The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  Is there some consolation here? Is it a comfort to say that up and down and round and flat depend on your frame of reference? That they depend on ideas? Maybe so. Last night, one of the physicists claimed that there are quantum-mechanical solutions to cosmological problems that only work when you add a conscious observer. He also speculated that the universe can’t exist at all without a consciousness to apprehend its existence. In short, we may not be as inconsiderable as we seem.

  Unless, more likely, it’s Yahweh’s consciousness that sets the thing in motion.

  The moon. No wonder people go crazy looking at that thing. Murphy’s wits are addled. His face is hot with moonburn. Love versus God. She’s okay she’s okay she’s okay. Do not make yourself afraid.

  But is she okay? Here she is in a gas station bathroom, and now, at last, one aspect of her predicament is clarified. The odor is unspeakable and the linoleum is filthy and there’s a spider the size of an oven mitt above the door, but these things don’t matter to her. The toilet seat is no longer attached to the toilet and there’s no toilet paper and there’s a mop rotting in a broken bucket and there’s a desiccated lizard crushed in a mousetrap and there’s enough poison on the homemade shelves to destroy most of the humans and animals in this little town, but none of these things matter to her either. A Guatemalan man bursts in while she’s standing before the mirror, apologizes mildly, and pauses a moment to select the appropriate bottle of poison from the shelf, and it doesn’t matter because she’s looking at the blue + on her First Response Rapid Result pregnancy test and it’s the happiest moment of her life.

  Stuff this into your Pyrex baking dish and roast it: When physicists tell you that the whole universe was once as small as a Tic Tac, or very much smaller, what they’re telling you is that the whole visible universe was once as small as a Tic Tac, or very much smaller. That’s all we know about because that’s all we can see. It could be that the universe, compressed to a smooth hot textureless timeless gravityless paste, was still infinitely large. It could also be that the universe is not a universe at all, but a polyverse or multiverse, and that outside our own local Tic Tac are an infinite number of other Tic Tacs, all expanding just as our own Tic Tac is expanding, a kind of fractal balloon-growth in which the universe, or polyverse, or multiverse, becomes infinitely more infinite at an infinitely rapid rate.

  Eva comes bustling across the parking lot and tosses the pregnancy test on the hood of the car.

  “Oh my God,” Murphy says.

  “Interesting that you should put it that way,” she says, grinning. “Something has put a baby in me. I hope it was you.”

  He has often imagined behaving inappropriately in this moment, but now that the moment is here he knows just what to say. He says that he will love this child no matter what, whether it’s his own child or a child of God.

  Part III

  We don’t need the mathematicians to tell us that Yahweh is the instantiation of a larger principle. When we talk about God, we’re also talking about those crucial abstractions: death and chaos, the future, the unknown. But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. Abstractions are dangerous. That’s one of the facts of life. We are born into a landscape of metaphor, and we must learn to read it correctly or we’ll die or go mad. For any creature that contends with an avatar like Yahweh, literary acumen is an evolutionary adaptation.

  And yet what is man, what is woman, that such an avatar is mindful of him, or of her, and he and she of it?

  Sometimes it’s all too much. Sometimes we have no option but to appeal to a higher power. Outside a defunct supermarket in an unfashionable seaside town, Murphy picks up a pay phone and there’s Satan, the adversary, asking how are things.

  “Christ,” says Murphy, “I’m happy to hear your voice.”

  He explains the situation. Satan is delighted. “Can you beat that?” he says. He asks Murphy to put Eva on so he can give her his warmest congratulations. The two of them press their heads together and hold the receiver between them, listening to Satan’s soothing voice.

  “But what do we do now?” says Murphy. “It’s overwhelming.”

  “Doesn’t your uncle Ted live around here?” says Eva.

  He gives her a blank look.

  “You’re always talking about Ted’s place in the redwoods. Let’s go there and rest. I think that would really help.”

  “Uncle Ted?”

  “Concentrate for a second. Uncle Ted’s house.”

  “Okay okay okay,” says Satan. “Everybody calm down. How’s this. I’ll distract Yahweh for a few days. A few days is easy. You two will go to Uncle Ted’s house. Rest and reflect. Enjoy the redwoods.”

