by Martin Riker
Yet I was not able to temper my affection (the fatal flaw of a too-loving father, I told myself, though I’m afraid this was as much a self-compliment as a criticism), and as my need for distraction and “downtime” increased, along with the explosiveness of my caring, I found myself edging back toward the television.
The television, from which Emily and I had been slowly disengaging. The television, which in fact had been pushed back into a corner months earlier to clear a play space for Samuel, and at one point had even had a tablecloth draped over it. The television, which now made its way back to the middle of the room, where it shared Samuel’s space in such a way that I could watch both simultaneously. It demanded my attention just as my son did, but unlike my son, it demanded precisely nothing else. No emotion, no real consideration, no responsibility whatsoever. It was an escape from life, from my son, from everything that mattered. And the more I watched, the more I felt compelled to watch, swooning all the while with self-loathing.
How had I become this way? Had television done this to me? Had it sewn into my soul a restlessness so pervasive that even the most profound wonders of real life were to be ruined by it? When I looked at myself now, I saw a man who expected every instant of his life to be compelling, who, when faced with a moment that was not immediately compelling, felt desperate to replace his own life with someone else’s, with the life of some character on television. Nor did I improve as Samuel grew—no, quite the opposite. I would spend an entire afternoon playing with my son and would to the outside observer appear to be a generous and loving father, attentive to my son’s wants and needs. Yet at the end of the day, I would realize, with something like shock, that I had not enjoyed a moment of it (well, moments, of course), but had spent the entire time counting down the minutes until it was over, until I could escape again to the thoughtless engagement of my television. As if my son were some horrible torture I was being subjected to rather than the joy of my life and the only living thing I loved! To be fair, the games he came up with were extremely boring (the game “neighbor” in particular was torturously dull, with “school” and “family” tied for a very close second); yet when you consider that the very sight of this child was enough to fill me with a sense of euphoria—and yes, I would often flash with euphoria throughout these incredibly boring days of playing, when I looked into that handsome little face and saw there the embodiment of beauty and wonder, and it would be extremely strange, this mixture of boredom and euphoria, this simultaneous living-in-the-moment and wanting only to escape it—all of this was, I’ve said it already but I have no other word for it, exhausting. My love was exhausting; my boredom, presumably caused by my exhaustion, was exhausting; my exhaustion was boring and guilt-inspiring, yet never did this accumulation of frustrated feeling lessen any part of the enormity of my love.
Oh, to have known, back then, even for a moment, the tragedy that would soon befall me! To have seen, not just my shortcomings, but how perversely I would be made to suffer on their account! But would I have improved myself, even with that knowledge? Or is it my self that I have always been condemned to, the inescapable limits of my nature, of which the rest have been merely results? These are the sorts of questions I have asked and re-asked over the years, and continue to ask all the time. For befall me that tragedy did, with no time for thought or reflection, on a winter night in 1965.
It was just a few days before Samuel’s fourth birthday, and I was watching television. I could probably list for you the complete programming from each night of the week for that season, but the schedule that will air forever on the Guilt-and-Despair channel of my conscience is Monday’s mixed-bag lineup of local news, To Tell the Truth, I’ve Got a Secret, The Lucy Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Hazel, and The Steve Lawrence Show, though I never got past Mayberry that night, for three-quarters of the way through the nine o’clock slot was when catastrophe struck.
My son was, as usual, not watching with me. He hated television, always had—I’d never been able to convince him to watch even the kiddie programs. That night, I’d put him to bed, or at least I’d taken him to the bedroom an hour earlier and assumed he was either sleeping, now, or else playing, but quiet in either case. I was always amused by Andy Griffith, its lighthearted characters in their small-town adventures reminding me a little of Unityville, a better, less dreary Unityville, where life was always interesting even though not much ever happened—and so I was quite disturbed when that evening’s episode turned out to be largely about guns. It was a bank-robbery episode, and included a lot of talk about guns, the virtues of having or not having them. Guns in Mayberry? And I wondered for a moment whether anyone in Unityville kept guns, a thought I’d never had before and that later seemed impossibly timely, in light of what was about to occur. For no sooner had I formed this thought than a voice out in the woods suddenly called my name—“Samuel Johnson! Samuel Johnson!”—and, startled out of my daze, I rushed to see what it was.
