by Aaron Thier
Now sufficiently recovered, Murphy has taken a shower and retreated to the spare room off the kitchen, where he and Eva are supposed to sleep. He has retrieved the copy of Moby-Dick that he keeps in the Prius and he wants to read a little in order to remind himself who he is, but when Eva comes to bed a short time later, after the movie’s thrilling resolution, he’s sitting in the dark.
“Are you better?” she says. “We should try to have sex.”
“I think I can manage it. I can try.”
“We have to do it. It’s where babies come from.”
He shakes his head. “That doesn’t sound right.”
No one vomits during the ensuing attempt to conceive a child, thank heavens. Only afterward does Eva ask why he has been sitting in the dark. He says that he couldn’t find the light switch, which is hardly a surprise, given that there’s no light switch to be found. Instead there’s a bare bulb protruding from the wall above the bed. Eva gives it a quarter-turn and the light comes on.
The decorative motif in this bedroom is alarming juxtaposition. When you remove the fishing hat from the stockpot and open the lid, for example, what you find is a Santa Claus figurine. And here on the empty bookcase is an electric shaver with no blade, and a bottle of Listerine from so long ago that it says “floor cleaner” on the label, and a hairless eyeless doll’s head in a broken mug. An indigo ribbon that just says “Participant” has been nailed into the window frame.
“But who in this house,” Murphy says, “could have been a participant in something?”
Eva rests her forehead on his shoulder. She has not been poisoned or covered in pepper paste, but she’s feeling hollowed-out. She tells him that they’ll leave tomorrow and they’ll do something, and he agrees, and she says promise me we’ll pull ourselves together and do something, and he promises, and she says she doesn’t care if it’s buying a trash mountain or what, it just has to be something, and he says yes, he promises.
“We’re not just going to be participants,” she says.
Then it’s lights out. Murphy sleeps badly because of his various discomforts, although for once these do not include muscle pain. Eva wakes up at one point and says, “I was dreaming of a monkey named Heineken.”
When Murphy returns from his run the next morning, Eva is sitting with Uncle Orson in the living room. She rises to greet him and says that she needs to tell him something. She has done something impulsive and reckless, she says. Murphy waits for her to continue but she does not. He’s sweating briskly in his Walmart shorts. His run was less painful than usual and he feels good.
“She couldn’t help herself,” Orson explains.
What she’s done is acquire—accidentally, it would seem—a kind of pet. Murphy spots the creature behind the television. It’s a small furry gray animal, whether dog or cat Murphy can’t say, and neither can Eva, and neither can we. She presses her hands together and grins fiercely.
“Don’t be mad!”
Murphy examines the animal. The snout is not so long that you can rule out cat, but not so short that you can rule out dog. Plenty of dogs have almost no snout to speak of.
“His name is Fluffy 2,” she says.
“Is it a him?”
“I don’t know. I looked down there but I couldn’t tell. I’ve been saying him for convenience.”
Fluffy 2 now makes for Uncle Orson with an air of determination. Orson says, “Get on up here, Bub,” and gathers the animal into his arms.
The advent of Fluffy 2 has done nothing to alter Eva’s plans. She is eager to get on the road as soon as possible. That’s fine with Murphy. He’s always happy to be in a hurry. He executes a single stretch—a forward bend, which he holds for three seconds—and then rushes away to shower and dress and drink a scalding cup of instant coffee. Eva steps outside with Fluffy 2. Orson continues to watch the news. There’s no audio, but that’s just as well, because the news is bad. A schizophrenic carpenter has gunned down a few of his colleagues and two bystanders at a job site in New Jersey.
Now Murphy joins Eva outside. She is holding Fluffy 2 in her arms and peering into his face, such as it is. He’s so fluffy that it’s hard to tell where he ends and the world begins. Murphy watches his ears and tail for hints. He extends his hand and Fluffy 2 licks it with his small pink tongue, which is rough, but not so rough that you’d feel confident saying cat. Eva says that she found him down there on the main road, near the Bojangles’.
