Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  Suddenly sunken into darkness, I panicked. I shouted inaudible shouts, thrashed my incorporeal arms—but calmed down again as Phil’s reassuring voice reached out to me.

  “Ah, there yuh go. No worries, Blossom’s a big drinker. She gives me plenty opportunities, so I’ll be back rill soon. Maybe soon as tomorrah, couple-tree days at most, and we’ll get back to talking. I imagine yer full of questions. Can’t say I have answers, but I do know how flustrating them questions can be. And the loneliness, of course . . . Fact is, I been dead a fairly long span now. In Blossom just a short while but before that were a priest, before that a trucker, and the line runs back. Originally I’m from over in Munhall. Was a bit known, Phil Williams from Munhall? Well, you wouldn’t of heard of me. Never spent much time aht the area . . . What else can I tell? These days I do get abaht pretty regaler, which weren’t so good for Blossom, owing to the sorts of things I get into, which she wakes up thinking she’s done herself only can’t remember . . . But there’s only so much philandering a soul can desire to do. After a while, yuh get tired of . . . well, yuh get tired of all of it. Say, next time arahnd, what say we take a walk, just a walk and a talk? It’s a luxury, a walk and a talk. But also they’re easier to handle on foot. Yuh can keep better gauge of which way they’re headed, sober or aht, and can try to adjust n’at. Takes some getting used to, but, truth be told, not so much . . . So, well, it’s good to finely meet. I’ll be by tomorrah, you’ll see. But owing as you’s already lights-aht there, I figure I mise well head aht. You understand . . . Anyways, au revahr, Samuel Johnson. Till rill soon!”

  It wasn’t the next night that Phil found me, but the one after, and by then I’d had plenty of time to think. Orson had spent much of the interval in bed, recovering from what must have been a powerful hangover, with Elliot stopping over several times a day to discuss the looming deadline on the critical proposal, which was labyrinthine in terms of paperwork and required Orson at every turn. He was frantic, frenetic—Elliot was. No doubt he expected Orson’s ill temper to reappear at any moment and felt great pressure to rush everything through, above and beyond the pressure he felt from how quickly it needed to be done anyway.

  Finally on the second night, Blossom arrived, unannounced, carrying several bottles of whiskey and acting nothing like herself. In fact I was a little embarrassed for Phil (embarrassed is perhaps not quite the right word) at how poorly he imitated Blossom. Even with his best effort, he sounded nothing like her at all, and if he hadn’t been in her body, and that body hadn’t clearly drunk a great deal, and if it hadn’t been holding forth whiskey on offer, I wonder if even Orson might have figured out something was wrong. In the end, though, Phil knew what he was doing. Soon Orson was staggering around the room, and not much later I stood firmly, or very close to firmly, in his place.

  “Welcome back!” Phil slapped my shoulder. “Now I imagine yer full of questions . . .”

  But being prepared, I replied: “Only one.”

  6.

  From the beginning of what might be called his conscious life—so from about the age of two—my son was very curious about the world. Always full of questions and, perhaps most impressive to me, never satisfied with the vague or lazy answers I was naturally inclined to give. It was exasperating, in one sense, those endless questions (why is the sky blue? Where does the blue part start? What’s behind the blue part? And so on), but I also could not help but admire them in a person so small. I barely remembered my own childhood, yet I was quite sure, in watching my son, that I had never been even half as serious. Oh, I finished the lessons assigned me, and my early interest in television indicates at least a basic curiosity about the world outside. But I was never serious in my curiosity, is the difference. I wore curiosity, as I wore everything else, more as a whim than a conviction. But my son—he was not like that. He was not like me at all, but much, much better. Not simply more curious, or serious; he was more driven, less easily distracted, endowed with those qualities of mind a person needs in order to make his own path through this world. And since I was not only a dull person but one with very few answers to his questions, I found I was constantly letting him down.

