Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  How strange to be out in the world! I thought, by now fully awake and experiencing, all at once, an exuberant rush of self-awareness, the flush of the fine weather, and overpowering relief at being free of that damn ship. After ten months circling the globe, I said to myself, to be here, suddenly, in this spot, this spot among all others. Having come here for no apparent reason; having all but stumbled here in leaving the ship. Yet with a sense, too, of having arrived here—at the top of the world! (Aside from the airplane, it was the highest place I’d ever been.) Christopher is right, I went on, it really does take so little to see the smallness of life on that ship. A few hours on land, barely a mile between us and the water, but it’s enough for the whole rest of the world to come rushing back in! Then I thought of my son . . . and a wave of sadness rolled over me. I was sad but also happy, both emotions at once. And Christopher—his eyes had turned hazy. He’d started to cry. Not for me, obviously, but I thought I understood him. I felt sorry for him. And for myself. For a moment, I felt sorry for everyone.

  It wasn’t very much later that we started back down the hill, and the day must have grown hot, because even leaving the shade he was sweating. He did not hurry but labored along, having somehow ended up on a different road going back than the one we’d traveled up. It was less touristy, this new road, lined with wooden houses and plain storefronts, local people going about their lives. They were nothing like me, these people—yet how lucky I felt to be among them! They had dark skin (not the first I’d seen, as there had occasionally been black people on television), and their town was unlike anywhere I had ever been; yet it also felt familiar to me, this place, this new road, in a way the touristy road had not. That road (and the beach, the bar, the crumbly old church) had seemed like a fantasy, but this was more believable, an actual place people lived. And I remember thinking then (the sort of whimsical, expansive thought there’d been no space for on that claustrophobic ship), it occurred to me that the outside world was not actually as “outside” as I’d once imagined, back when I’d known that world only through television. For even on this distant patch of the planet, a road was just a road, the weather was either nice or not, nothing was more or less than it ought to be, for better or for worse, and—and my thoughts continued this way, and I was feeling very wise and full of myself, when Christopher came to a stop.

  We were standing outside a small white house that was apparently also a shop. “Fortunes,” the sign said, and “Palms Read.” It was smaller than the buildings around it, and somehow ill fitting, as if it were thinner, or wider, or perhaps older? Certainly the inside, where we stood a moment later, was nothing like I would have guessed. No candles or beaded curtains or crystal balls, none of the “fortune-teller” props I’d seen in old movies on television. Just a cling-clanging of bells following us in from the door. There was a polished wooden table with some velvety chairs, an ornate lamp with a colored glass shade in the corner. On the far wall hung a large portrait of a black woman in a colorful outfit, but she was not the same woman who appeared a moment later in a fluffy bathrobe, wiping her hands on a paper towel.

  “You have no cash,” she said, upon taking a full look at us.

  “I—” Christopher patted his pockets. “That’s true.”

  “So?”

  “Right, of course. I would need money. And I don’t have any!”

  “So?”

  “I should be on my way.”

  “Wait!” said the Fortune-Teller. (I’ll call her that since I never learned her name.) She puzzled over us a moment. “Huh,” she said. “O.K., sit.”

  What happened next I cannot describe in any way that will seem nearly as fascinating to you as it was for me then. She simply stared at us, not briefly but for a remarkably long time. Whole minutes passed, and perhaps it was my philosophical mood, but I began to feel it was truly “us” she was staring at, not just Christopher but me as well—so penetrating was her gaze, so intent upon his eyes. When he started to speak, to mention again his lack of money, merely raising her finger was enough to silence him. In fact he was utterly cooperative the whole time, and tried hard to keep his eyes open, to sit still and not blink, as if he were sitting for an eye exam. Finally she spoke:

  “Yuh on the ship.”

  “I am!”

  “Course yuh on the ship. How else yuh come here? But life on the ship is no good for you.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “You think it be good, but then, no.”

  “That’s,” said Christopher, “that’s unfortunately accurate.”

  “But life is also no good before the ship. And before what comes before. Always, life is no good for you. Always you think it be good, but then, no.”

