“Where are you supposed to be?”
“Is this something I can ignore?”
He had six cavities all together, and his gums were receding rapidly on account of periodontal disease.
“There’s also some slight mobility,” I said, “here, and here.”
“Mobility?”
“They’re starting to move around on you.”
“My teeth?”
“I think we can probably save them—”
“Probably?”
“But I wouldn’t recommend waiting.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
It’s something you get from time to time. A perplexity. This is happening? To me? With my background, my livelihood, my nationality? I vote Republican. I have full dental. This whole prognosis needs rethinking.
I didn’t enjoy telling a patient that his teeth were in danger, that his health was suffering, and that he would experience discomfort and pain. My enjoyment was restricted to the very real pleasure of watching entitlement end. The immunities of great privilege have expired. You’re no different from the next guy. You’re mortal, and it’s ugly. What it is is you’re small, while the plain is vast and the sky is wide and the food is very far away. Welcome to that world, it’s here to stay. It was never gone. You just couldn’t see it through your driver and your doorman and the Asian dude holding your takeout.
“Listen,” I said. “We can save your teeth. We can restore your gums. We can rid you entirely of these odors—”
“What odors?”
“And if, after we do all that, you floss and use a water pick and a mouth rinse, and you brush twice a day, gently, with an electric toothbrush, and you change your diet, your mouth will be like new, and you should never have these problems again. After fifteen years of neglect,” I said, “wouldn’t you agree that’s a small miracle?”
I spent the better half of the afternoon fixing him up. His me-machine continued to buzz, but he couldn’t answer or reply because he was in with his dentist.
“Thank God he sent me and not somebody else,” Cavanaugh said when I had finished. “I never would have come if it were up to me. Do you think he knew?”
“Who are we talking about?” I asked.
He sat up, and I was treated once again to his aftershave, those subtle fleurs of a lush masculine springtime.
“Pete Mercer,” he said.
“The billionaire?”
“And my boss,” he said. “He’d like you to have this.”
He handed me an envelope. The short note read:
I’d like to speak with you. Jim has been instructed to give you my personal cell phone number. Please call at your earliest convenience.—PM
“We haven’t talked about your father’s suicide yet,” he wrote.
Had he known his true place in the world, he might not have taken his life. Are you ever in danger of taking yours? Does it cross your mind? How often? I know you’re lost, but my God, man! You belong by birthright to a noble tradition!
“What do you want from me?” I asked him. “What do you want, what do you want, what do you want?”
Your help restoring it.
The heat wave rippled and steamed in the atomic air. The sun, everywhere and nowhere, panted down the shafts and corridors of the city, filling the streets with a debilitating throb. It produced pore-level discomfort in me and my fellow pedestrians. Sweat clung to every lip and pit. Taxis thrummed with sunlight. Awnings crackled with it. Tar fillings ran soft and gooey down the streets, while every leaf, stunned into a perfect stillness, lay curled up in terror.
I was meeting Pete Mercer in Central Park. He wanted us to talk outside the office.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never met a billionaire before. Someone disciplined, I thought. Someone who rises before dawn, follows a regimen of weights and cardio without a single deviation from the day before, and successfully consumes the recommended dose of daily fiber. The big winners of this arrangement: his bowels and his bank account. His every minute strictly apportioned, his quantity of drink tightly controlled. Tailored with suit and tie, daily shaved regardless of mood, manicured, perfumed, and lotioned. The kind of man I could never be if given a thousand lives.
But the billionaire waiting for me on the bench was in a pair of worn-out khakis and hiking boots and consuming a five-dollar sandwich purchased from a street vendor. There was no way to look dignified while eating one of those things. He had to lean over with legs apart so that the juices, when they fell, landed on the ground and not his boots. He had ahold of about sixteen napkins in varying stages of saturation, with another half dozen balled up on the seat beside him, and when he stood at my approach, he fumbled around with a full mouth trying to shake my hand with some part of him that was clean.
I took a seat on the bench. His hair was short and conservatively parted. The only signs of age on him were the Earl Grey bags under his half-moon eyes and a neck just starting to loosen. He looked like you or me, except he had enough money to buy all of Manhattan south of Canal.
“Thanks for meeting me,” he said. “I enjoy reading your tweets. ‘We take refuge in the intimacy of marginalization.’ Was that today? Or yesterday?”
My tweets! He thought those were coming from me!