“The guy was selling him. He was in a milk crate.”
“There wasn’t any specificity as to puppy or kitten?”
“There was a for sale sign, that’s all. I paid ten dollars for him.”
Murphy is taking this well. Why shouldn’t he take it well? We misjudge him sometimes. Now he says that it doesn’t matter what species Fluffy 2 belongs to, if in fact he belongs to any species at all. It would just be good to know because it would help them decide what to feed him. Dogs and cats have different nutritional requirements. Cats are obligate carnivores, but dogs can eat vegetables.
“Yeah,” says Eva, nodding vigorously, “they like to eat carrots.”
They look at Fluffy 2, who is staring vacantly into the woods. His tail seems to wag, but they can’t be sure. It’s possible that he is some third thing, neither dog nor cat.
“He looked so cute,” Eva says, beaming and taking Murphy’s hand. “He had his little paws up on the edge of the milk crate.”
They say their goodbyes, they turn on the car, they back down the long driveway, and only when they reach the street do they remember that they have nowhere to go.
“Huh,” says Eva.
So now they face a moment of decision. There’s no particular reason to return to Miami, but there’s no reason not to return, and there’s no reason to go anywhere else. Yahweh could surprise them anywhere, but that’s always true. They face the same trouble on the road as they do at home: a lack of direction.
Eva purses her lips. She taps the steering wheel. My hair fell out in Santa Barbara. Here one descends to shelvings of the pit.
“So let’s just keep going,” she says.
“Sure.”
“You’ve been unhappy in Miami. And it’s not like ESL classes are the endgame for me.”
“I agree. I’m not arguing with you.”
“Maybe we embrace the chaos and then some kind of structure or plan will emerge.”
They stop at a gas station in town. Murphy buys a packet of Quaker Oats and eats it raw. Eva maintains that she is “still full from earlier,” a suspicious claim. They get Fluffy 2 some dog food and cat food and mix it all together with bits of radish.
As if to clarify her position, Eva says, “It’s not that I believe that life has any meaning, or that there’s any order to the universe.”
“There are pockets of order. That’s my impression.”
“Yahweh is probably just knocking around like we are, just reacting to things. Nothing means anything. It’s not like I sought out Fluffy 2. He just sort of appeared. He became manifest somehow.” She pauses to think of another image. “He crystallized, like rock candy.”
They share the gas station parking lot with some motorcycle people in matching leather costumes. Their jackets say “Death Before Dishonor.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” says Murphy. “I have a sort of belief in magic. I ate all the radish greens in the middle of the night. I was sure they would help.”
“But that’s not magic. That’s just good nutrition.”
“They were mostly rotten.”
“Probiotic. Full of biotics.”
He nods earnestly. “That’s what I was thinking too.”
In the end, Yahweh makes the decision for them, as he so often makes decisions for all of us. They’re driving east, why not, and Murphy, who seems increasingly fixated on the shootings in Oregon and New Jersey, is discussing the possibility of a move to Denmark, or Canada, or “anywhere else in the civilized world.” Eva has just left some insulting
voice-mail messages for the members of a disgraced congressional committee, and now she listens to Murphy without interest or comprehension. Then, at a bend in the lonely road, they see a figure standing beside a smoking Honda Element. It doesn’t occur to them that it might be an ancient Near Eastern storm god, and that’s because devious Yahweh, so unmistakable at other times, has cloaked his divine being in everydayness. But when they stop—like the good citizens they try to be, like good secular humanist Americans who try to live charitable lives without subscribing to a preapproved religiously motivated moral credo—he reveals himself with a triumphant shout, and a magical light begins to shine from his dark hair. It looks just like the luminous gas cloud that sheathes the black hole into which Matthew McConaughey descends.
Yahweh is angry. He points at Eva and says, “You have done evil in the sight of the Lord.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“You ran away. You avoided out of my sight!”
She winces. “We didn’t think you saw us.”
“I see everything.” He slams his fist into his palm and there’s a little pip of thunder. “Nothing is obscure to me.”
