by Martin Riker
I thought I’d been given a gift. A second chance to witness the miracle of childhood, but minus the responsibility, like a congenial grandpa (into my seventies, by then) at last able to pay a new small life the undivided attention it deserves. It hadn’t occurred to me—why, I have no idea—that instead of a “second chance” I would simply relive the first one, listening to or peripherally watching this wonderful little person sit aimless for hours before blocks and stuffies and worse, much worse—television programs!—while his “primary caregiver,” propped before an iPad, repeats my failures of fifty years earlier, the restlessness and distraction, the fleeing to screens when life is the thing right in front of you.
I thought—well, I don’t know what I really thought, only what I allowed myself to hope, despite a vast preponderance of evidence, against Anthony but against this “brave new world” as well. For of course it is no longer “television” but “screen time,” hydra-headed. It is the internet, it is binge-watching, it is YouTube channels, it is Google News: technologies I never had to contend with, battles I was never forced to lose. On top of which, he has a goal—Anthony—or thinks he does, a book he is supposedly working on, which he can never find time to work on, or tells himself he can’t, too distracted by his son, too distracted by his son even to attend to his son. And this goal has given him a reason, a justification—I never had a justification—so that while his fathering is even worse than mine was, still his guilt is infuriatingly less, a fact that has filled me with hate on many occasions, such as right now, writing this, thinking about all this, allowing myself once more to be bothered by things I have no control over simply because the blatant failure and injustice of them is unstomachable, and the idea that I should be forced to stomach them is unstomachable, to stomach them still! But leaving open also the possibility that my anger and judgment are not entirely fair. That in looking back over the past years I see only the bad things, I leave out the good things—for surely I do, and in fact I would like to think I did something similar to myself, over the years, assigning myself guilt I did not actually deserve. Some I deserved, but not all of it. For in fact I was a good father (I would like to think), or certainly better than Anthony (no contest there!), and at the very least I can say his was a peaceful childhood, Samuel’s. There was never fighting in our little house, no marital discord, two parents better than one but when they constantly fight, how is that better? When one is too busy and the other too impatient, when one can’t stop telling the other what a lousy parent he is, and the other complains he never gets anything done, and the first says if he’s so worried about getting work done, why spend whatever free time he has on the fucking internet, and anyway they agreed on this plan—didn’t he agree to this plan? Sure he agreed, but he didn’t know he was agreeing to have his entire life sucked up as if through a vacuum cleaner, a galactic existential vacuum cleaner, and—and on it goes, in front of the boy, not in front of the boy, while I, Samuel Johnson, seethe with fury, at but also for them, the world, all these years on this planet and nothing any better and most of it quite a lot worse. Because nothing ever ends (my fatalistic side), nothing ends or even improves; no goals get reached, no hopes realized, no struggles pay off—except that some, of course, one has to admit, do. Some things end. What kinds of things? Childhoods end, and you never get them back. Marriages end, even if a few manage not to. Books end, people finish them—and that is what happened, how all of this finally changed. A little over a month ago, Sanjana finished her book.
They were in this very room when she announced it, the “happy” room, whose atmosphere had long since been soured by hours of negligent parenting but whose colorful fruit-flavored appearance had not changed. Anthony was showing the boy checkers, and she came in with a remarkable smile on her face, remarkable because their discord had come to such a head recently; things had gotten so bad between them that there had not been any pleasant feeling in a very long while.
“I’m done,” she said.
“What?” he said, with something like shock, perhaps thinking, as I immediately thought, that she was talking about their marriage.
“My book!” she said.
And then he didn’t know what to say. Probably it had never occurred to him that this day would actually arrive, and the impenetrable gloom they’d forged together would at some point be interrupted.
“You can work on your book!” she said.
Also possibly because he suspected, as I had all along, that his need to work on his book was just an excuse to feel bad for himself, since the fact was, he hadn’t gotten much work done on it even before their son was born; yet having turned his book into the reason for his suffering, the justification for his perpetual distraction and lousy parenting, now he would actually have to work on it.
“In fact,” she said, “I’ve been thinking of taking Junior here to my parents for a month. You get the entire apartment to yourself.”
“Oh,” Anthony began, “you don’t have to . . .”
“No worries!” said Sanjana. “I already bought tickets!”
Aha!
He faltered for a moment, taking all this in. Then he asked—“just to say”—if he shouldn’t perhaps come along? That before he “got to work” he should probably “clear his head”; that he didn’t want her parents to think he was avoiding them. But “Oh no, no,” said Sanjana—he should stay and work on his book.
And so it came to pass that one morning, just under a month ago, the exhausting, distracted existence Anthony loved to complain about but had nonetheless grown used to was at last brought to an end, and he found himself standing alone in the middle of the apartment, looking around.
He had just seen them off to the airport.
