To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

  I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy? To scatter the clouds of your cynicism with its innocent delights in the simplest pleasures? That’s what I’d come to the mall to buy, I realized at once: a dog. I’ll liberate one of these cute bastards from cellblock 9 here and never be lonesome again.

  But then I remembered a time, preparatory to having children, when Connie and I decided to buy a dog, and after we took it home, I couldn’t stop thinking of how short a dog’s life expectancy is. It wasn’t right to talk about one day having to watch our new puppy die with Connie down on the floor playing with him and laughing, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to revel in the new puppy while it was still a puppy, because puppies become dogs all too quickly. And that was exactly my point: he’d be a dog in no time, and while he would appear to the human eye to remain unchanged for years, every day he’d be getting older, slowly but inexorably approaching death. When he died Connie and I would be bereft, which was, aside from being dead ourselves, the worst of all human things to be. Why ask for it? What had we done, impulsively purchasing this puppy without giving due consideration to its demise? I told Connie I thought we should return it. I couldn’t even get down on my hands and knees. I was up on the sofa crying, imploring her to take the puppy back. I could no longer so much as call it a puppy, and certainly not Beanie—no way could I call it Beanie. I just called it “the dog.” Connie got up on the sofa with me. She tried her best to understand. Inevitably she thought it had to do with my dad. But Beanie Plotz–O’Rourke and Conrad O’Rourke were apples and oranges. It wasn’t very likely that Beanie was going to put a bullet in his head because another round of electroconvulsive therapy had failed to take. Beanie just wanted to delight in the simple things. Do you know how embittering it is to watch something delight in the simple things while you’re consumed by the subject of death? Connie ended up keeping Beanie at her place. I’d stroke its fur occasionally when I was over, but that was about it. I left the Best Friends Pet Store empty-handed.

  By then, the other people at the mall had started to wear me down. Not just the handicapped but the sickly, the stunted, and the debt-soaked diabetics. At first, I tried to convince myself that they weren’t representative. I was at the ass-end of a cross-section, and soon sprites of health and beauty would come floating by, bare breasted, their outspread arms wrapped in banners of silk. But those who kept passing me were identical in every way: terribly misshapen people, whale fat or rat thin, trailed by homely broods while screaming at deaf elders in open psychological warfare. My countrymen. I took refuge in a single, healthy-looking woman on her way to pick out a high-end handbag or maybe a pair of shoes. She moved with purpose, free of the discord of the poor and the lost, and was gone in the blink of an eye. I gave up and went to dinner at a T.G.I. Friday’s.

  The waiter who came over to take my order was decked out from top to bottom in branded swag. Heavily mocked across America, swag was a comfort to me, because I had never forgotten how special it was to eat at a T.G.I. Friday’s when I was a kid. The swag brought back the memory of my mom and dad and the rigor with which we stuck to the least expensive items on the menu. Now that I had money, I always ordered more than one appetizer, the most expensive steak, something for dessert, and a Day-Glo cocktail or two. I wasn’t hungry. I was never hungry anymore. But it never got old. The Pottery Barn and Rubber Soul had gotten old, but my ability to order more than the chicken fingers with honey mustard from T.G.I. Friday’s would always provide me with a sense of accomplishment.

  As I ate, I wondered if what applied to the Pottery Barn and to Rubber Soul might also apply to people. It applied, I had to admit, to Sam and the Santacroces, who had been everything to me at one time and now were nothing. Would it also apply to Connie and the Plotzes? I didn’t like to think of Connie as pure utility now all used up, and most days I was able to frame our split as so much more than that. But that day at the mall, surrounded by the melancholy redundancy of everything on offer, I wondered if it was really Connie I longed for when I longed for Connie or only the novelty of being in love again, of being estranged from my self and enchanted by her family, by the Plotzes and by Judaism—which was lost to me now, if it was ever mine.

  On my way home, I stopped for beer at a package store. Whenever I stopped at a package store, I always looked for Narragansett, the beer my father drank while watching the Red Sox. It was during my cursory search for Narragansett, along a dusty aisle of niche beers, that I came across a warm six-pack of Ulm’s, a lager brewed in Ulm, Germany, and distributed out of Hoboken. It’s no hoax, I thought.

