The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  Satan nods. “Just repeat it to yourself when things are bad. You could try different translations too. ‘Do not make yourself afraid, the whole world is a narrow bridge.’ It would really be better if you knew Hebrew.”

  Before he goes, he tells them that they can reach him any time by picking up a pay phone. Then he bows deeply. He’s singing “Angel of the Morning” as he passes through the revolving doors.

  They don’t recognize anyone from Winston-Salem, but lots of people recognize them. How nice to relax with people who know who they are! Even if that’s not who they are. Murphy has a chummy exchange with a breathless fellow in a broad green vest. He says he’s hosting a benefit next month to raise awareness about private jet crashes. He’d be honored if Pierce would attend.

  “Did you say jet crashes?” says Murphy.

  “After heart disease, that’s the number one killer of CEOs.”

  “The not-so-silent killer.”

  “My point is that if you consider the degree of public sympathy and awareness, it’s pretty silent.”

  Murphy nods, gracious Murphy. “I’d be happy to come to your party.”

  Everyone seems to want something from the Pierces. Shadowy people accost Eva and try to win her support for one or another tawdry scheme. Here, for example, is a man in two-tone shoes and a sleek blue suit. He tells her he’d like to get in a room with her husband.

  “I’ve been in a room with him,” says Eva. “He’s a lovely person, but I don’t want to oversell that particular aspect of it.”

  “There’s that Jane Pierce wit. But seriously, I do have an intriguing matter to discuss. I’d just like to get in a room with him for ten minutes.”

  “A hundred bucks and I’ll arrange it. Do you have any preference as far as what he’s wearing?”

  This fellow will not be distracted. He says, “You’re too much, Jane. There’s that wit I’ve heard about. But would you just do me this favor? Would you tell him that Igor Morales wants to talk about aluminum? He’ll know what that means.”

  Murphy looks through the vast window at the eastern end of the reception area. Then he turns around and looks through the window at the western end. Then he turns around again. To Fluffy 2, who has been allowed to join them inside, he says, “There doesn’t seem to be any weather out here.” And it’s true, in a sense. This is the Sonoran Desert (Köppen climate classification BWh—a hot desert), and for much of the year it sits beneath a cap of warm subsiding air, which prevents convective storms from forming. Phoenix receives only 8.03 inches of precipitation per year, the distortions of climate change notwithstanding. This total is far below the threshold at which agriculture is said to be possible, although the sophisticated Hohokam built extensive irrigation systems here, including many miles of canals, before ecological disaster drove them from the region. Thus the name Phoenix—a city that rises from the ashes of these former settlements.

  Eva is also thinking about heat, and not just because they’re in the desert. She and Murphy heard a strange thing about heat and time on NPR today. She seeks out a mathematician and asks for clarification.

  “The idea is that heat doesn’t move from hot things to cold things as a rule,” says the mathematician. “It’s only very probable that it moves from hot things to cold things.”

  “Because it’s just particles in random motion? Random collisions?”

  “Right. And heat transfer is the only way you can tell the difference between the past and future, so if heat transfer is probabilistic, then you can argue that time is a probabilistic phenomenon.”

  Eva frowns. “Time doesn’t pass unless it’s hot?”

  “We’re talking about entropy. Think of it in those terms. The most likely thing is that the universe moves from a low-entropy state to a high-entropy state, because the number of possible high-entropy states is much greater than the number of possible low-entropy states. For example, take the atoms in an egg. You can arrange them in lots of different ways, and not so many of those arrangements have the macroscopic appearance of an egg.”

  “What does that have to do with heat?”

  “Put it this way: The Big Bang is a very low-entropy state, and you can tell that time has passed since then because entropy has increased. Entropy is where you get the arrow of time. It’s the only way you can tell the difference between the past and future.”

  “But what about heat transfer?”

  “Heat transfer or entropy. Either way.”

  “You’re saying that in the distant future, it’s unlikely that there are any eggs.”

