by Aaron Thier
By now, the excitement of the day has burned off and dejection settles like the mist from a humidifier. Eva hauls herself off to the luxurious bathroom in order to take a shower, but she gets stuck looking at herself in the mirror. For a moment, just a moment, her mind goes blank and she doesn’t have the faintest idea who that person is. Identity is tricky. Arnold Schwarzenegger only looks like a person. Underneath his flesh is a metallic endoskeleton and red eyes.
“But that’s just me,” Eva says aloud, staring at her reflection. “It’s me, same as always. I’m from rural Pennsylvania. I went to Johns Hopkins. I’m thirty years old.”
“Did you say something?” says Murphy
She steps back into the room and says, “My dad has never used a wallet. He keeps his stuff together with a rubber band.”
She looks down at her clothing. What do these garments say about her, and is what they say true? She peels off her clothes and plucks the little gold rings from her ears. She’s not satisfied. She’d like to imagine that she stands here now as she really is, her authentic self, free of ornament, but it’s not true. There are garments that she can’t cast off: her posture and bearing, her various facial expressions, her habits of mind, her modes of speech. These things are learned, acquired, affected, who knows. And suddenly they seem false.
“What’s wrong?” says Murphy, growing alarmed. “Eva! What’s happening here?”
She grips a hank of her hair and contemplates it with distaste.
“Hair is an ornament that can never be removed,” she says, “because even its removal is an aesthetic choice.”
“I get that, but I don’t see why it matters right now. Come over here. Have some potato.”
“The fact that we have hair means that we’re doomed to give a misleading account of ourselves.”
“Have some hand-sliced meat. Take a breath.”
No surprise, given the level of agitation in this suite, that tonight’s sex scene is frenzied and harrowing. At its denouement, Eva pulls a little of her hair out! Then, when the dust has settled, she sits on the floor, dreading her inevitable nightmares, and thinks of Sylvia Plath’s living doll: It can sew, it can cook, it can talk, talk, talk.
Early the next morning, an angel in a maid’s uniform comes by to tell them that they must leave the city immediately, without eating any breakfast. So now the wearisome traveling begins again. Here are the eucalyptus windbreaks, the oleander in the dusty medians, the distant mountains, the incomparable sky. Here’s a rattlesnake dead on the highway, poor thing. And here at last is the broad blue Pacific Ocean, largest and greatest of the earth’s oceans, with its relentless foaming waves, its vast beaches and rocky headlands, such a sense of scale, so much space and light, so much possibility. To come all the way west and see it—even God can’t spoil the feeling. They park the car and stare out toward Santa Cruz Island. A man with a blue guitar sits on the tailgate of his truck, singing hymns. Eva falls asleep with her forehead on the steering wheel.
The days pass like reed-boats. Their routine is well established. Up at dawn, a walk for Eva and Fluffy 2 and a brief, tentative, almost apologetic run in ballet slippers for Murphy, then a companionable breakfast of roasted cherries and roasted or mashed peas and maybe some fresh cherries, too, if there are any available. Then they get their instructions for the day, and then there’s an interval of driving, and then there’s some prophesy. There are good days and bad days, like always. Some days just don’t work out, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Yahweh. This morning, for example, Murphy wakes up in a sour mood, gets tangled in his sleeping bag, and falls through the tent flap. He hasn’t been awake more than three minutes, but Eva pokes her head out and says, “Tomorrow’s another day.”
One afternoon, she tries to explain what the prophetic impulse feels like: “It’s like I feel a charge build up. Or a kind of pressure. It isn’t painful, but I can’t ignore it. To make it go away I have to speak Yahweh’s name. That’s the best way I can describe it. And it pushes all my other thoughts right out of my head.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?” Murphy says.
“I don’t think so.”
He looks glum. “I can’t do anything for the woman I love.”
“I guess not.” She pauses. Then she says, “I have this terrible fear that love comes from God.”
“He wants you to think so, but I think it’s love versus God.”
She doesn’t respond. Even now she wants to say “Yahweh Yahweh Yahweh.”
Murphy shouts: “Eva! Eva! What can I do? Isn’t there something I can do?”
“There’s nothing. This is just the way it goes.”
“There must be something!”
“This is just life. It’s just the way it is. It’s like Uncle Orson and his chair.”
All the televisions in the United States are on, and they get brief muted glimpses of the American pageant, but the news is just reruns. Police murder an unarmed black teen in Florida. The president says that journalists are the most dishonest people in the world. A football player beats up his wife on camera and faces no penalty. Reality begins to look like a cheap contrivance, implausible and garishly lit, like a puppet show in a tanning bed. Murphy and Eva get angry and their anger feels like déjà vu.
Here’s one thing he can do for her: He can get her a pair of nonbinding diabetic socks. She isn’t diabetic, but she hates when her socks squeeze her calves. He hands them over and she presses them to her bosom and appears genuinely moved.
“They’re perfect,” she says.
