by Aaron Thier
And these ideas have their appeal, don’t they? Because then it would follow that the higher and nobler gods have nothing to do with matter, nor perhaps with dark matter, if it exists. We are free to imagine that they are creatures of dark energy, woven into the structure of space, which is always expanding, always expanding, and at an ever-increasing rate, no less.
Murphy, for his part, is still wandering around looking for a bathroom. God knows, or he doesn’t, what depraved committee approved this floor plan.
Meanwhile, Eva tells Yahweh that she wants a covenant. Nothing big. “Just a simple covenant.” She wants his assurance that she and Murphy and any children they have are going to be happy and safe. Can he manage that small thing?
“No.”
She closes her eyes and tries to regulate her breathing and slow her heart rate, as Buddhist monks are said to be able to do. If happiness and safety are too much to ask, she says, she will accept safety alone. Could he simply agree not to do anything horrific and terrible to them?
He looks away and says nothing.
“Then just give me some money!”
“Some money?”
“It would make things easier. We could buy Mount Trashmore.”
“Why would you want to buy a landfill? Of all the things you could ask your god, you ask for a mountain of garbage?”
“I’m asking for money, not garbage. What I do with it should be my own business. How much would it cost to build a resort on a landfill?”
Yahweh produces a small piece of gum, unwraps it, places it in his mouth, chews rapturously, and says, “Fifty dollars? A billion dollars? It’s nothing to me.”
“So I can have it?”
“I’ll give you seven golden hemorrhoids and seven golden mice.”
“Just the money is fine.”
“Name your figure.”
“A hundred million dollars.”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine.”
She’s becoming suspicious. She looks around warily. “Why is it fine?”
“I’m pleased that you made the effort in there.”
“And you react just like a human. You enjoy a piece of gum. You behave charitably.”
“Incorrect. I behave like myself, and you all emulate me, which is how I set it up.” He grins. Cars rush by. Fluffy 2 makes a funny mewling noise. “And now let’s go over my conditions.”
Murphy has at last reached his goal, and in his relief he indulges in a reverie about urinal design. Is it not wonderful that there are people whose job it is to meditate on the shapes and contours of these fixtures? To get such a job, you need years of schooling. It’s a fluid-dynamics problem. Then he begins to think of physics more generally, and then, a rarefied topic indeed, of neutrinos. And yet this is reasonable enough when you consider that there are trillions of neutrinos passing through us every second. Even on the quietest days, the quietest mornings, when the trucks have ceased to back up and the leaf blowers are all switched off. What are they? They’re uncharged elementary particles produced by radioactive decay, or so the physicists tell us. We have to take their word for it. They say that neutrinos have mass, but not much mass. Again we have to take their word for it. They say that they’re a kind of dark matter. They say that all but 5 percent of the universe is dark matter or dark energy. They say that neutrinos come in three flavors. Are they lying to us?
Murphy exits the building in time to see Yahweh pull out of the parking lot and speed away, swerving as he goes in order to knock over some traffic cones. He’s driving the Lamborghini again. Eva is sitting on the curb and Fluffy 2 is standing beside her, blinking and sticking his tongue out.
“You did so well!” he says, sitting down next to her and gathering her into a hug. “It’ll get easier. The thing about the pot and the city was surprising …”
But she doesn’t want to talk about that right now. She has to explain the covenant she has just made. Yahweh will give them some money, but he has imposed a surprising condition. He wants her to build a temple on the summit of Mount Trashmore. He has even supplied a magical set of blueprints. The specifications are all there: The threshold of the gateway is one rod wide. From the entrance to the gateway it’s ten cubits. From this gate chamber to that one is twenty-five cubits. Here’s the chamber where you wash the burnt offering. There are two tables on that side and two on this side, and they’re for the burnt offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering.
“I can sort of go over this myself later on,” says Murphy.
“This chamber is for the priests, the sons of Zadok, from the sons of Levi.”
“I thought so.”
