Thomas Murphy (6 page)

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Test devised by The Ohio State University

Please complete this
form in ink without the assistance of others.

         
1.
  
Name __________________________

         
2.
  
Date of Birth _____ /_____ /_____

         
3.
  
How far did you get in school? _________

         
4.
  
I am a Man ______ Woman ______

         
5.
  
I am Asian ______ Black ______ Hispanic ______ White ______ Other ______

         
6.
  
Have you had any problems with memory or thinking? Yes ____ No ____ Only Occasionally ____

         
7.
  
Have you had blood relatives with problems of memory or thinking? Yes ____ No ____

         
8.
  
Do you have balance problems? Yes ____ No ____

         
9.
  
Have you ever had a stroke? Yes ____ No ____

       
10.
  
Do you currently feel sad or depressed? Yes ____ No ____ Only Occasionally ____

       
11.
  
Have you had any changes in your personality? Yes ____ No ____

Dear The Ohio State University, I apologize for acting counter to your instructions and completing your form in purple crayon, rather than ink, but I thought it might make my responses stand out from the pack, offer a little flair. Know what I mean? As for the assistance of others, I needed assistance only with the first question. After that I flew like a donkey. Best, Murph.

         
1.
  
Thomas James Murphy. My parents named me Thomas, after Thomas More, James after James More, and Murphy after themselves.

         
2.
  
09/13/43. On the isle of Inishmaan, in the Aran Islands, in the west of Ireland. As soon as I saw where I was, I taught myself to stand and walk in an effort to escape, but was informed that they don't issue passports to babies. I explained that I'd be happy just to swim out and drown, but they told me everyone on Inishmaan says that.

         
3.
  
As far as possible. Either in fact or in my mind. A teacher caught me daydreaming in class and asked me, Thomas, would you care to rejoin the group. I said, Not really.

         
4.
  
Both. When my wife, Oona, was alive, I boasted that we had the America's first same-sex marriage. My friend Greenberg used to ask, which sex is that?

         
5.
  
All the above, just like you, you racist bastards.

         
6.
  
No, but I have had problems with drinking. The goddamn arthritis in my right hand makes it difficult to open the Jameson, so I smash the neck of the bottle on the kitchen counter, and hope no glass gets into the whiskey. You know how it is. Sometimes you just lose it. Like the time Woody Hayes, the coach of your football team at The Ohio State University, ran out on the field to tackle a player on the other team. You remember.

         
7.
  
Yes. The blood relative who comes to mind is my uncle Brendan, who was kicked in the head trying to lift the rear end of a plough horse, to impress a girl named Maggie. The first use of the term
horse's ass
I believe. Brendan had a lot of problems with thinking.

         
8.
  
Yes. I have balance problems with my checkbook. I can balance it on my nose while singing “The Mountains of Mourne” and smoking a stogie. But you probably don't mean that. My problems with balancing my checkbook usually stem from never knowing what I have in my account, which in turn leads to bouncing checks. I bounce better than
I balance. When Máire was little and we were dead broke (God knows why, there being so much money in poetry), I got a letter from one David d'Allesandro of the Chase National Bank, telling me that if I continued to write overdrafts, the bank would “find it inconvenient” to maintain my account. I wrote back, Dear Mr. d'Allesandro: If
you
find it inconvenient that I haven't any money, imagine how it is for my wife and daughter.

         
9.
  
I had a stroke of genius once or twice, but it evaporated before I could get to the typewriter. Do you have strokes of genius at The Ohio State University? The addition of the article
The
before your name seems like such a stroke. I wonder if other institutions will follow suit, such as The Vanderbilt, and The Amherst.

       
10.
  
Both. But don't worry about it, me Buckeyes.

       
11.
  
No, but plenty of people wish I would. Are you among them?

