The Problem with Murmur Lee

by Connie May Fowler

  Now there was a sobering idea. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m serious.”

  I grabbed the bottle of Patrón and took a swig.

  “You can look like Eddie Munster the rest of your life. Or”—she flipped back her hair—“you can let me help you.” She talked slowly, as if I were drunk, retarded, and four. Then she turned on her booted little heel and started walking the five steps to the bathroom.

  “Bring the bottle with you,” she said on step three.

  Murmur Lee Harp

  The light cracks open and I am free. I tumble and spin. The sky swirls. I hear myself sing, “Tra la la la la!” and suddenly I am back where all of this began: the Iris Haven River. The water splashes and I see myself in each droplet, reflected a thousand times, each reflection a different world. Oh, I was wrong about there being no wonder!

  My exile to that strange void has changed me. I am strong. Righteous. You knew I would be. In the wind’s fury, I saw the past. I witnessed Oster Harp stroll the beach as his wife lay dying, and my violent conception, which catapulted my mother into a paralysis kept whole by prayer, and my daughter’s ecstatic tumble into the arms of a father whose inability to love selflessly made him cruel. I saw myself exact the truth from Billy Speare and then stubbornly—almost pathologically—ignore it. Yes, I saw my life, my wonderful, wonderful life. How could I regret those days? They were precious. Rare. Finite. You’ve got to love it all, even the sorrow and violence and pain, because—believe me—being alive is a temporary privilege granted by a fickle universe.

  The current draws me away from land—perhaps far from the people who have gone before me—deep into the heart of the river. As I’m pulled through the water, ribbonlike, I wonder if the fish can see me or if I remain a nimble spirit.

  Edith Piaf

  I should never have gone to sleep the night of the White Party, because after our encounter with un peu de violence, the nightmare was unavoidable.

  The Vietnamese-Laotian border. My name was Jim MacHenry. Yes, they called me Mac.

  I fit the profile perfectly. A loner who, paradoxically, understood more than most the importance of being a team player. In fact, the loner in me made Jimmy Mac all that more of a player. A soldier’s soldier. I knew without a doubt what I had been put on this planet to do: annihilate the enemy one at a time. Pure. Basic. Divine. The chaos that accompanies When in doubt, empty the magazine does not exist for the sniper. We are pure, calculated, controlled death. Click. Click. Click. One shot one kill. One shot one kill. That’s the creed. It’s what I lived by.

  And I was good. Don’t get me wrong. I was no Carlos Hathcock with ninety-three confirmed kills. But I did my job. My daddy taught me to shoot nearly before I could walk. Perhaps he knew he’d spawned a sissy and was determined to drum any such proclivity right out of me. Handling a rifle was, to me, like drinking cream.

  Yes, sir! Gunnery Sgt. James MacHenry was one fine marksman. I brought down children and men and women. I did it because it was my job. I did it because if I didn’t, my fellow marines would die. I did it because I was following orders. I did it because I knew how to look through the crosshairs and become one with my prey.

  I breathed when they breathed. I blinked with they blinked. Our heartbeats were indistinguishable. I was the rising moon to my enemy’s setting sun. Oui. It was a very Zen process.

  There are an eternal number of dead moments—spaces where nothing exists—every day in every life. That was where I lived. I took my shot between the breath, between the opening and closing of the eye, between one heartbeat and the next. Right then, in that moment, in the in-between, I pressed the butterfly trigger.

  Death was already present. I simply made it permanent.

  And I never want to dwell there again. But the nightmare, like the sniper, is a hunter. C’est vrai. It stalks me. Patient, disciplined, focused. The night of the White Party, it stalked and took me down.

  After my guests left, I cleaned my home, put away all the silly flourishes. I wanted to face the next day with a clear slate. And I feared sleep. So I went so far as to wash down my kitchen walls. I admit that I spilled a few tears. I could not get the visage of Billy Speare sprawled and bleeding out of my mind. Nor could I block out the replay of Lucinda attacking him. This is why I feared sleep. Cela se comprend. But finally, slumber insisted that I come her way.

