by Aaron Thier
“I’ll tell you one thing. Our own trash mountain resort will be a very different kind of getaway.”
“There’ll be a temple there,” says Murphy.
“But we’ll have other stuff too. Educational programming. Pragmatic design. Reclaimed garbage furniture. The motif could be that all the fixtures and everything are scrounged from demolished and condemned buildings. I’m envisioning a sort of anti-resort.”
“And we’ll be careful,” he says, looking distastefully at some young men with gruesome slogans on their T-shirts, “about who’s allowed to come.”
“I guess.”
“No white supremacists. No Christian right. No hate groups of any kind.”
“We’ll have an ideological test.”
“We’ll do some extreme vetting on those fuckers. No more tolerance.”
But suddenly Eva turns solemn. “Wait, wait. We have to stop talking this way. Don’t you get it? This is how they talk. We have to find another way.”
“You want to have a scone with some KKK terrorist?”
She doesn’t respond. She knows he agrees with her, at least in principle. He’s indulging himself.
As if there weren’t enough to worry about, something’s not right with Fluffy 2. He’s been lethargic and unresponsive all day. Now Eva sets him down and speaks to him in a high earnest cheerful voice, but he just stands there blinking and sticking his tongue out. Murphy is quick to suggest that they call a vet. Eva isn’t so sure. He probably just has a cold. She feels his nose, which is dry, although maybe it’s supposed to be dry. Murphy says once again that they should call a vet.
“Veterinarians are no problem,” he says.
Eva straightens up and looks at him. He reaches for her phone.
“They’ve got a different insurance protocol,” he says.
What is Las Vegas anyway? Not long ago, there was nothing here at all. The first Euro-American to visit the area was John C. Fremont, who passed through in May of 1844 and left the following description: “After a day’s journey of 18 miles, in a northeasterly direction, we encamped in the midst of another very large basin, at a camping ground called las Vegas—a term which the Spaniards use to signify fertile or marshy plains, in contradistinction to llanos, which they apply to dry and sterile plains. Two narrow streams of clear water, four or five feet deep, gush suddenly with a quick current, from two singularly large springs; these, and other waters of the basin, pass out in a gap to the eastward. The taste of the water is good, but rather too warm to be agreeable; the temperature being 71 in the one, and 73 in the other. They, however, afford a delightful bathing-place.”
It sounds very nice. But he was less enthusiastic when describing the surrounding area, which he called “desolate and revolting country.”
Luck is with them today. The True Fortune Veterinary Hospital has just had a cancellation. The receptionist tells Murphy she can squeeze him in later this afternoon. Is his pet a dog or a cat?
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Let’s say cat.”
He can hear the woman typing.
“Name?” she says.
“Fluffy 2.”
“That’s eff ell you eff eff why numeral two?”
“Correct.”
“And what’s your pet’s name?”
On the way over there, he makes one suspicious claim after another. He argues, for example, that “vets are better than human doctors” because they deal with “so many different kinds of mammals.” Eva says nothing. “They’ve seen it all,” Murphy explains. Again Eva says nothing. Murphy says that veterinary school admissions are way more competitive than medical school. Eva peers out the window and frowns.
The veterinary hospital is in the real Las Vegas, where people live, or try to live. This is where tennis legend Andre Agassi grew up. There are pink stucco houses and a few garish green lawns, an absurd affectation out here in the desert, but a good many people are turning to xeriscaping. Could Murphy and Eva live here too? Could they plant cacti, enjoy the Vietnamese food, build a tennis court in the backyard, and compel their child to practice and practice, hour after hour, like poor little Andre? We’ve noted that even under normal circumstances, Las Vegas only receives 4.19 inches of precipitation annually. A frightening thought. On the other hand, it’s one of the most water-efficient cities in the country.
They arrive a few minutes early and Murphy steps forward to fill out the necessary paperwork. Eva sits with Fluffy 2 and reads about concierge medicine on her phone. There’s one very expensive option called, with who knows what ironic intent, “Universal Health Care.” You pay a retainer of sixty-thousand dollars a year and you get a worldwide provider network and a personal health care advocate to help you “navigate the complexities of managing your wellness.”