Love versus God. She tips forward onto his chest and remains there, breathing and gripping her new socks, which are made from bamboo fiber. Life is what it is, and either you accept it or you don’t. Either you let the current sweep you out to sea or you swim against the current as it sweeps you out to sea.
All of history is a rerun. It’s not just the news. History recycles the same elements over and over again. When gold was discovered here in California, prospectors poured in, and what happened then? The same thing that always happens. We can hardly bear to say it. The indigenous Californians, thousands and thousands of them, were enslaved and murdered. When they tried to fight back, retribution was swift. As the Yreka Mountain Herald put it in 1853, “Now that general Indian hostilities have commenced, we hope that the Government will render such aid as will enable the citizens … to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed … Extermination is no longer a question of time—the time has arrived, the work has been commenced, and let the first man that says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”
Only a few years before, the United States had taken California from Mexico in an unprovoked war of conquest.
Tonight, Murphy starts awake and discovers that Eva is in the middle of a speech.
“You know,” she’s saying, “you know that part. Elijah proves that Baal isn’t the real God. Yahweh sends him water and he doesn’t send any water to the prophets of Baal. That proves it.”
“Proves what?”
“So they kill the prophets of Baal and then the soldiers come to get Jezebel and they throw her out the window and there’s a dog and all that’s left are like her hands and feet, and maybe her nose.”
The next afternoon, she pursues an irritated young mother across a playground where they’ve stopped to stretch their legs and give Fluffy 2 a spin. This hard-hearted and stiff-necked woman, whose children are beating one another senseless not far away, has her own troubles, but that only makes Eva more insistent.
“The name of the Lord is Yahweh,” she’s saying. “I just have to tell you.”
“Get away from me.”
“I need to explain this. We’re in this together. I was nipped from clay just like you.”
“Get away!”
“This town will be a ruinous heap! He’s going to fill his belly with your dainties.”
“My dainties?”
“And stay away from Oreos.
”
The sky is perfectly cloudless. The eucalyptus leaves have no color. There is no moisture in the ground.
Eva says, “Yahweh will set you down like an empty dish.”
“Let him.”
“And then he’ll rinse you out.”
Murphy hopes that the grandeur of Yosemite will have a salutary effect, but their visit is disappointing. It’s true that the valley is very beautiful—impossible granite faces, parched air, manzanita, mountain meadows, waterfalls—but it’s thronged like Times Square. It’s a riotous and frenzied place. There’s something in the atmosphere that no one seems able to tolerate. Maybe Yahweh hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof. Eva feels even crazier than usual and she can’t stop shouting his name and making threats. She tells a group of Chinese tourists that this once-lovely place, and every other place too, the whole world, the whole universe, will become a habitation of dragons and a court for owls. They don’t understand a word she says.
“The fatness of your flesh shall wax lean!”
Murphy places a hand on her back and says, “Let’s move along, why don’t we?”
“But I’ve got to tell them. He’s going to make them all sleep an endless sleep.”
“Me and Fluffy 2 are pretty hungry. What do you say we break for lunch?”
“I don’t know what’s happened.” She raises a hand to her brow. “I feel so funny. I’m antagonizing these people.”
“It’s just that Yahweh has hardened their hearts, that’s all.”
“You think so?”
“Of course.”
She nods and says, “Let’s try to smile at everyone we see.”
“Okay.”
“Can we?”
“Of course we can.”
“Just that little bit of kindness goes such a long way. It brightens everyone’s days.”
“I agree.”
“We won’t smile in a crazy way. We’ll just smile a little and say, ‘Hey there, friend.’ ”
They come skidding down out of the mountains, camp in the fertile wasteland of the Sacramento Valley, and the next day they’re in Berkeley. Yahweh joins them, disguises himself as a homeless person, and roughs up a college kid who fails to give him a nickel. Eva distributes money to the city’s genuine homeless people and donates more money to the ACLU. Then they all stop to rest on a steep hillside near the university. The grass is crisp and golden and prickly. They can see San Francisco across the bay.
Although he knows that no good will come of it, Murphy can’t resist pestering Yahweh a little bit.
“Could you just tell me the truth about dark matter?”
“Maybe it’s an elementary particle.”
“Maybe?”
“I never thought I’d have to explain these things.”
Yahweh tosses a ball for Fluffy 2 and then makes the ball disappear at the moment Fluffy 2 tries to pounce on it. Eva is lying with her hands behind her head, blinking into the bright sky, muttering prophet talk or something else, nonsense, poems, who knows. The blue sun in his red cockade walked the United States today. Struggle is meat. First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.
“Humans have really surprised me,” Yahweh says, in what almost seems like a charitable admission. But then he says, “It makes me so angry!”
Tonight they’re obliged to attend a panel discussion at the university. There are two physicists and two mathematicians, and they’re talking about the difference between abstract and applied mathematics. For a while they discuss Alexander Grothendieck, who contributed so much to pure math and then ended his life in monkish solitude in the Pyrenees, eating dandelion soup and worrying that an evil metaphysical force had perverted the harmony of the universe. Murphy and Eva can relate to this bit, but the rest of the discussion is opaque, so it’s all the more surprising that when Eva rises to speak the name of the Lord, the panelists nod vigorously and thank her for her comment.
