Man Walks Into a Room (22 page)

And now it occurred to him,
who the hell was Ray anyway? You think you know someone and then you end up with a bomb in your head.

He ripped through his wallet for the telephone number of Ray’s house in L.A. Not finding it, he ransacked his bag, dumping the contents on the floor. Probably Ray was already looking for the next Output: he had no use for Samson now, it had worked, that was all he needed to know, there were others to prepare the way for. He couldn’t find the piece of paper with Ray’s number anywhere, and he held his head and tried to think straight, the blood pounding in his temples. He was enraged with himself for listening to Ray, for not pulling the phone out of the wall that first night he’d called him in New York.

He closed his eyes and sat very still. He would not go to the lab to demand Ray’s number. He would draw the blinds, lie on the bed, and try to calm himself.
There must be some explanation,
he thought. Soon Ray would come back—he
had
to come back—and with his soothing voice and his eloquence he would make everything all right.

But three days passed without any sign of Ray, and when Samson finally saw the lights on in his office, he’d run out in the dark and practically busted down the door. Buzzed with adrenaline, he’d walked up to the desk and swept the papers Ray was working on to the floor, along with the glass paperweight that shattered into pieces. Ray, the ageless doctor whose very macrobiotic existence preached a holistic good, the man born to be a leader among men, didn’t even blink. He didn’t protest or act shocked. He was as imperturbable as Gandhi, at
ease among lunatics because he knew that he could summon his strength if need be, his mind-over-body enlightenment, and kill in an instant—a humane thrust of the hand to crack the solar plexus.

They had remained frozen, locked in a gaze until finally Samson, trembling, turned and walked to the window, looking out at the valley. It had been dark outside, but he could still make out the line of mountains past which there was another lone valley, then another jagged range, and so on in waves of violent desolation. He felt betrayed, and there was no one anymore that he could turn to. His mind had been violated in a way that no one else’s ever had. The loneliness was savage.

He spun around and glared at Ray.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Let’s just try to be calm here.”

“Calm?”
He wished to plead ardently, to beg for sympathy. “You hijack my mind and load an atomic bomb into it, and then you disappear without a word and you expect me to be calm?”

“A personal matter came up. My son, Matthew, was sick and I had to make an emergency trip to San Francisco. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before I left. It was the middle of the night and you were asleep. And no one
hijacked
anyone’s mind.”

There was so much he needed to say, he hardly knew where to begin. “It’s like I’ve returned from the dead only to find that everything I knew is gone. That I’m alone and you—the one person I thought understood me, who I could trust … I thought you
understood—”
He felt his face redden with frustration at his inability to articulate what was happening to him, to explain the damage Ray had done.

“I do understand. It’s the reason I’m here, the reason
we’re
here.”

“Understand!” Samson nearly spat. “After what you said about getting out of our own heads? All that nonsense about sharing?”

Ray shook his head, his look stern and disapproving.

“This is a crucial moment in the research. It’s vital that you stay calm,” he implored.

Samson’s frustration surged against Ray’s refusal to understand, to even acknowledge, how he felt. It was as if he’d been bound and gagged inside his own head.
Ray continued, oblivious. “There are always moments in experiments, important experiments, where things could go—”

A flash of anger rose up in Samson, and he swung his arm back and brought it down across Ray’s face. He felt his fist make contact. Then it was like watching the aftermath in slow motion: Ray’s head thrown back (how
old
he seemed then, though the blood that spurted from his nose was bright with life), his body crumpling against the wall, moving a hand across his face as he shrunk from Samson, from something he had not made allowance for in all of his calculations, the possibility of his subject having, what—a mind of his own? Perhaps Ray was a normal man after all, as mistaken as anyone, capable of going terribly wrong where he believed he was serving a greater good. The blood was trickling out from between Ray’s fingers now, his eyes searching for what would be delivered next by one who’d just discovered a power over him. Samson regarded Ray with wonder, amazed at his own strength, at how unguarded, how suddenly human Ray seemed. He looked from his fist to Ray’s face, aware that something had happened: not the punch but something far more decisive, after which there was no going back. Ray had miscalculated—they both knew that—but only Samson realized just how much. No, Ray was not a bad man. He was something perhaps more difficult to accept: an average man, no better or worse than any.

