The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

  While examining the schedule, he discovers two things of tremendous interest. The first is that he himself is to discuss his own American Ideas on a panel tomorrow morning, during one of the conference’s first sessions. The second is that he, “Pierce,” is properly John Ransom Pierce, the heir to a Carolina textile fortune and a senior partner at Byzantium Capital, a firm whose true nature he is unable to grasp, although he grabs Eva’s phone and pursues the matter across several websites. The title of his panel will be “New South, Old Problems.”

  He looks at a few pictures of John Ransom Pierce. He is an aging bon vivant, and he does look plausibly like Murphy.

  Eva strolls out of the bathroom and begins to rummage around in her bag. She can’t or won’t pay attention to what Murphy’s telling her.

  “John Crowe Ransom?”

  “John Ransom Pierce.”

  She pulls a few items of clothing out and tosses them on the floor. “I’ve got a present for you,” she says. “I wrote you a poem.” She pulls out her bag of toiletries and flicks it over her shoulder. She removes a few books and sets them aside. She straightens up and frowns. “It’s okay if you don’t like it.” She pulls a few more things out and then she gives up and dumps everything on the floor. A brochure for a mining museum flutters to the ground. She’s written the poem on the back.

  “I don’t know if it’s good or not.”

  It’s not a love poem that rhymes, or a nature poem about standing in a stream, and she hasn’t used the words honeyed or riven. It’s a poem about a night out with Baby. Drunk-driving, breaking into that ex-lover’s house, playing Big Buck Hunter at Buffalo Wild Wings. If you’ll allow us the liberty, it’s a poem about the way in which a new baby is incorporated only gradually into a mother’s already cluttered and problematic life. A life so full of mistakes and regrets. It ends like this:

  From the corner of my eye I see him nod,

  hold up his glass of beer and take a sip,

  as if he’s about to tell me everything, right after this—

  but he just sits there, staring, slumped on the table,

  hot sauce on his belly and lips. I drop the gun

  and pick him up. Poor Baby. Something’s gone terribly wrong.

  It’s not a poem about the baby’s innocence, that is. It’s about the mother discovering her own innocence, and losing it, or something like that. Who really knows? Poems are poems.

  In any case, Murphy is enchanted, but he doesn’t have a good and credible way of telling her how much he likes it. This always happens. He’ll say he loves it, and she’ll never know how deeply he means it.

  Unfortunately, there’s no time to linger over the mystery of art. Their next task is to outfit themselves for the weekend. Murphy slips the poem into his pocket and they ride back down to the lobby and visit the boutique clothiers.

  Murphy’s concern is that Pierce has been a figure of fun for too long. He’s anxious to project an air of professionalism at his panel tomorrow. The sales associate brings him various shirts and slacks and he selects items of a pronounced and almost offensive modesty. With the exception of the clothing he’ll wear tonight, all of this stuff will be modified to his unique specifications by tomorrow morning at the latest. The tailor who takes his measurements isn’t fazed by the crutches.

  Eva, however, might as well be attending a conference on Mars for all she cares about conventional human clothing. She tries on a pair of $1,400 “floral jacquard culottes.” They are wide and garish and billowing and they look deeply strange on her slender frame. No doubt she’s working through some self-consciousness vis-à-vis the imminent transformation of her body. Luckily, the person waiting on her says that he cannot “in good conscience” permit her to make this purchase. She nods and asks if he’s heard the name of the Lord, which is Yahweh, and he says “Yes, thank you” in a deferential tone.