“I was under the impression…” I began. “I thought that you had denied…”
He shrugged. “What is there to deny?” he asked. “No documented history. No evidence of a past. Myths contradicting the Bible. Stories of survival that can’t be corroborated. What did you call it, ‘Suppressed down to nothing,’ or something to that effect? At most, we have… what? A family tree and some corrupted DNA. Is that enough to make anyone deny anything?”
“But your office just issued a denial.”
“If there were rumors circulating that I breathed oxygen, I would instruct my office to issue a denial,” he said. “I value my privacy.”
“I value my privacy, too.”
He handed me a paper bag with a sandwich inside. “Bought you lunch.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure if you were a vegetarian. They all seem to be vegetarians.”
I wondered who this “they” was.
“No,” I said. “I like meat too much.”
“Me, too,” he said.
I opened the bag. Hot juices were leaking from some fault in the foil.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” he repeated. “I’m sure you’re a busy man.”
“No busier than you must be,” I said.
“And thanks for taking care of Jim’s teeth. For that, the whole office thanks you.”
“Jim sure smells nice,” I said, “but he should take better care of himself.”
“We all should,” he said. “What made you want to become a dentist?”
“Oral fixation,” I said.
He howled with laughter. Not everyone thought that joke was funny. It wasn’t even a joke, really. It’s just that people expected you to say something less pervy. Nobody likes to be reminded of the perv potential in a medical professional, especially a dentist, what with his hands in your mouth all day. I appreciated Mercer’s laughter. It showed a sense of humor.
“I fell in love with a girl when I was young,” I said, “and her mouth was a revelation.”
“I’ve fallen in love with a mouth or two,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone into dentistry.”
“The pay may not have suited you.”
He laughed again. “No,” he said. “But making money’s a waste of time.”
“You should try convincing a patient to floss.”
“Not easy, I bet.”
“I question the point of flossing myself sometimes,” I said. “It tends to pass.”
“I never used to floss,” he said. “Then I started doing it and, man, I couldn’t believe the stuff that came out of my mouth. It was like, oh, look, a ham hock. And here’s half a bag of microwave popcorn.”
“You must hav
e large gum pockets.”
“Is that what they call them, gum pockets? Boy, that’s gross.”
“You think that’s gross, I’ll invite you over next time I’m extracting an impacted molar. You grab on tight with your cowhorn and do a bunch of figure eights, then you make that last pull and sometimes it’s like you can see the nerves still wiggling as you set the tooth on the tray.” He looked horrified. “You’re probably better off making money,” I said.
“When you break it down like that,” he said.
He stood and walked his trash over to a bin. I hadn’t expected to like him.
I’d watched the clip the day before. It showed Mercer testifying before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the financial crisis of 2008. He had bet against the system and made a killing. This, he said unironically, was the paradox that proved that the system worked. The representative from California expressed some disagreement and pressed Mercer to explain his “good fortune.” “Good fortune had nothing to do with it,” Mercer countered, and followed with a detailed account of his thinking toward the end of ’07, the folly of an extended period of no-money-down mortgages and the displacement of risk away from its source with unregulated vehicles like credit-default swaps. He was just doing the counterintuitive thing, which, in another paradox dictated by market logic, was really the intuitive thing. “The history of making money in this country is a history of exploiting the policy makers,” he said. “Liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican—it doesn’t matter. Let the policy makers act, and then study the places ripe for exploiting. Are they lending without interest? Attack the asset bubble. Currency pegs? Short foreign debt. The policy makers are there to protect capitalism, and America more generally. We’re there to be smarter than the policy makers,” he said to the policy maker.
He continued: “If I may make an analogy, Mr. Waxman, that must seem very remote to us now, I would suggest that the economic establishment in America, and really everywhere in the developed world, resembles in terms of concentration of power and ease of corruptibility the Catholic Church in the centuries leading up to the Protestant Reformation. It is a system controlled by a small number of insiders who would willingly do anything to continue profiting and to keep those profits as contained as they are substantial. The analogy breaks down only when we ask why those who suffer under such a system have not yet rebelled. In this instance it is not fear of damnation. It is ignorance. The people—I mean people who live more or less paycheck to paycheck, who have car troubles, visit the grocery store, that kind of thing—are ignorant of the magnitude of unfair play. To whatever degree they are not ignorant, they are resigned. If they continue to be ignorant and resigned, they will continue to be used and they will continue to lose.”
The comments piled up below the clip were full of impotent rage.