  “Hey, it happens. You don’t need to apologize,” he wrote.

  Think you’re the first one to go hmmm, this evidence is just a little too thin? Well, you’re not. We’ve all turned our backs on it at some point. Nobody wants to be a dupe. We’d be a bunch of gullible idiots if we didn’t have serious misgivings at some point. It’s a test of faith, Paul. A test of faith, and you passed. What it will do in the end is just make you stronger. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a religion founded on doubt asks you to take so much on faith?

  How many are there? One hundred? Two hundred?

  My rough estimate puts that figure somewhere between two and three thousand. But all very scattered.

  As Mrs. Convoy stood in the open doorway calling “McKinsey?” Connie turned to me and said, “I have a confession to make.”

  I drew closer. In the small confines of the front desk, crowded by the swivel chairs and shoulder to shoulder with blockades of files, drawing closer really only meant turning around. She sat on the chair, dressed entirely in shades of gray—a gray skirt over darker gray tights starting to fade at the knees, a gray T-shirt with darker gray bird—except for a diaphanous blue scarf twisted wildly around her neck. She wore a pair of flat blue tennis shoes that lacked all pretense to athletic utility. Her hair was set in bobby pins imprecisely arrayed, like a train yard seen from the sky.

  How inimitable the bobby pin is! The coppery crimp on the one prong and the other prong straight, the two dollops of hard amber at the endpoints. The bobby pin has not changed since it was worn by good-hearted nurses in virtuous wars. Though they held her hair down with old-fashioned severity, on Connie bobby pins were the very edge of fashion. I recalled the pleasure I took whenever I had the opportunity to remove them from her hair, one pin after the other, and to place them on the nightstand in a neat little pile, taking out one as carefully as the next so as not to pull the hair with it, until down came a storm of curls gently scented and still a little damp.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to say it. Remember how I told you that I was a nonpracticing atheist? Well, I’m not, really. I mean, I sort of was for a while, but now I think I’m not. An atheist, I mean. What I mean is, I’m not a hundred percent certain that God doesn’t exist, and sometimes, I’m almost certain that He does.”

  “As in, you believe?” I said. “You’re a believer?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  I was shocked.

  “Sometimes?”

  “Most of the time.”

  I was beside myself. On how many occasions had she expressed her skepticism about God? On how many occasions had she rolled her eyes along with me when some idiot on TV was telling women what was best for their bodies in the name of God? Or condemning gay marriage in the name of God? Or denying evolution and restricting scientific research in the name of God? Or defending assault weapons with hundred-round clips because God wanted us all to have guns? On how many occasions had she nodded along in implicit agreement while I went off on some Hitchensian rant?

  “Have you always been a believer?”

/>   “Not always.”

  “When weren’t you one?”

  “Around the time we got together.”

  “You were a believer when we first met?”

  “You made some very convincing arguments,” she said. “You can be very convincing.”

  “You mean… I convinced you to be an atheist?”

  “I was swept up!” she cried. “I was in love! I was willing to change!”

  “You lied to me?”

  That first year with Connie, year and a half even, I can hardly remember for how in love we were. We were just all love, morning and night, and all day, and love, and love. The only thing that gave me pause was her poetry. From what I could tell, she was a decent poet. Her poems never made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but neither did any of the published ones that she read aloud to me in bed, and in the park, and in bookstores, and in empty bars on winter afternoons. Not making sense seemed to be what it meant to be a good poet. Which was fine. But in that first year, year and a half, she stopped writing altogether. I thought it was important, if you called yourself a poet, to write poetry. I didn’t totally mind that she stopped, because I wanted her to be with me more than I wanted her to be actually writing poetry. But as time went by, and she still wasn’t writing, I asked her why. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m just happy.” “You have to be sad to write?” “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Maybe. I guess maybe I do. Because when I’m happy, I don’t feel compelled to write. I’m just happy being happy.” “So when you start writing again, I’ll know you’re unhappy?” “You’ll know that I’m stable. That I can write because I can think about something other than you, us. I can think about poetry again.” That made sense, I supposed. But I still had to wonder, what was she if she wasn’t writing poetry? She wasn’t a poet. Poets write poetry. She was really just a receptionist at a dental office. A receptionist and the girlfriend of a dentist, her employer.

