Murphy’s Lore
by Mazin Saleem
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 3
On the platform, I checked my calculations like a nervous traveller would their passport. If I missed him in this variation, it would be over a month’s wait now till the next. I looked for my train down the joining and parting rails, munching a travesty of a croissant bought with coins whose monarch I did not recognise, and asked myself where this was all going. Those lunatic lines, where were they drawing me to?
To Carol, my Carol?
If only.
To the Platonic Eddie Murphy. The ur-Murphy. The Eddie to end all Eddies whose Cosby-mimicking cry of DAAAAAA would be the “Yes” of the universe. His earlier variations had only been cosmetic, to trick me, to warm me up. He’d then started getting stranger as his masks and impersonations fell away. Because what I was being drawn to was the answer, the truth. What truth? Eddie Murphy is the core value from which existence extrapolates. He is the principle that survives all the creations, all the dissolutions.
Still, I had my doubts, thoughts, ravings.
Sat in the Quiet Carriage, rechecking the time. Stood in the vestibule to be the first off, being stared at by an en vogue little girl. Her earphones leaked unfamiliar music, her t-shirt featured the latest idol and, all at once, I felt a different pity for superseded Louis and George, a trivial mourning. “I haven’t heard of him, sir; is he one of the passengers?” She stared at me through her toy x-ray specs. I checked the window: she had a point. I looked like Rasputin.
I tried to smarten up before Departures. Smoothed-down beard, tucked-in shirt. Oh, it was all so transparent. Queues threaded long and slow around the hall before reaching any desks. The clerk frowned at her screen, at me, then back. So much for the thaw. With a smirk of relief at finding an excuse, she said my counterpart hadn’t renewed his passport.
Despair overtook me in Terminal One. I left on foot. Nearby farmland would have to make do for those black, remembered steppes. I bought beers at a village shop and slotted my change into their domed charity box where coins spiral on their rims towards a central black hole. Dodging cowpats, I spun in my own circles, waiting for the sun to go down or implode. Better that than the next variation. And the next, and the next, and the next.
How many did I have to go through? How many worlds was ‘I’ even in? Star following star came out to spin Van Gogh-wise above. Considering the improbability tree that had led to my birth, there should only ever have been one world with a me in it. But what did ‘me’ even mean?
There might be worlds that contain someone with my genes but not conceived by my parents; given enough chance, coincidental twins will occur. There might be worlds that fool me into thinking I’m home but where in fact there’s a comma instead of a colon in a book written centuries ago, up there, in a space-station library around a star in a distant frond of the galaxy. This was never going to end, not till I died; I’d never get back to her and say I was sorry. A whirlpool in my stomach from all the spinning.
Yet, so far, I’d not scrolled into any extreme topsy-turvy world. Nor into a distant past or future. The Murphy variations were each time only a degree more ‘out there’ than the last. I had to get a grip. I had to stop getting dizzy so I stood still and looked up.
The dome of night slowing around me. My God: it’s full of spirals!
Bursting through my bedroom door, looking for a roll of tape measure. On it I marked the spans of the variations so far then pinned the whole length to my wall. Why had I thought Eddie Murphy would have the answers? Pacing up and down, pressing my fingers to the markings, to my lips. Why had I so wanted him to? He wasn’t special. He’d never been exceptional. This was, though.
Did I work it out or did it work itself out? There certainly was an element, as I drew an x and y axis on the wall at the start of the tape measure, of showing something to myself that I already knew. I took the tape down at the other end, let it dangle, then pulled it round and looped over. There was structure here. With more pins, I fixed the tape every time it crossed the negative y: every time was at the start of a variation. The storm forecast grew on my wall.
This thing of ours: it wasn’t a deceleration towards some core Murphy, it was the steady drawing out of a spiral. The spiral’s centre was my original life and, the farther out I went, the more Murphy varied. And I spent longer in each variation in the same way I’d spend longer on each pass of a spiral.
Keys jangling, tapping for the lock, the shush of the front door and voices. I switched off the bedside lamp. Always these same avoidance tactics, my flatmates the bolder always blundering back into my life. The spirals grew instead by laptop-light, threads, theories, calculations, the name ‘Murphy’, now dashed, with title of ‘professor’, to a New Mexican high school. I managed a smile at what someone might think if they found such notes. From the sound of the stairs, ‘someone’ was most likely to be a Carol. I stopped smiling.
I had to go back, back to Eddie Murphy. Not because he was the man with the answers, not because he had a holy or sinister part in all of this.
He was the proof.
* * *
Insolent Rabbit! Raging Duck! You were bested! See, I did not forget to take a left turn at Albuquerque. I did, though otherwise, come unprepared: a new passport, but no hotel, and with so little money since being sacked that they almost didn’t let me in.
Into America. America’s psychic weight, like a holy mountain. The source of so much of the pop culture I’d had to learn. Here passed a yellow school bus; there a dog hooked its leg at a red fire hydrant. Through the pane of a genuine diner, I watched with watering mouth and eyes: they’re giving free coffee refills; they do give free coffee refills!
