by Aaron Thier
The audience is silent, stunned or delighted by the turn things have taken. Lemieux appears to be listening closely.
“I can see how this might be confusing if you haven’t been with us in the Pequod,” says Eva. “Think of it like this: Yahweh is just another kangaroo in the cosmic orchard. We can actually be fairly certain of that, based on his behavior. It’s kangaroo behavior. Maybe he hears the communication from the higher level, but he lives here with us and he’s susceptible to moonsanity just like we are. He can’t stand the sound of the apples. Maybe his real name is Yaldabaoth. He doesn’t know anything about the fullness, but he longs for it. Like all of us.”
“He won’t follow us to Mars,” says Lemieux.
“The colonization of Mars is the same as nude mud wrestling.”
The security guards have come alive. They climb the stage and advance, arms wide, like men trying to calm a shying horse. Eva ignores them.
“A black hole is a puncture in the fabric of space-time, but it’s also an object. It’s a hole, but it’s a fullness. Time moves very slowly when you get close to a thing like that. Unless black holes are really hot. Or doesn’t it matter? Heat just makes it more likely that logic exists.”
“Are you talking about Boltzmann?” says Lemieux. “Are you talking about entropy?”
“There’s another idea that space-time is like granulated sugar and sometimes it’s nowhere, so how do you puncture it? I get to this part of my argument and I enter the cosmography of hope. Is the soul the part of the human that exists outside of time? And if that’s the part that counts, then is my reason for wanting to have a baby that the baby already exists, and I just want to effect a coincidence that will enable me to hang out with him? Or her. I think my algebra is getting in the way. I’ve been too logical about this. All summer I’ve been too logical. Let me put it this way: The Bible is just a record of human experience. All of us are alive because someone took care of us when we were small. The universe seems strange when we learn about it, but it’s still the same home we’ve always had. Backyard green tree cemetery dawns. It’s the towns you don’t see that are the best ones.”
One of the security guards puts a hand on Eva’s shoulder and says, “Time to go.”
“But I wanted to tell you about goodness. That was my whole point. I wanted to say why it’s okay to have a baby.”
The security guard raises an eyebrow.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you shave your head. Matthew McConaughey sees all of time and he still cares, so why shouldn’t I? I wanted to talk about fusion. I know I’m causing a problem here. Just let me tell you what I really mean. I am the eye of the light. Is there an echo in here? I am the whore and the holy.”
She can feel her thoughts unraveling. Is it another of Yahweh’s jokes? Is all of this just exactly what he wants her to say?
She follows the security guards off the stage, but before stepping down she turns and addresses the audience one more time: “In the time of Trump there was a prophet named Eva, and this is what she said.”
Let’s imagine the movie version. In the grasslands of central East Africa there is a community of apes, just tubes really, that’s all they are, and they’ve got pincers and tent pegs and kazoos and sensors and a kind of electrical jelly to coordinate all their activities, and they’re like all the other animals, true, but they’re smarter. Maybe consciousness is just a symptom of information processing, or maybe it’s a kind of miracle, inaccessible to scientific inquiry. In any case, these apes develop techniques and strategies that enable them to outpace biological evolution and survive in every environment on Earth, no matter how inhospitable, and in that sense they are something altogether new, altogether exceptional.
Of course, from another perspective, the apes are just avatars. They are one manifestation of some general rules and principles, and there are other avatars out there, manifestations of other rules and other principles. There are mountains, rivers, stars, gods. The universe is busy with cognition. But some avatars are more problematic than others, and in Mesopotamia the apes encounter a rapacious and jealous god they call Yahweh. For many years, for thousands of years, he torments them, murders them, sows discord among them. And sometimes he exalts them. And somehow he manages to destroy or banish most of the other gods. For the apes it’s a nightmare scenario—everywhere they turn, there he is, and he’s in their hearts too. Sometimes they worry that he’s taken away their power of self-determination. How will they get out of this one?
But their curiosity is insatiable, their intellectual and technological progress is unstoppable, and gradually they begin to turn the tide. They conquer some of Yahweh’s favorite diseases. They learn to rewrite their genetic instructions, excising or correcting some of the bits that make them susceptible to wretchedness and depravity. And one day they build a spaceship that carries the best and brightest of them to Mars, and there in the red dust they establish a colony, they build cities, they live in peace and harmony. Yahweh does not follow them. There is never any slavery on Mars.
When they return to Earth, they’re wearing red Martian ghost shirts that not even neutrinos can penetrate. They have assembled an arsenal of miracles. They have climbed to the next rung on the avatar ladder. They meet Yahweh under a flag of truce in the California sun and they say, “Let’s talk. Let’s make peace.” Sitting Bull is there. Chief Joseph is there. Matt Damon is there. They dance the Ghost Dance together. And when Yahweh turns to shout at someone, when he’s fishing around for a piece of gum, when he’s distracted—what then? Will they do what Yahweh himself might do, will they do what he has taught them, will they part the sugary curtain of space-time and shove him out into the cold quantum nowhere? Or will goodness prevail, and compassion? Will they show him mercy?