No parent could be prepared for the sight that met me. If any parent could have been prepared, it would have been me, who over the years had created in my mind every sort of terrifying paranoid scenario that could possibly befall my child. But those were mere nightmares, tricks of the parental imagination, and when reality struck, they’d not prepared me in the least.
Here was my son, out in the night wearing only his pajamas (how had he gotten out without my noticing? Was I truly that distracted?), being physically restrained by a lunatic, a crazed long-haired man with my boy in one hand and an actual gun held over his head with the other. There was no time for thinking, there was not even a “me” to think, for nothing existed, suddenly, except this man and the two things he was holding: all of life in one hand, and in the other, nothing but death. The one I lunged for was the gun, and there was a struggle, and the sound of it firing. Then there was more struggle, and noises in the dark, then even greater darkness, and suddenly my son was standing next to me screaming as I looked down upon—myself? There I lay, shot through the chest, my eyes wide, my body quite obviously dead. What was happening? Was my death happening? Was my son, whom I tried but failed to reach out to, for I no longer had control of my movements—was it possible that my beautiful motherless son was now without a father as well? How had this happened? How had I failed him? What could I do? Until at last my soul turned and flew away from there—away from my life, away from my son, away—and I was not even able to look back.
2.
What happened next happened quickly, and in my shock and emotional confusion, I took for granted that everything passing before my eyes was part of the standard procedure for a soul departing this world. I failed to wonder, as I sailed over the forest floor, why my flight was horizontal rather than vertical, or why I seemed to be headed into town rather than in a more heavenly direction. Not until later did I recall a noise like hyperventilating, or notice that the voice in my mind shouting “Samuel Johnson!” did not particularly sound like my own. Even when I tripped and fell on the path, even then I was in no state to wonder why a soul would trip and fall, and only when that same soul fumbled with its keys to start a rusty truck parked by the trailhead was I at last struck by the odd turns my path to the afterlife was taking. In fact the thought that finally broke through to me was simply that I did not know how to drive. “Samuel Johnson!” cried the voice meanwhile—and the hands, the grungy hands scrambling, the heavy wheezy breathing, the truck’s unmuffled revving that brought lights on in the houses, and Thank goodness, I thought, they will see that something’s happened, they will check on Samuel, he will not be alone . . . And when the truck then plunged into darkness, it was not the darkness of death, but a darkness with headlights, unless death also had headlights, perhaps it did, how would I know, who’d never before died, who’d barely even lived, and Oh God, I thought, I’m dead . . . “Samuel Johnson!” cried the voice while the night’s black vacuum sucked me ever deeper in the only direction that road traveled—away—my soul ferried ever farther from my son, mile
after mile, until the terrible Charonic truck pulled out onto a much larger road, a highway bright with moonlight, then south—away—the moonlight flittering, on my left, off the great wide river, already farther than I’d ever been from home, now farther and farther still . . . Until at some point my soul’s grubby hand grabbed and twisted the rearview mirror and I found myself facing not my own ghostly visage but rather the very-much-living visage of my lunatic killer, the man who’d just orphaned my boy! “Samuel Johnson!” cried the voice, and in that moment the truck veered, flew through the left-side guardrail off a low cliff and down into the moon-shimmering waters below. Then blackness, and blackness, and finally silence and stop.
