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. Ne
arer 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.
Stone-eyed kids ran to greet us at the pier, ragged and scrawny, in pleated skirts and prep school blazers with coats of arms. They wore garlands of green leaves and sang in a language none of us knew. A bier bearing the body of an ancient priest with a thick white beard was wheeled in among them, and hundreds of the citizens lined up to view it. Some identified the man as their father. Others did not. At the appearance of the bier, the children dispersed, and then the bier disappeared. Where the bazaar had stood only moments earlier, there now was a flat grassy plain, with a few scattered pedestals in disrepair, and stone heads fallen at the bases, as in a defunct outdoor sculpture gallery. Excitement rolled through our decks, first class to steerage, but just as we were about to tie up at the pier, the immense island lurched and flew again, making it impossible for us to reach it. Then the stone-eyed kids returned and tossed us ropes. And at last we were home. Remember?
SELF-MADE EXILES like me are a dime a dozen, and that goes for fussy, cock-o’-the-walk Jimmy Joyce as well. Pray silence for the gates, the ones who remain in the fields, swinging open and closed, coming nowhere, going nowhere. Hinged, unhinged. A tip of the cap to those who stay put, the grayed deadwood not fit for kindling. The gates. The gates are Ireland.
SAYS HERE IN “Why Do Men Love Islands?” that Masafumi Nagasaki, a seventy-six-year-old skinny boyo with a nice even tan (the photo), lives in hermetic solitude and “apparently content” on a rocky island off the Japanese coast. Way to go, Masafumi. Says your island is “inhospitable,” and that you have endured typhoons, as you walk around naked. Glad they have no photo of that, Masafumi. I mean, who knows what you’re doing with yourself, you old devil.
As for Murph, he has lived on two islands all his life, both darlin’ places. The isle of my birth is an extension of the Burren, the terrain made of limestone pavements with crisscrossing “grikes” or cracks in it. The isolated rocks are called “clints.” As in Clint Eastwood and Zorba the Grike. There was a period of glaciers, as there always is, followed by the Namurian phase, resulting in what geologists call one of the finest examples of a glaciokarst landscape in the world. That is to say, more rocks. And weren’t we Inishpeople proud.
Now, Manhattan can also be seen as an island of rocks—vertical and gleaming, to be sure, but basically rocks. Says here in “Why Do Men Love Islands?” that my gender consists of loners like Masafumi, that we tend toward isolation, that we all would like to be Robinson Crusoe, that we swoon for the sea, and that we’re antisocial romantics. I say it’s the rocks.
LET TWO PAIRS of rowers start out toward each other from opposite ends of the ocean. Let one pair embark from Inishmaan and the other from Manhattan, and let them sing shanties as they go. Let the ocean be difficult for them, tossing and menacing. Let them think of giving up and turning back. But let them not turn back. Let them row in stippled strokes through the inhospitable sea, and the shouting weather, and the elegiac crashing of the waves. After a long time, let them reach sight of each other in midocean at last, and let them wave in joy and triumph. When they pull their boats alongside each other, let them weep and embrace. Let them inquire of each other’s health, and of their families’ health, and of their genealogies and roots. Let them praise each other and teach each other, and offer solace. Let them sing to each other, tell tales to each other, propose commercial enterprises to each other, and the creation of parks and cities, and galleries of art. Let them sleep and dream of the sublime. Finally, let them ask of each other why they undertook this mission in the first place. Let them not know why.
ARE YOU OUT THERE? The cry of poets everywhere. Are you out there? Meaning, not merely you at this minute, but you who exist a hundred, a thousand years from now. Are you reading old Murph, Sir Thomas James Murphy, Esq. himself. DEA, PCP, SUV, KFC? Have I done anything worthy of reaching across the plains of the years to you in your dumps or palaces? I see you walking in the stubbled fields, heads down over a book. A book! Still? Is it The Collected Works of Thomas J. Murphy you’re reading, or, if not all the works, a work or two, a phrase or clause, perhaps a single word quoted in your version of Bartlett’s. Even a plagiarized idea will do. Or have the secret police banned any mention of my name. Something?
Show me the palms of your hands. Show me on Skype. Nothing. The leathery puckered palms of your two-fingered hands. Nothing. Have you no interest in what went before? I may not be much, but I went before. My head teems with galaxies. Someday, in the year 5014, you too will have gone before, and if you write a poem, you too will ask, Are you out there? Of course, it is possible that at this stage of erosion you know nothing, including your own desires. You may have evolved to eyeless petunias marooned at the farthest edge of Lusitania, where there is only fog and skulls, in a place so desolate, it makes Inishmaan look like Metropolis. Yet, if you do not read me, if you do not read anyone, why kiss?
