Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  But Benjamin only looked puzzled, and there wasn’t time, right then, to talk.

  Then rehearsal happened, a languorous rehearsal. Henry was quiet the whole time, as quiet as he could be while still leading the band, and I assumed he was thinking about their brief exchange, about the surprising and frustrating fact that Benjamin seemed not to have given much thought to Henry’s book this past week, or any thought at all. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten entirely that Henry had a book he was planning to share, which must have caused Henry a sour feeling. And this sour feeling, which I imagined as composed of a variety of specific emotions, such as irritation and disappointment and self-doubt, this was the feeling Henry carried with him back to the piano, when rehearsal was over and others were packing up, which no doubt accounted for the gruffness in his voice when he said—

  “I don’t guess the grammar and punctuation and all that is up to college standards. I never got to college. It’s no college story, so . . . You’ll let me know what you think.”

  —and he handed the notebook to Benjamin.

  “Oh, your thing!” said Benjamin. “This is great. This is . . . I can’t wait to read this. Thanks for this!”

  “Hopefully you can make out the handwriting,” said Henry.

  “Sure I can!”

  “It still needs to be typed.”

  “Oh, this is totally fine . . .”

  “So . . . you’ll tell me what you think?”

  “I will!”

  “And don’t hold back about it, right?”

  “Hold back?”

  “With what you think.”

  The confusion on Benjamin’s face I took to mean that holding back had not actually occurred to him, nor that Henry’s story might contain anything to hold back about.

  “I’m sure I’ll love it!” he said.

  “O.K., good. Thanks,” said Henry, who by now seemed to have forgiven Benjamin’s earlier forgetfulness. In fact he sounded pleased.

  And that was it.

  It is frankly painful to remember Henry walking home that day, practically skipping over the sidewalk. It was his finest hour, though in true Henry fashion, his finest hour lasted fifteen minutes. Someone’s reading my book, I imagined him thinking, Benjamin’s reading my book, and next week Benjamin will report back what he thought. Maybe he’ll want to see more of it, and I’ll have to write some more, which I’ll be able to do, then, with that encouragement . . . When he came through the kitchen door, however, expecting to find the house empty, as it was most Saturdays at that time, he instead found Alma at the table in a fit of hideous laughter. It was a snorting, gurgling laughter such as I had never heard from Alma before, and I am happy never to have heard it again. Tears on her cheeks, body quivering, and there on the table sat Henry’s notebook number one.

  “Is this . . .?” She turned to him, awestruck. “I can’t . . . It’s . . . Here in my own . . .” At this point you could tell that what followed was going to be simply awful. “The world-famous Mr. Washed-Out Has-Been Might-Have-Been Never-Was? Leading expert in early childhood education? Right here in my own . . .” And so on. You can imagine the rest. Or, if you cannot imagine, simply flip back a few pages and reread Henry’s chapter, inserting boisterous mockery between the sentences, and you will have as good a sense of this scene as I can give you. It went on for a long time.

  “Henry!” she finally shouted, because by then Henry was gone, up to his room, cursing Alma behind the door.

  “Henry, come back down here!”

  Cursing Alma and also his notebook, and himself for having that notebook, or for not having hidden it well enough.

  “Henry Nelson!”

  No doubt asking himself, as he began to cool down, Well, what the hell’s she know? Telling himself, Not a damn thing. And next Saturday he would see Benjamin, who studied English and knew a whole lot more about writing and how to get stories to come out in a way people want to read them than Alma ever would. In fact that was one topic about which Alma, for all her talk, knew exactly shit.

  All week he was cold to her, and avoided her, to the extent that was possible, and I think Alma, too, felt she had gone too far. The revelation of Henry’s utterly tame secret must have come as a great relief to her, and she had overcompensated for her insecurities. She had let her relief come out as mockery, a joyful mockery that was neither Christian nor kind. Unfortunately, her apologies were, if anything, worse. “If writing crazy jive and imagining yourself some kind of broke-down wise-man saint of young people is how you keep to the Christian path, why, you go on ahead and”—is the kind of apology she tried several times to make, and she seemed surprised each time when Henry did not instantly pull out of his funk.

