The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  The episode is soon forgotten. The next day, the three of them are in Munds Park watching basketball at Pinewoodys Pizza & Grill, which is not to be confused with the Pinewood Bar & Grill on the other side of the highway, or the Pinewood Restaurant. The playoffs are drifting toward their conclusion and the importance of staying aggressive does not need to be emphasized. Alas, Yahweh decides to manipulate the outcome. He gives one player a sneezing fit. He blows out another player’s knee.

  The commentator says, “You have to treat this game like a game seven.”

  “I love this,” says Yahweh.

  The commentator says, “You talk about the high screen-and-roll.”

  An elfin player hits shot after improbable shot and gestures at the roof in what appears to be a show of gratitude to some benevolent divinity. Yahweh doesn’t trust that he is the intended recipient of this gratitude and strikes the player down with an ankle sprain.

  “Who set the wild ass free?” he says. “Who begot the dewdrops?”

  Murphy runs and runs in his new shoes. Take the weight in the arch, he tells himself. Land with a bent knee. It feels as if the bones in his feet are being ground to pebbles as he goes, and he registers this pain with a kind of satisfaction, believing as he does that every jolt presages a return to orthopedic health. The pain has assumed a progressive character and he jokes that he’s heading toward a crisis of well-being.

  Murphy has been to Flagstaff before. He was here with some friends in college. In fact, he has been to this very restaurant, which Eva’s phone has been so insistent in recommending. He is moments away from realizing this when he sees himself, or rather his younger self, standing under a red awning across the street. Here’s an improbable, low-entropy situation if ever there was one.

  Murphy is ashamed of his younger self, as we are all ashamed of our younger selves, and he feels a nearly irresistible urge to rush into the street and strike him. Luckily, he is not the impulsive young man he once was—the impulsive young man, that is, who stands there under the awning. He makes a show of concentrating on the menu and he consults Eva’s phone in order to discover which items are particularly prized. There’s always the one item that you’re supposed to get, and if you don’t get it you’ve missed your big chance and you might as well eat a banana peel out of the garbage. Here it’s the blueberry buckwheat pancakes, or, to borrow Murphy’s language, the griddle-cooked cherry cakes with cherries. Only when they’ve ordered does Murphy say he needs to step out and retrieve something from the Pequod.

  Young Murphy is waiting impatiently for his friends to emerge from the thrift store. Murphy walks past him without saying anything, but at the last moment he catches Young Murphy’s eye and gestures to the alleyway around the corner of the building. Murphy wants to conceal Young Murphy from Eva, despite the high philosophical interest of the situation, because, what will she think of him if she meets his despicable antecedent? He has been trying to conceal his younger self from her since the day they met.

  Now he stares at this familiar face. Young Murphy stares back. What is there to say?

  Murphy taps him on the chest. “You just have to be nice to people, okay? That’s all I want to tell you. Just quit the act.”

  “What act?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Young Murphy looks away. “Did you just come out here to yell at me? I don’t see how that’s supposed to help anything.”

  Is this how Matthew McConaughey felt, gazing at his own younger self from within his extradimensional machine? In some ways, present-day Murphy compares favorably with Young Murphy. His face is leaner and more angular, his beard is full, and his hairline, despite recent fears, is intact. He no longer looks like a young man. He is now simply a man. He’s also trim and fit and strong, as Young Murphy is not. But there’s something off about his coloring. Standing next to this earlier self, he looks faded and worn, like an old couch. And things are different around the eyes. Have his eyes gotten smaller? Young Murphy’s eyes are big and bright.

  “What you don’t seem to understand,” says Young Murphy, “is that I’m tired of being who I am. Or maybe you don’t remember.”

  “What?”

  “I’m tired of being so nervous all the time. It’s exhausting. My head is full of equivocation. I can’t say what I mean. I don’t even know what I think! I want to break free. I want to be one of those guys who goes straight ahead. You know what I mean? I want to be outgoing and charismatic.”