  It’s good to have a friend like Satan. Murphy calls his uncle, who reminds him that it’s never necessary to call—his door is always open, literally and metaphorically—and they get back into the car. It’s only an hour and a half. Murphy drives and Eva sits in the passenger seat thinking of the baby. The baby’s bright eyes, the baby’s smile. Or else the baby’s outraged Churchillian face. The baby’s anger. After all, the first truth of existence is that none of us start out as willing participants. She wants to apologize to this still-notional baby, and yet, at the same time, she feels very strongly that she wants to meet that baby. This desire is so powerful that it takes her breath away. So powerful that she has chosen to expose the baby—the very creature she is pledged to protect—to all the sorrow of the universe.

  Uncle Ted lives just a few miles from the beach, but the topography of this rugged coast is such that his house actually sits a few hundred feet above sea level. This means that in the event of a tsunami—an event that is extremely likely and even assured, given the configuration of the Cascadia subduction zone or, if you prefer, Yahweh’s lust for catastrophe—he would be safe, relatively speaking. For the last few years he has been living with a woman called Brette, a figure from his shadowy past. Murphy suspects that Brette is not her real name. She claims to be a retired showgirl, a “Las Vegas chanteuse,” but no one believes her. Some of Murphy’s family believe that she is an ecoterrorist in hiding.

  Ted is in the driveway when they arrive. He wears old Levi’s and a blue Pendleton shirt rolled to the elbows, and his beard is thick and gray. He’s boiling water over a wood fire. The vapor condenses on a curved aluminum hood and runs down into a pie pan.

  “Is that seawater?” says Murphy. “Are you desalinizing water?”

  “I’m trying to see how much I can recover by this method. Don’t think this is how I’d do it under normal circumstances. I’m losing so much!”

  He gives them both a hug. He crouches down to greet Fluffy 2. Young redwoods swing and dance in the breeze. Here at the ragged edge of the continent, the air seems thin and full of light.

  “My question,” Ted explains, “was how good could I do with only the materials in the woodshed?”

  Brette greets them as she comes up the driveway from the garden. She has a light fluting voice, not at all the smoky worn-out voice of a Las Vegas chanteuse.

  Eva walks down to the lake, strips to her underwear, tumbles into the cold water, and floats there for a long time. Then she climbs out, rolls herself in a towel, and lies shivering on the dock. Is she resting? The expression on her face is fixed somewhere between serenity and alarm. It seems both full of feeling and entirely opaque, like the expression on an Easter Island statue. She looks no crazier than yesterday, and no less crazy.

  When Murphy pokes his head over the railing, she says, “How are we going to take care of a baby? What were we thinking?”

  Murphy doesn’t respond. Now Brette appears and asks if she needs anything.

  “What do you even say to the baby at this stage?” Eva says. “In terms of why it’s good to be born.”

  “Raspberries,” says Murphy. “And other berries.”

  “Are you saying you’re pregnant?” says Brette. She looks at Murphy, who raises his eyebrows.

  Eva says, “I’m so tired. I’m tired all t
he way to my guts. I’m like a hose that’s been out in the sun for too long.”

  Now Ted comes to the railing as well. All three of them are peering down at Eva.

  “The name of the Lord is Yahweh,” she says.

  Ted and Brette don’t blink. She might have said that her favorite ice cream is mint chip or her shoe size is eight and a half. It must be that they’re familiar with all kinds of spiritual tics. They’re westerners, after all. They inhabit the geography of hope.

  “You’re not supposed to be talking about that,” says Murphy. “Satan said not to talk about that.”

  Dinner is chicken tacos, which they eat on the deck in the day’s last watery light. There’s also a little tripe and chicken skin for anyone who’s interested. Ted’s theory—and already we can detect the same impulses that underpin Murphy’s own strategies and tactics—is that the cheapest meats and meat products are the most nutritious. That’s because meat is priced according to the amount of connective tissue in each cut. The more connective tissue, the tougher and cheaper the meat, all the way down to the cheapest meat bits, which are all connective tissue and no muscle. But connective tissue, says Ted, is “the most rich and vital foodstuff” because it consists principally of collagen, which is the main ingredient in the human body. The idea appeals to Murphy very much and he’s chewing with gusto, although his chompers are giving him some trouble.