  Suffice it to say, she was doing plenty of writing these days. But now I had confirmation that there was something wrong with Connie on the same order as there was something wrong with me. All that time not writing poetry, downplaying her family affections, putting Connie-Who-Loves-Paul ahead of her own essential self. Poor girl, she was cunt gripped. She had loved me so much that she felt compelled to lie to me just as I had lied to her. A sadness settled into me as solid as the one I had churned through in the weeks following our final breakup. As it turned out, we were perfect for each other.

  “No wonder you didn’t want to spend time with your family in the beginning,” I said. “You were living a lie.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I want you to know that it’s okay to believe in God,” she said.

  She swiveled closer along the plastic runner, a few inches at most, but enough so that she might have easily taken my hand. I thought she might. But the most she did was put her hands on her knees.

  “It doesn’t make you weak or stupid,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “You wouldn’t think so.”

  “As long as you believe for the right reasons.”

  “And what reasons are those?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  I stared at her. I suddenly realized that this wasn’t just a confession.

  “Whatever’s going on with you—”

  “What’s going on with me?” I asked.

  “—as long as you’re choosing God for the right reasons—”

  “I’m not choosing God for any reason.”

  “Then what are you doing, getting wrapped up in this thing?”

  “What thing? It’s not a thing. It has nothing to do with God. It’s a tradition,” I said. “It’s a people. A genetically distinct people. And I’m not wrapped up in it.”

  “Why is our website still live? Why have you stopped pestering that Internet lawyer to do more? Why is it that every time I turn around, you’re composing a new email? Whatever you’re not wrapped up in, Paul, why does it seem to be so much more pressing than your patients?”

  I walked away, leaving her in that claustrophobic enclosure. I went down the corridor and through the door, into the waiting room. I walked up to the front desk and stuck my head in the window. She had thrown her head back but was sitting otherwise unmoved.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  She swiveled abruptly.

  “Let’s agree to stay out of each other’s business. What’s the point in meddling now, anyway? Who knows,” I said. “Maybe if we can keep to ourselves, we can both finally be honest with each other.”

  I withdrew from the window and went back to work.

  “Do I have to doubt God?” I asked. “It’s not that I want to believe. God knows. I’d rather just avoid God altogether.”

  It’s important to doubt.

  But why? You’re not doubting all gods, or God in general. You’re doubting a very specific God—the one that literally appeared before His prophet to decree that he doubt. How can anyone doubt a God that has appeared?

  Get rid of doubt? You have no idea what you’re suggesting. Where would the Jews be without faith? The Jews renouncing their faith, the bedrock of their morality, the very thing that makes them Jews—this is the equivalent of the Ulms who cease doubting. Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral. And like the Jews, once you take away our morality, you take away our purpose for being, you take away our advantage and our essence. What the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims have tried to achieve through violence will come about naturally through our own abdication: we will disappear from the face of the earth. Doubt, or complete the first genocide in human history. Doubt, or enter the war of death among other religions. Doubt, or die. Those are your options.

  But goddamnit—how can anyone doubt a God that has appeared?

  The paradox of God asking people to doubt is resolved in the Cantaveticles, cantonment 240. We know it as the Revelation of Ulmet.

