Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  Either it was all the stress on her body, or simply a coincidence, that after all these years of not dying, she finally did.

  She died, and I suddenly found myself six feet closer to blubbering Abram than I had been the moment before. From deep down in my new darkness, I cried out. I was crushed. I began throwing the most horrible fit. My adventure again thwarted, my hopes once more mocked, and my life with Tanya about to begin.

  10.

  It lasted many hours, that fit, and was the last I ever threw, because after that I stopped caring. I surrendered myself to Fate. I let go of all anger as well as any residual hope. My existence became wholly Tanya’s existence, and from then on, I went back to being nothing but a watcher, a viewer, an audience member. As I’d been from the start. As I’d always been and would always be.

  Or that was what, for the longest time, I told myself. In reality, that day Lillian died was simply the fiery prequel to a period of deep-simmering self-loathing, during which I said to existence: I do not care any longer! Not because I truly did not care, but because I was too angry and embarrassed to admit to caring. I sulked, essentially. I spent the next several years in a sulk.

  How Tanya spent those years, and the years after those, and the years after those, is a story that takes us through many unsavory places, under the influence of assorted substances and the tutelage of various hooligans, in a long parade of mostly degrading situations. It is a much more elaborate tale than I have time here to tell, but I will do my best to summarize at least its essential events, since twenty years is not an insignificant span; and since in the end this period proved important for me after all, for my feelings about myself and my place in this world; and since my relationship with Tanya was—well, it was complicated.

  Following the roadside debacle, Tanya and Abram managed together—it being in both of their best interests—to discreetly return Lillian’s body to the nursing facility, where it spent a final afternoon in front of the television and was discovered sometime after Tanya went home. Claiming sick, she’d left early, and so it was from Donald, of all people, who had come by Riverfront later that day looking for Tanya, that we learned Lillian had been returned to her room, either to await the coroner or possibly because her death had still not been discovered by the staff there. He’d snuck in from the patio as usual, had found her sitting in her wheelchair as usual, and had failed to realize she was dead. He had failed to realize he was waiting for Tanya in a room with a dead person, and that night he became far more disturbed than the situation called for, indeed practically hysterical, hyperventilating and needing to breathe into a bag for several minutes when Tanya finally explained it to him.

  Nor was Donald’s cowardliness my greatest discovery that day, for within moments of arriving home with Tanya, I saw how many illusions I had built around her, illusions I had not even known I was building. For years my mind had gone out of its way to cast Tanya, first, in the role of an angel, then later of a victim, no doubt of a broken home; and this was because—I saw it clearly now—she had come to stand for me as a sort of surrogate child. The daughter I’d never had in place of the son I’d barely known. Even when Donald had arrived on the scene and Tanya’s behavior turned despicable, even then some part of me was sure that Donald was at fault for all of it, Donald and the abusive parents I had concocted for Tanya the moment I’d learned she still lived with them.

  Now faced with the reality of her home life, however, I saw it was nothing like I’d imagined. Expecting cracked tile and boarded windows, I found instead coffee-table doilies and woven baskets of soap. Expecting boozy arguments with bottles sent crashing into patchy drywall, I sat instead through microwaved dinners with dull conversation. Far from abusive, her parents turned out to be rather simple folk, unassertive, permissive, perhaps a bit too often occupied with other things. In fact they reminded me of my own parents. In light of which realities, I was forced to entertain the possibility that Tanya was not much of a victim, unless of her own freedom. But as I was about to learn, freedom in the hands of a young person can be a very dangerous thing.

  To wit: our time with her parents proved brief, for following Lillian’s death, Tanya quit her job at Riverfront, and this led—when her parents finally discovered it, after several weeks lazing about Donald’s trailer during the day, playing video games and watching daytime television—to an unexpectedly heated argument with her otherwise placid father, and to another sudden shift in her circumstances. To be fair to Tanya’s father, his reaction was understandable, if not frankly understated, not really even anger but more a blustery exasperation, and having less to do with her quitting Riverfront per se than with her dropping out of high school the year before. And Tanya was so quick to turn this one disagreement into justification for moving with Donald to Colorado, where his cousin had found him a job as a ski-lift operator, that I rather strongly suspected she had decided to leave before their argument even started, and simply preferred to hold her father responsible for it.

  So it came to pass, one bright spring morning in 1989 or ’90, or more likely it was early afternoon since they tended to sleep in, that Tanya and Donald found themselves bumping along in Donald’s hand-me-down Volkswagen Rabbit through the woodsy vales and turnpike tunnels of central to western Pennsylvania, the surrounding hills already gone green. A fine but not glorious day. A so-so day trying to pretend it is other than ordinary. Tanya’s window is rolled down and she leans her head out to let the rushing air smother her, to be swallowed by velocity and the open road as she races toward the future, toward freedom without responsibility and adventure without common sense. She has left behind all she had previously been, is set upon discovering whatever she will become—and she is happy. She is so happy that I, Samuel Johnson, thick in my sulk and willfully numb to the world, nonetheless find myself hopeful for her. Even as we pass Breezewood, a place I’d promised myself I would never see again, and as my mind inevitably recalls its cautionary tales, replays its several decades’ worth of sobering experiences and weighs Tanya’s prospects in light of everything I’d seen and learned, even then, some part of me still feels hopeful. Because in her happiness I sense the sweet young woman she had been when I first encountered her, the young woman I tell myself must still be inside her somewhere, inside here with me, intending to save her from the hideous mess her surface self is almost certainly going to make of her future.

