The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  The number of cigarettes manufactured globally by all the different producers is around 5.6 trillion.

  Murphy’s legs and feet are giving him trouble again, and he’s grateful when Eva suggests that they take a break and enjoy some espresso at a stylish coffee shop. Fluffy 2, who has had to be carried for the last hour, laps some water from a bowl and then subsides into a noiseless slumber, settling like a mop on the concrete floor. Words like Reynolds and Camel and sometimes also the iconic camel logo are half-visible on the faces of the brick mills. Ghostly outlines and echoes. And there are powerful echoes, too, of slavery. Disadvantaged black Americans wander past, abandoned by their government but not, alas, by their vengeful god.

  Eva keeps thinking of the phrases “chemical afternoon” and “acid sunlight,” which come from Wallace Stevens. It’s a perfectly lovely afternoon, however. There’s nothing chemical or acidic about it. These phrases seem to bear no relation to the events and circumstances of the day.

  It’s when they gather up their slumbering animal and head back to the car that they get their sign, and the evening takes an extraordinary turn. What happens is this: A big round man hails them from the doorway of a hotel. He appears to recognize Murphy, whom he addresses as “Pierce.”

  “I didn’t know if we’d get to see you!” he says. “Old Pierce. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  Murphy bows.

  To Eva, the man says, “And the lovely Mrs. Pierce. I’m P. F. Barnum Gaines. Barney. I don’t need to tell you how valuable your husband has been during this trying time.”

  “I think you do,” says Eva. “I know him in another context.”

  Barney grins and says, “They told me look out for that Mrs. Pierce wit. They told me she’s quick as anything, that Mrs. Pierce.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Pierce—there’s no telling who these people are. But Barney is satisfied that whoever they are, they are standing here before him. This is probably Yahweh’s doing, although we can’t be sure. Barney himself is a prosperous looking person in a creamy black jacket and dove-gray vest. The creases in his trousers are as sharp as the folds in a fresh newspaper. His hair is hard and silver and thick and his face is a tantalizingly pale pink. Murphy wonders who he voted for.

  Now Barney apologizes for the small pouch that hangs from his shoulder.

  “My gadget,” he says. “What it is, they’ve put a chip in there.”

  “A chip?” says Murphy.

  “What they’ve done is put a chip in my throat.”

  “I see.”

  “It measures the acid. Then it beams the data to this gadget here.”

  He opens the Velcro flap and shows them the device. The display says that his esophageal pH is 9.8, a dangerously alkaline value, but this could be because Barney is eating some Tums. Eva wonders aloud if these might prejudice the test, but Barney isn’t concerned. What she has to understand is that the Tums have absolutely no effect. If they were any help, he wouldn’t be in this mess with his acid. If anything they make it worse, which is why he keeps eating them. He wants to get a robust reading on his gadget.

  Barney seems to expect them to follow him inside, but he’s worried that Fluffy 2 won’t be permitted in the main ballroom. He ponders this issue for a moment.

  “I think we can leave him with my man in the kitchen. Ray will know where to stash this furry fellow. They’ll bury Ray in his Cowboys jersey, but he’s a good man.”

  There’s no time to protest. He scoops Fluffy 2 up and walks through the doors. Mr. and Mrs. Pierce hurry after him.

  Murphy is thinking about that chip. The data goes to the gadget, but does it also go to the Internet? His own phone has been transformed, and yet it’s a mistake to imagine that he’s safe. The Internet hums and pulses all around him. There’s no escape. You might as well just write to UPS directly. Dear Friends, I thought I’d send along the day’s itinerary in order to spare you the trouble. I’m cc’ing the NSA and the Kremlin. My esophageal pH is as follows.

  Acid sunlight. Chemical afternoon. Eva can’t stop thinking about Wallace Stevens, and there’s no reason for it. Chemical afternoon. Chemical afternoon. It doesn’t bother her, but it’s inexplicable. The vivid, florid, turgid sky. The drenching thunder rolling by.

