Murphy’s Lore
by Mazin Saleem
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 1
Dear me! When you find yourself in this dumpster, too, accept my apologies. Outside circumstances were worse than before and, well, at least it’s not too badly upholstered. Look, you recline as I do on cardboard boxes and savour a cool breeze, what with that beer can holding open the dumpster lid. Not to let us see, mind you — Is it still dark outside? — but to vent the smoke from the candles I’m writing by. Counting by, too. Around the time they go out, the nightmare starts winding down. That is, if my calculations are correct.
‘If my calculations are correct!’ Hardly are those words out when an image of a frazzled boffin in a disaster movie troubles my sight. He says them as I snort at the TV and roll my eyes. Forgive me now, oh asteroid expert! Forgive me, inventor with your last-ditch plan. And bless my calculations because, if they’re incorrect, I may never get back.
In any case. what will remain in this dumpster are these words and a shocked old man. I must get it down fast. Despite or because of how weird it will sound. That double bluff annoys us, but here it fits. I must ask an improbable question: Does Eddie Murphy exist?
Akh, what’s the point? I don’t see why I’m asking you, friend. You’re as lost as I am.
* * *
Friend, lives are labyrinths. Lives are labyrinths, and your past is the thread you’ve trailed behind you, and telling your story is the attempt to walk back along that thread. My life was no different, a labyrinth, too, till I turned thirty-four, and the thread snagged, and life became something else: a deck of cards, the wicked kind, with its Ladies, Drowned Sailors and Spirals. Hey, so much has got mixed, why not metaphors too? What was the first hand I was dealt?
‘The Tower.’ A tower block? A flat high above a canal in a northern city. A thrifty banner hangs over the window: ‘Happy Bday cK!’ it reads.
As is the fashion in our world, my girlfriend and I share a designer nickname, one perpetrated by my flatmates George and Louis. Apart from me, she is of course just ‘Carol.’ Its similarity to ‘Karl’ made me homesick on first hearing; there was, though, that pleasant tension between the name’s masculinity and her. I gave my name in return, adding it might be easier for her to use Kostenka or Konstantinushka. She said these weren’t exactly diminutives and asked if she could call me Kon.
The four of us had met at work, a brain-draining web giant that shipped grunt work to foreign countries in exchange for senior staff. Eerie thing, migration. My surroundings were familiar but not quite right; how apart I could be made to feel by a new toilet flush or the typeface on a road sign.
Neither did it help that my variously shaded new colleagues responded to both greetings and questions with the same sort of panicked grin. Undeterred, I made three attempts to socialise, emailing the office about open lectures I’d seen advertised on physics or the new geometry. I was yet to learn of the absolving nature of the group invite.
Out of compromise, two fellow coders began asking my help with their lunchtime crosswords and cryptograms. I’d have them to thank as well for breaking my run of evenings spent alone watching TV or napping since arriving in the UK.
The concept — as George and Louis explained it after late-shift on our way to a pub — was for a sum of cash to be raised by exacting an entry fee from participants who, in elaborately named teams, could obtain the sum by answering a series of trivial questions. The catch, I think, was that everyone had to get drunk and so diminish their capacity for reasoning and recall. Good thing we had my learning on our side.
George named our team ‘The Spinal Taps.’ Not a medical reference, Louis corrected me: my first mistake. The quiz’s theme, which the pub had not advertised beforehand, was ‘Pop Culture.’ We did not win.
Louis said I’d ‘brought nothing to the table’: “no answers and no drinks.” I pretended to pay no mind. But little did they know of my resolve from that night on to learn more trivia so as to avoid further humiliations.
The task seemed impossible, infinite. I for one had never had the time or inkling to learn advertising jingles or rewatch kids’ shows as a grown man, unlike George and Louis, as I learnt once we moved in together. They’d stay up late discussing symbolism in The X-Files or the brute fact of the uniqueness of any long text.
George, the older, was the greater expert, though a grumpy one, as if trivia were not trivial but a state secret that had been declassified against his advice. Whereas Louis liked to smugly pre-empt lines of TV dialogue with his own renditions or shout out plot twists as if guessing them the first time round.
We played ‘Name That Tune’ or, rather. I’d be hanging my jacket when they’d come at me humming or whistling. At last I managed once to recognise an old folksong. They said it was the theme from Tetris. Their disbelief at this cultural unit having come full circle was expressed by their choking on laughter.
I think that’s what I saw in Carol. When the other girls in marketing said her name, it was often followed by the words ‘bless her’ and a story about whichever latest gaffe or piece of slapstick-cue hands slapped across mouths and much laughing.