  They were all there, waiting for me, a gallery of my kills. Faces, arms, legs, torsos blown to bits. Intestines and brains and white bones blossoming from jagged holes of exploded flesh. The enemy told me their names and shared pedestrian details about their loved ones. They showed me dog-eared ghostly images of sons and daughters and wives. One of them shoved a photograph of his family at me, said, Here, take it, it’s yours.

  I tried to wake up, to escape the knowledge of what a two-and-a-half-inch 700-grain bullet does to a body. Impossible.

  When I finally did manage to rise out of the nightmare, I no longer knew who I was. I lay there in a misty dawn light and ran my hand across my chest—a chest profoundly different from the one I’d lived with for sixty-two years. I realized that besides two firm breasts and a pussy, all I’d ever really wanted in my life was intimacy. So how did I go so wrong? I had been a good son. A good citizen. A good soldier. How was I to know what the killing would do to me? Sex change or not, what truly had altered me—what had played jacks with my soul—was Nam. The war, not the sex confusion, was the reason I’d never found love.

  Indeed. In that misty morning light, I realized that my emergence into womanhood had helped heal—to the greatest extent possible—Gunnery Sgt. Jimmy Mac. As a result of the sex change, I’d grown strong, honest. I’d said to the world, “This is who I am. Deal with it.”

  Lying there, I fondled myself. I felt my breasts. I pinched my mauve nipples—original to my soul, I might add—and they grew hard and wild. I slid my hand down to that place where once there had been a penis, nearly overwhelmed by the sad acknowledgment that I have never belonged. When I was a man, none of the accoutrements of being a male made sense. My cock in my hand. The sexual imperative to stick it in somewhere. The only ogling I did at breasts was out of envy. I wanted Jackie O hair and a nice fuchsia Chanel suit. But once I was transformed into the woman I’d always wanted to be, I still fell short of the mark. I wasn’t a woman in the biblical or DNA sense, as Dr. Z loved to point out. I was a transsexual. Which means confusion. My sexual identity was confusing to others. So despite having attained what I’d always wanted—a womanly body complete with curves and hidden wet places—true intimacy of spirit and soul still eluded me.

  I touched myself between my legs, and the skin memory—that which resides in the hand—performed what can only be called a tactile cartwheel. Nerves tumbled end over end at the surprise (or was it loss?) of finding only softness where a cock had once nestled and curled and sometimes awakened, plump and strange. I wrapped my arms around myself—an attempt to bring me back to my center—and decided that the White Party had been my laughable attempt to belong, to be accepted by an outside source, all of which had vanished when Mur died, since she was the only person who had provided me with those charms.

  How wonderful it would be, I thought, for someone to love me, to put their arms around me, hold me close, brush their lips across my cheek, whisper through my thinning hair, “I adore you, Edith.” I would like for a man who knows what to do with his penis to move it in and out of my new special place.

  “I’m so sick of the vibrator,” I said to the room. “Sick, sick, sick.” And I thought for a moment about the blow jobs I’d received when I still had my male appendage. Truly, that’s the only thing I missed about being a man. Ah, mon ami, blow jobs! From a male point of view, there’s nothing better. And it’s a sad fact of the world that there simply are not enough of them being given. I swear, we would fight fewer wars if men were blown more often. Daily if possible. No, it could not be that simple, I thought as I pulled my comforter close to m
y chin, that the true problem with humankind is that few of us get blown often enough. I was delusional.

  And disgusting, thinking about sex and loss and intimacy and death. I decided that every person I’d ever killed was with me always, asking me why. I said aloud, firmly, “I don’t know,” and my longing for my friend Mur grew bright red. It pulsed.

  “Damn it, Mur. I need you. Right now.” I needed her furious laughter, her good sense, her pink openness.

  But no, there would be no resurrections, no softening of loss, no easing of my devout aloneness or guilt.

  I stared up at the ceiling and wondered how I could be alone if I were surrounded by the people whose lives I’d taken. I flipped back my covers, sat up, slipped my feet into my satin flats, pulled on my bathrobe, wandered into my living room, and set the needle in the vinyl groove. “Des yeux qui font . . .”

  There would always be Edith, I supposed.