  “You—yes, you’ve—I’m afraid you’ve got me pinned!”

  The Fortune-Teller shrugged. If I were to guess, I would guess she thought Christopher did not take her very seriously. Skeptic that he was, I couldn’t imagine that he did, though he was in an odd mood, and the truth is I had no idea what he was feeling. Yet because I brought a very different perspective to these proceedings—because for me the so-called paranormal was by then normal to the point of being mind-numbingly dull—I personally could not escape feeling that something extraordinary was taking place.

  “So.” She sat back. “What you want?”

  “What do I want? What do people usually want?”

  “Advice.”

  “That’s what I want, I suppose.”

  “I am afraid you will not like it.”

  “Really?” Christopher sounded more interested. “Why on earth not?”

  “Can’t tell yuh that without giving yuh the advice.”

  “Right!” He laughed. “A conundrum!” And wagged a playful finger, though it came off more as awkwardness and nerves.

  Then she stood. She walked the room, musing. She appeared—if I can offer more interpretation, since of course I was extremely interested and following all of this very closely—to be legitimately fretting. At the very least, she was weighing whatever it was she had to share. And she apparently decided, in the end, to go ahead with it, for when she sat back down, she very slowly and very deliberately said:

  “You got no life. You think you have life before, and that you lost this life, but you got no life before either, so you lost nothing. You lost nothing and you got nothing to lose. Wait, wait. Although you got nothing, inside yuh’s a mon who lost something. He had something and lost it, and it is a real thing, and he is suffering this loss. His suffering is great, and he is stuck inside yuh, this suffocating mon.”

  “Yes, that’s how I feel . . .”

  “You misunderstand. You are not this mon. He is a mon inside yuh. A jumbee. Nothing I can do for you, but him we maybe help. Will you help this mon?”

  “Yes. I want to help him!”

  “You still misunderstand. To help this mon get back the thing he is missing, you got to give up the one thing yuh have. You got nothing, but everybody got one thing. But the mon inside yuh, he wraut up. He does not have the one thing yuh got. Yuh cannot give it to him, but give it up for him, that yuh can. And maybe this way he gets back the thing he is missing.”

  “I don’t understand at all!”

  “Nah, but me words been very literal. If you choose to help this mon, that is your choice.”

  “But you haven’t even told me what to do!”

  The Fortune-Teller fell thoughtful again. She mumbled out a discussion with herself, mumbling first to the right, then to the left, until one or the other gave up.

  “Buss off the ship,” she said. “You cannot go back there. There is nothing for yuh.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Take a plane from the other side of the island and fly to a place I will send you. I will send you to this place and give you stuff to eat when you get there. If you eat this stuff, then the mon inside yuh, the suffocating mon, maybe can do what he must to get back what he is missing. This mon, he needs to be brave. He needs to do what he
must. He will understand when the time comes. But you, you will not understand. No matter. Me words have been very literal, and I give them to yuh free, to do with as you wish. Chances slim, but there is nothing to lose, because you got nothing. So?”

  When we left the Fortune-Teller’s house, we had with us a small bag containing a mixture of herbs and a scrap of paper upon which was written the name of the special place she was sending Christopher. Reader, can you guess what that place was? She also gave directions to the Antigua airport and pointed the way, a twelve-minute taxi ride across the island. Christopher had no money to pay for a taxi, or for that matter an airplane ticket, but it occurred to me in a moment of dizzying hopefulness that perhaps he could collect-call his parents, make up some story, and get them to wire the amount. I felt desperately eager for this possibility and anxious to know what was going on in Christopher’s mind. Was he planning to go back to the ship? Forget the ship and head to the airport? Even now, I cannot tell you how much he believed of the Fortune-Teller’s speech or how well he even understood it. I can tell you only that the sun was well to the west, the late afternoon already turning to evening . . . that people passed by as we stood there, paying us no attention at all . . . and that we were still standing outside the Fortune-Teller’s shop when the deep groan-like wumph of the ship’s horn finally warned us we would need to start back. And I can tell you, too, that when at last Christopher turned and started walking—away from the docks, toward the island’s interior, the road, the airport!—I was filled with the most extraordinary feeling, and knew in my mind’s heart that Christopher was as well.

