Man Walks Into a Room (13 page)

Wingate blinked. There was something charming about how, once he was on a roll talking, another person’s interjections seemed to bewilder him. As if conversation were not a native skill but something he had awkwardly learned to imitate, like an ape in captivity taught to sign and give hugs but that remained ambivalent.

“What’s the last year you remember?” he asked.

“Nineteen seventy-six.”

“Damn.” Wingate whistled appreciatively. “So if I were to say, I don’t know, Iran-contra? Mean anything?”

“No.”

“Break dancing?”

“No.”

“Moon walk?”

“Sure, I watched it on TV.”

“No, like this—” Wingate stood up and glided backward across the floor.

Samson raised his eyebrows. “What is that?”

Wingate paused, his face grave. “I hate to break it to you, man. Fucking Elvis is dead.”

When Lana got back she screamed and tackled him, hooked her arm behind his back and grinned as if for a photo. Samson felt old and pitiful, like a lecherous uncle sweeping through town in a Cadillac to take his favorite niece to Sizzler. A bolt of misery streaked through his mood, and he wished he could find a loophole out of the moment. He stifled an odd, unaccountable urge to shriek, “Hi! How are you? Hi! How are you?” like the Asian Lionel Richie ferreting around the halls of Lavell’s hospital.

He followed Lana to the kitchen, where she found a six-pack of beer in a cabinet. She seemed even taller and more prone to accidents, yet less fragile, more beautiful.

“You live here?”

She rattled the ice tray over the sink. “I met him basically the first week I got here. It meant I didn’t have to bother looking for a place.”

Samson lowered his voice. “You’re at school and he stays home fiddling in the dark? Bombs and so forth.”

“Hah-hah. He’s a genius, if you must know.”

“Is that what they call it? What kind of name is Wingate anyway?”

“Hey,” she said, “I’m really glad to see you.” She handed him a beer and a glass of ice. In the light he noticed she had a silver ring through her eyebrow.

“They missed your ear again.”

“You’re a regular comedian. Everyone calls him Winn.”

“Who’s everyone?” He trailed her through the living room and down the hall, holding the bottle in front of him like a lantern.

They ate dinner at a plastic picnic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard, steamy tubs of tikka masala and lamb korma and little dishes of chutney and lime pickle. Samson couldn’t remember tasting Indian food before, and he sampled it in small forkfuls. Lana and Winn shoveled it in their mouths, dribbling rice and panting from the spicy heat, washing the stringy chunks of meat down with beer. Winn licked his fingers and talked with his mouth full, excitedly describing to Samson the hum and click of servers breaking up data, routers sending it out at the speed of light in signals amplified from station to station at the bottom of the sea. He was brilliant and magnetic: put him on a soapbox and he would draw a crowd. Samson could not help feeling disappointed that some nearness he’d wanted from Lana seemed impossible now.

While they ate dessert Samson told them about Ray Malcolm. He spoke quickly, focusing on a spot somewhere over their shoulders, at a lottery billboard across the street with an electronic number trailed by zeroes. When he started to tell them about Ray’s research, Winn froze, his coconut pastry stalled in midair.

There was a moment of silence when he finished and then Winn leaned across the table. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, as if people
around them were listening, but there was only the shopkeeper and his wife, who dug around in the gunnysacks of beans and nuts and dried tamarind, shuffling up and down the aisle in squashed house slippers.

“Let me get this straight: A man calls you out of the blue, in the middle of the night. He asks you to take a plane across the country and when he picks you up he tells you he more or less works for the government. He wants you to go out to a research compound strategically placed in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave. He tells you that he wants to play with your mind. And you say you think that sounds fine? Are you nuts?” A blue vein in his temple stood out, blood his body was deprived of, pumped up to feed the oversize brain.

“He doesn’t work for the government.” A hundred million dollars, Ray had said coolly, as easy as flipping a penny into the fountain. Some from the government in the form of a federal defense grant, the rest from private investors: the price of a pair of Hollywood movies. “And he doesn’t want to play with my mind. He wants to study it.” There was a way Ray had of talking about his case, how unusual, how
quite remarkable
it was, that made Samson swell a little with pride over his flawed medical record, his damaged brain, over the whole bloody history of a condition that also happened to destroy his life, not to mention Anna’s, but which he had survived, intact and almost—as Ray didn’t quite say but seemed to imply—gifted.

