Murphy’s Lore
by Mazin Saleem
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 2
Our movie nights had once been ways to extend our time spooning like we did in bed. She noticed though that the rhythm of my chest was much faster than her back’s. She asked if I was okay, rubbing my leg pre-emptively. I managed to claim I was fine while transfixed by the sight of a young Murphy in cowboy hat sat beside his fellow TV-addict of a mother. By the point Wonka was yelling the Latin subclauses of their non-disclosure agreement, I was shivering.
Carol went to get me a blanket, but I followed her upstairs, overtook, then swooned to a static-crackling duvet which looked as though it wouldn’t be there to catch me. She rubbed my back till I told her to stop asking me what was wrong.
The cage, it had started to drop. There could be no more work-shy lie-ins. George and Louis’ reaction at breakfast was to give me ‘funny looks’. Wish I could laugh. I resented them for not asking what was the matter as much as I’d have resented them for bringing it up. My bedroom became a gallery of printouts and showbiz mags. In my office, on overtime, I’d sit in the open-plan dark, yawning, crying and periodically refreshing Eddie Murphy’s IMDb page. Then one night, as my droopy eyelids almost hid it again, something changed.
It took less than a second. It was without the feeling of movement and with the sound of a radio scanning through stations: different offices scrolling around me, fewer desks, more desk plants, but then a hospital ward, a balcony-view from an icy height, the sea at dawn, in different tones and shades, like scrolling through microfilm, till the fizzing went and my office returned.
How I came crawling back! To bed, under the covers, where I foetal-positioned and refused all conversation. I did though take my phone with me, and in that screen-lit cave learnt Murphy had now won an Oscar. Bizarre times indeed, for this variation was qualitatively different to those previous: what deeper changes in the culture would there have to have been for Eddie Murphy to play the shrink who tells good Will Hunting it was not his fault, not his fault? Then whose fault is it? Whatever changes those were, they remained in place...
An hour passed. Another hour. I sat up under the covers and let them slip down: reality showed a little clearer, more sensible, like an old TV that’d been slapped. The scrolling flash in my office had been climactic, the last thunderclap of a departing cyclone. A whole weekend passed of adrenaline nausea, yet there wasn’t any further sign of him or his monstrous variations.
No reset button had been pushed exactly or so it seemed. But that was not for me to decide. All I had to decide was what to do with the mess that had been left to me.
“Carol? Everything’s fine.” Yanking open curtains, ripping filmographies from the wall. “All this stuff is coming down. It’s all going to be like it was.”
But she’d already left for work without saying goodbye.
On that last movie night of ours she had waited for my shivering to stop to try for a goodnight kiss. But I’d rolled her off; she had to help me in a different fashion.
“For Pete’s sake, why should I know? He was in a few, wasn’t he?”
“In the ‘80s.”
“Then Beverly Hills P.I.”
“You mean Beverley Hills Cop.”
“P.I.”
“Cop.”
“P.I.!”
“Cop!”
Maybe I hoped she’d convince me with an Insolent Rabbit-style dialogue switch. Maybe I was just being cruel. She was the one who stopped the rally.
* * *
I think I’ve got smoke in my eye. The dumpster’s needed propping open wider. This must’ve made it glow, because someone out there, walking by while singing, stopped in her Journey just as the lyrics said not to.
She was coming nearer. What the hell did she think she’d found? Some gold? An elf? There was a wet gust as my dumpster flew open.
No torches or cold gloves or police dogs this time. Instead a woman so drunk she looked at once enraged and very sleepy. We took a moment to consider each other.
Then my voice cracking with a parody shriek: “Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?”
She shrieked back, and ran off, knocking the dumpster. It slammed shut and blew out my candles.
Fool.
But then, relighting in this cryptic space, I see the folds in the candle-wax: the icing piled at the base of the cake she made for our birthday.
I don’t happen on such similarities. My mind seeks them out. What a ghoulish, vain thing love is.
