The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  It may be that he intends to buy a new phone, despite his insistence that phonelessness is his preferred condition. In fact we’re almost certain that this is his intention. But first, while Eva is off peering at iPads, he means to have a little joke. Murphy the prankster. He summons a Verizon employee and gives him a coy little smile. Could it be, he asks, that there’s something wrong with his current phone? He flourishes this smooth piece of phone-shaped wood and the young man stares at it in disbelief. He isn’t in a whimsical mood and he doesn’t find Murphy’s joke funny, nor does he bother to hide his irritation. This irritates Murphy, who now resolves to make life difficult for him.

  “I’m wondering if you can get the data off this thing,” Murphy says.

  “The data?”

  “Sure.”

  “Like tree-ring data?”

  “Pictures and so on. I know it looks like wood, but I think the data is probably still on there somewhere.”

  “A wooden phone.”

  “There are some pictures I really care about on there.”

  The young man is at a loss. Eventually the manager has to intervene, and Murphy guesses that it isn’t the first time she’s had to mediate between this sullen employee and a dissatisfied customer. The manager apologizes for any confusion and suggests that there may be a misunderstanding here. The root of the problem, she says, holding Murphy’s phone in her palm, is that Murphy’s phone is made of wood. They actually don’t have the ability to service it here at the Verizon store.

  “Yeah,” says Murphy. “I was worried about that. I thought that might be an issue.”

  Eva is standing with her hands in her pockets, watching people come and go on the sidewalk outside. Could they settle down here in this vibrant multiethnic city? Could they buy a bungalow in the shade of these extraordinary mountains, plant a peach tree, and eat buffalo? Lines from “Howl” flutter around in her head. Backyard green tree cemetery dawns. Ashcan rantings. Supercommunist pamphlets. Who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver. Waving genitals and manuscripts. Listening to the Terror through the wall.

  It’s a road-trip poem, after all. But now her reverie is interrupted by loud voices. Murphy, she realizes, is causing trouble. There’s no time for this kind of behavior. She walks over there and tells him so.

  “This kid has a bad attitude,” he says.

  “I do,” says the Verizon employee. “He’s right. I can’t stand our customers. The customers are so offensive to me.”

  Eva turns to the manager and explains, “Yahweh turned the phone to wood. Yahweh is the name of the Lord. Tell your friends.”

  The manager nods politely.

  Eva continues, “We’re sorry about this. You guys are doing a great job.”

  “I’m not,” says the employee. “But I don’t think I behaved all that badly just now, under the circumstances.”

  The manager says, “Thanks for visiting us. Come back soon.”

  Tonight they’re going to treat themselves to a hotel room. They find a modest place called the Front Range Inn, affirming meanwhile that a modest hotel is perfectly fine. There’s no need to stay in a really fancy place. They smuggle Fluffy 2 up in a duffel bag and collapse in exhaustion on the vast blue bedspread. Prompted by additional helpful e-mails, Eva donates a few more hunks of money to humanitarian causes and organizations. It’s easy—her payment information is already on file.

  After such a day, after the last few days, what can they do but stare vacantly at a movie until exhaustion overcomes them? There are lots of movies available, as always. They pour like neutrinos out of the western sky. Unfortunately, tonight’s movie takes up the very subject they’re trying to ignore, i.e. our relationship to our putative creator or creators. In this film, the creator figures are alien beings from a distant planet, although it may not be correct to call them aliens. They are genetically indistinguishable from humans. The differences are phenotypic—they lack body hair and they are titanic in stature. In any case, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace and her fellow cast members have determined the location of their creators’ world, and they undertake an interstellar expedition in order to learn everything they can. After landing on this remote planet, which at first appears to be uninhabited, the cast makes many unaccountably poor decisions and suffers a sequence of reversals and setbacks, nor does it help that Michael Fassbender, the ship’s android, has a secret agenda. Their misfortunes reach a climax when Michael Fassbender discovers a sleeping pod in which one last alien survives. Using techniques familiar to lovers of historical linguistics, he has reconstructed an ancient language in which he thinks it should be possible to communicate with the alien. A conversation with such a being may reveal important information about our origins, although one can only guess what this means to Michael Fassbender, who has been created not by the aliens but by the creatures who were created by the aliens.

  Murphy finds a tennis ball under the bed. He lies on his back and tries to toss it straight up in the air, so that it lands in his palm without him having to reach for it.

  “Let’s turn this off,” he says. “Or let’s see if there’s basketball.”

  But Eva is absorbed in the story. She reminds Murphy that there are titans all over the Judeo-Greco mythscape. There are titans in the Bible. Yahweh appears to have created them, or else they are the product of miscegenation between humans and angels. Yahweh destroys them in the flood—a genocidal program in which all but a handful of the Earth’s humans also perish.

