To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

by Joshua Ferris

  I turned.

  “When you have a minute,” she said.

  I had grown downright wary of Connie standing there with her iPad, preparing to show me God-knows-what new development, but at that moment, I was more relieved than when she had rescued me from telling Bernadette Marder that she was aging uncontrollably. I could stand and put some distance between me and Tommy and his inexplicably conjured stool.

  “What is it now?”

  She handed me the iPad. Twitter again:

  There are levels of suppression that even this far along in history should not surprise anyone when they finally come to light

  I looked up from the screen. “If you’re asking what suppression they’re talking about, Connie, I honestly have no idea. A massacre? A conspiracy? It could mean anything.”

  “Not that one,” she said, pointing. “This one.”

  Imagine a people so wretched that they envy the history of the Jews

  “Oh,” I said.

  “ ‘Imagine a people so wretched that they envy the history of the Jews’?” she said. She repeated it to indicate how little she understood what it meant and to appeal to me for guidance.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” I said. “That’s not me. I’m not the author.”

  “Who are they talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why bring up the Jews?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whose history is worse than ours?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She left. A few minutes later I followed her to the front desk.

  “You’re not going to tell your uncle about this, are you?”

  “My uncle?”

  “Because I’m not sure he’d understand.”

  “Which uncle?”

  “Stuart,” I said. “Any of them, actually. But Stuart especially. I get the feeling he wouldn’t like it.”

  “Like what?”

  “That tweet. The tweet you just showed me. About imagining a people whose history is more wretched than the Jews’. I think it would bother him.”

  “Why should that bother you? If it’s really not you doing the tweeting, who cares?”

  “Because it’s in my name. What’s he going to think when he sees it’s in my name?”

  “He’s going to think you wrote it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But here’s the thing,” she said. “It seems a little weird that at one time you were obsessed with Jewish history, and next we know, on Twitter, someone with your name is making comparisons between his history and the history of the Jews.”

  “First of all, I’m not sure I was ever ‘obsessed’ with Jewish history. And it’s not really ‘next we know’ because it’s been a while since I did any reading on Judaism.”

  “Still a strange coincidence, is it not?”

  “It is what it is,” I said. “I have no control over it either way.”

  “And then for you to come up and ask me not to tell my uncle about it, when telling my uncle never even crossed my mind, that’s a little weird, Paul.”

  “You know,” I said, “when we’re at work, it would really be best if we all called me Dr. O’Rourke.”

  “Why are you changing the subject?”

  “I’m not changing the subject. I’m responding to something you said.”

  “Why don’t you want my uncle Stuart to know about that tweet?”

  “Because your uncle Stuart already thinks I’m an anti-Semite. Is he more likely to believe that someone is impersonating me, or that I’ve gone off the deep end again?”

  “When did you go off the deep end?” she asked.

  I went back to finish up with Tommy.

  “What is an Ulm?” I wrote.

  And can you stop tweeting in my name? Connie’s starting to think it might actually be me.

  Who’s Connie?

  “Connie’s my office manager,” I replied. Then immediately wrote again:

  What do you mean, “Who’s Connie?” You know who Connie is. No one called her an “office manager” until you came along and made that website. She’s not an office manager. All she really does is write out appointment cards after scheduling new appointments.

  Why did I even send that? Before I knew it, I was writing back a third time.

  That’s not true. I sat in my waiting room recently and watched her work. It turns out she does a lot around here. At any moment she could be juggling ten different things. When I saw her the other day, I realized that she deserves a lot of credit for keeping things running smoothly.

  I quickly regretted hitting SEND. What was wrong with me? I didn’t owe him an explanation.

  Have you told her any of that?

  No.

  No! “No” was one word too many.

  Don’t you think you should?

  Probably.

  Then why don’t you? You’ve noticed something. That’s a huge success, Paul. Daily awareness is our biggest challenge. But it will come to nothing unless you share it with her. It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it’s inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

  Connie came into the room as I was reading. As casually as possible, I returned my me-machine to my pocket.

  “Who are you always emailing?” she asked.

  “I’m not emailing,” I said. “I’m reading about last night’s game.”

