The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  This is when Yahweh returns. You can’t decide to have a child and then expect Yahweh to leave you alone. Having a child means contending with Yahweh, as everyone knows. Nor is there any way to pretend that it’s a dream or a hallucination, because Murphy sees him too. He’s across the road at the other gas station. He’s wearing ostentatious Italian sunglasses and a black suit and he’s staring off toward the highway as if he knows just what he’s waiting for, although even a cursory reading of the Bible suggests that he never knows what he wants.

  Murphy says, “It’s Yahweh.”

  Eva ducks behind the car. “Did he see me?”

  “He looks like he’s waiting for something.”

  “He’s probably waiting for me. I knew it! You see how it’s unmistakable that it’s him? Like in a dream. You just know.”

  “I knew it was him right away, yeah. You just kind of sense that it’s him.”

  “I saw him again before we left Miami. I didn’t tell you.”

  Murphy frowns. “You should have told me.”

  “What’s he doing now? Does he have his Lamborghini?”

  “There’s a Lamborghini parked around by the bathrooms. What he’s doing is saying something to some girls. He’s laughing at them. Now he’s following them back to their car. They seem scared.”

  “He wants to do something horrific and terrible to them. Like with Job.”

  “Now it looks like he’s got some firecrackers or something. Those little ones. Do we call them cherry bombs? He’s putting them into a mailbox.”

  There’s a muffled concussion. Eva waits breathlessly, but Murphy doesn’t say anything.

  “Is the mailbox destroyed?” says Eva.

  “No.”

  “Now what’s he doing?”

  “He’s got something bigger. It’s like a rocket or something. He’s putting it in there …”

  There’s another concussion, louder this time, and Murphy sees charred envelopes spill out the bottom of the mailbox.

  “That one got it. Now he’s gone back to waiting.”

  Eva manages to open the back door and climb in without raising her head to the level of the window. Murphy backs the car out of the parking lot and drives away at a good speed, watching Yahweh in the rearview mirror as he goes.

  “Just don’t talk to me about Jonah,” Eva says.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Don’t you even mention Jonah.”

  “I won’t. I didn’t.”

  They skip Charleston and veer west. Eva suddenly has the idea that they should seek refuge with her relatives in the mountains of North Carolina. That’s where her father grew up, and her great uncle Orson still lives out there in the old family house. It’s as good a place as any, she says. It’s as “godforsaken as you could hope for.”

  She is badly shaken, and it falls to Murphy to offer comfort. First, his strategy is to point out that they are in no more danger now than ever. It has always been true, he says, that calamity waits just around the corner. At any moment, Yahweh could push them down the stairs and break their legs, or smash an asteroid into the earth, or kill everyone with disease. Seeing Yahweh changes nothing.

  But this is hardly encouraging. Eva slides down in her seat and groans.

  So now he tries a different approach. He reminds her of the secular humanist credo: They believe in what exists, or rather they believe “that what exists is what exists,” and everything that exists is subject to scientific inquiry and explanation. If God exists, therefore, then God is simply another phenomenon to be explained, no different than a tornado, or a methane plume, or rising sea levels. What’s true is true.

  “But that’s no consolation either,” says Eva.

  Murphy says, “True.”

  She has never taken him to visit her North Carolina relatives. She has stayed as far away as possible. But she’s in the grip of an atavistic impulse this morning. When she was small, her father got into trouble with his gambling debts and they all spent two weeks hiding in North Carolina. For Eva, even now, the mountains are where you go when you have to run away.

  “It’s a godforsaken place,” she says again, although Murphy has registered no objection and doesn’t seem to require an explanation.

  And so, by early afternoon, they’ve passed out of the lowland South, with its garbage hills and threatened seaside towns, and they are not far from Mount Mitchell, which at 6,684 feet is the highest point east of the Mississippi. The Appalachians are modest old mountains, and they can’t compare with the wild volcanic peaks of the West, but at least they’re high enough to shelter the Southeast from some of the colder Arctic air masses that sweep down across the plains in the wintertime. It’s always nice to think of this effect. The Alps, for example, shelter Italy from the winter wind and account in part for that country’s mild climate. It’s easy to forget that Italy extends from the thirty-fifth parallel, or about the latitude of Charlotte, to the forty-seventh parallel, which is farther north than Montreal.

