Man Walks Into a Room (9 page)

The week before, he and Anna had gone to the Museum of Natural History together. They glided through the dark halls past the glass display cases of yaks and bison, of gray wolves sailing through the blue dusk, hovering in the air above the snow. It was a Monday, and the museum was almost empty except for the small bands of children whose voices now and again reached them like the cries of survivors.
They picked their way through the dinosaur bones and butterflies not saying much, and as they were making their way out of the museum they wandered through a little room with a special exhibition of a time capsule contest sponsored by the
New York Times.

The winning design—two tons of stainless steel, with compartments that folded in on themselves like origami—was scheduled to sit in a courtyard of the museum for the next millennium. In the year 3000, it would be opened and, in the compartments filled with argon gas, suspended in thermal gel, the future would find their fortune: rabbit’s foot, hypodermic needle, horseshoe, ready-to-eat meal. Countries had donated objects like relief for a strange, hybrid disaster. Yo-yo, church bulletin, penicillin.

Samson had moved along the walls of the room, reading the small print about lost time capsules, time capsules in converted swimming pools to be opened in the year 8113, buried Gramophones, spaceships sent orbiting into other galaxies with copper-coated records that could play, in the hands of aliens, the first two bars of Beethoven’s Cavatina.

He went back into the living room and picked up the address book. He turned the pages looking for his father’s name, and when he got to the end without finding it he closed it and tossed it on the table. It was a quaint and childish notion to believe his father would have ever come back to find him. He had left. Whatever the reasons had been, he had gotten up one day and walked out the door, and the life he now had—if he was even alive—was a deliberate decision that did not include Samson.

He fumbled for the telephone and dialed the operator. He asked for Lana’s number and it was played to him on a recording. How many people had called for her number before, he wondered, that they should have a recording of it?

The telephone rang five or six times until she picked up, her voice muffled with sleep.

“Hi, sorry to wake you. It’s Samson.”

“Hmm? What time is it?”

“I don’t know—three-thirty maybe.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“I know, sorry. Do you want to go back to bed or can you talk for a little while? Don’t feel like you have to.”

Lana groaned but Samson thought he heard the light switch. “Okay. How are you?”

“Okay. Do you know there’s this guy who’s encoding the DNA of cockroaches with the great works of literature?”

“What guy?”

“This guy, this scientist. I read about it at the museum. He’s going to inscribe great books onto roach DNA. When it reproduces it will pass the book on and eventually, when there’s a nuclear disaster and we’re all wiped off the face of the earth, these indestructible roaches will be the carriers of Western civilization.”

“Jesus,” she breathed into the phone. He silently congratulated himself on her interest.

“They figure it will only take fourteen years until every roach in Manhattan is archival. There was this diorama of a couple of dead ones, test roaches who didn’t make it.”

Lana was silent on the other end.

“Imagine they could do that to humans,” she finally said. “Tattoo our DNA with Goethe maybe, or Shakespeare or Proust, so that we would be born with the memory of the madeleine or full of
Hamlet.”

“Small children taking their first steps saying. ‘To be or not to be.’”

Lana giggled.

“You know what the Spanish for cockroach is?” Samson asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“La
cucaracha.
There’s a poster on the subway about asthma and sometimes it’s in English and sometimes in Spanish. It’s of these kids sitting around and each of them says one thing that causes asthma:
El polvo! La polución! Las cucarachas!”

“I’ve seen it. How come you’re whispering?”

A siren screamed and faded into the distance, the sound of someone else’s emergency.

“Because the room is dark. And I don’t want to wake Anna.”

“How’s it going?”

“Not so well. I guess I’ve pushed her away and now she’s talking to me less and less.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did Dr. Lavell say?”

“Lavell? Lavell doesn’t dispense advice. He tells me the malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy. How do salmon know to swim upstream to spawn and die? That’s the sort of thing Lavell and I chew over.”

Lana told him how she was leaving for the film program in Los Angeles in three weeks, right after the term ended. Samson nodded, forgetting that she couldn’t see him.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“What do you think of that, that I’m going to L.A.?”

“What do I think? I think you’re lucky, that’s great. You’ll probably be a big star.”

“I want to direct.” “Still.”

Samson told her about an aunt of his who had gone on a date with Jerry Lewis, after he was Dean Martin’s kid but before he ended up fat in Vegas with a house tacky as fuzzy dice.

“What do you know about cloning?” he asked, but there was no answer on the other end, only the steady flux of breath. “Apollo to Houston,” he said, “Apollo to Houston.” He listened to her breathe for a few minutes then he carefully hung up.
Isn’t that something,
Armstrong said to no one in particular as he took that first, lazy step on the moon.

In the far corner of the room the dog moved his feet in his sleep, as if he were treading water.

WHEN HE LEFT
there wasn’t much to take. A few days before, they had stayed up all night talking. The first light had found them with Anna sitting upright in a chair against the wall and Samson standing at the window. They had both said too much, and the room had the stale closeness of a sickroom. It was early December, and when Samson cracked open the window a gust of freezing air came through. Anna shivered. At some point in the night she had told him that there was a part of him that was the same, and she was still in love with him. That at certain moments—mostly when he wasn’t aware of her presence—she felt he was back with her as he’d always been.

“But then I say something and you turn around. And I can see there’s nothing there. I mean, nothing that belongs to me.”

When he suggested that maybe he should move out, she didn’t argue.

“What is it like, I wonder,” she finally said, “to be you?”

“Like an astronaut,” he said, and in the dim light he thought he saw her vaguely smile.