  I removed the me-machine from my pocket and pretended to carry on reading about last night’s game. She didn’t move.

  “They didn’t play last night,” she said.

  I looked up. “Who didn’t?”

  “The Red Sox,” she said. “They were off last night.”

  “I’m not talking about the Red Sox,” I said. “I’m talking about a different team.”

  “What team?”

  “What does it matter, what team? The Yankees.”

  “The Yankees were rained out last night,” she said. “Fifth inning.”

  “That doesn’t mean there was no analysis of those five innings,” I said. I shook my head in dismay at the ignorance of non–sports fans.

  “The Yankees weren’t rained out last night,” she said. “They played Chicago and won eighteen to seven.”

  I left the room. I came back.

  “By the way,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I appreciate everything you do around here. The billing, and breaking down all the UPS boxes. And getting the desk flowers,” I said. “The flowers really make a difference.”

  She dimmed her eyes to fine crystal points, trying to discern my motive.

  “Since when do you notice flowers?” she asked.

  “That’s it,” I wrote.

  I’m done talking to you.

  My website changed the next day and now included cantonments 30–34 of the Cantaveticles. They picked up where the story had left off, with the fleeing of four hundred Amalekites to Mount Seir.

  “And David King of the Israelites pursued the Remnant unto Mount Seir,” my bio page read, “and he slew of them in Seir all the children of the tribes of Amalek, all four hundred still living; not withstanding Agag, the king of the tribes of Amalek in every generation, for he hid himself behind the cypress tree, to witness all that Israel had done to the Amalekites, from Hazazon even to Seir. And Agag wept for Amalek, whose blood wetted the beds of dry stone, and compassed around him like the willows of the brook, and came down like a rain from heaven.”

  On it went. Agag weeps until he has no more power to weep, whereupon he takes to cursing the God of the Israelites, whom he’d tried to win over in Hazor by basically subscribing to every tenet and custom his messenger boy managed to smuggle out of the Israelite campsite. “What hath thou wrought, ye God of Israel?” he cries in the thick of a lot of dead bodies and bloody camel remains. You picture something worse than Antietam, an undulant wave of body parts, torsos, heads of bloody hair starting to coagulate in the heat, in the middle of wh
ich the sole survivor of an exterminated people falls to his knees to curse a god he really thought might be God. “Did they not bow down before thee, and serve thee, and seek mercy in thy eye?” he asks. “And did they not keep all thy ordinances and statutes, and cease eating swine and coney, and circumcise themselves, and put on clean raiments? And did I not love thy daughter,” he asks, “and learn Hebrew for thee?”

  Then, lo and behold, who should appear before him, “moving upon a cloud of blood,” which was a little hard to visualize, but, you know, whatever, semantics—it’s God Himself, the First and Last. “Draw nigh hither,” says God, “and be not afraid.” But there’s little chance of that. Agag cowers upon the charnel cliff, wondering—in a twist on this type of story, in which the prophet always knows from the first gust of heavenly wind on his cheek just who’s talking—if it’s really God he’s seeing or, considering all the shit he’s been through, just a hallucination, the first documented case of PTSD. But there’s no doubting for long, as God seems really confident. “Ye shall know me as the Lord thy God,” He says, “who hath kept a dominion of silence unto this day.” That silence, He explains, was a practical one: He saw no profit in adding to the roster of all the other gods—the God of the Israelites, the God of the Egyptians, the God of the Philistines, etc. etc.—running around Canaan contributing to the bloodshed or, as He puts it, “commanding war among the factions, to vie for the firstfruits of every nation.” Why He doesn’t just wipe those gods clean from memory and usher in peace on earth is a question neither asked nor answered, but it’s made plain that He is, in fact, the one and only God, and He’s there to deliver Agag from the hand of strife. “Come now therefore,” He says, “and with thee shall I establish my covenant. For I shall make of thee a great nation. But thou must lead thy people away from these lords of war, and never make of them an enemy in my name. And if thou remember my covenant, thou shall not be consumed. But if thou makest of me a God, and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed. For man knoweth me not.” There follows a lot of demurral from Agag—who am I to be a prophet, I’m slow of tongue, the people will laugh at me, etc.—but in time he picks himself up and descends the slopes of Mount Seir, the first Ulm.