“Sharing? Getting out of our own heads?” Samson could hear himself speak but he didn’t know if his words were reaching Ray. “I’d say this is the most alone I’ve ever been.”

“As you
remember
being,” Ray corrected him as he wiped his bloody hand on his shirt and felt to see where the nose had broken. The blue stone on his ring briefly caught the light. “Maybe it was the wrong memory,” Ray conceded. “Maybe I should have chosen something less dramatic—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have chosen at all!”

“Damn it, Samson, you
volunteered,
you were fully aware.” Ray spoke through his teeth. The coolness of his tone surprised Samson. “Don’t try to turn this on me, as if I somehow failed you. There was nothing I didn’t tell you except whose memory you were receiving and
what it was. It would have produced images in your mind. It would have confused the purity of the transfer.”

“Did you think about how it would feel? A nightmare inside your head that belongs to someone else? Did you stop to imagine?”

“It was a test, not a war. I didn’t give you torture or killing fields, right? Let’s just keep this in perspective.” The blood was dripping onto Ray’s shirt in red blotches. “All you received was the memory of a
test
that took place forty-four years ago. A moment in history. A powerful one, yes, but we needed a strong memory. Something specific and intense that would be impossible to confuse with any memories of your own. And when you and Donald got lost in the desert, when I found you that day on the side of the road, I saw it in your faces, the bond you already shared. It was an ideal situation for the first transfer.”

Samson glared at him in silence, waiting for Ray to say something, anything, to salvage their own bond, the reason he had come out to Clearwater in the first place.

“Come on,” Ray snapped. “You were the perfect candidate and we both knew it. The nature of your condition—this immense receptivity you have to new memories—made it practically inevitable.” He paused, and shook his head. “I’m disappointed, I have to say. You seem to have forgotten everything we discussed. Taking risks, advancing science. Where no man has gone before, didn’t we say?”

“There’s a reason for that.”

Ray threw up his hands. “There’s a reason we haven’t sent men to Mars. But one day there won’t be. God damn it, you’re on the frontier of science, Samson. I thought we understood each other. An amazing thing has happened. Yes, we still have a ways to go. But we’re even further ahead than anyone thought. That so much of the memory came through, it’s monumental. Plenty of people would have fought to be in your place, to go down in history. It’s ridiculous to be throwing a fit.”

It would have been better to be angry, to have continued to pummel Ray, knocked over chairs, put his fist through the plate-glass window—to have felt anything but the exhaustion and sadness he felt now. He wished he had never come out to the desert, that he had let the
phone just ring that snowy night at the end of January. Everything but the loneliness had gone out of him.

“Like I’ve always said, you’re a fascinating mind, Samson. To lose so much memory and not want it back. Not a fucking thing. It’s powerful. A man not blinded by a lifetime of memories, who can appreciate the power of a single one. When Lavell told me you’d been found out here in the desert, it almost seemed like fate. I mean, can you answer me this: I’ve always wondered, where the hell were you going?”

Samson stared at him in stony silence. “You had no right,” he said at last, and turned to go. “You should have let me be.”

“So that you’d be where now? Alone, wandering the streets of New York like some lunatic? You came because you wanted to. You were waiting for that call.”

Samson looked back. Their eyes locked.

“Go to hell.”

Ray flinched, and Samson turned and walked out the door.

Outside, the night was endless, the blackness so complete that nothing did not belong to it. And then the answer came to him:
I was going home.

