Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  “This is the story of how yuh died?” interrupted Phil, at the height of my reverie.

  He was right, of course. I had fallen into this memory too intensely, and the point of the story was getting lost in the process.

  So I told the rest more directly: about hearing shouts outside—“Samuel Johnson!”—and running out to the crazed long-haired man with the gun in one hand and my son in the other. About the struggle, the shot, the instant darkness. About looking down upon my own dead body before my soul flew toward the town, not knowing, at that point, that I had transferred into my killer’s body. About the pickup truck and seeing the lights on in the houses, and the voice in my head shouting, “Samuel Johnson! Samuel Johnson!” About the highway and the Susquehanna and veering into my second death, and how looking down upon the dark Pennsylvanian landscape, I had thought I was finally done. I had said goodbye and told myself that Samuel would be safe. And how, no sooner had I made my peace than I turned and saw I was not bound for heaven at all, but had simply been transported to an airplane passing overhead. How, once I had realized I was not departing this world, my belief in Samuel’s safety had vanished, and I have never been able to regain it. How I have long felt that if I could just die, I mean die in a real and lasting way, if I could just move on somehow from this unending slog of ineffectual attendance, I was sure everything would be fine for my boy. Which meant that on some level my constant worrying about him was more for my own sake than his—which at any rate was entirely obvious—that my worrying did not help him and that nothing I could do would ever save him from anything at all. That it was essentially a self-serving desire, my desire to return to him. That I was essentially a self-serving person. That surely a self-serving person was not a good father—was, in fact, the precise opposite of a good father. That—

  “Slow down,” said Phil, and I took a breath. “Nah,” he said, “I mean the car.”

  Frazzled, I did as he said, and only when we’d gotten down under twenty miles per hour did I bother to wonder why we were slowing. Before I could ask, though, Phil cried out, “Once more unta the breach!” in a very dramatic voice. He laid his hand upon my arm.

  “What?”

  “Once more unta the breach!” He had the look on his face, the pained warning look. “From a movie. Aleast I think it’s a movie. Something I always imagined saying. And I’m afraid, friend Samuel, it’s finely time for me to say it.”

  “Phil . . .”

  “Yer a good dude, Samuel. Far as I can tell, yer even an O.K. dad. Worrying must count for something. Anyways, au revahr!”

  “Phil . . .”

  And then my friend Phil Williams, the only real friend I have ever known, smiled the largest smile I have ever seen, and hollered, as fearlessly as I have ever heard, while casting himself and Blossom out of our slow-moving vehicle into the predawn darkness: “Once more unta the breach!”—and rolled away.

  The line is from Shakespeare, in fact. Henry V. I just looked it up on the internet. The “breach” is literally a breach, a break in a wall, and some soldiers are being called upon to attack this breach, which is equivalent to throwing themselves in harm’s way. In other words, there is futility in attacking the breach, an unspoken understanding that the act, though heroic, is essentially pointless. But Phil’s act was not pointless. It was an act of friendship. He was trying to help me return to my son.

  Once more unto the breach, Phil Williams!

  And then Phil was gone, and I was alone with the road.

  It was either right before or right after I ran the tollbooth at the turnpike exit for Route 11 that the sun made its official entrance on the horizon. Well, it must have been before, while I was still traveling east, before I turned north, because I hold in my memory an image of orange smears swelling up into the predawn lavender. My head was swirling, had been swirling for some unknowable span of time, the present and past colliding in a confusion of thoughts and images and emotions. North up Route 11 . . . the river to my right . . . fields and forests and small towns . . . Phil gone . . . Unityville ahead . . . Samuel was sixteen!

  Twelve years I had been away. Twelve years since the night my name was shouted and I ran outside to save my son. For I had saved him, hadn’t I? I did not usually think of it that way, but that was obviously one way it could be thought of. I had seen the gun and had acted. I had saved him. Yet my actions had not been rewarded; we had both been made to suffer for what that lunatic had done, his reasons even now utterly unknown to . . . But at this point my mind landed upon a very unsettling thought.

  There in that van speeding toward Unityville, where I would presumably need to cause something bad to happen to Henry (with Phil gone I found I could no longer ignore this fact, could no longer tell myself I was just going along with Phil, which, I now realized, was precisely the lie I’d been telling myself), it occurred to me that I was at that moment in the same position the drunken, crazed long-haired man had been, all those years ago: steering toward my son with the intention of doing something terrible. Nor had I even begun to grasp the ugly coincidence of this thought when another, far worse thought, among the top three most horrific my mind has ever managed to conceive, suddenly struck me with the force of revelation.

  It was the voice. The voice of the killer not when he had been yelling outside my house but later, when I was inside the killer’s body and we were speeding away and the voice inside was still calling, “Samuel Johnson!” I had forgotten that voice, or lost it in the commotion, but now suddenly I remembered it, and knew it, or felt I knew it, was convinced I had known it all along. It was Emily. It was my wife’s voice.