  As for Eva, she is not allowed to have any of the homemade queso fresco, because of the danger of listeria. A modern pregnancy is all about minimizing risk. She knows that the risk of listeria isn’t great, but she also knows that the risk exists, and as long as it exists, however negligible it might be, she must avoid queso fresco and other soft cheeses. We never know when Yahweh will bring the hammer down. Queso fresco isn’t even a real cheese, and still she must fear it.

  “A baby!” says Ted. “Just think of it. When are you due?”

  Eva bops the table with her palm and says, “The name of the Lord is Yahweh.” Her voice sounds odd and constricted because she’s trying not to shout. “It’s Yahweh. Sorry. It’s Yahweh. I can’t stop saying it. I’m supposed to be resting.”

  “We could discuss religion,” says Ted. “No problem. That’s a good topic.”

  But Eva won’t discuss it. The name of the Lord is Yahweh, that’s all. There’s nothing more to say about it.

  “We have to discuss something. Food without discussion has no taste.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” says Brette.

  “I’ve got no trouble believing that you can get some utility out of the idea of God,” says Ted. “Everybody needs a large idea to structure their days. We used to have these ideas about orgone. We thought it was the anti-entropic force. We’d sit in these orgone accumulators. They were like outhouses. They were supposed to increase the orgone concentration. The idea was that we were fighting against entropy. That’s not far from religion.”

  “It’s interesting that you should mention entropy,” says Murphy.

  Eva says, “No one’s listening to me. The only point I want to make is that the name of the Lord is Yahweh.”

  “She means that it doesn’t have anything to do with religion,” says Murphy. “It’s just that God exists, and he wants you to know it. But everything else stays the same. It isn’t really a problem, philosophically.”

  “The deity paradigm isn’t an idea I’ve had much success with,” says Ted, “but for a while I’d try to stare into the sun each morning for ten seconds. And at another time I gave away all my books and devoted myself to chanting. And then there was the phase when I kept a tape recorder by the bed and I’d speak my dreams to it in the night. In the morning they’d turn out to be completely unintelligible.”

  “You’re not listening,” says Brette.

  “And now I take maybe thirty supplement tablets and capsules over the course of each day.”

  When they’ve finished eating, Murphy stands up, gathers a stack of plates, turns toward the screen door, and collapses in a heap, smashing the plates and crying out in pain.

  “Good gracious!” says Ted.

  It looks as if he has pivoted too enthusiastically and put pressure on his damaged foot. He tries to explain, but then he loses heart and lies back with his eyes closed.

  Brette’s gaze lingers on poor flushed Eva, but Ted hustles around the table and kneels at Murphy’s feet. Does Murphy mind if he has a look? Murphy extends his left foot and twirls it around. Ted takes the foot in his huge brown hands. He says does this hurt, does this hurt, does this hurt, and Murphy says yes, yes, yes. Then Ted switches to the right foot. Then he asks a few questions about the legs. It’s clear that the left foot is the trouble area.

  “We’ll call our own physician in the morning,” says Ted. “But in the meantime, I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor?” says Eva, coming to herself a little bit.

  “I have an M.D. It was just another phase. Another paradigm.”

  If it were anyone else, you’d call him a liar, but Uncle Ted has such a thick dossier of verifiable accomplishments that he doesn’t need to invent fake ones.

  “I went to medical school when I retired from tennis. I understood I’d never be a top player. But I never did my residency because I was oppressed by the repetition. And anyway, why stick yourself for life with a young man’s idea of his future? That’s when I took off and had my garlic farm. But you don’t have to be that well trained”—and here he applies some pressure to Murphy’s left foot, and Murphy shouts—“to know there’s a broken bone in here somewhere.”

