Man Walks Into a Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

to make connections between remote things as if unimpeded by the banal standards of habit. It was a side effect of his loss of memory, a creativity that sprung from an advanced mind experiencing the world as a novelty.
    For it was the simplest tests he always failed:
Where did you go to college? In what year did you marry your wife?,
to which he looked at them helplessly, hurt by their insistence. Time and again they made him recite the events of the days and now weeks since his surgery, tracing the line back until it dropped off into darkness.
    It was a long, unyielding darkness, a lengthy pause that could not be counted in years. And just when it seemed that it might be interminable, it ended and Samson emerged again on the other side in the sharp, unforgettable light of childhood.

HE HAD GROWN UP in California, in Los Altos, not far from the Pacific. As a child he’d often driven to the ocean with his mother. There was a spot they liked a few miles north of Half Moon Bay. They would pick their way down the steep cliff path that ran between the brush and aloe, then walk along the water. Samson would run ahead and crouch down to examine a shell or stone like an archaeologist of past waves. Often they took their dog, a little black dog, with them. She ran alongside Samson and buried her nose in whatever he stopped to look at, or else she hung back, keeping pace with his mother. Afterward they would drive back in the late-afternoon light, Samson lying in the backseat with the warm, sandy dog while the trees and sky flashed past the open window.
    He remembered these scenes clearly. At first they came to him one by one, small moments out of time like snapshots. Soon he began tostring the individual memories together, but as he placed one after the next a wealth of new memories would well up between the two. Every day his childhood multiplied, grew more complex with the addition of shadows, objects, angles, expressions. If he unearthed a blue chair it had to be sat on, and quickly he remembered his mother peeling apples in it, or the dog ramming her paws between the legs to retrieve a tennis ball. With this sudden whirl of motion, the succession of still images began to move and gained momentum. He found he could run through the years then stop on a moment at random like a single image in a stereoscope. His bicycle leaning against the side of the house, a crown of rust around the bell, the rubber foot on the kickstand scratched from use. The wooden rungs of his jungle gym eaten green by rot, the drab canvas tent sagging under the weight of water. The covers of books he had read over and over with the crazed perseverance of a record-breaker. The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
    He remembered playing handball with two boys against the garage door. They took turns swatting the rubber ball with their palms and each thud it made against the garage left a greasy smudge on the paint. He figured that if they could hit every spot on the garage door then it would be a uniform smudge, and so his mother might not notice or care. The hot July sun was on his neck. He aimed at the corners, higher and lower than he normally would have, and soon the boys began to yell at him for throwing away his shots. As a joke he threw the ball at the back of one boy’s legs. The boy threw it back harder, pelting Samson in the stomach. He doubled over in theatrical pain, but as the boys approached him he uncurled and dashed past them to the hose. He turned it on with a flick of the wrist and as the warm, lazy water made its way through the green coil the boys