  Tonight’s cocktail party and rustic evening meal take place outside among the glowing heat lamps. It is, as promised, an informal gathering. Excessive formality is for the peasants, who are compelled to affirm and reaffirm their significance with empty ceremony. But it’s lucky that Murphy and Eva have taken some time with their clothing, because everyone here is in uniform, so to speak. The finance people and the high-class CEOs swan about in slacks and jackets, cable-knit cashmere sweaters, plain black dresses and scarves and flats. The Silicon Valley people wear their iconic hooded sweatshirts, crisp tight jeans, and little slippery shoes. Careful of stress fractures, friends! There’s a group we might characterize, unfairly and unpleasantly, as blue-collar CEOs—the manufacturers of pool toys and cat food and so on—and they tend to be dressed more carelessly, with something approaching true informality, like children who have rushed to clothe themselves in their hurry to catch the school bus. The artists are dressed with studied eccentricity. Here’s a woman who specializes in outsized LED sculptures, and she’s wearing iridescent black tights and a yellow raincoat over a blue bikini top. She looks a little like Eva, who wears a provocatively short black dress, rain boots, and sunglasses. Instead of a shawl or scarf, she’s got a child’s blanket with sleepy bears on it.

  Murphy chats with Dexter Philpot, the wealthy CEO of Beyond Human, whom he accosted in Phoenix. He’d like to know more about genetic engineering, but he’s distracted by Philpot’s watch.

  “It’s a Franck Muller Crazy Hours watch,” says Philpot.

  “The numbers are in the wrong places.”

  “It’s a steal at twenty thousand dollars.”

  “But can you tell time with it?”

  “I use my phone to tell time. But this watch gets me to think about time. When I look at it, I realize that time is precious and fleeting.”

  This sounds just like something Murphy himself would say, but as he stands here on his crutches, his poem in his pocket, his bosom swelling with love and truth, he knows that this watch is a piece of garbage.

  Rebecca Hugginson, COO of Whisperer, has a baby on her hip, an accessory that manages to be informal and ostentatious at the same time. She has explained on numerous occasions that her role as a mother is at least as important as her role as an innovator. Alas, she and her husband have recently divorced for what both parties describe as “personal reasons.” Both Murphy and Eva sneak frequent glances at the baby. He, or she, isn’t drinking beer and doesn’t look capable of driving a car.

  Mrs. and Mr. Pierce have some friends among the guests. Michael Hock, who made his fortune selling rubber dog toys, greets Murphy warmly and wants to know what’s up with the crutches. Murphy says he ran himself over with a golf cart. Hock nods sympathetically. He’s having some troubles of his own. He and his CEO pal, timber baron and developer Bill Cruncher, went for a pre-conference hike this morning, but in the mountains they encountered poison ivy or something similar and now their legs are quilted with angry sores. Hock says it doesn’t matter. The pain is just another way to experience his strength.

  After a kind of respite, Eva is beginning to feel bad again. She can’t drink, because of the baby. Nor can she enjoy any soft cheese. Nor will Yahweh let her alone. Again and again, she feels the spirit of the Lord come over her and she speaks in ecstasy among the people.

  “His name is Yahweh!” she says to the crowd at the bar. “And can you even contemplate the thunderings from his pavilion? But that’s just the mere whisper that we perceive of him. When he holds back the waters, they dry up, and when he lets them loose, they tear up the land.”

  Some guests are good-natured about it, and others are not. A stern media personality—a woman whom Eva admires tremendously for her outspoken defense of women’s reproductive rights—takes her to task.

  “Are you saying Yahweh? Am I hearing you correctly?”

  “Yahweh Yahweh Yahweh,” says Eva, in ecstasy.

  “The despotic tyrannical totemic Man God. The Ur-Man. The thing itself.”

  “I’m sorry. I have to say it. I have no choice. I’m such an admirer of your work.”

  “I,�
�� says the media personality, “believe that we ought to do good in this world because that is the right thing to do. Is it really very hard to say what’s good and what’s bad? Do we need a demon to tell us? We just need to do things that increase the sum of human happiness and don’t add to the sum of misery.”

  “That’s what I believe too!”

  “If I wear a tinfoil hat and tell you that the Hubble telescope has instructed me to murder my child, you’ll tell me I’m crazy and hopefully you’ll call the police. But if I tell you that a Mesopotamian rain god is watching my every move and won’t permit me to work on Sundays, custom requires you to treat my claim with respect.”

  “You sound like Satan. That’s exactly what Satan would say.”

  The woman gives her a doubtful look.

  “But I agree!” says Eva. “None of this is my choice. It’s not like I believe in Yahweh. It’s not like I trust in him at all. I don’t even like him.”