  For while there may be only a few moments in each lifetime when a person chooses to affect his own fate, and fewer for some people than for others, nonetheless there are such moments, they do exist, and Christopher had finally found a way forward that was not a poorly conceived “eruption.” He’d found a chance to participate in the actual occurrence of his own life: to exercise freedom, to engage in action, to embrace change, to demonstrate courage! Or at least that is what I told myself he’d found as he set off in the direction of the Antigua airport. Filled with joy, I naturally assumed Christopher felt likewise. I also perhaps understood on some level that things would turn out bad for him, one way or another, and I wanted to think that for this one magnificent moment, he’d found it all worthwhile.

  In fact, what followed was probably the single most enjoyable hour of my afterlife. So little has been even bearable, these many years, far less enjoyable, but that hour I will always remember. After ten months trapped on that monstrous boat, we were out in the world, striding with open arms as a wave of life’s special energy washed over us. The ship’s horn wumphed again in the distance, sounding its final warning, but for us it sounded a far more profound departure (Christopher now stepping at a brisk clip), a headfirst plunge into the uncharted waters of existence. The sky orchestrated a gorgeous backdrop to this scene, a dusky swirl of red, orange, and yellow, like the skin of an enormous tropical fruit. Truly, I had never seen such a sky. Most importantly, we were—I did not understand all the details, but I was quite certain of the fact of it—we were en route to my son. My son. Across this island, I told myself, awaits an airport. Simply follow this road, a mere ten or so miles . . .

  The road quickly left the town behind and wound up into the hills beyond, but staying in sight of the ocean, and as we climbed we passed among clusters of small houses and a great variety of trees. Some of the houses were shack-like, others much nicer and modern in design, like houses in American suburbs I’d seen on television, but transplanted to this foreign place. Soon we’d reached the top of a long slope and could see that the road on the far side turned away from the ocean, wound down through the hills into the denser vegetation of the island’s interior. That Christopher chose this spot to stop for a moment seemed reasonable enough, and I assured myself he was not faltering in his resolve, only that he was in terrible cardiovascular shape and needed to rest for a moment against a wire post fence along the roadside. He stood gazing down a great wide hill of short grass, straight and green as a golf course, that emptied below into a vast yellow meadow, which ran long and flat as far as the sea.

  As it happened, his timing was fortuitous. For after only a few minutes standing there, enjoying the spread of dusk’s colors over the water, we were unexpectedly witness to a sight of a different sort. It was our own ship rounding the edge of the island and sailing out to the horizon, away. How strange its slow crawl through the water, its ugly lumbering through that shimmering sea. The contrast between nature’s beauty and man’s depravity has never seemed so startling, and we followed the ship’s path until at last it was such a small blip in the distance that you could no longer call it a blip at all. There went my captivity, my purposelessness, that cyclical, ineffectual destiny I thought I’d be trapped in forever. There went, too, some version of Christopher that he was happy to be free of and wished never to see again. Bon voyage! Adiós! Arrivederci, terrible life!

  Then suddenly, to my surprise, Christopher had hopped the fence. Before I even understood what was happening, he was up and over and already halfway down the long hill, sounding his loudest yawp as he stumblingly hurled himself over rushing green, aiming, it seemed, for the sprawling yellow meadow, perhaps even for the ocean beyond. Air swooshed past his ears and each time he fell (he fell several times), he seemed to get up again with greater vigor and even louder yawps, as if to yawp his way through the pain of his tumbles.

  Well, he deserves this, I told myself. Whatever “this” was. This eruption. I felt happy for him. Just that we had also, of course, an airport to get to.

