Murphy’s Lore

by Mazin Saleem

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3 4

conclusion

It’s hard to remember how many cops and quacks and priests I’ve spoken to in how many types of prison in this penitential land, or how many times I’ve had to explain to psychiatrists come from all over that I’d not kidnapped him for ransom or because I was angry or in love, or whatever other reasons my counterparts had done it, but for the sake of the most important experiment in the world(s?): my set theory, the theory of the spiral. No, the spirals! My discovery of a loom.

True, my perception was suffering by then, at the hinterlands of the variations, where the labels of things had changed. Sports logos and album covers were as different as they could be without being my negation, the taste of treats, the fate of villains in comics I thought I remembered: things fizzed. Hence my interrogators merge and cut into one another, merge with every slapping detective or pipe-and-lab-coat with all the answers. Hence this singular title card: ‘The Interview’. They always began the same.

“Why Eddie Murphy?”

“He was a lead. I’m just a detective, like you.”

“You’re garbage who stalks for kicks.”

“Hahaha! I wasn’t stalking him! What would I do without him? No, no, no: I was making sure of him.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’d be proof. That my theory about the set I’m in is correct.”

“You’re in this world! One man: yourself. And there ain’t no world but this one.”

“You’re wrong there, Doc. I’ve been in other worlds. I’ll never think it was just my imagination.”

In this way, they stuck to their story, year after circuitous year. So did I. They wanted me to agree with them, to hoodwink me so they could be done with me. I wanted them to understand how I might have found a way out, a way back to Carol so I could try to explain.

At this point Bad Cop would usually tag in Good. “Convince me. Tell me every last detail.”

“Back when I was picking between suicide and hope, I realised what would swing it was whether this nightmare could theoretically end. To work that out I had to work out what defined the set I was scrolling, because that would mean I’d be able to work out the size of it, too, again, in theory. So allow me to recall a few axioms; Murphy’s Laws, if you will.

“First, and most obvious: in all members of the set, Eddie Murphy exists, as does a counterpart me. Already this reduces the number of worlds I may have to get through.

“Second: in all of them, my counterpart exists in the right spatial coordinates, while Murphy exists at a variation.

“Third: in all of them, Murphy and I co-exist, and this is key. You’ve read their notes, you know the things I’ve seen: Murphy rivalling Letterman. The Michael Jackson concept album. The youngest professor ever to get tenure. But never Professor Murphy who found a cure for cancer, never Edward Regan Murphy who shot Ronald Reagan. Because those variations would need such different pasts and make such different futures as to disturb the delicate circumstances behind my parents’ conceiving me.”

“Then the real problem with your theory is that it’s inconsistent as all hell. Sure, your folks’ living mostly before Murphy’s time mightn’t have been disturbed by his so-called variations. But as for you, ain’t you always said you knew of him since you were a kid?”

“Quid pro quo: I tell you things, you tell me things. How influential is pop culture trivia on the course of our lives? Would Eddie Murphy’s never having been in any films meant my counterparts wouldn’t have emigrated to the UK? Fallen in love, sir? Broken the law?”

“Why, there’d have to be snowballing differences. On a long enough timeline everything’s triviality drops to zero.”

“Precisely, ma’am, and such worlds do exist, but they do not belong in this set. Those aren’t the worlds I’m scrolling through. Or can do, since a me isn’t in them, or is in them but not in a sufficiently congruent way.”

“Then the real problem with your theory is that it’s rigged to fail. You proclaim the variations of Murphy are limited. But could there not be infinite gradations within said limits, infinite ways in which he could, for instance, have been in the employ of the police constabulary? Thus we’re back, with you ensuring that your febrile delusion cannot and will not end.”

“Thank heavens, then, detective for the theoretical geometry of possible worlds. Try to imagine existence as a volume of threads, unspooling down through time, each thread a different life you could have had or, rather, are having. What defines the proximity of other threads to your own is their similarity. Though adjacent, they’re separated, isolated, these might-have-beens to everything but themselves. Except with me. I have come unstuck in mine. Wider and farther than anybody in my place would dare to dream, to the remote point in a spiral, where Murphy is... what? Why won’t you say? What harm can it do now?”

“A man with a wife. Children. Someone who simply made different choices to what you think he should have made.”

“Yes, Doc, ones that made not only his life but the universe different. In an equation as complex as the universe there’s no such thing as just one variable; look at your lab coat: why is it red? The only worlds that can possibly be are those coherent combinations of variables.

