Man Walks Into a Room (16 page)

“I’m trying to think,” Donald said.

Outside the light had turned the color of fired bricks, filing in through the window slats. If there were a cloud in the sky the sunset would be beautiful; that was the basic rule, Ray had said, the light needing something to reflect off of.

“You had a family?”

“My wife.”

“You had no idea?”

“I didn’t remember her.”

“And now?”

“We’re friends.”

Donald rubbed the area of his chest above the heart, making a scratching noise in the hair. “You loved her before, I’m guessing?”

“Yes, I’m sure I did. She’s very lovely: I think it wasn’t perfect, but from what I understand we loved each other.”

“It’s like you’re talking about someone else, Sammy. Like you’re a goddamn third party, you don’t mind my saying. Makes me think how lonely for her. One day you’re making love to her and the next thing,
wham,
she’s a total stranger.”

“It
was
worse for her in a way. But it’s been almost eleven months since I woke up and saw her face and there’s a way in which I love her now.”

“If you loved her once you can love her again.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“It never is.”

Donald stood up and started to dress, laying his clothes out on the bed as if packing for a cruise.

“And you? Married?”

Donald held up three fingers. “Three times. The first time I was too young and the last time too old. A twenty-five-year-old; it lasted four months.”

“And in between—”

Donald buttoned up a blue Hawaiian shirt, then stuck his hand under the collar and rubbed his chest. It seemed to be what he did when something moved or unsettled him. “It’s a long story. Whad’ya say I tell you on the way.”

“I’m not going.”

Donald pulled his socks up and shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He swept the coins off the night table and pocketed them, picked up a key chain with enough keys for a small fleet of cars, for an entire retirement community of luxury homes with the desert beginning in the backyard.

“Why all the keys?”

Donald held them up and jiggled them, watching how the light hit the metal. He smiled, threw them in the air, and caught them.

“Over the years, a man acquires.”

He ran a comb through his wet, iron-gray hair. Just to look at him, there was something distinguished in his face.

“Okay, last chance …”

Samson shook his head. “Have fun though.”

Donald strode across the room and opened the door. The light flooded across the floor.

“Don’t say I never told you, Sammy. The biggest city. A regular Shanghai.”

The day after he’d arrived, Ray had given him a tour of the lab. He’d introduced him to whomever they passed, head scientists, technicians, engineers. “This is Samson Greene. We’re going to be studying him for Output,” Ray had said, and men and women in white coats had stopped what they were doing and risen to greet him. Ray knew them all by name. He looked over their shoulders at their work, answered questions, made jokes, solved problems. He moved lightly, all spring and bounce, as if under the governance of a different gravity. Samson followed him down the hallways, through hushed, ever-cool rooms. They passed a wall of glass behind which a technician wearing white cotton gloves sat among a chaotic mass of electrical wire and metal boxes, scrolling through numbers on a screen.

“What’s that?” Samson asked.

“Looks like something a crackpot built in his basement, right?”

“Sort of.”

“It’s a supercomputer. The thing links thousands of microprocessors on a lightning-fast network. Each processor has about five gigs of RAM running on a 4GHz memory bus. The CPUs clock at just over three gigahertz, so the whole cluster can handle around ten teraOPS when it’s load-optimized. You probably don’t know what any of that means, but it’d blow your mind if you did. Astonishing power. Costs a fucking fortune just to keep it cool.”

Ray tapped lightly on the glass, but the technician didn’t look up. “He can’t hear me. The man is beyond language. Working in a different sphere.” Ray tapped one more time and then, as if on cue, the technician’s screen faded to black and a three-dimensional brain appeared revolving through space, so vivid it was more real than real itself, glowing signals of activity pulsing across its lobes, a mind going through the motions of thinking detached from all consequence, without blood or breath or beating heart to guide it. It made Samson weak in the knees. He watched it spin in its own orbit, the awesome spectacle of a brain
remembering,
and everything Ray had described to him high above Los Angeles condensed into fact and he understood, in an electric shock of comprehension, that he had come to the desert to hail in the future. His breath fogged the glass.

“It’s freezing in here,” he said, feeling goose bumps rise on his arms.

“Goddamn polar,” said Ray.

He went into the lab every day for them to study his brain. They put him in a chamber with Ping-Pong ball halves taped over his eyes, slathered conducting cream onto his scalp, and fit a helmet over his head. They closed the five-hundred-pound steel door and he sat alone in the dark, thinking. He listened to the instructions that came through the speakers. There was a certain thrill in being the subject of such intimate attention: to know that on the other side of the steel walls a team of scientists was tuned in, tracing the currents of his mind,
the migrations of his thoughts across the hemispheres of his brain. Sometimes they came in to fix a loose electrode. They put their hands on his head like a benediction.

Other days he inhaled something radioactive, then lay in the bowels of a machine that took pictures of the gamma radiation of positrons colliding with electrons as the substance moved through his cerebrum. Later they showed him the images, but though he studied them closely, he could find no sign of the empty field that he had returned to again and again for refuge since he had woken into his life. Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he’d briefly wondered if the emptiness he’d been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.