Why is the world the way it is, and how can we accept it? We try so hard to make it intelligible. We say it’s raining up there on the mountain because of orographic lift, and our political geography is an artifact of slavery, and the universe is expanding into a fourth spatial dimension, but at what point are we just making things worse? Life is cluttered enough already with the furniture of metaphor, and someday soon, knock wood, that baby will be walking and asking why, why, why.
For now, Murphy, Barney, and John Ransom Pierce are strolling down the corridor to retrieve Eva from the office where she has voluntarily confined herself. Murphy has apologized to Barney and Pierce, who have forgiven him; Barney has apologized to Murphy and Pierce, who have forgiven him; Pierce has apologized to Barney and Murphy, who have forgiven him. Who’s guilty here, and of what?
“It’s just that I’ve been trying to take things as they come and do my duty,” says Murphy. “I didn’t want to disappoint anyone.”
“It’s really my mistake,” says Barney. “I’m damned if I can say how I made it, though.”
Pierce shakes his head. “It’s the strangest thing. I can’t even say how I got here. What I mean is, what have I been doing all summer? Where have I been? I can’t remember anything. I remember a box of latex gloves.”
The television is on as Murphy and Eva pack their things. A burger appears, followed by the slogan “Eat Thick.” Next comes a commercial for a new soft drink. When you remove the cap, the lights go out, loud music begins to play, and beautiful women press themselves against you. Fluffy 2 rushes around the room and yelps, Murphy wonders if Jane Pierce was supposed to be the prophet, and Eva checks to see if Yahweh hath takeneth away all their money, but he hath not. And now here’s that Audi commercial.
Resort employees load Eva and Murphy’s things into the Pequod, which has been washed and vacuumed. Someone has even watered the collards. Barney stands with them in the sun as they prepare to leave. In fact, he insists that there’s no reason for them to leave at all. They should feel free to stay the week and enjoy the conference, as compensation for their trouble.
“But Barney,” Eva says, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you don’t have a clue who we really are.”
And then they drive away. They have nowhere to go; they can go anywhere, at least in principle. They are back where they started and yet not really, because humans are mortal and time is only likely to flow in one direction, especially in the hot summer. They open the windows and smell the neutrinos on the breeze. Eva looks at cribs on her phone.
Dear Baby, Around the time of the Big Bang, the universe was in a low-entropy state, but it’s been all complexity and confusion since then.
Dear Baby, The Big Bang isn’t even the beginning of the universe! It’s just the end of our theoretical understanding.
At the entrance to Yellowstone National Park, rangers are passing out leaflets that read, “Many visitors have been gored by buffalo.” Inside, a marker informs them that the Nez Perce passed through the park during their astonishing journey. They were nearly trapped here, but they eluded their pursuers in a clever maneuver and fled north up the Clarks Fork Yellowstone River, which was named for William Clark, whose half-Indian son, an old man by then, was a member of Chief Joseph’s band.
Here they are, driving and driving, and the country looks pristine and godless. The sky is a clear pale dusty blue. The mountains gallop along out there on the horizon. Black holes are colliding and subatomic particles are winking in and out of existence. Murphy and Eva feel a great lightness of spirit. Suddenly they know that it was all a mistake. A cosmic mix-up. And maybe not even that. Maybe this whole summer is just a dream Eva’s been dreaming in Coconut Grove, and in another moment she’ll open her eyes and see the jackfruit tree outside the window.
But they’re wrong, or else the dream of being a person is simply one from which there’s no waking. Outside Gillette, Wyoming, Yahweh leaps in front of the car and waves them to the side of the road. They fear a climactic moment, perhaps even a kind of resolution, but they don’t get it. Everything is as it was. Yahweh speaks of his suffering. He stands in the sage and says, “But they will be my people! And I will be their God!”
“No,” says Eva. “Please. What about Jane Pierce?”
He slips a Pixy Stick from his pocket and sets it alight with a snap of his fingers. “You’re Jane Pierce.”
“I’m not! You’ve got it wrong!”
“You’re not Jane Pierce?”
“I’m not Jane Pierce. I’m someone else. This is all a misunderstanding.”
He holds the Pixy Stick out for them to examine. The fire burns but doesn’t consume it. He draws himself up.
“What I’d like you to do now is visit Tito’s Diner in Indianapolis.”
Eva is speechless.
“Tito’s Diner,” Yahweh says again, gazing out over the hot windless plain. “And there you will tell them that the name of the Lord is Yahweh.”
Dear Baby, In the West, the radio stations begin with K. In the West, the drivers are more reasonable. In the West, it doesn’t rain very much. In the West, in the West. The government is the largest landowner. The sage goes on and on.
Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, and Colorado and Utah were next. But Freedom, as Murphy says, died here in South Dakota, at Wounded Knee, when a band of Miniconjou Lakota were massacred by U.S. cavalrymen. They fought back, like always, and managed to kill a number of the soldiers, but the massacre marked the end of armed indigenous resistance in America. The buffalo were gone and the ancestors weren’t coming back. The old hunting grounds were full of white settlers. Yahweh was there too. He was chewing his spruce gum and laughing.
Murphy says, “My library books!”
