The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  Eva doesn’t say anything this morning, except once when she’s alarmed by the shape of a cloud and she says, “What the fuck is that?” and Murphy says, “Just a cloud,” and she says, “Right, of course.” Signs of increasing aridity are now everywhere to be seen.

  In Salina, they leave the highway and drive north to the geographic center of the contiguous United States, which is located outside Lebanon, Kansas, just beyond the ninety-eighth meridian. Here in the heart of the heart of the country, you don’t find Matt Damon, and you don’t find an extradimensional machine filled with extradimensional shapes. You find a modest plaque, a shed marked “U.S. Center Chapel,” and a homemade sign that says “Lebanon Has Souvenirs.” The sky is like a dusty eggcup and the grass is already blond after a dry spring. There are cynical observations to be made about all of this emptiness, the rotten heart of the Union, etc., but in fact there is a vast peacefulness out here. If this is what the United States is at heart—a place where you can hear the locusts click in the dry grass, a place where you can hear yourself think—then things are better than we imagined.

  They eat granola for lunch once again. Murphy calls it cherries and peas. Eva is absorbed by her phone, which bothers him. He tries to tell her something that he learned recently about On the Road—another book, dear notional child, that you can only read when you’re young, and maybe not even then. It was published in the late fifties, Murphy says, just after the Interstate Highway System was authorized, which means that the world it describes, the two-lane America of the late forties, was already disappearing. It was always about nostalgia.

  But Eva isn’t interested. She’s typing something. Murphy turns away in irritation. It could be a text message!

  “Is On the Road as misogynistic as it seems?” he says. “For Dean, the end result of treating women so poorly is despair and misery.”

  Once again Eva says nothing.

  “But for my money, Huckleberry Finn is the greatest American road novel.”

  “Or Moby-Dick,” says Eva, surprising him.

  She isn’t sending a text message, not that there’s anything reprehensible about doing so. What she’s doing is looking at her checking account balance. There’s a teller transaction dated yesterday—one hundred million dollars have been credited to her account. She keeps counting the zeroes. She logs out and logs in again. A chill passes over her. The dry wind lifts her hair up and sets it down.

  The old brick buildings on Main Street in Lebanon are all empty. The windows are broken or boarded up. The Peoples Bank is just a mobile home with a tattered awning. This is how it is all across the plains, from here to Denver. Lebanon is a community of 218 people, according to the 2010 census, and this is down from a twentieth-century high of 822 in 1920—a loss of about 75 percent. All these Kansan towns are emptying out in the same dramatic way, and this phenomenon is called “rural flight.” Only 8.4 percent of Lebanon residents are college-educated, for example, and that’s because kids who go away to college do not return to their isolated hometown. The place is almost entirely white, although census data indicates that 0.5 percent of the population is Native American and 0.5 percent is Asian, whatever “Asian” means out here. It’s disconcerting to think that 0.5 percent of 218 works out to a single lonely person, but it’s more disconcerting that the figure given for foreign-born residents is just 0.3 percent—less than one person. How have the census people managed to arrive at this figure? Is it a foreigner with a few American-made prostheses? We wouldn’t trust an American-made prosthesis. Give us an Asian one any day.

  Eva and Murphy are rich. We don’t know yet what it means, and Eva has chosen to say nothing. She gazes into the middle distance. She shivers. She’s experiencing the exhilarating uncanny out-of-body sensations of the lottery winner.

  Unaware of their momentous windfall, Murphy continues to chatter inconsequentially. He says that the Prius is their Pequod, and Yahweh must be the White Whale, at least in the sense that he means something and they don’t know what. But who’s Ahab?

  “Fluffy 2 is Ahab,” says Eva. “Look at those eyes.”