  “So you see,” he wrote. “An Ulm is someone who doubts God.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I replied:

  It’s not logical. How can you doubt a God who appears?

  You’re not using the correct part of your brain, Paul—the atrophying part, the part that’s hungry.

  But that’s just it, I AM using my brain, and will always use my brain, and so this looks just as dumb as any other religious bullshit.

  Every religion brushes up against the illogical. The Buddhist discovers Nirvana only by realizing that the self does not exist, but it’s the self that must discover its nonexistence. The Hindu traverses the universe saying neti, neti—“not this, not this”—and when everything is negated, there stands God. The Jew believes that God made him in His image, but man is full of evil. The Christian believes that God was also a man of flesh and blood. The illogic tests faith—without it, there’s just party time.

  I prefer party time.

  I don’t think you do. Listen, Paul: the blessings of doubt have not excused us from the burdens of faith. We must suffer our contradictions as those who believe in God suffer theirs. With this difference: doubt is the most enlightened approach to God ever articulated to man. Monotheism is by comparison a pagan slaughter. It is the Ulms, Paul, not the Jews, who are the true Chosen People.

  A few hours later, I wrote back:

  You HAVE to doubt? I mean, it’s actual doubt, literal doubt?

  Literal doubt.

  The next few weeks went by in a blur. I couldn’t identify, for instance, when exactly the Wikipedia page on the Ulms first appeared. I don’t even remember what it said, except that some of it mimicked what “I” had written in my comment on the New York Times, including there being no Saint Paul of the Ulms to walk the footpaths of the Roman empire. The page was quickly nominated for deletion by trekkieandtwinkies, one of Wikipedia’s self-appointed editors, on the grounds of an insufficient something or other. At the time I believed it was possible to create a Wikipedia page for practically anything, like your newly formed metal band or your pet, not knowing that there were people out there like trekkieandtwinkies who policed all the new pages and did away with the bogus and/or frivolous ones. Every unmerited entry was dispatched into the dustbin of history in a day or two, as that first page on the Ulms was. Nor can I remember specifically when I first heard from Mikel Moore who worked at Starbucks, Joanna Skade of Microsoft, and Zander Chiliokis, all of whom were looking for more information on the Ulms. I remember the proliferation of comments and links, Twitter followers, new Facebook friends. I remember my repeated attempts to wring from my impostor why he was doing this to me, his continual evasions, and my growing rage. I remember a conversation with Kari Gutrich informing her of the others reaching out to me, and I remember the process of attempting to freeze the online accounts in my name, which required me to mail by post photocopies of my government-issued driver’s license along with a notarized affidavit testifying to my true identity—a frustratingly analog experiment. I also remember collecting a sample of what’s called whole saliva from Mr. Tomasino, whose salivary gland was failing; tending to a stoic little boy in camo shorts who split a tooth on a cherry pit; and referring a walk-in to Lenox Hill for an inhaled tooth. But what I remember most is Connie standing in the corridor with her iPad, looking pissed.

  “What?”

  “Can you come with me, please?”

  We went into one of the unoccupied rooms, and she handed me the iPad. In addition to looking pissed, she looked good. She was wearing a turtleneck, not the convent kind Mrs. Convoy favored, but a light, summery one, with the turtleneck part like an inverse turtleneck, big and loose and tilted like a cocked tulip out of which her head peeked, and the fabric wasn’t fabric so much as a billion little stitches of sparkling thread all woven together, silver and pink and red. Her taut bottom was nestled inside a snug pair of old jeans.

  “Read that,” she said, pointing.

  I read the tweet in question.

  “Know anything about that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you do know how offensive it is, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She walked away. I read the tweet again. Written in my name, it said:

  Enough about the 6 million! No more about the 6 million until OUR losses and OUR suffering and OUR history have finally been acknowledged

  “I don’t know why you’ve chosen me,” I wrote.

