Man Walks Into a Room Read Free Page A

eyes to those obscure white blooms a week after his operation that something like a fragment from a dream dislodged itself and floated up to the surface of his mind.
    It was the vivid color of the memory that startled him, a luminous blue. It was all around him, warm and smooth, and moving through it toward the glow of light he could hear muted sounds that seemed to come from a great, impassable distance. There was a felicity despite the slow pressure on his lungs that finally pushed him upward. He remembered that when his head broke through the surface of the water he’d been surprised by the chill of the air and the world that stood in perfect, microscopic clarity: the blades of grass, the night sky, the dripping faces of two boys illuminated by the pool lights. “Forty-three seconds!” one shouted, looking at his watch, then barreled down the diving board, leaped into the air, and clutched his knees, dropping into the water with a lucid splash.
    In the days following his operation, memories from his childhood continued to appear in his mind with unnerving precision. It was as ifthe apertures of his eyes, confused by the outside world, had been directed inward and begun to cast, like a camera obscura, perfect images on the whitewashed walls of his mind. The hairline cracks of a sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The sun falling through the leaves casting shadows on his fingers. His mother’s eyelashes. Anna had been overjoyed, squeezing his hand each time he described to her what he could remember. That’s what she was at first, this woman who sat day in and day out by his bed, whose thin wrists he could encircle with two fingers: an audience for his memories. And although it alarmed him that she knew, like an informed agent, many of the years and places of those memories, he continued to narrate them to her because he sensed that she could help him. Again and again he described his mother to her, in the hope that Anna might find her and bring her to him. When he asked why his mother wouldn’t come, she covered her mouth and looked away.
    “I love you,” she whispered, and in halting sentences she began to explain, weak with apology. He could not absorb everything she was trying to tell him. When she told him that his mother had died he felt it like the clean break of a bone and a sound came from him that he did not recognize. When he was too exhausted to weep any more he lay in silence, all his being drained to the flat line of the heart stilled.
    Anna remained hopeful, despite the doctors’ warning that these recollections of his childhood didn’t necessarily mean Samson would recover later memories. It sometimes happened like this, they said. As if the preservation of those early years was so crucial that they were kept under the protection of another faculty of the brain, so carefully guarded that they survived intact when, in a trauma to the brain, all other memories perished. And so it seemed to be with Samson, whose memories, beyond the age of twelve, faded away into the future like footsteps.
    When the taxi pulled up to their apartment building, Samson got out while Anna paid the driver. He stood bewildered at his door, unable to absorb that this was the very street he had lived on for five years, thatbefore that he had lived ten blocks south, before that downtown, and before that in California, and so on back through innumerable rooms with their qualities of light, their different views. His belief in his past life was polite: the kind one manufactures when in conversation with the faithful. And though he knew almost nothing about the woman walking toward him now, he wanted somehow to please her, or at least not to upset her any more than she already was.
    As Anna put the key in the lock, he could hear the sound of a dog’s excited whimpering and pawing at the other side of the door.
    “That’s Frank,” Anna said, fumbling with the lock. Samson saw that her hand was shaking and he was about to offer to