Thomas Murphy (12 page)

So, these are signs, Mr. Murphy. I can't say how bad, but definitely heading downward. I start to speak, but she shuts me up with a wave of her hand. I am finding her less like Joanne Woodward by the second, and more like Judith Anderson in
Rebecca,
without Judith's puckish sense of humor.

Let me tell you what we're dealing with here, scientifically, Mr. Murphy. Memory is a tricky item. It resides in patterns of neural activity all throughout the brain. After “neural activity” I begin to tune her out. There follows science shit, followed by more science shit at “cortex,” followed by “FDA-approved drugs,” followed by two more references to science shit, followed by “fiber tracks,” followed by “schedule a brain scan for you,” followed by science shit, science shit, and science shit. Our one-sided colloquy concludes with, But until then, Mr. Murphy, I want you to shape up. And before you fall to your knees and assure me of your heartwarming reformation, since I don't trust you, I'm going to inform your daughter of everything I've told you today. In short, you're cooked, Mr. Murphy. She exits before I can ask her for a balloon.

THE PARK IS
GRAY
and I am blue, thinking about how long it takes to live a life, and what do you wind up with? Age. People say it's unseemly to feel sorry for yourself, but I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. Who else would feel sorry for me? It gives me a hole to crawl out of when I write my poems. Snap out of it, Murph, I say. And then I do. Oona used to say it for me. I hear her now. Snap out of it, Murph. I keep walking and try. September is New York's best month, don't you think? You feel the sunshine
and the shrinkage all at once. Accordion days. Too bad it's January.

Three teenage girls sidle past me on the walking path. Two Irish, one Italian is my guess, each of them pretty and smiling and nodding to the old man. Snodgrass again: younger, pinker, out of reach. I smile back, like a dead star. I proceed a few steps and feel a hard shot to the nape of my neck. Now I'm down on my back in the path with the three darling teenage tree nymphs whom I passed a couple of seconds ago standing over me, and telling me to give them my money. See these? says the tall brunette, holding up the back of her hand and indicating her fingernails filed sharp as lobster forks. I'll cut you with these. Then the plump blonde kicks me square in the ribs. The stash, she says. They still use that word?

I reach under me for my back pocket and my wallet, and present all I have, maybe a hundred. That seems to drive the girls wild with happiness. The third girl, with the tattooed throat, gives me one more shot in the thigh for good measure before they all run off shouting and hooting. I'd have kicked their asses if I'd had four other guys with me.

Limping home from the park, I spot the sometimes-poet Arthur again. Arthur! Murph! Arthur the Bear! Murph the Bard! Today his mood is up. He has established an outdoor living room in front of the church on Amsterdam and Eighty-sixth. Apparently he has scavenged furnishings from the local garbage, and has come up with a
fairly complete place, consisting of a maroon sofa, with frayed floral-pattern upholstery, a Barcalounger with a missing arm, a couple of deck chairs, two unmatching end tables bearing two porcelain lamps plugged into nothing, and a three-legged plastic coffee table resting on an orange shag rug. I enter his room, and take one of the deck chairs. Arthur sits on his sofa, as always bundled against the cold, and looking more bearlike than ever, but otherwise at ease and self-possessed.

I just got mugged in the park, Arthur, I tell him. That's nothing, Murph. When I'm living in my cave, I get mugged all the time. Well, maybe you're right, I say. I'm probably making too much of it. How's tricks, Arthur? Good, Murph. Good. Couldn't be better. He hesitates. I want to remain with him in case the cops come, so I can explain his condition to them. But I'm kind of busy just now, he says. We sit in silence for a minute. He grumbles. Writing any poems? I ask. He shakes his massive head. I get the feeling I'm boring him. He stares at me impatiently. Finally, he says, I don't mean to be rude, Murph. But I'm expecting guests.

DEAR MURPH,

I like good singing as much as the next guy. And I don't have to tell you, you have great pipes. But when you stand in the courtyard at midnight, belting out
“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” at the top of your lungs, all four verses, the people in the building complain. And I mean loud complaints. About twenty of them. So, please, Murph. No more. I wouldn't want to have to report this to the landlord.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel A. Perachik (Dan)

Superintendent

P.S. It didn't help that you were singing in your skivvies.