He went back to his room and packed his few belongings. The silence was like an immense pressure, like the sound of wind beneath a bird’s great wings. He eased open the screen door and started down the dirt road toward the tarmac, his bag slung over his shoulder. He felt Ray was watching from somewhere and he resented it, the idea that Ray might know where he was going even before he did. He’d walked four or five miles east before a car came along, a couple with dirty hair and a skinny dog in the backseat. The sun was just starting to come up. Samson had barely gotten in before the man stepped on the gas again. They were on their way to a conference in Phoenix, two hippies from Oregon who managed a fish farm with wild spawn ponds for a brood stock of bluegill, crappie, and other species Samson had never heard of. The woman kept twisting around in her seat to look at him. They must have been going eighty miles per hour, but the desert was so vast
and uniform that if Samson focused on a spot in the distance it seemed as if the car stood still.

The man offered him a cigarette with one hand and rummaged under his seat for a cassette with the other while the woman grabbed the wheel and steered. It was a bootleg recording of a band with the murmur of a crowd in the background. Samson accepted the cigarette and lit it off the glowing coil from the dash. The woman wagged her head in approval, tapping her knees to the music. “It’s live,” she said, wrenching around as the dog skittered onto the floor. They dropped him off in Vegas at the Four Palms Motel, where they’d once stayed, waving and tearing off through the vacant parking lot.

When he woke again the TV screen was black and it was dark outside. He got up to turn the Weather Channel on, but nothing happened. He jiggled the button and banged the set, but it refused to come to life. He grabbed the phone off the night table and dialed the reception desk, in a small shack across a field of poorly lit parking lots.

“Hello?” a woman said, her answer quick and eager, as if she hadn’t received a phone call in months. The person who’d checked Samson in, a tiny Mexican with deep hollow eyes, had looked terrified, as if Samson had come in threatening to spray the shack with a semiautomatic if the man didn’t give him a room right away.

“Is this reception?”

“Yes it is.”

“My television is broken.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something happened and now it’s broken.”

“You turned it on?”

“You’re asking me if I turned it on?”

He struggled against the urge to shout, to rage into the phone in order to communicate the magnitude of his pain. He wanted so little really—just the sound of the television to help him through the night, the promise of rain elsewhere, and even this small thing he was to be denied. He felt devastated, unfairly wronged, and perhaps the woman
heard this in his voice because when she spoke again her own voice was softer.

“I have to ask. You’d be surprised. Some people think the television is supposed to be on when they come into the room, and when it’s not they call up complaining it’s broken.”

He wondered if he had actually reached the reception shack or if he had accidentally dialed some distant place. Was he truly to believe this, that there were people out there, a regular clientele, convinced that a television remained on unless it was broken?

“Look,” he implored.
“Please.
I’m asking you very nicely, can you fix my television? Be reasonable,
be
—” He kneaded his forehead in exasperation. “You can’t possibly understand how much it would mean to me.”

“Sir?” Her voice was faint. It promised nothing. Probably she was used to psychopaths and murderers. This was Las Vegas, after all. She must have been trained to handle suicides on a daily basis. A woman who knew her chalk outlines, who could recite a hundred ways a body could land sprawled across the floor. A broken television was not a cause for alarm, not for her. There were others who needed her, people calling at this very moment whom she could save simply by answering the phone as she had, acting surprised and pretending they were the only ones. Lost and lonely people to whom she ministered Vegas motel rooms like blessings, people she could help to survive one more night. “I’ll see if I can get someone to take a look at it as soon as possible,” she said. It was the best she could do and because it was not enough, because he could not bear the silence in his room, he stood up and walked out into the night.

He had a memory of Las Vegas, seen through the window of the taxi on the way to the airport when Anna had come to take him home. The lights had stunned him, a city that existed against all odds—against the sheer force of reality—broadcasting a message in the affirmative:
YES! YES! YES!
A year had passed since he’d woken up in a foreign life, in a city that no one could explain why he’d come to. And now, walking numbly down the Strip, it was not the neon but other
people that he couldn’t account for, knitted in pairs or tight groups, people who looked happy, positively beaming and holding hands, a man squeezing a woman’s ass, and she laughing and squeezing his, people who had the liberty to touch each other, who had things to talk about, secret expressions only they understood, who remembered, for God’s sake, the first time they met each other.