Man Walks Into a Room (23 page)

He walked into a casino and wandered past the tables, edging himself into a crowd gathered around a game of craps. Maybe it’s as easy as that, he thought to himself, just wedge yourself between this fat guy and that lady in a gold dress and you’re in, part of it, everyone vibrating in the glory of the high roller riding a lucky streak, keeping an edge against the house. And for a little while it was fine, the terror left him. But then the man started to lose and the mood changed, and soon Samson became unwedged and was wandering again in the maze of slot machines and felt tables. He watched as a heavy man, his shirt stained with sweat, let his body go limp while the bouncers dragged him across the floor. The man lost his shoe and it lay there until a cocktail waitress picked it up and carried it away on a tray of empty glasses. A man who was maybe years in debt, who had put up for collateral things he later found he couldn’t live without.

There were no clocks in the casino; no windows; nothing at all to suggest that time had any bearing on the place. No mirrors, no self-examination. On the way over he had stopped at a liquor store to buy some whiskey. It fit the new image he wished to form of himself: a force to contend with, a powerful man who would not be taken advantage of. He pointed to the only brand he recognized, Jack Daniel’s. A sign on the wall said I.D. was required, so he took his license out of his wallet and showed it to the clerk. The man laughed and gave him a strange look. “Don’t worry, man. I believe you.” Samson stared at the floor as the man counted out his change.

There was a bank of pay phones against the wall, and he walked over to a booth and took the bottle out of the paper bag. Then he dropped a quarter in the phone, and dialed the number of the motel. He unscrewed the cap and took a drink.

“Hello?” It was the saint in reception again, working the phone like a professional. Samson winced as the alcohol burned a trail to his stomach. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m calling to find out if my television has been fixed.”

“What room number?”

How many people had reported a broken television in the time since he’d called, Samson wondered, that she should already have forgotten him?

“Twelve forty-seven. Don’t you remember? I called earlier tonight.” He heard the click of her fingers moving across the keyboard.

“Um, yes …” He took another sip of whiskey as she searched the files. Perhaps she was less experienced than he’d thought. Not a saint at all, but a trainee. “It looks like the repairman was sent over there an hour ago. It should be working now.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s ten-fourteen,” she answered, and then, as an afterthought, added “at night,” in case she was talking to one of the ones who’d lost his mind.

But he hadn’t lost his mind. To the contrary, he’d lost everything
but.
His memory, his wife, his job, his friends, twenty-four years of his life—but not his mind. That was all that had been left and he’d retreated into it because there was nowhere else. He took another drink and tucked the Jack Daniel’s inside his tan windbreaker. He leaned against the smudged brass rail of the balcony and surveyed the casino floor: dealers dealing, clearing, swiping, doling, shuffling, as gamblers wiped their glasses, rearranged their balls, piled their chips into pillars as lights flashed around them, a bingo player asleep with her mouth open in a chair, a woman holding her handbag under a slot machine that was regurgitating the quarters she’d fed it, and what kind of victory, Samson wondered, was that? No, there was nothing left but his mind. The rest had all been lost or spent, and now he was surveying the damage, drinking down the Jack Daniel’s and surveying the ruins of it all.

The alcohol began to blur his unhappiness. He went looking for a
cigarette. He passed three boys who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, dressed up in suits and fedoras like adolescent Mafia.

They were talking in grave voices, probably about the next step of their plan, having managed to sneak into the casino. One of them cupped a cigarette in his palm and hung back as the other two headed off toward the card tables. Samson approached him. The kid looked up suspiciously, bracing himself.

“Hey,” Samson nodded, clutching his chest where the bottle was safely nestled. The kid nodded back, leaning stiffly against the wall. “Got an extra cigarette?”

The kid liked this. He straightened up and reached into his breast pocket, moving aside his wallet to get to the pack. Probably the three of them were hoping to pool their dough—years of saved milk money, of earnings from summers of lifeguarding at the municipal pool, bar mitzvah money or whatever the Christian equivalent was, baptism or taking-of-the-sacrament money, tips saved from the parents who instructed them to watch their kids in the baby pool—to add together all those sweaty, crumpled, well-counted bills for one hot night with a whore.