Dear Danny Boy,

May I drop over and strangle you?

Yours sincerely,

Thomas J. Murphy

Strangler

IF MCCLEERY CAN
DO IT,
I can do it. Have I told you about this? About McCleery? He strangled a dog. Big mother, it growled at McCleery and bared its teeth. And McCleery strangled it with his hands. Picked it up by the throat, stared straight into its wild red eyes, and choked the life out of it. Right there, in his own backyard. A cart wobbled down the road, drawn by a donkey covered in mud. An owl wheeled under the moon. Mrs. McCleery told her sister
from Wicklow to get out of the kitchen, and stay out. And McCleery strangled a dog.

KNOW WHAT I
THINK?
Of course you do. I'm always telling you what I think. I think these people, Dr. Spector and her crew of experts, have a severely limited view of memory. Some years ago, I was giving a reading at a college in Ohio, in the science building, of all places. And on the way to the auditorium, I walked past this massive wall chart of the human genome that tracked our genetic makeup back millions of years, to the chimps. So I asked a biologist who taught at the college how much of what people are made up of today existed in the original chimps. She said 95 percent. See what I mean? Our bodies are memory. The whole human race is composed of memory. My point is you can't lose your memory. You can misplace it, or relocate it. But you can't lose it, no matter what Máire or Dr. Spector or Perachik the informer says, unless your definition of memory is as narrow as an open door or a swimming pool or a fucking egg. Who cares if I forget my area code, for Chrissake? And the only reason I strolled into Hornby's pool was that I get so flummoxed in social situations, I put myself in a daze. I could have walked anywhere. Lucky he doesn't live in a penthouse.

About Perachik? How am I or anyone to know if what he's saying about me is true? The little rat has a vested
interest in getting me out of the Belnord, and into some assisted nuthouse. My landlord, to whom Perachik would not want to have to report my behavior, would pay the honorable superintendent a handsome little squealer's fee for services rendered to get his greedy paws on my rent-stabilized eleven rooms, and make three apartments out of them, each renting for five times what I pay now for the whole shebang. Why would anyone base an opinion of anything on the word of the slimy bastard, Perachik, I'd like to know. And there are only three verses to “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” Just sayin'.

All right, all right. Dr. Spector has a point. If my behavior keeps spiraling down, I'll be a fucking albatross to Máire and William. So when that happens, I'll know it, I'm certain of that. And I'll go to Virginia or some other enlightened state where a Dalmatian puppy can pick up a shotgun at a fruit stand, and I won't forget the shells, and I'll blow my empty head off. But until that time, let me glory in the fact that I am memory, and you are memory, and you can think about that next time you crave a banana.

SO I CALL
OUT
to the boyos carrying the curragh on Eighty-sixth Street outside the Belnord, Where are you going with that? We're goin' fishin', old man. Want to come? You bet! I say. And we head through the park over to the East River, toss the curragh in the water, and jump in after. It's a
hell of a town, New York, is it not? I say. 'Tis, they say. They got girls here and fish and poems, too. What else do you need? Not a goddam thing, we all agree. And we're drinking pints and singing songs and having a grand old time, until a yacht comes along and wakes us, and we drown.

HAD I NOT
been asleep, William, I would have missed the otters.

What otters, Murph?

The otters who were marching in my dream, William.

Were they soldiers, Murph?

They were. But they were soldiers without guns. They had bananas instead. And when they had finished with their marching, they laid down their bananas, and went swimming on their backs, the way otters do. Otters are masters of the backstroke, William. Your mother loves them. Ask her.

Are otters friendly, Murph?

Very. They also look you in the eye. I never met a shifty otter. They also read the classics. Like
War and Otters
and
The Otter Also Rises.
A great author named Homer wrote a long poem called the
Ottersy
, about a brave hero named Otterseus. Otters have a wonderful life. They lie on their backs, balance books on their tummies, and read the day away.

I wish I could see them.

