by Martin Riker
“Oh, I . . . This is just something I brought. I’m not even sure why. That’s quite a story, though. You have a family of your own now?”
If there is a particular moment I would like to thank Anthony for, it is this one. I can imagine how discombobulating all of this was for him, yet in the midst of it, he had the presence of mind to ask meaningful questions, substantive questions, the sort of questions I myself would have asked and wanted to know the answers to.
“No,” said Samuel, “I never did that.”
“So, no family . . .” He put a check mark in his notebook, which just looked ridiculous. “It must have been hard growing up without parents.”
“I don’t know. What’s hard? My grandparents were good people. And my father—I never really knew him. It’s sort of neat that he’s a hero, though.”
“He was a hero?”
“He died saving my life.”
Reader, I was overcome with emotion when I heard these words, coming so suddenly, as they did, on the tail end of hearing, from his own mouth, my son’s account of losing me. I am overcome again as I write these words now. You cannot imagine what it meant to me, hearing this from my son. Or perhaps, having read this book, you can, in fact, imagine it. I have no words with which to comment on it, however, no words but those words themselves. And since I am not yet ready to move on from those words and would like to linger on them just a moment longer, perhaps I will simply type them a second time:
“It’s sort of neat that he’s a hero, though.”
“He was a hero?”
“He died saving my life.”
(!)
Anthony then asked my son if he had any memories of me at all. It could be that he was hoping Samuel would say something to run contrary to my account, something that would allow him to hold on to his delusions. But I prefer to think the opposite, that in fact he was convinced of me by then, and while he had perhaps not yet fully come to terms with the fact of my existence (as evidenced by the emotional breakdown he suffered in the car on the way back to Bethesda), still some part of him was thoughtful enough in that moment to seek out every bit of solace this meeting with my son could provide me. But Samuel did not have any memories of his own, only the small things his grandparents had told him. He shared what he could share, then asked Anthony about the book he was working on. Anthony replied vaguely—set in the area, a while ago, and so on—after which Samuel asked if he thought he might use his, Samuel’s, story, and Anthony (who, of course, had already “used” Samuel’s story) said he didn’t know, but that he might, and would that be O.K.? Samuel said “Sure,” and that either way, he’d love to read the book when it was done. All told, they spoke for only thirty or forty minutes, and within moments of leaving the post office, we were back on the road.
He drove for perhaps an hour before he stopped. To be honest I was not paying much attention. I had seen Samuel. He seemed healthy, even happy, certainly happier than most. I had not felt the need to stay in Unityville any longer; in fact, once we left the post office, I rather felt that I did not wish to stay. I had been thinking, there in the car, about how strange a thing a goal is, how wonderful and at the same time unsettling it is to see a goal accomplished. Not disappointing, simply strange. I felt like a ball being inflated and deflated at the same time in equal proportions, thus remaining exactly the same size, seemingly unchanged, but in reality full of change and motion. But this thought was interrupted as Anthony pulled into the parking lot of an Amish pie store along Route 11 and turned the rearview mirror in order to see himself, and said:
“I don’t know if I’m crazy or what is going on here. I don’t think I’m crazy because I don’t feel crazy in any other way, and nobody around me seems to think I’m crazy, although obviously I have done some bad and stupid things. But I’m going to say this and it’s the only thing I’m going to say. I hope you got what you wanted. I mean I really do, I hope you did. But that’s done now. I have a family, my own wife and son who rely on me. Despite what you seem to think, I am totally fucking cognizant about my responsibilities to them, and I need to be taking care of myself, so I can take care of them. I can’t be having ‘accidents’ while I’m driving, or whatever. I can’t be wandering into bars or waking up in the back of a van in the middle of nowhere. I hope that’s clear because from here on out I am going to be one sober motherfucker and I am not going to speak to myself in a fucking mirror like this ever again.”
Since then, he’s been true to his word. In the two weeks since we returned from Bethesda, he’s not drunk any alcohol. He’s eaten better and even tried to jog. He continues to be a good father and husband, and while I do not wish to take credit I do not deserve, still I cannot help but feel that for once—for once!—I have been a positive influence on someone.
Then suddenly this evening, after the family had gone to bed, he got up again, restless. He went into the dayroom with his laptop, two bottles of whiskey, and quite a lot of beer. The dayroom has long since been converted back into a playroom, so he sat on a big cushion in the semidark and started drinking. For a moment I felt disappointed in him, that he was failing in his vow to his family, but eventually he unfolded his laptop, opened the document that contains my book, scrolled to the last page, and typed out the words in all caps that began this final chapter: THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME I WRITE IN THIS BOOK . . . and I understood then that he was allowing me this opportunity, which I have tried to put to good use.
It is still dark outside, though morning. There is still time before his family wakes up, still whiskey in the bottle, nor do I feel as if I’m nearing an end, but quite the opposite: I am feeling extraordinarily present! Giddy, in fact.
I would like to thank Anthony for his generosity and trust, and for this opportunity, which as he can see I did not use to his detriment. I would like to assure him that I do not hold a low opinion of him—and of course I myself am hardly above reproach. But truly I am nothing but grateful, and if he finds himself celebrating a bit too heartily on some future occasion, he should not fear me or what I might do. In fact, I would hope for the opposite, that he could find some comfort in the knowledge that I am here, not spying on him, not judging or conspiring against him, but simply witnessing, bearing witness. Surely that knowledge could be a comfort to someone, and to Anthony in particular: to know that however anonymous his life might sometimes seem, and however impossible it proves for even his family to know him, still, he is never entirely alone. There is always at least Samuel Johnson.
That will be my part of our bargain.
For his part, I trust that when this book is finally done, which is any moment now, but beyond that, in the days that follow, I trust that he will act on the good faith we have established between us and will send a copy to my son. He needn’t publish it to the world, and of course I understand that there are things here he might prefer others not see. But send it to my son, do that much, so that someday soon Samuel will be able to read it and learn everything these pages have to teach, or rather to tell (I won’t start pretending there has been “teaching” involved!).
And since I know in my heart that all this will occur, therefore now, in the final moment, I will stop referring to “you” or “Reader” or whatever I have called the person holding this book for the past however many pages, when I believed there was little chance that you would actually be my son. I will speak at last directly to the only reader I have ever truly cared to reach to say that these pages, then, are my account of how it happened, the manner in which everything went wrong. This is where I have been all the time you have walked in the world, and these are the experiences I have had—though not, of course, the ones I have wanted. They are all I have to share, and I do not know what good they will do you, in fact they may very well tarnish the heroic image you seem to have formed. But please know from the fact of these pages, from the great effort that went into crafting them, know from this that you are loved.
Acknowledgments
This book was
first conceived as a retelling of Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. Along the way this book went in some very different directions, but it still owes a great debt to Bird’s wonderful novel.
Thanks to Bradford Morrow for excerpting the first two chapters in Conjunctions.
Thanks to Josh, Laird, Ben, Kate, all the Coffee House folks, and, always, Danielle.
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MARTIN RIKER grew up in central Pennsylvania. He worked as a musician for most of his twenties, worked in nonprofit literary publishing for most of his thirties, and has spent the first half of his forties teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2010, he and his wife, Danielle Dutton, cofounded the feminist press Dorothy, a Publishing Project. His fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, London Review of Books, the Baffler, and Conjunctions. This is his first novel.
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