“I have some fond memories of church,” he said. “People who were nice to us. And I remember trying to pray after my mother died. I brought my hands together, I bowed my head. But then I thought, Let’s just say it is Jesus Christ up there. He’s not likely to be a fucking idiot, is He? He knows. He knows all right. So do the both of you a favor and get the hell off your knees.”
The door opened, and a loud group entered. They got drinks and retreated to the pool room, and for the rest of our conversation we heard billiard balls clinking in discreet silence, sometimes followed by roars and moans.
“To be honest,” he said, “I’ve tried just about all of them.”
“All what?”
“Religions.”
This included a long time devoted to Zen Buddhism, with annual retreats to Kyoto to study with a master who fought as a foot soldier in World War II. Mercer, who steadily grew his fortune over three decades, yearly submitted himself to a complete divestiture for ten days and did nothing but meditate on tatami mats and beg in the streets for alms. He was seeking, he said, always seeking, seeking so strenuously as to guarantee he’d never find. “Twelve years I went back and forth to Kyoto. It helped me see the bigger picture, but it left me cold in the end. You know what I think of Buddhism? It has good answers to all the wrong questions.”
He looked into Jainism, into anthroposophy, into Krishnamurti. He liked Judaism. He admired the Koran. He chuckled through Dianetics. He had no respect for what he called the Churches of Welcoming All: Unitarian, Baha’i, the rest of humanity’s tender mercies. He required something that looked evil in the eye, that understood the meaning of mercy to be justice commuted by grace, and that contended with the fact that death was nothing he was going to adjust to, make amends with, or overcome.
“I’m exempt from the worst of it,” he said. “I’ll never know suffering. I’ll never again know discomfort, if I so choose. But I die in the end. I still die, and maybe fucking horribly. And who knows what after.”
In the meantime, nothing sufficed, nothing was equal to the question, Why am I here?
“I wish I could have been a Christian,” he said. “I’d have had someone to the left of me and someone to the right always ready with an answer, whatever the problem, amens and potlucks, little talks with Jesus, and peace for life everlasting.”
He gestured to the bartender, who poured him another.
“The most interesting thing I’ve done was a five-day… what was it called,” he asked himself. “It was a deprogramming, but they never used that word.”
“A deprogramming?”
“At a certain point, I just said fuck it, you know? I’m hounded day and night, the seeker has become the sought, I’m wasting my life worrying about this crap. So I wanted to get rid of what I’d always called the Jesus Christ in my head. I mean God, God’s voice, but because I was raised a Christian, it was Jesus. Jesus judging, Jesus protecting, Jesus saying, ‘You might want to rethink that.’ Whatever the case may be. Big or small. Jesus was always there. Making little marks. Tallying it all up. Do you have that voice, always telling you right from wrong?”
“Sure,” I said. “But it’s usually off the mark.”
“Rechanneling, that’s what they called it. It’s like a recovery center. They’re in California. Everything that’s not in Asia is in California. I went out there to ‘rechannel.’ They have people on staff, behavioral therapists, neuroscientists, philosophers, atheists. The idea is to stop thinking that that voice was given to you by God to do His work and to start thinking of it for what it is: old-fashioned conscience. Something naturally acquired. Evolution’s gift. They hook you up to monitors, do brain scans. You role-model God. You study atrocities. They show you time-lapse videos of decaying animals. ‘Codependence to Aliveness’ was their motto.”
“Are you making this up?” I asked.
“How could I make this up?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Did it work?”
“For a while. But old habits die hard, you fall back into your familiar patterns, and then you fly out for a tune-up. They recommend once a year. Look it up on the Internet. People swear by it. They have a beautiful view of the ocean.”
He gestured again.
“What makes you do all this?” I asked.
“Ho,” he said. He gave me a sidewise glance. “You really want to know?”
“I really do,” I said.
He was waiting for the C train to pull into the station one day when suddenly he dropped to his knees. He was eighteen, broke, a freshman at Columbia studying economics. It was a day in late winter, and the trains were slow. The platform was crowded. Those nearest him parted as he went down, forming a small circle around him. What was indisputably a bowing down felt to Mercer like levitation. He was looking down on that little crowd looking down on him. Behind him, lifting him, making him light as a cloud, was the presence that touched him, which he knew he could not turn to look at. It was suffused light. He peered down with a smile on that little crowd wary of his contagion. They didn’t see the smile. They saw a kid fall first to his knees and then onto his back. Mercer, above them, where everything had fused into palpable spirit, knew everything about them: their agitations, their rancors, their grudges against the city, and his smile was merciful. He even knew their names and where they lived. He dwelled in eternity’s single instant, a dimensionless black dot on the one hand (that was the best part, he said, being nothing, being a black dot) and, on the other, centuries of void and fire, glacial eras, the enduring silence of undiscovered caves. In the common parlance, it was an epiphany, a revelation, a religious experience. Run of the mill, probably, by his own admission. The train approached. The people debated internally. Alert someone? Or ignore and board? A few of the more concerned moved him back, closer to safety. Who, or what, Mercer touched, and what touched him back through his own hovering figure, now broke away. He was no longer floating. He felt his back against the platform, the chill through the coat. Trains came and went. The start of God’s absence from his life began.