  It’s the silence that impresses you. And the empty space. And the towering blue sky. Some ecologists have suggested that we give up and surrender the Great Plains to the buffalo. This is part of a larger “rewilding” movement in which we would very much like to believe, except that the famously giant herds of buffalo, so remarkable to the first Euro-American explorers, might have been a recent anomaly caused by the die-off of indigenous Americans or, alternatively, by the disappearance of the buffalo’s natural predators and competitors. After all, those same indigenous Americans had hunted most of the large American mammals to extinction ten thousand years before, which is to say that the prehuman plains are gone forever, and although the past is always irrecoverable, it’s particularly irrecoverable in this case. We’re lucky we even have the buffalo. Euro-Americans came close to exterminating this majestic creature in the nineteenth century. They destroyed the culture of the Plains Indians in the process.

  A young man in a Cargill hat stumbles out of the saloon and looks at them with a puzzled expression. Murphy says hello. The man waits a beat and then responds, “Outstanding. How are you?” They gaze at each other across a vast sociocultural divide, and there’s nothing whatsoever to say, but they’re both trying to think of something. Then the man gestures at Fluffy 2 and asks, “What the hail kind of animal is that?” Murphy says he doesn’t know. The man raises his eyebrows. The two of them now squat to examine Fluffy 2. They reach no conclusion, but they part in friendship.

  A hundred million dollars. But in the context of the morning’s fears, Eva’s excitement quickly begins to fade. It’s no good pretending that she has won the lottery. The money is a gift from Yahweh, and even if he doesn’t intend to destroy mankind, his gift almost certainly means trouble. At the very least, they’re now obliged to buy Mount Trashmore and build his ludicrous temple.

  And still she says nothing to Murphy, who’s now explaining that chocolate is just mashed peas, like peanut butter, which means you’re allowed to have a chocolate-and-banana sandwich for lunch.

  “Are you going to keep it up with this food classification stuff ?” Eva says.

  “At first I was joking, but now I think I’m on to something. I should submit a restaurant review using this system. ‘Try the cherries with cherry sauce. It’s great with a glass of fermented cherry juice.’ ”

  Eva presses her hands together and frowns. She’s feeling unwell, and her diet of dry roasted cherries and peas doesn’t help.

  “I need some acidity,” she says. “I need a kiwi or something. I feel like I’m full of free radicals.”

  They pile into the Pequod and continue north to US 36, the road that will take them into the West. A sign says, “Control Disease. Register Your Farm or Ranch.” Another says, “Crossroads of Yesteryear.” There’s a landmark, but it’s closed. They listen to the radio as they go. A young black American sings about how much money he has, and the struggle he went through to get his hands on that money, and the resentment that people tend to feel toward him. Eva, who is also rich, listens for clues and tips, but there isn’t much overlap with her own experience. The singer reflects that no matter how much money he has, he is always who he is, which could be taken to mean that the money won’t change him—Eva, too, plans to remain the same person with the same values—but actually sounds more like a lament. No matter what he accomplishes, he says, he’ll always be a black man in America. His extraordinary achievement is a reminder that ordinary, modest achievement is not possible for many of his peers, no matter how hard they work. The system is rigged against them. The attainment of wealth looks like an accidental, undeserved, anomalous event—another of Yahweh’s whims. Thus their resentment, and thus his own anguished feelings about success.

  They eat chocolate-dipped cones at the Dairy Queen in Norton, Kansas. This relatively prosperous town (pop. 2,928) has a functioning grain elevator and a Jamboree Food
s and a yarn store and a Hidden Dragon Chinese restaurant where you can get Beef on a Sticks (8) for $5.55. There’s a defunct Conoco with a green peaked roof, but otherwise there aren’t many registered trademarks to be seen. Businesses are owned and operated by individual humans: Moffet Drug, J & R Liquor, Walter Motor Company, Boxler Insurance Agency.

  “So what’s this?” says Eva, holding up her ice cream. “According to your new system.”

  Easy: The cone is cherries. The chocolate is mashed peas. And the ice cream is made from milk, which is a kind of honey, because honey is the substance that animals make to feed themselves and their young. This is frozen honey foam served in a cherry cup with mashed peas.