Dogs yowl and cats gaze dispassionately from within the darkened interiors of their cat carriers. Fluffy 2 pays no more attention to the dogs than he does to the cats, and he seems to have recovered from his infirmity. He was probably just hot and uncomfortable.
Now Eva feels the familiar twinge and turns to a lady waiting with her cat. She says, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh?”
“I don’t care about that.”
“A day comes when it doesn’t matter whether you care or not.”
“I’ll tell you what,” says the lady, “I know just what you’re talking about and he doesn’t have one thing to do with grace.”
“What did you say? Say that again.”
“You’re talking about Yaldabaoth. It happened when the Aeon Sophia began to think. She intended to reveal an image from herself, but she lacked the consent of the invisible spirit. That’s how Yaldabaoth came forth. But she cast him away.”
“Okay, but what was it you said earlier about grace?”
“You’re talking about reality. That’s Yaldabaoth. He begot this realm and the seven authorities that rule it, and the other five authorities came from the depths of the abyss. He was ignorant of the fullness, but he perceived his ignorance. It was his longing for the fullness that produced reality.”
“The fullness,” says Eva. “You’ve given me something to think about. But I could swear you also said something about grace.”
The vet is a small Vietnamese-American woman whose patience is at an end. She takes one look at Murphy and says, “I don’t treat humans. I’m not allowed to treat humans.”
Murphy explains that they’re here for Fluffy 2.
“Under ‘Reason for Visit,’ you wrote ‘pain in the arch of the foot.’ You people have to stop coming in here. A guy came in last week and said his bird was getting headaches when it read the newspaper.”
“Some birds are really smart,” says Eva.
“I know that! I wrote the book on birds!”
“Fluffy 2 was sick,” says Murphy. “But now he seems okay. But I’m really having trouble. I need help. It’s so hard to see a doctor in America.”
“I understand that.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “But you still have to see the human doctor. There’s nothing else I can say. I’m a veterinarian. I get this sense that everyone is walking around out there having this revelation where they say to themselves, ‘Aha! I’ll just go to the vet!’ ”
“We get it,” says Murphy. “We aren’t like the others. But just let me ask you this, and let’s pretend that this question is about my pet. Isn’t it possible that if he’s having foot, knee, and hip pain, the problem could be a lifetime of wearing the wrong shoes? And is it really so crazy to think that some additional pain is inevitable when we switch him over to the correct shoes?”
The vet isn’t listening. She’s looking at Fluffy 2. “What kind of animal is this?”
“You’re the expert.”
She looks around wildly. “What’s going on here? What’s happening? Is it a prank?”
But before they go, she gives poor dejected Murphy the following advice: “My basic p
rinciple in my veterinary practice is that if the treatment is exacerbating the problem, you stop that treatment. Whether that treatment is a drug regime or a pair of shoes.”
A Joshua tree stuffed whole into a Dumpster. Headlights rushing toward them in the hot darkness. Toothy mountain peaks rising into a papaya sunset. More clues. More memories from the future. And here’s Yahweh, always Yahweh, come to spoil it. He climbs into their tent, pushes a huge wad of chewing gum into his mouth, and says, “It’s me, the Lord your God, compassionate and gracious, abounding in loving kindness.” Later he’s in the back seat of the Pequod and he leans out the window and sprays Silly String at the car behind them. His aim is unerring, despite all the complex aerodynamic considerations. He says, “The Glory of Israel does not deceive or change his mind, for he is not human that he should change his mind.”
Outside of Baker, California, Eva finally gets around to explaining time.
“You mean that it passes more quickly in hot places?” Murphy says.
“Or it’s more likely to pass.”
“Don’t joke! I really want to know.”
The landscape is desolate beyond description, but even more remarkable than the fact that there’s so little vegetation is the fact that there is some vegetation. Creosote bushes, cholla cactus, a few Joshua trees. How do these organisms manage? The temperature outside is 109 degrees Fahrenheit, although time doesn’t seem to be passing very quickly.
