To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

  So here’s what we’re going to do, he tells them, and sketches out a little plan he’s been devising, to bring into camp another god. But this time just one god, per the Israelites, because the one-single-god thing sure seems to be working out for them. The god’s name is Molek, and Molek has promised a whole bunch of things if the Amalekites just keep his covenant, the particulars of which include various prayers and sacrifices, walking thrice around a temple laden with wheat and gold, and the superbizarre practice of removing the pinkie finger from ten willing warriors who aren’t likely to heal in time for battle. “And he will take you to him for a people, and he will be to you a god; and ye shall know that he is Molek your god, which bringeth you out from under the burden of the Israelites,” reported my bio page. And they go into battle and lose another thirty thousand men.

  So they leave Rephidim for a place called Hazor, where they bicker and cower, licking their wounds and wondering what the hell to do next. The Israelites seem really determined, and the God of the Israelites is not the least bit fickle and is always really focused and effective. You get the impression that He’s really looking after these people, which gives Agag an idea, and he gathers the people around him. Gathering the people around him is getting to be a familiar trope by now, and one can’t help but fear for the fate of those eager to do the gathering around. “Every covenant hath utterly destroyed the cities of Amalek; every voice hath wrought sore destruction. Now even one god can save ye, the one living God that hath delivered unto your enemy a land flowing with milk and honey, and hath made of them a great nation, and given them ordinances of heaven and earth, and a Sabbath day, and hath sanctified and purified them, and bound them by a covenant, that they shall possess it forever, from generation to generation. Now I tell ye, all ye children of Amalek,” Agag continues in a new verse, which appeared line for line on my bio page, “the living God is with Israel, with all the children of Ephraim. And if ye take good heed to go with the living God of Israel, ye shall be spared the sword.”

  Can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Sounds like a good strategy to the desperate Amalekites, who enlist one of their own, a dead ringer for an Israelite, to steal into the Israelite camp, sniff around, and learn what he can learn. He comes back after the third day and tells them that, in order to be like the Israelites, they have to build an ark, and it should be made out of shittim wood so many cubits high and so many cubits long, and there are rules about the ark and the temple, and if anyone sins they’ll need to find a young bullock without blemish for a sin offering, and you can’t compel your brother to serve as a bond servant, and a whole bunch of other things. Oh, and everyone needs to get circumcised. And everyone’s like “Circumcised? What’s circumcised?” And the young Israelite-looking guy tells them what it means, and they’re all like “Jesus Christ, are you kidding?” And the Israelite-looking guy says he wishes. So all the men circumcise themselves, and they send messengers to the tribes of Israel to tell them what they’ve done, and they pray to the God of the Israelites that they be spared the sword.

  When the Israelites hear that the Amalekites have circumcised themselves “and were sore,” they crossed the valley boldly and slew them. “And there escaped not a man of the children of Amalek save four hundred, which rode upon camels to Mount Seir, and fled.”

  My bio page ended with the words, “From the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25–29.” I turned to Connie, who had been reading along with me.

  “That’s not how I remember it from Hebrew school,” she said.

  “Me again,” I wrote.

  Don’t think I’m not wondering why I’m still writing to you, Al. Look where it’s gotten me so far. But now that I know who you are, and can begin legal proceedings against you, maybe it’s time for you to cease any and all activity of this kind. The religious shit in particular. I’d rather you come for my money. Adult circumcision? A dude named Agag? I hope you hold this shit sacred, so that in the extreme unlikelihood that there is a God, you burn in hell.

