Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  “Then abaht a yer ago, or maybe less than a yer, but a while ago anyways, I thought something else. It was that maybe I’d see yuh again after all. Never went so far as me imagining all the things might of happened to yuh, which you’ll tell me abaht in just a minute . . . But what I did think was, the more I missed yuh, Samuel, the more it seemed you’d somehow or other end up calling one day. Blossom’d pick up the phone and there you’d be. It was all wishful imagining, of course, and most of me was sure nothing like that’d ever happen and I was just embarrassing myself thinking it . . . but then I did go so far as to start making plans, on the off chance someday you’d call—just the way you did—and I’d need to be perpared—just the way I was—which, even while I was building this booze stash and keeping the van gassed and with extra fuel cans I got back there by the spare, even then, seemed a fool’s hope at best. But what the hell, I figured, since the only other thing I had to do was watch television. Anyways, probably yer anxious to hear the plan . . .”

  At which point Phil finally began telling me his plan, which I will hold off recounting, since we eventually went through with it, so you will see what it was in a page or two anyway. But as I listened to his plan, I found myself growing uncomfortable, morally if not in other ways as well. Certain aspects of Phil’s plan struck me as rather disrespectful toward Henry, and for that matter toward Blossom, and I was surprised Phil could be so cavalier. I even felt a little disappointed in Phil, who for all his loose talk I still wished to believe was a decent, well-meaning soul. Yet when I interrupted him to express my concerns, Phil only laughed, and rather than set my mind at ease, he pointed out that my own plan—returning to my son—would inevitably involve acts far worse for Henry than anything he had proposed, a fact I was of course aware of but had somehow managed to push to the very back of my mind, and so far had safely avoided. Nor did Phil’s reminder cause me suddenly to confront this fact; I simply grew irritated, as if he had missed my point or changed the subject. “Fine, fine,” I said, “tell me the rest of your plan.”

  By now the sun was going down, though it was not yet dark outside. I put it around six thirty. The trees along the roadside flew past in a blur, while the trees far ahead on the horizon seemed to approach much more slowly. Then the approaching trees became the ones that flew past, as new slow ones appeared up ahead, and on and on that way while Phil was talking. I was listening but thinking also about my situation more generally. We had traveled only about an hour down the turnpike, but more than two hours had passed since I had first taken control of Henry’s body, and considering that I had no way of gauging how long that control might last, it struck me as odd that I felt so unconcerned about it. If anything, I felt rather confident, unreasonably confident. Why? It was not the reassurance of having a plan (not Phil’s plan, at any rate), nor that I had grown better at controlling a body (though surely one does, and probably I had). No, as I listened to Phil and watched the trees pass and the sky and so forth, I decided my inexplicable confidence had little to do with either Phil or me. It seemed, oddly enough, to have something to do with Henry.

  And this was when I finally noticed something missing from Henry. Something that in Orson I had constantly fought to suppress, in Henry, it seemed, was simply not there. If I had failed to notice the presence of this thing in Orson, that was because the last time I had ridden this turnpike, the entire experience was new to me, and I had no point of comparison. No, it was only in being here with Henry that I understood, in retrospect, what a struggle inhabiting Orson had been, and felt the absence of this thing, this feeling. Put simply, I felt that whatever part of Henry was still Henry, and wherever that part was currently residing, it did not seem in any hurry to get his body back. I could have it, his body, for all he cared. And while under other circumstances this realization might have saddened me for Henry’s sake, under these circumstances I could not have been more relieved, nor considered it anything other than a fortunate turn, which I supposed I was due, all things considered.

  After Phil had finished going over his plan, I told him these thoughts I’d just had about Henry, about this difference I’d noticed between Henry and Orson. Phil seemed very moved. He said that on occasion he had noticed such differences himself over the years, in the different lives he’d known, but that he had never been able to put such a thing into words. He said he appreciated my sharing that with him, and that these were the sorts of moments that friendships were for.