  And then it all poured out at once, out of whatever vessel of repression or unknowing I’d stored it in all those years and into my hyper-awake, hyper-aware, suddenly mortified consciousness. The events of that night replayed for me as they had many times before, but entirely transformed, this time, by a new understanding.

  She would have driven this same road, taken the very same journey I was taking . . . She was not trying to hurt Samuel, only to return to us . . . Four years she would have worked to return to us and at last there she was, calling to me, to bring me close . . . to get me close enough so that she could . . . and I had stopped her! Forced the gun from her hand and shot myself in the process. Saved Samuel? Why, I’d ruined everything!

  But wouldn’t I have recognized Emily? I went on. Even in that body, was it possible I had not known my own wife? And why would she have been holding Samuel but calling out to me? Unless she was calling to our son? Perhaps she had only just managed to grab him as I appeared at the door? What was her plan? Was her plan like my plan? Would she really have killed a man to see that happen? Or was that why the lunatic had simply stood there, why he had not fired but simply stood as I rushed toward him and grabbed for the gun? Because it was Emily—could it really have been Emily?—not a lunatic but Emily, and when the time came she could not go through with it?

  Am I going to go through with it? I finally asked myself directly. To kill Henry? Henry Nelson? Earlier, when I had told myself he no longer cared to be in his body, was that true? Or was I already trying to justify an act I had barely allowed myself to contemplate, for fear I might fail to see it through? Had Emily failed to see it through? Was she the one who had failed? Or would seeing it through have been the failure, a purely selfish act? An unworthy act? Unworthy of Samuel? Was that the point to all of this? Was there a point to all of this? What was the point to all of this? To choose correctly?

  And why now? Why was I asking these questions now? Couldn’t I ask them some other time, when I was not so close to achieving my goal? Couldn’t I set aside any thoughts about Henry and Emily and parenting and morality for another hour or so, before I overanalyzed myself into a horrible mistake? Before my thoughts or my conscience or my weakness or my sense of futility and despair ruined everything I had waited so long to realize? Was this not precisely what must have happened to Emily that day? That having gone through it all,
whatever terrible experiences she must have gone through, her own Christopher Plumes and Henry Nelsons if not—dear God!—her own Orson Fitz, having survived them all and finally returned to us, she had allowed doubt into her mind?

  She would have driven this very road, passed this very spot, the river to her right, this town coming up on her left. Twelve years ago she was where I am now and did what I am doing and thought and felt these same things, and she made a choice. Was it doubt that stopped her? It was not me who made a choice that day, but she.

  She chose humanity. She chose responsibility.

  What did I do? I messed it up.

  And now I am beside myself, aside of myself, as if I can see my own soul from inside this same body. A new failure rises up before me, a terrible storm cloud racing toward me across a clear morning. I cannot kill Henry Nelson! Why had I ever thought I could? For my son? For love? What sort of monster calls his selfishness love? What sort of father suffers such love upon his son? Suddenly, it is all very clear, yet how long I’ve gone on in this illusion! Through Christopher, Orson—would I have even killed Orson? Only now in the final moment recognizing the reality of the situation I have been in all along. For I was never anything other than a weak-willed man. A pointless being who, though blessed with a wife and son much finer than himself, has never managed to make himself any—

  9.

  The late seventies through the early eighties was a strange time for television. There were the same three networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS; the Fox network still a few years off), but they had changed in at least one significant way while I was with Henry; they had given up on social relevance. True, M*A*S*H was still around, and a few other early seventies’ holdovers, some hard-line journalistic programs, but the new prime-time programs were all fantastical melodramas (The Love Boat, Fantasy Island), nighttime soap operas (Knots Landing, Dallas), and lighthearted crash-’em-ups (Magnum, P.I.; Charlie’s Angels), things like that. I am sure there was an interesting sociological explanation for this move toward escapist, simpleminded programming, perhaps having to do with the political or cultural climate at the time. But since I had very little exposure then to news or current events, I had no idea what that explanation might be.

  Now, you might imagine that this mindless fare would come as a disappointment to me after the relative sophistication I had come to expect from television in the early seventies. The sophistication I had come to expect of myself, I should say, since my finer tastes in television back then had meant, to me, that my own mind had matured and grown more interesting. We had grown smarter together, television and I, or so it seemed to me, and this was an optimistic feeling. So you would think these new programs would disappoint me, and at first they certainly did. I was disappointed, or at the very least surprised. Yet left with no choice in the matter, my expectations rather quickly lowered, and I learned to love these dumber programs just as much.

  Love, yes, love. This is what I wish to make clear. For in scrolling back through all I have written so far, which I took some time to do after ending the previous chapter, I saw that I have described several times my negative feelings over the years about television’s hold on me, but have been less clear that this anger was never really toward television, but only toward myself. And post-living, my relationship with television has clearly been something else. With no choice but to attend upon lives that have nothing to do with me, tediously sprawling lives infinitely uninteresting to watch, television has been a blessing and respite. And guiltless—since stripped of the ability to act, one loses one’s guilt at not doing so. Television becomes a faultless pleasure, if not a welcome friend. And this is the sense in which I can say without compunction that 1978 to 1985 (actually to 1989, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself) was one of the better periods of my post-life existence—because I watched more television than at any other time—though the rest of that era is almost entirely a blur.

