by Aaron Thier
At a rest stop, a willowy angel leaps out from behind a Dumpster and accosts them. Under different circumstances, this would be a remarkable encounter, but for Eva and Murphy it’s already a matter of routine. The angel tells them to proceed up the road to Ludeyville, Virginia, and wait for Yahweh in the park. They know it’s an angel because its feet don’t touch the ground and its face glows with an interior light. It also lacks eyebrows.
So now here they are in Ludeyville. Fluffy 2 is eating grass, either because he is a dog or cat and seeks to alleviate some digestive complaint, or because he is a very small fluffy goat and requires the grass for nourishment. Eva is eating a carrot. Murphy is stretching his calves. The pain in his legs and feet has intensified once again. No doubt it was yesterday’s morning run followed by rigid motionless sitting followed by walking for many hours followed by an evening of impersonating a prominent person well known for his eccentric behavior. No doubt that was the perfect storm of factors and pressures that combined to wake him up at three o’clock this morning, at which time he retreated to the hallway to stretch and apply IcyHot Pain Relieving Balm. But this is also why it was impossible to forgo his run this morning, when it was at last time to rise and greet the day. Running is the only cure for the ill humor to which sleepless nights dispose him, and therefore the need for his run only increases when the symptoms of running too much make it impossible to sleep. That need is especially urgent these days because he wants to be in top form in order to give Eva all the support she needs. In a sense, ignoring her demand that he take a break from running is the best thing he can do for her.
As he stretches, he finds himself thinking of Miami with a great rosy fondness. He remembers eating lychees in his blue cloth shorts, reading Moby-Dick at the picnic table with his bare feet in the Bermuda grass, discovering some allspice seedlings at the corner of Douglas and Loquat. All his irritation is gone. He can’t bring the sound of a leaf blower to mind. He thinks of the iconic coconut palms against the dark sky. Guavas. Mangoes. Cotton candy clouds. A soft and insinuating tropical morning. He tries to remember the fierce heat of the sun, but in his memory the sun is mild and life-giving and the leaves unfurl languidly in a sweet breeze. His mind has scrubbed it all clean.
Coincidentally or not, Eva’s thoughts run along a parallel track. She is recalling a moment last year when she was brushing her teeth and it occurred to her that she had just lived through a day on which nothing memorable had happened, a day that would probably vanish in its entirety from her memory. This realization was so striking and terrible that she remembers the moment with perfect fidelity. The tile under her feet, the green biodegradable handle of her toothbrush, the purple light in the window. She’ll remember it all her life.
Now they discuss memory in general terms, and Murphy has a wild idea: Could you train yourself to experience daily life as if it were a memory? Could you learn to identify and fixate upon those features of the present that will be significant in retrospect, in the prismatic halo of nostalgia?
Eva considers this possibility. What will she remember of this moment? Maybe, she says, she’ll only recall the impression of space and light, nothing more. Or maybe that very steep hill over there with the round top. Maybe the blueness of the mountains. She likes to think she’ll remember how the air smells, but smells are hard. Sometimes you just remember that there was a distinctive smell. She wonders if that’s why smells and tastes are so evocative. They get tangled up with other memories, but you can’t recall them on their own, at least not voluntarily, and when you smell the smell again, or taste the taste, the whole tangle comes back.
“It’s the Proust Principle,” she says. “But will it be spoiled when our phones have the ability to take a picture of scents?”
All of this is related to what Murphy now calls “phenomenological relativity”—the feeling that travel alters one’s perception of time. Yesterday seems so long ago. This morning seems like last year. The faster you travel, he says, the faster life is transformed into a memory, so maybe if you go fast enough the present will shade and warp into a memory as well, or maybe not, probably not. No doubt there’s a “memory horizon.”
“Unless,” Eva says, “you could travel faster than the speed of memory.”
Murphy wonders if that’s what heaven is—the place out there beyond the memory horizon.
“Where every moment is a sweet memory of itself,” says Eva.