  Despite the elegance of the hotel, the event is casual. No evening clothes. Still, most of the men are wearing coats and ties, and Murphy and Eva look badly out of place in their matching work pants and sweaters. Murphy looks particularly dissolute because he’s got a five-day growth of beard as well, and not the tidy half beard that’s so fashionable now but a dark growth, like mold, creeping up toward his eyes and down toward his chest. Eva, who has no facial hair and couldn’t grow any if she wanted to—another example of sexual dimorphism—looks a little more tidy.

  Murphy is excited to do some sleuthing and figure out who Mr. and Mrs. Pierce are. He also suggests that this might be a good place to find investors for the Mount Trashmore Apocalyptic Riviera Development Group. Eva, for her part, should be telling people that the name of the Lord is Yahweh, but she gets stuck wondering about coincidence. What if Yahweh has nothing to do with this? What if they simply happen to resemble this absent couple so strongly that all of these friends and acquaintances are fooled?

  Now she outlines a hypothesis. Coincidence, she says, is a subjective thing. It’s the feeling that an improbable conjunction has occurred. And that’s because we subscribe to the idea that there’s a pattern to this—and here she waves her hand, indicating the hotel, the street, the city, the sky, the solar system, the universe—this nonsense. We like coincidence because it seems like evidence of a plan or scheme, but couldn’t you say that at every moment, because everything is just banging around all the time, the number of possible coincidences must be very large, and the chance of a coincidence occurring—or rather, an event that we perceive as a coincidence—is not really so tiny after all? It’s only the probability of any particular coincidence that is, or seems, very small. Which is to say that coincidence, which feels like the evidence of order, is a manifestation of disorder.

  “You don’t think Yahweh is up to something here?” says Murphy. “You think what’s happening is just chaos?”

  “I’m saying it might be chaos. Just random action on an ordinary chemical afternoon.”

  But then she thinks: Maybe Yahweh himself is chaos.

  Soon Mrs. Pierce is addressed by her first name, which is Jane. Then they learn that this is a party given in honor of a businessman or financier named Javier Mendez Menendez, who is either accepting a new position or retiring from an old one, or both. Two mysteries solved. Meanwhile, everyone recognizes them and greets them with terrific familiarity. Their shabby clothes are not the careless signature of two imposters but an eccentricity that is felt to be characteristic of this prominent couple.

  “Maybe you could start a kind of investigative agency,” says Murphy. “Mrs. Pierce’s Metaphysical Detection Agency.”

  “Motto,” says Eva. “We construe an explanation.”

  “You bring us one thread, we’ll pull it until the whole sweater unravels.”

  Someone says to Murphy that he looks different. Has he lost weight? Has he gained weight? Murphy says that he’s been taking better care of himself. Yes, the man says, someone mentioned something about that. Clean and sober. Wonderful news! Who would’ve guessed? Murphy smiles sheepishly and says that enough was enough. Pierce’s friend agrees.

  “Do you remember that night at the Fonthill,” the man says, “when you gave the speech about the coasters?”

  “No.”

  A woman says to Eva, “I’m here three days now and I’m walking around and my clothes don’t fit right, so I’m thinking to myself I’m thinking wow this weather the humidity or something I don’t know. It’s like my body is kind of swollen or something in all this humidity. I’m thinking am I sick? But this morning I realized I picked up the wrong suitcase at baggage claim and I’ve been going around in another person’s clothes.”r />
  Eva sips her club soda and asks for clarification. It has been three whole days?

  “I live in Phoenix is why the humidity is such a factor.”

  Maybe we’ll be able to confirm that this existential mix-up is Yahweh’s doing after all, but in a larger and grander sense, we can never be sure that the universe has any shape or order. It is undoubtedly true, however, that the universe is often characterized by the appearance of shape and order, just as Eva says. Isn’t that what matters for a human, which is a creature that deals in appearances and illusions above all? We’ll have to content ourselves with the illusion of order. Or else, as Murphy says, pockets of order. Or else dumplings of order formed by chance in the chaotic cooking-mash of space.

  Now Murphy is chatting with a distinguished older woman in a dark blue dress. He tells her: “We’re trying to buy a mountain of trash.”