  So it was a great relief to me when, for his third birthday, his grandparents (Emily’s parents) bought him the Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas—the new one, 1964. For hours each day, Samuel would pore over the pictures, or he would make me read him the articles; that, at least, I could do. It wasn’t strictly maps, although it included all kinds of those, but there were also pages to teach you about weather, and types of clouds, and gemstones and minerals, and the Earth’s geological composition, as well as population, vegetation patterns, the history of global migration, even the ages of the Earth. A half page of this last had been torn out before the book arrived to us, but I could forgive his grandparents some minor religious editing, since there were pages I steered him away from myself. Two pages in particular, maps of the ocean bottoms, triggered my protective impulses: the idea of undersea mountain ranges seemed inexplicably threatening, despite or perhaps because of the fact that I’d never in my life seen a mountain higher than a foothill or a body of water larger than a lake.

  But it was a great big colorful book, is the point, filled with learning and ideas, and we plunged into it together, father and son. It was an interest we shared, really the first and only mature interest we were able to share in our too-short time together. Through my son’s eyes, the world became a more complicated place, and knowledge a thing I was suddenly happy to have. And this newfound curiosity carried over to life beyond that book as well. We would watch clouds and trace their movements. We would decide their shapes (elephant, tree) and name their types (altocumulus, cirrostratus). Not just clouds, of course, but plants, animals, rock formations. Everything in the world became something new to know about.

  Now where this enthusiasm for learning would have led me had Fate not intervened, I truly don’t know. So tied was that pleasure to my feelings for Samuel that I doubt it would have lasted long, once he’d outgrown me. For outgrow me he certainly would have, and quickly. The day was not far off when he would graduate from that atlas to other books and ideas, to possibilities beyond any I could provide, and far from ruing that day, I was eager for it. To watch my son grow into the sort of person I had never myself even considered becoming—that was to be life’s greatest reward. Then Fate played its hand and I was cheated of that future. I was forced instead to merely imagine my son’s progress, to invent for him many hypothetical lives, to dream up all the adventures and occupations I’ve assigned him over the years. In each of these imagined lives, he does well for himself. He grows rich in ideas and strong in the capacity to pursue them. Nor do I think such dreams are simply the wish fulfillment of a doting father, but instead realistic extensions of the very impressive little person he had already become by the time I was torn away.

  Those, at any rate, were some of the thoughts I was having—memories of little Samuel and his atlas—as I sat on the passenger side of Blossom’s jangly, clanking orange-brown sedan on that night in 1973, barreling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike through winter darkness, determined to reach Unityville and be with my son, or near my son, despite some incalculably steep odds against it. Cozy in the green glow of the dashboard, amidst the clanks and car hums, under the too-hot heating system, I thought about Samuel, about our afternoons of learning, about the many varieties of clouds and the eeriness of undersea mountains. Probably I did not get as far that night as to imagine Samuel’s life trajectory, now that I think about it, since at the time he was still only twelve.

  Perhaps I should back up.

  At my second meeting with Phil—where I left off at the end of the previous chapter—I’d proposed an expedition and, Phil being instantly amenable, even excited at the prospect of an adventure, we’d made what preparations we could. Phil gave me tips for gauging Orson’s drunkenness or sobriety by certain physical indications—feeling in the hands, weakness in the neck—and showed me ho
w, by drinking or pinching myself or stretching my limbs, I could try to keep control of Orson. All of which I waited through, though in truth—which I did not say to Phil—I was feeling very impatient, and rather strongly suspected it was all the sort of thing you just figure out as you go.