  And then we were in Colorado.

  They lived in a mountain resort town of lodge-hotels and timeshares where everything was made out of logs. Log benches, log lampposts. The town itself, like a stump, expanded outward in rings: at center a pedestrian mall of clothing shops and ice cream parlors; farther out the gift shops, the pizza place; farther still the one grocery store, the gas station; and out beyond the town proper, a knotty cluster of old buildings where Tanya and Donald shared an apartment with Donald’s cousin, Todd.

  They’d arrived in the off-season, when hippies and burnouts loitered all day outside the shops, drifting among the benches in their dusty denim and tie-dyes, giving the mall more the appearance of a sixties music festival than of the alpine hamlet it affected later in the season. Donald did not like them—thus rose my opinion of Donald. In fact he had taken a surprisingly serious attitude toward his new life. In addition to operating a ski lift, he was part of a crew responsible for grounds work, facilities upkeep, janitorial, and refuse. This was the list he would recite whenever Tanya complained about his hours—lift operation, grounds work, facilities upkeep, janitorial, refuse—while Tanya, for her part, just wandered around. She wandered in among the hippies, and by the following spring had become a bit of a hippie herself, frequenting the town’s one head shop in long skirts and bracelets, smoking marijuana. Before we knew it, a year had passed since that hopeful day she and Donald had set out west in search of their futures, yet somehow Tanya’s future seemed farther away than before.

  Another year (was it 1991? ’92? Tanya hardly kept track of the years, let alone th
e days; nor did she ever follow the news or seemingly care to know anything at all about the outside world); about another year later, then, she was working at this same head shop and having sex with the manager, Barry. He was around Donald’s age and almost as physically repulsive, but lazier, less poor (his uncle owned the shop), and able to boast an even more off-putting personality. In fact, Tanya had grown indiscriminate about sex in general, having all types of relations with every variety of local deadbeat, rich and poor deadbeats, male and female deadbeats, invariably while smoking marijuana, usually in the back of the shop. Had we lost, already, the hopeful feeling? No—or as Tanya would say, “Nah.” But I, at least, had lost any confidence that Tanya’s better future was something she personally intended to bring about, and as the months passed, I found myself increasingly bothered by her floundering.

  It bothered Donald as well, who bothered Tanya about it, and Tanya, who seemed to pride herself in having absolutely no strong feelings about anything, nonetheless strongly disliked being bothered. Now they avoided each other. Now, when not avoiding each other, they argued all the time. Yet it wasn’t until Donald began studying for his GED in order to go to school for some sort of electrical training that Tanya finally dumped him, and then only because Barry’s uncle had “promoted” him to managing an adult shop in Denver, and he’d offered to take her along. How strange for me to hear Donald and Barry speaking, separately but in near-identical phrases (“get my shit together” and “keep my options open” and, oddest of all, “my career”) to describe their vastly different prospects! As for Tanya’s own prospects, she seemed not to require any, content to choose between Donald’s and Barry’s. She chose Barry’s prospects because—I can think of no other possible reason—they were far and away the worse of the two.

  So off we go to Denver.

  Though before we do I should say that I do not mean to be glib—it occurs to me I might be coming off as glib—whisking through Tanya’s life like this. As if it were just another episode, another pointless situation to be stuck in, like all the others. At the time I might have felt that way about it, some part of me certainly felt that way, but it was also true that my relationship with Tanya was different from any before. Even in my remoteness, I never disappeared into Tanya. There was always an unbridgeable distance, accompanied by a contradictory feeling of closeness that I’d also not previously felt. Both farther and closer, always conscious of myself as someone other than Tanya, but never indifferent as a result. Perhaps part of this feeling was physical, or that was what I told myself at the time, a young woman’s body being so dissimilar even from an old woman’s body, and certainly from the various male bodies I’d known (the most remarkable difference being Tanya’s menstrual periods, which did not appall or surprise me but which caused me, once monthly, to contemplate her life-creating capacity, her miraculous potential to beget small humans, a possibility that I’d never given much thought to as a young person myself and that Tanya, still a young person, did not seem to find nearly as extraordinary and wonderful as I did). But there was this distant closeness, is all I mean to say, a feeling I recognized even from the depths of my existential sulk but which would remain a mystery to me, a point of perplexity, an inexplicable fission in my illusion of indifference, and would only resolve itself much later, when I finally retook responsibility for myself and saw the situation for what it had been all along.

  But for now we are just in Denver.