  Now they visit the Jamboree Foods, where Eva anxiously watches her fellow mortals and feels as never before the weakness of the human position. Here’s a Central American teenager eating potato chips at the cash register; here’s a big round lady drawing a purple sweater out of her purse like a clown with an endless handkerchief; here’s Murphy himself, limping a little and grabbing at his back each time he bends over. Secular humanism teaches that we have a responsibility to take care of one another, and the money, the dangerous God-given money, seems to heighten the importance of that obligation.

  “He giveth,” Eva mutters. “Sure he does. And then he taketh away.”

  While Murphy investigates the produce section, she strolls up and down the aisles and asks patrons if they’ve heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh. After a little while she’s just saying “Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh” in a continuous dreary chant, and a little girl starts following her, also chanting “Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh,” and this drives her out of her mind with anxiety.

  Murphy walks outside and sniffs the dusty air. He wonders what it would be like to settle down here in Norton. They could buy a house for three hundred dollars, eat cold honey foam in the Kansan sun, and spend their time gazing meaningfully down the empty streets. But do they have hospitals and schools in Kansas? He read somewhere that they’ve all closed.

  They drive west into the flat empty country, and a few minutes later they cross the hundredth meridian. The agriculture that’s happening out here is dryland agriculture, with the center-pivot irrigation systems that make those perfectly circular green fields so marvelous to the children—tiny humans who have not yet lost their capacity for wonder—who peer down at them from airplanes. They have entered what Wallace Stegner called the “geography of hope,” thus distinguishing it from the geography of realistic expectation. The grass is parched and golden, and the sun is hot, and the clouds are small and round and hung with great care at the same height in the big blue sky. It’s so quiet that it’s possible to appreciate the fact that it’s never perfectly quiet. They step out of the car to stand for a moment in the ecstatic loneliness.

  Part II

  Religion and religious devotion are strictly proscribed by secular humanism, but as Murphy and Eva have already established, Yahweh himself, Yahweh the conscious being, is only what he is, and if he exists, then he exists as mountains exist, and neutrinos, and his nature is accessible to rational inquiry. In this sense, he is no threat to a secular humanist worldview. He is simply a wondrous thing to ponder.

  We have speculated about his circuitous designs, and we have wondered about the means by which he achieves or fails to achieve those designs, but we have yet to inquire into the nature of his consciousness, in some mysterious crevice of which those designs are presumably born. Thoughtful people have suggested that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of information processing, which is to say that it emerges organically. Construct a brain, they’ll tell you, and a mind will follow. If this is true, and we don’t see why it should be, but if it’s true, does it mean that consciousness is a phenomenon that always tends to have the same features, whatever the underlying physical structure that produces it? Does Yahweh experience consciousness in the same way that we do, even if he’s made of dark matter and we’re made of luminous/reflective matter? Or are his thoughts just the skin on a bottomless pudding, hardly implicated at all in his real activities, whatever they are, and does this explain why what he says is so often at odds with what he does? But humans are like that too.

  And what about the Internet? Could it become conscious one day? Would its consciousness resemble our own, and would it therefore be murder to destroy it?

  A hundred million dollars: It’s unsettling and miraculous, but it’s something that has happened, a phenomenon, a real event.

  “A hundred million?” says Murphy.

  He’d like to be the kind of person who takes this in stride, but he needs time to work through it. Somehow the money is more incredible to him than the apparition of God and his angels.

  Very slowly, he says, “It’s only fair. You’re working hard. You’re doing a consequential job. There are people in far less important positions who make a lot more. Think of finance people.”

  It’s six o’clock. They’re on the street in downtown Denver. Nineteenth-century town houses stand alone in parking lots, surrounded by municipal buildings and glass skyscrapers. The mountains loom in the west. The day has been hot, but the evening is cool, in which respect Denver is like the moon. Even here, in the heart of the city, the air has that aromatic western backcountry smell. It reminds Murphy of childhood vacations in Oregon and California, and it reminds Eva of “Howl.”