  Murphy is still trying to distract her. Now he abandons reason and turns clownish. Consider, he says, the “worst-case scenario”—that God created humans and everything else.

  “Big deal. Is it really so tough to make a human? Animals are just tubes. We’re all just a tube of cells enclosing the GI tract. Like worms.”

  “A tube,” says Eva, brightening a little, slipping a radish into her mouth, chewing briskly and efficiently. “Sure. And it’s open on both ends.”

  Science and philosophy notwithstanding, sometimes our best course is to make light of Yahweh’s existence, just as we learn to joke ruefully about the chilling fact of our inevitable death. Otherwise we have no chance of existing without going mad.

  “The interior of the GI tract is outside the body,” Murphy continues. “The tube is the body. Then you add some pincers, so the creature can stuff food into the upper opening of the tube. Then some tent pegs for it to stand on and a kazoo so it can bleat with joy or distress.”

  And don’t forget some rudimentary sensors so that it can detect the presence of food and/or danger. The whole thing is then surmounted by an “electrical jelly” that coordinates all these functions.

  “And voilà. You’ve created man.”

  Here they are in Appalachia, and if they were less distracted by their own extraordinary problem, there’d be a lot to discuss, like the fact that average life expectancy is dropping sharply in this part of the country, or the fact that everyone seems to be drinking a beverage called Cheerwine, or that sign over there that reads “Real Estate Store.” All of this might contribute to the sense that they are not in America at all, but somewhere else, a new place. But they aren’t thinking of these things. Murphy is thinking of nothing at all, and Eva is listening, so to speak, to the mixed-up chunks of Sylvia Plath that rattle around in her unsettled mind. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two. A love of the rack and the screw.

  “Does thinking in lines of poetry count as thinking,” she says, “or is it something else?”

  “Something else,” says Murphy.

  Over there is a man eating candy corn on a broken bench. His feet are horribly swollen and he’s snuffing oxygen from a green tank. He waves as Murphy and Eva zoom past. Eva lifts her hand. Murphy looks right through him and sees nothing.

  And yet somehow the mood in the Prius has grown less oppressive. Yahweh is in pursuit, sure, but he’s always in pursuit. Why should they be any more fearful now? They admire the blue mountains. They think they see a bobcat. Eva looks up the difference between East Carolina barbecue and West Carolina barbecue. The difference is that they like to use the whole pig in the east, but up here in the mountainous western part of the state, they prefer the shoulder. Murphy tries to joke that the mountain people didn’t go “whole hog” for secession either, but Eva doesn’t react.

  Meanwhile, her phone gives directions in an affectless female voice, and soon they’ve arrived. Here’s Uncle Orson’s street. Here’s Uncle Orson’s house. Eva
experiences that flood of dreamlike images that always haunts us when we visit a place in adulthood that we haven’t seen since childhood, but there’s no time to think about these things, nor any time to think of Time itself—in the turbid river of which, alas, we plunge inexorably to our deaths, whether we succeed in making light of the fact or not—because a passage of high drama is playing itself out in the driveway. A pale sandy-haired young man with flushed cheeks and no shoes is rushing back and forth on the asphalt while a policeman stands nearby and speaks calmly into his radio. There’s also a Hispanic woman in nurse’s scrubs waiting in the grass. The young man keeps trying to open the rear hatch of an old Nissan Pathfinder. He isn’t saying anything or making any sounds, but anyone can see that he’s experiencing inner torments.

