Man Walks Into a Room (20 page)

“Pontificating.”

“Like I said.” Donald’s tongue fluttered across his lips. “Because let’s just accept the fact that these might be our last, you know,
together. And what I want to know is, what makes you happy, Sammy? Tell your old pop now, because I
gen-u-inely
want to know.”

Somewhere the flap of wings, a desert owl or a raven or some other bird the amateur ornithologist would know by name, followed by a trail of facts and statistics. Very possibly cooing in her ear,
his wife’s
ear, with the authentic spotted-owl noise.

“I’d have to think. It’s not something that, you know, on the spur of the moment. To compose a list.”

“All right, I’ll go first. A beautiful pair of tits, simple. Let’s actually talk about this. Seeing Vegas lit up at night, coming down from Hoover Dam. I’ll warm you up. It doesn’t have to be big. I mean the small pleasures, the late show of the Folies-Bergère. The sound of my wife’s—Helen’s—voice. C’mon, your old pop’s last wish.” Donald was making an effort, but his voice was thin and tired.

“You’re being dramatic, but okay.” Samson gathered some pebbles and aimed at a rusty can. “Let me think.” A few moments passed with only the pathetic sound of the rocks hitting the metal, while Samson meditated on the subject. He thought of the first few days after the operation, when everything he’d looked at had startled and moved him. He thought of New York, of Frank and Anna, of the endless walks he’d taken trying to absorb the city and circumstances of his new life. He thought of his childhood.

“What, your Alzheimer’s kicking in?” Donald slapped his forehead. “That you can’t think of what makes you happy? Because it’s beginning to depress me.”

“Okay, okay. There’s Jollie Lambird, for a start.”

“Jollie what? Is this person, place, or thing?”

“Girl.”

“Now we’re talking.”

“Mostly it’s things from my childhood. Fishing with my great-uncle Max. Playing baseball with a couple of friends out in the field near my house. The summers. I was a happy kid, for the most part. Which one was Helen?”

“The second.”

“The long story?”

“That’s the one.” Donald was breathing heavily.

“We have time, why don’t you tell it?”

“Lemme catch my breath, Sammy. Tell me about Jollie. Sounds like a French girl. I like the French. Very free people. The women go topless.”

“This is when I was in the seventh grade, a girl who was twelve. Her chest probably as flat as mine.”

“Sounds precious,” Donald said. “Next.” “It’s always tits with you.”

“It’s tits with every guy! Stop any guy on the street and he’ll tell you it’s tits. Tits tits tits! And sometimes ass. And always pussy. That you don’t know this disturbs me. You’re like a kid, Sammy. Somebody’s gotta teach you a thing or two. If we get outta here alive, first thing is I’m getting you a whore. The best whore in the whole goddamn state of Nevada. Because it’s embarrassing. If you were my own kid—which technically you are because I said so—I’d be embarrassed.” Donald shook his head. “Repeat after me: Tits, pussy, ass! Tits, pussy—ass! Titspussya—”

“Shut up,” Samson said, struggling not to laugh. He pelted the can with a stone, sending it skittering across the ground.

“Fine. Don’t say I didn’t try to teach you.”

Samson waited for him to go on, but Donald only closed his eyes and lay still in an exhausted slump.

“There are other things too,” Samson offered. “If you still want to know, there was a beach near where I grew up—my mother and I used to go there. That would be one.”

They sat in silence.

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate,” Donald said, “all those memories, gone.” He coughed and didn’t move to cover his mouth. “That you can’t remember, it’s tragic. If I could, the memories I would give you. I had enough good times for two people. More than two. What do I need them for now?”

Samson looked at his face, but his eyes were still closed and his expression gave away nothing.

“Donald?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you? The stuff they’re working on at Clearwater, how much do you know? Did Ray explain it to you?”

“I got a decent idea.” Donald stretched out on the ground. “But what do I know about science? I go in and I do a job, I don’t ask too many questions. You on the other hand, you ask questions.”

“You
just asked
me
…” Samson said, but Donald was already asleep, breathing with some difficulty, making epiglottal sounds.

The moon lit up the dead wood of yuccas that wouldn’t rot, worn smooth like bones. A couple of coyotes howled, and Samson tried to think of them as dogs, related many times removed from Frank, who was sleeping with his head on his paws at the foot of Anna’s bed. Donald was sleeping with his arms around the rock he’d leaned against and claimed as his own, the way the shipwrecked cling to a shred of timber. An old man with terrible lungs in the autumn of his life, a dark, sad season that might be sped up drastically unless something, some intervention, happened soon.

He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything. The mountains and the stunted trees and the blazing, palpable stars and the coyotes and the power lines and the overpowering smell of sage. He knew that somewhere close there were trails: footpaths left by the Paiutes or Shoshones, forty-niners’ wagon trails, threads the field mice had worn down in the grass on their way to bitter water. Tracks which, if he could find them, would lead him through the mountains and out of the state into a greener country. But he was too tired to look any more.

It was being a small part of a great effort, performing a role that
couldn’t be filled by anyone else, that drew him into the project. It was Ray’s belief in the greater good, the larger picture. It was his unstinting acceptance of Samson, of who he was, not
then
but now.

