“How did he know to find me? How does he know to find anyone?”
“His research. It leads naturally from one to the next. We are all connected, Doctor. He just has to untie the knots. You’ll see how your ancestors’ names were changed. How they became anglicized, how they adapted to different homelands, how they were shed of their essential identities—you will see. But you will have to do something for him first.”
“What?”
“Accept the message.”
“What message?”
“That God has instructed His people to doubt. If a new reclaimant can accept that on faith, he doesn’t need to secure the ancestral records of each and every one of us. Do you know how much work goes into that? The travel? The painstaking research? It’s killing him. He’s going blind. And that puts more pressure on Lee to perfect the genetic test. For Lee and Arthur both,” he said, “it would be a relief if the message were enough.”
There was a commotion at the door. I opened it to find Connie eavesdropping. She righted herself.
“Yes?”
“We’ve been wondering where you’ve been.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and Abby and Betsy,” she said. “Who are you talking to in there?”
“Nobody,” I said. “A patient. Will you go back to work, please?”
She departed reluctantly. I looked back in at Al Frushtick. He was playing on his mustache like it was some bluesy harp. I’d had my identity stolen by that nut, and he was in there feeling sorry for himself for some vague spiritual defeat. I closed the door on him. The least I could do was make him and his abscess wait a little longer.
Connie turned back. “Who’s Grant Arthur?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d stop eavesdropping. And, hey,” I said, “find me an iPad, will you?”
I took care of my impacted molar and my chronic bruxer, believing I was punishing Al Frushtick. But I wasn’t punishing him alone. As I worked, questions occurred to me, and more questions, things I wanted clarified, possibilities. I hurried through the bruxer’s treatment with a growing sense of urgency. I was being foolish and proud. Something was near at hand. I had to act. I rushed back to room 5, but the chair was empty. The fox was gone.
He left a note. “I would have stayed,” he wrote. “But I don’t deserve to have my tooth fixed.”
Ersatz Israel
Six
AS WE ROUNDED THE midpoint of August, ball in the air and eye on third, I sat down again with Sookhart. I was there to request his services on an official basis by asking him to find me a complete manuscript of the Cantaveticles.
“I’m intrigued,” he said, once again stroking his arm hair. “But I’m also rather skeptical. I’ve spoken of this matter with several of my colleagues, all very learned people, and no one has heard of the thing. Nor has anyone heard of a surviving descendant of the Amalekites. Historians, biblical scholars, curators, dealers like myself—there’s no one.”
“How many of these associates of yours would it take for you to be convinced?” I asked.
“That’s precisely it. I can’t find even one.”
“But if you could, and he or she were a scholar or historian or whatever you require. What I’m asking,” I said, “is how many people does it take to make a thing like this real?”
“My dear fellow,” he said, pausing his self-petting to make a point, “people have believed in the most outlandish claims with all their hearts and souls since the beginning of time. It isn’t a numbers game.”
“But in matters of religion,” I said, “where it’s hard to prove anything empirically, numbers do matter, don’t they? How many people do you need to say that a system of belief is a bona fide system?”
“What system of belief?” he asked. “That Mithras is the sun god? That Ninirta is Marduk of the hoe? That Re repels the serpent Apophis every morning to restore Ma’at? That Iapetus is the father of all Anglo-Saxons because he was the son of Noah? That Yahweh was justified in striking down Uzzah for steadying the ark? That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life?”
“Yes,” I said, “any of them. All of them.”
“The difference between ten believers and ten million is a categorical one,” he said. “We call the one a cult and the other a religion. Personally, I don’t much care for that distinction. But without a certain critical mass, things do sometimes get weird.”
“You ask me,” I said, “the bigger they get, the weirder.”
“Consider the historian,” he said. “With all due respect to my historian friends, the historian is a vulture, and all of his colleagues are vultures, too. You can count on that lot to seize upon the carcass of a new discovery until it’s picked quite clean. I don’t blame them. They have papers to write and tenure to make. So with that in mind, let’s have a look at what you’re suggesting.”
He gazed upon the documents scattered on his desk, printouts of emails I’d sent him, the cantonments from my bio page.
“Someone comes to you with the information that you belong to this tradition, this people. They have a religion, roughly sketched as it may be, and they’re ethnically distinct. In fact they have their own genetic makeup. They constitute a race, and they can prove that scientifically. And despite suffering widespread persecution, a continuous line of existence ties them together from the time of the early Israelites to the modern day. Does that more or less sum it up?”
I nodded.
“Then why has no one heard of them? Why have the vultures in every history department across the world not seized upon them and picked this unique, this truly marvelous history clean for all to see?”
“Because they’ve been forced to keep a low profile.”
He stopped petting himself. He frowned, showing me the inner pink of his lower lip.
“How do you know that?” He glanced down at his desk. “Is that somewhere in… in all this…?”
