Murfi

Lloyd Murphy is an assistant manager in a manufacturing firm, and he is a man in the wrong world. Everybody makes demands on him, and what they demand is never anything he’d like. That’s how it always has been with him, ever since his childhood. He hates this, but he feels helpless to do anything about it. Then, late one Friday, his boss calls Murphy into his office to tell him something important.

Little does Murphy know that his world is about to change, opening a whole different world to him, a fantasy about to come true.

It begins as he spends a weekend alone in his rented flat. The following Monday, he doesn’t return to his job. Just what has he become, and why is he willing to lose his humanity?

Kenneth H. Fleischer is in his third career. With a formal education that was intended to lead to a career as an entomologist, he left college and went to work in the electronics industry, where he stayed for twenty-nine years.

His first love, however, was story-telling, and he began to pursue this interest seriously near the end of his engineering career, from which he formally retired at 50. His interests include music, philosophy, psychology, and cultural anthropology.

"I believe that a story has to grab the reader’s interest right away," he says. "If one is forced to be patient for the book to start paying off after several dozen pages, I think the writer has cheated his public. You’ll never see me doing that sort of thing."

Murfi is Fleischer’s first work to be published electronically.

The com line on his phone lit up and the phone beeped. Lloyd Murphy pressed the speaker-phone button. "Yes?" he answered.

"Lloyd, do you have a moment?" It was his boss.

"Sure, Mr. Evans. What do you want?"

"Would you come into my office, please?"

"I’ll be right there." Murphy wondered what Evans wanted. Had Murphy’s group underperformed again? Murphy knew his people. They didn’t underperform, really. It’s just that they were always expected to perform at emergency level, and folks got sick trying to do that every day. Murphy had always tried, as Evans did for him, to shield those under him from the worst of the company’s pressures, but one couldn’t be sure. Insofar as Murphy could see, the last quarter’s performance levels had been close enough to corporate projections not to call attention. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, Mr. Evans hadn’t sounded happy. He seldom did, but he was a good boss to work for, even if the company sometimes asked for too much.

The company always asked for too much.

Murphy put down the papers he had started to pick up -- after all, Evans hadn’t said what he had had in mind -- and went to Mr. Evans’es office.

When Murphy entered, Evans asked him to close the door. That meant that this was something serious. A personnel matter, perhaps. Murphy closed the door and took the chair in front of the desk, facing Evans.

As Murphy sat down, Evans said, "Please sit down."

"What is it?" Murphy asked.

"Lloyd, how have you been doing lately?"

"Well, sir, the Eddington Mills order is about sixty percent along, and the new NC machine is scheduled to go on line the middle of next week ..."

"That’s not what I mean. How are you doing, yourself? Is everything all right with you?"

"I’m all right. Why do you ask?" Murphy wasn’t all right. He was bone-weary and feeling depressed. Everybody wanted something from him and nobody ever gave him a moment for himself. It had always been that way, but it was getting worse.

Evans looked pointedly at him. "Lloyd, I know better; it’s all over your face. It’s close to the end of the day, and it’s Friday, so you don’t have to worry about your people, and we need this talk. You’ve never been an enthusiastic worker, but you’ve always had a real talent for handling people, so you quickly got promoted to Assistant Manager. My Assistant Manager. I just want you to know that I appreciate what you do for me, and, besides that, I like you.

"The problem is, you’ve been looking haggard lately. Are you having problems at home?"

"I live alone. You know that."

"Money problems?"

"No."

"Family problems?"

"Nothing that’s new. What are you getting at?"

"Lloyd, I’m worried about you. You’re not even thirty, and you look like fifty. I don’t want you to have some sort of breakdown."

Murphy didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Evans waited awhile, then said, "I want you to leave work early today, like in five minutes. Take the weekend easy, and just try to do nothing. Make it a sort of mini-vacation."

"What about the Rockland clutch plates? We’re still having problems with yield."

"Forget them until Monday. I don’t want you to take home a single scrap of work. And don’t work on anything you didn’t take home, either. Just take it easy and loaf. If your family pesters you, pull your phone’s plug or have an answering machine say you’re out of town. Whatever it takes. That’s an order. When you come in on Monday, I don’t want you to be looking like you’ve been on a chain gang."