The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  “Why can’t we?”

  “We have go the American Ideas Conference.”

  “I want to go to a treeless island in Greece, with blinding rocks.”

  “I want to go to Oaxaca and learn about all the different peppers.”

  “We can do it. Maybe Satan can help again. Or who cares? We’ll go some other time.” She leans back and closes her eyes. “It’s the strangest thing, but sometimes I feel this contentment. It seems like everything’s okay.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s just a feeling. I can’t explain it. Did you read that article about trees?”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “They have memories. They make choices. It’s beautiful. And did you read that article about the guy who writes the blog?”

  “The guy who writes the blog,” says Murphy.

  “Sure, yeah. He writes this blog, and what he does is …”

  She begins to summarize the article. Murphy has trouble concentrating. He peers apprehensively at the vast northwestern forest. He is not in an exultant frame of mind, and the last thing he wants to worry about is the consciousness of these threatened trees.

  They cross the border into Washington and have a nice time on the Olympic Peninsula, where they investigate the wet moss-stuffed Hoh Rain Forest. Thank heavens we have the concept of orographic lift to help us make sense of the geography. The Hoh Rain Forest is on the western or windward slopes of the Olympic Mountains and it gets 142 inches of precipitation per year. Seattle is on the other side of the mountains, in the rain shadow, and despite its reputation for dreariness, it receives only 37.49 inches of precipitation per year, an East Kansan total, far less than the cities of the East Coast.

  Very interesting, very interesting, but Murphy’s mind is elsewhere. He’s thinking about death. As Philip Larkin writes so memorably: “Most things may never happen: this one will.” And that’s why he decides to compose a letter to his unborn child. He wants to get some simple advice down on paper, in case Yahweh decides to destroy him, which could happen at any time. He tries to exclude his despair from this message, however, and works hard to achieve a balanced and objective tone:

  Dear Child, I haven’t found a way to get any flavor into a really soft fish, but I can tell you that snorkeling is worth the effort, John Singer Sargent will reward your serious and prolonged consideration, and sauerkraut and other fermented vegetables go well on sandwiches of all kinds, and other foods too. There’s no reason to be cautious or parsimonious in that respect. Also, you have to know your jellyfish, because some are harmless, but some are extremely dangerous.

  For Murphy, the notional baby is an earnest wide-eyed creature who requires instruction, but for Eva, this creature is imperfectly distinguished from her own self. If the baby is with her now, it seems as if the baby has been with her always. An accomplice in the crimes of her youth. A witness to the quiet sublime moments. The baby with bruised knuckles, emerging from someone’s RV and saying, “The clean-house smell of the pines out here only makes me feel oilier.” Or sitting there on Christmas morning in Pennsylvania, working through a stack of scratch-off tickets.

  They stop to eat blackberry cobbler in Olympia and Yahweh himself is there to take their order. To Murphy he serves a bowl of white sugar with a stone in it. To Eva he says, “You’ll eat what is offered to you. You’ll eat these napkins.” While she chews, he sits down next to them and says, “I’m going to do such a thing that both ears of anyone who hears about it will tingle. This place will be like a scarecrow in a cucumber field. I’ll smash them all, one against the other. And then they’ll know that I am the Lord.”

  But just as confusing as his indiscriminate abuse is this: his anguish. He comes to them the next day in trembling misery and says “My suffering!” with all the surprise and hurt of a child stung by a bee. He tries to reassure himself. “I’ll smelt out their dross. And they’ll know that I am the Lord. They’ll know.” He smiles the saddest smile in the universe, and in a quavering heartbreaking voice, he says, “They will be my people, and I will be their God.”

  Dear Child, Murphy writes, Do we wish we’d gotten a better god than Yahweh? Of course we do. It’s just one of life’s many disappointments.

  Eva shrugs it all off, at least for now. She rolls down her window and the hot dry air whips her hair around. She and Murphy are both going blond in the summer sun.

  She asks, “Did you love me from the day we met?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he says again, this time with a faint note of impatience.