“Take Carol’s ‘Cyberian Winter’: the granular difference needed to put my counterpart in the right circumstances, where an infinitesimal difference would not have sufficed. A new slogan, then, for the workers of the worlds: ‘Neither fractals nor determinism!’ My set is composed of an indefinite but not infinite number of members.”

“Then the real problem with your theory is that it doesn’t have the right evidence. If you do have all these threads around you that you’re spiralling through then, gosh darn it, you’d be in a constant blizzard of other worlds.”

“But with each scrolling, I’ve skewed across to a discrete thread and then gone straight down. Something else has been moving in a spiral. Something that keeps coming back for me. Catching me.”

“You’re not helping.”

“What do you mean I’m not helping?”

“I mean you’re not helping. Damn it, you’re not being hounded; singled out for some goddamn trial.”

“Except for my legal charges... No, I’m being helped. Or at least something is trying. Trying to put me right, your honour. Searching through worlds for the right one to put me into.”

“Oh sure, some kinda benevolent filing system.”

“But multiform! Multithreaded, like a loom. One that’s meant to keep every self bound to its thread, perhaps making sure we’re not conscious of all our other selves.”

“And how conscious are you? Of yourself? Aware of yourself?”

“I’m aware that with me something snagged. And ever since, this tie or bond has been spiralling overhead, catching me on each pass and sorting me into a life it assumes is mine. I go down that thread, irrevocably, one where my circumstances seem to be as they originally were. But the loom only compares with the world just gone and only achieves a near match.

Concordantly, my counterparts and I are never identical; our similar-seeming circumstances are actually built on different histories, for how else could they fit in the wider world vis-à-vis Murphy also having varied again? Ergo, I don’t stick around, I’m reloaded, and the loom scrolls me again, but taking longer now, having to look farther afield, spiral wider.”

“Then the real problem with your theory is that it’s pure sublimation. You betray it as such. This ‘spiral’, a cry for order. This ‘loom’, a manifestation of a desire to be helped from the outside. Let us help you like you want us to.”

“Only the reeling power of the loom can help me further now. Its spiral-mechanics limit my already limited set. The loom cannot run backwards: whatever happened, happened; it widens its search but, in doing so, it scans through only the variations that are left. It always fails. But if it could be tuned, it would become a powerful ally...”

“Don’t you see the danger, Kon, inherent in what you’re doing here? Delusion is the most stubborn problem the planet has ever seen, but you court it like a boy who finds mind-games fun. ‘Ties’ and ‘bonds’? ‘Tuning’? Stop enabling your madness!”

“No, forwards is the only way outwards. Though the outer limits of the set must exist, they nevertheless might be too far away for me to reach in my lifetime. And even if I just sat around, waited, and did reach the limit, the loom might simply stall there at the last possible Murphy variation... But there’s another possibility. Something else might happen when I reach spiral’s end, the widest gyre, the last Murphy eddy. The loom might recoil. With no options left, it might recoil and reel me back. Not back in time, back in reality.”

“And like that — phuh — it’s gone?”

“I’m afraid, my dear, the narrowing cone will have to match the widening one before it: it’ll take as long for me to spiral back in as it did to spiral out. For all the Carols of all the worlds I’ve scrolled, it’ll be as if their Kons are regressing to a former madness.”

“Then I just don’t know if I can wait that long.”

“And I can? Even if the loom does recoil, I risk the Twilight Zone irony of at last getting back to her but just as I’m about to die. There has to be a way I can start the process sooner, make the set run out quicker...”

“If you wanted this over quicker, you’d please just accept you’ve gone insane.”

“It’s more comfortable for you to label me insane. If I’m insane, how come I don’t know everything in much detail? Because I’ve never been here before: who the hell are you people? Why the hell has this Kon been put inside?”

“You seriously don’t remember? Because of your... issues with him.”

“No, that’s incidental.”

“Right. Then tell me in single words only the good things that come to mind about Eddie Murphy.”

“Let me tell you about Murphy: he was reliable, that’s all. When Carol got upset at me for not noticing her hair, I saw that, OK, it was different, but only in some worlds, while in others it was just as I remembered. Eddie Murphy always varies. He’s my transdimensional gauge. One that could’ve shown by a repeat variation that my escape plan had worked. And you took him from me when you detained me, and I’d gleaned it in his face on the football field, and it’s tearing me apart.”

“An... escape plan, Kostya?”

“One of you give me a pen, I’ll show you.”

“You know we can’t hand you anything.”