  “Exactly.”

  But if time is only a matter of chance, or, more generally, if it doesn’t exist in the way it appears to exist, then there is no cause and effect, and thus no action and intention. The free-will conundrum is soluble after all. In such a world, violence does not happen because Yahweh wills it. Instead, there is no will. There are no decisions. There is only all of it all at once, just as it is. But maybe this can only be true in very cold places.

  Now it’s time to file into the auditorium for tonight’s presentation. The speaker is Dexter Philpot, CEO of Beyond Human, who will talk to us about genetic enhancement. Fluffy 2 and an aggrieved cocker spaniel are left in the care of an animal nanny.

  “Did they say ‘genetic enhancement’?” Murphy whispers as they take their seats. “Is he going to talk about genetically engineering people?”

  “That’s what this is all about.”

  So it’s Murphy, not Eva, who gets up during the question period.

  “As I’m sure you’ve observed,” he says, in the weary tone of a schoolmaster dressing down his barbarous pupils, “humans are wretched and depraved. Why would you trust such a creature to mess around with its genetic instructions, which are what made it wretched and depraved in the first place?”

  Dexter Philpot laughs and says, “I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I do worry, sure. We’re being cautious.”

  Eva says, “And plus, have you heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh?”

  Quite unexpectedly, Igor Morales says, “You’ll be his people, and he’ll be your god.”

  The genial Mr. Philpot doesn’t think God bothers very much with this stuff. He argues that DNA is just another aspect of our physical reality. Genetic engineering is therefore no more ungodly than abdominal surgery. Would you refuse an appendectomy on religious grounds? All of this is distinct and separate from the idea of our incorporeal souls, in which he also believes.

  Murphy says, “I don’t want to be there when you tell Yahweh what he does and doesn’t bother with.”

  Igor Morales says, “Some people would refuse an appendectomy on those grounds.”

  Eva laughs and begins to say something and then, instead of saying what she means to say, says, “The name of the Lord is Yahweh. The name of the Lord is Yahweh.” She makes a face and looks around in confusion. “The name of the Lord is Yahweh.”

  Even if time is real and cause and effect can be depended upon, even if Yahweh himself permits us some freedom of action, there’s the danger that we’re only androids constructed by our DNA. And yet the situation is even more problematic than it seems. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: Our cells are full of mitochondria, with which we live symbiotically and upon which we are absolutely dependent for the manufacture of ATP, our energy-transport molecule. Mitochondria were once free-living prokaryotic organisms, and even now they have their own DNA. They are part of us, they are us, they are not us, without them we are inanimate clay. If free will exists, whose will is it that’s free?

  Murphy’s beard is coming in blond and red and black, a reflection of his mixed ethnic background. He tries to keep it pruned. Eva is tying her hair back in a faded blue bandana. They’ve got their collards in the back and now they’ve also got callaloo and purslane, although the callaloo isn’t well suited to life in a terra-cotta pot. They’re shouting Yahweh’s name and they’ve got an animal with them that they can’t identify at the species lev
el. You have to concede that they look like wackos, but this is the West, the geography of hope, and they aren’t the first wackos to cruise through here.

  In an especially empty part of southern Arizona, all blushing mesas and vast tumbled rocky plains, they meet an old signalman who says that he too has known Yahweh face-to-face.

  “It was a tough year when God came to supper each night,” he says. He spits and shakes his head. He’s a little careworn fellow in overalls. “Ever night he said he wanted peach pie, and ever night my wife baked him one, and ever night he said, ‘Where’s my apple pie?’ Everthing I earned was going for peaches. So one night he says he’d like peach pie and my wife makes him a apple pie and what does he say?”

  “Where’s my blueberry pie?” says Eva sadly.

  He nods and squints off into the distance.

  “Another day,” James Schuyler writes, “another dolor.” Now Yahweh tells Eva to bury her underwear under a rock. She does so. He tells her to dig it up again. She does so. “You will find it ruined,” he says. She holds it up and sees that it’s torn to shreds. He says, “Just so will I ruin the overweening pride of those who commit adultery with stone and wood.”

