Man Walks Into a Room Read Free Page B

help when the key slid into place and Anna pushed open the door. The dog jumped onto Samson, knocking him against the wall.
    “No, Frank, calm down,” she said, giving the dog a gentle tug on the collar. Frank turned around to lick her hand. She patted him on the head and he sat, obedient under her touch, peering at Samson with curiosity. Each stroke pulled the dog’s brow upward, widening his eyes and making his face appear comically surprised. Samson laughed and the dog shot out from under Anna’s hand and regaled him with snorts and a flurry of paws. He had an urge to grab the dog around the neck and bury his face in its soft ears, to curl up next to him.
    Anna switched on the lights and Samson and Frank followed her into the living room. Its walls were lined with hundreds of books. A few faded rugs covered the wooden floor, and the room was scattered with chairs and lamps that Anna was now turning on one by one. It was a pleasant room and looking around it Samson tried to connect it to the woman walking through it. It was like her somehow, it shared a certain coherence.
    When the room was completely lit—
like a stage,
Samson thought—she turned to face him. She had long, dark hair and a face that changed each time he looked at it. He’d overheard the doctors warning her not to expect anything of him, not to push him in the beginning to strain to remember. Not to look at him hopefully, expectantly, as she now was. He glanced from her to the books, thewindowsills filled with plants, and when he squeezed his eyes shut he felt something flap up like a pigeon into the skylight of his mind. He opened his eyes.
    “Did you read all these?” he asked. Anna’s eyes swept across the shelves.
    “You did,” she said.
    Later, during long afternoons at the library, Samson would read of miraculous cases in which sight is granted to the blind. As the bandages were removed, their families gathered around them awaiting the epiphany,
so
this
is how it looks!
But it never came because to see is not necessarily to perceive. The shapes the newly sighted registered had no currency with their brains, never conditioned to conceive of space. The colors had no bearing on the world they’d constructed out of time and sound. Reading these accounts—the bated breath, the sudden flow of light, followed by the confusion and failure of recognition—reminded Samson of his first days home. Anna, the rooms of the apartment, their things: he could see it all. But nothing yet had the weight of significance. Although the memories of his childhood were clear, they seemed marked by an otherworldly quality, so that now each thing seemed almost an archetype of itself, not yet trailed by a procession of associations and experiences.
    The second night Samson was home Anna was exhausted and fell asleep before him. He lay in the dark, breathing quietly so as not to wake her. There was a sound of cars driving through the rain and laughter from a television floating up from the floor below. He felt uneasy in their bed, but couldn’t think of someplace else he longed to be. Though he couldn’t remember the many years that had passed since his childhood, the bedroom he’d grown up in seemed part of a vanished world that had existed long ago. Despite his awkwardness and confusion, he felt not like a twelve-year-old but a man of thirty-six. It was only that he couldn’t remember how he’d become whoever he now was.
    He was grateful to finally be alone with his thoughts after the confused days since the operation, the slow awakening from oblivion to the facts of his situation. There was so much he didn’t know—how his mother had died, whether he had been in love with Anna, whether he had been a good man—but he didn’t yet have the courage or even the means to ask. He didn’t yet know how to breach the distance between himself and another person in the form of a touch, a question.
    He turned on his side to face Anna, careful not to wake her. It was