The kid opened the pack, shook one out, and passed it to Samson. He flicked open a silver Zippo blazoned with a dragon. Samson leaned in with the cigarette between his lips and the kid made a show of shielding the flame, a symbolic act of brotherhood entirely unnecessary, as the casino was almost airless. Samson took out the Jack Daniel’s that he’d been clutching to his chest like a wounded baby rabbit. He took a quick pull, jabbing the bottle between his lips and throwing his head back for emphasis, then passed it to the kid. The kid didn’t even wipe the rim, just tilted his head back and drank, as if he didn’t want to break the bond between them with a hint of distrust. He had a sharp, beaklike nose too large for his face, surprisingly pale skin, and a sprinkle of acne along the jaw: a face whose finest hour was yet to come.

“Samson Greene.” Samson extended his hand and the kid shook it.

“Luke,” he muttered softly, offering nothing more, still of the age where last names were reserved for a fraternity of peers—tossed around on the playing field and in dark basements, softly hooted by the
smoking wall behind the school.
Luke,
the kid said as if it were a defeat, an obligatory admission that Samson was his senior. He reminded Samson of the son of a minister, a boy into which a respectful manner had been drilled until it was a reflex. They leaned up against the wall, shuttling the bottle back and forth. A tour group of geriatrics spread through the aisles of the slot machines like a plague of rodents. The casino began to blur. After the last few hellish days alone in the motel, Samson was glad to have company. He felt a surge of gratitude toward Luke as he handed over the last of the whiskey.

“Nice suit.”

“Thanks,” Luke said. “I never wear it. I got it … I don’t remember why I had to get it. My cousin’s wedding maybe. I haven’t worn it since.”

He had a slight, almost imperceptible accent. No, not the son of a minister but of a
missionary,
Samson decided, his native English pruned like a hothouse flower, kept protected from the invasive and vulgar argot used in the streets of the squalid backwater nation where he’d lived as a child.

Samson noticed Luke looking at his clothes. He could tell the kid didn’t know what to make of them: the tan windbreaker streaked with dirt, the wrinkled pants that slumped around his waist. The absurd blue sneakers faded with dust. Luke took it all in and looked up at Samson. A very respectful kid, not quick to pass judgment, a kid raised to love his neighbor, testing out a little debauchery as innocently as he had once learned his catechism. His early years spent in Thailand or Burma maybe, where the missionary father had converted thousands while the boy stared out of the windows of a big house or played alone in the gated yard hunting snakes.

“Where did they go, the other two?”

“Those guys?” Luke shrugged. “Play some roulette, I guess. Blackjack maybe, I don’t know. You gambling?”

A kid not unlike the sort of kid he must have been at fifteen, sixteen. A kid who accepted Samson as Frank had: casually, without questions. He put his arm around him and Luke grinned, eyes slanted at
the floor. Samson would have liked to lend him advice and wisdom. To be, for a while, the older brother he himself never had.

He was feeling superbly drunk. So he had lost everything! He was a freeman, released from his life to the living hereafter. He could do anything, go to Burma and proselytize, join a brotherhood of monks on a mountaintop in Asia. Buy a bottle of whiskey, gamble away everything he owned.

“Hey,” he said. “What do you say we find the bar?”

“Cool,” Luke said.

“Where the hell is the bar in this place?” he asked, sloppily steering the kid across the casino floor.

Some hours later, Samson was sitting in front of a television turned to the Weather Channel in Luke’s hotel room on the thirty-fourth floor. The room had cost nothing because the father of one of the boys—not Luke, naturally, but one of the others—was a regular at the casino, a heavy gambler for whom the red carpet was rolled out every time he came to town. Luke was sitting across from Samson, his legs thrown over the arm of a chair, the fedora mashed down on the back of his head. Samson was explaining again, with the blurred and extravagant logic of the very drunk, how he’d ended up in Vegas.

“You’re saying totally annihilated? Is that what you’re saying?” Luke asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I woke up and there was nothing. I couldn’t remember—at first I couldn’t even remember my own name.”

“You couldn’t remember your name was Samson.”

“Right.”

“And then some doctor, the Ray guy, calls you.”