  The cast succeeds in reanimating the alien, but no conversation is possible, alas. He is enraged and immediately pulls Michael Fassbender’s head off. Then he murders several other actors, powers up his spaceship, and tries to fly away. No doubt he intends to make his way to Earth, there to fulfill a cherished ambition: To destroy all humans. Luckily, the handsome English actor Idris Elba and two of his friends are willing to undertake a kamikaze attack on the alien craft, thus making the ultimate sacrifice and saving humanity, at least for now. But there’s another threat, a philosophical threat, because we must ask ourselves why our putative creators should have wanted to destroy us in the first place. Noomi Rapace, who is recovering quickly from an emergency procedure during which yet another variety of alien was removed from her uterus, decides to seek an explanation among the stars. She is assisted by Michael Fassbender’s head, which has repented of its earlier betrayals. Its impressive intellectual faculties have not been impaired, thank heavens, by the loss of its body.

  Eva turns the television off and stares at the blank screen, thinking of Yahweh and Yahweh’s deeds. The correspondences with the film are inexact but suggestive. Her fear, as noted, is that Yahweh, too, is frequently vexed by the suspicion that it might be better to destroy all humans. A troubling thought on this cool night in the West, and she feels a big prophet’s love for all those people out there, yacketayakking screaming vomiting, as Ginsberg says, and whispering facts and memories and anecdotes, oh sure, and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars.

  “The United States,” she says, “that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep.”

  But she and Fluffy 2 fall asleep quickly. It’s Murphy who lies awake. He’s worrying about creation, as so many humans have also worried, millennium after millennium. He knows that it’s no problem to make a thing that looks like a person. He has already given his recipe: tube, pincers, kazoo, tent pegs, electrical jelly, sensors. What he’s worried about is reproduction, which requires a mechanism of inheritance. If the idea is to make something that can make more of itself, and if you do this by encoding the organism’s operating and assembly instructions in a chemical data chain like DNA, then the thing that can make more of itself is not the organism but the DNA. The assembled creature, complete with pincers and kazoo, is just a strutting android that the DNA manufactures in order to facilitate its replication.

  The moon is full in the big window. The city is quiet. The mountains march away, north and south. Murphy’s thoughts run to distort
ion and caricature. Eventually he takes a Benadryl and has banal dreams.

  Yahweh greets them in the quiet chill of the morning. He’s in the back seat of the Pequod, where he’s using a curling iron to press charred ruffles into some of the collard leaves. Meaningless destruction. He has inserted the power cord into his mouth.

  “Cut it out,” says Eva.

  He grins, but he doesn’t release the cord, which hangs from his teeth like a noodle.

  “I’m serious. Some of us need to eat those.”

  He tosses the curling iron into the dust and commands them to go south. That’s all he came to say. The Southwest is an arid waste, a zone of desolation. Which appeals to him very much.

  Eva turns to Murphy and says, “I had a dream that a giant almond was attacking me. Lindsey Graham promised he would help, but he did nothing.”

  Now begins a period of wearisome activity, and Yahweh comes and goes throughout the next week, checking on their progress. He’s with them in Colorado Springs, where he says, “My own people act toward me like a bird of prey. But I am going to feed them wormwood and make them drink a bitter draft.”

  In Springer, New Mexico, he pulls down a traffic light and causes an accident.

  In Roswell, where everything is alien this and alien that, he has a crack-up, just like a human, weeping into Fluffy 2’s fur and saying that he’s lost Ishtar, that nobody knows his name, that Baal is more popular, that nobody will ever love and respect him as the Israelites once loved and respected him.

  “My suffering!” he says. “They drink wrongdoing like water. They worship Baal and they’re happy.”

  Eva wedges a collard leaf into her mouth and chews viciously. “Nobody’s happy.”

  They aren’t allowed to plot their own route. In this respect, at the very least, they’ve lost their power of self-determination. Yahweh is there in person to hustle them to the next town, or else he speaks from the radio, or else his angels come pinging out of mailboxes or trash cans and instruct them to turn around and go back the way they’ve come. The itinerary that emerges is maddening, circuitous, pointless.

  They pass through Indian reservations. The dusty land, the small breeze-block houses, the unfamiliar formatting of the road signs. These are whole nations confined to the most desolate and marginal corners of this desolate and marginal countryside. Yahweh loves to remove people from the land their ancestors have occupied for centuries, he loves dispossession and exile, he loves violence, but so, of course, do human beings, and although it’s fashionable to argue that most indigenous Americans died of disease as Euro-Americans overran these continents, that’s just an attempt to shift the blame unambiguously to Yahweh. The truth is that Euro-Americans killed as many indigenous Americans as they could, whenever they could, and they did it with glee. Consider the Sand Creek Massacre, which took place in Colorado in 1864. A detachment of U.S. soldiers under John Chivington murdered as many as two-hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women and children, in a surprise attack rendered especially surprising by the fact that the victims were living there under the explicit protection of the U.S. Army. Murder, once again, under the white flag of truce. And these things happened again and again. They had been happening for centuries. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado rode through these lands in the sixteenth century and murdered everyone he saw. Why? The course of history is as witless and maddening as Murphy and Eva’s route through the high desert.

  When they drive through Las Cruces, New Mexico, they learn that the employees of a local distillery have no fingerprints. It’s because they have to handle hot metal all the time.

  When they visit the Melodrama Grocery in Whites City, they learn that the whole town is being sold at auction.

