Free Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

the Torah in Hebrew so that he would not be ignorant of where he came from.
Listen to the sound of the words,
Max would say, singing a few lines of the Amidah.
The sound tells you everything.
He took Samson to synagogue, and it was while daveningamong old men who smelled of menthol and wool that Max told him there was no such thing as God.
Then why do they come?
Samson asked.
To remember,
Max replied, and looking around at the group into which he had been initiated with this secret, Samson was overcome with pride. He couldn’t bear to think of how few of that congregation of wise men were left alive now.
    And the others: friends from his freshman dorm, ex-girlfriends, friends with whom he’d backpacked across Europe, women whose numbers he’d asked for but never called, professors, colleagues, friends’ parents, friends of friends, people he occasionally met for a drink, people whose parties he attended once a year. People he swore to call whenever he ran into them, people he never called. All these must have been listed in the book. He probably would have pleased Anna had he asked about each one, studiously copying down their statistics in the margin: profession, height and weight, beauty on a scale from one to ten. But he didn’t care to. He was tired of being reminded, of photographs like flash cards, of Anna’s surgical disapproval of what she called his resistance. He didn’t know how to gently tell her what he’d begun to understand: that the life she was trying to return to him he didn’t want.
    But in recent weeks it seemed like Anna was beginning to give up too. She acted more stoical, as if something in her had finally broken and turned hard. She tried less and less to cross the distance between them. The bedroom had become her territory and he only went in it to sleep, and sometimes not even then, spending the night on the sofa.
    He fell asleep with the address book in his lap, watching TV, and woke up with a start at three A.M. First he noticed that his mouth was dry and then he heard the television happily singing to itself. He got up, switched off the power, and stumbled into the kitchen. Two or three windows of the building across the street glowed blue. He opened the refrigerator and the light fell across the floor. He gulped from a carton of Tropicana and scanned the shelves for something to eat. Everything in the refrigerator now seemed foreign and unappetizing, as if it were the nourishment for another species, stronger, more enduring than humans.
    Once, when he was nine or ten, he had written a letter to NASA requesting information about other galaxies. A few weeks later a package had arrived from Florida with a Xeroxed letter signed by John Glenn, a photograph he’d taken of the moon with his over-the-counter Minolta, and a conciliatory silver package of freeze-dried ice cream. Samson took the ice cream to school with him and displayed it prominently on his desk. When someone looked his way he would carefully choose a chalky piece and let it dissolve on his tongue. During recess he told a group of girls that his father was an astronaut and was training for zero gravity at Cape Canaveral. The truth was his father had left when he was three. His mother never explained why, and Samson imagined that he had simply walked out one day, turned the corner, and kept on going. That he had shed his life like a set of old clothes, walking into a public rest room and coming out in a brand-new white suit, with a funny little smile on his face. Dumping a plastic bag in the nearest trash bin and setting off with a jaunt in his step, whistling. Samson had pictured this scene so many times that as the years passed, it became, in his mind, indistinguishable from reality. His mother refused to speak about him. All Samson had known as a boy was that he was alive somewhere. He believed that one day his father would return for him: the doorbell would ring and he would run to open it and find him standing there like Cary