  Or rather Colfax Avenue, which is the worst part of Denver, if not of Colorado, if not of everywhere else—or was back then, and I can’t imagine it has changed much. On any given heat-stroked afternoon, this endless strip of airless pavement conjured more a lawless desert town than a modern American city. By night, it attracted only the roughest elements and stank of all the worst odors, the odors attached to all the worst vices, festering in the crevices, and so on. Mornings, too, brought no fresh beginnings, but only again the punishing sun, to bake the pavement, to dry up the piss puddles by the bus stops. Nor is this description at all unfair or exaggerated or unduly colored by the fact that this horrible soulless place was where Tanya—my once-innocent Tanya—now began “working,” dancing naked behind smeary glass for incorrigible perverts.

  Barry ran the “shop,” and they lived together in a bungalow just north of downtown. Despite his pimpish posturing (and his actual pimping, for even if Tanya’s “work” stopped short of literal prostitution, surely in spirit it was the same), Barry in daily life was more idiotic than abusive. And Tanya’s own posturing, the “professional” posturing she seemed perfectly content to pursue, was itself more tedious than “exotic,” and in general theirs was a hazy, listless life. A life like a noontime nap in a stuffy room with no blinds or curtains, a nap that never quite happens, never quite arrives at rest, yet somehow lasts the entire afternoon. In addition to marijuana and alcohol they now occasionally smoked heroin—or “did” heroin, as they would say, though in fact they smoked it—and no doubt this increased substance abuse contributed to the sense I have, looking back at this time, that Tanya’s previously scattered attention span had disappeared altogether. In fact, having just racked my mind for a full minute, the only memory I can conjure from that entire period is of O. J. Simpson’s white Bronco speeding away from the police while Barry yells, “Go O. J.! Go O. J.!” before Tanya’s gaze drifts from the television back up to the ceiling.

  By 1993 or ’94 (so, our second or third year in Denver) she’d returned to her earlier habit of wandering during the day, though now through different streets, a larger and busier downtown, placing herself in the path of a much wider array of weirdos. She had a gift for meeting strangers, an openness—she always had. Part of me admired her for it. Most of me worried about her because of it. But the part that admired her would often point out, to the part that worried, that I had never known someone so at ease with herself and others, when she chose to be. In such moments I would even swell with pride, like a father watching his child excel at something he himself has never managed to be any good at. If she were only able or willing to pair this gift with a modicum of common sense, I told myself, she would accomplish, if not great things, at least passably good ones. But instead her gift almost always got her into trouble. And even when it didn’t (such as this next episode I am about to recount, which is actually the only time I can think of when her openness did not get her into trouble), it was only because Fate tricked her, and the trouble she thought she was getting into turned out not so bad.

  Of course the moment I use the word cult you will naturally assume that the life situation it describes must be horrendous. Actually, a rather fine line divides what we call a cult from any other group of relatively isolated, like-minded individuals. By certain standards, Unityville might be considered a cult, and Unityville, despite my grumbling about it, is one of the most reasonable places I have ever been. So too with Reverend Ryan’s Congregation of the Land, which, all things considered, was not a bad life at all.

  He’d approached her in a diner, and then over months regularly sought her out there to talk and drink coffee. He was an intelligent man, and not unkind, not unhandsome, which put him far ahead of Barry in all respects. Of course Tanya—being Tanya—was quick to trust him, but I—being me—remained skeptical, in particular of certain liberties he took with biblical passages I happened to remember rather well, liberties that steered these passages toward some very dubious conclusions as pertained to submission, sacrifice, and the supremacy of collective over individual worth. Yet it is a testament to the stupidity of Barry and the degrading horribleness of Tanya’s life in Denver that when the day finally came, when Tanya climbed into a van to join Ryan’s congregation farming marijuana in the mountain wilderness, I found myself wondering if it wasn’t for the best after all. And in fact it turned out considerably better than that.

  This I know was in 1996, so Tanya was now twenty-five.

  Which is not, as far as I can tell, particularly old for performing in peep s
hows, but which turned out to be rather on the high side for joining a cult, where the typical age was more like teens to early twenties. It was hard work, actual farm work, and regimented. They would rise in the morning and labor through the day, subsisting on a simple diet of healthy foods and steering clear of drugs, even the homegrown marijuana. They had no television or radio, but talked together in the evenings, and slept well. There was a Ryancentered religious component and some nontraditional sex, though nothing far afield of Tanya’s previous experience. In short, it was the healthiest situation we had landed in since leaving Pennsylvania, and if Tanya rather quickly came to hate this place, all the hard work and hard living she hadn’t known she was signing on for and never would have agreed to; if she spoke constantly of wanting to leave and stopped only because her whining was making her the target of widespread scorn; if, that is, even after months of acclimation Tanya still wanted only to get away from the Congregation of the Land and back to Denver and Barry, nonetheless I, Samuel Johnson, had become something of a convert (not of the stupid stuff, obviously), convinced that joining a cult was the best decision Tanya had ever made.

  But then, then Barry came to “save” her. Somehow he’d managed to track her down and arrived with some brutes to steal her back to Denver. He was surprisingly emotional about it, had worked himself into a tizzy, but had difficulty remaining angry when he saw how thrilled she was to go back. Nor did Reverend Ryan make any show of resistance; in fact I think Barry may have purchased marijuana from him on the way out. All told, we’d been in the mountains less than ten months, yet we were not even out of the driveway before I missed it.