He was standing listening to an empty apartment, to noises out on the street.
He stepped into the dayroom, this room, still cluttered with his son’s stuff.
Well?
After a few minutes, he started doing things.
He cleared out all the toys and cushions and kids’ furniture, even the gel flowers from the windows. Even the rug. He carried a folding card table from the basement storage area—the wooden desk was too heavy—and set it up in the middle of the room. He moved a folding chair in from the kitchen, placed that at the folding table, and stood back to take stock of his accomplishments. He announced out loud that it was time to get to work.
Part of the reason it feels so stark, it now occurs to me, is the absence of the toys and things. If the room had been empty in the first place, probably it would not look so Spartan to me now.
Once he’d laid claim to this work space, he carried in and arranged, around the surface of the card table, a laptop, desk lamp, and printer, along with some books. He did not have the most recent draft of his dissertation in hard copy, so he printed that out and stacked the pages to the right of the laptop. He moved the lamp to just behind the laptop on the right and the book piles back to the card table’s left corner, thus clearing table space to the laptop’s left, where the dissertation pages would eventually be stacked as he moved through them. All of this took no more than twenty minutes, even with numerous small adjustments. After which he went online, looked up movie showtimes, and left for the rest of the day.
The following days, too, saw no work at all, but only an orgy of laziness, of morning movies and daytime drinking, of walks, naps, and masturbation. Pizza and arcade games, more movies, naps, and wandering between bars at night. Three and a half years of parental slogging required at least three days of unabated gluttony, is how I imagine he explained it to himself. When the gluttony ended, which was actually on the morning of the fifth rather than third day, he made a large pot of coffee and lay in bed reading his dissertation and slashing at its pages with a pen. He grew sullen, and later that afternoon walked along the lake. He spent the next few days sitting at his laptop in the dayroom, typing in restless, superficial changes that more often than not he changed back. On the fifth day of typing—so the tenth day
of his “writing month”—he left the apartment and simply walked around the city. He slept through half the day after, then for the next two days stayed in bed binge-watching programs on Netflix. A very unusual way to write a book! When he again returned to the dayroom, he began a file on his computer titled NEW THING—and I understood from this bizarre two-week time-waste that he had found his dissertation to be hopelessly bad, and had given up on it, but apparently not on himself—not yet!—which was why he was now starting, or trying to start, something new.
But the “something new” did not go well either—it did not go anywhere—and that same night found his drunken head slouching toward the keyboard. He occasionally typed some words that he immediately deleted, then after a while began deleting for its own sake, simply pressing Delete on an empty document, Delete Delete, more drinking and deleting, until he was drunker than I had ever seen him, and his head landed with a thud on the keyboard, spelling ghrrgtvhfgdsxjkkjpkhp. And this verbless nonword stood alone on his screen, a testament to the absurdity and purposelessness of his life, or at least the absurdity and purposelessness of his previous two weeks, until finally I, Samuel Johnson—having waited through all this, the previous two weeks but also the years before, and having become by now unsalvageably disgusted—stepped in, sat up, and clicked New.
Then I typed: Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return.
Then: for my wife and son.
Then: 1.
I continued typing, and I suppose the rest is self-explanatory.
Except for the part where Anthony woke the next day and read my chapter 1, and of course he assumed he had written it. Of course he assumed that, in a drunken fit of inspiration, he had invented the tiny town of Unityville out of nothing, thus at long last—and much to his own surprise!—freeing his true creative genius from the heady cage of subconscious in which it had so long been trapped.
Except also for the part where he sat down again the next night, but insufficiently drunk, apparently believing the previous night had permanently unlocked his creative powers and that now that “his” book was under way, he could soberly churn out chapter after chapter—only to find that his muse refused to visit him. I will not bother to describe the many inferior pages he wrote that night, the ludicrous “fiction” he tried attaching to my own sober account of my struggles. I will spare you how embarrassed he was the following day to reread what he had written; how sensibly he responded by again getting blisteringly drunk; and how quickly I deleted his nonsense the moment I was able to.
And he continued drinking, and I continued writing. Some chapters took longer than others and affected me in different ways. I learned some things about myself in the process, or was reminded of things I’d not thought about in a long time. But you already know all of this, because you’ve read it. You may not have been here with me as I wrote it, in the latter half of June 2015, in this residential neighborhood of uptown Chicago. You may not know the feeling of sitting in this small room of dark windows, listening to ambient insects and occasional cars and the soft chatter of my typing. You may be existentially restricted to merely imagining this moment with me, never able to share it in any more meaningful way—yet for all of that, you are still closer than Anthony, who, though present in body, will never accept the reality of his own life.