She fits her hand into his. It’s a lovely day. It’s cool even in the sun.
“I wish I could remember this,” he says.
They hear the panicked honking and the squeal of tires before they see Yahweh himself. He’s walking right up the middle of the road, causing wild agitation among passing motorists. He wears a red Adidas tracksuit over a T-shirt that says “Define Girlfriend,” and he’s serene and carefree. He shakes Murphy’s hand. He says to Eva, “Pleasant afternoon.”
He’s in one of his less malevolent moods, go figure, and he wants Eva to know that he appreciates the difficulty of her new position. Today, he’s happy to give her some specific instructions. Her task is to present herself at the University of Louisville, where there’s going to be a public lecture on high-pressure physics. It isn’t clear whether he cares at all about the practice of science, but he gives Eva to understand that he detests the pretense of science—the belief, cherished by so many, that scientific enterprise constitutes an existential threat to him, to Yahweh.
“Tell them,” he says, “that the name of the Lord is Yahweh. That’s all you need to do. Tell them that there shall be no more delay. Speak my words to them and then set your forehead against them, whether they listen or not.”
Since Yahweh is in a receptive mood, Murphy tries to get some clarity on a few issues that have been bothering him. First, he asks about dark matter, i.e. matter that doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation. Does it really exist, despite our failure to detect it?
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” says Yahweh. “But why would you care either way?”
“I’m curious. I’m only as God made me.”
Yahweh slips a gold cigarette case from his pocket, withdraws a cigarette, and lights it with a snap of his fingers. It’s a Camel, which begs the question: What is Yahweh’s relationship to Reynolds American Inc.?
“I’d like to know how many dimensions you can see,” says Eva.
“Seeing happens in three dimensions. That’s what seeing is.”
“What about a black hole?” says Murphy. “What happens in a black hole?”
“What do you mean, ‘happens’?”
“What about neutrinos?” says Eva.
“The bellows puff. The lead is consumed by fire.”
But that’s all they’re getting from Yahweh today. Other business requires his attention. He does a back handspring and vanishes, and they’re left to themselves, two mortal creatures, two things sounding their kazoos and waving their pincers, at the mercy of time, God, the universe.
Eva extends a hand and says, “Shall we go to Louisville, Mr. Pierce?”
Now, at last, it’s time to go west—the direction in which American lives and American history inevitably tend. By noon they’re in the mountains of West Virginia, where the people speak with an incomprehensible accent but the ATM speaks BBC English. It asks, “How may I help you achieve your dreams?” And here’s a sign that says “REAL GOLD TEETH. EASY LAYAWAY” and a billboard for a construction company called Cretin Homes. Here are two Maudlin International Trucks. Murphy has driven on this highway before, years ago, on the way to California with some college friends, but does he remember this or does he in some sense remember that he should remember it?
It’s true that today’s encounter with the divine was less than ordinarily challenging, but there are other challenges on the American road. Out here in the mountains, there are vicious bumper stickers, gun racks, Confederate flags. There’s a billboard celebrating the new president’s purported love of coal. Eva won
’t even look up—she says that she’s trying to “remain optimistic vis-à-vis mankind”—but Murphy is furious. He has venomous thoughts about his compatriots. He doesn’t know that there are counties in southern West Virginia where life expectancy at birth is lower than it is in Guatemala, but he wouldn’t care if he did know, not now. Scowling and gesturing in the acid sunlight, he now delivers an impressionistic speech. It begins with a denunciation of the electoral college and then spirals outward, comprehending all of American history in just a few swooping turns. He condemns Thomas Jefferson, who made pronouncements about liberty and yet never freed his slaves, and he condemns “the Indian murderer” Andrew Jackson, and he condemns the annexation of Hawaii, and the idea of manifest destiny, and “pirate capitalism,” and even Brown University, which was founded or endowed by slave traders. He shifts to gerrymandering and voter suppression and then concludes by asking in fury why health insurance doesn’t cover dental care. His speech is difficult to follow at the sentence or paragraph level, but the basic thrust is this: How can we accept that the world is the way it is?