  Eva explains that when she was young, they made her say her prayers and she thought God was watching her when she got undressed. Then she read books and pulled herself together. Education changed her life. And now Yahweh won’t leave her alone. What a joke. But it doesn’t mean she’s not a secular humanist.

  The media personality seems to recognize that something more is going on here. Maybe she sees a young woman deranged by her passage through this cruel man’s world. She places a hand on Eva’s shoulder and repeats, “Yahweh is a symbol of woman’s oppression. It’s more important than ever that we understand that. We can give him no quarter.”

  These ideas are of course central to Murphy and Eva’s own secular orthodoxy. But now Eva’s tongue won’t move. Another of Yahweh’s tricks.

  Murphy catches sight of her as she crosses the patio, but from a distance she seems more or less in control of herself. Meanwhile, he’s hanging around with a group of six Internet people whose cumulative net worth exceeds ten billion United States dollars. He himself possesses a smaller fortune, but he is John Ransom Pierce, a not inconsiderable figure, and he has decided to test the Mount Trashmore idea on them.

  “We’re locked into about ten feet of sea-level rise. Ten feet at least. That’s an optimistic assessment. What nobody understands is that it’s a foregone conclusion. This would be true even if the government were still making real policy. The ice is out of equilibrium.”

  “We understand,” says Li Wei, founder and CEO of Klllickt.

  “It’s certainly doesn’t help that we identified the worst person in America and made him president. But what nobody gets is that we’re committed to this amount of sea-level rise in any case. South Florida is going to be inundated. It’s going to happen. It’s unavoidable.”

  “We all know this by now,” says Li Wei. “We think about it all the time.”

  Murphy keeps trying to lift his good leg off the ground and balance on his crutches. He says, “We have to think about this calamity in two ways. First, we in the private sector need to recommit ourselves to climate justice. There’s a lot we can do, no matter what’s happening in Washington. We’ve got all the momentum.”

  “Distributed solar,” says Li Wei. “Energy storage on the customer side of the meter.”

  Guy Pleurisy, CEO of Diddler, says that the new batteries are incredible.

  “But the illiberal part of it,” Murphy says, “is that we need to be alive to the opportunities that a radically altered climate will provide. Apocalyptic thinking is one thing, but we will need to live in the future as well. I’m talking about apocalyptic entrepreneurship. Think about Greenland wheat. And the Northwest Passage. You all are the innovators.”

  They are; they know it; they nod.

  “I do have one project of my own in mind,” he says. “I’m involved with some people who are planning to build a lunar-powered resort on a mountain of trash. But forgive me, I don’t mean to talk business all night.”

  Eva is beginning to lose what little composure she’s been able to maintain. She is tormented by ecstasy. The spirit of the Lord comes every few minutes, like contractions, and she pursues the CEOs and luminaries across the garden.

  “He will destroy your vineyards and make your women barren!” she screams. “Please listen to me! He’ll turn your homes into places where the Lilith reposes! He’ll requite you for your abominations! And then you’ll know that he is the Lord!”

  On the other hand, there’s a sense in which she doesn’t seem any crazier than the more eccentric of the CEOs. Gina Montez, who made her $1.2 billion in frozen empanadas and other ethnic treats, has sent her G550 jet back home to Seattle, where it’s to retrieve a bottle of wine from her five-thousand-bottle wine cellar. She has managed to conceive of a desire for the one bottle of wine that the resort itself doesn’t possess. And Johnny “Enterprise” Erickson, who earlier described himself to Murphy as “a simple man with simple tastes,” has demanded a flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that he calls “Gonzo Malt Madness”—a flavor that does not exist and must be improvised for him by the kitchen staff. Thus his desire for a thing has served to bring that thing into being. It’s like George Bernard Shaw says: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

  The media personality is taking Michael Hock to task. “The United States is one of only a handful of countries with no law on the books to guarantee paid family leave,” she says. “Depending on what you’re talking about, the other countries include Lesotho, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.” Michael Hock protests that he’s entitled to his own opinion, but the media personality corrects him: “You are entitled to an opinion as long as that opinion is informed by a responsible consideration of the available data. We seem to have forgotten this in America today. If your opinion is a matter of prejudice or it derives from poor information, it is not an opinion and you are not entitled to it.”