  Now, all this must have taken longer than it seems in my memory, for by this time the sky had grown dark, or dark enough for headlights. The van’s cockpit, though cavernous compared to the front of Blossom’s old sedan, still felt quite cozy in the dashboard light, as if we were gathered around a campfire telling each other our tales. Phil’s tales, I should say, for by now he seemed to have forgotten his earlier wish to hear about my past several years, and instead spoke more about his own life: his actual life and how he had lived it, how it had ended, and the various lives he had landed in since. All of which I found quite fascinating (it had never actually occurred to me what entertaining tales might be made of our unabated suffering), and I would happily here digress into a few of Phil’s sordid adventures, were I not busy trying to get us through my own.

  It was well after the sun had gone down, but only a short time after I had at last begun sharing with Phil a few of my own adventures, when a pained expression suddenly came over Blossom’s face. I put it around eight, but the truth is I have no idea. I knew what the expression meant, though. And sure enough, Phil pulled us into an empty rest stop (not the shopping-mall sort where you get gasoline but the unattended ones with just a few picnic tables and portable toilets) and called out, as if to a legion of participants, “Time to do the plan!” Upon which he popped the hood and went to fiddle with the wires while I refilled the gas tank from the containers by the spare. Then we both climbed into the back of the van—it was spacious in back, a cargo van—each with a full bottle of liquor. We removed our clothing (this was the part that had made me uncomfortable), then lay down under some blankets Phil had stored there. We drank very rapidly and deeply all at once, and put our heads down to pass out.

  There was a bit of an awkward moment before we fell asleep, when Phil suggested that I might at that point engage Blossom physically, and I quickly snapped: “I do not remember that being part of the plan!”

  “All I mean’s cuddle,” said Phil. “Cuddle or it won’t be convincing.”

  So we cuddled and passed out together, thus successfully completing the first part of Phil’s plan.

  In the darkness of Henry’s brain space, I waited.

  I thought of Phil waiting so close beside me, unreachable in the darkness of Blossom’s brain space. Mere inches separated us, yet for all we were able to do for one another, we might as well have been a million miles apart.

  Melancholy gave way to worry. I began to think that the next phase of Phil’s plan would not play out as he had imagined it, and that we had made a grave mistake.

  Too late for regrets! Too soon to despair!

  Until at last, around three in the morning, or at any rate still predawn, the next phase of Phil’s plan was propelled into motion by a sudden, disorienting, van-rattling shout in the darkness:

  “What the fuck!”

  “Henry Nelson!” yelled Henry, thrust back into his waking life.

  “Get off! Get off!”

  Followed by a full minute of banging and swearing, and something that sounded like tearing, and something that sounded like slapping, until finally the two of them managed to climb through the front of the van and spill out next to each other, naked in the light of the empty rest stop parking lot. Henry stood baffled, disoriented, but Blossom, now that she could see the situation, became calm, if not cool, if not frankly irritated, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time.

  “Jesus, calm down!” she ordered. It must have triggered Henry’s highly active passivity response, because he immediately di
d.

  The rest area was no darker or less dark than when we had first pulled into it, but it felt very different at this hour. It felt early rather than late, waking rather than sleep-bound. Mostly it was louder, because of bugs. There were two streetlamps, one on either end of the long but narrow lot. The lamp we were parked under cast light over a trash can and a pay phone, and the other over some portable toilets, and everything else, whatever was out there, was dark.

  Blossom and Henry got back in the van, turned on the interior light, and dressed. They had something like a conversation. They had no idea where they were, but Phil had staged the scene well enough that at least they did not particularly question how they had gotten there. In fact, now that he had taken it all in, I thought Henry seemed rather proud of himself, that he had managed to have such a memorable experience, all the more memorable for not remembering any of it. His expression in the rearview mirror—for some reason he kept looking at himself in the rearview mirror—was one I had never seen. Mischievous, a bit devilish. I thought of all his past exploits, the ones he had described in the notes to his saga or to Benjamin, and for the first time, it occurred to me that he might not have made them all up, that he might actually have done some of those things in his life before Alma.

