Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  By the third week, even the grandparents had grown restless. The days collected in a formless, dissatisfying pile, and tempers were running short. It was then that Anthony’s in-laws began asking him, casually at first, as if simply interested, then more aggressively, as his answers became increasingly vague, what he was working on, or “up to,” and in particular they asked about his book. Sanjana had mentioned it: that he had completed a book last summer but placed it in a drawer; that it had never come back out of the drawer in the subsequent months; that it had long since stopped being a topic of conversation between them. And since then, the in-laws admitted, they could not help wondering about this book—as well as, more generally, about his lack of a career or any discernible professional prospects? All of which irritated Anthony, of course, but gave me, Samuel Johnson, a perverse sort of thrill, having myself spent a fair amount of the previous year angrily wondering why my book was in a drawer, why Anthony had made no effort to publish it, its possible publication (I had decided after the fact) being the real reason I’d written it, since publishing this book was my best remaining chance of ever reaching my son. We would publish it and put it into the world, and there was a narrow but not nonexistent chance that my son would read it . . . Thus the fact that it remained inexplicably in a drawer had been a source of real irritation.

  But it was in the midst of one of his in-laws’ passive-aggressive interrogations, midway through the visit’s third week, that Anthony blurted out a request to borrow one of their cars. He wished, he said, to drive to northern central Pennsylvania, where he hoped “to do research” for the book they kept asking about, which was set in that area, and which he had apparently decided to pretend he was still working on, though I’m sure everyone involved suspected his real motive was simply to escape them for the day. Certainly I thought as much. I assumed he would drive to Baltimore, or even Philadelphia, and sit in a bar or a movie theater.

  But for once I was wrong about Anthony (it is possible I have been wrong about him on other occasions as well), and that night, when he logged on to his laptop and “Google Mapped” Unityville, PA (he even “Google Earthed” it, although there is very little online to see: there is an aerial view, but the “street view” sets you down on PA 42, where you can click yourself forward past a shack-like fire station and a few other lonely structures, but you cannot move off of this larger road to see the actual town)—that night, that is, I found myself facing the strangest, most unexpected possibility, a possibility so improbable it took me until morning to fully accept it—until Anthony had risen early and made his coffee while the others were sleeping; until he’d climbed into their hybrid car and stowed his travel mug in the cup holder, his map on the passenger seat. This is happening, I then said to myself. And the next moment, we were off: on a three-hour-and-forty-two-minute drive north, in a car that made so little noise I could hardly believe it was moving, in a mood so ecstatically happy I could hardly believe it was mine.

  On the road, the time passed quickly—or rather, at first it did not pass at all; there was no time, no passing, only a blur of expectation. It was as we approached Harrisburg that my attention began to anchor itself, as we encountered places I had previously been. Now the universe began expanding in all directions, forward over the asphalt, backwards across the fifty—fifty!—years I had been gone . . . Here was the spot, just south of Harrisburg, where once at sunrise, Henry Nelson had turned north onto Route 11 . . . Here was that small-city skyline, the Susquehanna wide and slow, and low mountains sliced short for the highway to roll through . . . Farther along, the tiny two-story where Lillian had lived, across from where Henry had died . . . Up ahead—up ahead the bend where, so long ago, many decades ago, a crazed long-haired man, in whose ranting, raving cranium my dear wife and I may or may not have been reunited for a fleeting moment without my even realizing it, had steered his truck into the river, and I had awoken in an airplane flying away from my son, my accursed “adventure” begun . . . Yes, it was as if my entire history was unfolding here, the history of my death recounting itself on the road back to my life, to the place I had lived, where my son might still—oh portentous road! One that had caused me great anxiety on previous occasions, but this time I could be still and watch it all pass, this time I could forego panic and doubt, because this time I was only a passenger. For once, being a passenger was the very best thing! I could sit back and know there was nothing I could do. That whatever might go wrong was out of my control. That because it was out of my control, it might go right for once . . . I was beyond excitement, beyond anticipation. I mean I was literally beyond these feelings. I did not feel them. I felt only calm. I felt only things I had never felt before, had longed for but never felt: that Fate did not hate me, that I would not make a mistake, that I might soon see my son.

  And it occurred to me then, in that heady three-hour-and-forty-two-minute moment, when my thoughts were many and scattered but not a single one lost from me, for I contained all of those thoughts and many others, and saw all things clearly as I had managed to only once or twice before: on that first night in Pittsburgh with Orson, sitting on the curb by the newspaper box under the dark buildings, and then later on Tanya’s trip to Tampa, lying on the ventilation grate under the stars behind the Waffle House, just those two moments and now . . . It struck me, that is, as rather funny, that despite all those years of trying everything possible to get back to Samuel, when having a goal and moving toward it was the only hope I’d held out, in the end all that effort had been worthless, really no help at all. And foolish! How foolish to imagine “returning” in a world that is constantly moving on? How foolish to attempt “making progress” when reality just keeps repeating itself? At which point I concluded—in good spirits, I felt quite whimsical thinking all of this—I concluded that my own existence had never been a matter of either progressing or returning, of moving forward or circling back, but that both had been present to precisely the degree required to make neither one useful to me. Whenever I might move forward, Fate had turned me back about. Whenever I was on the verge of returning, Fate chose that moment to move me on again. It was, when looked at from an outside perspective, fairly comic! But only because in the end—of many journeys, of many lifetimes, and of this particular three hours and forty-two minutes in the car—in the end “progress” and “return” had at last, in earnest, come together, for the sign up ahead said Unityville, and the next thing I knew, I was home.

