Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  You know, I have been planning all along to draw out at length this scene with my philosophy instructor at the bar. Having been forced to summarize Tanya’s story in order to fit it all in, I had thought I would at least end in a substantial scene to register the gravity of that moment. I would then share the real feelings I hold for Tanya, despite everything we had been through, or because of everything we had been through, and the considerable grief I experienced at losing her. But now that we are here, I think there will be no scene. I cannot help feeling that even with the distance of time and all that has happened and everything I think I have learned, still there is something inadequate about all this. Something phony, even if everything I’ve written is true. I’ve made fake feelings out of my real feelings, crafted too-simple stories of my time with Tanya, and pretended, for some reason, that I have distance on these events, which in reality I never did and still don’t. And while I suppose the same could be said for all of my so-called adventures, for every tale I’ve told in this book, yet only now do I find myself embarrassed by it, even ashamed of it, here wrapping up my time with Tanya. I will just tell you what happened and move on.

  He was disappointing. I had expected, I think, an older, more mature version of Christopher Plume, awkward and bookish, but serious, with a gravity of knowledge behind him. This man was shorter and shadier than Christopher and not much older—just out of graduate school, it turned out—and while he seemed to know his topic, I saw instantly that I would learn nothing new. And so eager! Clearly this was a unique adventure for him, riding out into the world to have sex with a woman he must have assumed was a nymphomaniac or something similar, a “worldly” woman, a “dirty” woman, a woman he no doubt had mythologized into a test of his own courage, a Herculean task, number whatever on his “bucket list,” a story to never tell his grandchildren. That she turned out to be noticeably older than him, and heavy, even though she’d lost weight, and that in addition to seeming generally trashy, she looked and acted, on this particular occasion, as if she were either drunk or psychotic, or possibly possessed by the soul of a dead man who was controlling (if inadequately) her movements—all these factors seemed only to excite him. And for so many reasons—including the quashing of my own hopes, my indignation on behalf of the intellectual tradition, my sorrow for all of humanity, and a sudden swell of guilt and defensive feeling for Tanya—for so many reasons, his excitement at the exoticism of this occasion was the most depressing thing I have ever seen.

  And I suppose I had not planned it all very well, and I really cannot imagine how I thought it might go, but my instructor was getting worked up, and I was plummeting down, down, until finally, in the midst of it all, I walked away. Not from the bar, but from Tanya. I ceded control, is the best I can describe it. I slumped into my hole at the back of her brain and quietly shut the door. It was something I had never done before, just “left” like that. But the effect, in this case, was that Tanya fell back into consciousness, not anywhere near sober, in this bar with this odd, eager young man, a situation that might have seemed strange to her had she not already survived half a lifetime of strange situations. And when, highly inebriated, he suggested she take him back to her place, she agreed. And they went, her driving, both still, of course, highly inebriated. She drove and they got out to the access road (her apartment complex was just off the highway access road), swerved around perilously as if this were perfectly normal, and finally launched into a telephone poll, that simple. All my talk about helping Tanya and being a guardian angel to Tanya and in the end I could not even get her to buckle her seat belt. My philosophy instructor had managed to buckle his, and survived to take me along with him, off to his life—goodbye, Tanya.

  11.

  I am sitting in a dayroom, a room made for light and air. But right now it’s nighttime. A small room, not a closed-in porch, but resembling a closed-in porch, at the front of a second-story apartment in an uptown neighborhood of Chicago. It has hardwood floors and white trim and a white ceiling. I would say it has white walls, but it doesn’t really have walls, or barely. The street side of the room and the two sides adjacent are all windows (with a little bit of wall beneath the windows), while the non-street side, where the room connects to the rest of the apartment, is taken up by a large arched entryway, too wide to have a door, or at any rate there isn’t one. I’m sitting on a folding chair at a folding table with this computer and a lamp and some other objects—books, bourbon. It’s very quiet here, only the patter of typing and night sounds through the windows. Shush of cicadas, occasional passing cars. Outside is dark, though the sky above the city, which you can see over the buildings across the street, never really gets darker than a sort of muddy gray. On the ceiling there’s a fan with wood-and-wicker blades, there’s an electrical outlet in the floorboards by the archway, and there really isn’t anything else in here at all.

