To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

  When I was filling a cavity or doing a root canal or extracting a tooth that was beyond repair, I’d think, This could have been prevented. I’d fall back on my old cynical view of human nature: they don’t brush, they don’t floss, they don’t care. A fox is a fox is a fox. But when they did brush and floss and still lost a tooth, I had to blame something else, and just as predictably, I’d point the finger at cruel nature or an indifferent God. I was always saying bad oral health was entirely in their control, unless I was saying that it was entirely out of their control. Then one day I had a patient come in, lived around the corner in one of the few remaining low-income housing complexes on the Upper East Side, worked construction, his hands the hands of a blind strangler, no effort beforehand to remove the chewing tobacco encrevassed between his teeth, and while I was at work on a little local train wreck in the upper-left quadrant, I let my mind wander. This guy probably had poor genes, ignorant parents, a mean childhood. He was never going to take care of his teeth. He never stood a chance of taking care of them. He was going to neglect them until they fell out or he died. Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings—God knows I’d tried—and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant. The man in the chair was lord over his best impulses no more than he was king of his worst instincts. Change or no change, his fate was out of his hands. The only question that ever remained was: are you a fox, or something better?

  “Dear Paul,” he wrote.

  I’m sorry you’re so upset. There’s so much you have yet to grasp. We have nothing against the Jews. Anti-Semitic? No. When in our history would we have had the freedom to pursue hate of any kind? No one in history is more qualified to identify with the Jews and their considerable tragedies than the Ulms. We aren’t the Jew’s enemy, Paul. We are the Jew’s Jew.

  The Jew’s Jew? What is that?

  Do you know of the escépticos driven into hiding by Alfonso the Wise? Has the Lodz Massacre been brought to your attention? Have the Ulm! Ulm! Riots of 1861 been discussed in your history classes? Has the execution, by British forces, of all Ulms living in Israel, to inaugurate the Jewish state in accordance with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, been so much as a faint shadow in your most distant dream? Do you know how close we are and ever have been to extinction? Say what you will about the tragedies of the Jews. At least they have been documented.

  The next morning, I was working on a patient while thinking about a headline in one of the celebrity magazines. It was actually more like a subheadline, which read, in response to Rylie’s announcement that she was pregnant with twins, “Rylie has always wanted to have two babies at once.” They had interviewed Rylie (“Exclusive!”), who confessed that for as long as she could remember, she had always wanted to have two babies at once. Not just one, and not two at different times, but two at once, boom boom. Even when she was three, when she was seven, and then when she was ten, Rylie had wanted to have two babies at one time. It was a childhood dream that kept persisting even as she turned sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, and now, believe it or not, she was pregnant with twins. At last Rylie’s dream was coming true, having two babies at once at last. And how better to share that dream come true with the world than on the cover of a celebrity magazine, under the larger headline “Twins!”

  I was thinking about Rylie and her twins and the subheadline announcing the fulfillment of her lifelong dream when Connie appeared in the doorway. I pretended not to see her.

  “Dr. O’Rourke?”

  I pretended not to hear her.

  “Dr. O’Rourke, when you get a minute,” she said.

  “Okay, Mr. Shearcliff,” I said, after dithering in Mr. Shearcliff’s mouth a little longer and finding nothing to detain me. “You can sit up and spit now.”

  Reluctantly I walked over to Connie. She wanted to discuss my latest tweet.

  My dream is to overcome my terrifying inhibitions one day, and sing on the subway with my banjo

  “You’ve said that to me,” she said. “You’ve used those very words.”

  I didn’t know where to begin.

  “This is maddening!” I said. “That’s not me!”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “I swear to God, Connie.”

  “This is you, Paul.”

  “No, it’s not, I swear to God.”

  “Is this some weird game you’re playing to get me back?”

  “Get you back? I broke up with you.”

  She cocked her head.

  “The first time I did.”

  “Why are you writing these things?”

  “I’m not! Look, I can prove it.”

  I dug out my me-machine and showed her the email exchanges between me and my double. I made sure she saw the part where I confessed to him my desire to get on the subway and sing.

  “How do I know this isn’t you?”

  “Emailing with myself?”

  “It’s not hard to create an email account.”

  “That’s my point! He created one in my name and used it to write me.”

  “Why did you write back?”

  “You’re missing the point,” I said. “You think I’m emailing with myself. I’m not emailing with myself.”

  “What’s this one?” she asked.

  She held the phone up so I could read.

  “Is that why you thanked me for the desk flowers?” she said. “Because some stranger pretending to be you told you to in an email? Paul,” she said, “do you need help?”

  I took the phone out of her hand.

  “It’s not me, Connie, honest to God.”

