by Martin Riker
And the Denver and the Barry we returned to were worse than before, for Barry had turned abusive, not of Tanya but of heroin, and everything was more serious, suddenly, and more ominous, even if Tanya tried to float along as if she were still young, as if her future were still far off in the distance, too far away (still!) to be able to see what sort of future it might be.
But now she was twenty-six. In youth, perhaps, but no longer blooming. Cult life had made her body strong, and her mind might continue to fool itself, but something in her soul was going sour. Whatever innocence remained buried inside she was clearly on the verge of losing, and in response to this mounting crisis, not my own but another’s crisis, I at last faced up to the responsibility that was not actually mine but that some part of me felt regardless. I would never manage to do anything for Samuel, but Tanya I could help. I would do what I could, because I could, and because no one else—obviously!—was going to.
My first thought was to return her to the congregation. It was the easiest and best plan. I would pick one of any number of highly intoxicated evenings and leave Barry a note: “Gone home to parents.” He would have no reason to question this note, nor any way to pursue it, since “parents” was not a topic Tanya ever broached. I would steal his truck, and he would have no reason to search for it in the mountains. Everything would go smoothly and well.
And so I picked my evening and I did, we did—we escaped! In the early hours, as the sun rose up the mountainside and the congregation set about their morning ablutions, I left us unconscious on their doorstep, only to find, when they finally managed to wake her, that Ryan did not want her back. He wished “no further hassles” from Barry and his goons. Unrestrained, in fact flatly rejected, Tanya jumped back into Barry’s truck and happily drove home. Where Barry threw another fit, and Tanya sobbed—“I didn’t mean to!”—swearing she didn’t remember a thing or even understand how all that could’ve happened. After which they cried together, and everything went back to normal, or “normal,” except that I suddenly found myself feeling even more responsible for her than before. I had taken on the task of Tanya, it seemed. I would need to see it through.
The next time I stole Barry’s truck, I took her south instead of west. I drove almost to the Mexican border and left her outside a McDonald’s. She woke up around lunchtime, ate a two-cheeseburger meal, and drove back. What she thought had happened, I cannot even imagine.
For a long time I considered writing a letter to her parents, and only hesitated because each time I played the scenario out in my head, it always went badly. Her father would arrive and confront her, and confrontation would only make her angry. Being imposed upon would only discourage her. But it was too obvious a possibility not to try, so finally, yes, I sent them a postcard. And they came, not immediately but as soon as her father could get vacation time. They checked into a hotel and arrived on her doorstep, and it all happened more or less as I had imagined, except that they did not try as hard as I had expected they would, in fact they did not try very hard at all. To be fair, the last time they had attempted to be firm with her, Tanya had taken the opportunity to move to Colorado, and no doubt this made them wary of summoning even the small amount of strictness the situation called for. Finally, I don’t imagine handling the situation differently would have caused any different result.
The third time we fled—in one of Barry’s friend’s cars, since Barry now kept his keys hidden—was more successful, though not due to any planning on my part. Which is not to say I lacked a plan: I drove east as far as Kansas, had run the car out of gas, rolled it into a ditch, and thrown away all her money. By now I had decided that my best hope was simply to fill her life with difficulty, to strand her in strange places and place her in uncomfortable situations so that she might be forced into self-reliance, or just grow so tired of her reckless life that she’d decide she’d had enough. Instead, she hiked to the nearest truck stop and called collect from a pay phone to ask Barry to come get her, and Barry told her not to come back. That he was fed up. Actually what he said was more off-putting than that, a blubbering garble of infantile neediness and accusations, like: “Bitch, you crazy . . . Yeah but what about my feelings? Barry’s feelings? . . . Well joke’s on you, cuz the Barry train’s leavin. Uncle Bernard promoted me. I’m movin to Tampa . . . Nah, it’s been planned for weeks now, but no way’m I tellin you, no way’m I bringin you along, you’re Cocoa Puffs, you’re Fruity Pebbles, I’m done with you, get it? Done. Barry is done. Get it? . . . How I treat you? How I treat you? . . . Because you never understood me, ’swhy. You don’t think I got feelings? You think I got no feelings?”—and on and on this way in what was certainly the dumbest, most expensive phone call I have ever overheard, ending with Barry’s friend grabbing the phone to demand his car back.
Then Tanya fell apart. She sat crying in the truck-stop diner until a sympathetic waitress gave her eggs. Over eggs she wept, over eggs she fretted about having no money, no way to move the car, needing desperately to get back to Denver, to “my Barry,” and so on. And I, Samuel Johnson, having finally managed to bring about my hoped-for scenario, felt nothing but sorrow watching her go on that way, crying to no one—to no one but me! Until finally she dried her eyes, forced a smile, stepped out onto the pavement, and managed—without much effort as it turned out—to solicit an exceedingly slow ride back to Denver, or rather a series of rides: the first taking her too far south, and the second, which brought her north, backtracking unfortunately east, and the third ride not to Denver but Boulder, which wasted another two days, by which time Barry had already taken off to Tampa.
