An old bridge had plunged headfirst into Mrs. Merkle’s breakfast cereal that morning, for no other reason than its time had come, and any idiot with a little focus could see that the poor woman just needed to have it replaced.
After Mrs. Merkle, I knew something had to be done, something radical. None of these half measures, like visiting the mall.
I began by deleting my email. Everything “Paul C. O’Rourke” sent me was gone, followed by all the correspondence between YazFanOne and the many strangers curious to learn more about the Ulms. Then everything from Connie. Then a brief exchange with Sam Santacroce (“We’re very happy in Pittsburgh,” she wrote of her and her husband and their two children). Emails to and from my friend McGowan. And finally everything else.
I called my phone company and terminated my contract. Then I removed the SIM card, bent it back and forth enough times that the plastic was irreparable, ran a hot tap over my me-machine for several minutes, and used an excavator to pry into it and disassemble its parts, which I threw partly into sewer grates and partly into the East River during a walk on my lunch hour.
Back at the office, I called my Internet provider and terminated service at home and at the shop. Within the hour, we went completely dark. I couldn’t believe it. There was still a way to opt out after all. You just had to be willing to go the distance.
“Why am I not able to log on to the World Wide Web?” Betsy asked, glowering at an iPad.
“It’s not working,” said Connie. “I’ve unplugged the router, or whatever. If that doesn’t work, I’ll give them a call.”
In no time at all, they were going out of their minds. Mrs. Convoy jabbed at the touchscreen with an unforgiving finger before giving up and shaking her head at the device, as if it had proved to be not just a frustration but a personal disappointment, something on the order of a moral failure. She abandoned it only to return five minutes later, like your most weathered smoker, whereupon she jabbed at it again, with feeling this time, finger practically recoiling with every tap, the taps growing louder and steadier as if she were knocking at a door begging to come in. Meanwhile, Connie was on hold with the Internet provider, trying to multitask with the phone in the crook of her neck, but too often drawn, as if by a spell, back to the desktop, to squint inches from the screen while clicking on the same unresponsive icon.
It was a thoroughly pleasant afternoon. No composing. No replying. No anticipation. No distraction. Just me and the drills, bores, bits, glues, plasters, pastes, etchants, sprays, crowns, amalgams, resins, pins, explorers, excavators, hand mirrors, picks, pliers, and forceps of my profession. I noticed the rich wonders of these dental accoutrements as if for the first time. They were burnished, immaculate, and spellbinding. Without the seductions of the online world, I was reintroduced to my chairs, my cabinetry, my tile floors.
Half an hour later, they cornered me in room 2 just as I was finishing filling the best cavity I’d filled in two months, if not ten years. They came bearing iPads and me-machines and looks of murderous rage, as if I had done actual physical damage to a child or a pet.
“You’ve got to be joking,” said Connie.
“Is it true?” said Mrs. Convoy, with the tragic tone employed to confront a man long harboring a criminal past. “Have you cut off service?”
“How long were you planning on letting us make fools of ourselves?”
“I wasn’t trying to be cruel,” I said, hands in the air to defend myself. “I was planning to tell you, both of you.”
“Oh?”
“But then I started watching you guys. Did you see yourselves? You’re addicted! Both of you! This is for your own good! Betsy, remember what you’re always telling me about the world and its beauty? You’re not looking at it anymore! The beauty, it’s lost on you! I’m doing this for you,” I said, “so that you don’t forget God’s world.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I have not forgotten God’s world.”
“I’m sorry, Betsy, but you have. I saw you. There was no getting out of God’s world and into that other one, and it was driving you nuts.”
“That’s a false distinction,” she said. “Whether it’s online or offline, it’s God’s world. He made everything there just as He made everything here.”
“ ‘Ebony Teases Her Brownie’?” I said. “Is that God?”
“What does that mean?” she asked me. She turned to Connie. “What in heavens does that mean?”
“Paul, why did you cancel our Internet service?”
“It’s a distraction we don’t need,” I said. “I haven’t had such a nice, stress-free afternoon since 2004.”
“And how are we going to get anything done around here?”
“Dentech still works,” I said. “That’s all we need.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Betsy. “No sirree bob. It might let you chart just fine, but for everything else, you need a connection.”
“Well, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to go back to doing things the old-fashioned way.”
“But we’ve never done things the old-fashioned way.”
“No,” I said, “but I bet Betsy has. She was around before technology.”
“The pleasures of your wit notwithstanding,” she said, “this is absurd. I haven’t worked in a dental office that hasn’t depended on computers since… can’t even remember. You’re out of your mind if you think we can go back. Should we also go back to whiskey and hand drills?”
“What do we do here?” I asked them. “We clean and polish. We fill cavities. We take out old teeth and put new ones in. What part of any of that requires us to be online?”
“But there’s HIPAA compliancy!”
“And claims submissions!”
“And the billing!”
“And email!”
There was no better place to find McGowan than the gym. He went there religiously. And though I hadn’t darkened the gym’s doorway in over a year and a half, my membership was still current, because I had never found the wherewithal to cancel. They just kept withdrawing month after month, and every month I would remind myself to cancel, and every month I would fail to muster the energy.