  Meanwhile, the prosaic business of life cranks on. They’re rich. They continue to insist that they won’t let the money change them, but it works its changes nonetheless. They pay their rent, which in effect makes their Miami apartment a storage unit for their computers and passports. They eat fancy food. Instead of washing their clothes, they buy new ones and donate the others to Goodwill. But somehow their clothes get more and more expensive. One day, as if by accident, Eva buys a pair of leather Dolce & Gabbana leggings for an astonishing $3,400. They’re candy-apple red. It’s a thrill to spend so much money on something she doesn’t need or want, but it also makes her sick. She won’t be able to do these things when they have a child. If they have a child. If nothing terrible happens. It will be important to teach this notional child that ostentatious display is crass and unpleasant. For now, though, she tells herself that the purchase is justifiable because these leggings will ultimately pass to a disadvantaged person at Goodwill. To that person, the leggings will seem like a miracle, and in a colloquial sense that will be true, since they proceed indirectly from Yahweh.

  Sometimes they rent a lavish hotel suite in order use the shower. They give the name Pierce, although Eva’s real name is on her credit card, and they check out after an hour or two. These nice hotels are a lot of fun, but they prefer sleeping in their tent. It gives them a deeper connection with the desert night. Its sounds, its subtle changes. They like their campgrounds, each one a little different and each one the same, and they like brushing their teeth by the spigot outside, and wearing sweatshirts in the clear cool air, and staring up at the appalling multitude of stars. And dawn is beyond description.

  One afternoon, without warning, Eva writes a poem. It goes like this:

  I’d like to write a poem for Malcolm X,

  But I know he wouldn’t want me to,

  So I won’t.

  She sets it down on receipt paper and hands it to Murphy without a word. She won’t say anything about it, now or later.

  There are moments these days when it does seem like they’re out beyond the memory horizon. Moments when they seem to glimpse the present as it will appear from the vantage point of the future. A woman in a U-Haul smoking a joint and laughing. A tiny train crossing a red desert basin. The road rising into a green thunderhead. These things are clues, but now they understand that clues are just visions of what will remain in the mind’s eye when everything else is forgotten.

  Theologian and mystic Thomas Merton says that the desert is the country of madness—“A sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.” “Thirst drives man mad,” he writes, but even Satan, apparently doomed to wander in dry places, “is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence.” It’s hard to credit this assertion, knowing what we know of Satan, but there is indeed something unsettling about the austere beauty of these rocky places. The columns and pillars of red stone, the deep green of the river valleys, the abrupt canyon walls, the sunrise, the sunset, the martian plains. It’s terrible to think that this beauty, like Eva’s leggings, may proceed from Yahweh.

  More clues: An apple on a fencepost. A coyote with a shoebox in its mouth. A sign that says, “Madrean Sky Islands.”

  All the songs on the radio are about staying up too late or dying too young.

  Driving north again, at yet another angel’s pointless behest, they stop at a bookstore in Scottsdale and sit wide-eyed as a physicist talks about black holes. The subject seems inevitable and urgent.

  Black holes, he says, are punctures in the fabric of space-time, but they are also objects, and like other objects they collide. When this happens, an enormous amount of energy “comes off,” more energy than is emitted by all the stars in the universe. Electromagnetic radiation cannot escape a black hole, which is why Matthew McConaughey requires an extradimensional machine to get his data out, so this energy “comes off” in the form of gravitational waves—perturbations in the fabric of space-time. Scientists recently detected gravitational waves from a collision that occurred three billion years ago.

  Eva and Murphy sit in stunned silence, saying nothing and thinking nothing.

  The physicist now makes a rapid series of claims, like a prizefighter finishing off an opponent who’s unconscious on his feet. Chief among them is his assertion that we must now evaluate the theory of loop quantum gravity, which is an attempt to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Once again black holes will be important. What we’re looking for is one that’s exploding. That will help us to figure out whether or not space-time is granular. It may be that quanta of space-time appear and disappear just like the elementary particles we so cherish.