And the walls here will be carved with palm trees and cherubim, she says. And here’s the sanctuary. The doorposts are six cubits wide on both sides. The width of the entryway is ten cubits. The chamber is twenty by forty cubits.
“Let’s just come back to this another day,” says Murphy.
They camp on the side of the road in Hoosier National Forest. The morning is cool and blue and primeval, and so far only Murphy is awake. He’s trying to enjoy the fragrant woodland air and fluting birdsong, but he is unable to achieve serenity, and not because of Yahweh or Yahweh’s temple but because his mind is full of media trash. Bits of language come crackling to the surface and he can’t tell the advertising slogans from the NBA memes. “Have you been fouled by your wireless carrier?” “The ability to finish in transition.” “Innovation that excites.” “You have to come out aggressive.” “Power through.” “You talk about the high pick-and-roll.” “You talk about the ability to finish in transition.” “It all starts with a kick.” Eva sleeps with Fluffy 2 curled around her head. Murphy watches them. “You talk about coming out aggressive.” They are three digestive tubes bathing in neutrinos at the bottom of a gravity well.
Eva seems refreshed this morning. Only moments after opening her eyes, she reaches back to unzip the tent flap, deposits Fluffy 2 outside, and suggests winsomely that Murphy try to impregnate her. It pleases Murphy to be a figure of such utility. A convenient appendage. A reservoir of genetic material. So now there’s another sex scene, a woodland sex scene this time, rapid but not furtive, and afterward they lie together and listen to the wind and the birds. Eva wants to make a joke about how gross sex is—Why would we ever want to do that with the person we love?—but she says nothing. It’s so pleasant in here that there’s no need for levity.
Alas, they have a job to do, and soon it’s time to break camp. Murphy rolls up the tent, stuffs it halfway into its bag, pitches it into the car, and stuffs the sleeping bags in after it. Then they take the road west to Illinois. As Eva drives, Murphy pokes at her phone. First he checks his e-mail. Then he tries to figure out how to buy a landfill, but he doesn’t know where to start. Then he checks his e-mail. Then he checks his e-mail. Then he reads an article about the chocolate diet, so-called, which is just what it sounds like and which is based on research that has turned out to be fraudulent. Some filmmakers created a deliberately flawed study in order to expose the relaxed standards of nutritional science and e-journalism. Then he checks his e-mail. Then he longs to not check his e-mail. Then he asks the Internet how he’d go about destroying the Internet, and the Internet has an answer, but it isn’t as satisfying as he’d hoped. The Internet is a vast machine, all nodes and wires and server farms, which does mean that it can be destroyed, but it’s so diffuse and redundant that destroying it means coordinating an enormous worldwide terrorist operation, and Murphy doesn’t have the qualifications for a job like that.
“I don’t get it,” says Eva. “Do you really want to destroy the Internet? It would be a disaster.”
What he wants is a little psychological space. Doesn’t she remember the days when you had to wait to look something up? And you had to call people on their house phones, and if they were out somewhere, even if they were just in the yard catching grasshoppers, you couldn’t talk to them. Doesn’t she remember those days?<
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“And now everything’s out of control,” he says, checking his e-mail. “No one’s allowed to go out and catch grasshoppers without sharing the fact with everyone they know. You can listen to all the songs, but that means that there’s no time to listen to any song in particular. And the news! Oh God. It just keeps coming.”
He looks wistfully at the country out there beyond the highway. There are some cheerful bluffs, more plowed fields, ornamental clouds, an occasional farmhouse. It’s true that Yahweh has turned his phone to wood, but it wouldn’t matter if he changed all of our phones to wood. To get back to where we came from, he’d have to change the memory of our phones to wood.
Soon the land begins to flatten out. It’s just grain elevators and water towers and newly planted cornfields out here, which reminds Eva of a book she read in which a journalist goes to an American cornfield in order to meditate on the effects of a mass extinction. The idea is that a mass extinction doesn’t mean fewer total organisms but fewer kinds of organisms. An aseptic modern cornfield provides the analogy. There are only a few species of insect that can survive here, almost no larger animals, and of course very few weeds. It’s a poisoned landscape inhabited by corn. This is supposed to be what the world was like after the great Permian-Triassic extinction event, during which up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrates disappeared. In the wake of this catastrophe, the ultimate cause of which remains unknown, the earth’s various ecoregions were overrun by a handful of opportunistic survivors like Lystrosaurus (“shovel lizard”), which was a sprawling pig-size digging creature thought to have been particularly well adapted to the high-carbon-dioxide, low-oxygen atmosphere that characterized that terrible period.
“Marianne Moore says somewhere that struggle is meat,” says Eva.
“Struggle is meat?”
“I don’t remember the context.”
“I sort of understand. Struggle is meat.”
“It’s about predators and prey,” she says, peering at the cornfield. “Maybe.”
Here’s another problem: We can wonder all we like about why Yahweh might want to orchestrate disasters like the Permian-Triassic extinction or the biblical flood—assuming, of course, that he’s the one responsible—but we also need to ask how he orchestrates these disasters. If he can manipulate the weather, for example, by what mechanism does he do so? Does he voluntarily mobilize the same forces that meteorological science describes, or does he exert some other kind of influence, possibly involving neutrinos, or is he himself a kind of force, immanent in all these phenomena but lacking conscious control, such that his relationship to mudslides and hurricanes is something like our relationship to the functions of our gall bladders?
They pass through St. Louis at eleven o’clock. It’s here that they cross the mighty Mississippi. It’s here that they pick up I-70. It’s here that they enter the American West, in a sense, but only in a sense, because at first everything is the same. The trees, the bluffs, the close damp air. It’s the old story: You wait for the big moment, and what you get is a gradual transition.
Questions about Yahweh’s methods and intentions lead inevitably to the free-will question and its vexing corollary, the self-determination question. We’ve hinted at this already. If Yahweh is the creator of mankind, a big if, then to what extent should he be held accountable for the bad things humans do? Not just vast crimes like the Holocaust, but smaller crimes too, like a mugging in an Atlanta alleyway. Even if we are permitted some freedom of choice, is our nature not determined and overdetermined by our creator? Is Yahweh therefore responsible for anthropogenic climate change? What about medical conditions that derive from exposure to man-made toxins?
Just west of St. Louis, in Weldon Spring, you can visit an attraction called the Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail. Missouri boasts plenty of other fun destinations as well. The biggest ball of string is in Weston, but the biggest ball of twine, or at least one of the four contenders for the title, is in Branson. In Bonne Terre, you can see the giant fiberglass animal cluster.
“We need the Internet to organize our political resistance,” Eva says. “How would we know which legislators to call?”
“It’s always the same ones, those fuckers.”
Lunch is granola and some tough raw collards from the pots in the back. They enjoy this meal in a park in Columbia, Missouri. Then they visit a food co-op and buy some cacao beans. A mild interest in the chocolate hoax has given way to this: an appetite for chocolate. The hoax doesn’t mean that chocolate is necessarily ineffective as a weight-loss aid. It only means that it isn’t necessarily effective. Not that either of them need to lose weight. They’re interested in cacao beans as a source of protein, fiber, and delicious magical phytochemicals.
As they shuffle up to the checkout line, snatching a few bars of dark chocolate on the way, Murphy wonders about fad diets. Why do Americans love them? It’s because Americans like bold and aggressive action. The United States is an Enlightenment nation founded on the idea that problems have solutions. A ridiculous conceit. How many world-weary Englishmen and Englishwomen would make that mistake? But Americans believe it. Americans believe that the solution to the problem of being human is out there, and you just have to find it and buy it by the liter.
The checkout guy says, “Did you know that eating cacao beans will actually help you with color perception? You’ll actually see a greater number of colors.”
Murphy smirks. More pseudoscience.