Rumors of your existence have reached headquarters. Before the mass suicides that ordinarily attend such bulletins, you might send word that someone is reading someone somewhere. Even if you have to make it up. Here I gladly abandon my ego. If nothing of mine survives, so be it. But Wallace Stevens? What of Wallace Stevens? Surely Mr. Death must have tunneled his way out of the camp, enduring the critics and other fecal matter, and found his way to you, bearing a poem or two, a line or two, or a thought. He said that poetry reveals appearances and renovates experience. Something worth preserving in that. No? Health. He said poetry is health. To your health, then. Sláinte. Cover your nostrils and your eyes. What is that howling? You?
Hard to believe that all our excursions end in ice. If I have a past, I have a future. My projections are contained in my time capsule. Within me I hold what is to come. I need not see it. Poetry should carry my future, even if the anthologies are airy, and the range of colors is reduced to gray, and there is no light in you. No light. Then read by my light, the light of me, by my flickering hope that by some means of transport, in the pebbles and the terns, shivers news of me and mine. You are my tongue. You are my poem. Are you out there?
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world . . .
—Seamus Heaney, in Thomas Murphy’s
Book of Dandy Quotations
DO DREAMS COUNT in the places that keep public records? Where a village stores the titles connected to land and the houses, and the histories of streets, and who lies buried in what plot in the cemetery. Has anyone ever founded such a hall for dreams? The dreams of the villagers. That would be something. Yes? The Hall of Recorded Dreams. Like that vast granite Hall of Justice built on Centre Street in New York in the 1830s, called The Tombs, where, alongside the courts, they kept inmates on Death Row, who walked across a Bridge of Sighs to the gallows. The Hall of Recorded Dreams would be even bigger than The Tombs, but it would be bright and full of life. And music playing. All the pop tunes that people hear in their minds. And there would be an Annex to the Hall, for Unrecorded Dreams that people kept to themselves, like prayers. What a field trip for schoolchildren, to walk through the catacombs and the stacks, and pluck down their family’s dreams, and their friends’, and their own. You could read your old man’s unrecorded dreams. Here’s my da’s. Oh, Jeez. They’re all about me.
THE HOTEL ROOM is cramped, with dark gree
n walls. It smells of tobacco and creosote. The picture of Don Quixote over the brass bed is not the usual, in that the Don is wearing gray running shorts and a blue beret instead of the knight getup, and is holding a Bic pen instead of a lance. The fireplace requires a shilling for the heat. Finding only pesos in my bathrobe pocket, I remain cold. Somewhere Dean Martin is singing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” so clearly, I wonder if he is in the room with me. Outside on the esplanade, a smiling couple seated at a round table with a red-checkered tablecloth are toasting each other with steins of coffee. He noodles her hair. They may be posing for an ad. At an adjacent table, a wolf and a goatherd are locked in conversation about the Ebola virus. The wolf slouches. The skull of the goatherd bulges like a purple lung. They speak in the language of the forests. A beggar approaches the table of the smiling couple, carrying a rolled-up canvas that he unfurls like the phases of the moon to reveal Las Meninas, the original Velázquez painting. He wears the hard shoes of an Irish dancer and a tunic of gold lamé. The couple ignores the masterpiece, and the beggar sighs, moves on, and vanishes on the road into a calamity of geese. In my hotel room sits an old DuMont TV with a circular frame for the tiny screen. W. D. Snodgrass is on the set of the Tonight Show, behind a heavy carved-wood desk. He is editing a manuscript. Startled, he looks up, and says, Murph? Why didn’t you write?
Murph? William says. Murph? Murph? I open my eyes to find my little William beside me on the bench in the park playground, tugging at my sleeve. Murph? Were you sleeping? Christ, I mutter, scared to death. I clutch him to me.
SO I CLUTCHED HER to me. But she broke my hold, and the cloak of my trance was lifted from my shoulders and I lay on the field, eyes open to the stars in shambles. Until that time, I lived in my dream state, riding the red mare bareback in midriver, the horse snorting and shaking the water off her, splashing, and stretching her great neck. When we came to the hospital, she bolted and threw me. I inquired after Cait. Her room was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges. It smelled of resolution. Cait herself was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges, invisible under the riot, which made it difficult to hold a conversation. So I held her instead, the tubes and sponges and the girl, now small as a name, saying this and saying that. How’s life? I asked her. Life? she said. Why are you weeping, Murph? Ya big sissy. Life could not be better. Life’s the best. Then she slept. And after a year or two, wouldn’t you know it, she flew out the hospital window in the company of a white crow, soaring high, so very high, all that was left of her was a pinpoint of light, like a point of emphasis, deep in the firmament. Since there was nothing more for me to do after that, I rested in the bed where Cait’s body had been, lay down in the depression her body had made. And I tried to fill it. But, of course, I could not.
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