Free Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss Page A

Grant in a blinding white suit. It was one of the first thoughts he’d had in the hospital once he’d fully grasped his situation: that his father had shown up at some point during the years he’d forgotten, and now there would be no way of knowing it. He hadn’t brought it up with Anna because it did not seem possible that he would have told her about it, any more than he would have advertised his deepest secret in neon lights.
    The week before, he and Anna had gone to the Museum of Natural History together. They glided through the dark halls past the glass display cases of yaks and bison, of gray wolves sailing through the blue dusk, hovering in the air above the snow. It was a Monday, and the museum was almost empty except for the small bands of children whose voices now and again reached them like the cries of survivors.They picked their way through the dinosaur bones and butterflies not saying much, and as they were making their way out of the museum they wandered through a little room with a special exhibition of a time capsule contest sponsored by the
New York Times.
    The winning design—two tons of stainless steel, with compartments that folded in on themselves like origami—was scheduled to sit in a courtyard of the museum for the next millennium. In the year 3000, it would be opened and, in the compartments filled with argon gas, suspended in thermal gel, the future would find their fortune: rabbit’s foot, hypodermic needle, horseshoe, ready-to-eat meal. Countries had donated objects like relief for a strange, hybrid disaster. Yo-yo, church bulletin, penicillin.
    Samson had moved along the walls of the room, reading the small print about lost time capsules, time capsules in converted swimming pools to be opened in the year 8113, buried Gramophones, spaceships sent orbiting into other galaxies with copper-coated records that could play, in the hands of aliens, the first two bars of Beethoven’s Cavatina.
    He went back into the living room and picked up the address book. He turned the pages looking for his father’s name, and when he got to the end without finding it he closed it and tossed it on the table. It was a quaint and childish notion to believe his father would have ever come back to find him. He had left. Whatever the reasons had been, he had gotten up one day and walked out the door, and the life he now had—if he was even alive—was a deliberate decision that did not include Samson.
    He fumbled for the telephone and dialed the operator. He asked for Lana’s number and it was played to him on a recording. How many people had called for her number before, he wondered, that they should have a recording of it?
    The telephone rang five or six times until she picked up, her voice muffled with sleep.
    “Hi, sorry to wake you. It’s Samson.”
    “Hmm? What time is it?”
    “I don’t know—three-thirty maybe.”
    “I’m sleeping.”
    “I know, sorry. Do you want to go back to bed or can you talk for a little while? Don’t feel like you have to.”
    Lana groaned but Samson thought he heard the light switch. “Okay. How are you?”
    “Okay. Do you know there’s this guy who’s encoding the DNA of cockroaches with the great works of literature?”
    “What guy?”
    “This guy, this scientist. I read about it at the museum. He’s going to inscribe great books onto roach DNA. When it reproduces it will pass the book on and eventually, when there’s a nuclear disaster and we’re all wiped off the face of the earth, these indestructible roaches will be the carriers of Western civilization.”
    “Jesus,” she breathed into the phone. He silently congratulated himself on her interest.
    “They figure it will only take fourteen years until every roach in Manhattan is archival. There was this diorama of a couple of dead ones, test roaches who didn’t make it.”
    Lana was silent on the other end.
    “Imagine they could do that to humans,” she finally said. “Tattoo our DNA with Goethe