Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  But it was a socially engaged era for television, is the point—and not just in the news or the more sophisticated programs, but in many of the more general programs as well, with even sitcoms taking on controversial issues (All in the Family comes to mind, whose big-mouthed, bigoted Archie was a favorite of Orson’s). Of course none of this seriousness would last very long—indeed, television in the years that followed took a very different turn—but at the time it felt important, even exciting. If television could no longer connect me to its imaginary world, for a while at least, I imagined it might show me the real one. Things were happening in that world, and through television I could be a part of them, or feel as if I were, or tell myself I felt so, a feeling I’d not known even during my lifetime and that came to mean a great deal to me during these years when everything else was so grim.

  Unfortunately, in the midst of this volatile, changing, socially engaged televisual world, or rather not in the midst but five or six feet in front of that world, sat Orson, who was every bit as volatile but not the least bit changing or engaged. Whatever optimism I mustered, his presence smothered again. His pointless attendance to those very same programs spoiled my vision of social engagement, causing me to admit that my “portal to the real world” idea might be as misguided as the “magic window” before it. For when the televisions were turned off, were not all lives just as isolated and ineffectual as Orson’s?

  But now—to get back to our story—now even my own profoundly isolated existence had taken a distinctly less ineffectual turn, for here I was with my new friend, Phil, speeding along the dark corridor of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, en route to my son—my son!—keeping a weather eye on our intoxication levels as we talked and laughed about television. I could hear in my voice the pleasure I was taking in describing all the programs, and could see that Phil felt this as well, for the smile on Blossom’s face grew wider as we went on, until at some point he interrupted to suggest that if we got through this and somehow both ended up in Unityville—who knows?—maybe there would be occasions—why not?—when we might arrange to get together to watch television? I laughed, but he was serious. I told him that would have been wonderful, an idea I would think back upon fondly, but unfortunately it was unlikely to happen, even if all of this did work out, since Unityville had no alcohol, let alone any television. But Phil said, simply, “How do yuh know?” And I had to admit he was right: more than seven years had passed since I’d left, and how did I know Unityville hadn’t changed? Certainly my son would have changed, grown larger and smarter and better at things, but maybe the town had changed as well? And I began then to tell Phil all about that strange tiny town I was so desperate to get back to, that strip of shabby houses huddled around the solitary church. I told him about the people there, and my life, the life before my son was born and particularly the life after, the things we used to do together, the tedious games he invented, his atlas, everything . . . And these various conversations, all the topics I’ve recounted here, took us just past the exit for Bedford, Pennsylvania, when suddenly and abruptly we pulled over.

  “Come arahnd,” said Phil, jumping out of the car and running back to fill the gas tank with the canisters from the trunk. A moment later I was at the wheel and he was leaning in at the window with a pained look and forcing me to take the keys.

  “Phil?” I said.

  “I know a feeling when I feel a feeling. No point discussing. Stick to the plan.”

  “But Phil . . .”

  “Maybe we meet again, Samuel Johnson. For yinz sake, I sure’s hell hope not. Good luck to yuh, though, and I’m sorry not to’ve made it there myself.”

  Before I could say another word, Blossom’s body was bounding away as fast as possible, leaving the lighted roadside and disappearing into the night. Just like that, Phil was gone.

  My sadness at losing Phil—and so suddenly!—was greater than I would have expected. It took me by surprise (I’d naturally assumed Phil would last longer than I would), but mostly I felt bewildered, for I had never before had a friend. Emily, of course, but no male friends. Certainly not Abram, and then, who else? Of course I’d known Phil only a very short while, and our personalities were so different; we had virtually nothing in common, except for the one thing we did have in common, this one rather profound thing. Or two, if you count television. Plus we’d both been lonely for a very long time. In short, so inevitable had been our bond, so quickly had it grown in our brief time together, that now that he was gone, perhaps forever, I tragically missed him, this man I’d barely known.

