Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss Read Free Book Online Page A

Sometimes she’ll get a certain expression on her face and it makes me feel awful. But I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m suppose to feel myself—it’s hard to even
begin
imagining what it’s like for her.”
    “Interesting choice of words, empathy.”
    “Why?”
    “For exactly the reason you said. Empathy is the capacity to participate in, or vicariously experience, another’s feelings. In order to do that, you need to draw on the memory of having experienced something similar—the very thing that is
impossible
for you to do.”
    “That’s true.”
    Lavell raised his hands. “So what did you say to her?”
    “I held her. She was crying so I put my arms around her.”
    “Good choice,” Lavell said.
    Eventually the discussion turned to his childhood, as it often did. The memories returned in no particular order. Why one memory declared itself at any given moment, he didn’t know. Knowing would mean understanding the order of the things.
    And then their conversation surfaced again in the present, breaking up the sound of birds bickering in the trees outside, and apropos of nothing Lavell asked, “Do you know what it feels like to be in love?” The word seemed out of place between his fleshy lips. Samson thought of Jollie Lambird, which embarrassed him, and he looked down at his shoes that seemed too shiny.
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    “What about Anna?”
    “Look, it’s all a bit mystifying.”
    “I should think so. One minute”—Lavell snapped his fingers—“and the next thing, you’re married. It would throw anyone.”
    Samson pictured Anna as he had seen her this morning, hovering above him. “She’s lovely. Beautiful and kind and what’s not to like? But why her and not someone else?”
    “A decision you made, we have to assume, based on experiences with other women before you met Anna.”
    “But who is she? I wake up in the middle of the night and she’s lying next to me. Sometimes she holds her breath when she sleeps. Her head hits the pillow and in a minute she’s asleep and then suddenly she stops breathing. Like she’s just jumped into a freezing lake. Like the sudden revelations of her self-conscious—”
    “Her unconscious.”
    “Her unconscious, as if it’s shocked her. Sometimes I want to pound her on the back to get her to start inhaling again, but just when I think she’s going to turn blue the breathing starts up as if she never stopped, as if she weren’t this close.” Samson held up two fingers with an inch between them.
    “Close to what?”
    “That place just beyond everything she knows for sure. The same place I woke up in.”
    “You had a cerebral lesion. Don’t you think there is a logic—a terrible logic—to your amnesia? The tumor destroyed—”
    “I know, I know. A little to the left or right and I might not have remembered how to go to the bathroom. I might have existed in some eternal moment, with no memory of the minute that’s just passed. I might have lost my ability to feel. I’m lucky, sure. What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost … negligible. It’s true that there’s grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny, sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?”
    “You were saying that Anna stops breathing when she’s asleep. How at those times you think she’s ‘this close’ to something. To what?”
    “Oblivion, I guess. Where I was when they found me in Nevada. And now I’ve come back from it and can never be the same again.”
    “What was it like, this oblivion?”
    Samson shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
    “Do you ever think there might be people who would envy you?”
    “They’d have to be crazy.”
    “Okay, how about this: if you could have your memory back right now, would you take it?”
    “Hey, whose side are you on?” Samson