“When I was twenty-eight,” he said, “I did something I had resisted doing since that day on the platform. I took the train out to Brooklyn, to an address I had never been to. I didn’t expect to find the woman I was looking for, but there was her name on the buzzer. I said to her, ‘Do you remember me?’ and she nodded, but she couldn’t place me. It had been ten years, after all.”
“What had been ten years?”
“Since we had seen each other on the platform. She was among the crowd that day.”
“How did you know where she lived?”
“I told you,” he said. “I knew their names and addresses.”
He should have just left—apprehended her, confirmed her, and walked away. But she invited him inside, and he followed her up the stairs. They sat down with coffee, and she asked him if the man had ever been found.
“The man?” he said.
“The man who hit you,” she said.
He had torn through the platform half naked, hit Mercer with a brass kettle, and down he went. “Just minding your own business,” said the woman, “and he came running right at you.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” he said.
“How do you remember it?” she asked.
“I know your name, don’t I?” he said. “How do I know your name and address? Explain that.”
“I gave all my information to the police,” she said. “You must have gotten it from them.”
Twenty years later, when Grant Arthur explained the origin of the Ulms, Mercer was prepared to listen. God had never reappeared to them, either. Not to reprimand them. Not to instruct them. Not to comfort them. Not to reassure them. Not to redeem them.
“It has been over three thousand years, and God has not returned for them,” he said. “It has been over thirty for me. Who better to understand the virtues of doubt than someone who once stood in the direct presence of God and had that memory taken away?”
/> He looked off.
“I must sound insane to you.”
“Strange things happen,” I said.
He turned to me with heavy eyes. I was reminded that he had arrived before me and that I wasn’t likely to catch up now.
“But I was still skeptical. I even hired a private detective to look into Grant Arthur. Asian woman. Come to think of it, she might still be on the payroll.”
“How does anyone doubt God when He supposedly appeared?” I asked him.
“You haven’t read it?”
“Read what?”
“Cantonment 240.”
“No.”
“Read it,” he said. “Your questions go away.”
“What happens in cantonment 240?”
He drank his drink and called for another.
“I can’t do it justice,” he said.
“Give me the gist.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t. And I wouldn’t try. I wouldn’t do that to you. It’s not an experience you want secondhand. You’ll have to go to Seir.”
He picked up his glass. He swung it like a cradle between his fingers, gently moving the liquid, peering into it, through it.
“I don’t want to have any more questions,” he said. “I have questioned myself out of too much. It’s only made me unhappy.” He turned to look at me, head a little loose on its stem. “Not a Christian, not a Buddhist. Zoroastrian no, atheist no. Not waiting for the mothership.” He downed the drink. “I’m a whore, Paul,” he said. “A whore who has bent her head into every car window that would lower itself. I’m tired of that. I want to be who I am.”
He gestured for the bartender.
“To be passed over by God in the final days, that must be a terror,” he said. “But to feel like you’ve been passed over by God all your days on earth? That, my friend, is hell.”
The weekend came, and I hung out with McGowan. We went to a bar and had a few beers. He caught me up with the Red Sox. I told him I couldn’t shake the image of Harper and Bryn going to the mall together, swinging the kids on swings, making them mac-and-cheese and giving them baths. He didn’t know who Harper and Bryn were. It was so easy to find yourself out of touch these days, I said to him.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Strip away the celebrity, and they’re just normal people,” I said. “Why can’t I be more like normal people?”
“Because you’re not normal,” he said. “You’re totally fucked up.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You are, Paul, you’re totally fucked up. You struggle with depression. Your idea of engaging with the world is watching a Red Sox game. And you take the job too personally.”
“I don’t take the job too personally. I take the job as it comes.”
“You think about the people,” he said. “You can’t do that. Their failings, their misfortunes. You have to think of it as one big disembodied mouth.”
“That’s what I try to do.”
“You try,” he said, “but you fail.”
I thought he was being a little hard on me. I just wanted to thank the guy for helping me out of the gym.
“You’re right,” I said. “I am fucked up.”