  Of course I did not wallow but slammed into gear, jerking and bucking Blossom’s abysmal vehicle back onto the road, thinking it was one thing to watch a car being driven by Orson or Phil, quite another to drive one yourself. Yet I am proud to report that after a frighteningly rocky first few minutes, the vehicle did claw its way to top speed (top of what I could manage), after which it was just a matter of holding to the road, which was a wide road, if hilly, and nearly empty of traffic at that hour. There were dangers, of course—hitting a deer, popping a tire—but the greatest obstacle I faced, at that point, was simply panic. I began to imagine Orson creeping back into my fingers—his fingers—and then was sure I was wrong, but then right—here he was!—was he? Yet when I took a drink to keep him down, I again panicked, this time that I’d overcompensated. His body would pass out, I told myself, and Blossom’s crappy sedan would wrap itself around a tree. I would wake up in some other awful existence, alone in the dark brain space of some backwoods religious fanatic or pregnant rest stop employee, someone who never touched alcohol and would never afford me the sort of unprecedented opportunity I was currently in danger of wasting, if only because I could not seem to calm down . . . How long I continued in this state is hard to say, but when the situation finally resolved itself, it was not by my own effort, but because Orson finally sobered up enough to retake control. There was a dangerously awkward moment, during which I fought him with all the power I could muster—which was none, it turned out. He jolted upright at the shock of himself driving, yet managed to pull off at an exit and park us behind a Dumpster before dropping off across the front seat, thus ending ingloriously my second chance at return.

  And so I turn back, begrudgingly, to Orson’s story.

  Though before we do, I might mention how surprised I am to discover the emotional changes mere thinking and remembering can bring about. For I can feel, at this very moment, my own happiness extinguishing, utterly extinguishing, as I switch from the memory of that first trip with Phil back to more of the Orson drudgery. It’s strange, when you consider how long ago all of these things occurred. You would assume that, given enough time, a person’s memory would stop carrying around its emotional baggage. Well, and perhaps it eventually does. Perhaps the problem in this case is simply that I hated Orson and his life very deeply, and despite how long it has been, it has still not been long enough.

  He awoke early the next morning to find himself in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, a town you may already be familiar with if you have traveled much or are the least bit unlucky. Town is perhaps a stretch for a town that is itself little more than a stretch, a single strip of gas stations and restaurants, its citizenry composed not of human beings but of truck stops and burger places, its claim to fame the same as its slogan: “The Town of Motels.” (Admittedly, I was predisposed to hate this place, the site of my journey’s end, yet I am certain I would have hated it under better circumstances as well.) According to local lore, the town’s history of providing rest and refreshment for weary travelers began centuries ago, in the days of the native people, and proceeded via hundreds of years’ worth of paths, railroads, and highways that had all for some reason dropped their travelers at precisely this spot. Yet it was only recently—just a few years back, in fact, during the construction of Interstate 70 and simultaneous renovations to the adjacent Pennsylvania Turnpike—that the town had truly come into its own. It seems a loophole in the Federal-Aid Highway Act had l
eft neither the Turnpike Commission nor the u.s. Department of Transportation legally responsible for constructing an interchange, or any way for travelers to move directly from one route to the other. In the ensuing battle of budgets, each had opted out. The result of this bizarre yet strangely believable scenario was that anyone moving between those two major thoroughfares now had to bottleneck through Breezewood, a time-delaying nuisance that overnight had transformed the town from a glorified truck stop of yesteryear into the ludicrous monstrosity one finds today: a transportation mecca, a bustling oasis of in-between-ness, and the ugliest, loudest place Orson had ever woken up.

  Not sure how he’d gotten there, he abandoned Blossom’s car and stumbled to a Denny’s. He ordered a breakfast platter with a ridiculous name, and when it arrived, he learned the extensive history of Breezewood—everything I’ve just recounted—from Phyllis, his sassy middle-aged waitress who was coming off-shift anyway, who did not have anywhere particular she needed to be, and who always spoke her mind and did not give a fig what others thought about it. To my surprise, Orson sat through the entire story, which far outlasted his pancakes. Phyllis stood beside his booth the whole time, as if this were some sort of civic duty she performed whenever the occasion presented itself. Orson seemed to like it, though, or at least he did not seem to hate it, and even stayed awhile after, talking with Phyllis, before setting off to find a motel.

