by Martin Riker
Reader, then and there I decided the course of my future, along with my purpose in this world. As we arrived at the docks and stood in the shadow of the enormous vessel, watching Christopher’s luggage lugged up a wobbly wheeled staircase to an opening in the ship’s flank, while dinghies and sailboats sailed out around us toward the largest body of water I had ever seen, I swelled with the most absurd optimism, and for a moment almost forgot I was dead. I imagined myself embarked upon a great tragic-heroic adventure. Whatever the way back to Samuel, I declared, I will find it myself.
That achieving this goal would prove infuriatingly improbable, but not technically impossible, and would set me on a quest spanning many years and many lives, through vast deserts of boredom, perilous droughts of despair, and occasional saving oases of friendship and love, is the story I intend to tell in these pages.
3.
Christopher Plume was the only child of a wealthy Boston couple, busy but not unloving, who regretted how little time they had to spend with him. He’d done well in college but had developed an oddly humble sort of arrogance about himself, in that he felt he knew more than everyone around him, yet also felt he knew almost nothing at all. He believed himself to be extremely ignorant by any reasonable standard, but saw the current standards for education—whatever those were in 1965—as so ludicrously underwhelming that despite his own ignorance, he still knew more than everyone else. He was sheltered and snooty, more awkward than mean-spirited, and loved nothing so much as being alone. He would happily have resigned himself to a life of the mind but for one ill-fated quirk of his character, that every once in a while, for one reason or another, he would suddenly panic that his natural inclinations were all wrong. That in withdrawing from society he was cheating himself of a fully human life. He would then plunge headfirst into society, where something terrible would happen, each time more terrible than before. So when this latest incident at college (the nature of which I never learned, as after his conversation on the airplane with Burt, he never again mentioned it) led to expulsion, and his parents suggested he spend a year working for his uncle’s shipping company, Christopher had jumped at the chance. It was not the prospect of high-seas adventures that enticed him so much as the hope of escaping “adventures” once and for all. Of losing himself in stoicism and bookish isolation. Which unfortunately for me was more or less what happened.
In fact, now that I think about it, my time with Christopher Plume is probably the worst place to start the tale of my own adventures, aside from the fact that this is where they actually started, since it was easily the dullest episode of my entire afterlife. Not only was Christopher’s work on the ship the most menial possible (countless hours of mopping and scrubbing, the only jobs he was qualified for), but he was a social outcast from the start. It probably did not help that when the crew first invited him to join them off-shift, he replied, “Oh no, that’s—You see I’m here more to read than anything—It’s nothing personal, of course. I’m sure you’re all very interesting!” Or that he was inept at everything, or that his uncle had ordered he be given a cabin all to himself when everyone else had to share. To his credit, Christopher did not seem bothered by the crew’s contempt, nor did he even mind all the tedious labor, since every moment not spent working—or sleeping, eating, talking to himself, or staring out his porthole at whatever new exotic location the ship had traveled to, though never once bothering to go ashore—he could spend reading books.
So many books! More than I had previously known existed. Rhymeless poetry, impenetrable philosophy, bulky incomprehensible novels, and others I would not even know how to classify because I could not understand them at all. He read and read. He slept and read. He mopped, scrubbed, brooded, masturbated, and read. Stranded on a floating island surrounded by semihostile natives, he tried to live as if he were alone in the world. And he would have been very disappointed, I think, to learn that he was not even alone in his room, that I, Samuel Johnson, was there with him, seeing only what he saw, hearing only what he heard, and being left, when he slept, with just the sound of his breathing in a darkness with no dimension; just the beating of his heart in an emptiness without space; just the nighttime noises of a mortal plane I no longer belonged to but somehow still occupied, to what end I could not imagine. Surely there was no situation so awful in all the world, and I the most pitiable creature living or dead!
You see, despite my confidence on the airplane that I would find a way back to my son, on the ship I quickly discovered I had no actual means of doing so. Though I could see and hear, I could not taste, smell, touch, speak, or affect anything whatsoever. I tried every possible escape . . . but what was there to try? No actions to take, no choices to make. Just awareness of myself as a being in nonspace, witness to a life that was not mine and had nothing to do with me. It was an afterlife unlike any the Bible had mentioned; in fact, more than anything it resembled (I could not help but notice) watching television. And in my fury I told myself this must be the point: as punishment for my failures in life, I was being made to suffer a television-like purgatory . . . but eventually I decided that didn’t make sense. Christopher’s life was so much more boring than television, after all. If the point of my “punishment” was to make me regret watching television, it was having the opposite effect. How badly I wanted to watch television! Though even that would have been torture, only incrementally less excruciating than the unremitting awfulness of those endless nights and days. Television didn’t matter, after all. Christopher certainly didn’t matter. Only my Samuel mattered, returning to my son, which, however, there was no way to do!