  Bill Cruncher, by now soggy with booze, attempts to fix a dysfunctional heat lamp and creates a sensation by setting his hair on fire.

  “Well,” says a famous journalist, accosted by Eva, “what I’d like to ask Yahweh is what was he thinking with the prostate gland? Why make a gland that totally surrounds the vital ureter? If there’s any inflammation, it just closes that vital tube right off. Can Yahweh answer that one?”

  A candy manufacturer tells Murphy: “What I don’t get is how vanilla ever came to be synonymous with plain. Vanilla is an absolutely ambrosial flavor that we derive from the seedpod of a Mesoamerican orchid.”

  It should be said that many of the billionaires behave well. Surely it’s true that people who are pleasant and affable prior to making their first billion generally remain pleasant and affable afterward. But some of them, like Ms. Montez and Johnny Enterprise, suffer from a derangement that sociologists have called Sudden Wealth Syndrome. We understand it like this: Newly minted billionaires know, as we all know, that everything they have will be taken from them by death, or Yahweh, whichever you prefer. There is therefore an enormous imperative to 1) enjoy the new money before the curtain comes down, and 2) use the new money to buy a life that is as free from inconvenience as possible. But since money will not buy any more happiness than each individual is capable of experiencing, and since life is inevitably fraught with inconvenience, a new billionaire is doomed to disappointment, and therefore also to rage, and struggles continuously to come to grips with the ultimate cause of that disappointment and rage, which is death, or Yahweh, with which, or with whom, none of us can come to grips. Thus the demand for Gonzo Malt Madness.

  Eva retreats to a quiet corner with Barney, who is too preoccupied with his health problems to mingle freely with his guests. He takes his temperature and records the value in a little notebook.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted,” he says. “You know how it is with illness. It’s so difficult to think of anything else. But I’m going to get this thing licked after all.”


  She thinks: I’m pregnant I’m pregnant I’m pregnant. But pregnancy is not an illness.

  “How has your summer been?” he says.

  “We went to the Grand Canyon.”

  “Lovely.”

  “And we saw the coast redwoods too.”

  “What a nice time you must have had!”

  “I keep telling myself that everything’s okay. Despite everything.”

  “A nice mantra, if you can make it stick.”

  “Sometimes I think everything is okay.”

  “That makes two of us,” he says.

  “And also I’m pregnant!”

  Barney slaps his forehead and falls back against the wall. It’s the best news, he says. He felt his blood pressure go down just like that.

  The sense of value judgment in the distinction between old money and new money—between sudden wealth, one might say, and chronic wealth—is distasteful but ancient. Aristotle himself said that the newly rich “have the vices of wealth in a greater degree and more; for, so to say, they have not been educated to the use of wealth. Their unjust acts are not due to malice, but partly to insolence, partly to lack of self-control, which tends to make them commit assault and battery and adultery.” But the distinction is meaningless in the United States, where there is no hereditary aristocracy. The great fortunes are made by con men, brigands, ferry captains, computer programmers, and fur traders. Just look at how Murphy and Eva have gotten rich. Just think of John Jacob Astor, who, at one memorable dinner party, is said to have wiped his mouth on his hostess’s dress. The whole nation is suffering from Sudden Wealth Syndrome.

  By now it’s getting late. The sun is down, the night is cold. Some guests are beginning to retire. You don’t become a billionaire by sleeping your life away, but you also don’t become a billionaire, divine intervention notwithstanding, by burning the candle all the way down on the first night of an exclusive conference. Ms. Montez, her wine safely retrieved, enjoys that wine, or believes she enjoys it, in her hot tub, where time passes more quickly, or is more likely to pass. Johnny Enterprise has his ice cream, but it’s a disappointment because the kitchen staff has not had time to work up the garish packaging he envisioned. Michael Hock sleeps on his terrace in the cold, dreaming sweet dreams of his rural boyhood.