  I opened my front door, to discover that we were socked in by a fine white fog. I stepped out onto the porch and into the mist. Anything could happen in the fog, I thought, absolutely anything. So I closed my eyes and conjured a new me. I was Edith, the real Edith, a solitary figure centered in a pool of light. Un très beau visage, tragique et triomphant. The audience, hundreds of souls, stretched out before me like starlight. They were captivated, impatiently waiting, praying for me to begin. “Vive l’ oiseau chanteuse,” they cried.

  I squared my shoulders and looked skyward—la couleur blanche de ciel—and began. Enveloped in light and fog, I became a woman with perfect pitch. But more than that—better than that—pain and joy and hope dotted the whirling dervish of my voice. I moved my people to tears. I reminded them, for a few moments, how exquisite life is. I made them feel as if anything—any sort of love—was possible.

  And as my words disappeared into the fantastic veil of this deep fog, as my voice traveled over all of Iris Haven—that thin strip of sand and palmetto—I fooled myself into believing that not only was I not alone; I was loved.

  Billy Speare

  So I was sitting on my couch, head back, ice pack lightly resting on my newly set and bandaged nose. Ariela “Doogie Howser” van den Berg sat cross-legged in the green crushed-velour club chair opposite me, chattering away, glowing over the fact that she had successfully caused me to yowl in pain and that the pain had forced from me tears, yes, sharp-edged diamond droplets of devout physical anguish. She also kept filling my glass with Patrón, sweetly explaining that as far as she could tell, it was the most effective painkiller I owned and that she was drug-free and had never been drunk a day in her life and planned to keep it that way.

  And then, after deciding that the only way to cope with her schoolgirl monologue was to pretend it was Muzak, and just as I was about to drift into sweet, blessed unconsciousness, she said, “I think that what we need to do once you look human again is introduce you to my mom. She needs a husband.” Ariela propped her feet on my coffee table. “I need a dad.” She smiled brilliantly at me as I lifted my head and looked past my giant nose. “And you’re it.”

  “Ha!”

  “What? How can you say no? You haven’t even met her yet.”

  I took off the ice pack, winced, reached for the Patrón. “Exactement, Doogie Howser! I haven’t met her yet. So how could I say yes?”

  Ariela sat there, blinking madly, twisting the ends of the chair cushion in her pale little fists. I think this deranged child was serious. She wanted me to be her dad.

  “Look, kid, I’m not the catch you think I am. And besides, about your mom, I’m not in, on, or even underneath the market womanwise.”

  Her Cleopatras snapped with surprise. “Get out! You’re gay? But all that straight sex in your book. Hot straight sex. What did you do? Make it up?”

  I know a few rules. Can even follow them most of the time. Rule number twenty-six: Don’t laugh in the immediate aftermath of having had your nose set if said appendage has been set without the numbing aid of an anesthetic. But this kid cracked me up. I laughed a long, hard, genuine laugh, all the while moaning, “Oh God, it hurts.”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said indignantly, rising to her feet.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I’m laughing because of course I’m not gay and I’m not in the market for women because my girlfriend just died. And I’m really not prepared to take on the role of being anyone’s father, seeing how I royally fucked up that duty with my own kid. She won’t even speak to me.”

  Ariela walked over to the table, rummaged through her purse, pulled out a cell phone, and punched in a number.

  “Hey! Don’t you dare call your mother.”

  “Fuck you, Mr. No Dick. I’m calling for a pizza. We’ve got to eat. Figuring out why you’re such an asshole—God, you laughed about your girlfriend dying—is going to take us the rest of the day.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Yeah,” she said into the phone, “I’ll hold, but not for long.” She rotated the phone away from her ear. “I hate being on hold. So, give me the four one one. The girlfriend. Are you all broken-up? Did you know each other long? Was it murder, or some ghastly disease?”

  “Yes. No. Accident. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You have to—yeah, I want a large veggie with extra cheese, light on the anchovies. . . . What’s your address?”

  It went on like this for a few minutes. Her interrogating me and ordering pizza simultaneously, me giving her nothing, but all the while feeling slightly amused at her bulldoggedness.

  She clicked off the phone, tossed it in her purse, and said, “You know what? You don’t act all broken-up.”

  Bang, bang, bang, there was a knock at the door.