  “It was the only time I ever saw you smoke a cigarette.”

  “I was doing it because you were doing it.”

  “Why was I doing it? I didn’t even smoke.”

  “It was raining and it was very hot,” says Murphy. “Do you remember that I’d just come from the vet school?”

  “You were buying meat.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “You were at the vet school buying meat,” she says. “There’s no way to get around it now. It’s part of the story of how we met.”

  East of the Cascades, in the long rain shadow, there are blushing deserts, creased and rumpled hills, thunderous rocks, wind turbines, balloon rallies, A&W’s, wheat fields. Eva makes an insupportable disturbance at a chamber music concert in Kennewick, Washington, and has to be ejected by a pair of ushers, but by now this is almost routine. She turns in the doorway and screams, “I’m filled with the wrath of the Lord. I can’t hold it in!” And then Murphy swings after her on his crutches and off they go. The moon is bright enough to read by and the best apples in the world are said to grow not far from here, on a few special hillsides where there’s ample groundwater but no precipitation or humidity.

  “I guess if they’re allowed to sell the meat,” Eva says, “there must be all kinds of regulations.”

  “That was my understanding.”

  “It wasn’t like it was cows they’d experimented on. Or sick cows.”

  “Of course not. There was all kinds of scrutiny, I think.”

  “But you never confirmed.”

  “I was afraid of what I’d learn. It was Florida. Maybe there weren’t any regulations after all.”

  Dear Child, Murphy writes, Remember that capitalist markets are human inventions. There’s nothing natural about them. They need to be strictly regulated or they just reinforce existing problems and inequalities. Also remember that cold medicine often makes you feel worse than the illness itself. And if you feel a madness for punctuality, know that I feel this madness too. It can be painful and aggravating, but no one ever missed a flight because they arrived at the airport too early.

  They cross back into Oregon and enter the remote Wallowa Valley, the ancestral home of Chief Joseph and the Wallowa Nez Perce. When they leave the valley and head north to Lewiston, Idaho, and then east into the Bitterroot Mountains, they are retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, but they’re also approximating the route that Chief Joseph and his people took when they were forcibly removed from their home and ordered to settle on the Lapwai reservation in Idaho. Murphy looks up the story on Eva’s phone. Murphy with his gloomy thoughts. Murphy who is drawn to this ghastly history like a moth to a flame.

  “I remember this from eleventh grade,” he says, holding the phone up. “I had to write an essay about it.”

  Joseph’s real name was something like Hinmatóowyalahtq’it, or “thunder rolling from the mountains.” He had long been committed to peaceful coexistence with the duplicitous Americans, but he could not accept the insulting and unjust resettlement order. His resistance provoked a series of violent clashes that led to the Nez Perce War, so-called, which was not a war at all but a thousand-mile fighting retreat as Joseph and his people, pursued by the U.S. Army but winning every battle, fled to Montana to seek refuge with their Crow allies.

  “Oh no,” says Murphy. “I remember this part too. From that Ken Burns ser
ies.”

  When they were betrayed by the Crow, they tried to reach Canada and claim political asylum, as Sitting Bull had done, but they were intercepted a few miles from the border. Here, starving and freezing, Joseph was forced to surrender, and here, too, he is supposed to have made his famous speech, which concludes: “I will fight no more forever.” But the speech might have been written later by a white journalist, and of course, as we hardly need to say, the terms of the surrender were not honored, they never are. In this case, credit for the initial betrayal goes to none other than William Tecumseh Sherman.

  Dear Baby, Never make a treaty with a white man.