In fact there was a way, or would be in the near future, but since back then I did not know that, my defeatist impulses rather quickly kicked in. I passed the first few months in a rage of furious impotence, but eventually, without even quite realizing it, I gave up. My conviction wore away. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing. Or not forgot, but one day I failed to bring it to mind. And then I was out to sea, so to speak. I was no longer the tragic hero I’d imagined myself on the dock that day, but only a bored hopeless soul doomed by Fate to an eternity of dullness, circling the globe without ever seeing any of it, reading book after book without understanding a word, having lost first my hopes, then my goals, and finally even my problems. Until for all intents and purposes I was Christopher Plume. We were both Christopher, in our different ways, even if he was the only one happy about it.
But life, I have noticed, only goes around in circles for as long as you don’t want it to. Once you’ve forgotten your aspirations and grown comfortable in your existential inconsequence, life jolts you forward, usually for the worse. And sure enough, after nine months at sea, Christopher’s cocoon life was suddenly interrupted.
First, his social standing improved. As awkward and inept as he somehow had managed to remain, still he could not stay a newbie forever. He did his work without complaining, which was at least something, and one day, without anything being said, the rest of the crew started treating him better, simply because he’d been around so long. For Christopher it was a confusing moment. For the longest time he’d been pleased to be ignored and excluded, wanting nothing more than to be left alone, yet now he found himself feeling—this was the second thing that happened—as if perhaps he ought to be a little more social after all. Was it the crew’s small encouragement? Or had solitude finally taken its toll? Perhaps he was simply exhausted by the constant effort of living mentally apart from people he had no physical way of escaping? Whatever the case, little by little he entered their ranks, allowing himself to become the person they preferred him to be. Amenable. Self-deprecating. Slightly dumb. Happy to take an interest in subjects he found utterly uninteresting. Willing to listen to the same stories over and over, to accept mockery without taking offense—and advice! There was, in our ninth month, a great deal of advice.
“You know, your problem is”—it always started with “your problem is”—“you’re too” fancy or stuck-up or snooty
or intellectual. Or “You’re too nice,” though where they got the idea that Christopher was nice, I can’t imagine. “You got to get dark, kid.”
“Dark?”
“Like, serious. Also, loosen up.”
“You’re so right,” Christopher would reply, downhearted. “What is it about me? It’s how I’ve always been! Why can’t I just” go ashore or smoke or invite everyone to hang out in his cabin and get drunk?
Of course they were already drunk in his cabin for these sorts of conversations.
“You know what ain’t in your books?” says one of the advice-givers. “The whole damn world. Adventures, dangers. Out there! You meet it staring or it swallows you up. Believe me. Believe me. Things I’ve seen . . .” Brows harden recalling everything that’s been seen. “And out here’s worse than anywhere. You go it alone out here—well, nobody should go it alone anywhere, but least of all out here.”
“That’s right,” someone else says. “Man’s right about that.”
“Course we love it out here. But it’s the worst. Out here, you learn to love the worst. That’s dark.”
“For me,” says Christopher, who has been only half listening, “it’s more that—Well, I get these ideas in my head, ideals against which I pretend to evaluate lived experience, when really it’s more like I don’t wish to be bothered with—with anything, I suppose—with everything! But is that any way to live?”
“Not out here it ain’t.”
“Not anywhere, but especially not out here.”
“Because life, I’ve come to realize—and by the way it’s spending time with you fellows that has allowed me finally to come to this realization—but life, I think, is largely about being bothered. What a strange revelation! And yet so true!” His voice very animated by this point. “Life is about being bothered!”
“Not sure that’s how we’d—”
“Not comfort and happiness, oh no no! It’s about forcing yourself beyond those familiarities to talk to people and do things and try things even when you don’t wish to, even when, not only do you not wish to, but also you know perfectly well you won’t enjoy it when you do! But we do these things, or you fellows do at any rate, these are the sorts of things normal people do. But me? I’m flimsy. Weak. I’ve always been—”
“Weak, that’s a better word for it. That’s what we were trying to get at earlier. Not so much physically, though that too, but more it’s your attitude to things, the way you walk around like a . . . You know chinchillas? I had a girlfriend once kept chinchillas. Soft, kind of stupid. They don’t know a thing about anything.”
“Which is true of me as well!”
“On top of your being snooty and snobby and so forth.”
“I have all sorts of shortcomings!”
“But, but, listen. This is the important part. You need to hear this part.”
“Tell me!”
“You’re O.K., kid. You may not know a single thing other than books, mops, toilets, and carrying shit, but you try. You try. Unlike jackass Stuart over there. He knows everything you could know about sailing, he’s one hell of a sailor, Stuart, but he’s also a lazy fishshit. At least you ain’t a fishshit, kid. That’s something.”
“That’s—Thank you for saying that!”
And it went on this way, in the manner of this conversation, for about a month.
Oh ludicrous month! Christopher increasingly convinced of the wisdom of his crewmates and the deficiencies of himself . . . losing his own sense of purpose, just as I had long since lost mine . . . the days and weeks running together; time an immeasurable lump. And it might very well have gone on this way forever—or at least for the remainder of Christopher’s one-year contract—but for an accident of circumstance, when one day his new “friends” invited him on an off-ship outing, where Christopher came to a rude awakening, and was faced with a fateful choice, and where this story of my time with him finally gets off the ground.