“Winn, chill a second, will you?” Lana turned to Samson. “This is someone whose life is basically driven by a deep suspicion of all forms of authority. Of—how do you put it, Winn? Of any centralizing force. Which explains why he’s sometimes”—she looked at Winn—“slightly paranoid.”

Winn was about to protest but her expression stopped him. Not one of severity but of love, the kind of tender look from an unusually beautiful woman who should not love you but does, that can reduce a man to silence. The evening light fell across her hair, greasy blond at the roots. The sun was going down somewhere in the city, or just beyond the city, at the desert’s edge where grids of vacant streets with blank signs lay waiting for the metropolis.

“Okay,” she said, and the story began for the third time, changing
slightly again: “This guy, this Dr. Malcolm, calls you up. He asks you to come to L.A. He offers you a fair amount of money …”

Before they got in the car Samson took a photograph of the two of them. They stood together with the lottery billboard behind them, Wingate’s arm around Lana’s waist. Just as he pressed the shutter a semi rammed past, obscuring the trail of zeroes, a streak of uncertainty moving behind them.

On the way back they pulled off the road to watch a small crowd gathered in front of a mall: cars parked sideways, doors flung open, people swaying on tiptoes gently held back by security guards. The group was struggling in numbers, with just barely enough bodies to qualify as a crowd, but a long way from being a full-blown mass whose voices might mesh into a single electric roar, powered by adrenaline, capable of trampling people alive. Everyone—the crowd, the security guards, and the former star who eventually rolled up in a limousine van—seemed to be going through the motions, having pledged to protect at all costs the illusion of fame, without which the city would be swallowed by a brutal wave of sadness and banality. The aging rock star got out of the car. He clasped his hands in the air and shook his fists. He gyrated a few times, and people shouted encouragement and playfully dodged with the security guards, who let a few of them get through to touch the hem of his coat.

“Jesus, he looks pathetic,” Lana said.

“Who is it?”

“Billy Joel.”

“You’re kidding. Ouch,” Samson said.

Winn shook his head. “I can’t even watch this,” he said. “We used to sing ‘Piano Man’ in my seventh-grade chorus. I kind of idolized the guy.”

“You
idolized
Billy Joel?” Lana’s eyes widened in mock horror. “The truth comes out.”

“For a couple of weeks. Come on, tell me ‘Captain Jack’ is not a good song.”

Lana raised her eyebrows and turned back to the spectacle of a last few, listless humps.

The whole event lasted two minutes and then Billy Joel disappeared into the mega record store and the slack, dutiful crowd dispersed, leaving only the revolving lights that continued to search faithfully for Billy Joel in places they would never find him: the windows of neighboring buildings, under cars, in empty sections of the sky. “Come on, ‘She’s Got a Way’?” Winn continued as they walked back to the car. “Great song, admit it.” He stepped in front of Lana, serenading her with a few lines. Something about the whole thing had saddened Samson, the many years that had passed, the charade of pretending to keep alive what had long faded into history.

When they got back to the apartment Winn went off to work on the computer and Samson and Lana sat out on the steps. The sun had gone down; the sky was indigo. A couple was having an argument on the second floor of the house next door, the woman hollering
shut up shut up shut up
every time the man tried to speak. After a few minutes she came out carrying a small television set with the cord trailing behind her. She put it in the backseat of her car and drove off. When the motor died away down the street the man came to the window wearing no shirt. He looked down and waved.

“They fight all the time. She leaves with one or two appliances or some clothes, but she always comes back the next day or the day after.” Lana lit a cigarette and kicked off her flip-flops. She had strong, boyish feet, feet so striking and expressive that it seemed as if the whole of her personality were centered there, migrating up the long legs and coursing through her body that hummed like an instrument.

“So are you in love with him? Winn?”