* * *
Calls from work grinding the bedside desk, exponential nagging from Carol: I reckoned I’d convalesced enough days and got up and dressed. I almost skipped down the spiral stairs to the minimart, taking money she’d lent me, thinking, Well, why shouldn’t I celebrate with champagne? Champagne and, and tubs of ice cream! It’s alarming how easy it is in moments of luck to forget the general spite of fate.
I was at the chiller cabinet baring my eyes to check a price sticker when the tub crackled louder and, for over a second, there scrolled before me: frost, snow, wire diagrams, square dances in huge halls, white pyramids, then vanilla ice cream. Slumping on the cold door, I looked down the aisle. With sickly fear, I looked at the bargain bin.
Of course Eddie Murphy was inside, doubled in a DVD double-pack. No longer a huckster guru in Holy Man but a singing monk in Brother Act and in Brother Act II — Kicking the Abbot.(Maestro, fade in sad piano: the Goldberg Variations.
Bedtime had to be cut to an unspooned minimum, regardless of how much it upset Carol and me. As for daytime. I’d hold open my eyes and pipette in water whenever they itched. Dozy fool, the storm hadn’t been passing at all! These ‘scrollings’ preceded each variation.
More than that: now I’d caught sight of them, they were showing me something else. Using Carol’s diary, I started a log... After 88 hours, I caught another.
Madness is disorder. There might be hints of looming structure, but they scatter like giggling children when your mind moves closer for a better look. But after the 88, the next scrolling came in 104 hours, then 120. Something else was happening here, ‘else’ being an understatement. Deceleration. I cracked the pattern then extrapolated back and forth. The next variation came bang on time.
A breakthrough at last! Beyond all hope. So did I go and tell Carol?
I opened a window to chat and got as far as swapping heys but then just sat there with it stupidly blinking.
Carol’s concern for me had of late gone through some troubling changes. She’d migrated her toiletries back to her flat. She’d even chastised me for giving her a compliment, staring at me, her tongue moving under her bottom lip, after she’d replied in front of our colleagues, “Why’s it always ‘you’re adorable’ but never ‘I adore you’?” I may have rolled my eyes, because she added, “You never get when I’m joking.”
We tried to see who could ignore the other longest; George and Louis would have to keep me company for now. At least they were still familiar. When I got home, they were watching an episode of Star Wars for the — possibly literal — hundredth time.
She had no cause to be like that with me. Never mind, watch the film.
I too had seen it, though I couldn’t remember much of it, or its pre- or sequels, instead remembered the cavernous local cinema where it had all begun, that whole saga. Even dubbed, its very first trailer had been portentous: ‘Somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now!’ Portentous but urgent.
Pointed, even.
To George and Louis I must have seemed naively shocked by the film’s paternity revelation, those howls of denial in fact proof of assent, confirming a live DNA test would be unnecessary for young Anakinovich, while repeating my own thoughts, as if I’d been psychic: ‘No! That’s not true! That’s impossible.’
We were not watching actors pretending to be star warriors. We were looking through a window into another world just as real as our own.
Even if the TV were not an actual window, then at least what was happening on-screen had to be a coincidentally accurate depiction of events from a long time ago and to come in galaxies much further away than previously thought. All that was needed for this to be true — ‘all’! — was the total manifestation of the possible.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true: every space opera, advert, sitcom, in-game cinematic, Saturday morning cartoon was somewhere happening right now; and worse, every trivial life story was a short story, a musical, an epic in verse, your personal melodrama the tragic opera you’d always thought it to be.
Canon endings degraded to alternate ones on otherworldly DVD extras. Somewhere the Empire not only struck back, it never ended, a message meant not for Philip K Dick but a complacent Rebel Alliance all along. Not even our most intimate words or thoughts were safe; lyrics and scripts from another dimension ripped them off, while in our chit-chat we inadvertently quoted lines from other, unfathomable pop cultures.
See, I hadn’t been going mad at all, and neither had I been witnessing a localised and ongoing warp in my own world. My mind was moving through a set of alternate worlds. Worlds where I was the constant and the variable was Eddie Murphy.
