The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  “You’re talking about the Hawks, right? Are the Hawks your team? Or the Grizzlies?”

  “I haven’t even gotten to the Hawks yet. The Hawks! Oh boy.”

  “But there have been some amazing games. The Rockets scored fifty points in the first quarter the other night.”

  Uncle Orson looks up with wide eyes and says, “Honest?”

  “They had something like eighteen assists in the quarter.”

  “Well—” and now he gives the impression of reconsidering everything he’s held to be true “—you do not score fifty points in a quarter if your aggression is poor.”

  Jo returns to the living room and says to Murphy: “I hear you could be interested in my heart-attack peppers.”

  “Almost certainly yes,” he says. “Did you say heart attack?”

  “I use them to make my special muscle rub.”

  “Then definitely yes. I’m in a lot of pain. I need a radical intervention.”

  “Short of taking a break from running,” says Eva.

  “They’re called heart-attack peppers because they get your heart going again if it stops,” says Jo. “They don’t cause heart attacks.”

  “Either way is fine,” says Murphy.

  “I cook them with some flour to make a paste.”

  “This is good,” says Eva. “This is much better than IcyHot. Who knows what chemicals are in there? We need to return to a natural way of living.”

  “Did you read that on the raisins box?” says Murphy. “That’s what it says on the raisins box. They’ve trademarked the phrase. I’ve been saying it to myself all day.”

  “It’s what I believe.”

  “Return to a Natural Way of Living.”

  “We should.”

  The heart-attack peppers are in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. Jo won’t even touch the bag with her bare hands. She puts on a pair of mittens. She also ties a towel around her nose and mouth. Then she puts on some old glasses to protect her eyes from any juices.

  “It’s so much better to avoid the IcyHot goo,” Eva says.

  “I agree completely,” says Murphy. “Who knows what’s in that stuff?”

  “It’s just some kind of toxic goo.”

  “The thing you have to remember is that these big pharmaceutical companies are only interested in the bottom line. It pays to remember that.”

  “For them it’s all about the rack and the screw.”

  “We complain that we’re so fucked-up,” says Murphy, shaking his fist, “but what do we expect? You do not sell your well-being on the so-called free market and then complain when you’re so fucked-up.”

  Jo opens the kitchen door so there’s some ventilation. “I’m sure you all are right,” she says.

  “The market doesn’t care about your health and well-being,” says Eva.

  “I’m sure that’s true, darling.”

  “Does a corporation take the Hippocratic oath? It takes an oath to maximize shareholder value.”

  Jo tosses a pepper into a saucepan and begins to crush it with a wooden spoon. Then she stops and tells them to go outside because there might be some fumes when she turns on the heat.

  “At least we’ll know what kind of fumes they are,” says Eva.

  Murphy nods vigorously. “They’ll be natural fumes.”

  “It’ll be like pepper spray,” says Jo.

  Now here they are in the road with the blue ridgeline glowing in front of them. A blessedly godless place, or so it still seems, and Eva, thinking of Yahweh, reflects that she hasn’t thought of Yahweh at all since they got here.

  They turn around to consider the curious situation of the house, hanging there the way it does. Has the earth itself recoiled from this structure?

  Eva says, “The way these guys live! And the worst is that this is what seems normal to me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. It breaks my heart to think of you as a little kid. At their mercy.”

  But now she frowns. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  A misunderstanding has developed.

  “You’re always so hard on my family. But I turned out fine, didn’t I? You love me. You say you do.”

  “I do love you, but that doesn’t mean anything. You’re exceptional. A lesser person wouldn’t have been fine. Quaid is a case in point.”

  “You don’t even know him and you call him a lesser person. It’s not like I was abused or neglected.”

  “I was trying to agree with you! Remember when we found loose shotgun shells in your dad’s bathtub? Jo is wearing hospital slippers.”

  “They’re all doing their best. She’s making you some muscle rub. And you make fun of her.”