  “You should go for a run sometimes. Clear your mind.”

  “I’m so hesitant about everything.”

  He does look hesitant. He’s shifting from one foot to the other and he can’t maintain eye contact, although Murphy is having the same difficulty. It’s not easy to see oneself clearly.

  “But you can understand why it’s frustrating for me,” says Murphy. “Because you know just what you’re doing. That’s why you’re so culpable, in my view.”

  Young Murphy smiles a weary smile, and just look at those pretty white teeth.

  “You’re projecting all this stuff on me,” he says, “and I haven’t even done anything. I’m not interested in reforming myself because I haven’t seen the need for it yet. Do you know what the real problem is?”

  “Do you?”

  “We’ve got different values, that’s what it is.”

  This might be true in some way, which is distressing. But does Young Murphy actually know that it might be true?

  “I’m not saying what I need to say,” says Murphy. “I thought I was prepared for this conversation, but I feel like I can’t make myself understood.”

  Some things are incomprehensible. But some things make perfect sense. Flagstaff (Köppen climate classification Dsb/Csb) receives an average of 21.86 inches of precipitation a year. That’s not much, but it’s a lot more than Phoenix, which is only two hours away. This is an effect of Flagstaff’s elevation. Air masses from the distant Pacific or the Gulf of California run up the mountain slopes, expand, cool, and shed their moisture as snow or rain. This is called orographic precipitation. The same mechanism accounts for the phenomenon we call a rain shadow. When the mountains are sufficiently high, all the moisture is wrung from the air on the windward slopes and the land beyond is especially arid. On a continental scale, this is part of why the West is so dry. The Great Basin sits in the shadow of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada. The High Plains, Denver included, are further shadowed by the Rocky Mountains.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” says Young Murphy.

  “Nothing’s wrong with my eyes.”

  “There’s something wrong with them. They don’t look right.”

  “They’re fine. Don’t look at them if they bother you.”

  “And your hair isn’t really any color at all. Is this what it comes to? You look so tired. Don’t you care about things any longer? Look around you! It’s the West! Look at those pine trees!”

  “They’re cedars,” says Murphy.

  “They’re ponderosa pine.”

  Murphy peers at his younger self in irritation. His essential grievance is and has been that this young man is affected and self-absorbed. This is not, in itself, a damning accusation, and it’s one that can be leveled at present-day Murphy as well, but he’s aware of this, and in a way that’s the point: Young Murphy lacks that self-consciousness, or so Murphy thinks. His affectations are intended to deceive himself. Everything he does is part of a program of self-deception.

  “Of course I care,” Murphy says passionately. “Of course I care about the cedars!”

  “The pine trees.”

  “I see that now.”

  But if Young Murphy’s expressions and gestures are somehow put-on, Murphy is shocked to realize that he has the same mannerisms. Growing up is a process that transforms affectation into habit. Thus Young Murphy is doubly culpable: He has committed these crimes of affectation and he has inflicted those affectations on his future self.

  Young Murphy s
hakes his head. “I don’t believe you. Can’t you smell the air any longer? Don’t you care what it smells like?”

  “I can smell it,” says Murphy, “but it’s different for me, because when I smell it I don’t just think of the trees and the place and the idea of the West. I think of you. I remember you smelling it. Do you see?”

  The truth is that he can hardly remember anything about this young person’s life. Wet flagstones and lyrical rain on the day of an exam. A bottle of rum in a dim room. The smell of Ivory soap, or else not the smell itself but the fact that it had a smell. Life pared away to the essential clues. And did he know they were clues at the time? The yeasty smell of the Bradford pears in the courtyard. A gust of cold air.

  “And what’s with the shoes?” says Young Murphy, pointing to Murphy’s ballet slippers.