On the morning he left, she went out with Frank while he packed. When she came back he was sitting on the couch with his bag at his feet.

“Isn’t there anything else?” she asked, the dog crouched between them like a small country. Samson looked down at the duffel that contained some clothes, the address book, his CT scans, now smudged with fingerprints. He scanned the living room. A burglar would find nothing here, would pocket only the pewter candlesticks to be thrown away later, found at dawn by the garbage collectors.

“No. I can always come back later. If there’s something.” But then his eyes caught on the camera on the shelf. Anna took it down and handed it to him.

“Take it.” He lifted it to his eye and found her through the lens. She stood patiently, like someone whose face is being felt by the blind, but when he pressed the shutter she flinched. “To remember me by,” she said, and smiled grimly. The dog rolled over as if he were dead.

Lana had already left for the canned sunlight of California, and that night Samson slept alone in her bed. It was a relief to lie with no one next to him, to be staring at the ceiling in a room he didn’t have to try to remember. To be so alone, free to retreat further into the emptiness of his mind: it gave him goose bumps. There was also the thrill of sleeping in the bed of another woman. The pillows smelled of Lana’s shampoo, like a tropical drink. She’d left a note on the refrigerator telling him to make himself at home and reminding him to water the plants, which he did as tenderly as if he were feeding baby animals. “Cheaper than cats,” she’d said when she showed him around the apartment the week before. He’d told Anna that he’d run into one of his old students, and that she was leaving for L.A. and offered him her place. He watched Anna for any sign of recognition of Lana’s name, but her face displayed only a withdrawn sadness.

The phone rang, and the machine picked up after a few rings. “Hi,
you’ve reached Lana,” her voice spooled through the dark apartment. “I’m in California until May,” and then the flat note of distress, of modern longing.

It was someone named T.J. He wanted her to call him when she got the message.

“She’s in Los Angeles,” Samson said, picking up the phone as the boy began to soliloquize about where Lana was at this very moment.

“Oh,” he said flatly. “Who are you?”

“I’m subletting her place. While she’s gone.”

“Oh,” again. “Well, give her the message.”

Samson listened to the dial tone.

People in the department had started to talk. “Who cares what they say?” Lana had said before she left, and Samson understood that she enjoyed being the subject of gossip, the alleged younger woman, though the truth was that nothing but conversation had taken place between them. Samson’s colleagues, who were willing to accept a brain tumor and amnesia, who sat on the coffee-stained chairs in the faculty room discussing the tragic loss of a brilliant mind, found his burgeoning friendship with a student unsettling. Plus there was the larger problem of what to do about his job.

He avoided going to the department, but ran into other professors at the library, where he spent most of his time. Eventually the chair of the department, Marge Kallman, a Romanticist who wore pants suits and carried shapeless handbags, called him in for a meeting. She sat behind her desk and the light came in from behind, catching like a halo in the spun web of her blow-dried hair. She spoke highly of Samson’s work, praising his book on the American tradition whose spine she rubbed as she spoke. She eulogized his teaching skills and his popularity among the students, his ability to
speak their language.
The tone of her voice shifted smoothly when she arrived, inevitably, at his illness and she repeated again how aggrieved at his loss everyone was. Gently she told Samson that they felt they had no choice but to begin the search to hire another Twentieth-Century person to fill his position.

Samson nodded encouragingly. He made it easy for her. He told her they could empty his office, he didn’t want anything. He asked
only that Anna could keep living in their apartment, which was faculty housing, and that he retain his library privileges. Marge looked relieved, glad to have avoided a scene. Samson complimented her brooch, a gilt peacock with rhinestone tail feathers.

“Would you believe I bought it in Las Vegas?”

“I’ve been there,” Samson said, standing up.

“Yes,” Marge Kallman said, signing forms.

“The desert,” Samson added.

It was Lavell’s favorite part of the story. “Why Nevada?” he asked, pacing like a detective along the circumference of a crime. He answered himself: “Because it’s perfect.” Because the desert is where you go when you find your brain scorched, blown-out, uninhabited. You go there for camouflage. Like a wild animal, you follow your instinct.

He stopped seeing Lavell. There was nothing left to say to him, as there was nothing to say to Marge Kallman, or even Anna. He lay still in the subterranean dark of a strange apartment. He fumbled for the camera. He opened the back and flipped on the lamp and in an instant the exposed image of Anna was burned out of existence.

He went to the library only to take out and return his books. He brought them home in stacks. He kept a ready supply of cash for the Chinese deliverymen that cycled the wrong way down the avenues the quicker to bring him a midnight pizza. He read widely, without a plan. He had no agenda. He favored books about astronomy and voyages in space, though he also liked biographies of movie stars or great leaders; without a past of his own, he was fascinated by those of other people. He read
People
magazine and sometimes
Rolling Stone.
He read about the end of the Cold War. He read all of the novels on the curriculum for his Contemporary Writers class, which he found on Lana’s shelves. He read about the life of John Glenn, the life of Yuri Gagarin, who traveled through space where only a dog had been. Carried out of the capsule when he floated back to earth, his body wasted by zero gravity.

Anna called him to discuss insurance and bank accounts. Sometimes she called only wanting to hear his voice.

“You okay?” Samson asked.

“Yeah,” Anna said, though she sounded subdued.

“How’s work?” he asked.

“Okay. Fine, I guess.” Silence. “Is anything new? Anything you want to talk about?”

He wracked his mind, thinking of something he might say to rescue them from another failed exchange. “I’m using the camera. I go on walks and take pictures.”