Well, if you fall asleep now, right now, you might see them. If you don't fall asleep, you might miss them. What's worse, William [kissing his forehead, and pulling up his covers], the otters will miss you.

Night, Murph.

Night, my boy.

A LETTER
from
Sarah:

Dear Murph, I hope you won't mind my writing you. But with Jack gone—I did file a missing person's report—I have no companionship. And writing affords companionship, as I don't need to tell you. Let me be clear, though, before you get all anxious and think, Oh Jesus, do I have to become this blind girl's pen pal? Or worse, exchange opinions on books with her, like those stories of high-minded, like-minded literary poo-bahs? Not at all. In fact, Murph, I'd prefer that you do not write back. For one thing, I don't want you to go to the trouble of making tapes or CDs, or even more difficult, using one of those gizmos that type braille. (I'm using a braille typewriter myself, a Perkins Brailler, which is great but a pain in the ass.)

It's not worth the effort. I'm not worth the effort. You would reach this conclusion yourself after not too long a while, and you would resent me, which I do
not want. Mainly, I just want to be able to call out to you once in a while, as a second conscience. Think of these letters as messages without a return address. Does that make sense? If I knew I was writing them only to myself, there would be no pleasure in it. It would exacerbate my loneliness, not relieve it. But if I know you're at the receiving end, Murph, I can spill my guts, such as they are, and know you'll catch what I'm tossing. (A revolting image.) In any case, thanks in advance, as they say. More anon, as they also say. Who are these “they,” anyway? And why aren't they around when you need them? As ever, Sarah.

UNDER THE WHITE
COVERLID,
now as then, my Belnord cottage rolls, the same cool turning. Memories run wild, as if the night had released all its prisoners. My ghosts are younger now. Imagine that. I am older than my ghosts, yet they retain a certain je ne sais quoi—authority? I love this time of night, this bed that makes me alert to everything—the hours, the planes in flight, the faucet drip. My senses gleam like candles. Sleep with me, life. There is no breakage, no estrangement. Fuck dementia.

REMEMBER THE DREAMS
instead. Remember, for instance, the morning Mannahatta first came into view,
through a gauze so dense, you could not tell if the magic isle was in front of your nose or elsewhere, miles away. And the fact that the immense island floated on geysers of air did not help. It swayed this way and that, and also that way, sometimes quavering like an arthritic hand, sometimes soaring starward, yet without rising. The density was noteworthy—five hundred feet of adamant, layered over with strata of minerals and topsoil, the muck and oozings of the land from which vertical rocks rose, archives blazing in the suns. There were two suns, one above the island, no more than three hundred feet high, one below at the same remove. Infinity glimmering. What a sight for a boyo from the Emerald Isle, who had not laid eyes on an emerald in all his twenty years. But Mannahatta was agog with emeralds and sapphires and rubies, diamonds too. Oh, the diamonds! Bracelets and tiaras encircling the flagpoles.

Drawing near, one could see that the island sloped downward in a funnel toward the center, where thousands of wide clay pots, vats really, collected rainwater and converted it into books. Flagons of mead were distributed to the poor, who (foolishly) used them as bocci balls. A prelate banged a crozier on a marble table. A baker paled. Along the walls of the slope were staircases consisting of thousands of steps from which people fished for carp and compliments. Guidebooks told that the principal occupations of Manhattanites were music, mathematics,
and butchering, and that the women were rich and loose. Nearer still, and it seemed that the staircases were made of bone. Alabaster, perhaps. Or snow.

At the center of the water vats, there appeared to be a black hole or chasm, that upon closer inspection turned out to be a bazaar, as in the
Arabian Nights,
the booths constructed out of the wrecks of ships, like ours, ships from all over the world that had sailed to Mannahatta for centuries. The booths displayed china dogs and precious rugs and fabrics—bolts of red and gold cloth, and works of art, both fine and cheap, and slaves, too, both black and white, whose singing talent was evident even at our distance, and whose chains dazzled in the light. A perpetual thunderstorm roiled therein, and gulped and gasped, its noise so deafening we plugged our ears. The rain licked the cobblestones on the quays.