  He slept most of the day. Alone again in the dark prison of his brain space, I had never hated myself so much. When he’d passed out in the car, I had hated myself, all that time in the Denny’s, I had hated myself, and now I hated myself for the better part of the morning and the entire afternoon. To have come so close to my son—relative to how un-close I’d come previously—and failed. To have failed again, as I had always failed him! . . . Alone I wallowed, and then, alone, I stopped myself. I sobered myself. I reminded myself that despite this recent failure, which after all had never been very likely to succeed, my overall situation was still far more promising than before. Not only had I regained my sense of possibility, but I knew now what needed to be done. And I began in that moment to plan my next expedition to Unityville, which I would launch immediately upon our return to Pittsburgh. I would reconnect with Phil. He would have a new vehicle, or would find one. We would plan ahead for every sort of contingency. There would be something we could do better, something we’d not thought of this first time around but that in retrospect we’d realize and improve upon. As soon as Orson wakes up, I told myself, it begins.

  Yet when Orson woke after sundown, instead of heading back to Blossom’s car—which in fact he never returned to—he showered and dressed (same clothes) and set out to explore the town. O.K., I told myself. It’s late. He’s been through a lot. All this must be strange for him. He’ll wander around. We’ll leave tomorrow.

  At night, Breezewood was not the same garbage-strewn eyesore the daylight revealed, but was transformed into a strange and lovely light show, a melancholic choreography of headlights and taillights and every color of neon cutting patterns in the dark. It was quieter as well, or had a quality of quietude, as if the darkness itself muffled sound. Silent and bone-sober, Orson made his way alongside the slow-moving traffic, on a berm edged with potholes and only occasional slabs of cracked sidewalk, from the turnpike on-ramp to i-70 and back, then the whole loop over again. Four times he lapped the length of that strip in what I took to be melancholic introspection, but which could as easily have been bewildered confusion, or even emptiness, an absence of thought or emotion—the entire walk lasting perhaps an hour and a half before landing him back at the Denny’s, where it seemed he was again going to eat.

  And the first person he saw as he entered was: Phyllis. They said, at the same time, “You still here?”—and then laughed together at the coincidence. She smiled at him, and I thought: What the heck is going on? In fact I momentarily wondered if, while he’d slept, as I had been busy cursing myself and my fortune, I’d unknowingly transported from Orson’s body into the body of some more sober, thoughtful, and amiable stranger. And it was only when he went into the bathroom to wash his hands before eating and I faced him in the mirror that I was willing to admit it was still him.

  He stayed at the Denny’s for several hours that night, drinking coffee and picking at his pancakes and listening to Phyllis when she came around, which was more or less constantly. Eventually he headed back to his motel and sat at the window until midmorning, at which point he again went to sleep, again slept all day, again woke, took his brooding, confused, or emotionally absent laps between the highways, and ended up at the Denny’s, to my mounting dismay. This time when he walked in, Phyllis gave a brash laugh and hooted that it was downright peculiar for a gentleman to spend more than a single night in Breezewood, especially a worldly gentleman such as himself, and what on earth was he trying to prove?

  “To be honest,” said Orson, “I have no idea.”

  Phyllis smiled slyly, and winked, and brought his coffee, and I could see she did not actually believe that he had no idea. She believed he had a very particular idea. And later, when she told Orson what time she got off work, and still later when they had awkward sex in his motel room, I’m sure she felt confirmed in her suspicions as to why Orson was still there in that town.