When I next “came to,” I was looking down upon the dark Earth from far above, at the tiny dots of light that mark the larger roads and scattered houses of rural Pennsylvania at night, and at the blacker black of the Susquehanna cutting south over the land. My movement was gentle, like oozing. There were no sounds but a comforting hum, no feeling but stillness and peace. I had just died again, it occurred to me, two deaths in quick succession, which was bewildering, yes, but this time it seemed to have stuck. And as I floated over the sleeping planet, trying to pinpoint which patch of forested darkness might contain my son, I told myself that things would be O.K. for him, after all, that his grandparents would care for him, and that the lunatic, whoever he’d been and whatever he’d wanted, was now gone. Samuel would be safe, I thought, with a good life, a warm and loving home. He would not be “better off”—how could my boy be better off without his father?—but there was nothing to be done about that now. His future was out of my hands . . . Yet no sooner had I begun to make peace with my fate than my entire field of vision was once more interrupted. My soul suddenly turned, tilted, and I saw that I was not floating heavenward at all, but rather was sitting in a long dark compartment surrounded by seats and sleeping bodies. I’d not departed this mortal coil, but had simply been looking down out the window of what I now recognized—having seen them on television and as specks of metal overhead—as a commercial airplane in flight, speeding me away from my son with near-sonic velocity. I’d not made peace with my fate; I was, if anything, more lost than ever!
Alone there in the darkness, with no sound but the plane’s low rumble and the soft snores and rustling about the cabin, I eventually forced myself to calm down. So abruptly had I been yanked from life to death, then from one death to another, then from what I believed was a heavenly trajectory back to this mundane sphere, that I felt wholly overwhelmed. Why am I here? What happens next? A man’s balding head rested inches from my shoulder, yet I had never felt so alone. I told myself this was clearly a dream, and I should simply wait to wake from it. But as my eyelids closed, and remained closed, and were quickly joined by a slower, heavier breathing that seemed also to belong to me; and since, despite my body having fallen asleep, my mind remained perfectly awake, there in the darkness, with nothing to see or do; and since I stayed in this wakeful state for what felt like days and was in reality perhaps two or three hours, I did eventually begin to take stock of my situation.
Upon death—I surmised for myself—my soul had flown into the lunatic killer’s body, and upon its death, I’d flown again, presumably into the body closest by. That body, this one, belonged to someone seated in an airplane flying overhead—and here I was.
Was I a ghost? If so, I seemed unlikely to haunt anyone, having apparently neither a voice of my own nor any other means of expression. Unseen, unheeded: that appeared to be the state of things. Trapped, in fact, in the darkness of another person’s head, a person being carried in a metal cylinder through the emptiness of night, night itself being nothing but the default state of a planet floating meaningless through space; and I began to suffer something like vertigo, my thoughts in danger of spiraling into pure chaos, when fortunately the eyes I saw through opened, and my body rose from its seat, squeezed past its sleeping neighbor, and made its way by the tiny floor lights—everything about this environment entirely new to me, bear in mind—to a cramped metal closet that was apparently the bathroom.
My first look—there, in the bathroom mirror—at the human form in which I’d been stranded was a little surprising, and caused my mind’s eye a hard blink, because the young man looked so much like me, my living self. He was a few years younger and better groomed, but in height and weight, skin tone and hair color, he might easily have been my twin. He was more fidgety (I was never fidgety), and as he proceeded to use the toilet, I saw that his stomach was flabbier, his whole body hairier—in fact in time I became aware of so many differences that I no longer saw any resemblance at all—but for a moment, at least, I could not escape the déjà-vu-like feeling that I had somehow become trapped inside a saggier version of myself. I later decided this was purely coincidence, but at the time this feeling fueled my imagination (although clearly reality had already out-imagined me by a considerable margin, and I was merely catching up), and I began to consider that there might be a purposeful Design at work. Perhaps the events transpiring were not random, but rather shaped by Reason, or by particular reasons, by an intention of some sort.