“Dear, did we watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the other month?”
“Charlie and the. Most of it.”
“And who played Mike TV?”
“My who?”
“One of the naughty kids. Obsessed with—”
“Some dude.”
“Not Eddie Murphy?”
“Who’s Eddie Murphy?”
Had Mrs Archimedes been so blithe? I insisted there was such a film star; she got angry back; we started shouting while George and Louis bulged eyes at each other. How many of our lowest moments are gossip or comedy material to our friends? When she asked what on Earth was the matter, I told her about my latest breakthrough.
“Well that’s just you to a tee: ‘I can’t be wrong’.”
“Carol, this is not like you.”
“’I must have just dropped into a parallel dimension! See, I can leap around the universe!’”
“You mean the multiverse.”
“Oh get lost.”
Why?
Why was multiplicity so meagre that a movie star was the variable? These worlds were otherwise so similar, down to the pencil that I’d snap and would remain snapped after each subsequent scrolling. Was it a trick then, or a test? Was Murphy a sinister agent patrolling pandimensionally, tormenting me because he knew I’d jumped over a line when, unlike him, I was not allowed to?
I had to find him and find out.
Carol had been right, Eddie Murphy wasn’t a film actor: now he was a retired baseball player. An auction on a signed bat led to a Facebook fan-page known in the past as ‘a creepy shrine’, where I learnt where he was, or rather would be: hosting a tribute show at a Brooklyn sports bar in two days’ time.
The next scrolling was tomorrow.
Once it happened, he vanished off the Internet. If existence is indeed a predicate, he may well have varied into nothing. Suppressing my terror at being abandoned, I reminded myself he might just no longer be famous. I had to go deeper, I had to descend into the Deep Internet. There had to be a simpler way to keep track of him, or so I agonised till at last I discovered down forgotten data mines the home address of an ex-Father Ed Murphy, diocese in the other England (‘Church of Needful Prayers’).
Forgive me for no longer believing in coincidence. Who else but a real ‘Holy Man’ could aid me in my quest? Filled with a new hope I went for the first time in a month to Carol’s.
She was displeased with the idea of a U.S. holiday, asked whether I’d even renewed my passport like she’d told me, and said she wasn’t going to lend any more money. Any more! Well it was to be expected. She really hadn’t been herself of late.
It came on like illness, the first tickle or pang that heralds an unavoidable sentence of suffering. There was another consequence of my discovery about the nature of the variations. If with each I scrolled into another life, then this Carol was not my Carol; I’d left mine, and long ago.
I had been unfaithful, or inconstant. Yet I still took refuge from this discovery with my head on her ersatz breasts. Lying awake with her asleep, I missed her so much it was like there was a rope in my guts that coiled up through realities, up to where it was attached to her, tossing and turning without the real me.
The final time I took refuge was the worst. She was quiet under me once we were done, though maybe because throughout I hadn’t made eye contact. She walked two fingers up my back — whorls to my moles — but paused after a few stiff steps. We waited until she asked what I knew had been coming.
“Do you love me?”
And I told her technically no.
The look on her face. As if she’d been checking what time her parents were due and I’d replied their train had crashed. Stab my heart, I told her no.
Controlling her voice: “And why not?”
“You’re not my Carol. And I’m not your Kon.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She turned and sat off the bed, head, shoulders and back in a gravestone. She was quiet for longer than I knew how to deal with so I got up and left. Only when I’d reached the last spiral of the stairwell did she yell down: “What have you done with my boyfriend? Where’s my Kon gone?”
There was a bob in my step, but I didn’t turn back. Or take it back. Or make excuses or lie or make her feel better. No, all I did was think: Good question.
How readily we’d fallen apart. Had my counterpart in this variation been a scoundrel, too? Was I a bad boyfriend in all possible worlds? Fine, Eddie Murphy would be my soulmate now. He might’ve started this, he might be the shiftiest of all, but he was all I had.
Copyright © 2023 by Mazin Saleem
