by Aaron Thier
The secular humanist version of the story goes like this: Two haploid cells derived from two diploid human entities combine to make a new diploid entity, a conceptus, which becomes an infant human by way of a series of implausible, preprogrammed developmental steps. The instructions for making this infant human are encoded in that human’s DNA, as we’ve already been forced to concede, and this DNA is inherited from the two ostensibly distinct human entities that have engendered it, which is to say that the instructions for the new human, or at least the discrete components of those instructions, exist before the new human exists. The new human is just a novel combination of existing materials, which means that it’s not quite new after all, except that it is new, and it has a unique consciousness, whatever consciousness is.
But this isn’t so different from the avatar theory. DNA encodes information as a sequence of base pairs, but that sequence is only one possible representation of the information, just as writing is one representation of spoken language and language itself is a representation of some abstract meaning. That’s why it’s possible to represent genetic information in other ways. You can write it down on paper as a sequence of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s, for example. Or, shocking thought, you can express it in the form of a living breathing creature—a human being. Because the fact is that we, too, are a manifestation of that information. We are the information made flesh.
“Our dog ate it,” says Eva.
“The crash test dummy?”
“Right. The dog’s name was Baxter. I saw him swallow it whole, but it must have gotten squeezed and churned in his stomach, because the arms and legs popped off and came out separately. Otherwise it could’ve gotten stuck in there and killed him.”
“A close call for Baxter.”
“One of many.”
Hang this in your smokehouse and cure it: Humans lay eggs, in a sense, and we lay our eggs in fluid, like fish and frogs, and we experience an aquatic life phase, so it seems okay to say that humans are amphibians. Even better, a woman’s eggs already exist when she’s an amphibian in the womb of her own mother, which means that we’re halfway born in the wombs of our grandmothers, who are halfway born in the wombs of their own grandmothers, and so on. In that case, when does life start, and what is an individual? There are mothers out there moving around, apparently distinct from their children. There are fathers too—fathers are useful, as noted, because they function as reservoirs of genetic material, and as long as their instinct for violence can be suppressed, they’re also good for carrying things and wielding tools—but the distinction between one human entity and another is not so hard and fast. It’s an illusion, this traffic of mothers and fathers. It’s all just a genetic stew. Maybe it has bits of avatar meat floating in it, but it’s the same stew.
“In North Carolina, this guy mistook us for a couple named Pierce. We went to a party and everything. Murphy gave a toast. Then it happened again in Phoenix.”
Brette raises her eyebrows but says nothing. Fluffy 2 rushes away and comes galloping back, his tongue coated with dust and redwood needles.
“Sometimes I see something,” Eva continues, “and I’m sure it’s my own memory, but not my memory from now. It’s like my memory from the future. It’s like a kind of déjà vu, but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a clue. Does that make any sense?”
“I know what you’re talking about,” says Brette. “That feeling. The light in the orchard. The empty hammock in the breeze. Something means something. It’s like the poet says: We’re just kangaroos among the beauty. But maybe your pal Yahweh is a kangaroo too. And beyond him there are more kangaroos. I have to believe that the universe is busy with cognition.”
They’re silent for a moment. They brace themselves in the neutrino wind.
“The Pierces are supposed to go to a conference in Montana pretty soon,” says Eva. “We still don’t know who they are. It would be easy to look them up.”
The distinction between humans and other creatures is not so easy to establish either. Accidental genetic novelties accumulate in time, and creatures gradually diverge from their ancestors, just as we do indeed diverge in certain ways from our own parents, but our parents are still our parents, and our ancestors are still our ancestors. It’s still the same stew. Follow the family tree back and at a certain point your distant grandmother isn’t quite human, although she’s still your grandmother, and at another point she isn’t quite a mammal, although she’s still your grandmother. From Eva to a sea cucumber is not so far to go.
“A big part of the trouble,” says Brette, “is time. Time is why it seems like things aren’t all happening at once, but then you wonder if time is only the medium we live in. Time is where you find phantoms like us. And maybe there are other media where you’d find other kinds of phantoms.”
“Because sometimes,” says Eva, “there’s that feeling.”
“Exactly.”
“The communication in the orchard.”
“The world’s a big bell,” says Brette, “and you’re just an ear.”
Now we’ve worked ourselves into an agony of confusion and we need to pause and take refuge in the hard facts: We are on the northwest coast, above the inundation zone, on the hundred and twenty fourth meridian, in a town that gets 63.10 inches of precipitation per year. We’re west of every American mountain range and there are no rain shadows to contend with. It all makes sense. God scowls in his heaven. The corporations make the products. Through the trees we can see the dark jelly of the lake shining and rippling under a pale blue sky.
But the sky is only blue because this is how the human brain, which is also a kind of jelly, configures the splash of radiation from a distant nuclear explosion. And up and down are up and down only because we feel the tug of gravity, only because we have mass, and the fact that we have mass needs to be explained, as does the mechanism of gravity. And we say “we,” but who are we? How is it that we can make these observations and ask questions about them? All of this is awful, by which we mean that it leaves us in awe, in a state of godforsaken wonder, and it takes a kind of faith to accept it.
