Read Online Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicole Krauss
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hadn’t noticed her especially, hadn’t looked after her with something like wonder as she gathered up her things after class and piked off, an explosive, heart-stopping thing.At the very least, she must have been the sort of girl who, if he’d met her when he himself was a student, would have been like a sword going clean through him.
She was the first friend he’d made aside from the dog, and somehow he wanted to keep her to himself. He didn’t tell Anna about her right away because it seemed like they shared almost everything else—ten years, a marriage, bed, bathroom, records, dishes, furniture, telephone, friends. He wanted something of his own, a small acreage outside their life together that belonged to him alone.
He balled up his lunch bag and threw it into the trash basket.
“If you decided to swim across the Bering Strait in a bathing suit,” he said. She looked at him. “I’d follow you in a paddle boat and shout encouragement.”
“Thanks. And if you ever decide to walk across the country again, I’ll follow you in a car.”
“You’d cheer me on?”
“All the way,” she said.
HIS DREAM LIFE WAS simple. He dreamed that he was running through endless doors toward a reservoir under a cosmic sky. On bad nights he dreamed that he was being buried alive. He dreamed of charred trees and hills of white ash, landscapes without people from which he woke, oddly, with a feeling of gladness. His dreams were remarkably unpopulated. Only once did he dream of his mother. The dreams had no plots, and most of them could be described in a line or two in the journal Dr. Lavell had asked him to keep. He logged these minimalist scenes every morning and occasionally he brought it to his appointments with Lavell, who looked it over like a schoolteacher checking grammar. He omitted one dream only, of Lana reading naked in the empty library, watched from somewhere above as she turned pages. At times he resented having to submit his every thought tomedical observation to be tagged and logged like archaeological fragments.
Halloween came and went, the streets of the Upper West Side crowded with small bands of witches and cartoon characters, girls with broken wings, aluminum foil warriors. Samson put some Mardi Gras beads on Frank and took him out, and a flock of ballerinas rushed up to coo over him, then whirled and curtsied away down the street like dervishes. The weather that until then had held out like an afterthought of summer, suddenly turned, and a freezing rain came down in sheets while the year skipped a season and fell comfortably into winter.
Anna began to give things back to Samson, dropping them in his lap without explanation. Old notebooks, his Swiss Army knife, his class ring. Things that belonged to him that had been there all along, in drawers, on shelves, things he didn’t know about and didn’t miss.
She handed him his address book in silence. He flipped through it.
“It’s depressing, all these people.”
“Then throw it out,” she said, retreating to the bedroom and closing the door behind her.
He wore an old bathrobe and surfed through the television channels, snapping the remote. Anna didn’t understand why he didn’t want to call anyone, or even try to contact the people he remembered, friends from childhood or his great-uncle Max, who had been almost like a father to him. He felt it would be too difficult to hear their voices. It’s not that he didn’t think of them sometimes, but what would he say? He didn’t want to know what twenty-four years had done to them. His great-uncle Max would be in his nineties now; Anna had said that he was in an old age home in California. Max who had escaped from Germany and taught him how to curse in Yiddish and throw a good punch, who snuck him books when no one was looking as if they contained pornography.
Good stuff,
he would whisper, closing Samson’s fingers around a volume of Kafka. He was not a religious man, but taught Samson to read
She was the first friend he’d made aside from the dog, and somehow he wanted to keep her to himself. He didn’t tell Anna about her right away because it seemed like they shared almost everything else—ten years, a marriage, bed, bathroom, records, dishes, furniture, telephone, friends. He wanted something of his own, a small acreage outside their life together that belonged to him alone.
He balled up his lunch bag and threw it into the trash basket.
“If you decided to swim across the Bering Strait in a bathing suit,” he said. She looked at him. “I’d follow you in a paddle boat and shout encouragement.”
“Thanks. And if you ever decide to walk across the country again, I’ll follow you in a car.”
“You’d cheer me on?”
“All the way,” she said.
HIS DREAM LIFE WAS simple. He dreamed that he was running through endless doors toward a reservoir under a cosmic sky. On bad nights he dreamed that he was being buried alive. He dreamed of charred trees and hills of white ash, landscapes without people from which he woke, oddly, with a feeling of gladness. His dreams were remarkably unpopulated. Only once did he dream of his mother. The dreams had no plots, and most of them could be described in a line or two in the journal Dr. Lavell had asked him to keep. He logged these minimalist scenes every morning and occasionally he brought it to his appointments with Lavell, who looked it over like a schoolteacher checking grammar. He omitted one dream only, of Lana reading naked in the empty library, watched from somewhere above as she turned pages. At times he resented having to submit his every thought tomedical observation to be tagged and logged like archaeological fragments.
Halloween came and went, the streets of the Upper West Side crowded with small bands of witches and cartoon characters, girls with broken wings, aluminum foil warriors. Samson put some Mardi Gras beads on Frank and took him out, and a flock of ballerinas rushed up to coo over him, then whirled and curtsied away down the street like dervishes. The weather that until then had held out like an afterthought of summer, suddenly turned, and a freezing rain came down in sheets while the year skipped a season and fell comfortably into winter.
Anna began to give things back to Samson, dropping them in his lap without explanation. Old notebooks, his Swiss Army knife, his class ring. Things that belonged to him that had been there all along, in drawers, on shelves, things he didn’t know about and didn’t miss.
She handed him his address book in silence. He flipped through it.
“It’s depressing, all these people.”
“Then throw it out,” she said, retreating to the bedroom and closing the door behind her.
He wore an old bathrobe and surfed through the television channels, snapping the remote. Anna didn’t understand why he didn’t want to call anyone, or even try to contact the people he remembered, friends from childhood or his great-uncle Max, who had been almost like a father to him. He felt it would be too difficult to hear their voices. It’s not that he didn’t think of them sometimes, but what would he say? He didn’t want to know what twenty-four years had done to them. His great-uncle Max would be in his nineties now; Anna had said that he was in an old age home in California. Max who had escaped from Germany and taught him how to curse in Yiddish and throw a good punch, who snuck him books when no one was looking as if they contained pornography.
Good stuff,
he would whisper, closing Samson’s fingers around a volume of Kafka. He was not a religious man, but taught Samson to read
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