He would need to admit that he is not a repressed novelist whose mind has taken flight via alcohol to invent the most inexplicably detailed fictions, but is just the more or less average person he deep down knows himself to be. He would need to accept that this book is not a fiction but a true account, one written by a dead man to whom his only tie is proximity. All of which is sufficiently outlandish to begin with, and since it could only lead him to despair, there is simply no reason at all for his conscious mind to credit it. Even this paragraph he will assume he wrote himself.
Do I care?
Why would I care?
There’s no good reason.
Meanwhile, it is now two days before Sanjana and their son return from Bethesda, and I have arrived at the end of my story. It suddenly occurs to me that the reason I have written it, the actual reason all along, was to end it, to watch my story at last come to an end. For that is how stories work, isn’t it? Things happen, and then everything wraps up. Perhaps in writing this book, some part of me imagined I was creating the necessity for my actual situation to change, if only because my story required it? That I, like this book, would at last have to come to an end?
A dayroom after dark is really a night room. It could as easily be named that, or as logically, if you look at its situation overall. Sitting here, I’m surrounded by darkness, a very large darkness, a sea of darkness that starts at the windows and stretches outward in all directions to points unknown, horizons unexplored, oblivions unexhausted. A dayroom at night is like a small boat you’re floating in, with just a chair, a table, a few other things—alone but not necessarily lonely, or not lonely at all but simply adrift, with no idea where you are going. Only when the sun comes up the following day will you find out where you went.
I guess I do not really know why I wrote this book. What I hoped to accomplish. I know the various reasons I have given myself, but having now arrived at its end, none of them ring true; nor have I experienced the satisfaction I thought finishing might bring. I am wondering whether, when all is said and done, I simply had nothing better to do.
Sometimes when I watch Anthony and his family on one of their better days, when they are spending time together, being caring and considerate, and when their little boy is being funny—in such moments the world appears to me hopeful, or at least possible, a place of possibility.
Other times, for example while staring into the computer screen at the endlessly reloading (or refreshing, a word that in the age of the internet has taken on something like the opposite of its original meaning) stream of harrowing world events, I find myself unable to see anything but calamity, a civilization bent on destroying itself and almost certain to succeed. In fact it seems obvious, in such moments, that the horrific catastrophic end will be arriving any moment now.
But most often I do not feel either of those ways. Most often I feel as I do right now. Not that there is still hope left, nor that it will all soon come to an end, but rather that all of this—the entire world, but starting with me!—ought to have been over a long time ago.
12.
THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME I WRITE IN THIS BOOK AND I WILL SAY NOW EVERYTHING I HAVE TO SAY. THIS OPPORTUNITY IS OFFERED IN GOOD FAITH AND WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IN THE MEANTIME NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN TO THE PERSON WRITING THIS, AND THAT AFTER THIS LAST TIME, LIFE WILL GO BACK TO NORMAL FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED.
The most extraordinary thing has happened! I do not even know where to begin.
Just over a year has passed since I ended the previous chapter—a perfectly fine year, in most ways. Sanjana and their son returned from Maryland to find Anthony in good spirits, neither overly anxious nor overly excited, nor overly anything else, but a calmer, more personable self than the one they’d left a month earlier. In the days and weeks that followed, too, his attitude only improved, and eventually it was simply accepted, without anyone having said a word, that one way or another Anthony had shaken off the restlessness poisoning his soul, and had embraced his role as a father and husband and as a reasonable human being. The virtual and televisual worlds remained a temptation and distraction, but the level of stress it brought upon his marriage was a fraction of what it had been. And he re-devoted himself to his son, who over the months that followed began to show himself an exceedingly clever little boy—he is almost five now—already good with math and reading, very curious and interested in practically every subject that crosses his path. In fact the boy has developed a certain intellectual bossiness, his pride in his big-young-man knowledge causing him to be at times unreasonably insistent, which I have tended to find cute rather than off-putting. And he is so often in good humor—the boy—that on those days when Anthony has summoned
the patience to participate in his increasingly elaborate fantasy games, they’ve invariably had a good time. Sanjana too, though very busy—back to the tenure track!—has managed to find more time for her family, and Anthony has continued to support her work. All told, it has been encouraging to watch, and given the timing, and how everything has played out, I can’t help but think I was at least partly responsible for these changes, because of the book I wrote and the lessons Anthony must have learned from it.
But none of that is the extraordinary thing I need to tell!
Six weeks ago, the family returned to Bethesda, Anthony along this time, Sanjana having decided she would like this visit to be an annual event. Not that it was very “eventful” even lasting a full month. Mostly they were there to give the grandparents time with their grandson. Indeed, Anthony and Sanjana treated their time there as an extended babysitting session, sitting by the pool, walking around the neighborhood, and spending whole afternoons in front of the largest, thinnest television screen I have ever seen, binge-watching foreign sporting events they’ve never watched otherwise and liberal comedy-news programs saved to the DVR, one program after another, until the daylight hours sagged all around them, and they felt nothing but bad about themselves.