by Aaron Thier
Eva says, “There’s a Sharon Olds collection called Satan Says.”
“I’ve read it,” Satan says.
“You’ve read it?”
“Literature is the element I live in. But could I ask you not to call me Satan?”
He suggests that they call him Lucifer instead. Latin enthusiasts will remember that it means “the bringer of light.”
“Did I read somewhere,” says Eva, “that it was Milton who first called you Lucifer?”
“I remember Milton. A strange man crying out to be milked. Incredibly, he thought he’d gone blind because of something he ate, and not because it pleased Yahweh to strike him blind. A man who knew so much! He didn’t know that.”
But now Satan says they need to be going. Tonight’s assignment is to antagonize an author whom Yahweh despises. She’s reading at a bookstore in Kansas City and they only have an hour to get there. It turns out that Satan—and we can’t help but call him Satan, but it’s okay because it just means “the adversary”—has been dispatched to guide Eva to the event and to play a special role in the spectacle that will follow. They don’t ask him to be more specific, but Murphy does ask why he’s beholden to Yahweh in the first place.
“Put it this way,” Satan says. “If Yahweh is the light of the light of the light, then I’m the light of the light of the light of the light.”
“Oh.”
Or, he says, maybe it’s just that he’s a part of Yahweh’s pantheon. No doubt every pantheon has its unique frustrations. For all he knows, another pantheon might be even worse.
The bookstore occupies the corner unit in a strip mall somewhere in the city’s baggy periphery. There’s a pawn shop next door, and some dangerous teens smoking by a Dumpster, and there’s a pizza box on the curb with the enigmatic legend “Destinee” written on it in Sharpie. It seems to Eva like a clue. They’ve got a few minutes to spare, so they feed Fluffy 2 his dinner and watch the wild bloody sunset foaming in the western sky.
“Indifferent as it is,” Satan says, presumably meaning the sun, “or indifferent as it seems to the works of God and man.”
Murphy is examining the dog- and cat-food tins while Fluffy 2 eats. This food is just meat and potatoes and carrots. Somehow the information comes as a great surprise.
“Food is all the same stuff,” he says, with an air of revelation. “Dog food, human food, scorpion food. It’s all the same components in different forms and combinations.”
He elaborates: Wheat is a fruit, like a cherry. And chocolate is a fruit too, but it’s the seed part of the fruit, like a pea in a pod. Everything we eat is just cherries and peas. And meat. We prepare these things in different ways, that’s all. Bread is like a baked cherry foam with yeast. And yeast is just fungus, like mushrooms. So bread is cherry foam with mushrooms.
“Why are you saying cherries?” says Satan. He turns to Eva. “He keeps repeating the word cherries.”
The reading is well attended, despite its inauspicious location. Here’s a guy in a Star Trek sweatshirt and one of those clear plastic face masks that basketball players wear when they break their noses. He has a CVS bag full of tattered papers and manila folders. There’s also a sinewy older man with a rolling suitcase and a portable DVD player. He’s sitting in the back watching Cheers and eating plantain chips. He has a plastic bottle of cooking brandy in his coat pocket and occasionally he says “That’s so funny” in a serene and mellifluous voice. Closer to the front is a respectful group of older women, possibly a book club. Murphy and Eva sit on the left side, near the back. Satan sits by himself a few rows in front of them.
The writer has just published a novel about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. They have never heard of her before and her writing is undistinguished, but she seems generous and kind and they listen politely, or they pretend to listen. Then the reading is done and the bookstore owner invites questions from the audience. The man in the Star Trek sweatshirt asks if she was in Haiti when it happened. A woman asks if she thinks publishing is dying or just changing. Another woman asks about her daily routine. Then Eva takes a few short breaths, slaps herself in the face, and asks if the writer has heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh.
Kansas City is a place where you might expect to encounter modest Christian people who have indeed heard the name of the Lord, whatever it is, and are not unfamiliar with manifestations of religious enthusiasm. That expectation now seems justified. The reading group women incline their heads respectfully, finding fault not with the message, perhaps, but with its abrupt mode of delivery. Yahweh doesn’t appear to have hardened their hearts, and Eva’s question seems likely to pass without comment.
But no: Satan says that he’d like to take up the issue, if no one objects, and of course no one does. He may not possess the strength of an unicorn, but the audience senses that he’s a considerable figure nonetheless. There’s a frightening gravity about him as he rises to speak.
“Are we to imagine,” he begins, “that the earthquake was somehow ‘God’s will?’ Is that what you’re implying? That all of that suffering was inflicted upon these people for some purpose?”
He continues in a weary, professorial style, touching with sly eloquence on some different facets of this question and then, more vehemently now, declaring that he doesn’t want to live in a world “where there are gods like that.” Luckily, as he now insists, there are no gods at all, or angels, and never have been. The injustice is that a person committed to reason must define him- or herself in opposition to so ludicrous a fantasy.
“An angel?” he says, laughing bitterly. “A shining little someone with wings?”
The bookstore owner says, “We’re getting a little off topic here.”
But the audience is mesmerized. There’s no stopping him now.
