“They fight all the time. She leaves with one or two appliances or some clothes, but she always comes back the next day or the day after.” Lana lit a cigarette and kicked off her flip-flops. She had strong, boyish feet, feet so striking and expressive that it seemed as if the whole of her personality were centered there, migrating up the long legs and coursing through her body that hummed like an instrument.
“So are you in love with him? Winn?”
Lana shrugged. “Maybe.”
“He seems like he’s good to you.”
Samson was glad to be alone with her. Since she’d left New York and he’d stopped seeing Lavell, there had been no one he could really talk to. There was something frank and unfinished about Lana that put him at ease. She knew, at least from afar, what he had once been like, but seemed undisturbed by the suddenness of the change, perhaps because she herself was always changing. She seemed to move through the world in a casual, haphazard way, absorbing whatever she hap pened upon; sometimes she reminded Samson of the sleepwalking characters in cartoons who blindly totter along the edge of cliffs but never fall. He knew she liked him but he couldn’t say why, and now he wondered whether she became so quickly intimate with everyone she stumbled across.
“How are things with Anna?” she asked.
“Better since I left the apartment. I always felt guilty there. I only realized it later, but looking at all those photographs and lying in our old bed, I kept feeling I’d somehow betrayed her. After I moved out, I think she began to accept things, to stop hoping so much.”
“I’m glad for her. It must have been awful.”
“She came over to your apartment to say good-bye before I left for L.A. At one point she was standing by the window, just thinking. Like she’d forgotten I was there. And for a minute it seemed clear to me the reason why I’d fallen in love with her.”
“Sure, the minute she no longer belongs to you.”
“She just seemed so much herself.”
Lana groaned and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Men. You want a woman just when she doesn’t want you.”
“Thank you, from your vast experience of human relationships.”
“Hey, you sound like my old professor. The one cool professor in the department.”
“Do I?”
She ashed her cigarette and smiled faintly.
“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s not it. It was like I saw her the way she might have looked the first time we met. Before we happened. And I felt like I understood something, that’s all.”
A sound of audience laughter came from the couple’s apartment, perhaps a spare TV the man dragged out on nights like this when his wife made off with a dangling electrical cord into the night. Samson took the cigarette out of Lana’s hand and sucked on it. The smoke burned his lungs and he coughed.
“Anna told me I used to be a very sexy smoker.”
“Are you serious? Because you used to tell us it was a disgusting habit whenever you caught us smoking before class. Which reminds me, I thought of something the other day. Something you told us last year in Contemporary Writers.”
“What’s that?”
“I think we were reading, I can’t remember what now, but it was about memory. You told us about an angel in the Talmud or something, the Angel of Forgetfulness, whose job it is to make sure that when souls change bodies they first pass through the sea of forgetfulness. How sometimes the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets, and then fragments of another life stay with us, and sometimes those are our dreams.”
“I said that?”
“It was a good class,” Lana said, mashing the cigarette into the step. “The kind you leave in a daze, a little in love with your professor.” She smiled and looked up at the apartment filled with the noise of recorded laughter, her face blurred in the shadows like a photograph in black and white.
When Samson got back to Ray’s the house was dark and there was a note saying he’d gone to bed. Samson was supposed to tell him in the morning what he’d decided. As casually as he’d acted in front of Lana and Winn, he was nervous about the decision. It was true that he could use the money. He himself didn’t have many expenses aside from the rent he was still paying for Lana’s apartment, but he felt a responsibility to Anna, to be sure she was taken care of at least for the foreseeable future. And yet having struggled these past few months in New York to cut himself loose, he wasn’t sure how he felt about joining up with anyone now, especially a whole team camped out in the desert. Still, the project as Ray described it seemed a monumental thing, a team of doctors working alone in the emptiness of the desert. And there was something about Ray’s voice, as mesmerizing and intimate as a midnight disc jockey inviting his listeners to stay with him through the night. There seemed to be greatness in Ray, and it flattered Samson that the doctor had singled him out and asked him to take part in the effort.
He was scared, but he wanted to tell Ray now that he would go, that he was ready to leave at any moment. He had done what he needed to in L.A.; there was nothing here for him. When he said good-bye, Lana had leaned against him and brushed his lips. He had wanted a sign that he was somehow special to her; that he was not just another person who blithely wandered into her life and fell under her sway. But it was only a sweet, vague apology and it awakened a longing, a sharp scrape across his chest, which he found unbearable.
Only Ray was asleep now. It was part of his regimen: macrobiotic meals, eight hours a night. Diving to a thousand feet. Possibly one of the few men who tested the limits of such watches, bringing the proof—a delicate bloom of coral—back from the Caribbean.
He thought about the conversation he’d had with Ray the night before. They had been sitting on the patio after dinner, discussing what it meant to lose the memory of so much experience and still have, as Samson had, a sophisticated sense of the world. There were the memories of his childhood, of course, Ray had pointed out, leaning back in his chair, his eyes patiently trained on Samson. But there was also a memory that was, he’d said, “a wisdom not our own.” A memory inherited from evolution, something like intuition that gives people the sense of union with which they enter the world. The lights had been on in the valley below, sputtering through the vaguely rustling trees: sodium streetlamps, approaching headlights, glowing beacons atop towers to warn low-flying planes. Ray’s view of the city noir, and something about the vista, the perspective, seemed to inspire him.