ALL RIGHT.
One
time they don't know about. I forgot my area code. I was FedExing poems to the
Kenyon Review,
and you know? Where the FedEx form asks you for your phone number? I wrote down 122. That didn't look right, so I put 221, then 121. I stared at the numbers a minute, and finally asked the FedEx man, what's the area code
for New York City? He gave no contempt with his answer. Oh, yes, I said. Sure. Thanks. I should have remembered it was a palindrome beginning with 2. Yeah, he said. A palindrome.

All right. Two. But that second time was different. I'm not sure if I forgot something, or if I was remembering something that didn't happen yet, like a dream. I was walking back to the Belnord, on Eighty-sixth between Central Park West and Columbus. Then I stopped, stood still. That much is fact. I don't know why I stopped, but I think I was scared or disoriented, the way one is when seated in a parked car in a parking lot, and the two cars on either side of you start to move backward. You think you are moving forward, but you are stock-still.

Well, that's what happened with me and Eighty-sixth Street. The entire boulevard liquefied and began to move toward me, like a whitewater river. As it flowed, it gained steam. I looked for something to grab on to, to keep from being swept away, but nothing presented itself—only me and the boulevard river rushing in the direction of the park, and making a godawful whooshing and gurgling noise, as it carried away TV repairmen, doctors, nannies, manicurists, policewomen, people who worked in Starbucks, dogs on leashes, and all the denizens of Eighty-sixth Street, everyone shouting and barking and waving arms in a desperate effort to remain afloat. There followed fire hydrants, trucks, buses, and larger debris
still—huge trees and an entire town house, all rushing down the rapids. Withal, I managed to stand my ground, expecting the river to gobble me up too, but it did not. And then it was gone, just like that, and Eighty-sixth Street was back to its original shape. Pedestrians were staring at me as they passed, wondering if I were ill. A beer delivery guy was the only one to stop and ask, Mister? You okay? I said, Maybe.

SEE HERE, BUCKEYES.
How sure are you about memory, anyway? Is it always applied to what you remember? For instance, I've always suspected that Shakespeare was really Charles Darwin. Or vice versa. I never know how one should put it. Oh, I appreciate that Bacon and Marlowe are assumed to be the chief contenders, since it's unthinkable that Shakespeare could have been Shakespeare. But, no offense, how obvious can you get. Anyone could name a literary contemporary of Shakespeare's and call him Shakespeare. Nothing to it. It takes someone with a real nose for crime to figure out that while Darwin was writing
The Origin of Species
in the nineteenth century, he was also polishing off
Hamlet
in the seventeenth. At first I merely surmised that only a man like Darwin had the sort of genius Shakespeare had, that is, the galactic imagination to perceive and declare connections among invisible stages of development. But
then I found an actual clue, a typo in
Hamlet
. “To be or not to be” was intended to read “To be
and
not to be.” There you go.

Do you follow? What if memory does not apply to the past, after all, but rather to something that will occur tomorrow or next week, and the past is something we only forget? And that would be grand, 'cause most of what we can remember is terrible. Looking back on our lives, we don't stand a ghost of a chance. But looking ahead to our past, why, ma'am, you've won the lottery. For all you know, the things you remember haven't happened yet. Small wonder you're confused. This is bound to affect your actions and decisions, because if you base either or both on your recollection of something occurring tomorrow or next week, you're bound to screw up. Yet even that conclusion would be based on projected memory. One thing, though. If memory is unusable in the traditional way, the mania for daily slaughter might be reduced. We Irish would lose our grudges. Unthinkable. History could not be held responsible for repeating itself. As a bonus, we would not need to hear that droning quote from Santayana anymore.

Which brings me to that old bird I'm passing at Eighty-sixth and Broadway right now. What if I only think of him as old because that's how he appears to me. My memory tells me that he is how an old man looks. He looks like me. But if my memory of such categories
has not happened yet, then neither has he, and he cannot be old. Why, he's a kid. A spring chicken. I don't look old to him, either. I, too, am a spring chicken. We cluck good morning to each other. There are two ways to look at people, I think. One way is as they are. One is as they will be. That old bird at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. He'll be learning to sit up and crawl soon. Not long after that, he'll stand and walk. Good for him.