On Sunday I drove up to Poughkeepsie, to the Sarah Harvest Dodd Home for the Elderly, to see my mom. I’d like to say that we had a nice chat and a rewarding visit, but she hadn’t had anything resembling a functioning brain for five and a half years. She couldn’t piss, shit, or eat on her own. She hummed a lot and stared at the TV. She always looked the same: noticeably older. She sat in a wheelchair in a room with long floral curtains and a netless Ping-Pong table. I sat down next to her and started asking all the questions I always asked. “How are you feeling?” I said. No response. “Are you comfortable?” No response. “You want this pillow?” No response. “Have you missed me?” No response. “What did you have to eat today?” No response. “What are you watching?” No response. “Are they treating you well?” No response. “What can I do for you, Mom? Anything?” No response. I started telling her about myself. “I’m doing well,” I said to her. “The practice is going well. Everyone seems to be pretty happy. I do have some bad news, I guess. Connie and I broke up. We’ve been broken up for a while now, but this time it’s for good. She’s seeing someone new. I’m happy for her, as happy as I can be. Which is off the charts happy, Ma. Do you remember Connie? Of course you don’t,” I said. “You have no fucking clue who Connie is. She came up to visit you a few times. She liked you. She did, she combed your hair. She does shit like that. It breaks your fucking heart.” I took her hand. No response. “Mom,” I said. No response. Her head was cocked almost in the direction of the TV. “Remember when I couldn’t sleep?” No response. “Dad died and I couldn’t sleep?” No response. “And then one night, you happened to tell me about Chinese people?” No response. “I was so scared that I’d be the last person awake in the world. I don’t know why that was so scary to me, but it was. But you said I couldn’t be the last person awake in the world, because just as we were going to sleep, all the people in China were waking up. Do you remember telling me that?” No response. “That helped,” I told her. “Did I ever tell you that?” No response. “Even though Chinese people were strange to me then, you know, because of their eyes. I hope I told you that before you lost all your fucking marbles,” I said. No response. “I’m sorry I kept you up. You were trying to hold things together,” I said. “You did a good job. Did I tell you that, that you did a good job holding things together?” No response. “Did I ever thank you?” No response. “Can I thank you now?” No response. “Can I kiss you, Mom? Can I kiss you right here on your forehead?” No response. I kissed her. No response. “Even now,” I said, “when I can’t sleep, it helps me to think about the Chinese. All thanks to you. And then, when I do fall asleep, I sleep like a baby, Ma. Every night, I sleep like a dream.”
Nine
SOOKHART CALLED WITH NEWS. “I’ve found a copy,” he said.
“Of the Cantaveticles?”
“I’m as surprised as you. Astonished, in fact. Never in a million years… well, what follows from this is… the implications are rather far reaching, aren’t they?”
“How’d you find it?”
“The seller contacted a colleague of mine who was making inquiries on my behalf.”
“Who’s the seller?”
“He wishes to remain anonymous. That is frequently the case with transactions of this nature,” he said. “I’m sure you can understand.”
“But it’s real?”
“It’s real, and it’s complete. My understanding is that it is of Hungarian origin and dates roughly to the middle of the eighteenth century.”
“Written in Aramaic?”
“Curiously,” he said, “it appears to be written in Yiddish.”
That surprised me.
“Can you read Yiddish?”
“My dear boy,” he said, “no one can read Yiddish. But don’t let that worry you. We’ll find you a Yiddishist, and you can have it translated to your heart’s content. So long as you share what it says with the rest of us.”
He went quiet.
“Well?” he said. “Shall I proceed with the purchase?”
“Today was a tough day,” he wrote.
The man who takes care of us around here came to see me. He keeps the grounds, does the repair work. He knows how to strip mold from the walls and put in new lighting, but he can also recite Kierkegaard and the Psalms. He’s been here seven happy years. But lately he’s been having dreams. In them, he sees his wife again. She tells him things about God. She tells him what heaven is like. The dreams are vivid. He wakes up and can’t shake them. He feels her in the room with him. He asks me my opinion of the dead. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. The dead are dead. He nods. He’s a thoughtful man, I can see he’s struggling. He knows some cultures believe that the dead are alive and well. They hover, they hold sway over the living. He wants to know if I agree t
hat it would be better that way, better to be separated from the dead only by a thin membrane that the dead can pierce when necessary. What’s called miracles. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. There are no miracles, only men. But I can’t help him shake the dreams.
He will leave, I think. It has happened this way before. We are our own worst enemy. We abandon doubt. We become believers. Even now our numbers are dwindling.
Please consider my proposal to pay us a visit.