When he wasn’t needed in the lab, he hiked in the hills behind the laboratory with a field guide, identifying plants and animal tracks, finding rocks scored by glaciers, each day going a little farther and marking his trail with stones. He didn’t know what had brought him to the desert the first time—or if it even
had
been the first time when the police picked him up, a man without a past walking half-dead in the noonday sun. Very likely he had arrived by accident, but if so, when the last stand of houses fell away and he found himself in such an expanse of emptiness, it must have relieved him to drift in a landscape that did not aggravate his mind but surpassed it in oblivion. He might have gone weak with gratitude to at last meet the scorched face of his own mind. Or maybe along with all memory his ego itself had been obliterated, so that he could no longer distinguish between himself and the world, and, reaching the desert, it was as if he passed clean into it. Maybe the look on his face the police officers had taken for blank was the ecstasy of absolute freedom, of becoming only weather. And then, just before he had dissolved into nothing, they had pulled him back by a thread, and he had woken again in the locked box of his mind, conscious of a clock on the wall that read 3:30.

At night he sometimes visited Ray in his office. He would find the doctor staring at the computer, lost in thought. At all other times Ray was keenly aware, a man who’d always sensed he was more intelligent than the rest, who’d learned to direct what was happening around him almost imperceptibly. It pleased Samson to find him so unguarded; it made him feel closer to him. Once when he’d come in Ray had been silent for a long time, so long that Samson began to wonder whether he’d noticed him enter.

“Ray?”

The doctor turned. “Samson. Sorry, I’ll just finish up this e-mail. Letter to a colleague of mine in San Diego,” Ray said, fingers rattling across the keys. “Odd guy. Knows everything about the hippocampus. The world expert on the hippocampus. Knows more about a ridge located on the lateral ventricles of the brain than he does about his own kids.” He leaned back and hit a key with a pianist’s flourish. “There. Finished.” He motioned to the chair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down, Samson. I’m glad you came by. I was thinking about something this afternoon and you came to mind.”

“Thinking about what?”

“The old thoughts. The whole subject of loneliness.”

“What, you think I’m lonely?”

“Are you?”

Samson shrugged. Some jazz was playing low from Ray’s stereo, and it reminded him of Anna as he had come across her once, humming and swaying barefoot to a plaintive saxophone coming from the radio. He studied a paperweight on Ray’s desk, a starfish suspended in glass. “I suppose you don’t get very lonely,” he said, “what with so many people around you all the time, with the whole team working together.”

“Me? I’ve been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse.”

“Really? Because it always seems …” Ray looked at him, waiting. “Anyway, what about your wife? Didn’t you say you were married?”

“When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you.”

Samson hefted the paperweight and paused to think of how his great-uncle Max used to take him to the pool at the local Y, how he would tread water and float on his back while Max did leg lifts in the water, talking to him about love. He spoke to Samson as if he were an old crony, one of the liver-spotted survivors in to do a few asthmatic laps, to exert a last burst of prowess, a man withered by exposure to the elements. He had been barely twelve.
Love,
Max would say, his gnarled toes breaking the surface,
love is the goal of the species. Not shtuping. Shtuping you can do anytime. It’s love that’s not so easy to find,
lowering the left foot as the right floated up in a regiment of European bathhouse calisthenics.

He put the paperweight down and looked at Ray. “I don’t know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?”

“Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you’ve actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again. Only it doesn’t last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion—the hope you’d held on to all those years—has been shattered.”

Ray stood up and walked to the window, and Samson marveled again at the starched clothes, the linen sleeves neatly cuffed at the elbows, the pants with razor creases, a man untouched by weather.

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think
this is the one.
And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it’s pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken
hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?”

“Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel
known.”

“But don’t you think that being alone is somehow”—Samson struggled for the right word—“I don’t know,
good?”
He thought of Anna dancing in her underwear, her T-shirt falling just at her hips. Anna looking out the window, on her face an expression he’d never seen, the trace of some part of her that remained unattainable. “That to love someone is one thing, but if it means giving up the part of you that’s alone and free—”

“That’s just it!” Ray shouted. “How to be alone, to remain free, but not feel longing, not to feel imprisoned in oneself.
That”
—he stabbed the air with his index finger—“is what interests me.”

Ray hurried over and pulled his chair next to Samson’s. He leaned in, his face so close that Samson felt the need to draw his head back to preserve the few inches that served as an unspoken barrier, a small margin of difference uncrossed except for intimacy. As much as he liked Ray, as much as he wanted to be personal with him, the sudden closeness set him on edge.

“You’re such an unusual case,” Ray continued. If he noticed Samson’s discomfort, he didn’t let on. “Not just what happened to you, not just your condition, but your
response
to having lost your memory. You chose freedom. Instinctively you chose it. Just left it all behind and headed out into a new life.”

“I had a tumor—”

“Okay, sure, but afterward. You didn’t want it back. You just turned it all away. No ties binding you to anyone. It must have been—it must
be
—exhilarating. And now you’re dealing with the consequences. The loneliness. I know. From the beginning I could see it. That first day, when I picked you up at the airport, I could see it in your face.”

Samson raised his fingers to his face, as if he could feel what secrets he had given away, things Ray had read in his expressions that he didn’t even know himself.

Ray talked and he listened. The arid heat that dulled Samson’s own thoughts seemed to concentrate Ray’s into perfect, terse structures, purified of all excess. It was at once captivating and unnerving, the ease and grace with which he spoke, as if he had rehearsed it before, and yet there was nothing unspontaneous about it. If anything, Ray seemed gifted at being able to seize the moment. He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.