  I’d say something off the cuff, like “I’d rather kill myself” or “Let me just slit my wrists” or “The only solution is to do ourselves in,” and she’d grow very somber, acquire a stillness, and with a passionate zeal in her voice, she’d say, “I hope you are not serious. Suicide is nothing to joke about.” And while I’d ponder that—she hoped I wasn’t serious but chastised me for joking—she’d say, “God alone is the arbiter of life and death. Suicide is a rejection of everything He has created, all the beauty and meaning in the world. Aren’t you capable of finding anything beautiful in the world?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not want to know about those websites. Please keep those disgusting websites to yourself. What I’m talking about is the sunrise, the sunset, the moon and the stars, the flowers in the botanical garden, the babies in their strollers. Isn’t there something besides grown women defiling themselves on the Internet you find beautiful?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Freedom is a concept, but I will accept it in the place of nothing else. But not the freedom to kill yourself. That is not freedom. That is the ultimate prison. My goodness, young man,” she’d say, “do you not look at the world around you? Do you never say to yourself, Look up! look up! on the chance that you might see a bird or a cloud, something that fills your heart with joy?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Yes, I agree, it passes too quickly. But good heavens, Paul, what is the point if we don’t possess it fully while it lasts? Everything is fleeting. Even ugliness. Even pain. Don’t you know the disservice you do to yourself when you let joy pass you by and hold on to the ugliness and pain?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not call that being honest. I call it failing to live a full life. Don’t you want to live the fullest life possible?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “You are not alone in feeling that way. If you want a name for it, it is called despair. I have known many people who, before they found God—” I’d cut her off right there as I’d done a thousand times before, and she’d say, “Fine. Forget God for the moment, if we must. It is the ultimate mistake, but for the sake of argument let us just forget God. But do consider, if we are here for such a brief time, and if there’s only so much opportunity, consider looking for the good. Shouldn’t we all look for the good, if only to keep our spirits up?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I understand there is not much good to be found looking at infection and neglect all day long. But what about coming to and from the subway? What about the walking tours you take? Is there not plenty of opportunity to look around you then and see… I don’t know what, something to help you carry on?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I know the subway is full of unhappy people, Paul. Oh,” she’d sigh, exasperated. But she’d persevere regardless, lovely, irrepressible Betsy. “I’m not talking about all the beaten-down people on the subway,” she’d say, and I’d make a few additions, and she’d say, “Or the deformed or the burned or the homeless. I’m asking about your walks to and from the subway station.” I’d answer, she’d say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Put the phone away once you enter the street and take a look around you. Why must you always be reading your phone?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “If you know it is merely a distraction from the many things you don’t want to think about, why let yourself be a slave to it?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “That is the most blasphemous thing I have ever heard. A little technology could never take the place of the Almighty. We are talking about the Almighty, for heaven’s sake. Mobile phones or no mobile phones, we still have the primal need to pray, do we not?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Sending and receiving email and texts are not a new form of prayer. Do you not understand that that little machine, by taking your attention away from God and the world He created, is only increasing your despair?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I don’t give a fig for the world it’s created. It will never rival God’s.” I’d ask her what I should be looking at, then, if not my phone, offering a few preemptive suggestions, and she’d say, “Yes, at the concrete. Yes, at the buildings. Yes, at the people. You might jus
t be surprised,” she’d say, “by all the beauty and joy you find. Don’t you want to be surprised?” I’d tell her, she’d say, she’d cock her head a little and purse her lips a little, and she’d say, reaching out her hand, “It is not too late for you, dear. Dear me, no, young man. It’s never too late.”

  Connie came up to me later that day and said, “Did you ever tell a joke about a priest and a rabbi to my uncle Michael?”

  Her uncle Michael was married to her mother’s sister Sally. He had a real-estate inspection business. Sally had stayed home with the kids, all grown now. They lived in a small house in Yonkers, but it was the right house, the perfect house. Somehow you knew that the minute you walked in. Considerate, warm people live here, you thought, people who know they have enough. It’s some kind of gift to realize you have enough and need no more. I was only in the house once, when Uncle Michael’s mother passed away and they sat shiva. I’d never sat shiva before. I’d hardly known about the practice and had to look it up on the Internet so as not to appear hopeless before Connie. So many people gathered nightly to sit shiva for Uncle Michael’s mother in Michael and Sally’s modest house that it was almost a shock when, after an hour or so, the Mourner’s Kaddish was sung, reclaiming the solemnity of the occasion from an almost-festive atmosphere. It was never festive in the immediate proximity of Uncle Michael or Aunt Sally or their children or any of Michael’s brothers and sisters, but for those of us out on the margins, where I was lurking, there was a lot of small talk and friendly conversation. I guess it was like any other funeral ceremony that way, a periphery of noise surrounding a nucleus of grief. But I also knew that it was unlike anything I’d experienced before, the act of sitting shiva. An Irish son attends a wake and buries the dead and then sits at home in private despair, but a Jewish son has seven nights to share his burden and his broken heart with his family and friends.

  “A priest and rabbi joke?” I said. “Where’s this coming from? I haven’t seen Michael in, what? Six months?”

  “This would have been a long time ago.”

  “Why are you bringing it up now?”

  “There was a rumor. I ignored it at the time. I thought people were just being difficult. Do you know a joke about a priest and a rabbi or not?”

  I was quiet. “I know lots of jokes.”

  “How many concern a priest and a rabbi?”

  I pretended to think about it.

  “Let me hear one,” she said.

  I cleared my throat. “A priest and a rabbi… ahem… excuse me. Okay, a priest and a rabbi hit the links bright and early one morning for a round of golf, but the foursome ahead of them keep holding them up.” I paused. “I learned this joke back when I was playing golf. That was a lifetime ago, Connie. I haven’t played golf in… Why do you want to know this?”

  “I want to hear the joke you told my uncle Michael.”

  “I’m not sure I would have told your uncle Michael this joke.”

  “Tell me the joke, Paul.”

  I preferred to be called Dr. O’Rourke inside the office, or even Dr. Paul, but I made no mention of this breach in protocol.

  “So they call the ranger over—actually, come to think of it, it’s a priest, a reverend, and a rabbi, the three of them together are going golfing. Like I said. It’s been a long time.” She gestured as if I were driving too slowly in the car in front of her. “Anyway, they call the ranger over, and the priest says, ‘We’ve been waiting to tee off for twenty minutes now, but those fellows ahead of us are taking an eternity. What gives?’ The ranger apologizes. ‘I can see why you men of God would be irritated,’ he says, ‘but have patience. Those poor men ahead of you are blind.’ The priest replies with a Hail Mary and a blessing, while the reverend says a prayer.”