  Eva parks a short distance away and rolls down the windows. The young man sees her and raises a hand in greeting, but he can’t spare any more time because he has to attend to his business in the driveway. Now they hear the policeman reading the Pathfinder’s license plate number to someone on the other end of the radio. The young man pulls off his billowing white T-shirt and his pants fall down. Then he yanks them up again, rushes to the car, and bends the license plate double so that the number is obscured. Next he hops into the passenger seat and waits. The nurse gets in on the driver’s side, buckles her seat belt, starts the engine, backs sedately down the driveway, and motors away. The policeman says, “Scratch that. License plate is bent. It’s a Pathfinder with a bent license plate.”

  Eva frowns up at the house, which is stuck into the side of the mountain so that the leading edge hangs off into empty space.

  “Too bad about Quaid,” she says. “I wanted you to meet him.”

  “His name is Quaid?”

  “He’s my cousin. He’s about three years younger.”

  It’s a two-story house, and the first-floor rooms in the back are below ground. Some of the window frames are covered in blue painter’s tape and there are puffs of spray paint in various colors on the brown siding. It does look like a godforsaken place, although you could just as easily argue that it’s a place targeted by God. In any case, Eva is feeling relaxed and easy. It’s Murphy who’s on edge. He wasn’t prepared for this scene, he hasn’t been paying attention, and now, for the first time, he appears to have realized where they are and he is asking himself the sad question of the age: Who did these people vote for?

  They walk up the driveway and knock on the screen door. A woman answers—Great Aunt Jo, Orson’s wife. She says, “Eva?”

  “It’s me!”

  “I didn’t recognize you because you look like a wire hanger. Don’t poets eat food?”

  “They do not,” says Murphy. “I’m glad you bring this up.”

  It looks like Orson and Jo are in the middle of some renovations, but Eva knows that they’ll never get past the demolition phase. Some of the wood paneling in the kitchen has been removed, for example, but now there’s a horse-racing calendar pinned to the exposed insulation. The cupboards are missing their doors and all the food is out on the kitchen table, but the boxes and cans are gathering dust. Cream of Wheat, Skippy, Hamburger Helper, Libby’s Vienna Sausages. There’s black plastic over one of the windows.

  “Quaid was in some kind of trouble out there,” says Eva.

  Aunt Jo rolls her eyes. “It’s been a few days of ongoing trouble.” Her accent is so thick that Murphy has trouble understanding her. “Years. The day that boy is out of trouble is the day I start at third for the Cincinnati Reds.”

  Uncle Orson calls out from the next room, “Which one is that? Who’ve we got now?”

  Quaid is not the only cousin in residence, it seems. Cousins are constantly showing up. This is not only a refuge from God and fiscal responsibility, it’s also where you come when your parents run off to Tallahassee to open an unaccredited dance school, as Quaid’s mother did.

  As for Uncle Orson, he sits in a broken recliner drinking a Krispy Kreme coffee. The vertical hold on the TV is screwed up, but they know from the audio that he’s watching horse racing.

  “It’s all I do anymore,” he says apologetically. “I’m hooked to this stuff.”

  Eva kisses him on the forehead—she loves her Uncle Orson. Everyone loves Uncle Orson.

  Murphy is the child of academics, and his parents are the children of academics, and he grew up listening to them talk about things like the declining cost of solar energy, shape-note musical notation, and the delights of P. G. Wodehouse. He may not have noticed the sick man with the candy corn, but he knows how lucky he is. He was raised—we never tire of emphasizing this point—in the church of secular humanism, and such an upbringing is a tremendous privilege, the rarest kind of wealth. His life has been easier as a result. Given some of the dangerous habits to which he was inclined in his younger days, it’s not unreasonable to think that if he were born to different parents in a different situation, he’d be barefoot in the driveway just like Quaid, his big white T-shirt the only thing holding his pants up.

  Eva says, “Your chair is broken.”

  “He won’t get a new one,” says Jo.

  Orson says, “This is my chair. You cain’t get a new one. This is it. It’s the one I’ve got.”