“Why should it be acceptable to construe rules of conduct from an anthology of ancient children’s stories? Why those children’s stories and not others? The Lorax communicates a more wholesome message.”
Meanwhile, what about the earthquake in Haiti? Our scientist friends tell us that it was caused by a rupture of the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault, which is fine as a description of the mechanism, but no one who has even a passing acquaintance with Yahweh and his deeds will fail to detect the cruel intentionality. Why should such a terrible thing have happened to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? A country founded by slaves who freed themselves but who were then forced to make reparations to their former owners, which is to say that the ex-slaves had to compensate the ex-slave-owners for the loss of their slaves, i.e. themselves. Having fought for their freedom, they then had to pay for it. The financial burden crippled the young nation, which was already crippled by economic embargoes.
Satan, meanwhile, presses on. The audience is stricken, wide-eyed, openmouthed.
“We’re asked to imagine an insubstantial being who lives in the sky. He knows everything we think, cares what we think, and has apparently created the world only to cause devastation and hardship for its occupants, whom he also created.”
To accept this premise is also to ask why, says Satan. Why would such a being do what he does? Why would he kill people by the thousand, and by the tens of thousands? It’s the oldest question, and disagreement about the answer has given rise to centuries of conflict among Christians and Jews and Muslims. But the dispassionate observer can see that there is no program after all. There is no order or plan to anything. If God exists, therefore, then his true desire could only be to produce violent confusion and discord. Persisting in one’s religious belief means ascribing to this divine being a nihilist malignancy that boggles the mind. Who wants to live in such a universe?
“And yet,” Satan says, “if we remove God from our understanding of the cosmos, we remove agency and thus we remove cruelty.”
Speaking of cruelty and agency, here’s something else: Hanes, which is of course headquartered in Winston-Salem, makes a lot of its clothing in Haiti, and the company recently fought a deter
mined battle to prevent this benighted country from raising its minimum wage from thirty-one to sixty-one cents an hour. Eventually, the U.S. State Department forced the Haitian government to accept a minimum wage of three dollars per day for textile workers. This perverse miscarriage of justice was moving forward even as the earthquake occurred, and wages have increased only marginally since that time. Maybe the safest hypothesis is that God and man have acted together in their pursuit of Haiti’s degradation.
Satan dismisses the audience and everyone stumbles out into the midwestern evening and stands around blinking in the purple light.
“I’m so sorry,” he says to Eva. “I’m mortified. I’d have warned you, but I wasn’t sure how Yahweh would react.”
Eva waves his concern away. He had no choice. She understands.
“I’m playing the Satan role,” he says. “Temptation to disbelief and so on.”
“Of course. Will he be happy with how it went?”
“It’s anybody’s guess.”
He offers to take Murphy and Eva to dinner, by way of compensation. There’s a place he knows on the Kansas side of the city. So now they glide over the wide Missouri, that storied waterway, and come to rest in a surpassingly nondescript postindustrial landscape such as one might find in any American city. But there’s more here than empty lots and old warehouses. There’s also Kansas City barbecue, the unique contribution of which is the burnt end. What you do is take the brisket out of the smoker, cut off the points, and put them back in until they get that delicious crust. Murphy orders three portions for himself, and fried okra too.
“Or really fried cherries,” he says, spearing some okra. “And the cornbread is just more cherry cake.”
Satan says, “I still don’t understand why he’s saying cherry.”
“It’s to illustrate that it’s all fruits,” Eva says. She looks glum and sounds glum, and who can blame her? The evening has been hard. “He’s using cherry as a generic word for all fruits. It’s a joke. He’s trying to cheer me up.”
Murphy nods and stuffs some burnt ends into his mouth. The food is so good that he already misses this place. Does that mean he’s close to the memory horizon?
He turns to Satan and says, “It seems weird that you need to eat.”
“Hush,” says Eva.
“No,” says Satan, “it’s okay. It’s a fair point. I actually don’t need to eat. I just like it.”
He chews heartily for a moment and then stops and appears to lose himself in some glum reflections of his own. Murphy goes on eating and eating. Eva stares at her hands and sighs. There’s a country freshness in the air and the restaurant hums with activity. Fluffy 2 is asleep in the car.
“I didn’t always look like this,” says Satan. “I used to be so pretty. I looked like Ava Gardner.”
Ever since they began heading west, Murphy and Eva have been monitoring the roadside vegetation for signs of increasing aridity. Things are certainly changing, but it’s not going to be the cathartic transformation they hope for. We’ve said this already. You don’t burst through a wall of trees onto the golden grass of the steppe. So where does the West really begin? They’ve been traveling on I-64 and I-70, right along the boundary between the humid subtropical climate zone (Köppen climate classification Cfa) and the humid continental climate zone (Köppen climate classification Dfa), a boundary line that extends from east to west and to some extent separates the old slave states from the free states, which is not coincidental, since it loosely describes the boundaries of the cotton-growing region. Moving from east to west, we are indeed moving into an increasingly arid part of the country. We will eventually cross a north-south boundary with a third climate zone, the cold semiarid climate zone (Köppen climate classification BSk), which begins in western Kansas. Consider the following annual precipitation averages:
Louisville, Kentucky: 44.91 in.