  “Even finance people have moms and dads,” Murphy adds.

  The streets are thronged with people. There has been a demonstration outside the state capitol. Excited young protestors rush by with their signs.

  Murphy says, “We’ll love our children even if they go into finance.”

  Prompted by an urgent e-mail and by the spectacle of civic engagement, Eva donates eighty thousand dollars to the ACLU. Because her payment information has been saved, she’s able to do this with just a few taps of her thumb. It’s an extraordinary thrill to give away so much.

  “Dissent is patriotic!” she says loudly, repeating the ACLU’s motto.

  Now, working from the assumption that Yahweh will soon taketh away what he’s just giveneth, they withdraw the daily maximum from the ATM and start dropping fifty-dollar bills into the hats and cans and bins of the city’s many panhandlers. This feels like a necessary mitzvah in the context, so to speak, of Yahweh’s inevitable cruelty.

  Eva insists that they aren’t going to let the money change them. Money changes what you can do, not who you are. Murphy agrees, at least in principle, but he’s also using Eva’s phone to identify the most expensive restaurant within walking distance. This is how they end up at the Palace Arms, in the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, where they order every single one of the first and second courses. They make only one exception—the Spanish octopus—which they forgo because they’ve read that an octopus is an intelligent, self-regarding creature, even if its brain does not resemble our own, structurally speaking. But they have no such concerns about pork, despite the reputed intelligence of pigs, whose brains do look a lot like ours. What can we say about this? Evidently, one feature of human consciousness, if not all types of consciousness, is a cheerful ability to abide deep inconsistencies.

  As Eva has already acknowledged, the money means that they have to buy the trash mountain after all. She must honor the terms of her covenant. And yet the purpose of buying the mountain was to make money, and money is what they now have. Yahweh has allowed her to trick herself.

  “This is how it works,” says Murphy, who now seems a little more comfortable with what’s happened. “Great fortunes always come from Yahweh. No one ever deserved anything.”

  The correct plural form of octopus should be octopodes, not octopi, since octopus is a Greek and not a Latin word. But in language there is no correct or incorrect, there’s only usage, and if we take usage as a guide, we are forced to accept not only octopi but octopuses. Another interesting thing, and this is just by the way, is that octopodes don’t live long and never know their parents, which is maybe
why they can’t progress, culturally speaking, even though they’re very smart. There’s more to intelligence than intelligence.

  You can tell a fancy restaurant by the care with which the waiters time their visits to your table. Here at the Palace Arms, they don’t surprise you mid-mouthful to ask if everything is to your liking, nor do they whisk your plate away while your dining companion is still eating. But there are limits to their courtesy, and Eva tests them.

  “Have you heard the name of the Lord?” she says to a busboy. “It’s Yahweh. Just nod if you’re hearing me.”

  He doesn’t nod. He makes a face such as only the most hard-hearted of busboys would make.

  “I know it’s unpleasant,” says Eva, “but couldn’t you humor a well-meaning stranger and just go ahead and share the name of the Lord on social media?”

  He says, “It might take me a little while to get to that.”

  A spasm of fear passes through her, and she wonders if this could be the evil spirit of the Lord that vexes poor mad Saul and so many others.

  She says, “He’s going to feed you to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field! Just listen to me! Just listen! The days draw near! And the fulfillment of every vision!”

  After dinner they take a walk in the cool western air. Fluffy 2 strolls insouciantly before them, swinging his tail, looking left and right. It’s a pleasant evening, and soon Eva feels less fretful. But the large plaza in front of the capitol building, so recently the site of inspiring demonstrations, is now full of drunks and suspicious characters, and it’s Murphy’s turn to be fretful. Never mind that he’s a suspicious character in his own right, with his beard and his limp and his darting movements. He suggests that they get out of here and visit the Verizon store.