  Fifty years since I had last set foot in that place. Shall I list again the lives I had known in that time, the routes I had traveled, to give you a sense of how far away I felt, how great the distance of time seemed as we turned onto Unityville’s now-paved street and parked not twenty feet from the spot where Abram had stood all those years before, on his horse-drawn buggy with the television in back? By the church where I’d spent so much of my youth? Where Emily and I had been married, where we’d set out together on what might have been our lives? To be there again, to look down the line of houses. I was not overwhelmed. It felt perfectly natural. I’d arrived.

  As for Anthony, I think he was already, at that point, a bit perplexed. He had of course assumed that Unityville would look nothing like the town he believed he had pulled single-handedly out of his imagination. Yet here it stood, not the same, but not so different. Potentially, a later version of the same. He walked from one end of the town to the other. He had brought along a notebook and pen, as if he planned to take notes on the place, notes whose only possible use would be to make changes to my book, and he carried these “at the ready” as he walked. No one else was on the street just then, yet I imagine he felt conspicuous, if not because he was an outsider, then because of the ways he was, eerily, an insider—as if he had once lived in this town in a dream, so well had he managed to describe it. Thus confounded, he was naturally drawn to the one building that least fit my description, the one most likely to discredit his “imagination,” a gas station/store at the far end of town that had not been
there in my time, but had clearly been there for quite a while since.

  It was the sort with windows all across the front under a hard-plastic awning, and inside, fluorescent lighting and snacks in aisles. It was a bit of a muddle of new and old fashions, at once too modern for Unityville (I thought) and too antiquated for a gas station/store (they’ve gotten quite flashy and elaborate), although probably I was the only person in the world for whom it would seem odd or out of place at all. The bell on the door was a real bell with a clink-clanky ring, not that elevator sound the electronic bells make, and there was a pickle barrel by the cash register, and maps and Mad Libs and yo-yos in plastic packaging. There were mirrors so you could see every aisle of the place, and lottery tickets and an ATM. It was a place of considerable curiosity to me, but finally it was just a gas station/store.

  The woman at the register looked to be in her thirties, with a brown ponytail and denim shirt. She was too young for me to have known her. Anthony loitered a little, then went up with a bag of mini pretzels.

  “Just the pretzels?”

  “Yes, thanks.” And he paid. Then he said: “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Sure. Shoot.” She was very friendly.

  “Great.” Here Anthony flipped open his notebook, which surprised the friendly woman and made her suddenly less friendly-seeming. “This town,” he said, “it’s been here a long time?”

  “The town? Hundred years or so.” She thought. “Maybe less. Maybe more. I think less.” She made a face as if flummoxed, a “flummoxed” face. “I guess I don’t really know.”

  “But you grew up here?”

  “These are odd questions,” she replied. She was right, of course. Even I could not figure out what Anthony thought he was up to. “When you asked to ask questions, I thought you meant like how-do-I-get-to-the-highway type questions.”

  “Right, sorry.” He made a little laugh, and looked at his notebook, and closed it. “I’m writing a book about this area,” he said more naturally. “Or part of it is set in this general area, but a long time ago. So I’m just up here trying to get a better sense of the place. There’s not much about it online.”

  “Well, that surprises me not at all,” said the woman, friendly again.

  I decided that I liked this woman, how prudently she had questioned Anthony’s nosiness, yet how quickly she was willing to be friendly again. It made me happy to like her, happy and a little bit proud: we were from the same hometown!

  “We have internet,” she went on, “but I can’t imagine why anybody would look us up.”

  “Well, if they do, they aren’t finding much!” He was a little awkward, Anthony, but all in all, he was doing better than I would have done.

  “What’s there to find?” she said. “I guess there’s the fire station . . .”

  “I saw that on the way in.”

  “There’s restaurants and bars over in Hughesville. Williamsport’s not far.”

  “Oh, I’m not really looking for restaurants or anything like that.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  Anthony paused, probably wondering that himself. “Just getting a sense of the place. The story of the place. I suppose if you have internet, you must also have television?”

  The woman laughed, then Anthony as well.

  “Right, of course you do,” he went on. “It’s just that I’d read somewhere this town was originally founded as a sort of religious community, without television or phones or things.”

  “Well, that’s true, but that’s a long time ago. I think things changed a lot in the early seventies, when they paved 42 and started calling it the ‘Wilkes-Barre-Williamsport Corridor.’ It’s really before my time . . . You could talk to Sam? He grew up back then. Plus he holds the undisputed title for Unityville’s most interesting life story. Not that there’s much competition, I admit. He’s just down the other end of the street at the post office. Sam Johnson.”