“It’s something to do with eggs and entropy,” Eva says. “I’m not joking, but I’m not so clear on this either. All I could gather is that there’s no time without heat. Or entropy. And they’re a matter of chance.”
“That’s tough to take,” says Murphy. “I’m hanging on by a philosophical thread as it is.”
“I’m getting it wrong. It’s about heat transfer. That’s where time comes from. So if you’re at thermal equilibrium, it’s unlikely that time will pass.”
What about the effect of climate change on the passage of time? A warming world is a world out of equilibrium. Is it therefore more likely that time will pass? Are eggs less likely to appear? Will the brief sparkling years begin to slip away even more quickly?
Murphy shakes his head. “If that’s truth, give me religion.”
Here’s another demoralizing feature of the human experience: Murphy and Eva spend a lot of time worrying about what they might be forgetting, but sometimes they have problems when they remember things too clearly. On this luminous desert morning, Murphy peers into the trunk of the Pequod, where everything is carefully organized in bags and milk crates. He’s looking for the raisins, but even though they’re within a few inches of his grasping hand, he is unable to see them. Vision happens in the electrical jelly—the eyes just gather the information. He has peered into the trunk so many times in these last weeks that his brain has ceased to refresh the data and he sees only the memory of the trunk. To his credit, he knows that he’s experiencing hysterical raisin-blindness. He is thinking of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” that famous story in which the critical letter is hidden in plain sight. Now it occurs to him that he hasn’t read that story. Isn’t it interesting that he’s aware of its themes nonetheless? He probably knows as much about it as he’d know if he really had read it, since he’d have forgotten everything about it anyway. Maybe he has read it and he’s forgotten. Anyway, the raisins are right here in this milk crate next to the potted callaloo. Hidden in plain sight.
“Concentrate,” Murphy says to himself, staring at them and seeing nothing.
Yahweh is in a fickle mood as they cross the Mojave. When they stop for gas in Boron, so named because it’s home to the world’s largest borax mine, he tells Eva to go inside and get him some candy, but he won’t say what kind. She has to play a guessing game. Does he want a Snickers? Not a Snickers. Does he want a bag of Skittles? Not a bag of Skittles. Does he want Twizzlers? Not Twizzlers. And so on. Eva begins to cry a little bit. All of this is taking its toll. Then he says he wants Necco Wafers, but not to eat. He wants Eva to burn them at his feet while he inhales the smoke. He says, “And I’ll requite you for the abominations in your midst. And you will know that I am the Lord.”
California City is the state’s third-largest city by area, although it’s home to only around 14,000 people. Houses are thinly scattered on the hard hot ground, and there are blocks on which no one has ever built. Stewart Avenue, Stearns Avenue, Orchid Drive. Empty, empty, empty. The city flickers in and out of existence as you drive through it—a quantum city. Today the temperature has risen to 111 degrees, but here’s a man watering his patchy lawn, and here’s a woman drinking hot tea on her front porch. To account for such phenomena, we must remember Thomas Merton: A human being would have to be insane to live in California City, but luckily for California City, the desert drives people insane.
In Rosamond, the weary traveler can visit Crazy Otto’s, “Home of the Biggest Omelette in the World.” Here Eva makes a speech, some of which she later posts on Yahweh’s Facebook page:
“We can’t know his purposes, but we can guess. He deranges the leaders of the people and makes them wander as if drunk. Is it a joke? Who’s laughing? He crushes us for a hair. You need to listen to what I’m telling you. Whatever he tears down cannot be rebuilt. Listen to me! The days pass like reed-boats. City blocks will crumble at a breath from his nostrils. This place will be a den for jackals and an abode of ostriches.”
A young man looks up in alarm and says, “There’s already an ostrich farm not far from here!”
Her dreams have been so florid and upsetting that she’s afraid to go to sleep. There are bags under her eyes. She hasn’t been eating much of anything. She sits in silence while Murphy drives, staring straight ahead, sometimes muttering. Backyard green tree cemetery dawns. Another day, another dolor. There were roses in the cool café. There were roses in the cool café.