St. Louis, Missouri: 40.96 in.
Kansas City, Missouri: 38.86 in.
Manhattan, Kansas: 35.69 in.
Salina, Kansas: 30.66 in.
Hays, Kansas: 23.45 in.
The Great American Desert is said to begin at the hundredth meridian, not far beyond Hays, so maybe that’s the beginning of the West. Follow I-70 a little farther:
Denver, Colorado: 14.30 in.
Richfield, Utah: 8.34 in.
And if you go southwest:
Las Vegas, Nevada: 4.19 in.
But follow the hundredth meridian up to Canada and you see something interesting. Precipitation totals remain below twenty inches a year, which is often defined as the threshold for aridity, but you start to get forests again. That’s because it’s colder and the sun is less intense, so there’s less evaporation.
Of course, climate change has distorted everything and these figures may already be meaningless. Alas, they’re the only figures we have.
Tonight they camp in Paxico, Kansas (pop. 221), on the ninety-sixth meridian, east of Manhattan. Satan has long since bid them farewell. Murphy is beset by aches and pains, Eva is still brooding, and both of them are trying not to think of Yahweh and Yahweh’s demands. Such thoughts are not easily set aside, however. After a sorrowful but disconcertingly vigorous sex scene, Eva lies naked and shivering on her sleeping bag and wonders how she can justify bringing children into Yahweh’s depraved and beautiful dream of a world. Murphy places a hand gently on her leg and thinks: If I lose her. If we have a child and something happens. If, if, if.
The next morning, for the first time, something seems different. There are cottonwoods and poplars and an oak on the road near their campsite. There are hills. There’s even a kind of stream. There are no tumbleweeds. And yet there is also no birdsong, and even in the tent the air seems dusty and dry. When Murphy pokes his head out and sees their neighbor sleeping at his picnic table in the lavender dawn, he’s looking at a tiny man under an endless sky, and he can sense the grassland out there rolling on ahead of them.
Eva is still asleep, so Murphy grabs a few dollars for coffee, slips out of the tent, pulls on his running shoes, and sets off at a leisurely pace. Is he at ease, despite everything? His legs are tight and his hips hurt and his feet feel terrible, but he tells himself that there’s less pain than usual. When he gets to the gas station, however, and drinks a little cup of coffee, he is so impressed with himself for running at so reasonable a pace, and also, what’s more, for interrupting his run to enjoy this coffee, and he’s so impressed by the quiet of the morning, and the pale sky, that he makes the mistake of drinking a second cup of coffee. This is like pouring the liquor of aggravation directly into his soul, and it creates a psychic emergency. Now he has to run farther and more briskly, and soon the pain is almost more than he can bear. It’s hard to have a body. The only thing worse is having a mind.
Eva is walking Fluffy 2 when Murphy limps back to camp. He has managed to quiet his nerves a little bit, and it’s a good thing, because she’s got her Bible out and she’s in an unsteady mood.
“How about this,” she says. “This is Judges 3:22. Judges is one of the most violent parts. ‘And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.’ ”
“You shouldn’t read that stuff. That stuff is bad for you.”
“Then you’ve got Yahweh and the Israelites at odds with one another: ‘And the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, when Ehud was dead. And the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor.’ ” She reads quietly for a moment. “Oh sure, well, I might have guessed: ‘Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.’ ”
“Who died?”
“One of the Canaanite generals. Sisera. He falls asleep from drinking milk.”
“There’s that an again. ‘An hammer.’ ”<
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“They destroy Jabin at this point. And next comes the War Song of Deborah, which tells the same story again. ‘She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.’ ”
“Does she fix his head in place by driving the nail through it, so she’s able to smite it off more easily, or does she smite it off with the nail?”
“You’d have to ask the rabbis. But guess what happens after Jabin is destroyed?”
“Tell me.”
“ ‘And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord: and the Lord delivered them into the hand of Midian seven years.’ ”
She’s thinking about these verses as they pack the car. A suspicion begins to dawn. What if Yahweh’s purpose in sending her out to proselytize is not to make people aware of his name, not at all, but to trick them into contempt and disrespect so that he’ll have an excuse to punish them later? Why else harden their hearts and stiffen their necks? Why else dispatch Satan to argue so vehemently against the very idea of religious faith? And there are lots of moments in the Bible when Yahweh seems to yearn for the destruction of mankind. What if that’s his real goal, and there’s just something about his programming that requires him to create a pretext?
Here’s a fun fact about Kansas: An untethered hot-air-balloon ride is considered a form of transportation and isn’t subject to the amusement tax. If you ride in the balloon while it’s still attached to the earth, however, your ride is taxable.
Here’s something else: When the railroads were just beginning to creep west in the second half of the nineteenth century, cowboys had to take their herds north from Texas to the various railheads up here on the High Plains. Townspeople in places like Dodge City and Abilene were afraid of these rambunctious Texans and occasionally hired notorious gunmen like Wild Bill Hickok to protect them, but there were also legal protections. There were strict gun control laws in the Wild West. Cowboys were not permitted to bring firearms of any kind into town.