Issue No. 3, Murder! - Young Life: A Nathan McMurphy Mystery, Part I

I was reached for the morning I had spent all week dreaming of, the Saturday morning I was to float downstairs mid-afternoon and greet my parents’ cries of “This is how you take advantage of your youth? You’ve wasted the day! Your breakfast, lunch, and dinner’s cold! We were going to take you to the movies but you can sure as hell forget about that!” with a calm, face-to-the-fridge, “Sorry, I dreamt in.”

I was reached for and thrown into the shower before the migrant leaf blowers had even wiped the sleep from their eyes. I reminded myself whilst dressing in yesterday’s corduroys to bring my pillow along so I could continue in the car, but I was called for and forgot. I sat back--my head on the folded-down armrest--watched the dew fly off the window, and called to mind mass homicide(1) .

Weekends arrive and tireless parents are never content to stop moving--they daytrip. Every state park, historical mansion, colonial village, art museum and arts and crafts museum has been trod upon by my parents and me on at least one Saturday afternoon. They were on a college campus kick, visiting every one, doing the same things at each: the library, the galleries, the dorms, the quads, the disparaging comparisons to their own alma maters. The went to remind themselves of the youth they had lost, not my awkward, lumpy, sixth-grade youth, but university youth--lithe, pale, and in all senses upwards.

The general feeling walking amongst such budding gods and goddesses was of overwhelming self-disgust. I, a pustule of a boy, trailed my parents under the age-old oaks and stone halls with all the anger and hatred that seethes from ugliness like the acne from my sweating, rubbing inner thighs. The feeling was not foreign, but was inflamed amidst people on their sexual peak. Had my parents brought me just to inflame me? Had my parents had me just to inflame me? I had to pee.

“Guys! Mom! Can we stop?” I made the plaintive plea trying to catch up through miles of topless volleyball and mud wrestling, careful my volume did not attract attention. Eventually, I did catch up enough to accidentally step on my mother’s bare heel. She turned back fast, her eyes tearing from the pain. She pointed to a three-story Georgian home across the street.

“Piss in there!” she said.

“I think I can hold it.”

“Piss in there!”

I kept the imposing edifice in view as I walked under a banner with strange letters, Greek to me. At the stoop I turned back and saw my parents continuing down the sidewalk. I thought, rather than run after them, I had better pee first.

The door was open. I saw no one in the foyer. I walked down the hall and peered into the keyholes of all the shut doors. Whatever the rooms were--I saw only crushed papers and soiled undershirts-- they were not restrooms. The hall took me to a staircase and, it being my only choice, I took it. I peered my way down another row of closed doors until I finally came upon a toilet. I shut the door behind me, tried to lock it, failed, and went.

It was an old toilet, involving an arcane system of pulleys and chains. I must have pulled the wrong pulley, or perhaps I wasn’t supposed to pull anything, but the box on the ceiling came crashing to my feet, cracking to pieces and soaking my Airwalks. I did my best to collect the porcelain into a neat pile. I turned on the fan to dry the floor and left the bathroom redder than I arrived.

An older boy passed as I stepped into the hall. He was like the rest of them, an inspiration to mannequins everywhere, but he shot me a very worried look. He walked fast, was down the stairs by the time I noticed the toilet water seeping out from under the door.

I heard voices and sirens; they got louder as I got closer to the bottom of the stairs. I wasn’t sure the floor I walked down to was even the floor I first walked into, it held so many people. Most were university youth, others policemen. A band of caution tape blocked off the stairs from the crowd. They must not have figured someone as young as I would have been in the house since I was able to walk quite comfortably under the tape.



Slipping in eye level with the older groins around me, I noticed all were facing the same direction and--slipping in that direction--I found a small clearing in the center of the hall, in the center of which was the body of a young man, alike in all physical respects to the standing bodies around it, but dead. Two policemen stood closest to the body, one at each outstretched arm.

“Do you think it’s another one?” said one to the other.

“There’s one sure way to find out,” said the other to the one.

He knelt beside the body’s chest, to a tear in its sweater. He pulled the tear apart, revealing a wound, and pulled the wound apart. A translucent liquid, bubbled, poured out of the gash and onto the floor, pouring until all that was left of the chest was a standing ribcage. The policeman closed the wound, ordered a bandage, and the leak ceased. He looked up to his partner.

“Yup,” he said. “It’s Pellegrino.”

I remembered my parents. I slipped my way back to the front door, feeling like a snorkler caught in so many jelly fish he didn’t know which way was surface. I found, after finally making it to the front, my problems of navigation were caused by the sudden fact that no light was coming from the open doorway. The bright Saturday daytripping weather had turned. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was so overcast one couldn’t help but imagine it was.

Having set off in the direction my parents walked off in, I was admiring a marble globe outside the planetarium when a very fat woman intercepted my path and grabbed me by the neck. Her apparel was as one would expect from a fat woman: sweat, and too small. The only remarkable characteristic, aside from the violent greeting, was a silver, shoulder-length wig, too silver to pass for real and yet even too silver to make for a sensible costume. I paid enough mind to what she was saying--though the dried Chef Boyardee in the nooks of her lips was distracting--to at least hear, in a nasal British, “Very like a murderer to calmly leave the scene.”

Despite my loudly-stated intentions of finding my parents, the woman in the wig turned me around and carried me back to the old Georgian house.

to be continued…