Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  “Girlfriend number one?” the driver asked, pulling up to a beige condominium and craning around to look at Samson.

  “Huh? Yeah,” Samson said, counting out the crisp bills Ray had given him.

  The driver pretended to zipper his lips. “Good luck!” he sang, then screeched off, taking the secret they shared with him.

  Samson knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment. When no one answered he tried the handle, which was unlocked.

  “Hello?” he called, knocking again on the open door.

  There was a couch along one wall, basket chairs, a blow-up dinosaur, and a junked television in the corner with wires sticking out of the back. A lone, gravel voice floated in from somewhere, and it took a second before Samson realized it was the radio, the low vibrating hum of distance below the voice’s bottom register.

  “Lana?”

  There was no answer so he followed the sound of the radio to the bedroom. The blinds were drawn and the room was dark except for the glow of a computer screen. Someone was hunched in front of it, his back to Samson.

  “Hello?”

  The kid turned around and it took him longer than it should have to register another person there, as if he were trying to refocus, to shift from one parallel plane to the other.

  “Oh, hi. You looking for Lana? She’ll be back—shit, what time is it?” He glanced at his wrist but there was no watch on it. “Back in, like, an hour.” A look of puzzlement crossed his face, something not necessarily local, solved in an instant as the features returned to slackness. He reached up and lowered the volume on a duct-taped radio, just enough so the words of the broadcast were still audible: Normal aging of monkeys’ brains causes a twenty-eight percent decline of neurons. He fingered his glasses and ran his hand through the back of his hair, matted down and stuck up, the troubled hair of an insomniac or day-sleeper. “Did she know you were coming?”

  The interesting thing, Ray had said, is that when we are working with the brain, we are dealing with an intelligence far greater than our own.

  “I’m a friend of hers from New York. I thought I’d surprise her.”

  “Oh,” he nodded. “Well, I’m just working on this … thing.” The boy—he didn’t look much older than nineteen or twenty—swiveled the chair around and looked at the screen. He tapped a few keys and waited to see what happened, then turned back, distracted. “Yeah. You want to wait until she gets back? I’m Wingate, by the way.”

  Samson shook the clammy hand and, when he introduced himself, Wingate brightened up and pushed some magazines off of a brown velvet chair that had little bald spots like a sick dog. Samson hadn’t heard of any of the magazines, Nuts and Volts, Midnight Engineer.

  “You have to send away for them. I know the guy who writes most of the stuff in Volts.” He flashed a grin. “So you’re Samson. Cool. Lana told me about you.”

  The fact that Wingate knew about him was the only assurance Samson had that he’d come to the right place, because aside from some girl’s sneakers at the foot of the bed and a bottle of nail polish on the night table, there was nothing to suggest Lana had ever been here. He wondered what Lana had said about him.

  Wingate chatted easily, rooting around in his hair as if he’d lost something there. He didn’t move to open the blinds or turn on a light, and so they sat in darkness, viscous bubbles floating across the computer screen like a lava lamp. He balled up his flannel shirt and threw it in the corner of the room. The radio piped up: There are several hurtles before this therapy can be tried on humans. Occasionally Wingate pricked up his ears, like a wild dog listening for the pack in the wind.

  Wingate told him how he’d drifted down from Palo Alto a few months ago, had migrated beyond the range of hackers with silicon dust on their fingers. After he’d graduated from Stanford he’d stayed for a year trying to decide whether to do a Ph.D. He wrote code for his adviser and for an operating system called LINUX, and hung out in the back of the coffeehouse on campus with guys from small Balkan countries doing work in the Robotics Department or Symbolic Systems, figuring out how to model consciousness using game theory and Boolean logic, who saw the world in terms of binary equations, one or zero. These were guys who had spent a decade in the department, Wingate explained, who watched the tall, blond undergraduate girls like wildlife, who drove beat-up cars whose backseats were full of junk even though their work was intangible, virtual. They had a keen and scheming and slightly adolescent sense of humor only understood in their own circles. Maybe they had come from war-torn countries that sent their brightest to American universities, but now they would never return from California. Wingate had come from the suburbs of Chicago but he might as well have come from beyond the Iron Curtain. He knew as soon as he got to Stanford—wandering dazed through the mission-style buildings, hiking in the foothills up to a massive radio telescope—that he had come as far as he would go.