She thinks of babies. She thinks: Electing to have a child means running the risk of losing that child, and surely there is no greater pain.
“As if pain could be borne,” she whispers, quoting something without knowing what. “As if we were sure to find our way.”
When an earthquake kills ten thousand people in Nepal, she tries to bite Yahweh in the upper arm. All those people had moms and dads. All of them were alive because someone had cared for them when they were small.
And yet, and yet, what if there is something like grace, as the Gnostic woman in the vet’s office said? What if Yahweh has nothing to do with it? What if Yahweh is really just Yaldabaoth, who is ignorant of the fullness?
They drive through a forest of wind turbines. Wind power is just another kind of solar power, since wind comes from the pressure differentials that arise when the sun heats different parts of the earth’s surface at different rates. Never mind about the effect this might have on the passage of time. You could also say that fossil fuels are a form of solar energy, since they consist of photosynthetic products from squished ancient plants. And yet not all energy comes from the sun. Geothermal energy is a nice alternative, but even better is tidal power, which comes from the moon.
Soon they leave the Mojave and cross into coastal Southern California, and it’s like arriving in a different country—vast, rich, vibrant, multiethnic. But there’s anger on the Golden Coast this summer. In downtown Los Angeles, protesters have staged an enormous demonstration. This dramatic event has a cinematic quality, and not just because it’s an important and moving thing but because it’s happening in California, where even the most routine activities acquire a hallucinatory shimmer. That’s because almost all of our movies are filmed here, even movies ostensibly set in places like Detroit or Louisville. We watch Matt Damon triumph over adversity beneath a powdery blue sky, and this takes place in California. Matthew McConaughey descends into a black hole, there to make the ultimate sacrifice, or so he thinks, and the black hole is in California. A stylish mom buys an Audi, friends buy friends beer, and these things happen in California too. In this way,
even if we never visit, we grow up knowing the place in the same deep way that we know the places we lived as children. We understand the character of its light, its flora, its architecture. And then, when we buy beer, when we experience longing, when we feel as if we have descended into a black hole, when we imagine that we too might triumph over adversity, we see that low desert light in our mind’s eye, the peach blush and the long clear shadows. If our feelings are programmed by the glowing screen, and to some extent they must be, then maybe we can’t feel them correctly until we feel them in California.
They drift through the exultant crowd. There is a wild sense that the good guys are winning, that evil is in retreat, that love will triumph. If hatred is ascendant in this troubled time, so is love. It’s indifference that’s on the wane.
Yahweh will only allow them one night in Los Angeles. They choose to spend it in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire, which costs more than their entire eight-month lease in Miami. They’re worried about bringing Fluffy 2 inside, but it turns out that only the shabby hoteliers and moteliers will give you trouble about your pet. In fact, a footman immediately brings Fluffy 2 a bowl of what he calls “hand-sliced” meat. Eva tells him about Yahweh and gives him a hundred-dollar tip. Then they order some hand-sliced meat for themselves. And baked potatoes with nothing on them. Murphy explains that potatoes are just potatoes, but everything else that grows underground is also a potato. Carrots and beets are potatoes. Ginger is a scented potato.
Exhausted after another long hot day, they climb onto the bed and watch a movie. Movies are full of useful information, and today’s film is no exception. This is the most famous of all android movies. You know the one. Humans have created an intelligent global security network called Skynet, which is like a weaponized version of the surveillance network that UPS uses to track its drivers. Originally programmed to keep humans safe, Skynet has determined that humans themselves are the greatest threat to humans. This determination leads inescapably to the conclusion that the only way to keep humans safe is to destroy all humans. Skynet has been more or less successful in this campaign, and all that stands between humans and extinction is an underground resistance movement captained by a determined genius. Skynet decides that rather than fight this genius in the present, it would be easier to send an assassin back in time to kill his mother, American actress Linda Hamilton, before she has a chance to give birth to him. For this mission, it selects the android hit man Arnold Schwarzenegger. All of this takes place in California.