Man Walks Into a Room Read Online Free PDF

began to back down the driveway. The water came just in time, and putting his thumb over thenozzle to increase the power of the spray, Samson aimed at them. He watched them disappear down the street shouting, the skin of their backs showing through their wet T-shirts, the water dripping down their legs leaving a trail on the dull asphalt. He spent the rest of the summer running from the boys with their water guns and buckets, running barefoot through the prickly grass, scrambling over fences, jogging through backyards, looking for the nearest pool he could leap into in order to rob them of the pleasure of soaking him first.
    In his memory he was often running. He sailed past the houses on his street lined with dusty eucalyptus trees, past the Shreiners’ tennis court where Mr. Shreiner lunged to return the endless rounds the ball machine steadily fired at him, past the Reids’ gazebo strung with wisteria, the school yard, the rise of foothills. He flew past his mother, who lay in a lawn chair with a book folded on her lap. Sometimes it was at top speed so that he could feel the hard ground explode in his shins with each step and his lungs gasping for breath, and other times it was a leisurely jog, a pace he felt he could keep up forever, that might take him across the county, across the state line, or down to Los Angeles.
Where are you running to?
his mother would ask as he clattered down the stairs, punching his arms into the sleeves of his T-shirt. But already he was out the door into the marathon summer.
    If he wasn’t running or playing with the two boys he was completely still. Sometimes, exhausted, he would lie on his back for hours wherever he had stopped, reading whatever was within reach.
What happened to you?
his mother would say, coming home from work to find him lying on the kitchen floor, a carton of orange juice still open on the counter. And either he would keep reading or he’d roll over and hug her ankles then leap up and dash past her, over to the neighbor’s pool or past Jollie Lambird’s house, whom he’d had a crush on since the second grade, to see if just now she was on her way out the door. It was like this, running through his twelfth summer, that Samson’s memories disappeared midstep into the void.
    At first the doctors listened carefully as he recounted these memories. But within a week or two, once his case had been discussed and marveled at in grand rounds, it was filed away and the doctors seemed to lose interest. He was given over to the care of a neurologist called Dr. Lavell. A colleague of Lavell’s in Las Vegas, a woman he had done his residency with, had called him about Samson a few days after the surgery. In their first meeting Lavell attached electrodes to Samson’s head and asked him to answer questions while watching his brain waves peak across a screen.
    “What can you tell from all that?” Samson asked after Lavell had completed the tests.
    “That you’re a thinking man.”
    “Anything else?”
    “In your case, not too much. We already knew we had a highly functional mind on our hands.”
    Lavell turned back to look at the screen. Finally he said, “But it’s pretty, no?” They both watched in silence.
    “You know what I was thinking just then?” Samson asked.
    “Tell me.”
    “I was thinking, what if you could make out exactly what was going on in someone’s mind just by watching those spikes?”
    “The thoughts themselves? Now
that
would be something.”
    “I suppose you wouldn’t get many volunteers. Too intrusive.”
    “I’d say. Only the very bold. Or the exhibitionists,” Lavell said.
    Samson grinned. From then on he came in to see Lavell once a week.
    Samson was highly observant, nervously absorbing everything around him. He looked to others for signs of how he should act, and because he liked and respected Arthur Lavell, Samson watched him with particular care. Lavell was in his mid-sixties, bald except for a chaplet of unruly gray curls that