  Eva has not enjoyed the privileges that Murphy has, and Eva is okay, but that’s because Eva is tougher than he is. She was the first member of her extended family to go to college. Murphy tends to forget this fact because she lives so entirely in his world now, but it’s true. She was born in a house like this one, barely hanging on to the side of a mountain, and she had to convert to secular humanism. That’s why he sometimes feels self-conscious around her, as if she—she who has had to fight for what she knows and believes—might someday realize that he, Murphy, doesn’t know anything at all and is just repeating things he’s heard grown-ups saying. But of course she has the complementary worry, which is that he’ll realize one day that she doesn’t know anything either, that she is just bluffing, that at heart she’s the kind of person who might pin a racing calendar to an exposed strip of insulation.

  Now she has a vivid memory of playing checkers with her grandfather on the floor of this very room. Grandpa—a man whom Yahweh has long since gathered back to his malevolent bosom. He had a canny smile and a persuasive way of talking, and once he built a machine that would suck bugs up from the porch and blast them back out into the yard. He sold drugs up and down the East Coast, and stole from all his wives, and got beaten up badly one time by one of his stepsons, but he would not hurt a fly.

  She follows Aunt Jo back into the kitchen. There’s nowhere to sit down, so Jo perches on the stove and Eva sits on the countertop.

  “Is there something wrong with Uncle Orson?” Eva says.

  “He won’t eat anything. That man is living on Ensure and blood thinners.”

  “He seems unhappy.”

  “He’s heartbroken over Quaid.”

  “What’s going on with Quaid anyway?”

  Aunt Jo slides off the stove and fusses with some dishes in the sink. She purses her lips. “All in all, it has been a bad spring for Quaid.” Then she pauses to examine the sponge. Then she says, “One piece of housekeeping advice, darling. When you reckon you have to wash your hands after you use the sponge, that’s the time to unwrap a new sponge. God bless America that sponges are so cheap.”

  Uncle Orson is a deeply weathered man with a round face and artificial teeth. Right now he’s so much of a piece with the decrepitude around him that it’s easy to mistake him for a heap of soiled laundry. His recliner slopes off toward the ground on the right side, where the leg and all the springs and other mechanisms have fallen apart. It’s just the upholstery holding it together. On his TV tray there’s an empty bottle of Ensure and a letter from Appalachian Debt Consolidation Solutions. He has written the names of horses in the margins: Mommy’s Angel, Geronimo Rex.

  “We’ve got a full house these days,” he says. “There’s Quaid, there’s Ora, there’s Fate, there’s I
mogene.”

  “Fate?” says Murphy.

  “Fate, Ora, Quaid. Then there’s Imogene. It might be there are some others.”

  “It must be nice to have your children and grandchildren around.”

  “I never see them! Ora works with the emergency squad. She’s up at all hours. She comes home at five in the morning!”

  “She drives an ambulance?”

  “It’s Imogene who’s the wild one. Let me tell you what I found the other morning. Right there in that kitchen garbage I found a pregnancy test. It was negative.”

  “But that’s good. You know she’s not pregnant.”

  “I know that someone wasn’t pregnant,” says Uncle Orson, raising his crooked old index finger, “at that time.”

  Here’s Eva on the countertop, feeling unhappy and frustrated. She too is not pregnant, not at this time. She’s looking at the Hamburger Helper and the trash can full of recyclable material and the Caloric Ultramatic stove and the strip of filthy brown carpet in front of the sink. The mismatched cutlery sits in an organizer on top of the fridge. Why have they taken everything out of the cupboards? Her own parents live like this too. It was just like this growing up. One house after another and all of them half-dismantled. One year she had to sleep behind a shower curtain in the front hall. One year a bear ripped the porch off the back of the house. If you wanted to go out the back door, you had to jump down five feet into the mud. Her father got a pool ladder to make it easier, but he never attached it. This kind of stuff is a boon to the poet, but first she must escape and work toward a new and different understanding of her place in the world. No mean feat.

  Out in the living room, Murphy asks Uncle Orson if he’s been watching the NBA playoffs.

  “These players are happy to sit back and wait for their opponent to make the mistake,” Orson says. “Is that playoff basketball? I’ll tell you right now you have to come out aggressive. Set a screen. Penetrate. Move the ball. Don’t wait for your opponent to give you the opportunities.”