  Her mistake, it seemed to me, was to assume that Henry’s attitude was nothing more than a funk, one she herself had caused. She failed to see that the real change in Henry’s attitude had nothing to do with her, or very little. The real change was: he had lost his secret. Both by accident (Alma) and on purpose (Benjamin), his secret life was laid bare. And while Alma was perhaps right to think that Henry the man was changeable and ought to come around, still, some changes are irrevocable, and the loss of a secret most of all.

  Saturday arrived, and while I suppose we might note, on Benjamin’s behalf, that he could not have known the importance Henry had placed on his opinion, nor realistically said or done anything that would have stood up to Henry’s expectations, still, his response was fairly inane. The moment Henry approached him, he called out: “I read your chapter!” This was before the Teachers Band rehearsal, before the onset of the sinking feeling and all the extraordinary events that followed, when Benjamin had just sat down at the piano with the notebook set on top.

  “And?” said Henry.

  “I thought it was great!”

  “Well, great is good.” Henry picked up the notebook. “Great is real good. But what’d you think?”

  “I just really liked it!”

  “All of it?” said Henry.

  “Sure!”

  “So no parts were better than others?”

  Here Henry was flipping through the notebook, as if to locate passages that might be particularly questionable or need special attention.

  Benjamin took a moment, either to consider his answer or simply to figure out how best to state an answer he had already formulated but was perhaps hoping he would not be pressed to give. “Well,” he said finally, “I suppose if I’m going to really push myself to think about it in that way, rather than just enjoying it, as I think probably anybody reading it normally would—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I suppose in that case . . .”

  By now the other musicians were sitting down.

  “. . . I’d say that I think it’s strongest when you’re telling funny stories and being lighthearted, and like that. The stuff about education and the advice to young people part is probably a little less . . . I mean, obviously it’s supposed to be. Those are important issues and obviously it wouldn’t make sense to be as jokey in that part.”

  “Right,” said Henry.

  “Sure, of course,” Benjamin went on, not really looking at Henry at this point. “I guess it’s more that when you move into this long part about education, which is really interesting by itself and says important things people definitely need to hear . . . But as part of the overall flow and everything, that part does drift away a little from what’s so . . . Henry-like about this.” And now he looked up—Benjamin—and brightened, pleased to have discovered the right phrase. “Yeah, I think that’s what I’m getting at,” he said. “It’s all really interesting, I just found that part a little less . . . Henry-like.”

  “O.K.,” said Henry.

  “Does that make sense?” said Benjamin.

  “So you’d get rid of that part,” said Henry.

  “What? No! Don’t do that! I’m just talking about the . . . how it fits . . .”

  By now the other musicians were waiting.

  �
��That’s the part you’re supposed to learn from,” said Henry, and you could hear the irritation.

  “Yeah, I mean . . . Yeah, you’re absolutely right.”

  “Without that part—”

  “Yeah, no,” said Benjamin. “Forget everything I just said. I completely overstated it.”

  “You have other suggestions?”

  “No, I just really enjoyed the whole thing. It’s great and not like anything I’ve read before! It feels real, you know?”

  “It is real,” said Henry.

  Though of course quite a lot of it wasn’t.

  “O.K.,” said Henry finally. “Thanks for reading it”—and he took the notebook back to his saxophone case, and rehearsal finally got under way.

  Now, probably Henry was already, at that point, thoroughly disappointed and angry. Most likely he felt the same unchanging sourness the whole way through rehearsal, even if personally I chose to imagine him fighting those feelings, for a while at least. He might have struggled (for example) to reconcile the actual conversation they’d had with the more successful conversation he’d anticipated. He might have tried to convince himself that it had all gone better than he thought, and, failing that, might have attempted to stay afloat, at least, of the ugliness pulling him under. Whatever the case, and however his thoughts actually unfolded, by the time he left the library that day, Henry had clearly decided things had not gone well at all. And I know I am not wrong in saying that this realization struck his ego a terrible blow, and struck a terrible blow to the imaginary future he had consciously or otherwise been constructing over the previous week, if not over the previous years. I know I am not wrong in saying this, because I remember very well what happened next.