  As for me: notwithstanding my desperate desire to be gone from “The Town of Motels,” I thought his “I have no idea” had sounded rather true. There was something different about Orson in Breezewood, a difference that had started back in Pittsburgh but that here seemed to have taken hold. He wasn’t drinking. He wasn’t swearing. He just wandered in silence, wandered the strip, wandered into Denny’s, not—this was the thing—as if he had no place to be, but as if he specifically wanted to be here. Not here with Phyllis, just here in Breezewood. And since I could not fathom why anyone would ever want to spend time in that place, I therefore took his “I have no idea” to mean that he himself did not understand why he was remaining in a place that obviously had nothing to offer, unless it was somehow to punish me, Samuel Johnson, who he did not even know existed, for having briefly disrupted his horrible life.

  Nor did the fact that he stayed in that motel for the rest of the week, and continued to see Phyllis, convince me that he had the slightest idea of what he was doing. And when, at the end of that week, he moved into her trailer home at the far edge of town (not a great distance from the near edge of town) and proceeded to enter into what can only be called a “new life” there, a sober life in which he did little more than sleep and eat and walk Phyllis’s dog, wear her deceased husband’s clothes, run errands in her truck, watch television in the trailer, and wander around; and when this “new life” kept lasting, week after week, until I could again feel myself losing hope, leaking resolve, and seriously doubting that a new return attempt with Phil would ever take place; in other words, during the entire tedious process by which the bizarre awfulness of Breezewood gradually became, for me, my new normal-and-familiar sort of everyday awfulness, still I never once believed, in all that time, that Orson understood what he was doing. Whatever it was—“life”—he was just going along with it.

  For three months he went along with it. It was a better life than the one he’d been living, so after a while I assumed we were done.

  In fact it had already begun to seem that Elliot and David and Blossom and whatever history had spawned Orson’s unending downward spiral all belonged to an irretrievable past, when one night, over sloppy joes in the trailer, Phyllis asked about his life before Breezewood. She had brought it up before, of course, early on, but had received such a gruff response that first time that she’d never tried again. But this evening, for some reason: “You had a job or . . .?” Orson was already eating his sandwich, but paused, his mouth stalled, sloppy joe stuffing up his cheeks, which must have looked rather weird and made Phyllis uneasy. “Never mind,” she said—but Orson, swallowing, said “No, no,” meaning yes, it was O.K. to ask.

  And then he told
her—not all of it, but enough. A lot. He told her things even I didn’t know—such as that he’d had a wife (?). About the business he’d built, how successful he’d been, and how after a while he’d let restlessness get the better of him and did things he’d later regretted. How boredom wasn’t the word for it, it was something much bigger than boredom, more all-encompassing, and how his wife’s leaving left him even more untethered than before. There was an illness—it was all kind of hard to pin down. He talked about his junk-filled house, his stuffy office, how he liked to drive around in his car. His wandering, his drinking. His life alone and the habits he’d fallen into, how one thing led to the next. About traveling but never really enjoying it; in fact how everything supposedly enjoyable eventually isn’t, but how you keep doing those things anyway, God knows why. About David, vaguely about Blossom, and eventually about Elliot, whom he went on about for a while. Until finally he arrived at the last thing that had happened, the new project proposal, how Elliot had kept coming over with forms and how surprised he, Orson, had been to find Elliot so concerned about it. That Elliot had actually seemed to care about it. So he’d gone along—he told Phyllis—he’d filled out the forms or whatever, but then life, or Fate, or something intervened. He’d ended up here, ended up doing this, the trailer, the sloppy joes. He hadn’t over-thought it. Probably he’d under-thought it. It was hard to know how much thinking was the right amount. At which point Phyllis, who’d been listening intently the whole time, who in fact seemed to have gotten wrapped up in Orson’s story as if it were a movie she was thoroughly enjoying rather than the dismal actual life of the person seated across from her, switched for a moment into the sassy Phyllis we’d seen less of lately and said, “You mean ya just left him there, with that deadline an everything? Ya just left?” Not with contempt, but anticipation, as if waiting for the part where the movie turns and everything is made better. But all Orson had to offer was, “Yeah.”