Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  They had fought then, and Samson said he wished she would stop blaming him for something, an illness, that had happened to him. “Sometimes I think you might be happier if I’d died,” he said, knowing how cruel a thing it was to say, saying it anyway. Anna looked as if she’d been punched and began to cry. Later he apologized, but the words hung in the air between them, hardening like the unidentifiable spilled things on the street that solidified into horrendous fossils. That night, while they lay in bed, Anna had said, “Maybe we don’t belong together anymore.” Samson had not known what to say and so he reached for her hand in the dark. He didn’t tell all of this to Lana. He stopped after the bit about walking out of class.

  They rode the elevator up into the stacks. Lana showed him how to find books in the shadowy, obscure districts lit by failing bulbs. Then in a hushed tone she said, “Good luck,” and turned a corner and was gone, leaving behind a slight electric disturbance in the air. He took down a few books she had recommended and, sinking to the cold floor, began to read. Soon he ceased to notice the slightly sickening smell of old paper.

  HE WENT BACK to the library often, and sometimes he met Lana for lunch after her classes. She was starving, she would say, and had to eat something before she fainted. They sprinted across Broadway dodging traffic and ducked into a noodle shop, or they bought falafel wrapped in paper and took them to Riverside Park, where they ate watching kayaks skim up the Hudson, imagining a wilderness of Indians. It was only the beginning of September and fall was still a long way off from the green shore of New Jersey, unspoiled and almost idyllic upriver. They discussed the possibility of swimming across, how long it would take and how far the distance, the drama of plunging in the murky water and looking back at Manhattan.

  “There was a girl who swam across the Bering Strait,” Lana said. “Maybe twenty years ago. It was some kind of statement. She wanted to encourage friendship and understanding between America and the Soviet Union. A long-distance swimmer, I forget her name, but the water was freezing and all she wore was a bathing suit.”

  “And she made it?”

  “She made it. She’d already swum the Channel a few times. I read somewhere that they have to have a special kind of body fat. Spread evenly over the body for insulation.”

  “You wouldn’t last a minute,” Samson said, gesturing at her rail-thin frame.

  “Hey, I’m tough.” She flexed her biceps, a joke.

  “I’m sure.”

  “My main problem is that I don’t like deep water. The idea of being suspended with miles of darkness, with who knows what, below.”

  They watched as a rusted tanker moved downriver toward the ocean.

  “I wouldn’t exactly volunteer myself.”

  “But what an amazing thing, don’t you think? A girl swimming alone across the strait that once carried the first human beings to this continent.”

  He imagined Lana stroking through open waters toward Siberia.

  “Amazing.”

  He liked to listen to her talk, her unguarded way of telling him what was on her mind, about a fight she’d had with a friend or a book she’d been reading. It was a freedom that seemed consistent with the way she moved, with her limbs that, if she did not concentrate on restraining them, were rarely still. Everything about her seemed accelerated, and the natural intimacy that had so quickly grown up between them surprised and delighted him. At times he felt convinced that they must have sat like this countless times before, paper lunch bags on their laps and the river below, but Lana insisted they hadn’t. He understood the unlikeliness of it too, he being her professor and she his student, and yet it seemed impossible that he hadn’t noticed her especially, hadn’t looked after her with something like wonder as she gathered up her things after class and piked off, an explosive, heart-stopping thing. At the very least, she must have been the sort of girl who, if he’d met her when he himself was a student, would have been like a sword going clean through him.

  She was the first friend he’d made aside from the dog, and somehow he wanted to keep her to himself. He didn’t tell Anna about her right away because it seemed like they shared almost everything else—ten years, a marriage, bed, bathroom, records, dishes, furniture, telephone, friends. He wanted something of his own, a small acreage outside their life together that belonged to him alone.

  He balled up his lunch bag and threw it into the trash basket.

  “If you decided to swim across the Bering Strait in a bathing suit,” he said. She looked at him. “I’d follow you in a paddle boat and shout encouragement.”

  “Thanks. And if you ever decide to walk across the country again, I’ll follow you in a car.”

  “You’d cheer me on?”

  “All the way,” she said.

  HIS DREAM LIFE WAS simple. He dreamed that he was running through endless doors toward a reservoir under a cosmic sky. On bad nights he dreamed that he was being buried alive. He dreamed of charred trees and hills of white ash, landscapes without people from which he woke, oddly, with a feeling of gladness. His dreams were remarkably unpopulated. Only once did he dream of his mother. The dreams had no plots, and most of them could be described in a line or two in the journal Dr. Lavell had asked him to keep. He logged these minimalist scenes every morning and occasionally he brought it to his appointments with Lavell, who looked it over like a schoolteacher checking grammar. He omitted one dream only, of Lana reading naked in the empty library, watched from somewhere above as she turned pages. At times he resented having to submit his every thought to medical observation to be tagged and logged like archaeological fragments.

  Halloween came and went, the streets of the Upper West Side crowded with small bands of witches and cartoon characters, girls with broken wings, aluminum foil warriors. Samson put some Mardi Gras beads on Frank and took him out, and a flock of ballerinas rushed up to coo over him, then whirled and curtsied away down the street like dervishes. The weather that until then had held out like an afterthought of summer, suddenly turned, and a freezing rain came down in sheets while the year skipped a season and fell comfortably into winter.

  Anna began to give things back to Samson, dropping them in his lap without explanation. Old notebooks, his Swiss Army knife, his class ring. Things that belonged to him that had been there all along, in drawers, on shelves, things he didn’t know about and didn’t miss.

  She handed him his address book in silence. He flipped through it.

  “It’s depressing, all these people.”

  “Then throw it out,” she said, retreating to the bedroom and closing the door behind her.

  He wore an old bathrobe and surfed through the television channels, snapping the remote. Anna didn’t understand why he didn’t want to call anyone, or even try to contact the people he remembered, friends from childhood or his great-uncle Max, who had been almost like a father to him. He felt it would be too difficult to hear their voices. It’s not that he didn’t think of them sometimes, but what would he say? He didn’t want to know what twenty-four years had done to them. His great-uncle Max would be in his nineties now; Anna had said that he was in an old age home in California. Max who had escaped from Germany and taught him how to curse in Yiddish and throw a good punch, who snuck him books when no one was looking as if they contained pornography. Good stuff, he would whisper, closing Samson’s fingers around a volume of Kafka. He was not a religious man, but taught Samson to read the Torah in Hebrew so that he would not be ignorant of where he came from. Listen to the sound of the words, Max would say, singing a few lines of the Amidah. The sound tells you everything. He took Samson to synagogue, and it was while davening among old men who smelled of menthol and wool that Max told him there was no such thing as God. Then why do they come? Samson asked. To remember, Max replied, and looking around at the group into which he had been initiated with this secret, Samson was overcome with pride. He couldn’t bear to think of how few of that congregation of wise men were left alive now.

  And the others: frien
ds from his freshman dorm, ex-girlfriends, friends with whom he’d backpacked across Europe, women whose numbers he’d asked for but never called, professors, colleagues, friends’ parents, friends of friends, people he occasionally met for a drink, people whose parties he attended once a year. People he swore to call whenever he ran into them, people he never called. All these must have been listed in the book. He probably would have pleased Anna had he asked about each one, studiously copying down their statistics in the margin: profession, height and weight, beauty on a scale from one to ten. But he didn’t care to. He was tired of being reminded, of photographs like flash cards, of Anna’s surgical disapproval of what she called his resistance. He didn’t know how to gently tell her what he’d begun to understand: that the life she was trying to return to him he didn’t want.

  But in recent weeks it seemed like Anna was beginning to give up too. She acted more stoical, as if something in her had finally broken and turned hard. She tried less and less to cross the distance between them. The bedroom had become her territory and he only went in it to sleep, and sometimes not even then, spending the night on the sofa.

  He fell asleep with the address book in his lap, watching TV, and woke up with a start at three A.M. First he noticed that his mouth was dry and then he heard the television happily singing to itself. He got up, switched off the power, and stumbled into the kitchen. Two or three windows of the building across the street glowed blue. He opened the refrigerator and the light fell across the floor. He gulped from a carton of Tropicana and scanned the shelves for something to eat. Everything in the refrigerator now seemed foreign and unappetizing, as if it were the nourishment for another species, stronger, more enduring than humans.

  Once, when he was nine or ten, he had written a letter to NASA requesting information about other galaxies. A few weeks later a package had arrived from Florida with a Xeroxed letter signed by John Glenn, a photograph he’d taken of the moon with his over-the-counter Minolta, and a conciliatory silver package of freeze-dried ice cream. Samson took the ice cream to school with him and displayed it prominently on his desk. When someone looked his way he would carefully choose a chalky piece and let it dissolve on his tongue. During recess he told a group of girls that his father was an astronaut and was training for zero gravity at Cape Canaveral. The truth was his father had left when he was three. His mother never explained why, and Samson imagined that he had simply walked out one day, turned the corner, and kept on going. That he had shed his life like a set of old clothes, walking into a public rest room and coming out in a brand-new white suit, with a funny little smile on his face. Dumping a plastic bag in the nearest trash bin and setting off with a jaunt in his step, whistling. Samson had pictured this scene so many times that as the years passed, it became, in his mind, indistinguishable from reality. His mother refused to speak about him. All Samson had known as a boy was that he was alive somewhere. He believed that one day his father would return for him: the doorbell would ring and he would run to open it and find him standing there like Cary Grant in a blinding white suit. It was one of the first thoughts he’d had in the hospital once he’d fully grasped his situation: that his father had shown up at some point during the years he’d forgotten, and now there would be no way of knowing it. He hadn’t brought it up with Anna because it did not seem possible that he would have told her about it, any more than he would have advertised his deepest secret in neon lights.

  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 disp
ense 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.