  8.

  It was around two in the afternoon when Henry arrived at a bar. Not his bar, not Alma’s, just a bar, one a few blocks from the library in the direction away from his house. It was dark inside despite the day; there was a pinball machine, and booths and tables. Rotating fans hung at various spots around the ceiling, and the man standing behind the bar, and another on a stool across from him, watched basketball on a bar-top television. Henry ordered a beer. “Beer.” He took his beer to the back and sat flipping through his notebook, or rather he flicked through, as if disgusted by its pages. Not just by the words but by the pages themselves. As if he wanted nothing more than to tear them out, those pages, the way a hero of Greek tragedy (allow me this seemingly heavy-handed comparison, since surely no life in ancient Greece was inherently more tragic than a modern life like Henry’s), the way an aggrieved hero of Greek tragedy might tear at his own eyeballs. To have them gone, to be done with them forever . . . except that destroying those pages would not have mattered. Nothing for Henry would have changed or changed back; plus there was another copy back at home anyway. Soon he switched to whiskey, after which he stopped looking at his notebook at all.

  And it was then that Samuel Johnson, who up to that moment had been rooting for Henry, in his way, and feeling sorry for Henry, suddenly woke up and remembered himself, Samuel Johnson. Remembered he had a goal that was entirely separate from Henry’s. I was me again. I shook off years of stupefaction—shook off, too, any thoughts or concerns about Henry—as my mind sprang back to an earlier time, to the feeling I had left four and a half years ago, in another bar, in another part of the city, inhabiting a very different human being, when I had last found myself facing, or on the verge of once again facing, some extremely narrow—but not nonexistent!—chances of returning to my son.

  No time to prepare, now that Henry had switched to whiskey, but I did not need time—surely I had waited too long already! I knew the best course to follow, had known it since before I’d even landed with Henry, and I knew, too, that it wouldn’t work. How could it work? There were too many steps, and no Phil Williams, and what were the chances I would reach Blossom after all these years?

  After all these years, a new attempt! Exhilaration wrestled with despair in the face of so much unlikelihood. As if I had already failed, my chances had failed me, and what I was about to embark upon was nothing more than the tragic performance of that failure, which would leave me even more miserable than before. Yet when the time came—around four in the afternoon—when Henry’s head drooped drunkenly toward the tabletop, another feeling took hold of me, a no-nonsense feeling, a resolve. My resolve forced aside my despair, where it could wallow—my despair—and sardonically comment all it wanted upon the series of impossible steps that my resolve was unquestionably going to proceed with, no matter what my other feelings thought.

  Cash on the table, fast from the bar, a convenience store, a pay phone, and that number I remembered perfectly well, Orson having dialed it so often.

  “Whadda you want?” barked the voice, and this was my first surprise, for it was better than I could have hoped and precisely as I had always imagined. The voice fulfilled not just one but both criteria of my best-case scenario: that it was hers, and that it sounded practically drunk already. And what a pleasure to finally use (a slight variation of) the statement I’d so long ago prepared!

  “This is Samuel for Phil who should meet me in front of the Homewood Library on Hamilton between Fifth and Braddock as soon as possible!”

  “Wrong number”—and she hung up. Just as I had imagined!

  Now, you might think such early good fortune would have made my outlook more optimistic, but if anything, as I got off the phone, I found myself falling deeper into disillusionment. Having reached the far side of those initial improbabilities, a vast field of impossibilities now came into view. How long would I keep hold of Henry’s body, after all? What were the chances that Phil would find me in that time? That after four and a half years he would be ready, with a vehicle and everything we’d need? And even if he was—and it seemed absurd to add more ifs to such a list—even if my luck held and I managed to solve problems I had not yet even imagined, it would have taken so long, by then, to get us on the road, how far could we possibly travel?

  In the shadow of the steps of the Homewood Library, nursing a bottle I’d brought from the bar, I stewed, my thoughts scattering.