Murphy is aggravated. “Hold on,” he says. “We’ve done evil? I saw that an elementary school in Oklahoma was destroyed by a tornado last week. Do you want to explain that one?”
Yahweh turns to Murphy with a look of surprise, but he must be used to this kind of thing. There’s something about this god that inspires rebellion. After a moment he returns his attention to Eva.
“You will visit all the great cities, and the small cities, and the towns, and the county fairs, and harvest festivals, and sporting contests, and you will tell them the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh. And on the Internet.”
“What about the Internet?”
“Tell it my name. That the Internet should know I am the Lord.”
Murphy is getting angrier. Incredibly, or maybe not so incredibly, it seems as if he has chosen this moment to have an existential meltdown.
“This is the world you made? Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to hope for a painless natural death. If that’s the way I die, I’m fortunate.”
“Stop it!” says Eva. She grins at Yahweh. “I’m so sorry about this!”
Now Murphy ticks off some major crimes: the Rwandan genocide, Darfur, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide. But these are all human crimes. Does he mean to say that he holds Yahweh accountable?
Eva is pleading with him to be quiet, but Yahweh doesn’t seem particularly bothered. He asks her, “Are you able to subdue him, or shall I?”
She begins to push him back across the road. He returns illogically to the gun theme. “What if you happen to see a black child in your neighborhood?” he says. She gets him into the car and tries to close the door, but he holds it open for a second and shouts, “You wouldn’t want to be unarmed, would you?”
Although Murphy’s denunciation is unfocused, it’s easy to see what he’s getting at. He’s been worrying about the arbitrary cruelty of the universe, but he’s also worried about the cruel things that humans do, and in this moment he fears that all humans are fundamentally bad, that the struggle to do right is misguided and hopeless, that secular humanism is a fantasy. He is, in a sense, experiencing a crisis of faith. He’s worried that Yahweh, god of rage and fear, is the one true god after all. And that might be why Yahweh isn’t angry at him. Yahweh’s principal goal, exclusive of any policy agenda, is to be regarded as the one true god.
And indeed, that’s really the only message that Eva is supposed to bring to the people. She must drive around, Yahweh says, proclaiming the name of the Lord. His instructions are not specific, nor are his threats. If she doesn’t obey him, an obscure evil will be visited upon her, that’s all. We might wonder, as so many have wondered before us, why he is compelled to speak through prophetic intermediaries, but we’ll never get an answer. That’s one for the sages.
Murphy is now permitted to rejoin them—an indication that Yahweh intends to bring the meeting to a close. Eva presses this enigmatic deity for more information.
“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do on the Internet.”
“I never said anything about the Internet.”
She sighs. The whole thing seems cheap and tawdry. “You just mentioned it. You just said it.”
“I never did.”
Murphy interrupts them once again. He wants to know if Yahweh can do “some kind of trick” as a demonstration of his power. Eva apologizes and tells Yahweh to ignore him, but Yahweh doesn’t mind. First, though, he asks Murphy to give him his phone.
“Why would you need my phone?”
“I’d like to check the weather.”
“Don’t you already know the weather?”
“I like to look at the radar sometimes. To admire my handiwork.”
And when Murphy pulls his phone out of his pocket, he sees that it’s now a phone-shaped piece of wood. He turns it around in his hand and tries to press the home button. He looks up at Yahweh, who, when Eva bends down to pick up Fluffy 2, gives him the finger.
Yahweh tells them to go to Winston-Salem. He doesn’t say why. “The will of the Lord exceeds comprehension,” he explains. Then it’s time for him to leave, which he does like this: He leaps up into the sky, snatches for a moment at the air, and vanishes, leaving the ruined Honda behind.
Murphy stands in the sun with his wooden phone. A kind of understanding begins to dawn. Maybe Yahweh thought he was playing a trick on him, but the joke’s on Yahweh. His phone has become a burden. It’s like a crack in the broad plain of life. It’s where bad news bubbles up. And now, because of an act of God, he’s free.
