To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

by Joshua Ferris

  “Who is?”

  “He’s created an email in my name. This person… or… program… whatever it is who… he’s pretending to be me in his private correspondence. He sent me an email from myself.”

  I looked up. I had said all of this to Mrs. Convoy.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  If I didn’t know from her physical proximity when the email from “Paul C. O’Rourke” landed in my in-box that it was not Mrs. Convoy, I knew it from her guileless and unblinking stare.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  A few days later Connie came up to me and said, “Have you really never used Twitter before?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve really never used Twitter before.”

  “How many characters do you have to work with?”

  “In Twitter?”

  “Yes, in Twitter.”

  “A hundred and forty.”

  “So you know that much.”

  “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Connie. Everyone knows that much.”

  “Have you been following your tweets the last couple of days?”

  “Kari Gutrich told me not to engage.”

  “Who’s Kari Gutrich?”

  “Kari Gutrich, Esquire. Talsman’s cyberlaw expert. She said engaging could only make things worse. So that’s what I’m doing, not engaging.”

  “You mean you’re just going to let someone say whatever he wants in your name and not even keep track of it?”

  “That lawyer was very frightening,” I said. “I don’t want to make matters worse than they already are.”

  “You’re not going to make them worse just by looking.”

  “I don’t know that. I don’t know how the Internet works.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know how the Internet works? You’re on your phone every five seconds.”

  “That’s you! That’s not me! That’s you!”

  She took a step back using only her neck. “Okay,” she said, “calm down.”

  “We couldn’t go to dinner without you spending half the meal reading your goddamn phone!”

  “Okay, okay, I know,” she said. “We’ve cataloged my failings. I checked my phone too often. Can we move on?”

  She looked down at the iPad in her hand. I could see that she was on Twitter, not because I was a Twitter user, but because I sometimes went to Twitter to read boggswader’s pithy commentaries and Owen from Brookline’s statistical revelations.

  “I’ll just take a few at random,” she said, and she began to read.

  Of all the species of vanity man indulges in, none is so vain as worship

  “What do you make of that?” she asked.

  “I said that?”

  “ ‘You’ said that. ‘You’ also said: ‘Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.’ ”

  “Is that really under a hundred and forty characters?”

  “Are you starting to see?” she asked me.

  “See what?”

  “This person on Twitter who’s not you? He sounds an awful lot like you.”

  “You think it’s me? You think I’m doing this?”

  “I’m just saying,” she said.

  “Nobody who says she’s just saying is ever just saying,” I said. “It’s not me, Connie. I’m not even engaging.”

  “You’ve been on your phone all morning.”

  “It just so happens,” I said, “that we lost to Kansas City last night. It’s important for us all to debrief, okay? Let me see that thing.”

  She handed me the iPad. I read:

  The world whips us with scorn, we are chased to the edges, we approach the brink of extinction

  “Did I write that, too?” I asked. She didn’t respond.

  If you must bathe, do so no more than twice weekly, and never by full immersion

  “How about that one?” I asked.

  “That one…” She trailed off.

  “I just hate it when people fully immerse,” I said.

  “That one’s less likely,” she conceded.

  “It’s not me, Connie,” I said, handing the iPad back to her.

  But could I blame her? All those tweets were in my name.

  The only Plotz to take me up on my offer for free dental care was Jeff, a distant cousin of Connie’s. Or so I thought when I made him the offer. As it turned out, he was just a neighbor from a long time ago. But he was still close to the Plotzes—or his family was close to the Plotzes. Stuart Plotz and Jeff’s father, Chad, were in business together (they owned a stationery store or manufactured paper or something).