  I was in the Thunderbox when I came across the fourth, or maybe the fifth, iteration of the Wikipedia entry for “Ulm.” Unlike earlier attempts, this one had been approved for publication by Wikipedia’s editors. What happened to trekkieandtwinkies, I wondered, and his strenuous objections to sanctioning an entry for the Ulms? I clicked around and found them alive and well on the entry’s “Talk” page. Reserved for editorial debate, the “Talk” page gave editors a place to scream and shout at one another about the relevancy of this and that while keeping their rifts and outrage hidden away from the main entry to preserve its authority. The debate on the “Talk” page for “Ulm, or Olm” was in full swing and involved EDurkheim, drpaulcorourkedds, BalShevTov, HermanTheGerman, abdulmujib, openthepodbaydoorshal, Jenny Loony, and others, none of whom could agree on the facts any more than Mrs. Convoy and I could agree on what it meant to “know” God. Trekkieand-twinkies savaged the entry’s legitimacy, but several others were persuaded of it by the entry’s most significant claim, which had to do with “Contemporary Israeli Aggression.” Israel, it was purported, was no friend of the Ulm. The introduction of Israel attracted a good deal of attention to the entry under debate, and the participating editors quickly assembled into one of two competing camps: those in favor of publishing the entry were generally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, while those objecting to the entry posted pro-Israeli arguments that were unrelated in every way to the question of the Ulms. The pro-Ulm, anti-Israeli faction provided seventeen footnotes linked to news articles and press releases that outlined examples of this “Contemporary Israeli Aggression” against Palestinians, Egyptians, Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Americans—practically everyone with the exception of the people under debate. “The Ulms were expelled from Seir (Israel) in 1947,” the mai
n entry read, “in further proof of Israeli aggression[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].”

  I drifted out of the Thunderbox still reading the entry, which, though now primarily a political tool, was much more than that. I dispatched a patient in room 1 and returned to my me-machine to continue reading. I did that half the morning: pulled out my phone between patients and read and reread the entry, memorizing its finer points.

  The Ulms’ origins were well documented by references to those books of the Bible where the Amalekites were mentioned, from Genesis through the Psalms. It was said that the Greeks called the Ulms metics and were known to them as anthropoi horis enan noi, or “the people without a temple.” There was a list of ways the Ulms had been systematically suppressed since the advent of Christianity: grand-ducal ordinances, council decrees, forced observances, sumptuary laws, fines, torture, and death. The Cantaveticles was described on behalf of this nomadic people as a “portable fatherland.” Cutting the hair at thirteen was a rite of passage for boys. There was a brief sketch of their fate map, or where in Europe during the Middle Ages the last of the Ulms had died out. The final meaningful documentation placed them in Upper Silesia as purveyors of salines.

