Free Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss Page B

maybe, or Shakespeare or Proust, so that we would be born with the memory of the madeleine or full of
Hamlet.”
    “Small children taking their first steps saying. ‘To be or not to be.’”
    Lana giggled.
    “You know what the Spanish for cockroach is?” Samson asked.
    “Uh-uh.”
    “La
cucaracha.
There’s a poster on the subway about asthma and sometimes it’s in English and sometimes in Spanish. It’s of these kids sitting around and each of them says one thing that causes asthma:
El polvo! La polución! Las cucarachas!”
    “I’ve seen it. How come you’re whispering?”
    A siren screamed and faded into the distance, the sound of someone else’s emergency.
    “Because the room is dark. And I don’t want to wake Anna.”
    “How’s it going?”
    “Not so well. I guess I’ve pushed her away and now she’s talking to me less and less.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What did Dr. Lavell say?”
    “Lavell? Lavell doesn’t dispense advice. He tells me the malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy. How do salmon know to swim upstream to spawn and die? That’s the sort of thing Lavell and I chew over.”
    Lana told him how she was leaving for the film program in Los Angeles in three weeks, right after the term ended. Samson nodded, forgetting that she couldn’t see him.
    “Hello?”
    “Hello.”
    “What do you think of that, that I’m going to L.A.?”
    “What do I think? I think you’re lucky, that’s great. You’ll probably be a big star.”
    “I want to direct.” “Still.”
    Samson told her about an aunt of his who had gone on a date with Jerry Lewis, after he was Dean Martin’s kid but before he ended up fat in Vegas with a house tacky as fuzzy dice.
    “What do you know about cloning?” he asked, but there was no answer on the other end, only the steady flux of breath. “Apollo to Houston,” he said, “Apollo to Houston.” He listened to her breathe for a few minutes then he carefully hung up.
Isn’t that something,
Armstrong said to no one in particular as he took that first, lazy step on the moon.
    In the far corner of the room the dog moved his feet in his sleep, as if he were treading water.

WHEN HE LEFT there wasn’t much to take. A few days before, they had stayed up all night talking. The first light had found them with Anna sitting upright in a chair against the wall and Samson standing at the window. They had both said too much, and the room had the stale closeness of a sickroom. It was early December, and when Samson cracked open the window a gust of freezing air came through. Anna shivered. At some point in the night she had told him that there was a part of him that was the same, and she was still in love with him. That at certain moments—mostly when he wasn’t aware of her presence—she felt he was back with her as he’d always been.
    “But then I say something and you turn around. And I can see there’s nothing there. I mean, nothing that belongs to me.”
    When he suggested that maybe he should move out, she didn’t argue.
    “What is it like, I wonder,” she finally said, “to be you?”
    “Like an astronaut,” he said, and in the dim light he thought he saw her vaguely smile.
    On the morning he left, she went out with Frank while he packed. When she came back he was sitting on the couch with his bag at his feet.
    “Isn’t there anything else?” she asked, the dog crouched between them like a small country. Samson looked down at the duffel that contained some clothes, the address book, his CT scans, now smudged with fingerprints. He scanned the living room. A burglar would find nothing here, would pocket only the pewter candlesticks to be thrown away later, found at dawn by the garbage collectors.
    “No. I can always come back later. If there’s something.” But then his eyes caught on the camera on the shelf. Anna took it down and handed it to him.
    “Take it.” He lifted it to his eye