  Jeff was a reformed drug addict who now counseled fellow druggies at a state facility. The condition of his mouth was pretty much what you’d expect. It wasn’t the worst boca torcida I’d seen, but it wasn’t a bouquet of roses, either. Treating patients with a history of chemical dependence is no walk in the park. You can’t load them up on nitrous oxide and then send them off with a month’s supply of Percocet and Vicodin. Jeff and I agreed to keep his pain management confined to nonopioid analgesics, which meant he winced his way through an hour’s repair work while his lower body squirmed about like a zombie’s twitching back to life. I kept up a running commentary to calm him down. I told him who I was, I mean who I really was, in case he was interested, which I thought he might be, seeing how I was dating his cousin. (She wasn’t his cousin.) I hadn’t been able to tell any of the Plotzes who I really was, I mean the me who was himself when not around the Plotzes, because they were always busy being themselves, which is to say vociferous, strong willed, and insular. They were extraordinarily polite and welcoming, but in the long run there wasn’t much they cared to know about the new guy. If I had been part of a family like theirs, odds are I would not have had much time for the new guy, either. What could the new guy do for me that was not already being done by a dozen family members always ready to offer me their encouragement, criticism, advice, censure, and love, often in the same breath?

  With Jeff in the chair, I could finally assert myself with a captive audience, albeit one bleeding excessively and staring in wide-eyed terror. I told him that I was first and foremost a Red Sox fan. I told him that my love of the Red Sox wasn’t uncomplicated. The single happiest night of my life came in October of 2004 when Mueller forced extra innings with a single to center field and, more spectacularly, David Ortiz homered in the bottom of the twelfth, halting a Yankees’ sweep of the American League Championship and initiating literally the most staggering comeback in sports history, culminating in a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to take the World Series. It was a validation of all those years of suffering, the cause of an unexpected euphoria, and a total cataclysm. Sometime in 2005, I told Jeff, the unlikely fact that the Red Sox had won finally sank in, and a malaise crept over me. I wasn’t prepared for the changes that accompanied the win—for instance, the sudden influx of new fans, none of them forged, as it were, in the fires of the team’s eighty-six-year losing streak. They were poseurs, I thought, carpetbaggers. With this new crop of fans I worried that we would forget the memory of loss across innumerable barren years and think no more of the scrappy self-preservation that was our defining characteristic in the face of humiliation and defeat. I worried we would start taking winning for granted. And I didn’t care for us poaching players and wielding power in the fashion of our enemy. It was difficult, I told Jeff, to find myself ambivalent, even critical, toward a team that had for years received from me nothing but unconditional devotion. We were underdogs, we knew only heartbreak and loss: how could I be expected to shift, practically overnight, to an attitude of entitlement? There was an Edenic weirdness to the whole thing, the same feeling that must have dogged Adam after Eve’s arrival: what should I wish for now? What should I want? I wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series more than anything in the world, I told Jeff, whose gum pockets were as loose as the dentures on a dockside whore, until they crushed th
e Yankees in truly historic fashion and swept the Cardinals, and then I wanted everything to go back to the way it was, so that I would know who I was, what made me, and what it was I’d always wanted.

  Jeff said nothing in reply to this information, which was to be expected, given his circumstances. Now we were almost finished, and it occurred to me that he was going to walk out with one hell of a sore mouth. He would remember, not the free dental care, but the hour of torture he’d endured in my chair, and any report he’d make about me to another Plotz would dwell on my dispensation of pain. What I needed to do, I thought, was make him laugh. That way, he might remember that he and I had had some fun together.

  “Do you know the one about the two German Jews who devised a plan to kill Hitler?” I asked.

  He looked at me with his olive-gray eyes, the whites they swam in marred by red lightning from his years as a wastoid. I read in the look a sign to continue.

  “These two fellows had it on good authority that Hitler was going to be at a particular restaurant in Berlin for a luncheon at noon sharp. So at eleven forty-five, they positioned themselves outside the restaurant and waited with guns hidden inside their pockets. Soon it was noon, but there was no sign of him. Five after twelve and there was no sign of him. Ten after, and then a quarter after, and still no sign of him. So the first guy says to the second guy, ‘He was supposed to be here at noon sharp. Where do you think he could be?’ ‘I don’t know,’ says the second guy, ‘but I sure hope he’s okay.’ ”

  I thought I detected a smile from Jeff, but it’s always hard to tell through the instruments. Soon after, a tear fell from the corner of his eye, but it was probably more on account of discomfort. Abby, of course, was masked and nonresponsive, just waiting to hand off the instruments.