Dear Baby, We don’t mean to give you the impression that it’s all hopelessness and misery out here. We have plenty of nice things to recommend. Try a little cider vinegar in cold water. Dry some laundry in the sun. Recite Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to a pet. Listen to Beethoven’s Fifteenth String Quartet on the first snowy day of the year.
And if, Dear Baby, you think you’d like to cut the screen off someone’s bedroom window, please don’t, please don’t.
For a long time there are no trees, and then there are trees. They eat Eastern Carolina barbecue in Rapid City. They visit Wall Drug, famous for being famous. They cross the hundredth meridian and visit Sioux Falls, where the average annual precipitation has climbed to 26.34 inches and there’s the tiniest bit of midwestern moisture in the air.
“My computer has been on this whole time!” says Murphy.
Sitting Bull’s name was Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, except it wasn’t, because the Sioux had no written language, so he wrote “Sitting Bull” when he gave autographs, and he gave autographs all the time, especially when he was traveling with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. He didn’t save any money because he kept giving it away to homeless people. He made sure his children learned English and were prepared to live in the white man’s world, but as for himself, he said, “I would rather die an Indian than live a white man.” And when he addressed the hated Dawes Commission, he said, “I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.”
This happened yesterday and it’s happening today and it will happen tomorrow. Time is some kind of cube, that’s what Matthew McConaughey will tell you, but the big questions have no answers and the big problems can’t ever be resolved, and the tragedy of Sitting Bull and the Sioux is only one tragedy among many. How can we explain to you, Dear Baby, that this is the way it works? It doesn’t make any sense. We are recent immigrants living on stolen land in a country built by slaves, and we carry on, knowing nothing, saying anything, and feeling inexpressibly privileged to be here frowning in the light of the world.
So Murphy and Eva drive and drive. Maybe they return to the Northeast, where they both grew up, there to live among their former selves, there to be overtaken by their future selves, just as we have overtaken them already, or been overtaken by them.
Dear Baby, We think it was that other Murphy, Beckett’s Murphy, or else friends of that Murphy, who said that life is a fever and a dream, and a wandering to find home.
Dear Baby, Happiness comes and goes like weather. Don’t count on it, and don’t count it out.
There are simply things you can’t do anything about. Almost everything, in effect. Maybe that’s the lesson. Today Yahweh is jazzed up about the Trash Mountain Temple. He unrolls some new blueprints and says, “And I will enter by this door, and no human shall enter, but if a human shall enter he shall enter by this door, and by the back door I shall enter, but no one may enter after …”
They are sitting at a picnic table at a rest stop in Iowa. This is just part of their lives, at least for now. The world is what it is. It’s not perfect.
We think of Murphy and Eva on the road that summer, or this summer, or some summer to come. Murphy the heir to a textile fortune and Eva the prophet. We wake up in the darkness and listen to the rain on the roof, and we wonder at the traffic of all those Murphys and Evas in the wet American night. In this world and the next. In this galaxy and the next. In this ballooning Tic Tac of a universe and the next.
Dear Baby, We loved you when you were no more than a thought, and we’ll go on loving you.
Dear Baby, We think it might have been Emily Dickinson who said that one clover and a bee make a prairie, and you don’t even need the bee.
Acknowledgments
I want to express my deep gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts. May it live forever. Also thanks to: Cynthia Cannell, Audrey Thier, Peter Murphy, Paula Thier, Sam Thier, Zacc Dukowitz, Elizabeth Bevilacqua, Ryan Holiday, Callie Garnett, Sara Mercurio, and everyone else at Bloomsbury. And to Sidney Thier, for all his help. And I want to acknowledge the poets I quote, sometimes without attribution: Weldon Kees, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson. But I especially want to thank my beloved real wife, th
e real poet Sarah Trudgeon, whose real poems I attribute to Eva in this novel. These include “The Mad Pigeon in the Attic,” originally published in the Times Literary Supplement; bits of “It’s a Big-Buck World” and related poems, which appear in The Plot Against the Baby; and “Poem for Malcolm X.” Thanks to Sarah also for all kinds of help with the manuscript itself.
A Note on the Author
Aaron Thier is the author of the novels Mr. Eternity, a finalist for the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor, and The Ghost Apple, a semifinalist for the 2015 Thurber Prize. A contributor to the Nation and a graduate of Yale University and the MFA program at the University of Florida, Thier received a 2016 NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing. He lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Also Available from Aaron Thier
Mr. Eternity
Present day Key West. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying. In short, everything is going to hell. It’s here that two young filmmakers find something to believe in: an old sailor who calls himself Daniel Defoe and claims to be five hundred and sixty years old.
In fact, old Dan is in the prime of his life—an incredible, perhaps eternal American life. The story unfolds over the course of a millennium, picking up in the sixteenth century in the Viceroyalty of New Granada and continuing into the twenty-sixth, where Dan serves as an advisor to the King of St. Louis. Some things remain constant throughout the centuries, and being on the edge of ruin may be one. In 1560, the Spaniards have destroyed the Aztec and Inca civilizations. In 2500, we’ve destroyed our own. But there are other constants too: love, humor, and old Dan himself, always adapting and inspiring others with dreams of a better life.