“There’s a hilarious story,” he says, looking about as transported by hilarity as a dead pigeon in a game bag, “about Jefferson rebuking the students at UVA after they’d had some kind of gun riot.”
Eva waits a beat, but Murphy is silent, his fists and jaw clenched.
“What’s the story?” she says.
“What story?”
“About Jefferson and the UVA students.”
“I don’t know.”
In Lexington, at a store that also sells stuffed bears, Eva buys a Bible. She pages through it as they take the road west out of town. Maybe God exists, maybe the world is a sorrowful place, but she’s in an analytical frame of mind and she knows that knowledge is the path to understanding and compassion.
“Here’s a part where Saul is trying to kill David,” she says. “They’re just chatting or something and then the evil spirit from Yahweh comes upon Saul and a javelin appears in his hand. He tries to pin David to the wall. David manages to run away. He avoids out of his sight. The problem is that Yahweh has abandoned Saul and he’s with David now. I suppose it’s hard to see why Yahweh gives him the javelin.”
“But that’s typical of Yahweh,” Murphy says. “That’s right in line with his other methods and strategies.”
“And now listen to this: ‘He hath, as it were, the strength of an unicorn.’ ”
“A unicorn?”
“An unicorn. Yahweh hath.”
“As it were.”
She studies the text in silence for a few more minutes. Then she frowns and says, “ ‘She smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him.’ ”
The clouds are tumultuously bright. The sky is vivid, florid, turgid. Or is it only that these phrases, once uttered, doggedly attach themselves to the world? Eva ponders this new problem. Does art distort perception? She mutters another phrase from Wallace Stevens, “The honey of common summer,” but she can’t remember the context, and so, in a sense, can’t complete her thought, if it’s right to call it a thought.
They arrive in Louisville with time to spare, but it takes the better part of an hour to find parking on campus. Eva has been able to stay positive and upbeat all this time, but Murphy can sense that her resolve is weakening.
“What do I do?” she says. “Do I just sort of interrupt?”
It’s a sin to interrupt a lecture, unless the lecture is evil. She wishes Yahweh had given her some powers or some special knowledge that would make her more convincing.
“Do I look okay, at least?”
“You look beautiful.”
She peers at herself in the side-view mirror.
“You don’t think I should tart myself up a bit?”
The lecture takes place in the first-floor auditorium of a Stalinist laboratory complex. The setting reminds Murphy of his stormy younger days, during which he worked in laboratory complexes just like this one. He was not suited to the repetitive labor of scientific research and quickly lost his mind. Now, however, the anguish and loneliness of those days is sufficiently remote that he remembers that time with longing.
Eva is trying to work out her strategy. She has an obligation to tell these people that the name of the Lord is Yahweh, but there’s no reason why she has to leave it at that. She also plans to explain why his existence is no cause for despair. In that sense, she’ll still be an advocate for goodness.
“Because the chilling follow-up question,” she says, “is how do you remain compassionate in a world where he exists? How do you live a good life, despite God?”
This is what Murphy was getting at earlier: How can we accept that the world is the way it is? For now, however, it looks like Eva is convinced that we can accept it. A confrontation with God, she says, is nothing more than a test of faith. Do they believe in kindness and generosity because an ancient Near Eastern storm god has mandated that belief? Of course not. Goodness in the service of a divine being is not goodness. It’s a moral abdication. They believe in goodness for its own sake. That is their faith. And they need only remain true to it.
“So even though I’ll be functioning as Yahweh’s prophet,” she says, “I’ll actually be able to spread a hopeful message.”
They sit halfway back on the left side, close to an exit. The house lights dim. The speaker and his handler mount the stage. Both men are clean-shaven, boyish, and severely bespectacled. They are distinguishable from one another only because the handler has not been able to button his shirt in the correct sequence.
Murphy turns to look at Eva, who grins and gives him a thumbs-up.