  Samson had no idea what Wingate was talking about. He seemed a being returned from the future, already evolved, and Samson felt his stomach drop when it dawned on him this was the company Lana was keeping.

  “I grew up near there,” he said, interrupting Wingate’s monologue. He wanted to ask Wingate things, like what the hell was LINUX and what were people like from the other side of the Iron Curtain? He wanted to ask him what, exactly, was the nature of his relationship with Lana. At the very least, he wanted to hear the names of the familiar streets of his childhood, to sketch out a map and identify landmarks.

  Instead he said, “I was Lana’s professor at Columbia.”

  Wingate nodded but seemed unimpressed. He jumped up and twisted the volume on the radio. He leaned in, his hand resting on the box. And now it’s time for Laotian Community Radio. Remember: keep your mind open and your radio tuned to the left.

  “Damn. I thought it was going to be something else.”

  They listened to the first few minutes of a man talking in heavily accented English about flooding along the Mekong and then Wingate switched off the power. The gooey bubbles slid across the computer screen, doing a convincing imitation of weight and mass.

  “What happened to your radio?”

  Wingate picked up the battered box and opened the battery hatch as if the answer were hidden there. “It’s just an old transistor I unpacked and put back together again. I wanted to see if I could pick up this pirate station out of Pasadena.” The kind of kid, Samson thought, who takes everything apart to see how it’s wired. Who starts out by leaving pennies to be flattened on the railroad tracks and ends up controlling push-button bombs.

  “This guy beams his signal to a hundred-and-eighty-foot antenna planted on the roof of his house, and then it gets picked up, amplified, and rebroadcast over FM. On a vacant frequency, right under the nose of the FCC. They busted him and he just packed up and moved his transmitter down the street.”

  “What does he say on the air? It seems a lot of effort to go to.”

  Wingate shrugged. “He’s an anarchist. A guy who will go that far to make a point. There are plenty of people doing it; you can order transmitter kits easy off the Web. There’s a kid in Florida sending out advice fourteen hours a day on how to blow things up. He’s a freak but mostly you’ve got people who want to chip away at corporate control, anticapitalists who want to shake up the media conglomerates from beneath. People who live for open systems.”

  In the desert the hippies camp out at the hot springs, Ray had said. They splash around nude while the high-voltage wires audibly crackle overhead, driving power across the valley. While the military empties rounds of M-16s in the dirt. In the desert there’s the military and the anarchists like a perfect equation, like scales of judgment. The rest are there biding their time: the Confederate Mexican Army hiding out like Ché in Bolivia, waiting to take back California by guerrilla tactics, the Japanese American arm of Yakuza packing paint guns for flash drills, skinheads staging mock rallies in the shadow of the Panamints. Loners waiting out the apocalypse.

  Wingate tur
ned around and began punching the keys on his computer, searching for something on the Web, a site he wanted to show Samson, while Samson imagined a delicate network of light and glass, shimmering and transparent, crossing and spinning out, trying to become infinite. Once, when he was a kid, he had taken a ball of string and taped it to the walls length by length, turning the tiny vestibule between rooms into a human trap that his mother had blithely walked into.

  He stared at the back of Wingate’s matted hair and for an instant his mind froze and he felt he could not remember how he’d arrived in the dark bedroom, or who Wingate was, or how he’d come to know him. Loudly, as if he himself were trying to transmit his voice through vacuum tubes, Samson explained that he knew next to nothing about computers. The most he could do was find call numbers on library terminals. He hadn’t even turned on the computer he’d found in his office at Columbia. It was a question of he couldn’t find the switch.