  Eva listens and tries to concentrate as Murphy narrates this story, but her mind wanders. Baby singing a song that goes: “Nicorette, she’s a girl I know.” Baby encouraging her to use words like honeyed and riven in her poetry. Or buying meat at the vet school, for God’s sake. Or driving a stolen golf cart. Or out on the town, leading her astray. One second, she thinks, we’re looking up the nutritional value of a hazelnut, the next we’re crouched on an ex’s porch and Baby’s using my car key to cut the screen off an open bedroom window.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Dawes Act further divided Indian territories and opened large areas of tribal land to white settlers, a religious movement called the Ghost Dance swept through the remaining indigenous communities in the West. Its adherents believed that ritual purification, Native American unity, and the correct practice of the ritual dance itself would restore balance to the universe. They believed that the ancestors would return to fight on behalf of the living, that the buffalo would multiply once again, that the white people would leave and evil would be rinsed from the earth. They believed that everything would be as it had been. They believed that the disaster of the present was a bad dream. Some of the dancers wore ghost shirts that were supposed to be impervious to the white man’s bullets.

  Eva is pregnant, sick to her stomach, oppressed by the demands of The Almighty, but she’s in a great frame of mind. She’s writing a poem. She wants to travel. It’s Murphy, thinking dark thoughts about America and American history, who requires consolation. There’s no reason or justice in these matters. He lies with his head in her lap and his eyes closed. Eva holds him tight while she reads his letter to their notional child. Some passages are scrawled in a big looping hand and some are written with micrographic precision. The sentiments, too, are uneven. But she knows that he’s sensitive to criticism.

  “It’s great,” she says

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course it is! It’s full of good insights.”

  “I’m going to revise it. It’s turned into a list of sorrowful aphorisms.”

  “I see what you mean, but it’s still very good. We might just include a few more nice things, to balance out the mood.”

  Murphy thinks for a long time, and eventually he says, “You can plant a pineapple top and it’ll root down and start to grow.”

  “Perfect. I’ll write that down.”

  “Eventually it will produce a pineapple. They’re delicate, so you have to make sure the plant never gets cold.”

  Because the elite concierge service Universal Health Care is the only option she’s investigated, that’s the one Eva chooses. It is among the most expensive and least universally accessible of concierge medicine services, and she feels guilty about this, but she wants the promised health care advocate. She needs help navigating the complexities of managing her wellness.

  So now, easy as anything, she has an appointment in Missoula, Montana, where she is to have her blood removed, as Murphy persists in saying, and subjected to extensive tests. It pays to pay a huge amount for health care. The doctor’s office is like a resort hotel, and when she feels light-headed after having her blood drawn, they give her a choice of small pies. Her pregnancy is confirmed, and the tests will shortly reveal that all is well. She is instructed to continue not eating soft cheese.

  Murphy, too, gets a kind of going-over at the doctor’s office. Meanwhile, he broods over his injury. Maybe it will heal funny and it will never be the same.

  “But then again,” he says, “it’s true every day that we’re not what we were yesterday.”

  He peers out the window. The street ends abruptly in a spray of gravel a hundred yards away, at which point a dramatic treeless butte rises above the city.

  “We won’t tell the baby that,” says Eva. “At least not at first.”

  The Nez Perce passed through Missoula too. Murphy presses his hands together and frowns. He looks like he might burst into tears.

  “I should be the one consoling you,” he says.

  The Ghost Dance was associated with resistance to the Dawes Act, and white officials worried that it would spark violent confrontation. That’s why they were so worried when they were told that Sitting Bull intended to support the movement. They sent Lakota policemen to arrest him, and he was killed during the struggle that followed.

  Everything is just beginning and everything is already over, and it’s all happening at the same time. To Matthew McConaughey, time is like a cube that can be entered at any point, and to an entity like Yahweh, time is just the medium in which a certain kind of business must be transacted. To the right kind of physicist, time is a probabilistic phenomenon and the difference between the past and the future exists only in the context of heat exchange, or increasing entropy. But none of that makes history any easier to stomach. None of that makes parenthood any more comprehensible to those who must prepare themselves for it.

  “I can’t help it,” Eva says, lifting her legs and admiring her bamboo socks. “Sometimes I think everything is great. Sometimes I’m happy. I know it’s not a defensible position.”

  The American Ideas Conference is an annual event at which CEOs and visionaries and writers and artists share their “ideas,” if they have any, and discuss the future of the American nation-state, if they believe it has one. The billionaires also do what billionaires do best, which is make deals that will earn them additional billions. Those guests who are not billionaires watch this process with envy.