“No,” I said.
“How have you come to know that they’ve kept a low profile? And how have they possibly managed to keep it so low that they’ve succeeded in escaping the notice of all the world’s historians?”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be a dupe. I’m just as sure as you are that what I’m dealing with here is some kind of scam. I’ve brought in a lawyer who specializes in cyberlaw. She’s telling me I’ll have grounds for a lawsuit once everything plays out. People can’t go around stealing other people’s identities. But maybe,” I said, “just maybe we’ve never heard of them because they’ve been persecuted so thoroughly that they hardly exist anymore. Pick anyone you want—the Jews, the Native Americans, the Waldensians—and the Ulms have them beat. And because of their low numbers throughout history, they’ve flown beneath the radar.”
“You know the Waldensians?”
Keep clarity! I thought to myself, down at the lowest register of sound. But I was already committed, had spent so much time emailing back and forth with myself, with the man known online as Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., that now I knew more than the historian. Did I really want to believe? I had half hoped Sookhart would call me back to myself, my old self-respecting self, tell me the Waldensians were just another invention.
“They were mentioned to me as a people who suffered a similar persecution,” I said. “Also the Chukchi of Russia. They’re an example of a people who have lived a long time on the brink of extinction.”
“One more time, with that name?”
“The Chukchi. There’s about five hundred of them.”
He jotted it down. “Who mentioned this to you?”
“Also the Penan, the Innu, and the Enawene Nawe,” I said.
“And who are they?”
“Other endangered peoples.”
“Their names again?”
I spelled them out for him, and he jotted those names down, too.
�
��And why have they been persecuted?”
“The Chukchi?”
“No, the Ulms.”
“Even the pagans and the heathens believed in something. These people believe in nothing but their obligation to doubt God. It makes people nervous.”
Again that mildly obscene pink of his dubious lower lip showed itself like a petal. Then:
“But again, everybody who’s anybody has at least something to point to in the historical record. Even, I assume, these”—glancing down at his jottings—“Chukchi. Where is this great trampled people of yours in the historical record?”
“Hiding in plain sight,” I said.
“Sounds like you know more than you’re letting on.”
“No, not really.”
“Hiding in plain sight?”
“Read any history book,” I said. “Read about ‘the masses’ and ‘the villagers.’ Read about ‘the natives.’ ‘The serfs’ and ‘the locals’ and ‘the nomads.’ ‘The heretics’ and ‘the blasphemers.’ ”
“And it is the Ulms who are being referred to?”
“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes ‘the masses’ just mean the masses.”
“So throughout history they’re there, just unnamed, unidentified.”
“That’s the suggestion.”
“From this fellow here,” he said, indicating the printouts, “this ‘Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”
I nodded. He dropped his pen and sat back.
“It’s a stretch,” he said. “We still can’t ignore the efficient marketplace that is academia.”
“But knowing what you know about history,” I said, “might there be levels of suppression that should not surprise us when they finally come to light?”
He puckered his lips and massaged his thyroid in contemplation.
“But to imagine a people of the Bronze Age doubting the gods,” he said finally, “when most of them were still spooked by a gathering of dark clouds, praying to wood carvings…” He shook his head.
“Here’s my offer,” I said, handing him a check.
He studied it. His brow bellowed at the sight of the number, and he glanced up at me. Then he stood and extended his hand.
“But it never pays to be a doubting Thomas,” he said.
“The Plotzes know where they came from,” he wrote.
It doesn’t surprise me that you fell in love with them. We are drawn to people rooted in a strong tradition. It’s always the wrong tradition for us, and the results are disastrous. But I don’t blame you. Belonging, fitting in, loving and wanting to be loved in return—they are the most natural things in the world.
How do you know about the Plotzes?
You told me about them.
I never told you I fell in love with them.
I don’t have psychic powers, Paul. I pieced a few things together from a couple of emails.
I had a hard time falling asleep after my dad died. My mom would close the blinds, turn on my night-light, and tuck me in, and I would settle into the dimness hoping that sleep would come quickly, but it never did. I needed to fall asleep before my mom did, because if I didn’t, I’d be the only one awake in the apartment, and that was as bad as being alone. Being alone was the loneliest and scariest thing. If she fell asleep, all the other people in our building would fall asleep, too, and I would be awake while all the grown-ups were sleeping. I had to fall asleep! But nothing I could do would stop time or keep the night from growing longer and darker. From our building, sleep would spread like a sickness to the other people on the block. Soon everyone in the city would be asleep, and not long after that, everyone in the world. I would be the only person awake in the world.