“There’s a lot we don’t know, Samson. About the brain and the nature of consciousness. People squirm when the subject of spirituality comes up, and I don’t blame them—the meeting of science and spirituality has produced some pretty flimsy thinking.” The ice cubes melting in his water glass had slipped and clinked together. Ray glanced down, then fixed his gaze back on Samson. “Though we shouldn’t forget that the fucking Bhagavad-Gita helped build the bomb.” A fleeting smile had crossed his lips before his face settled back into its relaxed lines. He’d cleared his plate to the side, as if to make space for what he was about to say.
“Look. What if we just defined the spiritual aspect of human nature as the need to belong—be it at some cosmological, biological, or social level. What people call spiritual experiences usually involve a sudden feeling of being supernaturally connected in some way, right? White light, a communion with God, a moment in which you suddenly comprehend the whole fucking universe. Whatever it is. But who knows about God or no God? And at the end of the day, who really knows anything about the workings of this thing we’re in, called the universe for lack of a better word? No one. To me, that’s a very lonely idea.”
He had watched Samson’s face, registering the reaction to each word, the way a great performer constantly reads his audience, testing its weather.
“What we do know is that we are all in this together. So what if it were possible to ease the terror of it by experiencing one another’s consciousness? In a very controlled way, like sharing a memory.”
He had paused, letting Samson abso
rb the information.
“See, science is about sharing. The reason we want to quantify is so we can communicate and share more clearly. The more carefully I can define something, the better I’m able to share it. So if a guy tells me, ‘I’ve just seen the light,’ and I don’t know what he’s talking about, then I can’t share that. But if he gets me to have the same experience, that begins to be science.”
Samson had felt that he was starting to understand, that the picture was coming into focus. “So this whole project, finding a way to transfer memories, has to do with a hope that those sorts of moments can be shared?”
“Yes, but it’s more than that. The reason I became a scientist—I was a doctor, remember, but from the beginning I was moving toward pure science—was because I wanted to ease the yearning. My own to begin with, but it was clear to me I wasn’t the only one. People—physicists, whatever—will tell you we’re all tuned into the universe, to something greater than ourselves. What I say is, why can’t we try to share, at the deepest possible level, that distant connection? What I’m saying is, why can’t we get inside each other’s heads? From time to time, to get out of ourselves and into someone else. Simple idea, but the ramifications are extraordinary. The possibility for true empathy—imagine how it would affect human relations. It’s enough to keep you awake at night.” Ray grinned. His teeth were perfect. “Or to send you out to the desert.”
They had sat in silence as Ray watched him. Samson averted his gaze and looked out at the view. He tried to keep his mind from racing, to allow the immensity of all Ray was proposing to sink in. He imagined having Anna’s memories of himself transferred into his mind: to feel what it was to be her remembering him. To experience what it was to remember himself.
“We’re not so unalike, you and I,” Ray had finally said. Samson straightened up in his chair and met the doctor’s eyes. “Are we, Samson?”
He fumbled in the dark for the telephone on the hall table. As it rang on the other end, he remembered that it was three hours later in New York and that Anna was probably asleep. He liked the idea of waking her, the intimacy of a late-night intrusion, her voice soft and unprotected. But when it continued to ring and no one picked up he began to wonder what she was doing out so late, or even if she was sleeping elsewhere. The thought agitated him, and he tried to remember if during the past weeks she had mentioned anyone, a man who might have begun to slip effortlessly into her life in the space he’d left behind. He hung up and dialed again, but no one answered. He was about to try a third time when a door opened and Ray came out wearing a pair of pale blue pajamas.
“You all right?”
“Yes. Sorry if I woke you.”
“Not at all, I’m a light sleeper. A slight breeze and I’m up.”
Samson looked down at the phone in his hands and replaced it in the cradle. “I was just calling … I thought maybe Anna—my wife—was home. We’re separated now. She asked me to call when I got here.”
“Did you get through?”
“No one answered. I’m just a little worried—” Samson glanced down at his watch in an attempt to appear convincing. “It’s late there.”
Ray nodded. A few seconds passed and then he said, “Give her time. Give yourself time. It’s a tragic thing to lose someone, whatever the circumstances. But it’s amazing how resilient people are. Sure, it’s hard to believe now, but one day you’ll both wake up and realize it’s all right. You’ll open your eyes, and maybe the light will strike you in a certain way, and you’ll sit up and think to yourself, okay.”
“It’s harder for her.”
“Maybe so. But you shouldn’t underestimate the stress you’re under. Even if you’re the one who decided to leave, it doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad. Anyone would. Sad and confused, I’m sure.”
He was grateful for Ray’s generosity, for the sage calm that could only have been the solid remainder of so much experience.
“Well, I’m glad you’re up,” Samson said. “I wanted to tell you that I’ve thought it over and I’ve decided to do it.”