I fished out my sandwich and assumed the open-legged position. It was too hot to eat that day, but I didn’t want to be rude. He returned from the bin and, as I choked down a chicken shawarma, told me how it happened to him.
He was visiting his mother’s graveside in Rye. On his way back to the car, he found a man standing around, valise in hand, waiting for him. Mercer assumed he was with the press. But upon closer inspection, the man didn’t look like a journalist.
“What do journalists look like?” I asked.
“Frivolous,” he said, “or self-important.”
“And Grant Arthur?”
“Martyred.”
Arthur’s first words to him were, in effect, I know who you are, you’re Peter Mercer, but I also know that Peter Mercer doesn’t know who he is. Maybe it struck Mercer as an interesting thing to say. Or maybe there was enough truth in it to make him stop and wonder if this was somehow different from the usual run of nonsense. Since acquiring his wealth, Mercer had been asked to fund extraterrestrial scholarships in deep space, donate money to free caged elephants, support a campaign to make jousting an Olympic sport, bribe the Russian parliament, and assist a blind woman with a blind dog buy a house in the Hamptons. He wasn’t likely to let someone sit in his car and unfold a fairytale of his lost family and its sundered tradition. But that’s exactly what he did, and Grant Arthur’s research still amazed him.
“I knew nothing about my family before he showed up. My parents’ names, sure, and the names of my grandparents. Arthur had documents going back hundreds of years. It took him forty minutes just to lay them all out. Then we parted, and the first thing I did was have everything verified by an independent genealogist. The name of every descendant, the accuracy of every date. She didn’t find a single fabrication or mistake until around 1650.”
“What happened then?”
“She reached her limit. Arthur’s research took me back to 1474. There’s something very satisfying about discovering that you are a part of a continuous line stretching that far back,” he said. “Is this at all familiar? Or did it happen differently with you?”
I felt… left out. Frushtick had had his continuous line revealed to him, and now Mercer.
“They evidently have something else in mind for me,” I said. “I haven’t been shown anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Not in the way of my genealogy.”
“Have you done the genetic test?”
I shook my head.
“Then how do you know?”
I told him about the website, the Facebook page, and the Twitter account.
“They made you a website without your permission?”
I nodded.
“And you’re not writing those tweets?”
Had he been so friendly, bought me that sandwich, laughed at my jokes, had he wanted to meet me solely for my tweets?
“I’m afraid not.”
“So you might not belong. They might simply be using you.”
“Maybe,” I said.
He turned and looked off. When he turned back, it was to slap his thighs in preparation of standing. “Well,” he said, rising.
“Are you leaving?”
“I don’t want to take up any more of your time.” He extended his hand. “You’ve been an immense help.”
I stood at last and accepted his handshake. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how have I been of help?”
“Serious people don’t go around impersonating others online. They don’t steal a man’s identity and proselytize in his name. If I were you,” he said, “I’d hire a good lawyer. I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a hoax, as have I. It was compelling,” he added, before walking off. “Too bad it’s over.”
He was probably right, I thought. It was a hoax. His swift departure from the park reminded me that it was possible to see that clearly again, and to leave the whole ridiculous fantasy behind without another thought.
I went to the mall that weekend to work through some things. Was I relieved it was a hoax? Disappointed? Returned to outrage?
When I decided to stop buying things, years ago, I started saving my money with the intention of doing some good for the world. Rather than buy whatever I had my eye on, I tallied up its suggested retail price, and at the end of the year added everything together and made a big donation to a cause I believed in. Haiti. Hunger. Starting families off with some farm animals. As far as I could tell, it never got us anywhere. Haiti was still a mess, malnutrition was on the rise. I didn’t expect to cure every ill, but the only real difference I saw was an uptick in my junk mail. Better living through economy was one thing, but trying to improve the world through a few donations just highlighted the futility and put me in a funk.
Now buying was back on. It made me feel better to buy, it reassured and comforted me. In light of my recent gullibility, I needed to be reassured. But walking the mall corridors, I had a hard time finding something I needed, wanted, and/or didn’t already own. I stepped into the Hallmark store, to set the bar low, subjecting myself to an onslaught of sentimental cards, heart-shaped vases, and inspirational plaques (HERE’S THAT
SIGN YOU WERE LOOKING FOR: LOVE, GOD). Next I went into Brookstone, the high-end novelty store, and sat in the massage chair. I also test-drove the latest in pillow technology. But I already had the massage chair, or had had it at one time, before getting rid of it, and with respect to the pillow, I preferred the old technology to the new.
I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn.
Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair.