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

her literature classes—when he looked confused she explained that it was a story he’d taught in class—and how the other night, curled up in her bed, the only place she could read anything, she’d finished the last page and started crying. She told him about how she’d cried a lot since coming to New York two years ago, from Cleveland, Ohio. She cried through the whole first week, when the pay phones on the street swallowed her quarters and left her with the flat, senseless dial tone, a sound she believed—according to a theory she was forming about the city’s volume—came from other parts of the city, from the electrocardiograms of dead people. She cried when she passed the skinny guitar players underground who also played the drums with their feet for a hat full of change and a couple of dollar bills. And she cried when they handed her back her Columbia ID with the photograph they’d taken of a girl who’d been crying because she couldn’t ever go back to the suburbs of Cleveland anymore, not in the same way.
    As she spoke he tried desperately to imagine it all. Something about her appealed to him, and he wanted to be able to picture the brief stunt of her teenage history, to follow it as if through a telescope lens.
    She told him how she’d decided to cut her hair, which was blond and reached her waist, how she had to pay the hairdresser extra money to convince him to do it because he said it was a crime to cut it, people kill for hair like that, and how afterward he got down on his hands and knees to collect it because he realized that he might be able to sell it for a wig. She left the money on the counter and walked out, leaving him crawling around on the floor. She walked down Amsterdam Avenue and tried not to keep touching her hair, which sort of threw her off balance every time she ran her fingers through it, like when you think there’s another step but there isn’t and you come down hard on theground. The next day she dyed it black with some stuff she bought at Rite Aid. For a while the new haircut made her feel better, made it feel that it wasn’t her, Lana Porter, who had left her high school boyfriend, who was taking the year off to try to push his band out of the basement to maybe make it big in Japan, left her bedroom with plush wall-to-wall carpet, left all her popular friends who had never been as smart as she. With the new haircut people looked at her differently, which she was glad for because she couldn’t anymore be the same person she had been all along; she had to give something up to make room for all of it, for the dumb, ecstatic city. She stopped crying after that, and now she only cried once in a while, when she least expected it or when she finished books that she especially loved.
    She seemed not to inhale when she spoke so that the words tumbled out in breathless disorder, and Samson sat waiting to hear more. But then she glanced at her watch and announced that she had better go, she had work to do in the library.
    Samson volunteered to walk with her, explaining that there were some books he wanted to check out. He followed her across the green, through the cool halls of Butler Library, and she showed him how to look up call numbers on the computer. He hunted and pecked at the keys with his index fingers, but couldn’t understand how to move the cursor with the thing called a mouse, rolling it around in sudden, spastic strokes. He wanted to match her openness, to be as casual and easily present as she seemed, so he told her how Anna had wanted him to take a computer course at the Y. He’d gone a few weeks ago and sat among the jangly society women with their manicured nails poised on the keyboard and the geriatrics who waited until the teacher came by to turn on their computers. Though they were promised that learning to navigate cyberspace would change their lives, Samson felt he couldn’t bear a baptism in the twenty-first century with such a group and walked out in the