Ray grinned and balled his fists in the air. “Terrific! That’s fucking great news, Samson. You don’t know how pleased you’ve made me. You’ll see—what we’re doing out there is just extraordinary.” His gaze was brilliant, piercing. Finally he glanced down at the phone. “What do you say we try calling her in the morning, huh?”
Samson nodded.
“Just terrific,” Ray repeated, then turned and retreated to his room, calling good night behind him.
Samson stood by the bedroom window looking down at the dark swimming pool. The longing he felt was a sense of missing that had not occurred to him yet, though he could not say exactly whom or what he longed for, whether it was his wife or Lana or something else entirely, something much larger that he couldn’t name. A long time passed before he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. In his mind he walked like an ascetic across the scorched emptiness. He resolved to go further, to give up more. He drew a blank and clutched his knees to his chest and in the morning he woke like that.
ONCE THEY WERE OUTSIDE the city limits Ray shifted into fifth gear and did eighty miles an hour, chewing on pumpkin seeds from his pockets and spitting the shells out the window. He called out the names of the tortured vegetation along the road, greasewood, sage, the first stunted Joshua trees with crooked arms that once pointed believers through the desert.
They stopped at a stand with wind chimes that sold cacti and other succulents. A college-aged kid with a red baseball cap told tourists who bought the baby potted plants, water it once a month, knowing the souvenir succulent would be dead in the cup holder no more than a few days into their trip, baked and dehydrated.
The plant stand was next to an Arco, and Ray filled up with gas while Samson called Anna from a pay phone. He caught her just as she was leaving for the park. A friend, an amateur ornithologist, was taking her to see the red-tailed hawks that nested in a window ledge above Fifth Avenue. There was a row of hard-core enthusiasts with telescopes who did round-the-clock surveillance.
“Were you with him last night?”
“What do you mean?”
“I called and no one answered. I thought maybe—”
“I was probably asleep. I’m a sound sleeper, and the phone is in the living room, remember? I didn’t hear it.”
“Oh. But I would understand if there’s someone else …”
She didn’t reply, and he was unsure of the meaning of her silence.
“How is it?” she asked. He pictured her in the kitchen, wrapping the extra cord around her wrist.
“Fine. We just left L.A. I’m calling you from”—he glanced at a road sign—“Lancaster. I’m basically already standing in the Mojave.”
“The Mojave? I thought Dr. Malcolm was in L.A.”
Ray smiled from the car and waved.
“He was. I can’t talk for long, Annie. Ray’s waiting.” He paused, confused. “Where did I get that? Did I ever call you that?”
Silence. “No.”
“You don’t like it.”
“No, I do. It’s what my brother used to call me.” Samson couldn’t remember a brother, a man who shared her eyes or mouth. That Anna had never mentioned her brother made Samson jealous, as if he were an old lover whose photograph she’d kept.
“I’ll call you something else,” he said quickly. “What I was going to say is that his research team works out of a ranch in the desert. There’s a lab there, facilities. About three hours from L.A.” Built in the 1940s as a spa, Ray had said, a failed attempt by a tycoon to attract the rich for the curative effects of the semiarid climate. Mineral baths from the salts of dry lake beds. Open spaces, rugged mountains, wildflowers. Abandoned for years before they found the daughter who owned the deed, a schoolteacher in San Jose. The laboratory now named after the failed spa, Clearwater.
Samson watched something translucent, a scorpion, scuttle across the packed earth.
“It’s way out
in the desert. The nearest town is military.”
He waited for Anna to speak. In the last month, while he was still in New York, she had seemed to be trying to distance herself, not to become estranged but to give up the desire she’d felt, like a constant pressure, since he’d disappeared. For months after the operation she had nightmares, things she wouldn’t vocalize. Dreams inside of dreams, she said, so that she didn’t know if she was waking or asleep. She seemed to be struggling against it now, against being dragged back into all she felt for him, against the desire to save him.
“What exactly is the nature of the research anyway?” she finally asked. “You think it will help you remember?”
She had channeled it back into her work. She spent late nights at the center; she took in paranoid schizophrenics and psychotics and served them juice in Dixie cups. She trained the staff. Never get between them and the door.
“No, it’s not really like that. Mostly he wants to study my mind.”
“I better run, I’m already late. Is there a telephone number?” she asked.
“I’ll call when I get there.” He paused while a truck pulled out onto the highway. “Anna, this guy—Ray. He’s advancing our knowledge of the mind, talking about things we never thought were possible. There’s something … I don’t know … noble about it.”
“I’m sure. Dr. Lavell said he’s brilliant, right? If you’re interested in what he’s doing and can be a part of it, that’s great.” When she’d picked up the phone the crisp nearness of her voice had surprised him, but now she sounded vague and distant. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”
The scorpion came back and scurried off in the opposite direction, tail arched. A recorded operator broke through the line, warning that he had a minute left and the call would soon be terminated.
“My card is running out—” He had wanted to tell her about what he’d felt last night. Not about Lana, but about the feeling, which had quickly moved on from the slender, frenetic girl to become pure desire, spreading out like a blot of ink on paper.
Man Walks Into a Room Page 10