  But it was over the following two days that Phil did the really important work. While I watched Orson pull himself out of a second hangover and stumble back to Elliot’s proposal, Phil stowed a map and cash in Blossom’s glove compartment, gassed her car—a Dodge Dart that was both rusty and rust colored, so it looked like the car itself was bubbling up around the wheel wells—stored extra canisters in the trunk, and managed to pack the passenger-side foot space with enough booze to take us to the far side of New Jersey, had booze been our only obstacle. Even his Blossom impression had improved, and when he arrived on the third night with bottles in both hands, it took no time at all before Orson was out of commission and Phil and I down to the car, winding our way through the Pittsburgh streets, our borrowed faces silly with smiling, more full of hope and happiness and more genuinely excited by the adventure before us than two nonliving people had probably ever been.

  He’d been jabbering from that first moment—Phil had—but my own mood had quickly shifted, as I started to think about my son. Now in addition to joy and excitement, a great deal of sadness flooded in, along with terror, anticipatory regret, an overwhelming clash of emotions—with the result that I wasn’t really listening to Phil. I thought all the thoughts I’ve just shared with you, those memories of Samuel as well as many others. I remembered and reminisced and no doubt I even wallowed for a while, until finally Phil quit whatever he’d been talking about and started going over our plan.

  It was simple: If Phil started to lose feeling and it was beyond anything he could fix, I would dump him. We’d pull to the side of the road and he’d get out and I would drive on from there. “Don’t worry abaht me, Samuel, I’ll be fine. Blossom’ll be fine,” Phil assured me. But if I, Samuel Johnson, began to lose feeling, or specifically if I passed out, Phil would take us as far as he could and leave us. Best to get as close as possible, my reasoning ran, and take my chances from there.

  This plan had been decided during our second meeting, but it wasn’t until Phil rehearsed it again in the car that it occurred to me to mention that I did not actually know how to drive. I’d seen Orson enough to understand the mechanics of it, but I had never, myself, driven. You might imagine this would be a point of concern for Phil; in fact, it was a point of hilarity, apparently the most amusing thing he had ever heard. In general, too, as we rumbled down the turnpike, I could see the deep enjoyment Phil was taking from the “knowledgeable” role he got to play, and it struck me that, following his early disappointment, he had become rather pleased with the idea that he knew more about our circumstances than I did. Ah, were that only the case! Unfortunately, when it came to the real questions that haunted me (How long will we be stuck in this torturous purgatory? being the obvious first), Phil’s responses were vague and conjectural, and other than his handful of “tips” and a condescending impromptu driving lesson he proceeded to give me right there in the car, I found his “knowledge” both disappointing and irritating. I even started to lose some enthusiasm for our newfound friendship, when fortunately a new question occurred to me that Phil would actually be able to answer.

  “Phil,” I said, “what did you do?”

  In the closeness of our little green-glowing cockpit, Phil squinted.

  “I am not one hunnert percent sure I understand that question, Samuel.”

  “It’s just that I’ve always assumed that being the way we are”—my voice slowed here, and actually I had a melancholy tone throughout this conversation—“that this was intended as a punishment for something I’d done.”

  “Hm.” Phil thought. “That I never considered.”

  “So you never did anything this could be punishment for?”

  “I did a helluva lot this could be punishment for, I just never considered it were. Why, what did you do?”

  “Oh,” I sighed. “It might have been a few things.”

  “Such as?”

  “I slept with a woman out of wedlock.”

  “Cheated on the wife.” Phil nodded understanding.

  “No, she was my wife, we just weren’t married yet.”

  “Hm,” said Phil, and he did not seem very impressed.

  “I never held much belief in God,” I went on. “I never disbelieved either. I wasn’t a believing sort of person—or maybe the point is that I wasn’t a disbelieving sort. I never challenged my own mind, as far as God was concerned. Or as far as anything else was concerned. I just went along with it.”

  “Hm,” Phil said a third time, and now it was a little annoying. It occurred to me he was not really considering what I said, but was just acting ponderous as a courtesy. “I think,” he said finally, “none of that sounds so bad.”

  “My parents thought otherwise.”

  “Well, yeah. Parents.”

  That was true—I did not really care what my parents thought.

  “There was one other thing,” I said, my voice very purposeful now. “I watched television when I should have been watching my son.”