  Family is tough. It’s hard to decide on a position. Murphy feels bad when he thinks about Jo in there making him a thing he does indeed want and value. At the same time, he’s a little angry. He knows who these people voted for and he doesn’t forgive them.

  He’s about to offer an insincere apology when Eva says, “In the fridge, I found some mozzarella from 2002.”

  They subside into quiet contemplation. Eva looks out into the blue Appalachian afternoon. Murphy looks at Eva. He watches her tuck her hair behind her ear and frown, and he thinks of all the other beautiful girls he’s known, all those beautiful girls tucking all those wisps of hair behind all those many ears and looking out meanwhile across all those bright fields or gray oceans or crowded cityscapes, and he knows that all those moments were just quantum pre-memories of this moment, this beautiful girl, this wisp of hair, this ear. That’s how it works sometimes. The physicists have figured it out, or so we’ve heard, or read, or seen in a documentary, or somehow misconstrued, who knows. The way photons are going to behave in the future alters the way they do behave in the present; what Murphy admired about all those other girls were the things that pre-reminded him of Eva.

  “I don’t think they’re actually hospital slippers,” she says.

  Murphy is certain they’re hospital slippers, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “They don’t have any information, that’s all,” Eva says. “They’re just guessing. My grandfather wasn’t like that. He had that con man’s intelligence. Once he dropped off a black box and told us never to open it. Another time he dropped off a horse! He brought her in the bed of a tiny red pickup truck. He built the sides up a little with wooden slats.”

  They return to the house. Jo seems to feel that Murphy may be insufficiently robust for the pepper treatment, but it’s too late now. Here she is with the saucepan in one hand and a rubber spatula in the other.

  “Drop your shorts,” she says.

  “Drop my shorts?”

  Eva says, “Drop your shorts, for God’s sake. Do you want to be cured or not?”

  He drops his shorts, exposing Walmart underwear and sharp Miami tan lines. Jo asks him to explain where he’s having the pain. He tells her here and here, and also everywhere else. But mostly here and here. She uses a rubber spatula to spread some pepper paste on his quadriceps and asks him how it feels.

  “It feels like cake frosting.”

  “Do you feel the pain relief yet?” says Eva.

  He feels nothing. “It might be good,” he says, “to abrade the skin with sandpaper, so the medicine really penetrates.”

  A few minutes later, Murphy is on his back with his legs in the air, saying, “I think it’s helping” and also weeping and coughing because somehow he’s gotten the pepper paste into his eyes and mouth. His shorts are still around his ankles. Eva and Jo hover close by. Orson remains in his chair.

  “How long does the pain relief last?” says Eva.

  Jo is remembering that she never did use a whole pepper before. She always just used a piece.

  “Should we scrape it off?”

  Murphy won’t allow it. Once again he says, “It’s good, it’s helping.”

  Now Uncle Fate appears, but he’s not really Eva’s uncle. He’s one of Jo and Orson’s children.
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br />   “It’s great to meet a man called Fate,” says Murphy. He reaches up and they shake hands. But Murphy has pepper paste on his hands. Then Fate raises his hand to his face.

  “Don’t rub your eye!” say Eva and Jo.

  He rubs his eye. Now he has to rush to the bathroom and flush it out, which is what Murphy should do as well, except the intensity of the pain relief is so great that he can’t stand up.

  When Fate returns a few minutes later—his eye red and watering, his hand scrubbed raw—he has had time to consider the situation and determine that it doesn’t interest him. What really demands his attention right now is a horse in the fifth at Brookhill. He needs to discuss this with Orson. The horse is not Mother’s Angel but Mother’s Little Helper.

  Orson says, “He has got a lot of speed, but I don’t think he can go the distance.”

  “I know this horse,” says Fate.

  Orson shakes his head. “That horse has had a lot of problems.”

  Fate is holding his hand out, trying not to touch anything.