  “Shit, that was fast,” she said. “You got any dough?” She clomped the three steps to the door and flung it open, not bothering to see who in the hell it was before exposing herself. She looked her poor next victim up and down. “Who are you?”

  “Well, aren’t we Miss Manners. Billy, you in there?” A woman who looked vaguely familiar—I guess I’d seen her at Salty’s—stuck her head in.

  “Oh, he’s here all right. What’s left of him. Come on in.”

  Clearly, I was not in control. I stood up, wobbled, I’m afraid, and stuck out my hand. “Billy Speare.” Yeah, that was her. Seen her at Salty’s. She was a handsome woman. What the hell is she doing here? I wondered.

  We shook. She had a firm grip, maybe too firm. “I’m Charlee Mudd,” she said, tossing back her blond hair, narrowing those startling green eyes. “I’m sure Murmur told you all about me.”

  I looked at my wanna-be daughter, whose arms were crossed in front of her. She wore the bemused look of a woman who sensed a grand game was about to begin and only she—of all the people in the world—knew the outcome. I looked at Charlee Mudd. I thought, I could fuck her, but I sure would never like her.

  “Have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? Yeah, I think she did mention you.”

  “She yours?” Charlee Mudd asked, nodding her head at Ariela.

  “Yep. That’s dear old dad,” Ariela chimed in, as speedy as only an eighteen-year-old can be. “Who’s Murmur? Your dead girlfriend?” she asked ever so delicately.

  “Goodness. You are really something,” Charlee Mudd said to Ariela, a definite note of awe creeping into her voice.

  “Why, thank you. It’s difficult, you know, standing out as a real person when you’ve got such a famous dad.”

  “Ah,” Charlee Mudd said, “I suppose it would be. I love your tattoos. They really are gorgeous,” she added, cocking her head this way and that to get a better look. “Do you have a name?” She spun her gaze back on to me. “Does your daughter have a name?”

  “Ariela,” we both said in unison.

  “Pretty.”

  “Thank you. My parents named me after a great-great-aunt who was Vladimir Nabokov’s ghostwriter and lover. She wrote every word that came out of his mouth.”

&n
bsp; Oh God, Ariela, that made no sense. Any daughter of mine would know better than to say something that stupid.

  “Really? That’s fascinating,” Charlee Mudd said. She and Ariela’s eyes met, and I am certain that some sort of feminine secret communication flew between them. It was two against one. Two strangers were standing in my tin can, strangers with ovaries—and they had experienced an undercover mind meld right in front of me, and I didn’t really know what either of them wanted. I mean, Ariela had said she desired a father. But how come of all the writers in all the world she’d chosen me? Just because of my brilliance? I didn’t think so. And who the hell knew what this so-called friend of Murmur’s wanted. I took a fresh swig of Patrón. I was getting over this warm little scene. And fast.

  “How’s your nose?”

  “Just fine. How’s yours?”

  “Dad! That was sooooo rude!”

  “Listen, Ms. Mudd, I’ve had a rough eighteen hours. Can I just ask flat out what you’re doing here?” That was good. I had scored an offensive shot. I was back in the game.

  Ariela zipped over to the fridge, pulled out two soft drinks, and handed one to our guest. “Here, Charlee, have a Coke.”

  “Thank you.” She popped the top, hesitated, and then said, “Ariela, do you mind if your father and I talk in private?”

  “Actually, I do,” she said.

  “My gosh, you’re confident for someone so young.” She turned to me. “This conversation really needs to take place in private.”

  I indicated the green velour. “You heard my daughter. She stays.” I wasn’t happy with the tone that had crept into my voice. But I didn’t like her being there. I didn’t like her appropriation of Murmur Lee. I hated busybody cunts. “You’ve got five minutes,” I said as I slid the Patrón bottle to the center of the table. “So shoot.”

  And good old Ariela said, “Bang, bang. You’re both dead.”

  Murmur Lee Harp

  Time doesn’t really exist where I’m at, so I’m not sure how long I sojourned with the fish. All I know is that a speedboat zipped by, kicking up a mighty wake, which propelled me onto the shore. I am happy about this. I missed the strange happenings on land and I have high hopes that I won’t be the only spirit here. Where are the Harps and Katrina and my baby girl? That’s what I want to know.