I don’t know.
When were you born?
I’m trying to think, he wanted to say, give me time, and finally it came to him, January 29.
Aquarius.
Water Bearer, eleventh sign of the zodiac, the stars taking the shape of a man pouring water into a jar.
He shone the flashlight at the star chart and tried to find some connection between the flimsy rotating disk and the massive, breathing field of stars. It took a minute before the scattered lights focused into distinct groups, shapes that the ancients had seen as animals, hunters, and dippers. He sat down on the busted couch. A bat flew by, almost grazing his head. He thought about everything Ray had said to him over the past week. He could see the laboratory below and heard the distant hum of the generator. He thought about how he had arrived in such a strange and compelling place, all the unlikely events that had led up to this.
Then his thoughts returned to Jollie Lambird, to that night when he was twelve and nothing yet had happened.
What about you? What sign? He had her hand then, her cool fingers folded into his, and he moved his thumb gently across hers. He didn’t care if he never spoke to anyone else in the world, as long as she was there, whispering, Andromeda, Polaris.
Leo.
He inched toward her until their sides were touching, arm to arm, leg to bare leg. Sam? she whispered. Do you think—This was Jollie Lambird, whom he had been in love with since the second grade, and he was ready to answer any question she might have for him. But he didn’t hear the rest of it because just then he kissed her, a kiss that may have lasted for hours while porch lights shuddered and went out across the neighborhood. While stars themselves lit up or went out, stars that had not yet been given names by which to remember them. It was the last week of summer before the seventh grade, and afterward he walked her back to her house. He kissed her again, shyly and gently, now with the thrill of knowing that he had a small claim on her affections. He ran the rest of the way home, leaping over toys left lying in yards, over rosebushes and garden chairs, running through countless dark yards, his heart pounding in his chest, each step an exercise of joy, and that, really, was the very last he remembered, running through the dark before the world stopped, and in the empty silence all he could hear was the sound of his pulse.
DONALD CAME BACK the next day at noon. There was only one access road to Clearwater, a long dirt road lined with cottonwood trees, and Samson could see the trail of dust the taxi kicked up before it shuddered to a stop in front of the Bathhouse. He waited outside the door and watched Donald struggle out of the car, his shirt untucked, reaching for his wallet.
He shuffled past Samson without a word and flopped facedown on the bed.
“So?”
“Who am I?” he said into the pillow.
“How was Vegas?”
“I didn’t go.”
“You didn’t go to Vegas?”
“I’m telling you I didn’t go.”
“Then where did you stay last night?”
He rolled over and grinned. “Wouldn’t ya like to know.”
“I would.”
“Give me a minute, will you, Sammy? I’m luxuriating.”
He had gone to see a friend of his called Lucky. That was the name she went by; it was a stage name first and then it was her name. He had meant to go to Vegas but then the taxi passed right by Lucky’s place; he’d had no idea it was so close. She’d been happy to see him because the only people who visited her these days were truckers and military personnel.
“So what, you caught up on old times?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
“Whad’ya mean, what do I mean? We. Caught. Up. On. Old. Times,” Donald said, thrusting his hips for punctuation.
“Donald.”
“Yeah?”
“You went to a whore?”
“No, Sammy. I went to see Lucky the human vacuum cleaner.” He pulled himself up from the bed. “Of course I went to a whore.”
There was silence and then they both started to laugh, Samson rolling around on the bed, and Donald coughing and choking, leaning over as if he were going to hack his lungs up. They quieted down and then Donald gave a few dry, scraping wheezes and the whole thing started again.
When he’d finally gotten ahold of himself, Samson said, “That cough sounds awful.”
“Toucha cancer. Nothing to get worked up about.”
“Really? God, how many packs a day did you used to smoke?”
Donald looked up at him and coughed some more. Finally he straightened up, his eyes tearing, a funny grin on his face.
“Would ya believe, I never smoked a day in my life.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I kid you not. My old man smoked. What do I want with brown plaque on the teeth and a nicotine stench?” It was true: Donald was a remarkably hygienic man, taking a half hour each morning and night to complete his toilet of flossing, shining, scrubbing, spitting.
“The whole time I was in the army, not a goddamn puff.”
“I didn’t know you were in the army.”
“Name one thing you know about me besides I got a mean cough, a whore named Lucky, and some prime property, whad’ya call it—” He paused for the right word, looking to Samson for help. “Sounds like masturbating. The thing they do with babies born too early.”
“Incubating?”
“Right, some prime property incubating outside Vegas.”
“What do you know about me except that I lost my memory and I have a wife?”
“My point exactly. You could be a mass murderer. A regular Charles Manson. Who, one of those lab nerds tells me, used to hang around not far from here when he was waiting for helter-skelter.” Donald wiggled his fingers in the air and made popping eyes.
“I’m scared,” Samson said listlessly, propping up his pillows. “So what did you do in the army?”
“I don’t even know. It’s been like a hundred years. I was maybe nineteen and I had a girl in California who I was crazy for.” He paused, thinking. “You believe I don’t even remember her name?”
Samson raised his eyebrows.