  “You watch television?” Phil sat up, and his face—Blossom’s—lit with new interest.

  “I . . .” The question surprised me. “Well, yes, I have. I mean, I do.”

  “If one thing bums me aht abaht Blossom,” said Phil, “it’s she never watches television.”

  And while I’m sure some part of me was irritated by how blatantly Phil had just changed the subject, when clearly I had been trying to say meaningful things about myself and my sins, or “sins”; nonetheless, given how poorly our conversation had gone up to that point, it came as something of a relief that we then started talking about television.

  It turned out that Phil and I shared many favorite programs—the programs of my youth—and quickly found ourselves laughing over memorable episodes and beloved characters and disappointing program cancellations. I expressed sympathy for how long he had been away from television, not just since Blossom but for several years before, and when I offered to tell him about some of the programs he had missed, he said, “Samuel Johnson, that’d please me!” So just like that, our roles in the conversation switched, for now I was the one sharing what I knew, experiencing the pleasure of having knowledge and sharing it, if not indeed surprising myself a little by the sheer quantity of information suddenly flowing out of Orson’s mouth.

  And given how important television was to the formation of my friendship with Phil; and given how greatly television defined my experience of the world during my Orson years, about which I’ve said almost nothing; in fact, given what an enormous role television has played in my existence in general—on and off, of course, over the years, but overall so significant that it would be fair to say the story of Samuel Johnson is almost as much about television as it is about Samuel Johnson; given, moreover, how careful I am being, in writing this account of my adventures, to skip the dull parts, to merely allude to the boredom and passivity of my existence without actually subjecting you to it, at the risk of giving the wrongful impression that I’ve spent most of my time tuned in and alive to the world, when in reality I’ve been almost always tuned out, and for quite a lot of that watching television; for all these reasons, and more generally just to give you a better sense of what television has meant to me, perhaps I will quickly say a few words, here at the spot where I said similar things to Phil, about my television viewing during my Orson years.

  Although they had just one year between them—my year at sea with Christopher—the television I’d known in life and the one I came back to with Orson were quite different. It was as if television in the late sixties and early seventies had departed a wholesome childhood to embark upon an awkward adolescence, where half the programs had gotten smarter and half dumber, all at once. For every mature and forward-thinking Mary
Tyler Moore Show, you had five mindless repackagings of Let’s Make a Deal. For every brilliant Richard Pryor or Carol Burnett, you suffered a heinously mediocre Hee Haw. Between these two extremes were stuffed lawyer and doctor shows, which seemed to have replaced the police and cowboy shows of the early and midsixties, and which at the time struck me as disappointing, rather bland, and boringly formulaic. Yet when I thought about it, I realized those lawyers and doctors were no more formulaic than the police and cowboys before them. Which meant, I supposed, that my own tastes had changed?

  In fact I already knew this to be the case. On the day I had died, television had lost much of its “magic” for me (because I held television partly responsible for what had happened—if not television itself, then its effect on me—but also for more complicated reasons, which I intend to describe later on), yet in the year that followed, marooned with Christopher, with no television anywhere around, there’d been no opportunity for this disillusionment to play out. Thus it was only with Orson that I realized how much my feelings toward television had changed—had grown more mature, were less easily impressed or affected. And perhaps this “maturity” also accounts for my increased interest, in returning to television during my Orson years, in the news.

  That, and the news itself was so urgent, with Vietnam and the Chicago race riots and all kinds of other issues and unrest. There were earthquakes and coups and world-altering assassinations; men first walked on the moon. Documentary-style programs taught me about famine, and the plight of immigrants, and economic crises (though the big one, OPEC, I missed by six months, and only learned about on the History Channel two decades later. I did catch coverage of the Watergate scandal, which broke in the summer of 1972 and dominated the news in the months after, though the hearings weren’t scheduled until May of the following year, by which time I was again far away from television).