At least by then George and Louis had noticed I’d fall quiet if they joined in. She laughed though; her approach to life — at first, anyway — was refreshingly variant to mine. All winter. I’d moaned about the way my flatmates sneaked film quotes into conversations, no matter how serious or trivial, while my Christmas Carol neither sympathized nor shrugged but instead left under our spirally tinselled tree a big floppy Film & TV guidebook.
Soon I was understanding more and more of those inane things my flatmates referenced. And admittedly I enjoyed some of them, and happy was my surprise on recognizing this or that sitcom my father had scavenged from the airwaves, but with the cast no longer dubbed, instead speaking American, as if possessed or revealed as spies.
I had no gift for Carol in return, but I quickly said for me that the holy day came later and on a different calendar, to boot: a prophetic variation. She said not to worry about it, but I told her I’d make it up to her on her birthday; it wasn’t like I’d forget. When HR indiscreetly pointed out I shared birthdays with another member of staff, the coincidence, which had made me feel superfluous, made Carol laugh and say, “Well!” And so it became one of the first milestones of our happiness. Soon we were celebrating together.
‘Celebrate’ is perhaps too strong a word, for I have always avoided parties, both of the house and dinner kind in view of the expense and the trivial conversation. But the year that, in a sense, was my last, she convinced me to join her for a meal after reassurances there’d be no kiddy-cakes or numbered balloons. Then maybe a pub afterwards, though I drew the line at a disco.
Chopping scissors circled my head like birds over a KO’d cartoon; cheep cheep they go, then dive in to cut. She’d said I had to at least get shaved and sheared before going out. She was asking over the top of her tabloid, “You sure you don’t want to go out-out?” I reminded her we had a budget. Cheap cheap. She sulkily watched the motion of the barber’s pole over the door. To disprove her insinuations, I gave the man a tip; he looked at the coppers as if I’d returned the tissue for wiping stray hairs.
My temper flared at her for remembering her phone only once we’d got to the restaurant where, despite my warnings, she’d not booked us a table. She then said I should accompany her back home, claiming it was dodgy down the canal at night, even though the flat was only minutes away, and it would’ve been rude for her to take calls.
I was explaining to her how she ought to plan these things as she held the door and looked at her feet. Lights switched on and dozens of voices yelled what I suddenly felt.
The party was overcrowded with our combined friends: dozens of Carols, plus my flatmates. I’d soon drunk so many beers that when looking at our birthday banner my eyes and ears fizzed, and I passed out on the couch. Then later, in bed, couldn’t sleep. Wasn’t big enough for two anyway so, lured by the sirens of the TV, I rejoined George and Louis in the smoky ruins of our flat.
They weren’t watching TV so much as leafing through it, cop serials, chat-show paternity tests. This continued till an Eddie Murphy stand-up comedy special. It drew us out of our fug, prompting Mulan insights from George and, from Louis. a bad impression of Murphy doing his Bill Cosby and Mr T. impressions. Louis chuckled and sighed at himself then asked if we remembered Eddie Murphy’s appearance in Quantum Leap.
Sidestepping his trap, I declared BS. They turned on me with incredulous stares. I replied that yes, I was serious, and that in fact Murphy was someone whom I’d viewed quite extensively. The swish outfits and fast cars of this streetwise entrepreneur were a capitalist aspiration that my father had drilled into me, making my future dread of the man that much more a trial. George and Louis were still staring, as though I’d claimed the world was flat. But I, no longer the foreign naïf, refused to back down. We agreed to search the man’s history.
It was all there in black and white pixels. A few more clicks brought up some pictures of the episode: Murphy in a tuxedo, a band leader whom time-travelling Sam Beckett had to save from racists so he could go on to inspire Stevie Wonder.
“Sorry, Konman, a ways to go yet!”
“Aw, and there’s you thinking you’d finally reached Shang Trivia.”
They high-fived. I told them I was going to bed. I vowed one day to best them. But while brushing my teeth, watching the spiral of mint spit, I saw the face of Eddie Murphy, spinning like a newspaper. Those squinting eyes, that smug grin: it was like he was up to something.
Carol, having booked me the morning off, was getting ready for work, padding around the bed, blond hair darkened and thickened from her shower; she seemed tired. She saw the state I, too, was in, which made her laugh and give the sort of hard humming kiss old aunts give wincing boys. Then she left me by myself in the party aftermath. My eyes were getting used to the light. My ears fizzed in the unnatural silence. To calm my nerves, I started logging my gifts.
I’d been on this thread once about The Divine Comedy, predicting variant geometrical structures of the universe, and so I’d sent a link to Carol, adding that the book would look nice on our shelf, which otherwise held only a few used Sudoku books — mine — and a pristine Middlemarch, which was hers. The morning of the party, I’d been woken by her pressure — through the duvet rather than skin-to-skin — but she was already presenting me something. It was blocky yet bendy. I took off the wrapping, knowing what she’d bought.