“I do hope that at some level,” Brette says, “there’s something that’s no longer a something. An eclipse. That must be what people really mean when they say ‘God,’ because why would they be talking about Yahweh?”
“The real God,” says Eva, “is the idea of there being an idea of there being a something that’s not something. Right? Or else it’s the place where grace comes from. Is it crazy to talk about grace?”
“Call it goodness. Or just that feeling. It has to come from somewhere.”
Eva’s mood has improved during their stroll. There’s no denying that sometimes she feels a certain something. A window bangs in the soul and happiness blows through like a gust of wind.
“Goodness or grace,” she says meditatively. “Or something like that. It pours down the cosmic ladder.”
But now Ted and Murphy have returned, and the sound of tires on gravel recalls Eva and Brette to the luminous construct that we call daily life. They start back down the path and cross the footbridge, and when they get closer they can see Murphy swinging across the deck on crutches. He is a phantom, sure, or a hunk of avatar meat in the universal stew, but individuals do assert their prerogatives. They insist on running when everyone knows they should rest. The meat, whatever it is, is the part of the stew that we spend most of our time chewing.
“Were you really a showgirl?” Eva says.
“They called me the Belle of Anaheim.”
Eva sighs and places a hand on her abdomen. She hopes the baby is okay in there.
“It’s supposed to work,” says Brette, guessing her concern. “The whole thing is set up to work. More often than not you could have the baby in your living room.”
“But that doesn’t help with the worry,” says Eva.
“Because the worry is an important part of it. That’s how you keep yourself safe. The worry is an evolutionary adaptation.”
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br /> Murphy has a stress fracture in his left foot. He doesn’t have a splint or a cast, but he has to keep weight off the foot for six weeks.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says miserably. “Let’s not even talk about it.”
Ted is interested in the asymmetrical nature of the injury, which is evidence of an asymmetrical gait. He speculates that the left leg will weaken while Murphy is on crutches, and the right leg will get stronger, so it’s possible that his asymmetrical gait will correct itself that way. The challenge is to discard the crutches at just the right moment, when things are in balance.
Eva says, “The challenge is overcoming the lunacy long enough for the foot to heal.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Ted says, shaking his head. “Easier said than done.”
“I can hardly believe it,” says Murphy. “The whole time with those ballet slippers, I was sort of joking. And we both knew it! But now I have to face the consequences anyway.”
Eva and Brette cool off in the lake, Ted heads back into town to pick up groceries, and Murphy subsides into gloom. She’s pregnant she’s pregnant she’s pregnant, he thinks. If something should happen. If I should lose her. It would be the. I’d never be able. How could I keep.
He fetches some ibuprofen and makes himself a cup of green tea, which is no simple thing on crutches. Then he tries to distract himself with Moby-Dick, but he quickly runs into trouble. The Internet is not yet conscious, or at least not yet capable of manufacturing a real-life Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it exists, and its existence has created a new way of life, a new attitude, an Intertude, such that he cannot sit still and read because he keeps thinking of all the things he needs to look up, like the scientific name of those wild roses that grow in Nantucket, and some figures about the longevity of bowhead whales, and something Hawthorne said about Melville and religion. As he has already observed, it doesn’t matter that he has reverted to the phoneless condition of his teenage years. The Internet is all around him. The refrigerator is connected to the Wi-Fi network. Thus his failure to concentrate is a world-historical problem and not a problem of local application. He affirms that the Internet must be destroyed, and soon, before it achieves consciousness and turns good or evil, either of which would be terrible.
Eva sweeps into the house. The sunlight and the sweet clean air seem to cling to her person. “I don’t know anything about babies,” she says.
Murphy nods. He doesn’t either.
“I try to think of the baby,” says Eva, “but I can’t think of a little red newborn with a starry glare. You know how they have that starry glare?”
“I don’t know anything about newborns.”
“They have this glare. I know that much. But I can’t think of my baby that way. Instead I think of a little sidekick. He comes with me to do this or that. Or she. Just a tiny person with no impulse control. I imagine the baby drinking a big pint glass of beer.”
Murphy nods, but he can’t muster a smile.
“A deranged homunculus,” says Eva.
Murphy hangs his head.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you in pain?”
“I’m embarrassed.” He lifts a crutch and thumps it a few times for emphasis. “I feel like an idiot. But that reminds me that you have to go to the hospital too and get your blood removed, so they can test it. That’s part of the tradition of being pregnant.”
True enough. She probably wouldn’t have to go to the doctor at all, she could probably deliver the baby at home, but probably isn’t good enough.
What Hawthorne said about Melville was this: “If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential.”
And Hawthorne had this to say about the birth of his own child: “I find it necessary to come out of my cloud region, and allow myself to be woven into the sombre texture of humanity. There is no escaping it any longer. I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it.”
