To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

by Joshua Ferris

  I smiled and turned away, raising my me-machine back to eye level and directing my attention to the Internet. I glanced at the message boards to get boggswader’s reaction to last night’s game. Then I read Owen from Brookline’s sabermetrics analysis and EatMeYankees69’s play-by-play breakdown. Then I watched a few (muted) highlights and then posted a comment or two of my own on one or two of the blogs and the message boards. Then I carefully refocused my attention on Connie.

  She was now receiving a package from the UPS man. She also called the missed appointments, managed the reschedules, picked up the desk flowers I only ever half noticed, kept the water cooler full, and changed the ink cartridge in the printer. And she was the one who had to eat the patient’s shit when he or she came out miserable with a bloody mouth and the first thing we did was demand a copayment.

  I looked back at my me-machine. I continued to be discreetly scrutinized by my patient, who was still trying her best to place me. I scrolled farther down on one of the message boards—and that’s when I saw the next thing they’d done.

  They’d put me on the message boards and on the blogs.

  I posted regularly to both, but always incognito, as YazFanOne. I never posted as Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. But now a Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., had made his first appearance on the message boards and blogs.

  He was saying things like, “Amazing third inning. Go Ellsbury. Click here for more commentary.”

  And “What a crushing eighth. Three RBIs for McDonald. And take a look at this.”

  The links “Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S.” provided were entirely unrelated to the Red Sox. The first was an article reporting on an alarming new development between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The second involved endangered tribes and other marginalized peoples.

  When I looked up some indeterminate time later, I found the three of them, Abby, Connie, and Mrs. Convoy, staring at me from behind the front desk.

  “Really?” said Connie. “Again?”

  Mrs. Convoy shook her head gravely. Abby glanced away, hurrying off somewhere to judge me in private.

  I smiled at my patient: the jig was up, it was me, her dentist. I approached the front desk with my me-machine.

  “Look at this,” I said, “look! They’ve outed me. I’m on the message boards, the blogs. I’m all over the place!”

  Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, “And how is the ‘complete experience’?” I told her, she said, “And do you think the ‘complete experience’ might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?” I told her, she said, “We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown.”

  She walked away in frustration. I went around and sat down next to Connie. I showed her the comments and postings by YazFanOne. “That’s me,” I said. “Who else would complain about Francona like that?” Then I showed her the newest member of the message boards and the most recent poster to all the blogs, Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. “That’s me, too,” I said, “but that’s not me posting. ‘Great third inning’? ‘Go Ellsbury’? That’s some dumb bullshit. I don’t post dumb bullshit.”

  “You say this is you?” she said, pointing at my name on the me-machine.

  “My name, yeah, but that’s not me posting, because I would never post dumb bullshit like that, and certainly never under my real name.”

  “Why never under your real name?”

  “For the sake of privacy,” I said.

  “And so you post under this other name here, this YazFanOne?”

  “Right, YazFanOne. That’s me. This Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., he’s someone else. Except not, because that’s also me. I’m Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S.”

  “So for the sake of your identity,” she said, “you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.”

  She looked at me as blank as a stapler while waiting for my response.

  “You don’t seem to be getting the point,” I said.

  “Oh, I think I get it,” she said.

  “First it was the website. Now it’s this. I know you think I’m paranoid when it comes to the Internet, but look at this. Does this not justify everything I’ve been warning you about? This is a revolution, Connie. Everyone assumes that the new world order will be benign, but it won’t be. Just look at what they’re doing to me—and who am I? I’m a nobody.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She was scrutinizing the screen. “Your name is Paul C. O’Rourke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s the C stand for?”

  “What?”

  “The C. What’s it stand for? I thought your middle name was Saul.”

  “Paul Saul O’Rourke?” I said. “That doesn’t sound very likely.”

  “Then why did you tell me that that was your name?”

  “I seriously doubt I ever told you that my name was Paul Saul O’Rourke,” I said, laughing understatedly at the absurdity so clearly on display.

  “But you did.”

  “If so,” I said, “I must have been joking.”

  “You weren’t joking,” she said.

  “Can we please, please focus on what’s important here? Someone is impersonating me. They’re posting to the blogs and message boards using my real name. They’re pretending to be me, but it’s not me.”

  “And who are you, exactly, if not Paul Saul O’Rourke?”

  “Paul Conrad,” I said.

  “Your father’s name?”

  “It was my mom’s doing. He would not have thought enough of himself to want anyone to have his name. Except when he was manic, when he probably would have happily named me Conrad Conrad Conrad.”

  “Let me see that thing,” she said. I handed her my me-machine. “What are these links to?”

  “One’s an article in the Times about Israel and Palestine, and the other’s, I don’t know, something about endangered peoples or something.”

  She started clicking around.

  “You’ve commented on this article,” she said.

  “I’ve what?”

  “The one in the Times. You’ve commented at the end of it.”