The front cover wasn’t one I expected on a book of medieval verse: two men in scuba gear windmilled their arms as they fell off opposite sides of a speedboat.
She prompted me: “The Diving Comedy.” Adorable expectant look on her face.
My kiss overshot, hitting a closed eye. “Just what I was after.”
Another look from her, different, longer this time. Now what was wrong? She kissed back properly. “That’s the joke.”
There followed birthday intercourse and breakfast.
If only this day could’ve been starting so well. Soon it’d be time for my shift and yet I’d just started to nod off, fizzy dreams jolting me awake with that split-second sense of not recognising what room you’re in. I debagged from my duvet and tried reading what Carol had got me. However, it was silly. I leaned hard around the bed for alternatives. Yes, perhaps the old Film & TV Guidebook would help me keep my eyes open.
It should have warned me how relieved I felt looking at its front cover, Mickey Mouse as a sorcerer, billowing Monroe, a CGI T-Rex for that ‘modern’ touch-as if in some faraway place, by myself and in trouble, I’d met acquaintances I didn’t care for but jumped up and hugged them nonetheless. The pages were so soft I couldn’t exactly flick through them, more scraped them away in search for a particular entry. ‘Murphy; Edward Regan (“Eddie”)’
No mention of a part in Quantum Leap in the man’s otherwise varied and interesting career. So much for crowd-edited content. I gave a triumphant ‘Ha!’ and folded a corner of the page so the clinching evidence would be near to hand. The corner, like an arrow, pointed at the next column, at another entry.
“Good afternoon, Carol. Was Eddie Murphy in Cheers?”
“Oh, doing fine, myself.”
“Sorry. How are you? OK. But was Eddie Murphy in Cheers?
“Don’t think so. I never really watched it. Not coming in?”
Never watched Cheers? My flatmates would’ve cried, but I was too relieved to dwell on them. See, even print editors nod. Before I could say thanks, her voice went. She must have been pressing the phone to her breast because I heard a muffled shout: “Roseanne. Eddie Murphy: in Cheers?”
Heat to my skin like a boiler switching on. The phone’s ear popped and her voice returned.
“Roseanne says yeah.”
I believe the appropriate local expression is: ‘Ah s****.’
* * *
From then on, at work and at home, I hammed about in the black cloak of a bad mood. Perhaps my flatmates were up to something especially devious. From behind my eyelids I’d sometimes sense my stuff quietly shifting around me. George and Louis had after all spent a rainy day assembling a domino run of CD cases that made a can of beer splash me awake. The two of them were nearly forty years old.
Ignoring the matter was probably best. But how could a man who peeked at his girlfriend’s texts leave something like this alone? Especially with the Internet, the damn Internet: ‘what a resource of information at your fingertips!’ Well, now it had become a taunting know-it-all, tempting me to keep checking whether I was losing my memory, if not my mind.
Static buzzed my head, my eyes swam: I needed more sleep. But I stayed in bed only to avoid slipping up in front of my flatmates, while the comment threads I blankly scrolled through were alt-tabbed for search engines the moment Carol went downstairs.
No, Eddie Murphy hadn’t appeared in Cheers. He had appeared in Seinfeld.
Were I making mistakes about a set of things, I would’ve admitted my immersion in Western culture wasn’t yet at a satisfactory level and gone back to my secret studies. Were it a set of mistakes about one thing, then I would’ve admitted Eddie Murphy was a particular blindspot that needed remedy. But these mistakes of mine were not accumulating. They were varying.
I did not dare consult a psychiatrist. I did not want to give a smug lab-coat the chance to cash in on a new disorder. I did however leaf through one of Carol’s psychology textbooks and learnt about people who could hear sounds but not songs, or who saw coded messages in coffee foam. Many of these people managed to function, within reason. By now that was all I wanted: to know I’d continue to function.
But after a post-work nap that didn’t take because my bored flatmates were, from the sound of it, speed-surfing TV channels, I read through blurring tears that there’d never been any films called Shrek for Eddie Murphy to star in. In their place, something called Ogre and Out!, the title also the donkey’s endlessly repeated catchphrase. The horror of it. Varying and worsening.
Received wisdom says if you think you’re going mad, then you’re not, because the mad have no idea that they are. Lies! Lies! When you start to feel the panic, that’s when it truly starts. And when you find a version of Willy Wonka with Eddie Murphy, and your girlfriend just says, “Ooh, let’s watch it!” what reaction other than panic do you expect? The worst confirmation of my predicament was that nothing bothered her.
Copyright © 2023 by Mazin Saleem