  The sun is down and the air is cold and the sky is a pale luminous blue. Before long, no doubt, the moon will spring from the horizon and oppress them with its incommensurable mysteries. Murphy limps inside and lies on the rug in the front room. The rest of them clear the table. Eva is thinking: I’m pregnant I’m pregnant I’m pregnant. Broken bone or no broken bone, Murphy is also thinking: She’s pregnant she’s pregnant she’s pregnant. Ted hauls out his pill organizer, fills a gallon jug with water, and gets to work swallowing vitamins.

  Eva says, of the forthcoming baby, “We don’t know who it’ll be. So at this point it’s still everyone. All possible babies.”

  “It’s like that fairy tale,” Brette says, “Schrodinger and the Cat.”

  Eva looks at her for a moment and says, “Have we met somewhere? I’ve got the funniest feeling.” But Brette doesn’t seem to hear.

  Getting a doctor’s appointment is not the hardship Murphy anticipates. He has money, which is all that really matters. The next morning, he and Ted leave for town in Ted’s old Nissan pickup. While they’re gone, Brette is going to take Eva and Fluffy 2 to see the old-growth redwoods on the other side of the ravine.

  Eva is pregnant, as we’ve already established, and even for a person whose nerves are in good trim, pregnancy is a conceptually challenging state of affairs. A nine-month gestation period and then a new phantom emerges from the very body of the adult female. How could this be the way it is? The whole setup seems much less credible and intuitive than the egg strategy, so popular among other members of the animal kingdom, although now that we think about it, the egg strategy is just as magical. How could there be enough nutrition in a bird’s egg to sustain the tiny creature through the full term of its gestation?

  She thinks of breast pumps and strollers. She thinks of Yahweh. She touches her abdomen and she hopes, but hope is too mild a word, that everything is okay in there.

  “How can I forgive him for the world he’s made?” she says.

  “Who?”

  “How can I forgive him for the painfulness of life. The painfulness of it. If the world is Yahweh’s invention after all.”

  “But I don’t understand,” says Brette. “Why do you feel you need to forgive him?”

  “It’s about making peace with the way things are. Or convincing myself it’s not so reckless after all to bring a kid into the world, where Yahweh can get at him. Or her. Why do I want to
have a baby anyway?”

  “Babies are wonderful.”

  “I’m worried it’s just my programming. I’m a kind of robot.”

  “Sure,” says Brette warmly, “why not? But you’ll see how it is. This tiny human comes, and it doesn’t speak English, and you have to get up in the night and shake it until it goes back to sleep, and the whole thing is the loveliest thing in the world. It’s the very acme of human happiness.”

  They pick their way across a wooden footbridge, they walk around a steep hill, and suddenly here are the tallest trees on Earth. It’s as easy as that. They crowd the road. They are alien and remote. They’ve outgrown their tree-ness and they brush the next rung on the avatar ladder. It’s like John Muir says: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” Eva and Brette and Fluffy 2 scramble up the path and experience a kind of diminishment. Their footsteps are no louder than the sound of an ant chewing. The rhododendrons are twenty feet tall and they look like blueberry bushes in a kitchen garden. There is a smell, but who will remember it? The impossible trunks of the impossible trees march away into the hills.

  “I can’t believe it,” Eva says.

  “It takes a moment to adjust.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Luminous cables of sunlight are threaded through the gloom. The intelligence of the trees hums all around them. Eva’s anxiety seems inconsequential in this context and begins to mellow.

  “It’s just that I’ve got no control over anything,” she says. “I’m like a crash test dummy or something. Just accelerating into the wall.”

  “I’ve always wanted a crash test dummy for myself,” says Brette. “They have that placid look about them. They know, but they don’t say. I’d set it up in the living room, by the Chinese checkers.”

  “I had a little toy crash test dummy when I was a kid. You pressed a button on its chest and its arms and legs blew off.”

  Eggs or live birth, the other question is where the animus comes from to begin with. Are we all just loose souls rattling around in the tin can of the universe, moving from vessel to vessel? Could it be that we really are created by God or a god or gods? Or else the animalcule forms when seeds are planted in the menstrual blood. Or we’re the fleshy avatars of a more general force or principle. Or we are the light of the light of the aeons of light, and we are God, and God is us. Or we emanate from the imperfect understanding of he who is ignorant of the fullness. These are just stories, and each one is as good as any other.