  As for Blossom, she was in a sour mood, particularly when the van failed to start.

  “Fucking A.”

  “Seems you and me had a time,” said Henry, in the passenger seat now and sifting through empty bottles with his foot.

  “Yeah yeah,” said Blossom. “You got coins?”

  “I got what?”

  “To call a tow, dumbshit.”

  “Nope.” He settled back in his seat as Blossom searched the various small compartments of the driver’s side for change. “Nope, I got no coins . . . Not in any hurry, either . . . Just taking my time, enjoying the view”—by which he must have meant his view of the back of Blossom’s head, as she was at that moment leaning over his lap to check the compartments on the passenger’s side.

  “Huh?” Blossom sat up.

  “I was saying—”

  “Fuck you.”

  Then she tried the key again, and when the van still wouldn’t start, she stepped outside and kicked the door.

  “Guess we’ll have to wait till somebody comes,” said Henry.

  “Fucking A,” continued Blossom, and she began to walk around the van, every few seconds kicking a tire or door.

  “Could be a while, I suppose,” called Henry.

  Blossom kicked the driver’s side.

  “Much more comfortable here in the van.”

  She rattled the back door.

  “Phew! Can’t imagine all the booze we must have drunk.”

  She kicked the passenger side.

  “A lot left, too, looks like.”

  “Yeah?” came Blossom’s voice.

  “Whole lot,” said Henry.

  “Well, huh,” said Blossom. Then: “Fuck, whatever”—and she came back around to the driver’s side and climbed in.

  Upon which more booze was consumed, more conversation attempted, back to the booze, and before we knew it, Phil was reconnecting the wire under the hood while I sat dumbfounded by the success of his plan. Thirty seconds after that, we were back on the road.

  Since we had no way of knowing what lay ahead or who would last longest this time around, it seemed prudent, despite how bad I was at it, that I be the one to drive. There passed a tremendously rocky first few minutes, which Phil found very entertaining and which you can imagine well enough—but when at last we settled into the next leg of our journey, Phil began:

  “So you were telling yer story. Yer death story? The story of how yuh died.”

  In fact I had not been telling that story before Phil’s plan had interrupted me. Rather, I assumed this was Phil’s awkward way of asking me to tell it. But it was too personal, that story. Too depressing. So instead I started talking about my childhood. Then about Abram and Emily. Then about my son and what an impressive young person he had been from the start, how I had struggled to be a good father to him, and how more often than not I had failed. In other words, I told Phil many of the things I have already told you, some of which I had already told him on our previous trip down this same road. And it was only after I had spoken my way through a great deal of this history that I realized I had in fact been easing myself into the deeper waters of memory, and that I’d arrived, as if unknowingly, at the story Phil wanted to hear.

  “It was after Samuel had gone to bed,” I said, my voice grown waxy and distant, as it seems to whenever I speak of the past, “and I was watching The Andy Griffith Show. If you know that program, you know it stars a friendly sheriff, Andy, in the funny small town of Mayberry. A sweet program, but this particular episode was strange. An article about Andy had been published in a national magazine, ‘The Sheriff without a Gun’—because Andy never carried a gun—and a television producer who’d read the article had brought his film crew to Mayberry to make a documentary about Andy’s life. Throughout the episode they talked a lot about guns, a topic more serious and ominous than I expected from Mayberry, and which gave the episode a surprisingly threatening tone. On top of which, it turned out the television producer was not even a real producer, but a con man planning to rob the local bank by pretending to film a robbery scene. And since I had always thought of Mayberry as a sort of television version of Unityville, innocently tucked away from everywhere, this ominous tone of guns and crime unsettled me and made me question for the first time whether Unityville itself was safe, and whether anyone in town kept a gun, questions that in hindsight were eerie premonitions of what followed . . .