Eva calls her supervisor and tells him he’ll have to find someone else to cover her ESL classes. It pains her to abandon her students, but she is, by her own cheerful admission, not great at her job. There are plenty of energetic instructors ready to take over for her. Her students will be better off.
Murphy, on the other hand, has no obligations and hasn’t spoken to his editor in weeks.
“I could fake a restaurant review from the road if I had to,” he says. “ ‘This brassy bighearted nightspot offers gastro-fare with a postpunk Viet-Hungarian twist.’ ”
“Try the word salad.”
Abandoning their apartment for an unspecified length of time causes no problem at all. A friend can be dispatched to retrieve their computers and other cherished and/or valuable items. None of the furniture is their own. Their things are rotting in a storage pod in Massachusetts.
Winston-Salem sits just below the mountains in the Carolina piedmont, and if Yahweh has chosen it at random, it’s a felicitous accident and Murphy and Eva are delighted to visit. There are dramatic swooping hills, inspiring vistas, handsome old brick buildings. Everything is set off nicely against the pale windy blue of the spring sky. If only they smoked, it would be like coming home: This is the birthplace of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which was founded in 1875 and at various times made Camel, Winston, Salem, Doral, and Eclipse cigarettes. It still makes Camel and Doral, and now it makes Pall Mall and Misty and Capri and Newport as well, although it no longer makes Winston or Salem. If cigarettes don’t appeal to you, however, this is also the birthplace of Hanes and Krispy Kreme.
“I think maybe one problem I was having in Miami,” Murphy says, “was that I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t find any time to sit down and think about what I wanted to do with myself.”
“It’s very noisy. You feel like you’re living in a construction site.”
“It’s more the light and the palm trees and the festival atmosphere. Then you go to the beach, where you brine yourself in hot seawater and bake your brains in the sun. No one can concentrate under those circumstances.”
“And then,” says Eva, “next, here comes the parade of ladies in their underwear.”
“It’s not congenial to concentration and focus.”
The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company used to be part of RJR
Nabisco, just as Philip Morris used to be associated in some mysterious way with Kraft Foods. Now it’s part of Reynolds American Inc., whose other subsidiaries include the American Snuff Company, the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, Niconovum USA Inc. and Niconovum AB, and the R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company. Reynolds American is itself a subsidiary of British American Tobacco, a corporation that has been implicated in some uninspiring crimes. Those are the facts. But it’s possible that an understanding of these corporate relationships does not lead to an enriched understanding of the human experience.
“Plus,” Murphy says, “it’s always summer down there! It isn’t that I like winter, but meat needs to rest after it’s cooked.”
Without specific instructions from Yahweh, they have no idea what they’re supposed to do, so they visit Old Salem, a lovely and exquisitely well-preserved historic district, with many points of interest and notable buildings. There appear to be people from the past here as well. The fellow coming out of the Moravian bakery is wearing a frock coat, and here’s a woman leading a horse to water and exhorting him to drink. It’s peaceful to contemplate these visions of an older and quieter world. A pre-Internet world, needless to say. Fluffy 2 seems to like it as well. There are plenty of things to sniff, and plenty of things to stare at while standing rigid as a board and making no sound. A lovely place, yes indeed, and no reason to think too much about smoking—the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
Could they settle here in Winston-Salem? Could they stand on street corners in the wind, learn to prune their crape myrtle, eat wafer-thin Moravian cookies, and raise children whose home NBA team—here’s that problem again—is the Charlotte Hornets?
And what does “preventable death” mean anyway? Does it mean a death that is not attributable to the whims of Yahweh? Do such deaths occur? This is one aspect of the free-will question—another one for the sages.
Eva whispers Yahweh’s name to a police horse, but she can’t bring herself to say it to a human being. She is waiting, as prophets do, for a sign. She seems perfectly at ease, however, which is inexplicable and just goes to show you how unpredictable people are. Murphy is feeling good as well, although this is at least partly due to the fact that he is now unable to access the Internet or check his e-mail, which produces a holiday sensation. He feels as if he is at large in the world.