Alas, the lecture is incomprehensible, although it begins simply enough. As Yahweh has already mentioned, the topic is high-pressure physics, or maybe it’s fusion, or maybe these are the same thing, who knows. The speaker begins by saying that he and his colleagues have been discovering all kinds of new phases of matter. He says that matter, as one might expect, behaves unexpectedly when you begin mashing it. First you mash the electron shells together, and then you mash nuclei into other nuclei. But it’s at this point that Murphy and Eva lose the thread. How, for example, does this fellow create the extraordinary pressures necessary to crush nuclei into nuclei? They gather that a laser is required, but he keeps mentioning compression waves and something he calls a “gold can.” Soon he’s talking about an Easter egg filled with heavy hydrogen.
Eva waits for the question and answer period. It’s not until she opens her mouth that she realizes she’s not going to be able to say what she wants to say. She begins, “Have you heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh?”
The speaker is silent for a moment, and then he says, “Is that a question?”
“This city shall not be a pot for you,” she continues. The words come to her naturally, in exactly the way that a line from Wallace Stevens might come. She doesn’t understand them, but that’s okay. Much of Stevens is also impossible to understand. She continues, “This city shall not be a pot, nor you the meat in it. The fulfillment of every vision draws near. And then you’ll know that he is the Lord.”
She might have hoped for kindness from this audience, which presumably consists of secular humanists like themselves, but she isn’t going to get it. People stare. Contempt ripples through the crowd. She says nothing more.
The speaker adjusts his glasses and frowns. Then—and this is his unpleasant way of dismissing her and inviting more questions—then he says, “Has anyone else stopped taking their medication?”
It’s a disappointing evening. Luckily, it’s soon over. Murphy holds her hand during the time that remains, but he’s been swilling coffee and soon he has to rush off and find a bathroom. Eva heads out to the parking lot, where Yahweh is standing by the Prius with Fluffy 2. The lecture has impressed her with a sense of all the incredible things we know, and all the things we don’t know, and all the things we can’t know, but even though Yahweh appears more considerable in
this light—even though he is an embodiment of the great and terrifying mystery itself, the huge intractable Why of it all, and even though he looks taller today, more imperious, and somehow radiant with sexual menace—she has had a humiliating experience and she is hurt above all. Now it’s her turn to have a meltdown.
“You set me up!”
He nods. “I hardened their hearts.”
“You did what?”
“I hardened their hearts. And stiffened their necks.”
She sits down on the curb and puts her head in her hands.
He continues, “I have my purposes, and it’s not for you to wonder about them.”
“What purpose could it serve to make everyone wonder about your purposes? You’re supposed to be all-powerful.”
“And you antagonize me even so. It never ceases to amaze me.”
She looks around in wonder. The grass is green. The oak leaves snap and shine. The sun has come to rest on the blue hill. She can’t believe the world is like this. She asks him why he would subject his prophet to such humiliation, or any humiliation at all. What’s stopping him from making people revere him? Then she gets angrier and enlarges the scope of her critique. What about the suffering of children? What about cities destroyed by volcanoes? What about the indignity of aging? What about the bride who’s murdered on her wedding day? What about the Holocaust?
But Yahweh smiles mysteriously and says, “What about all the beautiful things in the world? What about the splendor?”
“Exactly. What about it?”
Eva has raised a lot of good questions. Let’s take up just one: If Yahweh really does possess the strength of an unicorn, then why can’t he have things the way he wants them? How could an omnipotent being be so strictly limited in the exercise of his power?
Some of the early Christian groups, collectively called Gnostics, had a tantalizing answer. They argued that Yahweh was only the demiurge—the creator. They said that he was a monstrously imperfect god, possibly insane, certainly the lowest and worst of the gods, all of whom, in any case, were just facets of the divine fullness from which everything comes. His need to create and then to meddle with a physical world was explained as a symptom of his imperfection, as was his consciousness, or the fact that he was impelled to interact with the material world by means of a consciousness.