Man Walks into a Room

ONE May 2000 WHEN THEY FOUND him he was halfway down the only stretch of asphalt that cuts through Mercury Valley. The two police officers saw him up the road, ragged as a crow. He looked at them blankly when they pulled up next to him, neither surprised nor grateful. They asked him questions that seemed to confuse him, and his gaze slipped past them to scout the desert. He didn't struggle when they frisked him. They opened his wallet and counted out twenty-three dollars and change. They read his name and address aloud to him but his expression registered nothing. The man before them in a filthy suit bore almost no resemblance to the bright, focused face on the New York State license; sun had darkened his features and dust had worn itself into the creases of his skin so that it was impossible to believe he was only thirty-six. They assumed he'd stolen the wallet, and though it was clear he was dehydrated and confused they locked his wrists together as they led him into the car. He sat rigidly in the backseat, at a forward tilt with his eyes fixed on the road. They called him Samson not because they believed it was really his name but because they could think of nothing else to call him. While they treated him in the emergency room in Las Vegas for whatever he was suffering, one of the police officers put in a call for a search on Samson Greene, d.o.b. 1/29/64. When it was discovered that Samson Greene had been missing for eight days, last seen walking out of the gates of Columbia University and down Broadway into the clear afternoon, things began to get interesting. Someone in the Twenty-fourth Precinct in Manhattan was able to connect the police officer to the social services agency where Samson's wife worked, and after speaking to three people he was finally put through to her. Hello? she said quietly into the phone, already informed of who was on the other end. Is he alive? There was a short, confused discussion: what did he mean, they weren't sure if it was him, didn't his license say Samson Greene?, to which the police officer didn't want to reply, Lady, Samson Greene could be lying in a ditch somewhere outside Vegas having taken a knife to the chest from the man who's now a card-carrying member of the West Side Racquet Club, the Faculty of English at Columbia University, the Museum of Modern Art. Are there any distinguishing marks? the police officer asked. Yes, she said, a scar down the back of his left arm. She paused, as if Samson were lying in front of her and she was inspecting his body. And a birthmark above his shoulder blade. The police officer said he would call her back as soon as he knew anything, giving her the number of the pay phone out of courtesy. She insisted on waiting on the line, so he left the receiver hanging off the hook while he went to check whether it was in fact her husband on the gurney. A nurse passing by picked it up and said, Hello? Hello? When there was no answer, she hung up. A minute later the phone rang but no one was around so it just rang and rang in urgent bursts, each ring separated by a brief, desperate silence. Later they were able to reconstruct most of his journey from the receipts for bus tickets in his pockets, from the few accounts of witnesses who recalled having seen him--a waitress, the manager of a motel in Dayton, Ohio--confirmed by the ghostly flicker of his image caught by the wandering eye of security cameras. When they eventually played these tapes back to Samson he smiled and shook his head because he could not remember where he'd been or why he'd gone there. In a way that she couldn't explain, alone in her own sadness, those images made Anna Greene want her husband terribly, as she hadn't since they began to share a bed, a car, a dog, a bathroom. In one of them, the only one in which you could see Samson's face clearly, he was standing at the checkout desk in a Budget motel outside NashviKrauss, Nicole is the author of 'Man Walks into a Room' with ISBN 9780385503990 and ISBN 0385503997.