Lana shrugged. “Maybe.”

“He seems like he’s good to you.”

Samson was glad to be alone with her. Since she’d left New York and he’d stopped seeing Lavell, there had been no one he could really talk to. There was something frank and unfinished about Lana that put him at ease. She knew, at least from afar, what he had once been like, but seemed undisturbed by the suddenness of the change, perhaps because she herself was always changing. She seemed to move through the world in a casual, haphazard way, absorbing whatever she hap
pened upon; sometimes she reminded Samson of the sleepwalking characters in cartoons who blindly totter along the edge of cliffs but never fall. He knew she liked him but he couldn’t say why, and now he wondered whether she became so quickly intimate with everyone she stumbled across.

“How are things with Anna?” she asked.

“Better since I left the apartment. I always felt guilty there. I only realized it later, but looking at all those photographs and lying in our old bed, I kept feeling I’d somehow betrayed her. After I moved out, I think she began to accept things, to stop hoping so much.”

“I’m glad for her. It must have been awful.”

“She came over to your apartment to say good-bye before I left for L.A. At one point she was standing by the window, just thinking. Like she’d forgotten I was there. And for a minute it seemed clear to me the reason why I’d fallen in love with her.”

“Sure, the minute she no longer belongs to you.”

“She just seemed so much herself.”

Lana groaned and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Men. You want a woman just when she doesn’t want you.”

“Thank you, from your vast experience of human relationships.”

“Hey, you sound like my old professor. The one cool professor in the department.”

“Do I?”

She ashed her cigarette and smiled faintly.

“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s not it. It was like I saw her the way she might have looked the first time we met. Before
we
happened. And I felt like I understood something, that’s all.”

A sound of audience laughter came from the couple’s apartment, perhaps a spare TV the man dragged out on nights like this when his wife made off with a dangling electrical cord into the night. Samson took the cigarette out of Lana’s hand and sucked on it. The smoke burned his lungs and he coughed.

“Anna told me I used to be a very sexy smoker.”

“Are you serious? Because you used to tell us it was a disgusting habit whenever you caught us smoking before class. Which reminds
me, I thought of something the other day. Something you told us last year in Contemporary Writers.”

“What’s that?”

“I think we were reading, I can’t remember what now, but it was about memory. You told us about an angel in the Talmud or something, the Angel of Forgetfulness, whose job it is to make sure that when souls change bodies they first pass through the sea of forgetfulness. How sometimes the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets, and then fragments of another life stay with us, and sometimes those are our dreams.”

“I said that?”

“It was a good class,” Lana said, mashing the cigarette into the step. “The kind you leave in a daze, a little in love with your professor.” She smiled and looked up at the apartment filled with the noise of recorded laughter, her face blurred in the shadows like a photograph in black and white.

When Samson got back to Ray’s the house was dark and there was a note saying he’d gone to bed. Samson was supposed to tell him in the morning what he’d decided. As casually as he’d acted in front of Lana and Winn, he was nervous about the decision. It was true that he could use the money. He himself didn’t have many expenses aside from the rent he was still paying for Lana’s apartment, but he felt a responsibility to Anna, to be sure she was taken care of at least for the foreseeable future. And yet having struggled these past few months in New York to cut himself loose, he wasn’t sure how he felt about joining up with anyone now, especially a whole team camped out in the desert. Still, the project as Ray described it seemed a monumental thing, a team of doctors working alone in the emptiness of the desert. And there was something about Ray’s voice, as mesmerizing and intimate as a midnight disc jockey inviting his listeners to stay with him through the night. There seemed to be greatness in Ray, and it flattered Samson that the doctor had singled him out and asked him to take part in the effort.

He was scared, but he wanted to tell Ray now that he would go, that he was ready to leave at any moment. He had done what he
needed to in L.A.; there was nothing here for him. When he said good-bye, Lana had leaned against him and brushed his lips. He had wanted a sign that he was somehow special to her; that he was not just another person who blithely wandered into her life and fell under her sway. But it was only a sweet, vague apology and it awakened a longing, a sharp scrape across his chest, which he found unbearable.