Since by this point in the story you will likely have become, with regard to Tanya’s perennially poor judgment, as incapable of surprise as I was, therefore I will not waste anyone’s time attempting to make sense of her next catastrophically bad decision, and will simply tell you that hitchhiking to Tampa took several weeks.
These were sober weeks, and, in their way, quite extraordinary. Difficult, of course—they were “hard-living” weeks—but weeks during which Tanya nonetheless performed a particularly amiable version of herself; not only, I thought, to obtain rides, but because the life itself, life on the road, despite its burdens, was quite agreeable . . . Days chatting in truck stops or traveling, evenings lying out under the stars in cool weather, toasty on the warm ventilation grate at the back of a Denny’s or Waffle House, the bag of clothes I’d originally packed for her doubling now as a pillow . . . Meeting people, showing ease with people, placing people at their ease . . . Days that passed like breezes, and as they passed, my spirits lifted. It seemed to me this version of Tanya, this healthier version, was as true as any other, perhaps more true than all the others. Many times I thought, There is no reason this Tanya could not be the all-the-time Tanya. No reason at all! There is nothing to keep her from using these excellent social skills in more responsible situations, for example applying herself to a job and a lifestyle that might actually be worth having . . . After which I would imagine for her any number of better scenarios and would wonder what we were doing here instead of there.
Then one night, stretched out on a ventilation grate behind a Waffle House in—Kentucky? Tennessee? Alabama? Wherever it was, it was swampy, thick with insects, and mysterious in a way only the South has ever seemed to me. The dark mossy magical South, I mean; not Tampa. Stretched, though, under the black dome of night, the stars in all their seemingly meaningful patterns, the Milky Way’s galactic smudge, the twinkling bottomless black that makes everything suddenly small, that makes already-small things—such as my own existence—seem even smaller . . . Stretched out and staring for hours, thinking mostly about myself (no idea what Tanya was thinking about), contemplating the long course of my time on this planet, my thoughts unexpectedly turned to that first night with Orson in Pittsburgh so many years ago, that minute spent leaning up against the newspaper box, staring down the dark empty avenue. That moment of self-knowledge, which I suddenly realized I must be having
again—now, here—another such moment of seeing and knowing myself, as if I could nod across the ages, call out to my former self: You saw this coming, not this but something like it . . . You knew I’d be here, just as I know you’ll always be there, forever in that moment, seeing all you’re seeing, feeling all you’re feeling, and suddenly, or eventually, as this experience of existential largeness began to fade, as I came back into my smaller self, I realized I had reached a conclusion. Or rather, I saw at last the conclusion some part of me had clearly come to long before.
For so many years had I tortured myself over Samuel, trying to return to my son as if there were something I could do for him, even while knowing full well there was nothing. Four times I’d tried and failed. Three times I’d tried again, only in the final instance accepting the situation for what it was. And then I had sulked; I had wallowed. Years had passed, during which I had watched, as if they were staged for my personal entertainment, the terrible decisions this young woman was making or failing to make, the situations in which she placed herself. I had watched and done nothing when all the while right before me was someone I could help, because she was naturally passive, near-constantly intoxicated, and because help was something she actually needed. Tanya, I could help.
And then I had helped her, or tried to, but out of a sense of obligation. Imagining myself some sort of begrudging Samaritan, I had stepped in as a stopgap, but pretending it was all a task that would soon be over, after which I would return to my self, my own purpose, as if I had one any longer.
But here, under the stars behind the Waffle House, I know that I have no purpose of my own. And while so far my efforts to help Tanya have not aided her at all, I see that I have not truly devoted myself to the task. Under the stars behind the Waffle House, I am tired of lacking a reason for being and am ready to accept the reason Tanya has been offering all long. If in my time on this planet I have played many roles—a friend, a ghost, a nuisance, an absent father; mostly an audience member, or nothing at all—to Tanya I will be something else. A guardian angel, a parent more attentive than any real parent could feasibly be. And if she is not precisely the daughter I would have chosen, well, we do not choose our children, and in that sense she more closely resembles the daughter I might have had. And she is not yet thirty (I was not yet sixty); it is not too late! So: I will plan and prepare where she squanders and flails. I will think long-term where she, when she thinks, thinks short. I will compensate for her self-destructive impulses and if need be erect elaborate artifices of circumstance, pursuing every imaginable sacrifice, until I have created for her a better life, whether or not she wants it, and this, this will be my purpose.
Of course, every parent in the world will immediately recognize the foolishness of this resolution and will laugh at the inevitability of my failure to come. No doubt some part of me was scoffing even then. But the point to having a goal is not always to reach it, and no matter how inevitable my failure might have seemed—or how inevitable it in fact turned out to be—I would like to think I was at least somewhat original in how I brought it about.
In Tampa, Barry still did not want her (“Like seriously, bitch, what the fuck?”), but Bernard, his fat uncle, uglier and scarier than Barry, was happy to give her a job.