  We read it together:

  Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., Manhattan, New York

  At the turn of the millennium, they were just one of many mystery cults, almost indistinguishable from Christianity, which was being heavily persecuted at the time. But unlike Christianity, they had no apostles, no campaigns, and none of Paul’s passionate intensity walking the footpaths of the Roman empire. They were a people risen out of the ashes of the exterminated Amalekites, and when the tide of Christianity broke over the world, their message was drowned and their people destroyed. The Cantaveticles reads as one long serial extinction. They die out, “a portion weeping, a portion smiling, a portion on their knees refusing to pray.” And yet a remnant always reappears, to be hunted down and extinguished totally in some later, more distant episode.

  July 18, 2011 at 8:04 p.m.

  “That’s a weird comment,” she said.

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “Calm down. I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying it’s weird. It doesn’t have anything to do with the article.” She read the comment once more. “I know the Amalekites,” she said. She typed the word into Google. “ ‘Name of a nomadic nation south of Palestine,’ ” she read. “ ‘That the Amalekites were not Arabs, but of a stock related to the Edomites (consequently also to the Hebrews), can be concluded from the genealogy in Genesis, chapter thirty-six, verse twelve, and in first Book of Chronicles, chapter one, verse thirty-six. Amalek—’ ” She stopped herself. “Amalek,”
she said, turning to me. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

  “Who’s Amalek?”

  “The ancient enemy of the Jews,” she said. “The most enduring enemy. He never dies, he just reincarnates.” She turned back to the me-machine. “ ‘Amalek is the son of Esau’s first-born son Eliphaz and of the concubine Timna, the daughter of Seir…’ ”

  “Seir?” I said. “Like Seir Design?”

  “ ‘That they were of obscure origin is also indicated in Numbers, chapter twenty-four, verse twenty, where the Amalekites are called “the first of the nations.” The Amalekites were the first to come in contact with the Israelites… vainly opposing their march at Rephidim, not far from Sinai.’ ”

  “Sinai, Amalekites—this has nothing to do with me,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

  She handed the phone back. She didn’t know, and shrugged.

  Identity theft was intended to separate a man from his money. When and how did they come for my money? Was it Anonymous, or someone beyond even his malignant skill set? Or was it something else altogether, something yet unfathomable, taking shape behind a firewall securely blocking my view of things, to make me not the victim of some nefarious online activity, but the perpetrator?

  The things written in my name seemed to carry significance, some ancient charge. If I didn’t turn away with rage, I would have turned away with… what? Embarrassment, I guess. An absurd sense of responsibility. It wasn’t the real Paul C. O’Rourke talking. It was an impostor, a more determined and mysterious Paul C. O’Rourke who, unlike me, had something urgent to say. I didn’t comment on the Internet, with the exception of my remarks about the Red Sox, because, to be perfectly honest, the real Paul C. O’Rourke didn’t have anything to say.

  “Found my comment on the Times,” I wrote Seir Design.

  Also found my posts on the Red Sox message boards. I got news for you, pal: I don’t post dumb bullshit. Your impersonation attempts aren’t going to fly. Everyone who knows me knows that when I post, I post gold. They also know that I don’t give a damn about mystery cults, Sinai, or the Amalekites, fun as all that sounds.

  I went back to work. I never wanted to go back to work. That’s not to say I didn’t like work, but that getting back into work, sitting down chairside again, receiving the explorer from Abby, restarting the machinery of diagnosis and repair—no. It was all too familiar. But then, five or ten minutes into it, something clicked, and again I was focused, moving from patient to patient—making patter, replacing a tooth, designing a new smile for a bride-to-be. Trapped inside all day telling people to floss didn’t always eliminate the fleeting sensation of being alive. Beyond the oppression of my familiar surroundings, the irrepressible persistence of self among my staff, and the accusation in the eyes of many of my patients that I was at best a colossal inconvenience, there were reasons to cheer. Widows interested in braces. Children overcoming terror. And all those who had brushed, flossed, and water-picked according to schedule, who needed little work and no lecture, and who left with the smiles they deserved. Work wasn’t a struggle then. It was a gift, really the best defense I knew against the chronic affliction of my self-obsession.

  One of my patients that day was a man with a case of Bell’s palsy. He had woken up in the night with a collapsing face on account of that inexplicable neurological condition that usually strikes the obese and the old. My patient was a little overweight but still a young man, and yet I got the impression that he was not taking good care of himself. He looked like your typical overworked substance-binging New Yorker whose nerves, by way of an especially public form of revenge, had poxed him with a temporary facial deformity. It had happened a few days ago and would take its own sweet time in resolving itself. In the meantime he was dealing with an abscess. The Bell’s palsy had something special in mind for him when, instead of making his face droop, it pried back the right cheek and suspended it there, turning his expression into a mad dog’s snarl. That snarl had opened up a little window into the current state of his oral health, which at that most inopportune time had taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they were related, the Bell’s palsy and the suddenly pregnant abscess endangering his first molar. Or maybe my patient had fudged his timeline—patients are the most unreliable people—and he had been living with the abscess but had chosen to ignore it, as he claimed it wasn’t causing him any pain. Ignore it, that is, until the Bell’s palsy drew back the curtain on his infection for everyone to see, everyone who was already gaping at the poor man for viciously smiling like a Doberman at the gate.