  After consulting the Internet and dragging him into the bathroom, Eva pours a little milk into Murphy’s eyes. The milk is supposed to have a detergent effect. Then she washes the muscle rub off his legs with liquid hand soap. Then she rinses his legs with gin. Then she sets him up on a folding chair by the television with a box fan to cool the affected areas. It’s his eyes that look really bad, a fierce redness and a cascade of tears, but he says the pain relief is fading.

  “I shouldn’t have used that whole pepper,” says Jo.

  “It’s okay,” says Eva. “He isn’t very resilient about these things. Another person might not have had a problem at all.”

  Murphy acknowledges the truth of this and tells them he’s fine now, no big deal. He’s in his underwear and he’s feeling a little foolish, but the really important thing is that all the muscle soreness is gone.

  Dinner is mixed vegetables boiled in the bag, Uncle Ben’s Country Inn Rice Pilaf, and some white fish. There’s no table and everyone has to sit where they can. They use paper plates and plastic silverware. Uncle Ben’s rice is parboiled, which makes it resistant to weevils.

  “Could I ask,” says Murphy, still in his underwear, “how you got the name Fate?”

  Eva says, “It’s a family name, right?”

  “It must be,” says Fate. “People have been called Fate in our family for as long as anyone remembers.”

  The nice thing about spending time with a man named Fate is that anything you say acquires a deep aphoristic meaningfulness: Fate is not my real uncle. Fate sleeps on the couch in his parents’ house. Fate told me about a horse. Fate is a gambler. Fate voted against American democracy.

  “My granddaddy was called Fate,” says Orson. “That man was five foot tall but don’t let him hear you say so. Do you know Johnson City?”

  “What?” says Murphy.

  “Do you know Johnson City?”

  “He’s never been to Johnson City,” says Eva.

  “Do you know Texas Pete, who has the Cowboy Grill in Johnson City?”

  “He doesn’t know Johnson City,” says Eva. “He’s never been in this part of the country before.”

  “I’ll tell you what Grandpa Fate would do. He would just disappear for a whole month. That’s what he would do.”

  “And Texas Pete was involved somehow?” Murphy says.

  Orson uncaps his Ensure and drinks half the bottle in one noisy swallow. When he’s done coughing, he says, “How do you know Texas Pete?”

  “Texas Pete is a kind of hot sauce,” says Fate.

  Now another family member appears: Cousin Imogene. All Murphy knows about her is that she may not have been pregnant a few days ago. She’s tall and lightly built, like Eva, and she resembles Eva in other ways too—the air of abstraction, the quick wild grin. She nods at Murphy and Eva and says, “What are y’all doing?”

  “Just on a trip,” says Eva.

  But nothing more is said about it. No questions are asked in this house because everyone knows that if you ask questions, you’re likely to get answers that upset you. There’s no mention of Quaid, for instance, which seems strange or even very strange, and although Ora is supposed to be asleep downstairs, that’s really just the best-case scenario. She might be in lockup or she might be stoned at the fun fair. It’s better to take things one step at a time and struggle only with the problem in front of you.

  Orson says, “Fate is a good boy.”

  To Murphy, the fish tastes like a headache, and halfway through he feels the sweat start in the small of his back. That’s not right. It’s very cold in here and he’s in his underwear anyway. Then the first wave of nausea sweeps over him. He rises, pats his mouth with his napkin, picks up his shorts, and says he’ll just step away for a moment. Next he passes an unspeakable hour in the freezing bathroom. Jo and Orson are initially concerned to establish what it is that’s happening, but they aren’t surprised, not after the way he reacted to the muscle rub, and soon his illness becomes just another immutable fact about which nothing can be said or done. Murphy isn’t very resilient, that’s all. It’s the way things are. No one else gets sick from the fish.

  Eva is worried about Murphy, though it must be said that his reaction to the meal is nothing unusual and that many previous evenings have concluded in the same way. In any case, there’s nothing she can do for him right now. She checks his status every fifteen minutes. The rest of the time she sits with Imogene and Jo and Orson in the living room. Imogene is drinking gin from a Dixie cup and smoking a cigarette.