“I’m serious, that’s terrible. Lemme think a minute and it’ll come back to me. It was some movie-star kind of name. Very sexy. Anyway, I used to write this girl letters like you wouldn’t believe and when I got some time off I went back to see her. I was nuts for her, so the first chance I get I hitchhike all the way to San Francisco, and when I get there I find her sister and the sister won’t tell me where she is. So obviously I get a little hot under the collar.”
“That’s understandable.”
“I would say so, having just come all that way, bouncing around and snorting diesel in the back of a pickup. So next thing I know, this guy walks out of the back room—the sisters were sharing a place—and he tells me Ruby—that’s her name, Ruby Davis, for cryin’ out loud, I’m not Alzheimer’s yet. So he says Ruby’s gone and she doesn’t want to see me ever again. Scram, he says. I remember it like it was yesterday, the pathetic brown plants on the windowsill. And then I smash him across the jaw. Something comes over me and I smash him. Everybody’s stunned for a minute and then I just walk out the door and turn the corner and that’s the end of it. Except it isn’t because to this day I still wonder what the hell I did that made her turn off me. We were gonna get married.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened is nothing. I came back here—”
“You were stationed near here?”
“Yeah. I came back here and when I had half a chance I got acquainted with some girls along the lines of Lucky.” Donald grunted so as not to upset his lungs again. “I was green behind the ears. Boy did we have fun. I guess it was for the best in the end, what happened with Ruby. I might have spent my whole life unawares of certain”—he searched for the phrase—“pleasures of the flesh.”
He struggled against the urge to call Anna. H
e wanted to hear her voice, to test out how it sounded in the hollow space of the desert, to perform his own experiments on the nature of absence. But something in him didn’t want to give in to it, didn’t want to admit to whatever else it was that made him want to call her. In the end he picked up the phone and dialed anyway. She wasn’t home. It was nine o’clock at night in New York, too late for her to be at work and too early for her to be asleep, which meant she was somewhere out in the glowing city.
Donald was needed in the laboratory about four hours each day. He sat in a room by himself, attached by electrodes to the supercomputer, the system they nicknamed the Catcher after the dream catchers the Indians wove out of string and feathers to catch nightmares in their webs, allowing only the good dreams to find their way through to the dreamer. Donald sat, dosed with sodium pentothal to increase the vividness of his mental images, and tried to concentrate on remembering the thing he had agreed to remember, while Ray observed him through mirrored glass and the engineers and scientists watched the data stream across their screens. One memory, a few moments that happened more than forty years ago, broken down into billions of binaries, one or zero. Often his mind wandered, and much of the cerebral white noise they recorded had to be discarded. He came back drained and exhausted, woozy from the drugs, limping for comic effect to hide the fact that he was shaken. After he’d showered and lain under the air conditioner long enough to recover a little, he strutted around grabbing invisible lapels and announced, in a high-pitched, mock English accent, his speech slightly slurred, that he had been chosen for the electromagneticism of his neural patterns.
“’Ello, old chap,” he said, passing the mirror. “Just ’eard I was elected for my magnetic neurons.”
Billions of binaries, one or zero: simple as that. Like a game of Twenty Questions, an endless series of deductions performed to break down the world into its smallest parts. Are you Samson Greene, one or zero? Is this your wife, one or zero? Do you love her? One or zero. We repeat the question: Do you love her, one or zero? The subject appears to be having difficulty answering. Is this a difficult question, one or zero? Until the world is reduced to math and all the equations equal zero, and in the tremendous silence of that final moment they ask in a trembling voice, the only ones left: Does the world exist? One or zero. And the answer comes back, though there is no one left anymore to hear it, the digits on the clock rolling back to start again with nothing.
Donald slept the rest of the afternoon, his breath steady while his eyes fluttered across the images of his dreams. Samson watched a yellow column of dust whirl across the valley. He sat on the windowsill and watched it until it dissolved in the wind.
He wanted to ask Donald about the memory they had selected to record and transfer. The one part of Donald that would continue after he died, that might live as long as it took for Vegas to reach him. He had told Samson how he’d gone into the hospital about his lungs, and one of the doctors who saw him, a friend of Ray’s who knew what he was looking for, called Ray up and said he had someone. From what Samson had gathered from Ray, in the last year ten or fifteen people had been through Clearwater to donate a memory. The sort of Inputs Ray looked for were ordinary people who had witnessed radical things, people who had suddenly found themselves part of something greater than themselves.
But Samson didn’t ask, and Donald never discussed the memory. Instead Donald made jokes about it, insisting that they were recording for posterity the moment of the biggest known orgasm of the twentieth century, experienced by a woman while under the touch of one Donald Selwyn, or that he was really the long-lost Elvis, that he was cutting a solo album of the silence in his head.