He lay on his back and listened to Donald breathe and thought about his childhood and soon he was thinking about his mother. It was a loss that was almost too painful to consider, and he could only do it now, in the vaulted silence and stillness of the desert. It was as if he had been sleeping while she died, or worse, laughing his head off at a party. It had always been the two of them; it was as if he had closed his eyes and then, when he opened them, he was old and she was gone. As if she had taught him everything she could and this was the final lesson, the one that all the others had prepared him for. To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

He was lying on the floor of the southern Mojave Desert remembering his mother, and now tears were running down his face, his face that, though he had not known it, had given all of his loneliness away. Curled on the desert floor under the unjust stars, silently weeping for all he had forgotten and could not change, he let himself remember the only things he could. He was remembering and there was a chance that in New York, where the streetlamps would have already begun to fade against the gritty light, Anna was lying between the white sheets of their bed remembering him. There was a chance that in some cosmic equation a burden was added to your load each time you made for someone’s memory.

A mass of rock loomed up about a mile away, or maybe ten miles; it was difficult to judge the distances. And beyond that there were other rocks, buttes and flanks and sheer sandstone faces with secret lithologies, mountain ranges being born or dying, temporarily landlocked, unable to break off and drift into oceanic obscurity like parts of California.

His mother must have liked Anna, with her grace and giddy laugh,
if you could make her laugh; the daughter she never had. It still surprised him when Anna knew things about his mother; things she had observed herself, but also details she couldn’t possibly have known and which he must have told her. How you could tell if his mother had been in a room because of the lingering scent of expensive perfume, the one luxury she said she would have even if she were destitute. How her politics were radical, and she liked to argue about them with anyone willing. How she took up causes and fought tooth and nail, organizing marches and night meetings from which she came back exhausted but elated, her eyes sparkling and a halo of stray frizz around her face giving her a mad look. How, before she went out on a date, she would poke her finger into a few stubby lipstick tubes and paint her lips, the combination of shades always producing the same bright red that left streaks on her teeth. How she was merciless in board games and made a show of beating his friends at chess, and appeared not to be watching the road when she was driving—checking her makeup in the mirror, searching under the seat for a token. How she rarely mentioned his father, though once or twice he found her on the floor reading a packet of old letters. That when she cried, tears would stream down her face and she would open her mouth but no sound would come out, as if she were surprised and unclear as to whose emotions had possessed her. That Anna knew these things about his mother made him feel bound, even indebted, to her.

He shivered in the cold and thought about curling up next to Donald to conserve body heat. But the old man’s spindly legs were sprawled as if he had been knocked down running, like a victim of lava preserved instantly in the stonework, a delicate and lasting thing, and Samson left him as he was. He was too cold to fall asleep, and he thought of the bonfire his great-uncle Max had made one Fourth of July on the beach, how he and his cousin had played a game of staying inside the circle of heat until they practically glowed and their eyes stung, and then turned and plunged themselves in the ocean. He fantasized about taking all the facts he knew of his life up until the age of twelve and, using a complex formula, mapping out his life exactly as it would later happen, multiplying out into the inevitable future. The
whole life spread out like a model city. In the fantasy he could take his twelve-year-old self by hand—waking him up, the hand clammy with sleep—and walk him outside to see it, like a view from above: the small, faraway rest of his life. He wondered whether the boy would approve of it all: whether a respectful silence would come over him while he stood in awe, or whether he would in fact turn his head and look away in disappointment or disgust or even shame. Tears gathering in the corners of his eyes which he would angrily push away with a fist.

He woke a few hours later at dawn to the light breaking over the valley and the sound of a car passing in the distance. Donald was curled into a ball in the dust. Samson sat up and listened, then jogged in the direction of the noise. In a couple of minutes he found the blacktop. There was a speed limit sign sprayed with bullet holes. He stepped onto the road, walked to the middle, and stood on the faded broken yellow line, looking both ways down the length of paved gray to where the tarmac dipped and vanished in the haze. He stood there for a couple of hours until the sun was diffuse and white in the sky, and eventually he saw a car move slowly out of the distance. He watched it approach for a long time, like a movie with no plot, and when he could see the figure hunched behind the wheel he waved his arms.

He ran back through the scrub to where Donald was sleeping with his face in the dust, and gently nudged him awake. The old man rolled over, and when the sun hit his face he lay still for a minute, and then he said, “Who am I?” and opened one eye.

THEY WOULD COME
to him and he would put his hands on their heads. He would feel their skulls through the tips of his fingers and then he would flatten his palms around the crown and call on the powers to heal them. When he was young, Ray told Samson, that’s how he wanted it to happen. That was before he spent nights in the anatomy lab, slumped in a chair with a headache from the formaldehyde, in the freezing basement of the medical school. There were students who hadn’t had time to dissect an arm or hand and so cut off the stump and took it back to their dorms wrapped in newspaper. Young apprentices lugging body parts through the night. The next day the sanitation men would find a slashed heart in a Dumpster and call the police department. But Ray had made friends with the night guard—he brought him a sandwich and coffee around midnight—and he let him in to work in the lab until his shift was over at dawn.

The first time Ray had opened a skull, sawing along the cranial suture line, he had gone weak in the knees. He had cut the brain loose from the spinal cord and held it in his hands. The gray matter was not gray at all but a dull brown. At five in the morning he stumbled back to his car and drove home. The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child’s. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hairy web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart pumping blood through her arteries. It terrified him how easily these systems could fail her. He sat down on the bed and laid his hands on her head, the palms over her crown of shiny black hair. She turned and looked at him, and for a moment she seemed not to recognize his face.