clapped his hands sharply in front of my face however, not just once but three times, in rapid succession.—Now? he said in a way that sounded like but was certainly not a question. I nodded quickly and made for the door.
5
You see then why a report becomes necessary.
You see how the tiniest misunderstanding is conflated. How with more information. How the meeting had been conducted, nonetheless, information or no, almost none whatsoever, with the utmost precision and professionalism. How precisely and professionally, subsequently, I have narrated the events. Transcribed. How henceforth it will be simply a matter of pulling a precise and professional and perhaps quite creatively fastened sheaf of pages from my satchel, and locating the moment in question, and pointing a stern and righteously trembling finger at that precisely and professionally transcribed moment, and being redeemed. Rewarded. Regaled with praise for keeping such a fine account.
However tedious to keep it may already be proving.
6
Whereupon such tedium, offered an inch, begs mightily, mercilessly, for a yard, and I am compelled to gesture—with a great and profound reluctance, somewhat wishing reports had never been started—toward that great tedious time between my waking and today, rendering, one can only hope, further digression unnecessary.
So:
Murphy came after I was already there. He came of his own accord.
I too may well have come of my own accord; I may always have been there, but Murphy definitely was not always there, and as far as I can ascertain was not summoned/dragged/blackmailed/et cetera. I remember the day he came. It had not been sunny then either and, as would make sense, he did not carry any smell of sun about his person.
Whence the sun smell.
I wonder.
I also digress. From the digression itself as it were. He came and he was absorbed without formality into us. Maybe he had been expected. Binelli introduced him to me as Murphy. He didn’t look like a Murphy, like what I at least would expect a Murphy to look like. And apparently I didn’t look much like a Finley to him, because when Binelli introduced us (Murphy, Finley; Finley, Murphy), Murphy said,—Finley?
And Binelli said,—Sure, why not?
So.
When Binelli had retreated behind his door, Murphy stared and stared at me. I was made slightly anxious by this, until I realized the probable cause.—My eyes, I acknowledged.
He nodded quickly.
—Are yellow, I finished.
—Yes, he said.
—I don’t know why, I said.—They just are.
—Yes, he said.
Then he said,—It’s very unusual, yellow eyes.
Then he said,—Why do they call you Finley.
—Why do they call you Murphy, I answered, not really answering, having ultimately no surefire explanation.
—I suppose, he said,—it’s my name?
He said it like a question and looked at me closely. For what, who knew. Perhaps an answer. Perhaps not. The eyes I am aware can be distracting. Binelli had said so at least. The Lamb had as well, had in fact on several occasions pronounced them nightmare-making.
—Try not to look at them, I offered.—If they bother you.
—They don’t bother me, he said.—Finley, he said. He shuffled something in his pockets which was, I would soon come to learn, a regular thing he did. Stick his hands in his pockets and jangle around in there. And rock a bit back and forth, and look down at the ground, and hum a little three-note tune. All these things he did on a regular basis. A nervous set of habits I supposed.
—Okay then, Finley, he said, pronouncing my name with what I may or may not be paranoid in assuming to be a touch of distaste.
It’s not a terrible name. It’s not something, at least, I can help. I was named, as people generally are, and the naming forces were beyond my control.
Did I mention yet that Binelli made me a Russian? By way of my papers, he did. He did that knowing full well my feelings on the matter. This is important to say now because Murphy asked where it was from, Finley.
I said I didn’t know, but my papers made me Russian. And then he laughed and laughed and laughed.—Russian? he said over and over.—Russian?
And then he stopped laughing all of a sudden and said,—That figures, and then that was all for our first conversation. We’ve had many since then. And with the tyrannically needy tedium thus appeased, there I’ll let the digression end.
7
Mr. Uppal, Professor Uppal—the correction had been made over introductions and then flogged to death throughout the port course each and every single time I referred to him thereafter as Mister, with admittedly a sort of autistic inability to make the mental change required to correct the salutation—born Early Uppal, was late.
8
On the matter of Mr. Uppal:
Professor Uppal:
Born Early Uppal, year unknown, but one could surmise a good fifty-to-sixty-to-sixty-five years ago and count painfully backward and guess at a decade, if one were to care enough to go through the trouble.
I perhaps should, but do in fact not.
Care.
Enough or to.
It would only, after all, require yet another unnecessary digression, this time involving maths no less, for which other reports may happily clear room, encourage, even, with their tidy charts and year-end projections and cheerful calculations but for which this report has no time. Starting already behind, as it were, and not inclined in the least to frivolity.
He was to have been more grandly named, this young Uppal, this first Uppal child to result from the union of Singh and Elda Uppal (née Holliday); he was also, however, to have been more grandly born and thus deserving, poor creature, of the imposing and unwieldy moniker which was to have been bestowed upon his squalling brown head. For Singh and Elda Uppal had conceived, right alongside this hopeful fetus, a plan to rise swiftly and with a certain irascible fervor through the ranks of high society—not the shabby high society of their native land either, no, but of a society whose very dregs outshone the royalty of their own high society in immeasurable wattage. And the ease with which this rising was to occur seemed so simple, such a no-brains-necessary sort of plot, that they looked upon their neighbors and friends with a scorn that increased as quickly and magnificently as Elda’s girth—more so, even, as she was a slip of a woman to begin, and though