  Then into the meadow, its grass waist-high and whistling past, its expanse somewhat longer than it had seemed from above, longer and more exhausting. And as we slowed down on the verge of hyperventilation, I saw there was suddenly a building in front of us, a structure I hadn’t noticed until now. It was not a house or dwelling but just a small shed, such as we used in Unityville to store tools for the gardens. Surrounding this shed, however, was a low, shoddily erected barbed-wire fence, and barely contained by this fence were two of the hungriest, meanest dogs I had ever seen. They were not even full dogs, only fangs and rib cages, snarling and flinging themselves at the barbed wire. Instantly Christopher switched from fast-forward to slow-backwards, sputtering calming words aimed seemingly at himself. We’d backed up this way perhaps thirty feet and were turning to run the other direction—back across the meadow to the hill, up the hill to the road, down the road to the airport—but when we faced around we found, standing in our way, an enormous, and I mean simply enormous, an enormous and determined-looking bull. It was lean but more than large enough to disembowel us, and seemed eager to do so. So back toward the sea we turned, running again, past the shed, the dogs, and we had just come in reach of the water—why the water? Was the water safe? Do bulls and dogs not like water?—when my field of vision did a backwards somersault through the air. I saw, all at once, the sea, the sky, the bull, and the distant hill behind us. Then all was black, and stayed black for some time. Until at last I was standing above Christopher, from the outside looking down, and this time there was no confusion. I knew what had happened and what it meant. It meant no airport, no journey, no son.

  I considered ending this chapter here, with Christopher’s death. I thought, in particular, that I should probably devote a separate chapter to my time inside that bull, if only because it is the most unusual circumstance I have found myself in, and readers might theoretically learn something from it. (Is that why you’re writing this, I asked myself, for readers to learn things?) But the truth is, I was inside that bull for less than forty-eight hours, and there was nothing about the experience that would be of use to anyone. In fact, it was just one uneventful night, which I personally spent in anguish, and by the next day, and from then on, that particular bull’s life was not typical in the least. The man who owned the bull discovered the scene in the early hours and immediatel
y hid the animal away, hoping to save it, or himself, from an ignoble fate. We spent an hour in a claustrophobic trailer truck, then were stowed away in a barn. But the nature of Christopher’s injuries must have been utterly apparent, so that we were soon discovered by the authorities and moved to a holding pen in an incredibly filthy facility that I assumed to be a slaughterhouse, and there we awaited our fate.

  It was late that evening, my second in Antigua, while the body I was trapped inside trod small circles round and round the pen, like Christopher’s ship sailing round and round the globe, as if even this brute beast felt obliged to describe for me the pattern my existence would forever follow, when the Fortune-Teller came to visit.

  “Is big news,” she said, leaning over the fence, “what happened to that boy. I heard it on the radio. That is how I knew to seek yuh. That boy was rich, got a rich family. Too bad he had no cash for taxis, you think? Ah, feel no way, I made new arrangements. Another mon is coming. He will take yuh on this quest. This new mon is gahn een—sick. Anyway he says so. I tell him ‘Drink still-beating bull blood.’ Ha! He is a crazy old mon and I think he will do it. Then I tell him, ‘After yuh drunk the bull blood, take a special quest.’ I give him the same stuff, same instruction. I think he will do it. But now, listen. When you get back to this place, you got to do the thing. You check? This mon is a bad mon, dogheart, so don’t feel no bad feelings. That rich boy was not so bad. Hard to do the thing to that boy. So this turned out good—safe. This bad mon got no love. He’s sick, a crazy mon. So if you got to make him dead, no worries. Everybody gets dead. You dead. There is nothing special about this. Love is a special thing. Rare thing. Rare things worth more. Simple. You check?”

  Of course I did not really know, that night, what to expect of the following morning. But as the Fortune-Teller sauntered off into the darkness, I felt toward her a deep pang of warmth and the most overwhelming swell of gratitude. That she had seen me, bothered to notice me, to let me know that she knew I was there. That she had even chosen to help me, and with so little cause, really no cause at all! I wished I had more time with her, could have thanked her. I wished I could have asked the million questions stored up inside me, or at least gotten some clarification on her incredibly vague instructions. But mostly, of course, I was full of anticipation. And joy! How extraordinary to be back in the world! To feel myself again a participant in existence. To know I was no longer alone. That there was hope. That whatever else happened, there was now at least possibility.