  There are rain shadows all over the West, but some of the most dramatic ones occur in Hawaii. This tropical island chain, which is said to be part of the United States, is really a submerged mountain range. Thus Hilo (Köppen climate classification Af—a tropical rain forest climate), on the eastern or windward side of the Big Island (the winds are easterly in the tropics), receives 156.79 inches of rain annually, making it the rainiest city in the United States, at least as long as we accept the proposition that this Polynesian nation is part of the United States, which we do not. The western or leeward side of the island is parched, and there are resorts on that coast that boast annual precipitation totals of around 9 inches per year, hardly more than Phoenix.

  The eastern slope of Mount Waialeale, on the island of Kauai, gets something like 450 inches of rain each year, which makes it one of the rainiest places on earth. But the town of Waimea, in the lee of the mountain, gets just 21.70 inches. Slightly less than Flagstaff.

  Everything’s bigger in Asia. The Tibetan Plateau creates the largest and greatest rain shadow on earth.

  “I’ve got a question,” says Young Murphy. “If I cut my ear off, will you suddenly be earless, or am I seeing you from another dimension?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too.”

  “Should we give it a try?”

  “Should we give what a try?”

  “We could cut my ear off. But it could be some other permanent injury if you’re squeamish. Let’s give me a really bad cut and see if you get a scar. Or just snip the end of my earlobe off.”

  “Why do you want to mutilate your ear? That’s crazy. It would spoil the rest of your trip.”

  Young Murphy nods. He closes his eyes and listens for a moment. “What I want most of all is to be completely where I am. That’s the essence of what I want. Do you know what I mean? I’m trying to concentrate on the weird gray wind and the grasshoppers. I want to breathe in the beautiful idea of this place.”

  Murphy smiles. “I kind of like you. I can’t help it.”

  There are places in Alaska that get a lot of rain as well. Ketchikan and Yakutat receive about the same amount as Hilo, and the tiny town of Whittier, so small that it hardly counts as an inhabited place, gets 197.8 inches annually. Much of this Alaskan precipitation falls as snow, although the climate of Ketchikan (Köppen climate classification Cfb—a temperate oceanic climate) is mild. Alaska is also said to be part of the United States, although this claim, like claims for the statehood of Hawaii, is difficult to credit.

  “Just tell me one thing,” says Young Murphy. “Just give me a hint.”

  It’s dangerous to tell your younger self things about the future. Without cutting Young Murphy’s ear off, they have no idea what effect any of this will have on the inscrutable web of causation, if causation exists.

  But Murphy would like to spare this young man some pain. “You’re going to develop a peanut allergy,” he says. “Just be aware of that. It manifests itself as deep nausea.”

  Young Murphy is nodding and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Murphy wants to grab him and tell him to get a grip. But the moodiness is partly an affectation too, since Young Murphy wants to be perceived as a glamorously unpredictable figure. There’s no way to untangle it all and figure out what’s really going on, and that’s because Young Murphy isn’t entirely himself yet, just as Murphy isn’t entirely himself, just as none of us are entirely ourselves.

  “It’s possible that you can avoid it if you’re circumspect with peanuts at this point,” Murphy continues, now in despair.

  “That isn’t what I want to know.”

  “But it’s also possible that the allergy comes from metabolic changes and not sensitization, in which case you’re going to develop it anyway, so you might as well enjoy the peanuts while you can.”

  “I don’t care about that. I want to know if it’s all going to be okay. All of it! My life!”

  “Eva says I should try to eat …”

  “Who’s Eva?”

  “What?”

  “You said Eva.”

  “I didn’t. Forget it.”

  “Who’s Eva?” Young Murphy is grinning wildly. “Who is she? Where do I look for her?”

  They drive and drive. They shout Yahweh’s name. The landscape changes and stays the same. Sometimes the Mobil station is a BP and sometimes it’s a Sinclair, and sometimes the McDonald’s or the Burger King is a Carl’s Jr. or an In-N-Out, but it’s always the same place. A fan palm here. A sugar pine there. A Joshua tree if they’re lucky.

