Man Walks Into a Room Read Free

something had been removed from his brain and what filled its place, like air rushing into a vacuum, was emptiness. Though there was nothing else to call it, it wasn’t quite forgetfulness. He tried to explain this to Anna once enough time had passed that he learned, again, what forgetting was; it wasn’t like the amputation of an arm where the mind still feels an itch in phantom fingers. It was a completeeradication, the removal of both memory and its echo, and it was this that Anna couldn’t understand, this lack of regret. But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even
loss
is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?
    Weeks later, on the plane back to New York, Samson sat next to Anna, his head shaved and bandaged over the incision, the large envelope with his CT scans resting on his knees. He had lost twenty pounds, and the clothes he was wearing—the only things Anna could find in the cheap stores near the hospital—were unfashionable and didn’t fit properly. Out of the corner of his eye Samson saw that Anna was staring at him, but he was afraid if he spoke to her she might cry. He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else. When the plane began its descent into La Guardia, she covered his hand with her own, and as they touched down he looked at her hand, trying to make something of it. During the taxi ride through Queens, Samson pressed his forehead against the window and read the illuminated signs along the highway. When they crossed the Triboro Bridge and Manhattan rose against the night sky, Anna asked, “Do you remember?”
    “From the movies,” he said, and leaned forward to see.
    The benign astrocytoma they removed from his brain had been preserved on slides, and stored in the hospital’s pathology lab. The biopsy suggested that it had been slowly growing for months, maybe years, without effect. It was what they called a
silent
tumor, without the manifestation of symptoms that might have alerted anyone to its presence. Before the moment Samson had put down a book in his office at the university and closed his memory with it, there might have been small falters, moments when his memory lapsed into blackness before returning seconds later. But if these had happened there was no way of knowing now. All the while, the tumor had been forming itself in his mind like a nightmarish pearl. That late May afternoon, school just let out, the shouts of students floating in through the open windows, it had finally gained enough mass that its gradual exertion of pressure became too much. Between two words in a book Samson’s memory had vanished. Everything, save for his childhood, which days later in a hospital in Nevada he woke up remembering.
    At first he couldn’t even remember his own name. Still, there were things, like the taste of orange juice, that were familiar to him. He knew that the woman who stood by his bed in the red shirt was pretty, though he couldn’t think of plainer faces against which hers stood out. These early signs were promising, and as the doctors tested him it became clear that not only had he retained a sort of intrinsic memory of the world but, more remarkably, he was able to lay down new memories. He could remember everything that had happened after the operation. The doctors seemed puzzled by this, and during teaching rounds they paused for a long time in Samson’s room. They continued to inject him with glucose, but as the days passed it was clear his memory loss wasn’t an effect of the edema. His particular scenario—retrograde amnesia causing the loss of all specific memories prior to surgery, while the capacity to remember still functioned—was highly unusual. And while Samson seemed to have forgotten his entire autobiography, he nevertheless knew that the flowers on the night table were called amaryllis and that the woman who stood by his bed, Anna, had brought them for him. And it was in opening his