  How do I feel? What can I say about my circumstances? Those are good questions. Having arrived, at last, at my final chapter, I have been asking myself those questions.

  I suppose I am better off than I would have imagined five years ago, when Tanya died and I was transported into the body of my philosophy instructor. Had you asked me back then where I would be in five years, I would have guessed something worse than this. And understandably so, for as he left the hospital the following morning, after several hours blubbering to the police; and also during the train ride back, as he stared out the window at the desert of corn that covers the state of Illinois, perhaps comparing that desert to the state of his own soul; or while examining himself in the mirror of the train’s tiny bathroom, his face frozen in an anguished expression, like a theatrical mask symbolizing Anguish (I’m sure it was genuine, his anguish; I’m not saying his anguish was not genuine, only that it seemed much more for himself than for Tanya); in short, throughout the entire despicable sequence of events by which my philosophy instructor crawled his way back to Chicago, my opinion of him was understandably low, and so, too, of my own future prospects.

  Back then, this room looked much messier. Anthony—I’ll call him that now—had a roommate, not a friend, just someone who rented this dayroom, so it was cluttered with that person’s, Gary’s, things. You had to look at Gary’s piled-up things whenever you walked through the apartment: his futon mattress, his guitar case covered in stickers, and his conga drum, also covered in stickers. What a dismal time, those first months back from Peoria! Rarely leaving his room, rarer still the apartment, and since my entire knowledge of Anthony was limited to his performance with Tanya and this moody behavior back home, I assumed this was it, the course of our future, a forecast of endless gloom, which to be fair was not solely Anthony’s gloom but mine as well, for what was left to me then? With all my mysteries revealed? The real mysteries were never about God or Fate, of course, not revelations about existence or lessons hard learned. No, the real mysteries were only about myself—of course they were—about who I was and might become, and now I had my answers, Tanya had given me that. Tanya and to a lesser extent Lillian, and Henry and Orson, even Christopher had given me that. I had my answers and was ready, well past ready, to be done.

  But if there is one lesson my story must have taught us all by now, it is that nothing is allowed to end in this world. Everything moves on, or starts over, or cycles; it doesn’t stop but slouches forward, or circles back—existence, time, one direction or another, “fate”—and sure enough, as the shock of Peoria wore off, Anthony returned to civilization. Having encountered him at his lowest point, I had naturally assumed it was the average, but now I discovered he had friends, and places he liked to go, a past, and so on. At a party in the fall he met Sanjana, a recent graduate of the same school he’d attended, though she’d studied anthropology, and in school they hadn’t met. She, too, had recently come out of a bad situation, a psychologically trying relationship she described to him in rather exhaustive detail, which had likewise left her feeling distraught, depressed, and insecure. They began seeing eac
h other immediately.

  At the start of their relationship, they—

  But am I really going to tell this story? For several days now, proceeding through my other stories, approaching this one, I have wondered what I would do once I arrived. I thought: No, it’s too near, too complicated; my feelings about it are discombobulated, raw, unclear. Doubtful I could even be fair. The closer I came to the end, the more anxious I was feeling to be done with it. Then Tanya’s story—well, it had an unexpected effect on me. It left me wondering why I’ve been telling any of these stories at all. I’ve just assumed there was a reason. But now I’ve told them, haven’t I? And I suppose there’s no practical way to skip this last story and still have the rest make sense.

