The World Is a Narrow Bridge by Aaron Thier

Author:Aaron Thier [Aaron Thier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635571417
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Yahweh greets them in the quiet chill of the morning. He’s in the back seat of the Pequod, where he’s using a curling iron to press charred ruffles into some of the collard leaves. Meaningless destruction. He has inserted the power cord into his mouth.

“Cut it out,” says Eva.

He grins, but he doesn’t release the cord, which hangs from his teeth like a noodle.

“I’m serious. Some of us need to eat those.”

He tosses the curling iron into the dust and commands them to go south. That’s all he came to say. The Southwest is an arid waste, a zone of desolation. Which appeals to him very much.

Eva turns to Murphy and says, “I had a dream that a giant almond was attacking me. Lindsey Graham promised he would help, but he did nothing.”

Now begins a period of wearisome activity, and Yahweh comes and goes throughout the next week, checking on their progress. He’s with them in Colorado Springs, where he says, “My own people act toward me like a bird of prey. But I am going to feed them wormwood and make them drink a bitter draft.”

In Springer, New Mexico, he pulls down a traffic light and causes an accident.

In Roswell, where everything is alien this and alien that, he has a crack-up, just like a human, weeping into Fluffy 2’s fur and saying that he’s lost Ishtar, that nobody knows his name, that Baal is more popular, that nobody will ever love and respect him as the Israelites once loved and respected him.

“My suffering!” he says. “They drink wrongdoing like water. They worship Baal and they’re happy.”

Eva wedges a collard leaf into her mouth and chews viciously. “Nobody’s happy.”

They aren’t allowed to plot their own route. In this respect, at the very least, they’ve lost their power of self-determination. Yahweh is there in person to hustle them to the next town, or else he speaks from the radio, or else his angels come pinging out of mailboxes or trash cans and instruct them to turn around and go back the way they’ve come. The itinerary that emerges is maddening, circuitous, pointless.

They pass through Indian reservations. The dusty land, the small breeze-block houses, the unfamiliar formatting of the road signs. These are whole nations confined to the most desolate and marginal corners of this desolate and marginal countryside. Yahweh loves to remove people from the land their ancestors have occupied for centuries, he loves dispossession and exile, he loves violence, but so, of course, do human beings, and although it’s fashionable to argue that most indigenous Americans died of disease as Euro-Americans overran these continents, that’s just an attempt to shift the blame unambiguously to Yahweh. The truth is that Euro-Americans killed as many indigenous Americans as they could, whenever they could, and they did it with glee. Consider the Sand Creek Massacre, which took place in Colorado in 1864. A detachment of U.S. soldiers under John Chivington murdered as many as two-hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women

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