We’d anchored that morning off the island of Antigua in the West Indies. A clear day, and bright, the water impossibly blue, and we landed in a cove of such unusual beauty that for the first time in a very long time I, Samuel Johnson, was shocked out of passive stupefaction, and remembered myself. Not that I thought about myself, or my goals, my problems—only that I woke, at long last, to thoughts and feelings that were perceivably my own. For as soon as we’d cleared the docks it was down, first, to a long yellow beach, soft and powdery. Then a forest path—a wide swath of packed dirt—the sun cutting shadows through the treetops. Here were plants I’d never seen and flowers I’d never imagined, birdsong I’d never heard. Of the few places I’d traveled in life and death combined, this was by far the most vibrant, and I felt something like excitement, a rustle of anticipation . . .
Up a gradual incline and as we walked, a man named Dawson, who had been working on the ship longer than anyone and never failed to impart whatever knowledge he’d picked up along the way, informed us that the island’s native name was Wadadli; that the locals spoke a mixture of British English and Caribbean Creole, the latter a sort of choppy English mixed with African words and inflections; that the average rainfall was only forty-five inches, which apparently wasn’t very much; that over the years he personally had come here more times than the rest of us had gone anywhere (which in my case at least was almost certainly true); and that the most important thing to know about the town we were just now entering was that it boasted the world’s best cabana bar, where a few moments later we arrived.
What followed was disappointing (a sign of my growing self-awareness was how disappointed I felt), because in the midst of this natural paradise, when we might have gone off exploring or lain out in the sun, visited cultural sights or met and talked with local people, instead they did what they always did: they got drunk. Christopher was no different, except that he drank faster, spoke less, was poked fun at more, and needed to use the bathroom at least twice as often. In fact it was in returning from his fourth or fifth trip to the bathroom, after perhaps two hours in the bar, that Christopher discovered the others were gone.
“Isn’t that spectacular,” he said out loud to no one. “They’ve all left while I was in the bathroom! Left me here with nothing!” Which was not entirely true, however, because they’d left the bill as well. “And this!” He held it up.
Indignant, drunk, still he kept calmer than I would have expected. He gathered his wits, folded the insufficient cash he found in his pocket into the thickest wad possible, set it casually on the tabletop as if it were unquestionably more than enough, and meandered his way out of the bar into the bright Antiguan afternoon. Then a quick right, a left, another right, before taking off at a sprint up the sloping road.
“Cretins!—Hooligans!—Jerks!” he spouted some moments later as he finally slowed down, out of breath from uphill running. “Gone from the table, what, three minutes at most? And the drunk fools forget you even—Or worse, they don’t forget, they—probably left on purpose!” The scene of their departure unfolding for him as he pushed on up through the town, past shops, attractions; it was basically a tourist town, or at least we were in the tourist part of it. “Well of course if they left the bill, they must have left on purpose,” he went on, “laughing, most likely, slapping each other’s stupid shoulders, and—” And having established for himself that the others had definitely left on purpose, had mocked and poked fun at him and were no doubt still mocking and poking fun, his anger turned, now, on himself, for he was the one who’d allowed this to happen—how? “By being a fool, is how—a dupe! A rube! Falling in with them in the first place, then—listening to their self-important blather! Adopting their overwrought affectations, squeezing myself into the narrow confines of their ludicrous worldview, as if their ‘ship life’ were anything more than—As if it added up to anything at all!” Angry at himself but also at them, still. Angry at his own anger, and at the situation overall. Of course this was far from the first time the crew had demeaned him, yet it seemed (still cl
imbing . . . the whole town was one big hill) that being away from the ship, being out on his own in a place so lively and open was giving him new perspective, or else old perspective, was reminding him of the person he preferred to be. “And how little it takes to see clearly!” he laughed, shedding, now, layers of that life that had so recently encrusted him. “How little distance we need to once again see the world writ large and recognize the smallness of the life we’ve been living! To stand before one’s decisions, decisions that moments earlier seemed perfectly logical, but that we no longer recognize, or rather—Well, what is it, in the end?” Having by this point reached a spot where the road split left or right but where Christopher kept straight, leaving the road to climb some stone steps up the grassy hilltop. “Is my subconscious need for companionship overwhelming my conscious desires and preferences? Or is my self-consciousness thwarting my natural state? Have I so internalized society’s prejudice against solitude that I doubt my own autonomy and place confidence in others, not because they deserve confidence but simply because, being others, they are not me?” But by now he’d reached the hilltop, and stopped, both walking and talking to himself, in the crumbly graveyard of an old church.
Here everything was quiet. There was no one else around, and from that height, on that day, you could see for miles in all directions. Below lay the town and the beach and dock, out further our ship, the ocean. Turning, we saw the island’s interior, an expanse of green hills, a rolling skyline against a hazy blue horizon.
He sat in the shade of a knotty tree, more somber than before, possibly more sober, looking out at the world’s green-blue enormity and pushing pebbles around with his feet. The only sounds were the breeze riffling the tree’s small leaves and the scratch of the kicked pebbles. He was alone with his thoughts. I was alone with mine.