“No, no, no.” Samson tried to stand up, to pace, to clarify for Luke and himself the chronology of events that had led to this current situation, this exorbitant drunkenness on the thirty-fourth floor of a Las Vegas hotel called, what was it?

“The Mirage,” Luke offered.

“The Mirage.” But he couldn’t seem to make his legs work, and fell back into the chair. “With the son of a missionary,” he added.

“A what?”

“A
missionary,”
Samson repeated loudly, rummaging with a finger in the pack of cigarettes to see if there were any left.

“Who’s a missionary?”

Samson leaned his head back and sighed.

“Your father.”

“He is not.”

Samson looked over at Luke and tried to focus. The kid had taken off his jacket and shirt and was sitting in a white undershirt with the fedora still clamped on his head, like a photograph of an old jazz musician except with no instrument. They always had the instrument in the photos, a battered horn that seemed to have absorbed all the light, casting the room in darkness.

“Then what was he doing in Burma?”

“In
what?”
Luke screeched, laughing as if Samson had just delivered the punch line of a joke.

“Burma.”

Luke straightened up, sensing the need for a solemn reply.

“He’s an attorney. In L.A. He’s never been to Burma.”

Samson tried to absorb this information calmly. Luke fingered the brim of his hat, his eyes on Samson, waiting. Fine, so his father was an attorney. There was no reason to let this steer them off the track they’d been on, straightening out just how it was that Samson had ended up where he had.

“At least you have a dad,” he said quietly. “So what he’s never been to Burma.”

Luke hesitated, trying to follow.

“I don’t even remember my dad,” Samson explained. “He left when I was three.”

“My old man is a total asshole,” Luke said, his face darkening.

“What do you mean?”

Luke shrugged. “I mean he’s an asshole.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Are you kidding?” Luke snorted. “He’d flip out. He thinks I’m in San Diego at a science fair.”

Samson stopped to think about this, struggling through the alcohol haze to see the kid for who he really was, though it had been a nice story, a pleasant thing to imagine the kid riding his Chinese-made bicycle through the rooms, believing his father was doing the work of God.

Luke picked at his shoelaces in silence.

“You know what?” Samson said at last.

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I want you to remember it, because nobody else is going to tell you.” He paused, looking the kid hard in the eye. “People are no good, Luke. Take it from me, they’ll just let you down.”

Luke nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s true. But you know what? Fuck ’em. We don’t need them.”

Luke glanced up and Samson flashed him a smile.

“Yeah,” Luke agreed, grinning.

“Fuck ’em,” Samson said, pleased with the sound of it.

“Fuck ’em,” Luke echoed.

Samson nodded, allowing this to sink in. The Weather Channel gave a tropical update. “Now.” He rubbed his eyes. “Where the hell was I?”

“In the hospital.”

Yes, Luke was there to stick it out with him, to see the story through to the end. His father was an asshole, so what—one day the kid would grow up and leave it all behind.

“Right. And I remember nothing. And there’s this woman by my bed, a beautiful woman.” Let it be like a fairy tale then, a dark and handsome story, simple enough that the kid could one day tell it to his own children.

“Your wife.”

“My wife,” Samson said, settling back in to tell it.

“Your life,” Luke added.

“My wife, my life,” Samson said, feeling generous. “Anna.”

With Samson orating and Luke clarifying, the master and his assisting scribe, they laid out the events of the past year. It was the first time Samson had told the whole story. Lavell, Donald, Lana, Ray, even Anna—each knew only parts of it, and besides, they had their own biases. Luke, however, was a fair and impartial witness. And so, with cantorial vibrato, drunk on whiskey and truth, attempting again and again to mount the chair to speak from a podium of air, Samson had it out. For nothing, any longer, could be used against him. He had suffered, and for this he would be granted amnesty. Luke would see to that. When it was time—when Samson had built his towering case and climbed atop it to gaze down at the pitiful world, when he had stood for a while in the just silence with the wind at his back before slowly beginning the descent, when his feet quietly, belatedly touched the earth—the kid would be there waiting. Samson would kneel before him, and Luke would lay his hands on Samson’s head and bless him. And then, finally, Samson would be free.