  She walked away. Then she came back.

  “If that’s the case,” she said, “if it’s really not you saying all this crap, then what’s happened to your outrage? You were out of your mind when you thought they had made you into a Christian. Now you’re this other thing, this weird other thing, and somehow that’s okay? You’re emailing back and forth with the guy? You’re letting him tweet in your name? You have a Facebook page, for God’s sake! Where’s the old you, Paul? I wouldn’t question it if I could locate the old Paul somewhere.”

  “He’s right here,” I said. “He’s still outraged.”

  “If your fight against the modern world was going to end, and you were always going to tweet and blog and all the rest of it, why not tell everyone who you really are—a great dentist, and a true Red Sox fan—and not this… this…?”

  She threw up her hands and walked away.

  Mrs. Convoy was in room 2 prepping an impacted molar while in room 3 a chronic bruxer with a hypertrophied jaw was waiting for me to treat the eroding effects of his grinding and clenching. I couldn’t find an iPad. You buy the newest technology for the office, and then you spend the rest of your time trying to locate it. Or figure out how it works. Finding it or figuring it out becomes more important than tending to patients. It becomes a personal imperative, finding and using the thing you’ve spent thousands of dollars on or figuring out how to work the thing that’s so invaluable to your practice. Who gives a shit about the patient? It’s like the patient just disappears. You’re not even there yourself, really. You’re in this weird hermetic world where it’s just you and the machine, and the question is, who’s gonna win?

  I entered room 5 and came upon another patient. He was obviously in a lot of pain, telling from the moaning. Looking high and low for a spare iPad, I heard him take a deep breath and then go, “Ah-rum… ah-rum.” I turned slowly, and sure enough, it was him. “You!” I cried.

  I reached down, grabbed Al Frushtick by the collar, and lifted him into the air.

  “Dr. O’Rourke!” he hollered. “God help me, I’m in so much pain!”

  I refused to treat him un
til he explained everything.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Israel?”

  “It didn’t work out! I came back. And now I’m in big trouble! You’re the only dentist I trust. You have to help!”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Why did you create a website in my name?”

  “Are you kidding me? I couldn’t create a website in my own name! This is just some big misunderstanding!”

  “My lawyer looked into it, pal. You’re listed as the registrant. And before you left, you called yourself an Ulm and said I was one, too. So don’t act dumb.”

  “Treat me first,” he cried, “oh, please!”

  I still had his collar balled in my hand and his shoulders raised well off the chair. I grabbed a pair of forceps with my spare hand and started probing his nostrils.

  “Okay,” he muttered weepily. “Okay, okay.”

  I set him down.

  He smoothed out his rumpled shirt and winced again at the aching tooth.

  “I’m sure they have your family records,” he said, “and I’m sure they’re as thorough as anyone’s.”

  “My family records?”

  “Everything you’ve wanted to know,” he said, “whether you’ve known it or not: who you are, where you come from, to whom you belong. To whom you belong, Doctor.” Forgetting the tooth, he smiled at me, then quickly resumed wincing. “But that’s not how they’re going about things now. By now they have enough reclaimants. They’re interested in finding out who among the reclaimed will elect the old way of life on the strength of the message alone.”

  “What is a reclaimant?”

  “Someone reclaimed from the diluted bloodlines and forced conversions of the diaspora. Haven’t they been in touch with you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s irresponsible,” he said and, with one swipe to the left and one swipe to the right, expressed dismay in the crisping up of his wilting mustache hairs. “I think that’s irresponsible. But they have their reasons. Listen,” he said. “If they won’t tell you, I will. You belong to a lost heritage. A counterhistory. Your genes prove it: that’s where our history resides. It’s inescapable, it extends back hundreds of years. I don’t have your specific details, but I’m sure Arthur does.”

  “Who’s Arthur?”

  “Grant Arthur. He’s the one who found you. You belong,” he said. “You’re as old as the Egyptians and even older than the Jews.”

  “I should knock your teeth out for the things you people are saying about the Jews!”

  “Wait!” he cried, gripping the arms of the chair and throwing his body back, away from my fists. “What are we saying about the Jews? Nothing bad! We feel a kinship with the Jews. We use the Jews as a point of reference, that’s all. Do you think we should use the Native Americans? I find them more apropos, personally. The accusation of heathenry, the mass slaughters, the subsequent history of alcoholism and suicide. The squalor of a once-great nation. But they lack a global reach. The history of the Jews is a helpful comparison, that’s all. Suffering shouldn’t be a competition.”

  “It sounds like a competition when you read about it on Twitter,” I said.

