I wrote:
Betsy?
I deleted that and wrote:
What do you know about me, or think you know about me, “my brother”?
Irritated at receiving no reply, I kept at it.
Am I an indoor person or an outdoor person? Cat or dog man? Do I keep a journal? Watch birds? Collect stamps? Do I plan my weekends all in advance, pack them full of activity, and then sit back and watch them unfold? Or do I wait until they’re here and squander them? You don’t know. And why don’t you know? Because whatever you think you know is subject to change at my whim. I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Watch me break out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a cafe.
Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.
I meant “cage.”
He wrote back:
Here is what I know about your life. You’re an indoor man because your profession demands it. You feel estranged from nature, unable to access it. You’ve replaced it with television and the Internet, which come directly into your home, and supply your need for diversion even as they coarsen your instinct for the spirit. You don’t have kids because you feel untethered and uprooted, and you can’t imagine bestowing that legacy upon a child. You are too much in your own head, trying to unravel the mysteries. Sometimes they make you despair and you give up hope. However, there’s nothing wrong with being in your head. In your head, with your thoughts, you live a rich and complex life, full of anxieties and regrets, yes, but also tenderness, and fancy, and unspoken sympathy for others. There is a lot of emotion coursing through you at any given moment of the day, and maybe nobody knows it because nobody can read your mind, but if they only knew, if they knew, they would say, He’s alive, all right, he’s alive. You can’t ask for much more than that.
Or can you?
“Dr. O’Rourke?” she said. She might have been saying it for a while. “Paul?” she said.
It was Connie. I let the hand with the phone fall to my side.
“Is everything okay?”
I nodded. “Everything’s fine,” I said.
I waited until she walked away. Then I wrote:
How do you know all that?
He replied:
I told you. I am your brother.
It might seem that a dental professional can never really get to know his patients because visits are so infrequent and short-lived, but you’d be surprised. When someone is religious about regular checkups, and between those checkups has toothaches and accidents and cosmetic needs and thus requires additional work, a warm rapport can easily develop. Some patients even thank me after the most brutalizing treatments, genuinely grateful for what I do for them. When next they come in, I will ask about their jobs and their families before getting down to business. It’s almost small-town that way.
That morning, when I walked in on Bernadette Marder, despite having worked on her for nearly ten years, I honestly thought she was a first-time patient. She looked so much older than the last time I saw her.
The sight of Bernadette looking old reminded me of a joke. A woman makes an appointment with a new dentist and discovers that he has the same name as someone she went to high school with. She wonders if her new dentist could be the boy she had such a terrible crush on when she was a girl of fifteen. But when he walks in, he’s such an old fart that she quickly comes to her senses. Even so, after the exam is over, she idly asks him what high school he attended… and sure enough, it’s the one she attended! “What year did you graduate?” she asks him, growing excited, and he names the very year she graduated. “You were in my class!” the woman exclaims, and the unsuspecting dentist screws up his eyes and peers at the old hag in the chair and says, “What did you teach?”
My patient, Bernadette Marder, looked so hideously old, so hideously and prematurely aged since the last time I’d seen her, that all her most stressful and trying years might have been crammed into six months. She had gone from forty to sixty-five in a mere hundred and eighty days. Her hair had thinned out and just sort of died on the top of her head. A scaly pink meridian divided one limp half from the other. An array of wrinkles, radiating from her pale lips, had deepened and fossilized, and her face sagged. And yet when I realized (thanks to the name on the chart) that it was Bernadette, my Bernadette, and not some first-time geriatric patient, and asked how she was doing, she told me she’d never been happier. She had just gotten married, in fact, and had been given new responsibility at work, which came with a small raise. I couldn’t comprehend it. Never happier, newly married, making more money, and looking like death. Almost impossible to track on a day-to-day basis, the passage of time is at work on people unremittingly. As a dentist seeing familiar faces only once every six months, I became acutely aware of it. It is the inexorable truth of our existence on earth, and if it is happening to Bernadette Marder, I was made to realize once again, it is also happening to us—to Abby, Betsy, Connie, and me—though it remains elusive, indeed invisible, so that, presumably, we will not all stop in horror and stare and point at one another until the screaming begins. No, we carry on, as Bernadette was doing, dwelling happily in a constant present that persisted day after day even as it continually perished, never demanding a sober assessment, or a sudden outburst of pity, or the radical reconsideration of everything.
Looking at Bernadette in the chair, sallow, wrinkled, bald, and happy, I felt I had no choice but to tell her. But tell her what? I didn’t know. What good would it do, what action could she take? She was being consumed in some way, literally consumed before my very eyes, and no one, probably for fear of offending her, had said anything. As a medical professional, it was my obligation to do so. I just didn’t know how to put it into words. No matter how well intentioned, I might only end up offending her and then losing her as a patient. Did I want to sacrifice Bernadette’s billings to my observation that she appeared to be growing older faster than the rest of us? No, I thought. I will just ignore it. But how can anyone in good conscience ignore it? “Bernadette,” I said, and she turned to me in the chair. You’ve grown old, Bernadette. No, I couldn’t say that! Bernadette, your best days are over, it’s all downhill from here. Good God, no! You’re fucking dying, Bernadette! No! You’re practically decomposing on a cold slab! Oh, God, she was looking at me so intently now, I had to say something.
“Bernadette,” I said, “I mention this only out of…” I stopped and began again, saying, “Bernadette, have you, or your new husband perhaps, noticed that, well, how shockingly—”
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
“Oh, Connie!” I exclaimed.
“When you have a moment,” she said.
I looked happily down upon Bernadette. “That’s Connie,” I said. “I must go and talk to her.”
But on my way over, I saw that she was holding her iPad, which could only mean more unpleasantness.
“What is it this time?” I said.
“Twitter,” she said.
In the last week, the comments, messages, and postings made in my name continued to appear on respectable sites like ESPN, HuffPost, National Geographic, while expanding into darker recesses, into fringe chat rooms, unmoderated forums unfurling sex and death, my brand proliferating across platforms, burrowing ever deeper into the shallows… and now, two weeks after the O’Rourke Dental website appeared, “my” first tweet entered the world. It came from the account of @PaulCORourkeDental (New York, NY • www.drpaulcorourke.com) and it read:
Error and misfortune arise in the world from the belief that God’s chief aim for creation is universal belief
Connie and I puzzled over that one awhile.
“I think you’re saying you shouldn’t believe.”
“I’m not saying anything,” I said.
“I know it’s not you, Paul,” she said. “You don’t have to keep insisting.”
“I just want to make clear—”
“I know it’s not you
. There’s no reason to be defensive.”
“I’m not being defensive, I’m being pissed off!”
“You sound defensive,” she said.
I read the tweet again. I thought she was right. I was advocating, or my impostor was advocating, possibly on behalf of God, against belief. I fired off another email while Connie watched.
Twitter now, huh? Why are you doing this to me?
I handed the iPad back to her, and she read the tweet again.
“You know what it sounds like to me?” she asked, before walking away.
“What?”
“Something an atheist would say.”
I knew I was in love with the Plotzes when I felt embarrassed to be an atheist, and instead of insisting upon it as a declaration of my essential self, around them I kept it under wraps. Rejecting God seemed an affront to their entire way of life, at least as I understood it: to the prayers sung on Friday night, to the commandments kept on the Sabbath, to every God-directed effort made throughout the week. They worked hard at their faith. They made it as much about the body as the soul. Sure, the Catholics crossed themselves upon entering the church, they touched holy water, they knelt before climbing into the pew, but these were but the throat clearings of a proper Plotz. The old-timey sway-and-song of charismatic Protestants was a set of Plotz knee bends. That’s why it came as such a surprise when Connie told me that Ezzie, another uncle, was an atheist. I was really shocked. I’d watched the guy. He looked as devout as the rest. “He doesn’t believe in God?” I asked. “Nope.” “Why not?” “Because… I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask him.” I wasn’t going to ask any Plotz about atheism. “Is it because of the Holocaust?” I asked. She looked irritated by the question. “Not every Jew who doesn’t believe doesn’t believe because of the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t have a specifically Jewish set of reasons for not believing. Hello?” she said, pointing to herself. “Sometimes we just don’t believe.” “But Ezzie acts like he believes,” I said. “He bows his head. He wears the whatchamacallit. He goes to synagogue.” “But that’s different,” she said. “What’s different?” “Of course he does those things.” “Why?” “Because it’s important to him. He’s a Jew, it’s important.” “Because of the Holocaust?” “What is it with you and the Holocaust? Do you think everything we do centers around the Holocaust?” “No.” “The Holocaust, sure, a very big deal. But it was a while ago. We don’t wake up every morning asking ourselves what we should or shouldn’t be doing on account of the Holocaust.” “Sorry,” I said. “It’s new to me.” “Ezzie’s an atheist,” she said. “Why? I don’t know. Why are you an atheist?” “Because God doesn’t exist.” “Well, there you have it. That’s probably what Ezzie would say, too.”
But why did it remain important for him to go through the motions? More than that: to actively and willingly participate in customs and rituals whose essential purpose was the glorying of God?
Who cared! What a way to be an atheist! When you were born a Christian and raised a Christian and then slowly awoke from the dream song of Christianity to face its philosophical absurdities and moral outrages, you stopped doing everything you once did (which was very little to begin with, maybe a little prayer, a little Bible study, a little church on Palm Sunday) and sat alone with your disbelief—conscientious, yes, and principled, but also a little bereft, left to make meaning on your own and to locate a source of continuity somewhere in the structureless secular world. Not Ezzie. Ezzie could pop by Rachel and Howard’s house on a Friday night and just jump in and do it all and then pop out again, spiritually restored but still on firm ground. He wanted to do such things. He had an obligation, as a Jew, if only out of loyalty, to continue a tradition that had received its share of knocks, or more practically to remain connected to his family, his childhood, his forefathers, his people. To remain connected! I didn’t know why he did it, but that, I thought, would be reason enough. And reason enough to make an atheist like me envious of all Ezzie could discard and still hold dear to his heart.
