back to the suburbs of Cleveland anymore, not in the same way.

As she spoke he tried desperately to imagine it all. Something about her appealed to him, and he wanted to be able to picture the brief stunt of her teenage history, to follow it as if through a telescope lens.

She told him how she’d decided to cut her hair, which was blond and reached her waist, how she had to pay the hairdresser extra money to convince him to do it because he said it was a crime to cut it, people kill for hair like that, and how afterward he got down on his hands and knees to collect it because he realized that he might be able to sell it for a wig. She left the money on the counter and walked out, leaving him crawling around on the floor. She walked down Amsterdam Avenue and tried not to keep touching her hair, which sort of threw her off balance every time she ran her fingers through it, like when you think there’s another step but there isn’t and you come down hard on the
ground. The next day she dyed it black with some stuff she bought at Rite Aid. For a while the new haircut made her feel better, made it feel that it wasn’t her, Lana Porter, who had left her high school boyfriend, who was taking the year off to try to push his band out of the basement to maybe make it big in Japan, left her bedroom with plush wall-to-wall carpet, left all her popular friends who had never been as smart as she. With the new haircut people looked at her differently, which she was glad for because she couldn’t anymore be the same person she had been all along; she had to give something up to make room for all of it, for the dumb, ecstatic city. She stopped crying after that, and now she only cried once in a while, when she least expected it or when she finished books that she especially loved.