  It was with the purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia on my mind that I came to, so to speak, with an explorer in one hand and a drill in the other. That was unexpected. Why was I holding both? If I was about to explore, why did I need the drill, and if I was about to drill, why did I need the explorer? And in fact I was about to drill, because it was turning on the drill that halted my thinking about purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia. But what was I drilling? I sat elevated above my patient’s mouth, its darkest parts throbbing involuntarily under the unforgiving light. I looked down the length of the chair, over a skirt suit and tights capped with black flats in need of a shine. A female, I concluded. Possibly a professional of some kind. When I turned back, her eyes, miming a wild animal’s flight, had skittered to the far corners of their sockets, removing me and my doings to the periphery. I glanced at the computer screen. It read “Merkle, Doris.” Mrs. Merkle had been a patient for years, but I couldn’t even recall saying hello to her that morning. (“Hello to ye and thou!”) I glanced over at Abby, who gave me an uncharacteristically aggressive look. I could only make out her eyes on account of the pink paper mask, but they were so alarmed, so interrogating, that I had to look away. I’d never seen her like that before. Are you at a momentary loss? her eyes seemed to be asking me. How can you be at a momentary loss when you have a live drill in your hand? I set the explorer down and returned the drill to the rack in order to read Mrs. Merkle’s chart. I quickly discovered that Mrs. Convoy had put nothing in her chart that morning. Of course it was possible that Mrs. Convoy hadn’t seen Mrs. Merkle, that Mrs. Merkle had come straight to me without a cleaning in need of some emergency procedure. I looked over at the tray to see how it was laid out. You can usually tell what you’re doing from a properly laid-out tray. It wasn’t just a momentary loss, I realized, trying to interpret the tray. No, I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing for Mrs. Merkle. This is what happens, I thought, trying to divine the tray for some sign of direction, when you let your mind wander at work. It hardly mattered that I had let my mind wander about purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia and not the wretched history of trades by the Boston franchise, or why I liked clowns in my pornography. I had a duty to be focused on the patient in the chair. But the tray was telling me nothing or, rather, it was telling me many things, all of them conflicting. What is this? I almost demanded of Abby. Look at how sloppily you’ve laid out this tray! Since when is a dental tray akin to some basement toolbox or allocated junk drawer where we just go digging around in hopes of finding what we need? But I didn’t dare say anything or even so much as look over at Abby, because too much time had passed since I turned off the drill, and now I was afraid that we were all conscious—me and Abby and Mrs. Merkle, too—that I had no fucking clue what I was supposed to be doing for Mrs. Merkle. And things just got worse when I decided to have a look inside her mouth. An incisor and its neighboring canine were gone. Had I just pulled them? Of course not—there’d be blood and gauze, and I’d still be feeling it in my arm. I must have been doing a reconstructive procedure for Mrs. Merkle, putting in a double crown or a partial denture or some other pontic. But if that were the case, why did I have a drill in my hand? And what in hell were the gutta-percha points doing out on the tray alongside Peeso reamers and the butane? I tell you this much, it was that rare day on which you raise your glass to the malpractice insurers. It would be great, I thought, if I could just let her go. “Up you go, Mrs. Merkle. You’re all set!” But that was absurd! She still had two missing teeth! I wasn’t likely to get off the hook just by letting her leave. Her eyes returned from their sojourn in a safe place to search me out, as so much time had passed since my last (first?) sure-footed gesture. Why the pause, her eyes seemed to be asking me, why that stricken, dim-witted look on your face? I couldn’t even say if Mrs. Merkle was numb or not. I was running straight at the woman with a spinning drill and didn’t even know if she was numb! I gestured across Mrs. Merkle’s body for Abby to follow me out into the hall. I had no choice: the chart told me nothing, the tray told me too much, and the mouth only compounded my confusion. We huddled close together. “Look, Abby,” I said, “between you and me, I don’t mind telling you, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing for that patient in there.” Abby pulled down the mask covering her face and said, “I’m not Abby.” It wasn’t Abby! She didn’t even have Abby’s eyes! She certainly didn’t have Abby’s mouth. And she was much shorter than Abby. I had never consciously realized just how tall Abby was. “What do you mean you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing?” she asked. “Aren’t you the dentist?” I had no intention of admitting to a complete stranger that I had no idea what I was doing. “Who are you?” I demanded. “Where’s Abby?” “Who’s Abby?” she inquired. “Who’s Abby?” I cried. “Abby! My dental assistant!” “Oh,” she said, “she’s on an audition.” “An audition?” “That’s what I was told,” she said. My neck began to hurt, I had to look down on her so severely. She couldn’t have been more different from Abby had she lived among gremlins in a tree house. “Why is Abby going on auditions?” I asked. “How should I know,” said the tiny temp. “I don’t work here.” Mrs. Convoy walked by. I confided in her my predicament. She said, “How on earth could you arrive at that point?” I told her, she said, “Bagwell going to the Astros again! How many times have I told you not to think about Bagwell while treating a patient? What room is she in?” She left and came back. “Not one of mine,” she said. If Mrs. Convoy hadn’t seen Mrs. Merkle that morning, Mrs. Merkle must have been in for an emergency procedure. But which one? “I think you have no choice but to ask the patient,” concluded Abby’s replacement. Mrs. Convoy didn’t notice her there at first, she was so small. The two of us peered down at her. “Although she’s really numb. I doubt she can make herself understood.” “She’s numb?” I said. “Who numbed her?” Connie appeared. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Who numbed her?” said the temp. She looked up at Connie and then over at Mrs. Convoy. “Is everyone sure this is the dentist here?” she asked, gazing up at us with the vicious smallness of a doglike goblin. I turned to Connie. “Do you remember checking in a Mrs. Merkle?” “Of course,” she said. “She called first thing this morning.” “She did?” I cried. “What’s wrong with her? What am I doing to her?”