Man Walks Into a Room (15 page)

“Pay phone romance?” Ray asked, looking over his shoulder.

“My wife.” There were two pairs but the fifth was a dud.

“Ahhh,” Ray said, “no luck.”

There was a movie, Samson thought, a black comedy, where Ray would be cast as God. Beneficent. All-knowing.

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there’s not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it; not yet gauzed by memory.

Samson explained this to Ray. They turned off the highway onto a two-lane blacktop stained with motor oil. A cinder cone rose up, prehistoric, in the distance. He explained how sometimes one or another of his hands suddenly fell numb. Cut off from his heart. He could say such things to Ray, a doctor with knowledge and compassion who wanted to help. A man who had dedicated his life to science, who understood the discipline of renunciation. Giving it up all at once or bit by bit. The religiousness of it. The blood only getting as far as his elbows but not reaching his hands. He told Ray about his own project, having woken up to emptiness, the thrill of giving up more, to renounce home and wife, a whole city, to give up and give up until there was nothing left at all.

And then?
Ray asked.

There were dirt roads with wheel ruts that turned off toward the
mountains. One valley over, there were still track marks from General Patton’s tanks. On the moon—he read this in a book—a footstep will last intact for two million years. No wind. There were fossils on the desert floor, the impressions of Pleistocene fish preserved rib by tiny rib. The absence more beautiful than the vanished fish.

And then? Once you’ve given up everything,
Ray asked again, excitedly tapping the wheel, pushing ninety now,
don’t you have to set down the first mark?

It was a conversation they had over and over until Ray finally exploded a bomb in his head. At that moment, though, they were hurtling into nowhere, and though Samson didn’t yet know what Ray really meant, he somehow felt understood.

Soon it was only the flat earth on all sides.
The desert is a hunger artist,
he remembered Ray saying;
it renounces everything.
Later he was never sure that Ray had ever really said it; sometimes it was like Ray was right inside his head.

“HEY, YOU WANT
a picture of me?” Donald was wearing a pilled flannel bathrobe and had his arms crossed tightly over his gut as if he was about to flash. “How come you don’t want a picture? You saying I’m not good-looking?”

“You want me to take a picture?”

“I’m saying.”

Samson lifted his camera and focused. “Tell me when,” Donald said, planting his feet like a batter taking his stance.

“Okay: one, two—”

Donald pulled open the bathrobe and grinned. He was wearing a pair of white boxer shorts printed all over with red lipstick marks. There were elastic sock marks around his shins, the legs thin and ropy beneath the bulky girth around his middle, as if the body parts belonged to different lives.

“Heh.” If Donald laughed too hard it triggered a coughing fit in his lungs. It was a risk each time and mostly he just made a shallow, wheezy grunt in the back of his throat. “That’s gonna be a prize. Show me when you get it back.”

Samson breathed on the lens and wiped it with a special cloth, removing stray dust particles. He fussed and polished and sprayed it with compressed air, listening to Donald hum in the bathroom. Steam rising as Donald tested the temperature of the water, fogging the mirrors. He hadn’t taken the picture but it wouldn’t have mattered since he never developed the film anyway. He felt that there was an asceticism, a lawfulness about it: composing images that remained invisible as long as they were kept from the light.

They were living in the old bathhouse now converted into pleasant rooms, himself and Donald Selwyn, who owned property outside Las Vegas. For the moment the land was still nothing, a wasteland of desert.

“The way I figure,” said Donald, eternal lounge lizard, positioning his face in front of the air conditioner, “it’s gonna be worth millions. We’re talking the fastest-growing city in the country. Eventually it’s gotta reach me.”

He had a mat of hair on his chest and arms, enough for a sweater. He coughed, a deep, phlegmy hack. He was in his sixties and in poor health, and Samson refrained from mentioning the obvious flaw in Donald’s plan, the unlikelihood of his living to enjoy the windfall.

Meals were served in the dining hall, with glass doors that opened to a landscaped garden of cactus, Indian paintbrush, and ocotillo. A maid came to their rooms every day to change the towels, make the bed, and fold the end of the toilet roll into a neat V. The old wooden signs had been repainted and the buildings were still referred to by their original names—the Bathhouse, the Sauna—like sinister euphemisms, as if the spa were fronting for an illegal operation. There was minimal security, only a lazy guard swatting flies in a booth: the only thing marking the entrance aside from a small sign and an unceremonious cow grate. Anyone who accidentally happened upon the
place would guess it was a discreet health resort, well hidden, the sort with poor signage and an elite clientele.

The research team—neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, computer scientists, engineers, and lab technicians—worked in a thirty-thousand-square-foot laboratory kept slightly warmer than a meat locker, powered by a huge generator. These were people who had left their universities and state-of-the-art hospitals and come out to the desert, following the stream of speculators who had come for silver, gold, and tungsten, for casinos and cattle, for prospective spas. People who believed in the power of science the way others before them had believed in the wrath of God.

They lived in bungalows with backyards that butted up against the mountains. On the weekends, to alleviate the occupational hazard of compulsively picturing their own brains at work, they grilled steak and ate coleslaw, watched their children play in the sprinklers, iridescent rainbows forming above their sopping heads.
If
there were children: many of them had come alone, leaving husbands and wives and significant others who had careers of their own, city dwellers who thought of the desert as something you drive through to get to other cities. It was an intimate group and when they socialized they tried to avoid the subject of memory. They had SUVs they took into the rugged mountains, scree crunching under the wheels that occasionally went flat, at which point the men rolled up their sleeves while the women lined their thumb and finger up with the scale in the map’s legend and measured how many miles to the nearest service station.