That same afternoon I saw a new patient, an old man with poor gums. He introduced himself as Eddie—an odd name, I thought, for an octogenarian. But, hey, if you’re Eddie at ten, you’re still Eddie at eighty. Eddie let me know the minute I sat down that he had been seeing the same dentist for over thirty-seven years. A Dr. Rappaport. I knew Dr. Rappaport. He had a good reputation. He also had—and this was the reason we all knew Dr. Rappaport—an unusual hygienist, whose habit it was to enter the room and ask her patients to hold certain instruments while she worked. “Hold this,” she’d say, handing the patient an instrument while in the middle of a cleaning, and “Hold this,” which the patient did dutifully, if not wholly comprehendingly, one instrument after the other—only to discover later, upon closer inspection, that she had only one arm. She was a one-armed hygienist. She was a very good hygienist, from everything I heard, even compared to hygienists with both arms. You can be a one-armed golfer and a one-armed drummer—why not a one-armed hygienist? The variety of determination in the world never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, about three weeks before my new patient was scheduled to see Dr. Rappaport, Dr. Rappaport’s office called to inform him that Dr. Rappaport had died. My new patient was going to have to find a new dentist. But after thirty-seven years, Eddie—who, at eighty-one, and weighing in at about a hundred pounds, was no spring chicken himself—didn’t want to find a new dentist. He was happy with Dr. Rappaport. Dr. Rappaport had taken fine care of his teeth for nearly half his life. It was inconceivable to him that Dr. Rappaport could die. That tall, youthful man with the lab coat and tan, how could he die? “He must have been a full twenty years younger than me,” said Eddie, who, I recognized, was one of those patients who found in his biannual checkup an opportunity to unburden some of his loneliness. He was a talker, and although I was busy that afternoon, that poor old dad was going to be dead in six months, and so I rested the hand that held the explorer and let him talk. I looked over at Abby, to nonverbally share in the conclusion that we had a talker on our hands—only to find her gone again, replaced by that diminutive temp I disliked. Where was Abby? She was there that morning. She never came to me, not even when all she needed was an afternoon off. She went to Connie instead. To Abby I was more like some creepy janitor, with his leer and mop bucket, than I was the man in charge. I didn’t care for the way the temp looked at me when I looked at her thinking I was looking at Abby; it was, I thought, the natural expression of her face at rest, but it made me feel vaguely accused all the same. Why is she not wearing a paper mask? I wondered. Does she not care if flecks of dental scum invade her membranes and nostrils? Abby would never not wear a mask, I thought. I peered back down at Eddie, whose face—though not at rest, as he was still going on and on about Dr. Rappaport—appeared melancholy, beautiful, and lost. His eyes were much wider than eyes typically are at that age, swimming in a pure whiteness. It was one more indignity of old age, he was saying, like chemo, or incontinence, to have your dentist die on you. Whose dentist just ups and dies? Old people’s. But not even old people expect it. Among the most basic guarantees that life goes on, that life is ever going on, is the promise that after the passage of six months’ time, your dentist will be alive and ready to receive you. When my patient learned that Dr. Rappaport had had a sudden heart attack, despite his relative youth and vigor, and was no longer receiving anyone, he realized that he, too, was bound to die. He’d always known it in an offhand way, but if it could happen to Dr. Rappaport, death was coming for Eddie, too. It was one of an accumulation of things that sent him spiraling into depression. He stopped taking care of himself, stopped going to the doctor, stopped doing any of the exercises necessary to keep his rheumatoid arthritis in check, and stopped flossing at night. Only at the urging of a physician friend did he get on an antidepressant and resume making an effort. But by then, his health had deteriorated. His rheumatoid arthritis was much worse, and as a result, it was virtually impossible for him to pull the floss out, wrap it around his fingers, and manipulate it between his teeth and gums. He couldn’t even use a floss pick. He’d flossed every day for nearly fifty years before Dr. Rappaport’s death, and now he had lost the necessary dexterity. A casual glance at his hands and anyone could see why. Each of his fingers veered at the knuckle like the end of a hockey stick. I didn’t know how it was possible to do anything at all with hands like that, even so little as turning a doorknob or opening a jar. Eventually, I thought, those fingers are going to meld into one, as teeth sometimes do in the mouths of the super old, and his two finger chunks, one on his right hand and one on his left, will be useless for anything but sitting in his lap pointing at each other. I should bring Connie in here, I thought, and show her Eddie’s hands and ask her if she still sees the point of lotioning every ten minutes. Lotion an inch thick, to this favor you must come. And Mrs. Convoy, too, I should bring Mrs. Convoy in here and demand to know why I shouldn’t immediately go outside and smoke a cigarette and continue smoking throughout the afternoon, since we all arrive at the same conclusion. After the hands, I’ll show them Eddie’s teeth and tell them his absurd predicament: half a century of flossing, only to be knocked on his ass by news of a dead dentist.