I was trying so hard to fall asleep that I kept myself awake, and being awake, I felt as though I would never fall asleep. It was a terror that took hold of me quickly as I lay in bed, and everything my mom had done to prepare me for sleep—the books we read, the prayers we said, and the almost-countless number of good-nights I made her say from the doorway before she could leave—was no match for that terror. I was in my room for ten or fifteen minutes at most before I had to call out: “Mom?” Sometimes she would say “Yes?” or “What?” but usually it was “What do you want?” After good-nighting for fifteen minutes, after going away and coming back again to reassure me of some trifle, after her patience had been tested multiple times even before my attempt at sleep had properly begun—and all of this after a long day at work and readying dinner and tidying up—she was running on fumes. She must have also still been grieving. Grieving and trying to make sense of what had befallen her. Trying to make sense of it while trying to hold things together for me. But there is holding things together, and then there is dealing with a nine-year-old who refuses to sleep night after night. “What do you want?” she’d ask, and the edge in her voice was like the hand that takes the arm of a disobedient child. But I pretended not to notice her tone and ignored the encroaching dread of entering the next logical step in a nightly pattern that quickly established itself that year. I cloaked my terror one last time in the pleasantries so natural to exchange just before sleep and responded by calling out through the thin walls, “I just wanted to say good night!” “Go to bed now, Paul,” she’d say. A few minutes later, I’d say, “Good night, Mom!” and she’d say “We’ve said good night plenty of times now, Paul, too many times.” And a few minutes later, although I tried really hard not to, I’d call out again, “Good night, Mom!” “We’ve been over this,” she’d say, “we’ve been over this and over this. Good night for the last time!” You couldn’t blame her, because this happened every night, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. By then, we both knew that we were back inside a recurring nightmare, and the only questions that remained were how long I would keep her up and how mad she would get. I stopped saying “Good night, Mom!” because the pretense was over and started saying, “Mom, are you still awake?” And from a distant room, she would scream, “AAAHHHHH!” Then a little later I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d say, “GO TO SLEEP!” Then, much later, I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” I’d repeat “Mom? Mom? Mom?” afraid that she might have actually fallen asleep, until she’d finally say, “GO TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW! RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!” and that was a terrible relief. I was sorry she was angry with me but happy she was awake, which meant that I was not alone. Eventually, no matter how many times I called out, she stopped answering, so I would have to get up and walk to her doorway and say, a little softer, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, so I’d walk into the room a little, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d be lying there with her eyes open. “Mom, are you still awake?” I’d ask, although I could see by then that she was. Her eyes were open, and she was staring up at the ceiling, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and without turning to look at me, looking up at the ceiling, she’d say, “No.”
When we woke up in the morning, she was either in my bed with me, or I was in her bed with her, or I was on the couch and she was on the floor at my feet, wrapped in my Red Sox blanket.
The day after I engaged Sookhart, an investment banker came in by the name of Jim Cavanaugh. Even the bankers of Wall Street look like infants when they are reclined in the chair and bibbed in blue. It would not be unreasonable to pick them up and rock them in your arms, if that were only part of the early training.
He smelled good. I thought I detected hints of cardamom and white birch. Men like Cavanaugh, in the financial institutions and law firms, always come to my chair floral with designer scents and aftershaves. I pictured these emissions competing, on the molecular level, in a bloody, feral melee with their peers in every conference room and hallway cluster, every private office and chartered plane. One whiff of Cavanaugh and I had no doubt that his pricey little eaus strolled from the battlefield undiluted and triumphant.
He was reading his me-machine whe
n I sat down chairside. His fingers swiped and daubed at the touchscreen, coloring in all the details of a fine landscape of self. A glitch in the soul produced that delay between his breaking off from the machine and his return handshake. He tucked the thing away in his pants pocket, where it buzzed and trilled with approximations of nature. I turned on the overhead as Abby handed me the explorer. Mrs. Convoy’s worries were not exaggerated: his mandibular right second molar was grossly carious, and the sinus was discharging buccally. I bent the light away.
“Are you in any pain?”
“My gallbladder,” he said. “And I have a bad back. But I work through it.”
He was almost indescribably good smelling. Only the most reactionary heterosexual impulses prevented me from burying my nose in his neck.
“I mean in your mouth,” I said.
“My mouth? No, my mouth is fine. Why?”
I percussed the tooth with the gross decay. “No pain here?”
“No, not really.”
“Here?”
“No.”
He should have been in extraordinary pain. That he was not led me to believe that he must be taking something—if not everything under the sun. “Are you on any drugs at the moment?”
“Nothing that hasn’t been prescribed.”
“When was the last time you saw a dentist?”
“Six months ago? No, I’m totally lying. Fifteen years? And I don’t floss, so don’t bother asking. And my diet’s terrible. I drink twenty Cokes a day. On a good day. That’s better than a cocaine habit, though, right? Maybe not for the teeth. I know meth’s bad for your teeth, but cocaine’s not meth, right, when it comes to your teeth? Why all these questions? You’re making me nervous. I’ve never had a cavity in my life.”
“You have one now,” I said.
“But I’m not even supposed to be here.”
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel Page 17