  Afterward, Connie and I stood at the front desk, watching Jeff leave.

  “I hated that guy growing up,” she said. “Fucking crackhead.”

  I was taken aback. “You hated Jeff?”

  “What an asshole,” she said.

  That’s when she set me straight about who he really was (neighbor versus cousin).

  “He used to call us all dirty Jews,” she said.

  I was further surprised.

  “But isn’t he…”

  “What?”

  “Jewish, too?”

  “Who, Jeff?” She laughed.

  “I thought his father and your uncle were business partners.”

  She looked at me, confused. “They delivered newspapers together when they were kids,” she said.

  He wasn’t related to her, his father wasn’t in business with a Plotz, and he’d called her a dirty Jew. I’d just treated that anti-Semite to a thousand dollars in free dental care.

  The trouble with these revelations wasn’t the free work or the wasted time. It was the laying bare of the extent of my desperation. I returned to the room where I had worked on Jeff and reflected on my folly. I wanted the Plotzes to come to know me, even if only through word of mouth, as a dedicated Red Sox fan, a man with a sense of humor, and a generous health-care provider for their family. But how could I expect the Plotzes to get to know me when I couldn’t settle down long enough to separate out the Plotzes from the rest, when I went around hysterically offering everyone free dental care, and when, with the exception of Connie, I never really got to know any of them? You see, I never really saw any of the Plotzes as people. I only ever really saw them as a family of Jews.

  On the first of August I received an email from an Evan Horvath asking me to fill him in on what I was talking about on Twitter. I could be a little oblique on Twitter, he wrote, which he wasn’t blaming me for. That was the nature of Twitter, and my tweets were always compelling. But now he was looking for more substance.

  It was one thing to get messages from the impersonator “Paul C. O’Rourke,” because I’d sent emails to Seir Design from my YazFanOne account. But how did Evan Horvath get my YazFanOne email address? “It’s on your website,” he wrote. I looked around the O’Rourke Dental website but found nothing. An ominous feeling came over me. “What website?” I wrote back. “Seirisrael.com,” he replied.

  I had another site! And on the site called seirisrael.com, someone had posted my YazFanOne email address, together with pictures of a dusty, sun-bleached compound called Seir located in the Israeli desert. The captions beneath the photos of the cinder-block buildings said things like “Meeting House,” “Community Hall,” “Old Stone Hut.” “I’m sorry,” I wrote back to Evan. “I don’t know anything about this.” “I just want to know about the doubter’s sacrament,” he replied. “What is the doubter’s sacrament?” I asked. “That’s what I’m asking you,” he wrote. “Is it real?” “I don’t know anything about the doubter’s sacrament,” I told him.

  “What is the Feast of the Paradox?” asked one Marcus Bregman.

  Marianne Cathcart asked, “Would you call the K-writer and the P-writer ‘prophets,’ or does that imply that the Cantaveticles was written by God? And if it was written by God, how do you reconcile that with doubting Him?”

  “I’ve seen a few times now where it says that Pete Mercer is an Ulm,” read another email. “Is that THE Pete Mercer?”

  Pete Mercer, according to Forbes.com, was a “publicity-shy hedge-fund manager” and the seventeenth-wealthiest person in America. Within the month, his fund would take the extraordinary step of issuing a statement on his behalf. “Unfortunately Pete Mercer of PM Capital has been the victim of a hoax. He categorically denies the bizarre allegations that he is an ‘Ulm,’ and respectfully requests that the online rumors currently circulating about him cease immediately.”