  One of his accessory canals was weirdly branched, and clearing out that last bit of rot was like trying to hook my hand around the back of a refrigerator to plug the cord in. As I was finishing up, Connie came in to tell me I had a call.

  “Talsman’s on the phone,” she said.

  “It’s Talsman,” said Talsman, when I picked up. Talsman called himself Talsman.

  The site was registered to an Al Frushtick.

  “Frushtick,” I said. “That name’s familiar.”

  “Sounds like ‘fish stick’ to me,” said Talsman, ever helpful.

  I got off the phone. “See if we have a patient named Frushtick,” I said to Connie.

  She came back ten minutes later with Al Frushtick’s file. I’d last seen him in January, when he told me he was leaving for Israel.

  “This guy!” I said. “I know him. He’s the one who said he wanted to fuck you.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah! He was all hopped up on gas. Betsy!” I cried. “It’s our patient!”

  She was in with a patient. “What patient?”

  “The one with the meditation techniques! Remember?”

  “Who?”

  “The Tibetan! He wanted me to yank his teeth without—oh, never mind. Al Frushtick,” I said to Connie. “That’s who’s doing this to me!”

  “What did you ever do to Al Frushtick?”

  “What did I ever do to any of them?” I said. “Fixed his rotten teeth. But then he said something to me. When I was showing him out the door, he said something…”

  “What was it?”

  “He said he was going to Israel, but not because he was Jewish. I was helping him on with his coat. He said he was something… something ethnic, or something. I thought it was just the gas talking.”

  “Something ethnic?”

  I tried my best to remember, but it was lost.

  “Hi, Al Frushtick,” I wrote.

  This is how you repay a man for repairing your teeth?

  The site changed the next day, and now my bio page hosted a more extensive biblical or Bible-like passage that almost told a story or homily or parable or something. It started with one of those endless genealogies that always does me in when I try reading the actual Bible, this one and that one begating first with the wife, then with the concubine, and then, after too many hins of wine, with the daughters. All the characters of the tale possessed the names of Star Wars figurines you find arranged upon the walls of toy stores, accessories sold separately. One guy was named Tin, who had a son, Mamucam, who had a wife called Gopolojol. Not another word on Tin and his kin, but they no doubt carried some kind of weight as we made our way down the conga line of middlemen and bit players to arrive at Agag, king of the Amalekites. The Amalekites were a strong tribe of noblemen, traceable to Abraham and dwelling peacefully upon the pastures of a place called Hazazon. They had stocks of cattle, camel, sheep, and oxen. “And such as went forth to battle, with all instruments of war, there were one hundred thousand and twenty and four thousand and five hundred, which could keep rank; and they were not of double heart,” my bio page reported.

  One day the Amalekites were attacked by the Israelites, who came upon them from the west. The Israelites targeted a party of weak and infirm Amalekites who could not defend themselves, seized their camels, and fled. In retaliation, the Amalekites readied their armies for war. But then Moses showed up. “Moses came forth and bowed bef
ore Agag with a trespass offering, saying unto him, Hearken unto my voice, I pray thee; lay not the sin on Israel, for Pharaoh hath kept us in bondage four hundred years and thirty.” Moses tells Agag about the Israelites’ long captivity in Egypt, the terrible travails of their desert wanderings, and their covenant with a single God who seems to have abandoned them. He begs Agag’s forgiveness for taking that cheap swipe at them, explaining that they’re hungry, tired, and scared. “And the people of Israel had pity in the eye of Agag, and he took butter, and milk, and the calf he had dressed, and set it before them, and they did eat. And Israel parted laden with ephahs of flax and measures of barley, and of spices very great store.”

  And all was well until the Israelites amassed a huge army and attacked the Amalekites again. “The Israelites took the war upon them, and blew with trumpets, and dashed to pieces all their enemies.” Agag, king of the Amalekites, fearing the wrath of a pitiless people driven by a bloodlust to take all of Canaan “from Dan even to Beersheba” so that they might fulfill their God’s covenant, says to his people, “Let us fetch the gods of the Egyptians, and the gods of the Canaanites, and the gods of the Philistines, and make covenant with them, that they may save us out of the hand of our enemy.” When word spreads through camp that the gods of every tribe in Canaan have arrived to defend the Amalekites, a great cry goes up, and the earth rings. But little good the gods do them once the fighting begins. The Israelites reduce the Amalekite army from a hundred twenty thousand men to seventy thousand in three days. They flee back to camp and then abandon Hazazon for the safe haven of Rephidim. I was making a real effort to follow along.

  Who should come after the Amalekites in no time at all but the muscular, divinely inspired Israelites. This time Agag says to his people, Okay, well, obviously that last strategy needs a rethink. Not much luck to be had bringing all those gods together. Maybe they were jealous of one another. Maybe the powers of one canceled out the powers of another. I can’t really tell you what happened because I’m not a god, I’m just a king. But one thing’s for sure. We got our butts handed to us on a tabernacle back there. “Hear my voice; ye children of Amalek, hearken to my speech: Ye have gone a whoring after every god that dwelleth in the land, and have made false covenant with them. And every god hath made of you a carcase unto the fowls of the air, and the wild beasts of the earth. And your children have grown strange.”