  “What have you been doing?” Eva asks her.

  Imogene shrugs.

  “Are you going to school?”

  Imogene says, “Down at the Hennigans.”

  “What?”

  She sips her gin. “Waitress.”

  There are only two books in the house. One is an anthology in which some of Eva’s poems have just appeared. Her sister must have sent it here. The other is a Bible stolen from a motel. These are not reverent people and they’ve probably only stolen it out of a sense of duty or propriety. It’s some kind of fast-food Bible, with a menu at the beginning from which you select items that will gratify your particular spiritual craving: “Help in Time of Need,” “Guidance in Time of Decision,” “Courage in Time of Fear,” “Warning in Time of Indifference.” There is no entry for “General Info About Yahweh” or “Why It’s Forgivable to Have a Child.”

  Eva lets the book fall open at random and reads: “Is not this David, of whom they sang one to another in dances, saying, Saul slew his thousands, and David his ten thousands?” She closes the book and looks at the wall. It’s the King James translation, which surprises her. Then she opens it again and reads: “And when the king of Moab saw that the battle was too sore for him, he took with him seven hundred men that drew swords, to break through even unto the king of Edom: but they could not. Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel: and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.”

  She rereads this passage twice. What seems to have happened is that the Moabite king has sacrificed his eldest son to a Moabite god, a ghastly business, but somehow it’s even more ghastly that the sacrifice is effectual. Of course, it’s not surprising that the Bible is full of alternative gods, insistent as Yahweh is that he’s the one true god. If it were true, he wouldn’t have to make such a big thing about it.

  “Have you read this?” Eva says.

  At first Imogene doesn’t seem to hear her. Then she says, “Of course I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  The television is on and the picture quality is better now. An athlete recently accused of making false statements is making another false statement, specifically that none of his previous statements have been false. Next up is a clip of the president making false statements of his own, and then some footage of a protest march in Chicago, and then
coverage of a shooting in Oregon, where a lunatic has murdered nine people in a university auditorium. Then there’s a story about a celebrity teen who has driven her sport-utility vehicle through a showroom window. She has been released from jail and she’s in a good position to benefit from the publicity associated with her crime. She appears genuinely contrite, for all that it really matters. Eva feels contrite as well, but what does she have to feel contrite about? She hasn’t done anything wrong. All she’s done is carried on day to day and worked hard and ended up in a much better position than Imogene, who has been living here since she was in middle school, when her own mother ran off to Nevada to sell hearing aids.

  Orson is snoring concussively in his chair. Jo gazes at him fondly and says, “My old valentine.”

  Here’s a commercial that asks: “Have you been fouled by your wireless carrier?” And here’s another in which good friends drink beer together on a rooftop, and you just know that these folks aren’t going to wake up tomorrow with blood on their faces and remorse in their hearts.

  Aunt Jo turns on a movie—a welcome distraction. It goes like this: Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway have traveled to a distant galaxy only to discover Matt Damon. Unfortunately, Matt Damon has become demented in his cosmic isolation and he tries to kill them, a gambit that only results in his own death. After this, Matthew McConaughey performs the ultimate sacrifice, tricking Anne Hathaway into traveling home to safety while he himself descends into a black hole with his robot friend in order to gather the crucial data about gravity. What he and the robot could never have anticipated is that the black hole contains a fifth-dimensional machine sent from the future to enable them to send their data to Matthew McConaughey’s daughter, Jessica Chastain. They achieve this by agitating the second hand of the watch that Matthew McConaughey gave her long ago, when she was still just a child actor, except that he also gives it to her now, because the fifth-dimensional machine contains a tesseract or even many tesseracts—a tesseract is the fourth-dimensional analog of a cube—in which, or through which, or by means of which, all time appears present and accessible. Jessica Chastain uses the data to solve gravity and save humanity.