The afternoon swings by and they hardly get a look at it. Then they eat chicken curry on the deck and watch the cool night coming down. Redwoods rise all around the lake in their abstract swaying singleness, their here-ness, their nowhere-ness. A neighbor plays “Redemption Song” on the flute. They remember it so fondly, this moment. And they remember Savannah so fondly too. And they remember the faded lettering on the old mills in Winston-Salem, and the blue mountains of North Carolina, and the cornfields of the Midwest, and the sun and the locusts and the high towering loneliness of the shortgrass prairie, and Denver stretched out in its rain shadow, and the red deserts and endless freight trains, and the impossible scale of the Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles, and even Yosemite. All these places, longed for as the rosy past is longed for. And meanwhile the neutrinos rain down, or pass up through the earth, and the stars pop and fizz, and the moon raises the hair on their necks. In the morning, they take the road north.
Whether Yahweh is the worst and lowest of the gods or not, he is the proximate deity, and when he elects to impose his will, there’s nothing Murphy and Eva can do about it. He catches up with them in southern Oregon, where they’ve stopped at an overlook to stare at the ocean, and he sits them down on the guardrail and subjects them to a sermon. Satan can distract him no longer, it seems. Yahweh wishes to reestablish his authority.
“It is not my desire,” he says, striding back and forth with his hands behind his back, “that anyone shall die. But if the righteous turn from righteousness, they shall die. Are my ways unjust?”
Does he know that Satan has deceived him? You can never be sure what he knows. Eva and Murphy look at their feet. The wind is blowing hard but Yahweh’s hair doesn’t even stir. The trees are scraped back against the rocky headland. Eva hopes against hope that he doesn’t know about the baby.
“Your ways are unjust,” he says. “Your ways are unjust! Not my ways. If a man eats at mountain shrines, or defiles his neighbor’s wife, or approaches a menstruous woman, or lends at interest, or commits robbery, or requires a pledge for a loan, or looks to the idols, or mistreats the poor, then that man will die, because the wickedness of the wicked will be charged to him.”
Murphy mutters, “You don’t care about the poor.”
Yahweh silences him. “But if that man has a son, and if that son does not eat at mountain shrines, or defile his neighbor’s wife, or approach menstruous women, or lend at interest, or commit robbery, or require a pledge for a loan, or look to the idols, or mistreat the poor, and if he gives food to the poor, and clothing to the naked, then will that man die? He will not! Because the righteousness of the righteous will be credited to him.”
This could go on forever, and it does go on for some time longer, but then Yahweh remembers Mount Trashmore. Have they arranged the purchase yet? Have they spoken to any contractors? If not, why not? If not, have they not considered that the vengeance of the Lord is terrible?
He leaves them with this command: They are to attend, as previously discussed, the fifth annual Gaines, Plessy, and Rogerson American Ideas Conference—“summer camp for billionaires”—which will convene in one week at the Peach Valley Club, a private ski and golf community in Peach Valley, Montana. Yahweh is firm about this. It may be that he hopes to turn the power and influence of the conference attendees to his own advantage. In any case, he now departs by leaping from the cliff into the ocean, and Murphy and Eva return to the Pequod and continue north up the wild coast. Apparently they’re free to pick their own route, so they have lunch in Newport, and afterward they interact with seals. Fluffy 2 shows great interest in these creatures. Could it be that he’s a marine mammal who has reverted, by way of an epigenetic miracle, to the terrestrial form of his ancestors?
Eva thinks of an afternoon she spent with an old boyfriend, trimming and packaging marijuana, and she imagines the baby helping her with this project. Tiny fat fingers, little Ziploc bags. The baby enchanted by the boyfriend’s neighbor, a big woman with giant breasts. This vision is more real to her than the memory. T
he baby making pronouncements, like Murphy does, and getting involved in the work; Eva trying to tell the baby this isn’t right, something’s not right, they aren’t going to remember this day with pride.
In Portland, they visit the Rose Garden. They do it mostly for sentiment’s sake, because Murphy’s father comes from Portland and they used to visit the Rose Garden when Murphy was small. Here, not surprisingly, Murphy sees his much younger self, a child self, clutching an NBA basketball almanac and peering at Mount Hood. He does not trouble this morose little fellow, but he feels a greater kinship with him than he did with the Murphy in Flagstaff. It occurs to him that in some ways, adulthood has meant a return to the habits and inclinations of childhood. The Murphy in Flagstaff was the outlier—a Murphy on a psychological Rumspringa.
Eva may be pregnant, she and Brette may have solved theology, but those things don’t stop her from going crazy again here in Portland. She rushes down the paths with an ice cream cone in her hand and screams, “His name is Yahweh, his name is Yahweh, tremble before him, he honors those that honor him but those that spurn him will be dishonored.” Murphy can’t catch her on his crutches.
And yet she’s quiet and serene by the time they get back into the car. She buckles her seat belt and looks thoughtfully out the window.
“Couldn’t we go somewhere else?” she says. “Somewhere good. We have all this money. We could get on a plane. Remember how we said we’d go to Alaska?”
“We can’t.”