  “Ultimately,” he says, “we’ll want to know if black holes are hot.”

  The next morning, deranged by his exposure to so much science so close to bedtime, Murphy claims that he has “solved the problem” of his legs and feet. The problem is actually his shoes, and the solution is barefoot running. Why has he not considered this before? He explains the principle: Most athletic shoes are profligately cushioned, constricted in the toe box, and made with a significant heel-to-toe drop. The result is an unnatural posture and gait. The Achilles tendon is neutralized. The foot strikes the ground at the wrong angle. The force of each impact “rockets up and down the leg.” It’s like running in high heels.

  “Look at me,” he says, affecting a tottering posture. “I’ve got my hips kind of thrust forward and my upper body is collapsing on itself. It’s an effort to hold my head up. As if it weren’t hard enough already to hold my head up.”

  Since real barefoot running is impracticable in a country covered in broken glass and dog waste, he does the next best thing. He locates a cobbler who can make him a pair of minimalist running shoes. He pays the man two thousand dollars to rush the job, and because of the simplicity of the design, it only takes a few hours. The new shoes are like ballet slippers that flare out at the toes.

  “You can guess my feelings about this,” says Eva, leaning against the Pequod.

  “But this is different. This is a solution.”

  “Go ahead and test them. See how they feel.”

  “They don’t need testing.” He gives her a smirk. “They’re absolutely philosophically sound.”

  “Run around the block, though.”

  “All the way around the block?”

  “Just run around the parking lot if you’re afraid.”

  He runs around the parking lot. Immediately he can feel his feet, knees, hips, and back realigning, or so he imagines. It’s a wonderful feeling, and painful, especially in the heels and calves. He will have to get used to it. But the process of getting used to it will in itself entail the working out of a cure. The pain is therefore the signal that soon there will be no pain.

  Later, they’re in a Home Depot parking lot eating chocola
te-and-banana sandwiches—more cherries and peas—when an angel in chef’s whites climbs out of a Dumpster and rebukes them for this day of idleness. He, or it, dictates some new driving directions. They are as chaotic and elliptical as always, but ultimately they describe a kind of circle with a radius of about fifty miles. So Murphy and Eva get back into the car and hum away into the desert. It’s frustrating to drive and drive and not get anywhere, but today Eva is committed to the idea that a higher logic obtains. They have been traveling in circles for years, she tells herself. They have been wandering in the desert of their indecision. This whole trip is a figurative manifestation of their failure to make clear professional choices and get going in life. It makes perfect sense. She grips the wheel. Everything makes sense. The world is a narrow bridge. Struggle is meat. Never mind that the arrow of time exists only in the context of heat exchange. Never mind that heat exchange is a matter of particles bopping around at random.

  Now they endure some long days on the American road. Signs encourage motorists to “Crush Smokes.” Someone is offering “Foreclosure Tours.” Here you can buy “Guns + Jewelry,” and here you get “Free Rodeo Tickets w/ Wrangler Purchase.” They listen to NPR and the news is bad. Protests swell across the nation.

  One day Fluffy 2 says, “What if I spoke a single articulate sentence, and no one ever mentioned it?”

  One day Yahweh corners Eva and says, “You’ve disrespected me and disobeyed my commands. On every high hill and under every verdant tree, you recline as a whore.”

  Eva has no idea what he means. He keeps talking about prostitution. She asks for clarification.

  “I told you not to eat Oreos,” Yahweh says.

  “Oreos?”

  “You disobeyed me! You defiled my land and made my possession abhorrent!”

  “I never ate any, though.”

  “I forbade it!”

  “You never said anything about Oreos!”

  “Obedience,” he says, leaning close and speaking in a hoarse whisper, with more than a little threat of sexual violence, “is better than the fat of rams.”