School was out for summer, and with my phone and laptop pawned and my tendency to get thrown out of libraries on Draconian hygiene grounds, I had little choice but to set up watch under the bleachers of the football field. Begging in town was distasteful but necessary; my shame, though, at not ensuring my solvency, even if on an interdimensional jaunt, was sometimes too much to bear, and I’d avoid mirrors in restrooms in case I saw my father’s disapproval in our eyes.
Without money, hunger too became a constant, and I’d forage behind the diner, wondering if I’d even survive till this nightmare was done. At least I’d never scrolled into a world where I was already dead. Yet no me was going to survive forever, and the longer this went, the older I got, the fewer alternate lives there’d be left for me to scroll into. Visible through the bleachers, Professor Murphy’s parking spot waited like me. The tarmac softened. His name on it wavered.
Had my progress been linear as I’d once thought, the variations would have led me only one way: away. While with a spiral, I at least got to ask when the centrifugal might slow down, retract, become centripetal... In other words, stay positive!
And in the hot night, the sound of the crickets was both recognisable and new. I know now why soldiers fear dying abroad. Not because you’ll be trapped as ghosts, but because dying is already lonely enough without having to do it in another world.
Janitors appeared with the cactus flowers, the final run-up before school. I hid all my things in a dumpster, which looked like it might even be good for sleeping in, since the sun wasn’t out for as long. The first day back was the last of this variation; it had its kids in their cars and cliques and all the rest, but no sign of him. Sabbatical? Suicide? Come late afternoon, the football team was practicing between my hiding place and his parking spot. I shoved them away in mime.
Screams, loud and high-pitched, like the schlocky trailer for a B-movie. It turns out the bleachers hadn’t hidden me from cheerleaders so much as censor-barred me.
He looked confused, the old cop who was called, embarrassed by his redundant shouting and gun. I’d already gotten down on my front with my hands behind my head. I had noticed just in time.
There he was! All twinkly eyes and compact motions, and he even saw me, Eddie Murphy, that nutty professor, my own mad scientist. He gave ‘the Bleacher Creep’, as I’d soon be slandered, a worried look, almost a knowing look. I shook my fist at him as the cop dunked me into the patrol car and the fizzing on his radio got louder.
Till that day my experience of Eddie Murphy had been in 2-D, on repeats, out of chronological order, so seeing the real one up close, at odd angles, familiar but not quite right and alive, was like seeing a haunted doll or a creepy animatronic. Preoccupied with such, it only dawned on me later that the good few seconds now of varying upholstery and radio static meant I was one more world along yet still in a cop car.
This shouldn’t have been surprising; each scrolling had put me in a sham identical place to where I’d been before. But how the hell had my counterpart gotten arrested?
Pop culture, you liar! The prisoner gets no such ‘one phone call’; what I got was a lifetime ban and deported. Only at the airport did I have a chance to speak with the person who’d know. The gaps between rings are tensely long on international calls. Moments of our alternate life together ran like a romcom montage in my memory: under the sheets close-ups, hands held over wheat at the golden hour. I’d give anything to be back with her, back then. Oh, my Carol, pull me back to you now: you’re my density.
“Reverse charges? You taking the mick?”
“According to you, why am I here?”
“Konstantin Onatoppovich” — I should never had taught her Russian usage — “please don’t start that crap.”
“I suppose I have been acting odd. Or has he?”
“I think when you dumped me with no explanation—”
“Yes, but where did I go?”
“The States.”
“Sure, and why?”
“Cyberian Winter. The IT security conference?”
“An offensive name. Many of my—”
“Died in the Gulag. Yeah, you told me. Not many enough.”
“I never told you that. Ah, but this is perfect. Thank you, Ca- I mean, Miss Whitecastle.”
“Is that it? Wait a sec. Look, OK look. I know it’s been ages. And we still need to talk things out and things. But first... just come back, Kon.”
“Why? I’m not your boyfriend.”
She started giving me the nth-degree bickering I won’t embarrass you with all over again. Humourlessness, apparently, is our problem; that, and avoidance. I let her hang, no doubt to answer the questions of the airport cops who’d failed to detain me.
What was her major malfunction? She was going to find someone else, and long before me; to be precise, her Kon was going to come back just as she’d asked. Because if I was a usurper, it was only temporarily, and the usurped all treated me in kind. My Carol had suffered more than any of them, suffered a whole series of impersonators, like me but not me, each swapped in for longer than the last, each unaware of the last or the next, each claiming, if you were to ask, his own facts about Eddie Murphy. But they all slotted back, got reunited, one by one, scrolling after scrolling.
How long would she and I have to wait? How long can two people endure? We shall find out.
My growing age and shrinking funds were already making it harder to keep on the trail, and what with the authorities too, I needed another solution to Murphy, a better one, in any case, than just hoping he’d want to stop and chat. Especially since what happened in the cop car had hinted at a good thing, maybe the best of things: home.
Consider how, after my arrest and escape, each new counterpart of mine was also a fugitive, but brooding, say, in a California motel with maps and memory aids, or absent in Wyoming from some project on cryptography or cartography. The question was: could I force a change, and a more significant one than these? Determine what world would be next? Say I kept a man in a room. The next scrolling along, would he be gone or would ‘he’ still be there, if for a variant reason?
What if the man I kept in the room was Eddie Murphy?
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Mazin Saleem