  Wingate blinked. There was something charming about how, once he was on a roll talking, another person’s interjections seemed to bewilder him. As if conversation were not a native skill but something he had awkwardly learned to imitate, like an ape in captivity taught to sign and give hugs but that remained ambivalent.

  “What’s the last year you remember?” he asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-six.”

  “Damn.” Wingate whistled appreciatively. “So if I were to say, I don’t know, Iran-contra? Mean anything?”

  “No.”

  “Break dancing?”

  “No.”

  “Moon walk?”

  “Sure, I watched it on TV.”

  “No, like this—” Wingate stood up and glided backward across the floor.

  Samson raised his eyebrows. “What is that?”

  Wingate paused, his face grave. “I hate to break it to you, man. Fucking Elvis is dead.”

  When Lana got back she screamed and tackled him, hooked her arm behind his back and grinned as if for a photo. Samson felt old and pitiful, like a lecherous uncle sweeping through town in a Cadillac to take his favorite niece to Sizzler. A bolt of misery streaked through his mood, and he wished he could find a loophole out of the moment. He stifled an odd, unaccountable urge to shriek, “Hi! How are you? Hi! How are you?” like the Asian Lionel Richie ferreting around the halls of Lavell’s hospital.

  He followed Lana to the kitchen, where she found a six-pack of beer in a cabinet. She seemed even taller and more prone to accidents, yet less fragile, more beautiful.

  “You live here?”

  She rattled the ice tray over the sink. “I met him basically the first week I got here. It meant I didn’t have to bother looking for a place.”

  Samson lowered his voice. “You’re at school and he stays home fiddling in the dark? Bombs and so forth.”

  “Hah-hah. He’s a genius, if you must know.”

  “Is that what they call it? What kind of name is Wingate anyway?”

  “Hey,” she said, “I’m really glad to see you.” She handed him a beer and a glass of ice. In the light he noticed she had a silver ring through her eyebrow.

  “They missed your ear again.”

  “You’re a regular comedian. Everyone calls him Winn.”

  “Who’s everyone?” He trailed her through the living room and down the hall, holding the bottle in front of him like a lantern.

  They ate dinner at a plastic picnic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard, steamy tubs of tikka masala and lamb korma and little dishes of chutney and lime pickle. Samson couldn’t remember tasting Indian food before, and he sampled it in small forkfuls. Lana and Winn shoveled it in their mouths, dribbling rice and panting from the spicy heat, washing the stringy chunks of meat down with beer. Winn licked his fingers and talked with his mouth full, excitedly describing to Samson the hum and click of servers breaking up data, routers sending it out at the speed of light in signals amplified from station to station at the bottom of the sea. He was brilliant and magnetic: put him on a soapbox and he would draw a crowd. Samson could not help feeling disappointed that some nearness he’d wanted from Lana seemed impossible now.

  While they ate dessert Samson told them about Ray Malcolm. He spoke quickly, focusing on a spot somewhere over their shoulders, at a lottery billboard across the street with an electronic number trailed by zeroes. When he started to tell them about Ray’s research, Winn froze, his coconut pastry stalled in midair.

  There was a moment of silence when he finished and then Winn leaned across the table. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, as if people around them were listening, but there was only the shopkeeper and his wife, who dug around in the gunnysacks of beans and nuts and dried tamarind, shuffling up and down the aisle in squashed house slippers.

  “Let me get this straight: A man calls you out of the blue, in the middle of the night. He asks you to take a plane across the country and when he picks you up he tells you he more or less works for the government. He wants you to go out to a research compound strategically placed in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave. He tells you that he wants to play with your mind. And you say you think that sounds fine? Are you nuts?” A blue vein in his temple stood out, blood his body was deprived of, pumped up to feed the oversize brain.