  Murphy doesn’t tell Eva about Young Murphy, but he feels funny about keeping it from her, so he says, “I’ve often had the sense, on this trip, that what we’re really looking for is ourselves.” She raises an eyebrow and let’s this pass.

  Thomas Jefferson thought it would take a hundred generations to people the American West. It was already peopled, and then we de-peopled it, but then we re-peopled it, and all in a few short years. Lord James Bryce, who was appointed British ambassador to the United States in 1907, marveled at this haste: “Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying that you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people? In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy.”

  They visit the Grand Canyon, where they reflect that the most remarkable feature of this geological formation is that it’s not disappointing. This is Murphy’s second time at the Grand Canyon and he keeps a sharp lookout for his former self.

  And here’s the Hoover Dam. And here’s Lake Mead.

  And here’s a message from P. F. Barnum “Barney” Gaines, who must have gotten Eva’s phone number in Winston-Salem. He just wants to make sure that they—Mrs. and Mr. Jane Pierce—will be attending his American Ideas Conference in Montana. They promise him they will.

  And here’s Yahweh again, brooding over some perceived insult. “Oh Christ,” he says. And then: “Goddamnit!”

  They arrive in Las Vegas just in time for Eva to make a scene during the keynote address at a convention of electrical contractors. Security has to escort her from the auditorium. Now they’re out on the crowded Strip, where the wind is hot in their faces and the forbidding date palms rise to an astonishing height. Grinning men stand in doorways and pass out little cards with pictures of prostitutes on them. “2 for $200. No hidden fees.” You can’t take a road trip of any duration, it seems, without running across the theme of prostitution again and again.

  Eva is agitated and uncomfortable. The casinos and pinging slot machines have stirred up some bad memories. When she was ten, her father’s bookie was evicted from his apartment and had to stay with them for a whole week. He was obese and diabetic and she watched in horror as he administered his insulin shots. He screamed at her for not screwing the lid down on a jar of tomato sauce. She was eighteen before she learned that not all fathers had bookies.

  She’d like to get out of town as quickly as possible, far from these reminders of her problematic girlhood, but Murphy is in some distress. He’s wincing with every step he takes.

  “I don’t think the ballet slippers are helping,” she says.

  “
They’re all that’s keeping me from true infirmity.”

  It’s hard to tell whether he’s joking or not. When he has to turn a corner, he slows down and swings out wide.

  “I can’t take this any longer,” says Eva. “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  “Are you kidding?” He pretends to look around. “Are we in Canada or Denmark, that we can just go to the doctor?”

  “We’re rich. We’ll bribe them for an appointment.”

  He insists that it won’t work. No one’s going to give him an appointment without Nevada insurance. They aren’t going to take it on faith that he can pay.

  “I know these doctors,” he says. “This is America. This isn’t Norway.”

  So Eva suggests a concierge medicine service, which is how some rich people do it. Murphy doesn’t know anything about concierge medicine, but he knows that you have to join first. It’s like a club. And that would mean further delay.

  “Then let’s go to one of those urgent care places,” Eva says.

  He dismisses this with a haughty gesture. “Certainly not.”

  “An emergency room?”

  “It’s not an emergency. The pain has just sort of concentrated itself in my feet. There’s the same amount of pain, but it’s happening in fewer places.”

  Eva hands a fifty-dollar bill to a homeless man, who nods and says nothing. Her eyes sting in the hot wind. She’s just gotten through telling the electrical contractors that terror will overtake them like a flood, and their food will turn to asp’s venom in their bowels, and their affairs will shrivel like mallows and wither like heads of grain. Now she has to contend with this. More lunacy.

  Down the street, there’s a casino called Paris. And here’s one called New York-New York, and another called the Venetian. You can travel to the middle of the desert and visit the whole globalized world.

  “This place really is pretty weird,” says Eva. “Weirder than I thought it would be.”

  “There’s a kind of truth in it, right? You want to say it’s a cheap perversion, but it’s also kind of the essence of the whole human experience. The world is a narrow bridge, but it’s also a casino.”