“You watch too many movies, quacks. I’m going to have to put it all down on paper at some point. My escape plan is to crash the loom. Say I made a change in the thread I was in; something major though, mad; the kind of plan cooked up by a mad scientist: I could blow the Hoover Dam, perhaps, or deface Mount Rushmore. Because if I did so, then the next time the loom scrolled, it would have to find another world in my set in which another me had done the same mad thing and also had an Eddie Murphy kept locked in a motel room, but all for his own reasons! Surely there’s no way it could. Instead it would hit its limit early.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Quite. Between the two of us, I don’t think mad changes would’ve worked. It’s not as if the loom’s ever struggled to find me worlds where I’m some weird obsessed Eddie Murphy stalker. And what with me being so poor and high-strung of late, I’m sure I’d have messed up even a simple bank robbery. Then one afternoon I realised, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead.”

“Realised what you did, Mr Desadeski?”

“Realised how to make a simpler change. One that’ll put a stop to this at the very least. And maybe, just maybe, send me on my way back.”

“It seems to me you’ve overlooked a glaring third option.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’m glad you asked. Maybe there are no real problems with your theory. And you can and do make whatever small or big change that forces the loom’s hand. But what if, instead of stalling or recoiling, the loom scrolls you somewhere else? What if it’s forced to reach for an extreme?”

“Murphy’s and my coexistence prohibits any.”

“Yes, but not alt-histories or far-out parallel dimensions. Something, as you said, simpler and yet, for you, inconceivable, unacceptable. For there may be another world out there with a Kon in it who’s also done whatever simple ‘change’ you’re planning. In fact he’s done all you’ve done, is in the right circumstances. But, unlike other Kons before, this one also claims he’s been going through the Murphy variations.”

“If there had been identical worlds, then the loom would’ve matched me with one the first time round.”

“I never said identical. It’s not. In a simple way. Its Kon claims he’s gone through the Murphy variations but, for him, they just never really happened.”

“No.”

“In that world, Kon is just mad.”

“No, no, no.”

“So, if all of this works like you say, if you insist your theory is true, then what we believe will become true. You will scroll into him. Hell, you might already even be him.”

The Interview usually stopped there.

Awful tired, dog-tired, I’d accept the shot then limp out of the interrogation while trying not to cry. I once even turned to add, “F-ing Docs.” Another time though, it was they who turned.

“Just one more thing: this ‘escape plan’ of yours... If it worked, if your calculations were correct, when you finally got back to your centre, would you hold on?”

“How can anyone predict themselves in a world where this happens? It’s like a natural disaster. It can only be attributable to non-human error.”

“Maybe it was your fault.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“Oh, Kon. Kon, you are blind. Look where you are, for Pete’s sake.”

* * *

The morning I got out was a wet and sunny morning. In the rainbow I could see a white castle. The years have been kind; she wasn’t mine though. I walked as if to her then went past her, headed one last time for Eddie Murphy.

The authorities have not taken well to my recidivism. I hide in alleyways. I think about their third option. It’s got me up nights, that’s the truth. I’ve started to lose hope. What’s more, I still haven’t found him.

Maybe I was wrong about the set: Eddie Murphy is not the defining condition of it. My dumpster goes dark and fills with sour, grey, twisting threads. Time’s up.

Just remember the change! Simpler, doable — and yet so unlikely to be repeated, right down to the letter but for different reasons, in any world that’s left in the set.

This is it.

This: what you’re reading. What I’ve been writing. To be on the safe side, here’s some original last words, some gobbledegook I just thought of, a mad victory cry: colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

With that, the escape plan is done, held up where I can see, where you’ll see. Everything rests now on the incoming variation. Whether I return to a world I’ve been in before or whether the next scrolling won’t be the scrolling home. How I wish I’d found him.

I’d have shaken Eddie Murphy by the hand; thanked him for taking it as well as could be expected, and told him how I knew of him: not a resident of a hospice but the Comedy Hall of Fame; not a defector to the Soviets but a star; and one whom my father and I used to love watching together in Trading Places and The Shawshank Redemption. Then I’d have left, swapped with the last Konstantin to have kept my thread warm.

It’s to him I’ve been writing: to ‘me’, to you. You for whom I also shall do my own ‘Eddie Murphy doing Bill Cosby’ impression:

“I HOPE these words don’t just end up with the Trashman, though to him Cyrillic may as well BE computer CODE. I hope you didn’t leave or FIND things with Carol... in too bad a SHAPE. I hope I’m corRECT... and you are the last and not the next. I hope the Manchester SHIP Canal is as grey as it has been... in my DREAMS. I hope... DAAAAAA.”