“Did you know,” says Eva, “that the name of the Lord is Yahweh?”
Now they stand out in the sun eating cacao beans, which are so bitter that they must consciously suppress the instinct to spit them out. But they aren’t quite as bad if you eat them with a piece of dark chocolate. They’re even pretty good. Or are they? At a certain point, because of the incredible purported benefits of chocolate, which do not necessarily not include weight loss, it’s impossible to untangle all the inputs. The thought of chocolate is so delicious that it affects the taste.
“But it is so colorful out here,” says Murphy. “Look at the rich red of that Kia Optima. And the vividness of the no-passing sign. Even the asphalt. Don’t you think?”
“The colors are so striking. I was just thinking that.”
“What a lovely world.”
“It’s tempting to think,” says Eva, crunching up a cacao bean, “that it isn’t the worst of all possible worlds after all.”
Unfortunately, this is a short reprieve. An hour later they’re at a convenience store in western Missouri and they spot Satan standing by the gas pumps with his hands in his pockets. Like Yahweh, he’s immediately recognizable as himself, even if he’s not what they expect. He is a stocky and unassuming angel. He has arched, ironic eyebrows. He looks like Salman Rushdie.
“No,” says Eva. “No no no. I can’t take this.”
Satan crosses the parking lot and stands at the entrance to the convenience store, holding the door for a small boy. He bows slightly as the child passes through. The boy’s mother gives him a radiant smile.
“If we just pretend he’s not here,” says Eva.
They’ve been listing novels that they think their child should be made to read. There are novels you have to read when you’re young, they agree, like Absalom, Absalom!, Jane Eyre, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their duty as parents will be to expose their child to these things while the window is still open.
“I tried to reread Blood Meridian last year,” says Murphy, “but I’m too old now. I just kept thinking about how all those murdered people had moms and dads. We’re all alive because someone took care of us when we were small.”
“I never read Blood Meridian.”
“You’ve missed your chance.”
Satan is right behind them. He clears his throat. Eva freezes.
“In my darker moments,” Satan says, “the only book I can bear to read is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
They turn around and
glare at this shabby fallen angel. But Satan is unhappy as well. He apologizes for intruding. He’s here at Yahweh’s insistence—Yahweh is busy, or wants them to think he’s busy.
“And listen,” he says, “I know what you’re thinking, but before you say anything, just consider this: You’ve heard the worst things about me, but who have you heard them from?”
Eva cocks her head.
“It’s Yahweh and his acolytes who’ve been defaming me all this time. Yahweh and his acolytes. Do you understand what I’m saying? And they’ve been successful.”
Eva grins.
“You see my point?” says Satan.
The convenience store is thronged with exhausted travelers. They all have their own problems, but if those problems can be solved by purchasing things, they’ve come to the right place. There are diet peach “refreshers” available for just $1.19 a bottle. There are Raid Ant Baits, Velveeta Cheesy Bowls, Hot Shot No-Mess! insect fogger, Detour Lean Muscle whey protein bars, Advil, Cutter Backyard Bug Control, Crisco, Laffy Taffy, Meiji Hello Panda choco cream biscuits, Little Trees Black Ice car freshener, and so on, and so on. Chemical afternoon.
“Yahweh has been poisoning everyone against me for so long,” Satan says, “that nobody remembers I used to be the angel of the morning.”
“Like the song,” says Eva.
“Of course.”
“Is it secretly about you?”
He shrugs. Lots of songs are secretly about him. It isn’t as if being cast as Yahweh’s enemy has been bad for brand recognition.
Eva says, “It’s a great song. Now we’re all going to have it stuck in our heads.”
The three of them walk out to the car. The sky is a powdery blue. The new leaves on the honey locust trees are a wild highlighter yellow. A vivid yellow. Satan pays for the gas, bless him. He leans back against the car while the tank fills and mutters a little A. E. Stallings lyric that begins, “Why should the devil get all the good tunes …”