  “He doesn’t work for the government.” A hundred million dollars, Ray had said coolly, as easy as flipping a penny into the fountain. Some from the government in the form of a federal defense grant, the rest from private investors: the price of a pair of Hollywood movies. “And he doesn’t want to play with my mind. He wants to study it.” There was a way Ray had of talking about his case, how unusual, how quite remarkable it was, that made Samson swell a little with pride over his flawed medical record, his damaged brain, over the whole bloody history of a condition that also happened to destroy his life, not to mention Anna’s, but which he had survived, intact and almost—as Ray didn’t quite say but seemed to imply—gifted.

  “Winn, chill a second, will you?” Lana turned to Samson. “This is someone whose life is basically driven by a deep suspicion of all forms of authority. Of—how do you put it, Winn? Of any centralizing force. Which explains why he’s sometimes”—she looked at Winn—“slightly paranoid.”

  Winn was about to protest but her expression stopped him. Not one of severity but of love, the kind of tender look from an unusually beautiful woman who should not love you but does, that can reduce a man to silence. The evening light fell across her hair, greasy blond at the roots. The sun was going down somewhere in the city, or just beyond the city, at the desert’s edge where grids of vacant streets with blank signs lay waiting for the metropolis.

  “Okay,” she said, and the story began for the third time, changing slightly again: “This guy, this Dr. Malcolm, calls you up. He asks you to come to L.A. He offers you a fair amount of money …”

  Before they got in the car Samson took a photograph of the two of them. They stood together with the lottery billboard behind them, Wingate’s arm around Lana’s waist. Just as he pressed the shutter a semi rammed past, obscuring the trail of zeroes, a streak of uncertainty moving behind them.

  On the way back they pulled off the road to watch a small crowd gathered in front of a mall: cars parked sideways, doors flung open, people swaying on tiptoes gently held back by security guards. The group was struggling in numbers, with just barely enough bodies to qualify as a crowd, but a long way from being a full-blown mass whose voices might mesh into a single electric roar, powered by adrenaline, capable of trampling people alive. Everyone—the crowd, the security guards, and the former star who eventually rolled up in a limousine van—seemed to be going through the motions, having pledged to protect at all costs the illusion of fame, without which the city would be swallowed by a brutal wave of sadness and banality. The aging rock star got out of the car. He clasped his hands in the air and shook his fists. He gyrated a few times, and people shouted encouragement and playfully dodged with the security guards, who let a few of them get through to
touch the hem of his coat.

  “Jesus, he looks pathetic,” Lana said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Billy Joel.”

  “You’re kidding. Ouch,” Samson said.

  Winn shook his head. “I can’t even watch this,” he said. “We used to sing ‘Piano Man’ in my seventh-grade chorus. I kind of idolized the guy.”

  “You idolized Billy Joel?” Lana’s eyes widened in mock horror. “The truth comes out.”

  “For a couple of weeks. Come on, tell me ‘Captain Jack’ is not a good song.”

  Lana raised her eyebrows and turned back to the spectacle of a last few, listless humps.

  The whole event lasted two minutes and then Billy Joel disappeared into the mega record store and the slack, dutiful crowd dispersed, leaving only the revolving lights that continued to search faithfully for Billy Joel in places they would never find him: the windows of neighboring buildings, under cars, in empty sections of the sky. “Come on, ‘She’s Got a Way’?” Winn continued as they walked back to the car. “Great song, admit it.” He stepped in front of Lana, serenading her with a few lines. Something about the whole thing had saddened Samson, the many years that had passed, the charade of pretending to keep alive what had long faded into history.

  When they got back to the apartment Winn went off to work on the computer and Samson and Lana sat out on the steps. The sun had gone down; the sky was indigo. A couple was having an argument on the second floor of the house next door, the woman hollering shut up shut up shut up every time the man tried to speak. After a few minutes she came out carrying a small television set with the cord trailing behind her. She put it in the backseat of her car and drove off. When the motor died away down the street the man came to the window wearing no shirt. He looked down and waved.