  “Ah,” she says. “A young man with a dream.”

  “We’ve got big plans for that mountain. But I’ve been mulling over a new project, which is that I want to destroy the Internet.”

  “Interesting. They’ll say, ‘Oh, Pierce has been helping with strategy for our support brands, he’s been pursuing some interesting opportunities in Eastern Europe, and he’s been working to destroy the Internet. Just a passion project of his.’ ”

  “Right. Because my question is why does UPS need to know my esophageal pH?”

  “It’s absolutely gratuitous. I agree completely.”

  “And how do the phones know so much about traffic? And is the TV watching us when we watch it? Why does it care what we do?”

  Eva spots Barney sitting in a club chair against the wall. He waves. He’s fussing with a blood pressure cuff. She takes a step in his direction, but now a tiny mannequin of a man darts across her path and says, “I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’m so glad. Your husband has been a friend for a long time. And what is it that you do?”

  “Oh,” she says, “metaphysical detection, dream litigation, psychoactivism. I’m really a Jill-of-all-trades. Have you heard that the name of the Lord is Yahweh?”

  The mannequin purses his lips and nods. “I’ve heard something about that, yes.”

  Here’s Javier Mendez Menendez, the honoree himself, although Murphy has yet to determine what it is that he’s being honored for. Menendez is wearing a red jacket, like a bellhop’s. He grips Murphy’s hand and thanks him for coming, and they engage in some amiable chatter. Fun is had at Murphy’s expense: He is poorly dressed and unshaven. Murphy accepts this with a you-know-me smile and they pass on to other subjects. He finds that he has no trouble striking the proper note. He’s making a good impression. While he and Menendez chat, mute smiling people gather around them, just as celestial garbage accumulates around planetary bodies.

  “Now let me tell you a story about our friend Menendez,” Murphy says. “A few years ago I was at a shareholders’ meeting and Menendez’s name came up. Next time I saw him, I said, ‘How’d you like to run a two-billion-dollar company?’ He said to me, ‘Pierce, I’m running a three-billion-dollar company now, but if I keep on like this I’ll be running a two-billion-dollar company by the end of the week!’ ”

  Riotous laughter. Menendez is laughing too. He appears to remember this moment, although it never happened.

  “But seriously,” says Murphy to Menendez, “so glad to be here with you. So happy for you. Here’s to you, my friend.”

  He raises his water glass. Other people raise their glasses. Someone says, “Skål! Prosit!” Menendez beams. It’s a moment of rich solemn heartfelt camaraderie.

  Eva is impressed that Murphy has managed to appear so natural in this role. He plays the part well enough that we’d call it ruthless cunning if the performance were not characterized by such apparently genuine affability. He is not incapable of affability in the normal course of things, and in fact he’s affable much of the time, but this is also a man who, just this morning, nearly wept with rage when he had trouble working the gas pump at the Kangaroo.

  “You’re doing a great job,” says Eva, meeting him at the bar. “You’re a natural.”

  “It’s just my sense of noblesse oblige.”

  She raises a finger in admonishment. “But what have I told you about that? None of that talk.”

  A clinking of glasses. A hush. Menendez rises and thanks everyone for coming. He talks about arriving in the United States on a boat made from trash barrels and old lounge chairs, and now look at him: He’s got a fur-lined bathtub and a chef who makes him hummingbird tongue whenever he wants, and he’s got all the friends in the world.

  When the evening begins to wind down, Barney takes them back to the kitchen to retrieve Fluffy 2. It does look like Fluffy 2 has had a good evening with Ray, and when he sees them he leaps around joyfully, a little like a dog, a little like a kitten, a little like a small goat.

  “I hope we’ll see you at the conference this summer?” says Barney.

  “Oh yes,” says Eva.

  “The American Ideas Conference.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s nothing like Peach Valley in midsummer. If I can just make it there, I feel like I’ll be cured.”

  “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” says Eva.