Donald could do impersonations. He scuffed his feet around on the floor, got down in a stance, and said, “Who am I?” He took on the whole body, not just the face and voice. He grabbed an invisible microphone, swiveled and dipped. He lugged a lame leg around, crouched and flicked an air cigar.

The nearest town was called Hillcrest, one of those single-purpose towns, sprung up in the middle of nowhere with a suspicious water
source. Ray told Samson that Clearwater’s food and other supplies were trucked in weekly from Los Angeles: bottles of Perrier, fresh baguettes, coffee, freeze-packed salmon. People from the lab went into the town out of boredom, to poke around the Wal-Mart and the Christian Fellowship charity shop. This was a town that came to a grinding halt for the playing of taps. People stalled at the crosswalk saluting the sun going down in a nuclear sky.
Day is done, gone the sun.
Post–Cold War, the town was advertising itself as an oasis for retirement: high-desert elevation, three hundred and fifty days of sunshine a year, no smog, thirty-five churches, community events, gateway to unlimited recreation sites. Snugly fit into the crook of the navy’s single largest landholding, seventeen hundred square miles of missile testing ground.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh—

He was there but he could leave at any moment.

Donald was an Input, one of a group of paid volunteers who had been elected to donate a specific memory that had been chosen and agreed upon by both themselves and Clearwater Labs, the neural patterns, the firing synapses, axon-to-dendrite, distilled into billions of shards of data and stored in gigabytes. The Input leaving in a hired car with a generous check.

Donald hacked and looked around for a place to spit.

“What I’m saying is you take the fastest-growing city in America, and eventually it’s gonna hit a certain target. If I bought ten miles closer I woulda had to pay more per acre, but there woulda been less time to wait. In the end I was willing to wait the extra ten miles. Bigger payback.” He rubbed two fingers together. “More moola, if you catch my drift.”

Donald could do Jack Nicholson, Wayne Newton, Marlon Brando. In the shower he could do Elvis. “This one’s easy,” he told Samson, then stripped down, turned on the water, and began to bellow. They were not so entertaining for their likeness (it took Samson a long time to identify them, and often he couldn’t, a shortcoming that Donald attributed to his memory
problem)
as for the live power they lent to Donald’s otherwise placid face.

“You lookin’ at me?” Donald said, pulling an invisible gun out of the stretched-out waistband of his pants.

It was five
P.M.
and Donald was bored, having already scouted the Clearwater pool for any young blood. There was a smattering of teenage daughters with stringy hair who were bused out to schools with Indian names on the weekdays, girls so desperate for something to happen that they might have condescended to talk to Donald. He kept interrupting Samson’s reading, which consisted of the new issue of
Time
—he had mostly gotten bored of
People.
Donald was trying to convince him to split a taxi to Vegas. He insisted they could get there in time for a show.

“Whad’ya want, magic? You want girls? You name it. Whad’ya want, live animals?”

Samson turned the page.

“We go for the night and we’re back by lunch. They won’t even know we’re gone. Whada they care? We signed our papers.”

Samson had signed a nondisclosure agreement Ray had given him when he got to Los Angeles, and a form giving the Clearwater Labs permission to study his brain, but that was all.

“Lemme guess: you’ve never been to Vegas. See, we gotta spread the word. Educate people about the good life, the low cost of living. Not the things they heard of, the poker and the strippers, but the eighteen-hole golf courses and good schools, the goddamn indoor ice rink. We’re talking a city that has wired the trees with
ultrasonic systems
so no birds will land and shit on innocent people. Remember, you heard it from me: the city is gonna grow to something unbelievable. The biggest city on earth. Putting the whole goddamn China issue to rest. It’s a question,” Donald said from where he was lying spread-eagle on the bed, “of simonizing the masses.”

“Galvanizing,” Samson said, turning the page of his magazine.

“What?”

“Galvanizing
the masses.”

“Sure, Sammy, whatever you say.”

There was something in Donald’s voice that made Samson look up
from the page he was reading. When their gaze met he noticed Donald’s eyes for the first time, watery and pale blue, in a certain light almost colorless. Their eyes locked and Donald blinked. They were the hungry eyes of a dog that missed nothing, eyes that had gone so light as to avoid the question entirely of whether they were under the power of some darkness.

“I’m gonna call you Sammy, you mind?” The name, like all nicknames, a small plea for the familiar. “Whad’ya say to that plan, Sammy, we call a taxi and in an hour we’re in Vegas.”

“I don’t think so. I think I’ll just read tonight.”

“Sure, Sammy, okay.”

There wasn’t much to do in Clearwater. There was a rec room for the kids and sometimes the lab technicians played a few rounds of mindless Ping-Pong that quickly turned competitive. There was a VCR and a big-screen TV and a small library of movies. A satellite dish beamed in a selection of four hundred channels, half of them in Spanish. The porn channels, Donald reported, had been blocked off.

“Can I ask you something, Sammy?” Donald piped up after a few minutes.

“Yes.”

“What happened to your—” He tapped his head.

“I had a tumor. It was benign but it damaged my memory. There are about twenty-four years I don’t remember.” Even as he said it, it seemed like something that had happened to someone else, to one of the celebrities in the magazines he read who seemed to be forever surviving tragedies—leaps out of windows, high-impact car crashes—the experience of which they claimed to channel back into their art.

“Jeez.” Donald sucked the air and sat up, swinging his varicoseveined legs over the side of the bed. “Nothing came back?”

“Not really. When they found me—actually it wasn’t far from here—I didn’t know my own name. But after the tumor was removed the memories from my childhood returned. I remember up to when I was twelve.” It was a story he’d told countless times, now whittled
down to a few phrases; a story that, like all true stories, lost something with each telling.