  At the start of their relationship—Anthony and Sanjana’s—they expended quite a lot of energy analyzing their motives, worrying that their attraction to one another was the result of their mutual insecurity and neediness, and that in a more normal or natural emotional state, they would never have come together at all. They discussed whether an attraction based on need was even a real attraction per se; or—contrarily—whether such an attraction was in fact the most normal, natural, and obvious sort of attraction; or—a third option—whether “need” was necessarily even the defining aspect of their attraction (an assumption neither wished to accept a priori), and anyway, isn’t needing a particular relationship at the same time that you happen to have that very relationship an example of rather extremely good luck? In short, they were slow to accept the fact that, in addition to the fortunate timing of their coming together, they also simply liked each other. This is the sort of people they are.

  Once they’d come to accept the legitimacy of liking each other, however, they quickly decided they also loved each other, and promptly and without much ceremony married each other, at which point roommate Gary and his mattress and various stickered instruments disappeared from this dayroom (to where? Who knows), which was then cleaned up and outfitted with Anthony’s desk and books and filing cabinet. It looked then quite a lot like it does now, though his actual wooden desk and chair softened the space, whereas this card table and folding chair are more severely ascetic. Meanwhile, Sanjana took over the cozy room at the far end of the apartment that had previously been Anthony’s “office,” a room he’d almost never entered in the time I’d been with him, though he treated its loss as a small catastrophe, proof of his personal failure, probably because that is precisely what it was.

  But here I need to back up.

  You see, Anthony had completed his PhD only a year or so earlier and had been teaching courses online because he had failed to obtain a postdoc, a position that would have supported him while he revised his dissertation into a book, which he needed to finish and publish (since he had no published papers) before he could be hired into a tenure-track faculty position. A tenure-track faculty position being apparently the only career path he had ever considered. In the absence of a postdoc, however, and the consequent need to teach courses online, his efforts to revise his dissertation had proved scattered and disheartening. He’d lost confidence. Lost interest in his work. He’d started to question whether academia was the best use of his talents, or whether he was simply in academia because he could not think of other uses for his talents, or whether the talents he had acquired in academia simply had no uses anywhere else? At the height of this anxiety and self-doubt, he had traveled to Peoria, where I, in the guise of Tanya, was at that moment working on my final paper about his dissertation. I believe my paper, that tiny shred of outside affirmation, had meant a great deal to him, in the state he was then in. His imagination had taken hold of that shred and made it into something greater than it was, an elaborate fantasy of validation that had probably turned inappropriately sexual even before I inadvertently left that damn window open on Tanya’s computer. All of which is to say that, seven months after Anthony’s trip to Peoria, as he lugged his office suite into this dayroom, I was willing to allow that an overwhelming sense of existential failure had been at least partly responsible for his tragic stupidity with Tanya, and to consider that Anthony might be simply a neurotic, self-imploding buffoon rather than the calculating monster I had previously imagined.

  But the reason Sanjana got the office space—to get back to our story—and Anthony this louder, more open, more distracting space to work in (not that anyone should care about their work spaces, but the reason matters for what happened next) was because unlike Anthony, she had already been hired, on the strength of her published papers, into a tenure-track faculty position with significant professional responsibilities, not least the expectation that within six years she would revise and publish her own dissertation as a book. Since her relatively stable and lucrative career was more important to their future than Anthony’s nonexistent career, therefore her book’s completion was a greater priority, a fact that lost him not only his office space but soon quite a lot more when they discovered—here it is!—that there was a baby on the way. A son. And then they had him, their son. At which point Anthony, as “primary caregiver,” lost whatever autonomy he had managed to save for himself, swallowed whole by this lovely, needy child.

  I had forgotten how that happens. I’d forgotten so much about those early years of watching a child grow, the lengthening, the blossoming. I’d forgotten—or else the memories had simply stretched so thin over the years, over the incredible distance from then to now, that I had come to doubt them, the memories, since surely whatever survived was at least partially false or fabricated, half-imagined or mixed up with images from elsewhere, from other people’s lives or from characters on television. So when the boy arrived, he was in some ways familiar to me, to my memories of Samuel, but in other ways startlingly new. New to the world but to me as well, and to Anthony, of course, to their marriage, to the apartment, everything.