  And then it’s home to another Super 8. That’s how it works. You venture out into the great world and then, when the job is done and the hands are all shaken, you slip back to the peace and quiet of room 210. There are plastic cups in individual wrappers and an ice bucket and a brown carpet, and the window is jammed closed. Eva unplugs the air conditioner before she turns on the bathroom light. There’s a coffee stain on the curtains. They smuggle Fluffy 2 in against regulations.

  But they’re too excited to go to sleep immediately, so they turn on a movie, and never mind whether the television is watching them watch it. In tonight’s film, Matt Damon is not alone and mad in a remote galaxy, as he was last night, nor alone and sane on Mars, as he was in another recent blockbuster. Instead, he’s on a space station in orbit around the earth. He’s wearing an exoskeleton that gives him exceptional strength, but in effect this is his only asset. On the debit side of the ledger, he has sustained a heavy dose of radiation and the data he’s loaded into his brain is, or are, if you like, giving him a headache. But it gets worse. The data is encrypted, which means that it will kill him if he tries to upload it to the space station servers. Thus he is faced with a decision: He can retreat and save himself, or he can make the ultimate sacrifice by choosing to upload the data anyway, killing himself but saving humanity, although in this case he will be saving humanity from problems of its own making—segregated housing and unequal access to health care—and not from the atmospheric nitrogen which was so inexplicably vexing to Michael Caine, Matthew McConaughey, and Jessica Chastain.

  Eva grows tired of this and subsides into reverie. She knows she didn’t do very well with her prophetic duties today. She only said Yahweh’s name twice, once to a horse and once to a mannequin. She’s also worried that Yahweh will exact retribution for the abuse that Murphy directed at him earlier in the day. And what kind of animal is Fluffy 2? And now she too is worried about the library books in their Miami apartment.

  Then she says: “What if he makes me pregnant?”

  “Who?”

  “What if Yahweh makes me pregnant?” She unbuckles her pants. “I want you to do it. Before he does.” She flops down on her stomach and says into the pillow, “Quick! Before he sees!”

  We’ll draw a stiff motel curtain over the scene that follows. Afterward, Eva watches the movie and Murphy stands before the bathroom mirror with a short length of dental floss and thinks about how to explain oral hygiene to a child. You can try for parsimony with your dental floss, he’d want to say, but if you tear off too short a piece, you can’t get a good grip and you end up having to throw it out and tear off another. Then you actually use more floss than you’d have used if you ripped off a longer piece in the first place. There’s a lesson here
that’s bigger than oral hygiene, although oral hygiene is important.

  Now Matt Damon faces a new challenge. Before he can save humanity, he must defeat his well-equipped adversary, demented South African actor Sharlto Copley, who not only possesses a threatening accent and superior training but has been wired into an even more sophisticated exoskeleton. How will Matt Damon get out of this one? But Murphy and Eva can guess easily enough. Sharlto Copley’s erratic behavior will probably be his downfall, and Matt Damon will indeed make the ultimate sacrifice, as all heroes must. So Eva takes a shower and Murphy switches to basketball. The Eastern Conference game has just ended; the Western Conference game is about to begin. One player tells the courtside reporter that the mentality you’ve got to have in this situation is you’ve got to treat every game like a game seven. He discusses the importance of being, and staying, aggressive. Tip-off will follow shortly, but first here’s that Audi commercial. In a world where everything’s the same, buying an Audi is a quick and effective way to distinguish yourself from your fellow suburbanites. Murphy hears himself muttering, “Innovation that excites,” but what’s that? That’s Nissan, not Audi. Next there’s a commercial in which a young woman rides a white horse down a tropical beach. The horse talks about what it’s like to walk around on four feet instead of two.

  The next morning, they buy some additional changes of clothes, large bags of dry dog and cat food, granola, more raisins, some cashews, and some vegetables. They buy a tent and sleeping bags. No more identical motel rooms for them. They buy a pair of collard plants at a nursery and put them in the back, under the hatch, so they’ll have fresh greens wherever they go. Murphy notes that the milk they purchased in Miami is still good, but he feels certain that it must be on the point of going bad, so he drinks the rest of it, half a carton, with his breakfast.