  But you have some real balls, fucker. Stop claiming to be Paul O’Rourke. All this religion crap? Hey, guess what! I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT. Stop talking about it in my name. If it’s really important to you, grow some balls and Twitter it up in your own fucking name. ABOVE ALL, STOP TALKING ABOUT THE JEWS IN MY NAME!! Stop talking about the Holocaust and the six million. People get real worked up about that, for good reason. Then they come and ask me to clarify, and I can’t clarify the first fucking thing. Nobody cares about your wretched history, especially when you compare it to the history of the Jews. What do you have against the Jews? Are you just another anti-Semitic Internet troll? You might also consider not giving history lessons over Twitter. Imagine Abraham Lincoln doing the Emancipation Proclamation via Twitter. Are you not a man? Do you not have loftier ambitions for the miracle of speech than the dispatch of a hundred and forty characters from an undisclosed location? A man is full of things you simply cannot tweet. I have dreams of one day overcoming my terrifying inhibitions and singing on the subway. Tweet that, you fuck.

  I once confided in Connie my fantasy of playing the banjo on the subway and singing along. I’d never told anyone that. I also told her that if she found me doing it, she would know that I was either (1) a changed man or
(2) an entirely different person altogether. But to change so much that, with all my inhibitions and musical insecurities, I’d sit down with the banjo on the F train and start singing “San Antonio Rose”—no, that sort of change would render me unrecognizable to myself, so I would necessarily have to be an entirely different person, meaning I would have to suffer a blow to the head and return from the tunnel of beckoning light with better odds and a bigger heart. For me to sing on the subway, I told her, as much as I wanted to, was impossible, because forever standing between me and my singing on the subway was the essential, reluctant, ineradicable, inhibited core of me. “But don’t you believe in the possibility of change? Of self-improvement?” she asked. And I told her what I believed: that genuine self-improvement, actual fundamental change, was exceedingly rare—was, in fact, more like a myth in line with that of a divine Creator. We are who we are, for better or worse, with the exception of a few uncharacteristic gestures and sudden moments of vulnerability. This I did not tell her: if I could have summoned the courage to sing on the subway, I could have also confessed to Uncle Stuart that I loved him, him and all his brothers and all the Plotzes, and vowed never to fail or disappoint them.

  My favorite children’s book is called Doctor De Soto, by William Steig. Dr. De Soto is a mouse dentist who will fix the mouth of any animal who doesn’t eat mice. It says so right on the sign hanging outside his shop: CATS & OTHER DANGEROUS ANIMALS NOT ACCEPTED FOR TREATMENT. It’s a reasonable policy. (It has led me to wonder if I have ever done work on the mouth of a murderer.) One day a fox shows up outside Dr. De Soto’s office, weeping with pain. Hippocratically bound and inherently kind, Dr. De Soto is predisposed to help the fox, and his wife, who works as his assistant, encourages him to take pity on the poor beast. So Dr. De Soto, the brave hero dentist, climbs into the fox’s mouth and finds a rotten bicuspid and unusually bad breath. (This is how you know that Steig wasn’t a dentist: it’s all unusually bad.) The fox is grateful to Dr. De Soto. Yet even knowing that his redeemer is in his mouth at that very moment working to remedy the pain, the fox itches to eat the tasty little morsel. Dr. De Soto puts the fox under to extract the tooth, and the fox, laying bare his irrepressible nature, drunkenly mutters how he best likes his mice prepared. That night, Dr. De Soto has his misgivings about the next day’s follow-up. A fox is a fox is a fox. However, he must go through with it. Once he starts a job, he always finishes it. His father, he says, was the same way. (My father, too: he’d start to redo the bathroom grout or lay new linoleum in the kitchen with any other man’s new-project gusto, and when it was exactly one-third complete he’d leave, drive some distance, sell the car for a low figure, and walk home and hand the money to my mother, weeping.) I won’t spoil the ending for you, but needless to say, a fox is a fox is a fox. The foremost heroism on display in Doctor De Soto isn’t the mouse’s noble determination to help despite the mortal dangers all around but the touching suggestion, briefly entertained, that the fox might have an innate capacity to change.