  I stopped.

  “Why are you stopping?”

  “Should I go on?”

  “Is that the punch line?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me the punch line.”

  “But the rabbi, he takes the ranger aside and he says, ‘They can’t play at night?’ ”

  “That’s good,” she said, without smiling.

  “You’re not smiling.”

  “I’m curious to know why you thought it was an appropriate joke to tell my uncle Michael.”

  If I told Michael that joke, it was because I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted him to like me. I wanted them all to like me. I wanted to be a Plotz. I wanted to be a Jewish Plotz who sat shiva and went to shul and made babies with Connie behind the bulwark of safety that was the Plotz extended family.

  “Why,” I said, “is it anti-Semitic? It’s not anti-Semitic, is it?”

  I was always paranoid that I might be saying something anti-Semitic.

  “The man was sitting shiva for his mother,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that it might be bad timing?”

  “No, Connie,” I said, “that’s not when I told him that joke. I wouldn’t have told him that joke then. I wouldn’t have told him any joke then. Who told you I did that?”

  “I told you, it was a rumor. I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  “And you shouldn’t now! Connie, come on, I wouldn’t have told Michael a joke while the man was sitting shiva. I have better sense than that.”

  “Is that right, Paul Saul?” she said. “Tell me, please, all about your better sense.”

  I left her to tend to a patient.

  I had passed Carlton B. Sookhart’s Rare Books and Antiquities just off Park Avenue many times over the years and never dreamed I’d have reason to stop in. I did so that Friday. His office was part rare-books showcase, part cabinet of wonders. The main room was dressed in double-wide planks of Brazilian hardwood that howled underfoot like a splintering ship. A rolling ladder of matching hue tracked along the tall bookshelves where whispered all the dead and vital moments of human history. His desk was set off by a single step and a railing of twisting balusters as delicate as blown glass. Suspended behind him in Plexiglas sat an ancient sword with a gem-encrusted handle—“from the Crusades,” he said—and in the display case directly to his right, skulls aligned on one shelf obediently peered out into eternity. Our conversation began with an explanation of the rock on his desk, which looked like your average rock, no bigger than a baseball, but was in fact from a famous archaeological dig in Jerusalem. It now served Sookhart as paperweight. I felt sorry for any rock forced to leave a kingdom of buried secrets to sit on top of invoices in a cloistered room on Eighty-Second Street.

  I told him about the appearance of an unsolicited website for my dental practice and the fraudulent postings made in my name.

  “Have you heard of something called the Cantaveticles?” I asked him.

  “The Cantaveticles,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “A collection of cantonments?”

  “And what is a cantonment?” he asked.

  Every word was an inflection shy of a phony British accent. His shirtsleeves were turned up and his arms exposed to the elbow; as we talked, he stroked, a little obscenely, I thought, the copious white curls of his arm hair.

  Sookhart had brokered many high-profile transactions over the years: one between a Jordanian and the Israel Museum for a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a second involving an original Gutenberg Bible. He served as seller’s agent in both deals. In the late nineties, his reputation suffered a blow when a private collector and thermal chemist accused Sookhart of forgery. Carbon testing proved his dating of a leaf of the Aleppo Codex (from the long-missing Torah section) was off by several centuries. The Internet is a treasure tomb.

  I handed him a printout of my bio page, which prompted him to pat himself down before finding his reading glasses on his desk.

  “No, no, this is all wrong,” he said once he’d finished and removed his glasses. “The Israelites didn’t attack the Amalekites. The Amalekites attacked the Israelites.” Quickly licking his thumb and index finger, he flicked through the
King James on his desk with Google speed. “ ‘Remember what Amalek did unto thee… when ye were come forth out of Egypt; how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee… when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.’ ”

  “My bio page says something about them attempting to convert.”

  “To Judaism? Not likely. The Amalekites were godless savages. They only knew camel thieving.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “What happened to any of them?” he said, resuming running his fingers through his hair. “The Hittites, the Hivites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Edomites, the Jebusites, the Moabites. Did they assimilate into the dominant tribes? Did they evolve into Indo-Europeans? Or did they simply die out?”

  “But there are four hundred left at the end of the story,” I said.

  “According to this,” he said, indicating the printout. “But this is quite at odds with the biblical account, quite at odds indeed.”

  “What’s the biblical account?”

  “Those four hundred men are blotted out.”

  “Blotted out?”

  He smiled at me in a way that suggested pleasure in ancient bloodshed. “Extinguished. Exterminated. At God’s command, of course.”

  He swiped his thumb across his wet tongue once more and shuffled again through his King James.

  “ ‘And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon,’ ” he recited, “ ‘went to mount Seir… and they smote the rest of the Amalekites.’ ” He sat back. “The first genocide in documented history.”

  I called up “my” comment on the Times website and read it to him.