A punishment from God—it must be, what else?—a punishment for failing to believe or having sex out of wedlock, for my shortcomings as a father or watching too much television, one or all four, since these were the only sins I’d committed that seemed at all worthy of God’s attention. And they were serious sins, I supposed, and deserving of punishment, perhaps even a punishment like this—were it not for my son. For although sometime earlier, while floating over the Earth, I had told myself Samuel would be safe without me, that was only because I’d assumed I would be gone. Whereas now that my fate had proven otherwise, I was again convinced my son desperately needed me, if only because I was still here for him to need. To remain in this world, to continue to exist on the same mortal coil as my boy and yet have no means of protecting him—the situation struck me as indefensibly sadistic. Surely no power in the universe was so pointlessly malicious? Surely events would soon conspire to return me to my son?
Well, and why wouldn’t I return to him? I went on, my body by now back in its seat and sleeping, so that I was once again speaking to myself in the dark. Was the world so large (at that time I did not actually know how large the world was) that fortune would not soon land me back with him? True this airplane was taking me away, but airplanes, I knew, also returned, and the same people who took them in one direction tended to take them back in the other. Surely I would soon return to my son with as much haste as I now sped away!
For hours I went on this way, and by the time the pilot came on the loudspeaker to announce the plane’s descent, I had fully deluded myself with hope for a swift and sympathetic conclusion to these profoundly unsettling events. The cabin lights came up, and now my body awoke, as did the other bodies around it. The plane then landed, followed by a long period of taxiing around the runway, during which my neighbor, the one who had been sleeping by my head, spoke to my body as if they were already acquainted, as if perhaps they had spoken at the start of the flight as well. Thus I learned that his name was Burt (“by the way”) and my name—the name of the young man I was stranded in—was Christopher. I learned that Burt had come to California (this was how I learned we were in California) to join up with his wife and daughters, who’d moved here some months earlier while he looked for a job. I learned many other things about Burt, who spoke continuously throughout what ended up being an incredibly long tour of the tarmac, until at last Christopher was asked what brought him to California, and a voice that was not mine said:
“Oh, I—That’s a very long story. I was involved in—How to explain? I was doing well in college, very well, in fact, not that I’m bragging, hardly! Of course that doesn’t—only that I tend to be rather introverted, or bookish, happily, I should say, and yet! Somehow trouble manages to—Well it’s really been my whole life, hasn’t it? Happily reading, or writing, ‘steering clear’ and—But then, then, f
or reasons I will no doubt never understand, a moment comes, it always does, when I question the very—I panic, that is, that I’m making a terrible mistake, cheating myself of a ‘normal life,’ not that I’d particularly want one of those. But before I can come to my senses—alas!—I’ve launched myself into the social sphere, where something goes wrong, it always does, upon which I erupt, that’s what my parents call it, an ‘eruption,’ it’s the same every time. Only in this present case—that is, my parents, for various reasons—It seemed prudent that—You see, they arranged, out of the ‘kindness of their hearts,’ so to speak—or perhaps, to be fair, out of the actual kindness of their actual hearts—This morning, that is, I’m to set off for a year aboard a ship—not a passenger ship, an actual shipping-type ship, so no pool chairs or shuffleboard, I’m guessing—still, I’m off to ‘see the world,’ as my parents put it—I told them I’ve no intention of seeing any such thing ha ha—At any rate, there you have it!”
Soon I would learn firsthand quite a lot more about Christopher Plume—more than I wished to know, more than anyone should ever be forced to know about another person’s daily existence. In this moment on the airplane with Burt, however, with Christopher still new to me, as I listened full of hope for how his plans might bring about my swift return to Samuel, I stopped short on the words “set off for a year” and “see the world,” and my mind’s heart collapsed. I spent what remained of the morning’s journey in a kind of hate-filled daze. The situation was too ripe for mere coincidence, and it occurred to me that Fate, or God, or whatever force could be behind this (for I have always believed some force must be responsible for the heinous conditions of my afterlife; I believe it even now, all these years later, with still no evidence either way), whatever force was orchestrating these atrocious events was in fact more viciously ironic than I could ever have guessed. Clearly its intentions were set against me, and rather than return me to my son, it was steering me as far away as possible.