  “Well, but it was more than that,” I went on, staring out at the illuminated portion of road, which disappeared beneath us as the car sped forward and new road rolled into the headlights, but which looked so similar from moment to moment that it might have been the same road over and over, spinning beneath us on a giant wheel. “Over the years, thinking back to the events of that night, including the events of that television program, I’ve come to question whether the guns and violence were only the obvious threat, the apparent source of my ominous feeling, but not the only source, or even the most profound. Because there was something larger going on in that episode of Andy Griffith, something I was unable to fully articulate for myself at the time. The idea of making television on television, of making fake television on real television—or, technically, faking making fake television on real television—and in Mayberry, the last place you’d imagine television being made . . . for some reason this idea caused a great disruption in my sense of normalcy. I started to have thoughts, strange disorienting thoughts, though they were soon interrupted by the tragedy that followed, and by all the chaos that followed that, and I didn’t think back to them, the thoughts, for a long time after . . .

  “But later, much later, I did think back to them—not once but many thousands of times. Indeed, over the years I’ve thought about that night in extraordinary detail, about the tragedy, but also about my feelings during that television program. And among the many things I’ve noticed . . . I was going to say ‘about that episode of Andy Griffith,’ but of course it’s not the episode I’ve noticed anything new about, only the feeling it gave me, the disturbance it stirred inside me. And yes, it’s possible that in reality I did not feel all the feelings or think all the thoughts I’ve remembered, or any of them for that matter, but only invented memories in light of what came after, planting in my past not just my understanding of my feelings, but even the feelings themselves. For when you look at the sheer amount of detail I’ve ‘remembered’ from that evening, the breadth of what I’ve ‘discovered’ in my memories, it does start to seem improbable that, for example, in the midst of watching Andy Griffith and wondering about guns and so forth, my mind would also stop to consider the more theoretical issue that any program produced by characters on my television program (such as the con man claimed to be producing on that
episode) was presumably also viewed by characters on that program (that is, by Andy and his friends), yet this is exactly the sort of thing I ‘remember’ thinking. It would be their program to watch, but also still mine, since my reality contained their reality, and my television their television. This thought leading, then, to an obvious follow-up, that if a program could be produced and watched in Mayberry that reflected Mayberry’s reality as fictionally yet faithfully as Mayberry reflected mine, it further followed that there could be, or in theory undoubtedly would be, television producers inside that television program producing their own shows, perhaps set in other small secluded towns. Such a program’s reality being contained within Mayberry’s, of course, which was still, for the same reasons as before, contained in mine. And wouldn’t the people on that program—that is, on the program inside the program inside the episode I was watching—wouldn’t those people, too, be perfectly capable of watching a program inside the program inside the program inside my own? And so on, a potentially endless sequence, programs inside programs all the way down, an improbable image that for some reason has taken hold of me more often than any other, over the countless hours I’ve spent reliving the events of that evening, and looms largest in my memory, regardless of whether I thought it then or only invented it after the fact. Larger and more recurring than the actual scene of my actual death is this image of me sitting before that episode of Andy Griffith, my mind spiraling out from my sofa-bound body, chasing a chain of strange logic forward or inward through an endless tunnel of television programs, one after another, each taking me farther from reality, but actually taking me nowhere at all. There I am falling forward through generations of programs, or variations of programs, through version after slightly different version of essentially the same thing. Until finally—as I picture it—I stop and look around. I look back through this enormous line of television screens, this endless corridor of programs, only to see, at the far end, a tiny face staring into the first screen way back at the beginning, which is now the last screen from where I’ve arrived. And that face is mine, of course. I left it only moments ago, despite how many screens and programs have passed between us in that time. It’s my face, it looks just like me, I’m there and I’m here and I’m no different at all, except for one difference, there’s one decisive difference, that back there playing beside me on the sofa is—”