It was different with Mrs. Convoy. With Mrs. Convoy, I was a big loud brawling debunker. I wanted her to confront the follies of the Bible and to face the plain reality of a world without God. So I’d avail myself of the arguments, and she’d say to me, “But how do you know?” I’d avail myself of more of the arguments, and she’d say, in a slightly different tone, “But how do you know?” And I’d avail myself of still more of the arguments, and still she’d say, “But how do you know?” What we were really arguing about, of course, was how we should define the word “know.” But in the heat of debate we skipped right over that. She knew I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that I knew as she insisted I know (a higher standard of knowing than she demanded of herself), which left the door cracked open to the most maddening of counterarguments: “How—do—you—know?”
So I asked her one time, I said, “Okay, Betsy.”
We were having dinner at an Olive Garden in a mall in New Jersey. She was sipping her customary glass of Chardonnay, I was on my fourth beer. I liked going to the Olive Garden now and then. It reminded me of my childhood. I liked going to the mall for the same reason. I no longer went to the mall to buy things, as Mrs. Convoy did. Nowhere in America would I find that one thing I had not yet purchased at least once in my life. No, I was done buying, I was done wanting. Wanting all the time, for everything, it’s numbing. But I still went to the mall with Mrs. Convoy. In the vast whirring spaces of a mall, overlooking the sloping carpeted ramps, I felt at home more than I did anywhere in Manhattan. Whenever I was homesick or nostalgic, when others left for Long Island or upstate New York, I visited the malls in New Jersey and sometimes went as far as the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia, where I walked the wide aisles with the hordes and bargain hunters. I liked nothing more than to sit on a bright mesh bench in the middle of all that sack rustle and watch people come and go from the Foot Locker, I liked nothing more than to stroll along the kiosks of sunglasses and affordable jewelry, I liked nothing more than a food court. Here is where, growing up, I had made the most of things. Here at the mall every August my mother bought me back-to-school clothes, here at Christmastime I coveted the toys we couldn’t afford, here I filled my empty summer hours with something more than strife and television and the smell of dogs. The mall was always beckoning, and I had wandered it with purpose. The mall itself was my purpose. If I had a few coins to scratch together, I could turn them into a Coke or a high score on a video game or an illicit smoke in the parking lot. And now a mall returned me to a time when desire was easy to resolve. Look, it was still working for so many of them! There they were, with their lists and missions, their handbags and gift cards, moving with oblivion in and out of the stores. A mall can make you feel alive again if you go there only to watch and if you watch without judgment, looking kindly upon the concerted shoppers, who have no choice about buying or not buying, it would seem, and who would not want that choice—not if it meant no longer knowing what to want.
“According to you,” I said to Mrs. Convoy at the Olive Garden, “and correct me if I’m wrong here, but according to you, the only way into the kingdom of heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. Now Connie, as you know, is Jewish. Her whole family is. Which means, among other things, they reject Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. And I happen to be very fond of the Plotzes,” I said to her. “I’ve never met a family like theirs before. There’s about four hundred of them, while in my family, there was just the three of us, and then, kaplow, just the two. But anyway, you would, if I’m not mistaken, have the Plotzes burn in hell because they don’t accept the divinity of Jesus Christ. Is that correct?”
Mrs. Convoy sipped her Chardonnay, then set the glass down, reclined back in her chair, and narrowed her eyes at me.
“It’s not a trick question,” I said. “You insist, do you not, that Connie, with all her family, will be pitched into the boiling waters of hell upon death because they don’t believe in Christ.
”
“How do you know,” she asked me, leaning forward, whispering her thoughtful reply across the table, a reply that chilled me to the bone, “how do you know that at the very last second of Connie’s life, Jesus Christ doesn’t open her heart and she converts?”
For the record: I did not become an atheist to be smug. I did not become an atheist so that I could stand above believers and shout my enlightenment down at them. I become an atheist because God didn’t exist. The only god I cared to entertain, which came to mind in the Olive Garden when Mrs. Convoy confided in me her private solution to the Jewish problem, had personally approved a bumper sticker I once saw on the back of an old Saab parked in downtown Boston. BELIEVERS MADE ME AN ATHEIST, it read.
“Why am I doing this to you?” he wrote at last. “Because you’re lost.”
“Lost?” I replied.
What business is it of yours if I’m lost? You don’t know me. You’re just saying things to make me think you do. The most obvious things. All that stuff about being alive inside my head, feeling intensely though no one knows it—that’s so obvious. This is some kind of scam you’re running and I want to know why. Unless it’s you, Betsy. Is it you? Connie, is this you?
I promise you, Paul. It’s no scam. Please, be patient. I know it must be uncomfortable for someone to pop up out of nowhere and diagnose your troubles with pinpoint accuracy. I don’t think you’re an animal in a cage—far from it. You’re the full measure of a man, thoroughly contemporary, at odds with the American dream of upward mobility and its empty material success, and in search of real meaning for your life. I should know, Paul, I was there once, too. In fact, you might even say that you and I are one and the same.
As I was reading, I had the feeling that something was off. An unease just under the skin. I had the weird sensation that he was in the room with me. Or on a computer on the other side of the wall. I looked closely at his email address.
“He’s writing to me under my own name,” I said.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel Page 13