  “Sam . . .?”

  Have I mentioned that it was a lovely day? Not that it matters, since regardless of the weather I would have found it to be the most perfect day in the history of the universe. A day with nice big clouds—I’ve always preferred a few pillowy cumulous clouds—and even though I could not smell, still as we started out across and down the street, the memory of Unityville’s smell was in my thoughts, the woody crispness and whiffs of manure. As a boy I had walked up and down this street as often as I had done any other single thing. Some days I would spend an entire afternoon walking up and down it, although I never thought of it as walking, in fact I probably did not think about it much at all. Certainly I never imagined myself going somewhere along the length of this street. Certainly I never had the feeling that when I reached the other end, I would arrive at a destination, let alone the destination, the culmination of decades of effort, the single moment that every one of the past fifty years’ worth of moments had aspired to. And how odd, I thought—still walking—how odd to discover, after everything, that in the end my story was not about a person stuck with himself and going nowhere forever, but instead about someone who had a goal and actually achieved it? Who faced some rather epically unheard-of obstacles and floundered in some truly spectacular ways, and who even frankly lost sight of his goal more than a few times, and so could just as easily have ended badly. But who nonetheless succeeded—he succeeded—and not by Fate but by his own hand, if not precisely by his own design (for it was my writing this book that had brought us here, even if that had not been my intention in writing it). Until finally time and space arrived at here and now: here was the post office, and inside, my son.

  To say I did not at first recognize him would be preposterous, but in a sense also true. The post office—a small tan room with a countertop, with a single chair out front and with boxes stacked behind the counter—occupied the front of a house, and there was no one else there, so no one else he could be. Of course I knew he would no longer look four years old—he was fifty-five—but I suppose I did not expect him to be quite so . . . heavy. Not that I was disappointed—not at all!—I am simply describing my first thought. And I am describing it primarily because, more than anything, this thought was a revelation about myself, a revelation that took place in an eyeblink yet in that instant completely remade five decades of my self-image: it had never occurred to me that, had I lived, I would have gotten fat. My father was a large man, my mother heavyset; yet in my mind I had always kept my youthful waistline. It did not matter—I am not saying that any of this mattered. And of course the only reason it was my first thought upon entering the post office was because all my other thoughts were so much larger, so much more complicated and overwhelming, and this thought, being small and obvious, was all that my mind could manage.

  “I’m looking for Sam Johnson?” said Anthony.

  “You found him!” He was very friendly, immediately friendly, my son.

  “You’re Samuel Johnson.”

  “I am.”

  Though undoubtedly shaken by the preponderance of coincidence, I must say Anthony played all of this out with surprising aplomb. I suspect that even at this point he did not want to believe the increasingly unavoidable facts of his own situation. He introduced himself. He gave his spiel—that he was working on a book about the area, or with part of it set in this area, and how the woman at the gas station had sent him over here—and Samuel, who had a natural ease about him, the sort of person about whom you think, when you meet him, that he has never known an inch of anger or an ounce of ill will, said that of course he would be happy to help.

  “And your parents?”

  “Both dead. I was raised by my grandparents.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, it was a long time ago. My mother died giving birth to me, and my father when I was four. That’s probably the story Lauren was talking about—the woman at the gas station. It was back in the sixties, so the fact that people still talk about it gives you an idea of how little happens around here. It’
s sort of a local legend.”

  “I guess I would like to hear that story, if you don’t mind.”

  Out again came the damn notebook.

  Then Samuel, who’d been leaning toward us on the counter, straightened up. “Sure. Well.” He took a moment. “There was a vagrant roaming around the woods up here around dusk. I think of him as a vagrant, though the truth is nobody ever found out much about him, who he was or what he was doing. But for some reason he ended up outside our house. We lived in a small house my father’d built when he and my mother were married. It was just a short walk from town but out in the woods, secluded. Anyway, I must have been playing outside that night, I don’t actually remember any of it, but I understood it all enough at the time to be able to tell people in town what had happened, and then later, when I was older, they told it all back to me. So even though I was there, I only really know this story as a story. But I was small and playing outside the house, around dusk, and this vagrant came along and grabbed me and I guess he had a gun. I must have yelled, and my father ran out of the house and straight at the vagrant. He wrested the gun right out of this man’s hand, and got me free, and made the man run off and never come back. But once the man was gone I saw my father’d been shot. I ran to town but he was dead before anybody got back to him. The vagrant showed up the next day drowned in the Susquehanna. He had a truck, which suggests he wasn’t really a vagrant exactly, in fact the oddness of everything is probably why it became a local legend, since it’s not like my family’s the only one something bad ever happened to. Everybody has their theories about it, each one as crazy as the others. I was raised by my mother’s parents. They died some years ago as well. Now I live over in Hughesville. Are you going to write any of this down?”