“That’s the original Hindu sense of the word avatar,” says one of the mathematicians.
“An earthly manifestation of a divine being,” says the other.
“Yahweh, Shiva, etc.”
They’ve been discussing what they call “mathematical avatars.” The idea, as far as Murphy and Eva can determine, is that each mathematical category, each mathematical entity, maybe even each mathematical theory, is the manifestation of something larger and more abstract. You climb the avatar ladder into a region of greater and greater generality. The problem is that there are an infinite number of ladders, so there can’t ever be a unified theory of pure math.
“And maybe,” one of the panelists says, “the whole thing is based on the wrong assumptions.”
There’s some comfort here. If Yahweh is an avatar in the original Hindu sense, then there must be something beyond Yahweh, a larger and greater divinity, or sequence of divinities. That sounds a little like the Gnostic explanation, and if it’s true, then it’s likely that violence and hate do not proceed exclusively from man or exclusively from Yahweh. Instead we are all just individual actors doing what we can on this plane of reality, and there are other planes, and competing influences or forces on every plane.
A comfort, maybe, but not comfort enough for poor Eva. Her chest hurts, her stomach hurts, she’s crying into her cherries and peas. Murphy keeps saying, “You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay,” but she hardly sleeps at all tonight, and in the morning, here in the glorious golden hills of Northern California, she is remote and unresponsive. She can’t grasp the content of her own thoughts. Her very essence feels attenuated. Has she been maddened past endurance? Will she decide to shave her head? Murphy grips her knee as she drives and says, “You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay.”
Today, Yahweh too is in the grip of some exceptional feeling. They’re on the street in Sonoma when they hear the flatulent roar of his Lamborghini, and then the ludicrous orange car comes ripping around the corner and he’s bopping the horn and shouting.
“There you are! You avoided out of my sight!”
“Please …” she says.
Then she falls down. Murphy tries to help her up and finds that he can’t move.
“Mortal!” Yahweh shouts. “Mortal! Did I not pour you out like milk? Did I not congeal you like cheese? Can I not do with you what I like? I’m going to treat this nation like the wood of the grapevine, which I have designated to be fuel for fire.”
“Please. I didn’t do anything.”
“You’ve multiplied your harlotries!”
“Is it the lecture you’re mad about? You told us to go to the lecture.”
“You played the whore. You spread your legs to every passerby. Even now you’re unsated.” He fishes around in his pocket and pulls out a slip of receipt paper. “Eat this. Eat what’s offered to you.”
In a kind of trance, Eva stuffs the paper into her mouth and begins to chew. Murphy is unable to speak or raise his arms.
“Ha!” says Yahweh. Then he hands her some pieces of orange peel. “Now eat this.”
She slips them into her mouth and chews mechanically. He seems pacified.
“Let not the strong man glory in his strength, nor the rich man in his riches, but only in this shall one glory: In his earnest devotion to me. For I the Lord act with kindness, justice, and equity in the world. In these I delight.”
He tells her to sleep on her left side for ten nights. He tells her to mingle with the uncircumcised of heart and propound riddles and allegories. And then they’ll know that he is the Lord.
Privately, Eva feels a deep dejection and interprets the obscene pointlessness of her prophetic enterprise as a harsh analogy for the more comprehensive pointlessness of human life and human civilization. But for an hour or two she manages a little good cheer, so that it appears to Murphy that she has taken Yahweh’s rebuke in stride. He is impressed by this show of resilience and speaks rapidly about inconsequential things, trying to keep her distracted.
In the early afternoon, alas, they vis
it a bookstore and she loses her mind. She yells so loudly that her voice cracks. She thrusts the Staff Picks from their shelves.
“He’ll make the sea boil like an ointment pot!” she screams. “Listen to me. Listen! They won’t speak any longer of Topheth or the Valley of Ben-Hinnom. They’ll be talking about the Valley of Slaughter!”
She rushes outside and stands weeping in the sunlight. Murphy limps after her and holds her tightly and gently all at once, like a man carrying an antique chair.
And soon afterward, remembering nothing, she says, “I’d like to stop at a bookstore somewhere and pick up Karen Solie’s new collection.”
She sleeps for a while as they drive north, but if this nap refreshes her, she doesn’t say so. She feels an unnamable feeling. She is unrecognizable to herself. Then she complains of stomach trouble and they pull into a gas station.
Now Murphy is waiting in the parking lot with Fluffy 2, who noses around in the golden grass. The moon is out and suddenly it occurs to him, with the force of a new revelation, that the moon is round. It’s a giant rock beyond the sky, and it’s round, and it’s up, and at the same time, if you were walking on the lunar surface, you’d be walking on a flat plane, its surface would be down, and the earth itself would be up. The earth, too, is round and manifestly not round. But the roundness of the moon predates the roundness of the earth, since the earth was flat until we developed the techniques to determine its roundness mathematically. Maybe it only became conclusively round when we took a picture of it from space.