Do I need to describe Tampa? It is like the worst parts of Denver spread more evenly around. Plus humidity and palm trees and so on. Salsa music, cigar making, a barn-like building you drive through to buy beer. The truth is I never saw much of Tampa. I occasionally saw the ocean, but mostly what I saw were the cruise ships, those lumbering behemoths that daily puked their passengers into the touristy zones of the city, including the zone home to Gentlemen’s Choice, the club where Tanya waitressed and spent all her time. From the club’s back lot you could see them in the distance, a long, low cityscape of ships, while a few blocks farther out, from the kitchenette window of Tanya’s apartment, they were the horizon itself, a jagged white line that marked the limits of our new life.
And perhaps it is not surprising, with those ships always in sight, that in those days my mind often turned to Christopher Plume, back at the start of my ill-fated journey, and at times I felt almost near to him—ah, Christopher! Forever back there in his cabin, reading his impenetrable books, on the far side of a great chasm of time and space. And it’s true that thinking of Christopher often led me to think about myself—as what does not!—about the unbelievable distance I had traveled across those years, all my extraordinary and my extremely ordinary experiences. But mostly I tried not to think about myself or anyone else. I existed now for Tanya, I was focused on Tanya, and the situation with Tanya was—complicated.
Though Bernard paid her poorly, he did pay for her apartment, where they “partied” together a few times a week. And it wasn’t long before she and Barry were back to “partying” together as well, or “hanging out,” or whatever they called their countless pointless hours together. So that, between the nephew and the uncle, Tanya rarely paid for substances of any sort. Plus, she kept her tips. And since she was a popular waitress, not just physically attractive but friendly as well, she brought home quite a lot of money—more than anyone realized, more than even Tanya realized, for whenever she was debilitatingly drunk, stoned, or otherwise unsober, I was stealing and hiding away as much of it as I could.
I was stealing and hiding her money because, after careful consideration, I had come to the same conclusion her parents must have reached years before, that education was Tanya’s best hope. Not only would education provide her with better career opportunities, it would also address the larger problem, that of Tanya herself. Earlier, I had hoped that if I simply altered her circumstances, Tanya would decide on her own to do the rest, but that had not gone well. Gradually I had come to realize that change could only arrive from inside Tanya, but before this could happen, first her insides would need to change! Only through education would her worldview expand, would she come to care about worthwhile things, would she no longer settle for the worst possible circumstances but seek out something better.
So I hid her money to save up for school. I stole, to make her a better person. Nor was this the worst hypocrisy I embraced since I had also to condone her self-destructive drug and alcohol consumption, without which I would have been stuck, unable to help her at all. I told myself that these moral ambiguities were a burden I would bear in the short-term so that someday I would no longer need to, because I would no longer be needed at all.
Unfortunately, moral ambiguities were far from the worst of my obstacles (would that moral ambiguities were the worst of my obstacles!); my real problems, both the short- and the long-term, were much more mundane.
My short-term problem was myself.
By this point in my existence I could handle a body as adeptly as I ever would, yet when it came to direct personal interaction, to speaking with sober living people in a normal social situation—for instance, to open a bank account—that I considered, and would surely continue to consider, an extremely awkward prospect. This is an aspect of my existential predicament I’ve not described up to now, because up to now it had little bearing upon the situations I’d encountered. Abram was a special circumstance. Stumbling into bars to watch television might have been fun for Phil Williams, but even that was not something I would normally attempt. In short, trying to control a body involved such physical peculiarity, and resulted in such an unruly outward presentation, that were I to engage a normal citizen in sober conversation I would surely be thought (or Tanya would be thought) to be drunk, struck with a severe nervous disorder, or else dangerously insane, none of which had I ever considered a particularly good idea.
Now, however, I had a purpose, and this purpose would require me to do things in the world, things I had avoided up to then. There were sacrifices I would have to make, risks I would take if need be! Or so I told myself. As it turned out, I did not have to take any risks at all—for during all these years Tanya had bummed around in an unwavering state of stagnat
ion, the world had changed a great deal, and now we had computers and the internet.
I’d not had much to do with them, though I certainly knew what they were. The year before, there had been all that hoopla about the y2k virus, and even though Tanya did not follow the news or actively participate in any form of cultural awareness, it was almost impossible not to know quite a lot about computers in general by the time it was done. In fact, the whole world was more or less “online” by now, even if I, as usual, was late to the party. This all changed, however, in Tampa, as computers finally reached me in the person of Ken, the awkward potbellied computer technician in the apartment next to Tanya’s who was clearly in love with her, or in lust, or obsessed over—I could not determine the exact nature of his feelings, only the fact of them.
He was constantly doing things for her, fixing things for her. And Tanya, still capable of sweetness (despite everything!), treated Ken kindly as well, if less like a man than like a large stuffed animal. He was a friendly presence, a cuddly harmlessness occasionally popping its head into her universe of booze and drugs and hooligans. They would drink beers out on the balcony. She borrowed things and never brought them back. Once, she gave him a houseplant. He would tell her he was worried about her, that she should take better care. She called him sweetie and patted his bald patch. And when neither Bernard nor Barry was around, she occasionally allowed him to show her his computers. He showed her the internet and how you could buy things, look things up, and “chat.” He showed her e-mail and created her first account. He even gave her a set of keys to his apartment so she could use his computers when he was out, which Tanya never did, but which I, Samuel Johnson, did whenever circumstances allowed.