  When they stop to have a look at the White Sands Desert, the world’s largest gypsum dunefield, Yahweh is strutting around with a Gatorade and a cockeyed grin, and he’s saying, “I’ve just had a fight with Hephaestus.”

  Smokey Bear is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

  Murphy peers out the window at the twisted conifers and aromatic desert plants. He doesn’t know what mesquite is and doesn’t bother to look it up, but he wonders if that’s what he’s seeing out there. He remembers a plant called “ocotillo” from Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses, which, like every western, is about the end of the Old West. There is riotous greenery along the small rivers and creeks, and cactuses of every shape and degree of armament. Sometimes there are Joshua trees—a picturesque type of yucca named for a biblical figure instrumental in the expulsion of the Canaanites from the land their ancestors had occupied for centuries.

  They attend a rodeo. This is an American ritual in which impoverished young men are trampled by large animals and then clowns dance around their broken bodies. Eva is horrified, but Murphy can’t stop laughing. His laughter comes at the wrong times and is regarded, with perfect justice, as inappropriate and even obscene. The man sitting next to them tells him to shut the fuck up. This fellow has a T-shirt that reads “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer-Holder.”

  They’re in line at Dairy Queen when Murphy looks up in alarm and says, “What about Jesus?”

  “Big problem,” Eva agrees.

  “He protects us from Yahweh?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “He mediates a little bit.”

  “It’s definitely a comforting idea,” Eva says.

  “My question is, What is he?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Who knows? That’s the big problem.”

  “Is he a god?”

  “In Luke, he’s only a prophet.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And there were early Christians who said he was a god,” Eva says, “but he was his own god. He wasn’t associated with Yahweh.”

  “That’s good too.”

  “It would even be okay if he really were Yahweh’s only son.”

  “Because then,” Murphy says, “Yahweh’s decision to murder him is bizarre and tragic and just exactly the kind of thing that Yahweh would do.”

  “The trouble is when you say that Jesus is God.”

  “Exactly. And that’s what everyone says.”

  “It’s a problem because in that case,” says Eva, “his death means nothing.”

  General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was named for an indigenous American and famous for brutality, wrote the following lines at the beginning of the war with the Sioux, shortly after the Sand Creek Massacre: “I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no more vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands.”

  But the Sioux were also riding through the West murdering the peaceable Crow and Mandan. This is just what it is to be human. The strong versus the weak. The terror in the grass. Is it Yahweh’s fault? Do erring and causing to err come, as Job alleges, from him? Both Chivington and Coronado claimed to be acting in God’s name. Everywhere we turn, it seems, we run into the free-will problem. Satan, whose own existence disproves his thesis, argues that there are no gods and that the universe should seem like a less forbidding place as a result—a system without agency. But if this were true, and we were entirely free to do as we pleased, and Yahweh were only a story we told in order to explain our own vileness, then it would mean that there is no explanation for our vileness. In this respect, it’s a comfort to surrender what agency we have and lay the blame at Yahweh’s feet. Easier to say that when we cut our enemies from their horses and mutilate their bodies, we do so only at his behest.

  Eva tries to set up Yahweh’s social media accounts. She posts incomprehensible Bible verses. His followers are mostly robots and white supremacists.

  Meanwhile, she speaks his name in every town and hamlet of the American Southwest. She is met almost universally with scorn, and occasionally with derision. Even ostensibly pious people are upset by the spectacle of a young woman shouting the name of the Lord. Their hearts are hard and their ne
cks are stiff.

  Sometimes she speaks, as the prophets so often speak, in a kind of ecstasy: “The president has clothed himself in desolation. Now calamity shall follow calamity, and rumor shall follow rumor. And then you’ll know that Yahweh is the Lord.”

  But sometimes she’s all too aware of her predicament: “Please, everyone just listen. You don’t know him like I know him. He’s going to do something terrible to you! Please be alert! Share this warning on your social networks!”

  And sometimes confusion overtakes her. She gestures and walks in little circles.

  “Hello?” says Murphy. “Yes? Are you there?”

  “It was almost time for lunch,” she says. “Pain is human. There were roses in the cool café.”

  In the context of all this confusion and turmoil, it’s a relief to discover that they are Mr. and Mrs. Pierce again in Phoenix. Yahweh has instructed them to attend a dinner and presentation at the Orizon Institute, a think tank of some kind, but it’s Satan who meets them in the reception area to give them their badges. Unfortunately, he can’t stay and chat. He has another errand in Phoenix tonight.

  “You have to go so soon?” says Eva. “Right away?”

  She looks devastated. Murphy, too, is unhappy. Satan frowns and chews his lip. He doesn’t like to leave them like this.

  “I’ll teach you a trick,” he says. “I’ll teach you an incantation that will protect against despair. If things are dark, and I’m not around to help, you can repeat it a few times and it’ll help. I assume you speak Hebrew?”

  Eva shakes her head.

  “You don’t speak Hebrew?” He seems incredulous. “Are you sure?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. Let’s see. The translation would go something like this: ‘The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.’ ”

  Murphy and Eva both repeat this very slowly. Eva says, “That’s lovely.”