Which brings me to that girl Sarah, whom I have not met. Yet I have met her picture, snapped in the past. We are old friends who have yet to make each other's acquaintance. Sarah, do you recall what I started to say to you?

We have to rethink this whole business of time. Don't you agree, Buckeyes? I mean, since time does not exist and never has, we ought to reconsider the entire question. Remember two months from now? Maybe it's language that confines us. We simply do not have the language to deal with the past in the future. We don't have the grammatical tense. If we did, we might say some remarkable things in our beautiful garbled new tongue. The language spoken in the world's not. And everyone would listen to our language, because it speaks the truth, and people would learn from it when they grow young again, and eventually are born. We must love the world. Is that not so, my Buckeyed friends? I refuse to budge from my trance.

IN THEIR TRANCE,
the grown-ups sat in concentric circles in a field, the men in the inner circle, the women in the outer. Have I told you about this? We children were excluded, but were permitted to watch. What good these ancient harvest rituals were supposed to accomplish confused me, since the only crop I ever saw on Inishmaan was potatoes, and little enough of that, studding the land like the rocks. Still, the grown-ups prayed, like their Druid ancestors, year after year. They were more successful when they asked divine powers for fish, the invisible crop that seduced men to the ocean, where many died. Synge caught the repetitive sadness of the island fisherman in
Riders to the Sea
—the relentless scraping of the curraghs on the pebbles, looking like the shells of mussels, but heavy. Four big men at a time hauling the boats to a place on the shore where the vessels could float. The men would climb aboard and wobble out, slowly out and slowly back, if ever they came back.

In their circle in the field, the men sat bobbing back and forth as if at sea themselves, like the davening of Jews of which I learned from Greenberg much later in America—bodies rocking, keening for the dead, and for their lives. The women surrounding them did the same. They wore hats of red and brown wool, and their great arms glistened in the moonlight that beamed behind the ribs of the clouds. They prayed in Irish, the lilt of the rhythms lifting up and down in the human circles, ris
ing and falling like boats. At the top of a hill, a thick gray horse halfheartedly grazed.

Outside the two circles we children played like sprites and ghostly figures. We dressed up as animals, I don't remember why. It wasn't part of the ritual, I'm pretty sure of that. Perhaps one child did it once, long ago, and the custom caught on. We dressed as goats and hares and sheep and unreal animals too, satyrs and unicorns, in a concocted mythology. The liquid shapes of us moving about the shadows, and the moaning of our parents and grandparents. One year I was a boar. Another, a wolf. One time a ram. I snorted and spat like a ram. I spoke the language of rams.

What all this looked like from above, I cannot imagine. The elders prayed under the sighs of the moon. I remember thinking, What sort of God would be moved by such a sight? What God would be impressed by the prayers of a people as small and miserable as my own? In the center of the circle of the men a turf fire burned in dull ashes. It neither flared nor tapered nor extinguished itself, but held to a steady warmth and its shifting colors of red and brown. After several hours, the gray smoke generated by the fire rose and settled on the people like a cloud descended. It filled our noses, ears, our eyeballs. My senses were filled with smoke.

The night I was a ram I met a bull. Timmy Leary was the bull. His horns were alder branches. While the grown-
ups prayed, we had it out head to head on the dead plain, near an outcropping of chipped rocks. We stalked each other as the moon swirled around us. On a patch of frozen rainfall I got him down, though Timmy was bigger, a wide table of a kid. Still, I gathered up my ramness, lowered my great round horns, and hit him hard in the stomach. He hit his head on a rock, and was dazed. Lying on his back he eventually opened his eye like an owl's, and I picked up a rock, as if I were about to kill him. Timmy Leary, the sweet laughing boy, who never did me a moment's harm. As we were walking back to the circles of grown-ups, he asked me why I did that. I told him, It wouldn't be you I was killing, it would be them.
Them
? he said. But by then I had left him to go his own way, and I turned toward the cliff over the skull of the sea.