project.”
“Your project?”
“You could say. It’s something I’ve been working on for years. But there’s a whole team of us working together now. Science like this, at the level we’re working at, demands incredible cooperation. Experts pooling their knowledge.” He lifted the mug to his lips and swallowed, holding Samson’s gaze. When he spoke again his voice was low. “We’re out there engineering something truly fucking amazing. Getting inside the brain in a way that’s never happened before. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“And what is it, exactly? The project? I guess that’s the twenty-million-dollar question, right?”
“Hundred-million.”
“What?”
Ray smiled. “It’s a hundred-million-dollar question, and yes, you should be asking, and I’m going to tell you. A man doesn’t get a call to drop everything and come three thousand miles without getting a good answer why.”
“Good. Okay.” Samson bobbed his head, a little relieved though he wasn’t sure why. He felt Ray was on his side, and now he wanted very much to be on Ray’s. “Actually there wasn’t much to drop. I wasn’t doing anything in New York.”
“Then it’s convenient for both of us that I found you when I did. By the way, what I’d really like to do is talk about you. Because I’d say you’re now an unusual expert on the subject of memory. What did I say last night about your turning this into a vacation? I’m amending it. You’re not off the hook until you talk to me about what it’s like inside your head. We’ll say you owe me that.”
Samson happily raised his mug to toast, and knocked back the rest of the tea.
“What is this stuff anyway?”
“Thistle. Feel like a walk?”
The air was already warm, a late-winter morning in California where snow is something that happens when you shake a plastic globe, coming down over the Nativity. They passed driveways guarded by cameras, outdoor sculpture, topiary. A man driving a red convertible accelerated past them, his hand out the window to catch the breeze while the car stereo played Stevie Wonder,
“very superstitious.”
The next day Samson sat alone in the back of a cab, sweating. Heat was coming up off the asphalt, simmering under the sprawled city. They were crawling through midday traffic on the freeway, and he was scanning other cars for pimps and starlets. In his mind he played back the things Ray had told him, one piece at a time. In the monastic tradition the desert is a sacred place of simultaneous being and nothingness, Ray had said. A proving ground in which the sense of individuality is obliterated on the way to achieving a higher state. Samson thought about a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, something against which to measure the desolation. It was in a movie he once saw, a girl in cowboy boots chewing gum and scrounging for quarters to make the only sort of call the phone booth knew, the call of the long-lost and the missing. During which only the wind or stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier between silence and silence.
A woman with fuzzy blond hair in a ponytail wriggled in her seat in the car next to the taxi, singing along to the radio. When she looked over, Samson winked. The girl was embarrassed at first and so was he, but then she smiled and fluttered her fingers that ended in two-inchpink nails. They rolled along at the same pace, glancing happily at each other and waving whenever they were realigned after one lane went faster than the other.
“Get her number,” the taxi driver encouraged him, grinning in the rearview mirror.
“I have a girlfriend,” Samson said, to avoid conversation and keep his eyes on the girl.
“Two girlfriends!” the driver said gleefully, and went back to the job he was now taking very seriously, of staying neck and neck with the girl’s car. When they came to the exit and had to turn off, it seemed everyone was a little sad, the girl, the driver, and Samson, who wondered what her name was;
“Your project?”
“You could say. It’s something I’ve been working on for years. But there’s a whole team of us working together now. Science like this, at the level we’re working at, demands incredible cooperation. Experts pooling their knowledge.” He lifted the mug to his lips and swallowed, holding Samson’s gaze. When he spoke again his voice was low. “We’re out there engineering something truly fucking amazing. Getting inside the brain in a way that’s never happened before. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“And what is it, exactly? The project? I guess that’s the twenty-million-dollar question, right?”
“Hundred-million.”
“What?”
Ray smiled. “It’s a hundred-million-dollar question, and yes, you should be asking, and I’m going to tell you. A man doesn’t get a call to drop everything and come three thousand miles without getting a good answer why.”
“Good. Okay.” Samson bobbed his head, a little relieved though he wasn’t sure why. He felt Ray was on his side, and now he wanted very much to be on Ray’s. “Actually there wasn’t much to drop. I wasn’t doing anything in New York.”
“Then it’s convenient for both of us that I found you when I did. By the way, what I’d really like to do is talk about you. Because I’d say you’re now an unusual expert on the subject of memory. What did I say last night about your turning this into a vacation? I’m amending it. You’re not off the hook until you talk to me about what it’s like inside your head. We’ll say you owe me that.”
Samson happily raised his mug to toast, and knocked back the rest of the tea.
“What is this stuff anyway?”
“Thistle. Feel like a walk?”
The air was already warm, a late-winter morning in California where snow is something that happens when you shake a plastic globe, coming down over the Nativity. They passed driveways guarded by cameras, outdoor sculpture, topiary. A man driving a red convertible accelerated past them, his hand out the window to catch the breeze while the car stereo played Stevie Wonder,
“very superstitious.”
The next day Samson sat alone in the back of a cab, sweating. Heat was coming up off the asphalt, simmering under the sprawled city. They were crawling through midday traffic on the freeway, and he was scanning other cars for pimps and starlets. In his mind he played back the things Ray had told him, one piece at a time. In the monastic tradition the desert is a sacred place of simultaneous being and nothingness, Ray had said. A proving ground in which the sense of individuality is obliterated on the way to achieving a higher state. Samson thought about a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, something against which to measure the desolation. It was in a movie he once saw, a girl in cowboy boots chewing gum and scrounging for quarters to make the only sort of call the phone booth knew, the call of the long-lost and the missing. During which only the wind or stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier between silence and silence.
A woman with fuzzy blond hair in a ponytail wriggled in her seat in the car next to the taxi, singing along to the radio. When she looked over, Samson winked. The girl was embarrassed at first and so was he, but then she smiled and fluttered her fingers that ended in two-inchpink nails. They rolled along at the same pace, glancing happily at each other and waving whenever they were realigned after one lane went faster than the other.
“Get her number,” the taxi driver encouraged him, grinning in the rearview mirror.
“I have a girlfriend,” Samson said, to avoid conversation and keep his eyes on the girl.
“Two girlfriends!” the driver said gleefully, and went back to the job he was now taking very seriously, of staying neck and neck with the girl’s car. When they came to the exit and had to turn off, it seemed everyone was a little sad, the girl, the driver, and Samson, who wondered what her name was;
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