  “On Twitter,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Hey, this outreach is really happening.” He ruminated a moment, scratching, with nervous automation, the pale groove that ran between the two halves of his mustache from nose to lip. “There was a lot of debate about the dangers of calling attention to ourselves. But Twitter… that’s significant. Well,” he said. “Anyway. Does that help clarify things?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  He shot me a look full of incomprehension. “Why am I here? Why am I here?! Doctor, turn on that light and look inside this poor mouth!”

  “You said you were leaving for Israel. What happened?”

  He shook his head and sighed and reached up for his mustache again, stroking it this time with deliberate melancholy.

  “You’re a sadist, Doctor. A real sadist. I come in here, a Scud missile bearing down on my nerve, and you demand that I share the story of my greatest spiritual failure. Is this what you call compassion?”

  I leaned back against the sink, crossed my arms, and swung one ankle over the other.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “In the end, I couldn’t do it. It’s been too long. I was raised a Christian. All those years of prayer. I have the God gene, I guess, for good or ill.”

  “You mean you couldn’t doubt?”

  “I had every reason to.” He sat up and tucked his feet under his legs in some kind of Eastern position. “Have you heard of Cliff Lee, the geneticist? Dr. Clifford Lee, of Tulane University?”

  Frushtick explained that Dr. Clifford Lee had held the Howard Rose Professorship at the Hayward Genetics Center of Tulane University in New Orleans for years until Grant Arthur revealed to him that he was an Ulm. A year later, Lee relocated his family to Israel to work on isolating the genetic particulars of the Ulms. His work, according to Frushtick, who suddenly spoke with all the technical command of a scientist, centered around modal haplotypes, microsatellites, and unique event polymorphisms: difficult genetic data necessary to prove Ulm-specific ancestry.

  “He devised a test that’s sixty to seventy-five percent accurate,” he said. “Eighty percent if you came north out of the Sinai into the Rhine Valley prior to the Ashkenazi migration. There was some intermingling between the two groups, obviously, but given their bitter history, not enough to affect the testing.”

  “Testing of what?”

  “Ulmish descent. There are no guarantees, just ballpark figures—he’s very clear about that. For me personally, there was a seventy percent chance. But whatever Lee’s test lacks, Arthur supplements with a case file.”

  “What does that do?”

  “Haven’t you been listening, Doctor? It proves that you’re an Ulm.”

  Grant Arthur’s research was exhaustive. Frushtick still recalled the amazement that overtook him as Arthur laid out his file for the first time. The names of ancestors, place and date of births and deaths, eternal branchings of an ancient family tree. Arthur went out into the world, to all its repositories of records, contracts, military conscriptions, cadastres, in the name of finding the lost. He wasn’t just reclaiming souls; he was restoring an order too grievously out of whack to ever be put right in his lifetime. It gave him a certain zeal.

  “There were wills, land records, census records,” Frushtick said. “He had documents from government registries, hospitals, foreign courts. Licenses in foreign languages—many of which he speaks fluently. Port records, notary records, ship logs. I picture him on trains shunting across the tundra, landing in propjets in unstable countries, carrying his overstuffed valise with the portable scanner, sleepless again, hair rumpled, unhappy, but on his way to a library and some new name. It will give him just enough of what he needs to reaffirm his purpose, and he’ll go on like that, on and on, until he takes his last breath between two obscure points on the map. Make no mistake,” he said, “Grant Arthur is one of the great men. A mere mortal will never know how he does it. He carried my lineage back to the 1620s. Can you imagine? Before him, I thought I was half German and… God knows what else.”

  I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores. But I was impressed by 1620.

  “He started with my mother’s maiden name, Legrace. From Legrace he moved back to DeWitt, and from DeWitt to Strickland, to Short, to Kramm, to Kramer. He went back to Bohr, to Moorhaus. Names I never knew existed, the names of my family, my people… I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have someone lay out for you how you extend back through time like that. I’m haunted to think that I could have died without knowing the satisfaction of it. I would have remained lost, skating over the surface of
life, knowing nothing of any importance.”

  “How did Grant Arthur know that he was a reclaimant?”

  “From his father. But not until that man was on his deathbed, because he was ashamed. He gave his son the name of a man in Quebec, where there was a small community. The Quebecois told him about the escépticos, so he went to Spain. There was a man in Castile–La Mancha who had just lost his parents and who thought he was burying not only the last of his family but the final two speakers of a language they spoke only at home. Grant Arthur tracked the man down in Albacete, and when he greeted him in his mother tongue, the man wept.”

  “What is an escéptico?”

  “He will tell you about them when he shows you your family names. I’m sure he has them. All of them, going back to… who knows how far. He will lay them out for you, generation by generation, until you see how you connect, how you belong.”