I wanted to apologize to McGowan for letting our friendship lapse. At one time, McGowan and I had been really tight. We were both dentists, and we both loved the Red Sox. I looked around for him when I arrived, but he wasn’t there, so I got on a treadmill. It felt good to be doing something physical again. A year and a half had gone by during which I hadn’t lifted a finger. I was really out of shape, so I started slowly. I gradually increased my speed until, twenty minutes in, I was clocking seven-minute miles. It felt great. I kept it up for two hours, twenty-nine minutes, and fifty-seven seconds. It was an approximately twenty-one-mile run. I burned three thousand one hundred and nineteen calories. My failure to exercise might be contributing to my vulnerability, I thought, and if I pushed myself, I would be set right again by massive infusions of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, the Three Stooges of the brain.
By the time my run ended, McGowan had arrived and was over by the free weights. I didn’t know if he would welcome seeing me or not. But I had nothing to fear. Never in his life had McGowan known an imbalance in his neurotransmitters. He gave me a jiveshake and a smile, then made a big face at the alarming quantities of sweat my body was producing. He asked me how the indoor lacrosse was going.
“The what?”
“Didn’t you quit the gym to do indoor lacrosse?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “That was pretty short-lived.”
He and I talked throughout his workout as though no time had passed at all. I was pleased that he wasn’t angry. I was also a little perplexed. Did he not remember being hurt that I had removed him from my contacts? Was my betrayal so minor to him, our friendship so slight, that it really didn’t matter? As we talked, me sitting on some machine intended for something, and McGowan lifting and setting things down again, I had the sudden feeling that I could be
anyone to McGowan, that I was only another guy at the gym who happened to be within earshot, and that our connection went no deeper than a shared profession and a preference for Boston baseball. I remembered all over again why I had once deleted him from my contacts. It made me unreasonably sad. I started crying, but not wanting McGowan to see me cry, I kept my face as emotionless as possible while allowing the tears to fall as drops of sweat, and for the two or three minutes that I was staring straight at him and crying, he kept lifting and didn’t notice. Once I had collected myself, I tried to stand and leave, but I found it impossible. That run had done something to me. I literally could not move. McGowan had to practically carry me into the men’s locker room and then out to the street, where he held me up while hailing a cab. He rode with me all the way into Brooklyn and helped me up the stairs and into my apartment. Only then did I realize that McGowan really was a good friend, and that it was essentially easy to be a good friend, and that, by that simple formula, I had probably never been a good friend to anyone, or to too few people, at any rate.
I spent the next day limping from room to room, patient to patient. The pain in my legs was easily explained, but why did it hurt to clench my jaw? To open and close my fingers? I could hardly hold the explorer and eventually had to cancel all my afternoon appointments.
She was my last appointment of the day. She had on a Red Sox cap over her long, sandy-brown hair. The cap was well worn: it was easy to envision how, in the course of its lifetime, it had been torn off, stretched out, kicked around, lost for good and found again, its bill molded to form, its band boiled in sweat, the whole thing stomped on and run over and chewed up. Now the stitching around the B was coming loose. It was a prized possession, that hat, a family heirloom, as priceless as anything on an auctioneer’s block. The woman wearing it had my heart.
She turned when I entered the room and said, “I’m not here for an exam.”
I shut the door.
“What are you here for?”
She stepped away from the window, into my arms. No, she stopped far shy of that, at the sink, even as I urged the echo of her heels to continue. She undid the twin buckles of a leather valise laid flat upon the counter. She removed her sunglasses, disentangling from one plastic corner the delicate loose strands of her lovely hair. She suggested I have a seat. I immediately pulled up a stool.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She removed a sheaf of papers from the leather bag. “A research assistant.”
“To whom?” I asked. “For what?”
“For the general effort.”
She was really very tall, over six feet, and when I sat down, under her weather, as it were, full of breeze and light, and watched her concentrate, ordering and straightening the papers in her possession, I almost said, being insanely cunt gripped, “I love you.” Somehow I kept it to myself. But that’s exactly how it happens, every time, that quickly, that easily, and there is nothing I can do about it.
“Let’s start here,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘the general effort’?”
She handed me my birth certificate.
“Okay?” she said to me.
“What are you asking?”
“Does that document look familiar to you?”
“It’s my birth certificate,” I said. “Hey,” I said, “how’d you get my birth certificate? Who notarized this?”
“And this is a certificate of marriage between Cynthia Gayle and Conrad James, the fifth of November 1972.”
She handed me my parents’ marriage certificate. It had been stamped by the county clerk’s office and initialed.
“Are those your parents?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
Next, in rapid succession, came each of my parents’ birth certificates, as well as the certificate of death for my father; the birth certificates of my four grandparents; their marriage certificates; and finally each of their death certificates. There was Earl O’Rourke and Sandra O’Rourke, née Hanson, and there was Frank Merrelee and Vera Merrelee, née Ward. I didn’t recognize the names on the next generation of documents. They belonged, according to her, to my great-grandparents.