From time to time, Samson sensed an incandescent excitement pulse through the team, something they might have felt passing like a storm, disturbing their steady calculations. At such times, they seemed to move carefully around each other, as if it was shock weather, as if they might transfer electrical currents if they touched. He overheard them talking about it, a day in the future when, if everything went as planned, the journalists would be waiting at the gate. He imagined it, people scribbling notes, snapping photos of anyone who entered or left, scrambling over each other to point their enormous microphones in the direction of any noise. Recording the coyotes for atmosphere, talking on satellite phones to their superiors who sat in air-conditioned offices with two walls of glass. There had already been a few leaks to the press, Ray said, false alarms that had brought vans with revolving antennas and a small band of Christian protesters or a traveling doomsday group. Word had gotten out, there were rumors in the scientific community, and someday in the future, whenever it happened, they would come in crowds and send back their stories in digital, while the anchors on the big networks hosted live panels of experts debating the philosophical and ethical consequences of their work, of memory transfer, or M.T., the complex process to which they had dedicated years of their lives already entombed in the colloquial as a set of initials. Samson imagined a press conference where Ray would answer questions in front of a makeshift backdrop with the blue and white Clearwater logo behind him, comfortable in front of the cameras, bantering with the journalists like a presidential candidate, a spokesman for the future, his watch glinting in the sun, age undetermined.
The press would be there to guide the public through it, allowing the news to settle over them in waves, helping them get accustomed to the idea, to absorb it into their daily routines of making the coffee, picking up the dry cleaning, getting the kids off to school. For the first week they would be able to turn on the television at any hour and it would be there, like a foreign-language immersion program. In the ensuing weeks, the media would continue to saturate them with special reports and expert panels, but each day with less frenzy. They would slowly wean the public off the special hour-long programs as the whole thing began to seem as run-of-the-mill as a heart transfer, even if it would be years before the technology was cheap and efficient enough to be made available to the public. Perhaps Ray would take the Nobel. Hollywood would already be at work on the movie, the final hurtle of total consumer absorption. The journalists, by then, would have long since packed up and left the desert, leaving behind empty cans and plastic forks and film canisters and crumpled napkins that caught in the tumbleweed and blew in the wind.
He called Anna again from a phone in one of the offices, and this time she answered. Her friend, the amateur ornithologist who was also, as it turned out, an architect, had taken her to an open rehearsal of a dance performance, and she told Samson how the choreographer had stood around in the spotlight talking into a microphone headset about the inspiration for the pieces, while the dancers limbered up and hung from their waists and lay around karate-chopping their thigh muscles onstage. It was late and the office was empty and silent except for the hum of the copier. He wanted to keep her on the line and when he ran out of things to ask her—about the weather and if she was sleeping well and how was Frank—he told her that he missed her. It surprised him, the words coming out without him first forming them in his head, words pressed up from his gut where he felt a gnawing desire to feel her skin and inhale her breath and feel the length of her body against his. She was silent on the other end, the great, vast, pin-dropping silence that only fiber optics can achieve, and he wondered if she was going to cry. But when she finally spoke her voice was clear and steady. She said it was nice to hear, but she wasn’t sure if it was something they should talk about just now.
“But do you miss me?” he quietly insisted, drawing lines and arrows on a yellow legal pad by the phone.
“Samson,” she pleaded, her voice going breathy and failing at the end.
“I just want to know. If you don’t, it’s fine. I understand.”
“Please, Samson. Would it be enough to say that sometimes I still wake up crying?”
Immediately he felt mean and foolish for having pushed her. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not a question of sorry. It happened and now we need
to move on.”
“Sometimes I think—” he said, but didn’t finish, because what he really wanted to do was turn off the overhead fluorescent light that was not a continuous, reliable light, but a light that his great-uncle Max once told him was made up of thousands of pulses per second, a sort of strobe light that was actually plunging him, every fraction of a second, into darkness. He wanted to shut it off and sit in the dark once and for all, to cup his hand over the phone and say, Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up?—and so on with a list that would keep her talking through the night. But he didn’t ask because he didn’t know if he wanted the answers. It was better, he felt, had felt from the beginning, not to know. He only wanted to pose the questions, as if just caring enough to ask might give absolution.
“I have to go,” she said quietly. There was a long silence, a silence that they both breathed into until finally she said, “Frank misses you,” and hung up. Frank, who possibly looked up when he heard his name, wondering why now, of all times, he had been summoned.
That week a letter also came from Lana, long and rambling, written in neat script on loose leaf torn out of a notebook. She was staying on in L.A. for the summer, had gotten a job working for a director, actually working at his house where he did all his editing, a house at the end of a long dirt road, built around an open courtyard, with tropical plants imported from Polynesia. Things were going okay with Winn, she wrote, although she had a crush on one of the guys she worked with, a sound engineer who played her samples of thunder and door slams and the shatter of plate-glass windows. He had recorded her picking up the phone, and whenever his computer ran into trouble there was the sound of a telephone ring and then her voice saying “Hello?” It was a little confusing, she wrote, I mean my feelings for him, since she was pretty sure she loved Winn. But how are you and what’s going on with the research? Are you coming back to L.A.? And at the end of the letter, just above the little heart she drew followed by her name, she scribbled Call me. He couldn’t remember seeing her handwriting before, but the sight of the girlish letters caused a brief wrenching feeling in his stomach. Though he tried to understand his feelings for her, Samson couldn’t say exactly what Lana meant to him; he only knew that she seemed to awaken in him something that must have been, for some time, asleep.
Man Walks Into a Room Page 13