  Time passed, probably not as much as seemed to.

  And as my mind grew thinner—I mean as my hopes grew more remote—I began to think again of Henry’s life, of what would happen to Henry once my failure had played out. That he could simply return to his life seemed impossible. He could return to his situation, of course, but his life, his secret life, was already gone. Probably for the best, I told myself. Perhaps all that had happened would give Henry the push he needed, would force him back into the world, and there were still things out there for him—we’d seen it with his teaching—things better than the rut he’d been stuck in. Yes, it was definitely for the best. I almost hoped it all worked out for him. Or rather, I did; I began right then to hope that things would work out for Henry, and to picture the life he would move on to . . . when suddenly and unbelievably a decrepit white van pulled up, driven by a familiar stocky, expressionless woman who called out:

  “Samuel Johnson!”

  “I’m here!” I cried, and ran over.

  “It’s you?” Phil laughed, seeing Henry.

  “It’s me!” I laughed, and I jumped into the van.

  Penn Avenue to Parkway East to the turnpike, a quick and unencumbered escape, all green lights and effortless passing (even at the turnpike you just grab a ticket)—in short, a more perfect exodus than anyone could have planned, Phil and I ecstatically jabbering all the while over wind through the open windows:

  “It’s rilly you?”

  “Who else!”

  “Yuh look different!”

  “Obviously!”

  “Yer a black dude!”

  “And you have a van!”

  “Rill piece of shit, though!”

  “I’ve never ridden in one!”

  “Blossom got her in a bet if yuh believe it!”

  “I believe everything today!”

  “This
dude tried to . . . Ah, listen to me, already gahn on about Blossom and all her nunsense and bullcrap, when you been away more than four yers now doing who knows what and—”

  And so on: a hugely enthusiastic reunion. Yet we had hardly started onto the turnpike and rolled up the windows when already I was souring the mood with my worries and doubts.

  “No worries,” said Phil, having brought us up to cruising speed. “I’ve thought everything yer saying a hunnert times aleast. We got all we need right there”—he indicated the passenger foot space, which was packed with bottles of liquor. “Most important, I got a plan.”

  However, he would hold off telling me his plan for just a minute, Phil said, because he was very anxious to share with me all that had happened since we’d parted.

  Thus I learned that following our last trip, Blossom had hitchhiked back to Pittsburgh and returned to her life as if it were all perfectly normal. Phil, thinking I was long gone and that he was once more alone in the world, had returned to his own philandering ways—yet nothing felt the same. Nothing satisfied him. Having at last connected with another stranded soul, and having felt again the wholesomeness (his word) of human camaraderie, he was no longer able to take pleasure in the empty pastimes he had previously enjoyed. He found himself staying in at night, or taking Blossom home after she had taken them out. And when, after some months had passed, he did begin to venture out again, it was only to a bar to watch television.

  Indeed, Phil told me (facing out the windshield as he spoke, the distant waft of his voice making clear that he had rehearsed this long explanation many times in his solitude, and had many times imagined performing it for me), television had taken on a new importance for him during the years since our parting. He had tried to watch as much as he could. And when I told him that during that same period I had watched none at all, he seemed very disappointed—for apparently Phil had often thought of me while watching television. He had pictured me off somewhere seated before a television myself. He would imagine us watching the same program, and this had been a great comfort to him. In fact, he said, he had come to believe, during this time, that the very best thing about television, the best and most important thing, was not the programs it showed but the fact that they aired everywhere simultaneously, for everyone all the same; so that, if a person watching in Pittsburgh had a friend way off in Unityville who happened to like the same sorts of programs, the Pittsburgh person could tune in knowing there was a sizeable chance he was not watching alone, that he and his friend were enjoying it together, even if not right there beside. So there was really nothing closer or more personal you could do with another person than watch television together, even two hundred miles apart. You were seeing the exact same things, thinking pretty much the exact same thoughts, or not really thinking any thoughts at all but having the same pictures and words run through your head—you were practically the same person during that time! And this realization had been a comfort, and had made watching television the only thing he ever really wanted to do any longer.