  Connie was upset that I didn’t want to have kids and believed that my decision had to do with her. After all, when we fell in love, I, too, thought that we would get married and have kids. I even got excited about it. So it was easy to understand why she would think that my change of heart had more to do with her than it did my own dawning realization that I could not bear to think of having a child. I kept this to myself at first, hoping it was just some passing fear, some typically male reservation about confronting the end of youth, or some shit. But it didn’t go away and didn’t go away, and when I finally told her I was having second thoughts, she was disbelieving and pissed off and accused me of wasting her time. Men can waste all the time in the world, but not women. The last thing I thought I was doing at the time was wasting her time. I had no idea that my impulse to have a child would reverse course and that dread would set in. Not reservations. Not fear of change or responsibility. Dread. Dread on behalf of the unborn. Dread of its terrible power of love. What if I failed that child? What if I failed Connie? What if she died and I was left to fail the baby alone? What if I died and failed them both through my absence?

  It broke my heart. It might seem unlikely, because it was my decision, and I made it consciously and deliberately, but it broke my heart. All I had to do to begin anew and keep Connie in my life forever with what I could forever call my own was start a family with her. Starting a family with Connie, I would become, in a sense, whether certain Plotzes liked it or not, a Plotz. And I wanted to be a Plotz. I wanted to be a Plotz more than I ever wanted to be a Santacroce. Anything to be a Plotz. Except making another O’Rourke.

  “Your name is O’Rourke,” “Paul C. O’Rourke’s” next email to me began.

  What does that mean to you? Are you a good Irish lad who sings “Danny Boy” at your local, shoulder to shoulder with the other pseudo-Irish who have never left New York? Or do you hate parades and think green beer is a bad idea? These are vital questions, Paul, having to do with your sense of heritage, your religious affiliation, your place in the world. Do you feel something is missing? Does it gnaw at you at night?

  If you feel disconnected, if you feel displaced, I’m here to tell you that there’s a reason for that. And it’s not because you’re “difficult,” or “moody,” or whatever else people have called you throughout your life. Your “difficulty” is expl
ained by your displacement. The more intense the displacement, the more difficult you become. This is a pattern I’ve very much noticed. Is any of that accurate? My apologies if it’s not. You might have found a way to be perfectly happy despite all.

  Yours,

  Paul

  A few days later, I began to really think about the email exchange I was having with myself. I wondered what Connie would make of it. “It’s not actually you you’re emailing with, is it?” I imagined her asking. She had her suspicions that the Paul C. O’Rourke on Twitter was actually me; why not, then, the one with whom I appeared to be exchanging emails?

  “Okay, Tommy,” I said to the patient I was finishing up with while thinking about the email exchange I was having with myself. Ordinarily, after saying “Okay” to a patient, I almost invariably said, “You can go ahead and spit now” or “You’re free to spit” or some other invitation involving spit, but this time, I said, “Time to take a stool sample.” A stool sample! I honestly have no idea why I said such a thing. Can you imagine a dentist ever needing to take a stool sample? It just sort of appeared, like an aura, and before I even knew what I was saying, out came the seizure. “Time to take a stool sample.” It was the last thing on my mind, a stool sample, but apparently the first thing out of my mouth, for reasons far beyond my comprehension. I was thinking about my email correspondence with myself and what Connie would think if she found out about it, and then boom! I hardly knew how to recover. I looked over at Abby. Above the mask, her brows had bent into those bat wings she wore whenever I said something stupid or incomprehensible. I peered back down at my patient, whose eyes gazed up at me, mute with worry. What could I possibly mean, his eyes seemed to be asking me. What about his mouth could call for a stool sample? What had I seen? And what would I do with it, what would I be looking for in the stool sample? I will tell you, even I was stumped. The only way out of it, I thought, was to start laughing and to pretend that I had always intended to say what I had said about the stool sample because I had such a wicked sense of humor. I had to pretend that basically all day long, all I did was sit there scratching my funny bone, lighting up the people around me in a spirit of pranksterism and joy. So that’s what I did. I started laughing, patted Tommy on the knee, and told him that I was just joking and that he could sit up and spit. Then I acquired a preoccupied air while, still laughing to myself, I turned back to the tray to avoid anyone’s sight, especially Abby’s, because Abby of course knew that I was the last person with the spirit of a prankster. I was lost in my attempt to hide when Connie said, “Dr. O’Rourke?”