  Now into the basement storage space went Anthony’s office things, and into this dayroom came all sorts of colorful squeezies, plush stuffies, and battery-operated swingies and spinnies. Suddenly, this was a sunny, happy space. A space of shapes and colors, oversized numbers and letters, paper mobiles, crocheted rainbows, and endless gurgles, giggles, screams, and squeaks. Also diapers, with a clever sort of air-lock trash can for disposing of them. On the windows hung sticky flowers of rubbery gel, on the floor a shaggy rug (sky blue), and every remaining inch of unoccupied space was smothered in soft cushions. All of which made me feel—how? I reminded myself I’d been down this road before, this road and many others. That for decades I’d suffered for my affections and finally had fortified myself with an impenetrable apathy. But none of it made any difference. Face-to-face with the boy, the son, I was ambushed by optimism, and—

  On second thought, I am not going to tell this story after all. These past years, this most recent regurgitation of joys and disappointments. I am sorry to break it off, but more sorry to have started it.

  I will tell you instead about the television of today, though in all likelihood you watch as much as I do. I will finish television’s story, which is a large part of Anthony’s life anyway, just as it was of mine, and which deserves its own ending, as don’t we all.

  William Shatner now appears in a sitcom based upon a Twitter feed, as well as in commercials for a website that searches other websites for travel bargains. On any given day, I might encounter him on various channels as a young man being Captain Kirk, a little older as T. J. Hooker, older still as that lawyer on Boston Legal, and finally these various internet-related roles that old age has arranged for him. Sometimes I imagine him—the actor, William Shatner—afraid to turn on his television (or switch on his smartphone or iPad or whatever screened device is networked into whatever content-sourcing telecommunications package he subscribes to) for fear that he will suddenly be faced with his life in its entirety, playing and replaying its odd trajectory forever, an experience he was perhaps once excited to discover but has long since grown tired of, or rueful of, tired and rueful being the only emotions
I can imagine for him. After which I wonder why everyone in the world is not afraid of their own screens for this very same reason. Because even if they do not see themselves, still, how could they not see themselves? How they’ve spent their time, how they continue to spend it, this shockingly large chunk of what their clocked hours amount to.

  Or should I talk instead about today’s programs, which are, as usual, both better and worse than ever? Game shows that insult their audience with the transparency of their greed. Reality shows now the norm rather than the exception, as if television during my most recent absence settled upon its own worst self, its least attractive habits, deciding at last and forever that everyone’s got talent, that every race is amazing, every makeover extreme, that everyone should marry a millionaire, and even the most forgettable celebrities will never be allowed to stop dancing. It is a lifeless world; if not dead, at least lifeless. While on the other side, the “quality” side, the flourishing of nonnetwork television has meant that many programs have gotten exceedingly good, for those who can afford them. The Netflix programs, the Amazon and HBO programs. Well, you know.

  So perhaps I should proclaim, instead, how television is dead in another way, how it has split not just into evermore individualized programming segregated by race, class, and gender, but also onto countless unshared screens, its last source of common ground now buried under ever-growing piles of rarely recycled electronic devices? How television nonetheless lives on, a programmable cybernetic steroid-carcass of the magical window I once loved, yet another victim of this world’s inexhaustible capacity for exhausting itself. Shall I mention how, perversely, in its living death, I find television even more relatable than before? How television seems to want to be done with itself as much as I do? Or less obviously, that I believe everyone else feels the same way, since the very best program on television today (The Walking Dead, a wonderful zombie-apocalypse program heading into its sixth season) is essentially a postapocalyptic fantasy about starting over, where the isolating, distracting, depressive media-soaked world that humans currently inhabit is swept away and replaced by a world in which the constant battle for mere survival (against zombies and other people) creates true fellow feeling and a daily life in which everything matters, where there is no place for boredom or distraction and every moment is lived in the sheerness of the present? Shall I point out the absurd irony that this simpler-seeming, more fully lived-in universe is accessible only through a screen, or that this fantasy about the destruction of the media-saturated world is one of the most-watched programs in television history?