  Following the inadvertent catastrophic death of Henry (though I should back up to explain that I did not kill Henry Nelson, or certainly I tried not to, or chose not to but then messed it up. I was driving, my thoughts scattering, panic escalating. I was overwhelmed with emotion, overrun by thoughts and doubts, and I lost control of myself—so, also, of Henry. Who unfortunately was not very quick to regain himself, and unlike Orson, did not handle the transition back into consciousness well at all. Waking to a straight road with no obstacles or traffic, he slammed down on the gas pedal, presumably mistaking it for the brake, veered sharply to the right for no apparent reason—like flinching—and flipped the van into the river. I had made the “right” decision, but had failed to see it through, and was suddenly and forever burdened with this failure, and with regret for putting Henry in such a dangerous position in the first place. In my defense—since whenever these events return to haunt me, and I again hold this discussion with myself, I at some point always come to my own defense—I did not exactly ask to be put in my position either, and surely intentions matter as much, from a moral perspective, as whether one succeeds or fails. Which does not, however, change anything for Henry, of course, and the truth is I will always suffer the knowledge that, though I did not intentionally kill Henry, my intentions did kill him—my failed intentions—which, whatever else you might say about them, are still mine and not his, even if he was made to suffer them, on that emotional morning all those years ago); following, that is, the tragic end to my time with Henry, I found myself standing at an upstairs window, staring down across Route 11 at the underside of Blossom’s van, now stuck half-sunk in the river. I was bewildered, overwhelmed. Around me were cats, what seemed liked hundreds of cats—actually there were five—yet before I could think about cats or could process in any other way the particulars of my surroundings, I was thrust into rude sobriety. It was not drunkenness I was suddenly sobered of, but idiocy, the idiocy that moments earlier had sent me into paranoid hysterics and caused me to lose control, and that I now—too late!—recognized as complete nonsense.

  Emily’s cries? How would that even make sense? How could Emily and I have been in the same body? If more than one soul could be in a body, wouldn’t other dead people be here with me now? Where are those voices? If that day I heard Emily, why not others right now? Wouldn’t every body in the world be filled up with souls from the beginning of time, legions of voices stuck listening to each other forever, and . . . and I went on this way, unraveling the logic I had spun for myself moments earlier on the highway, convincing myself now that it had not been Emily’s voice I’d heard, nor even a woman’s voice at all, that it was perhaps my own voice, though that theory had its own holes and landed me, as every theory seems to land me, in yet another cloud of doubt. And trying to lift that cloud with additional speculations left me, as usual, awash in self-loathing. How I wished to be rid of myself once and for all! Yet having just died my fifth death, I could not help but notice I was as intolerably present as ever.

  Since that particular spot along the Susquehanna was not deep enough for the van to sink from sight, we stood watching a long time as police and ambulances arrived. We did not stay long enough to see Henry pulled from the river, but long enough for the light outside to become fully a daytime light, until the cats became irascible for breakfast. We turned then, and I saw that I had landed in a very old house, in a room stuffy with old and weathered things: a rag rug and a shadeless lamp, another lamp with a beaded shade, an antique dresser, a glass cabinet of figurines and trinkets, and a rocking chair draped with what looked like it could very well be an original Colonial-era quilt. The air around me held visible dust. There was dust on the lamps and furniture. There were cracks in the walls, but just the hairline sort that occur naturally in old plaster, and other than the dust, I did not find the room particularly dingy or unclean or ill kept. Beside me, beneath the window, stood an enormous old television console, while across the room, beside the door, a tall dressing mirror revealed to me at last the new form I had found: tiny, wiry Lillian Rudge.

>   She was ancient even then, her spine already bowing. She would grow older, and older still, and all the while her body would continue to fold inward, year after year, as if packing itself up like luggage for a trip it kept refusing to take—but of course I did not know that at the time. No, in the early days of our time together, she seemed a perfectly doomed elderly person, and certainly in many ways she was. Always depressed, she spoke only of wanting to die. Nor did I blame her, with all her friends long dead, living alone in her empty house with her cats and her presumably very painful degenerative osteoarthritis. It was Catholicism that kept her from suicide, and for that she resented Catholicism quite a lot. To her daughter, Elizabeth, practically an old woman herself, who stopped by every lunchtime to play cards and deliver groceries, Lillian would describe at length the various ways she might have committed suicide by now, had she been gifted with a less Catholic soul. Elizabeth, for her part, seemed not to take this talk very seriously, perhaps because, like me, she expected Lillian to die at any moment anyway, hopefully peacefully and in her sleep.