  “It’s the biggest test so far,” says Murphy. “Be kind to these people. Try to respect their humanity.” He glances around suspiciously.

  For context, Peach Valley is on the hundred and thirteenth meridian, receives 13.02 inches of precipitation annually, and has a cold semiarid climate (Köppen climate classification BSk). It’s also high up at about 5,200 feet. The Peach Valley Club itself costs something like a million dollars to join. Astonishing figure. It is indeed a lavish retreat, and Murphy and Eva look a little out of place in so rarefied an environment. The Pequod is coated with dust, the collards are ragged, Fluffy 2 is stained purple with raspberry juice, and what’s more, what’s more, there’s an ancient Near Eastern god in the back seat, peevishly demanding Gatorade. But they are rich, after all, and in that sense they belong. The shoe Murphy wears on his good foot is a Ferragamo loafer, and Eva is wearing her red Dolce & Gabbana leggings, although she’s cut them off at the mid-thigh and she’s calling them her “fancy pants.” They check in and they are Mrs. and Mr. Jane Pierce, no questions asked.

  They’re relieved to see old Barney, who embraces them and hopes they had an easy trip. He has a blood pressure cuff velcroed to his left arm.

  “Have you heard the name of the Lord,” says Eva, “which is Yahweh?”

  “I could use his help about now. I think it was when I saw you last that I had the chip in my throat?”

  “UPS was tracking you that way,” says Murphy.

  “The results were not conclusive. There was a biopsy but damn me if it wasn’t negative.”

  “What’s the diagnosis?”

  “The diagnosis,” says Barney, suppressing a belch, “is that there is nothing wrong with me. Do you know what they call my kind of discomfort?”

  “Gastritis.”

  “Gastritis, yes. Gastritis. Which is just Greek for stomach problem.”

&n
bsp; “Is it Greek?”

  “It could be Phoenician for all I know. The outcome is I’m at square one, my friends. I’m no closer to the answer as to what is really wrong with me. I’m only drinking deionized water, to be safe.”

  Now it’s time to pop off to their suite in order to change and shower and rest. Barney sends up a sterling silver dish of hand-sliced meat for Fluffy 2, who is by now accustomed to luxury accommodations and sniffs disparagingly at this meal. Eva is ravenous and longs to eat some, but the meat is uncooked and pregnant women must not eat raw animal products. Murphy does eat some, which distresses the footman who has delivered it. He soon returns with a fresh portion, presumably to spare Fluffy 2 the indignity of eating from a plate that another guest has touched.

  While Eva takes a shower, Murphy turns on the television and lets the electronic colors wash over him. Sporting events are being contested. Celebrities are crashing their cars and making speeches to highway patrolmen. Dams across the nation are close to failure. Here’s a commercial for a vehicle that enhances one’s sense of individual liberty. Here’s a football player boasting that he will be “even more focused on team-based play” this year. Here’s the president smirking beneath his unforgivable hair.

  Eva is sitting on the edge of the tub thinking about how nice the tub is, and the suite, and everything. She’s thinking about all that money in her checking account. It isn’t as if she doesn’t feel bad about the fancy pants and the Ferragamo loafers and the luxury hotels. To balance things out, metaphysically speaking, she has donated more than six million dollars to the ACLU and a handful of environmental advocacy groups. They’ve been sending her special updates to tell her what her money’s been doing. She wonders idly if these charitable donations count in the great karmic ledger. Are they annulled by the fact that she often donates money after making some extravagant purchase for herself? But maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. Her own soul is of no account. All that matters is that the good guys have the money they need.

  Murphy lowers himself gingerly to the floor, sets his crutches aside, and does a few sit-ups and other non-weight-bearing exercises. Then he consults the binder of conference materials. Seminars and panel discussions take place in the mornings, and in the afternoons there are recreational activities. This tapestry of summer fun is checkered with high-quality informal rustic meals.