To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel

by Joshua Ferris

  She zeroed in on one specific branch of my family tree, that of my paternal great-grandfather’s.

  “You will see you were not always an O’Rourke,” she said.

  She handed me the next document.

  “What is your name?”

  “Clara,” she said.

  “Clara.”

  “Yes, Clara,” she said. “You have in your hand the birth certificate of Oakley Rourke. Oakley was your grandfather’s grandfather. Notice how his name is spelled: R-o-u-r-k-e. He became the first O’Rourke after a ruling by a district judge in a criminal matter. Your great-great-grandfather was a convicted horse thief, as you can see… here.” She handed me a warrant for arrest from the state of Colorado. “ ‘O. Rourke’ became ‘O’Rourke’ on this document here,” she said, “most likely by a common elision. That’s how it happens: errors, omissions, transpositions. Oakley must have approved of his name change, because he was O’Rourke when he moved to Maine and bought land, here—” She handed me a property deed. “Maybe he needed a fresh start. He remained an O’Rourke all the rest of his days.”

  She handed me his death certificate attesting to that claim.

  “This is my family tree,” I said. “You’re showing me my family tree.”

  “Before Oakley, there was Luther Rourke, his father.”

  “I’m so pleased that you’re showing me my family tree.”

  “And before Luther, his father, James Rourke. He would have been your great-great-great-great-grandfather. But he was not a Rourke. He was the last of the Rourches, R-o-u-r-c-h. Have a look here… and here.”

  She handed me two more documents.

  “Is this your job?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “What is your job?”

  “I don’t have a job. I go to school.”

  “What do you study?”

  “Forensic anthropology. Please have a look at what I’ve handed you.”

  There was nothing new looking now, nothing computer generated. The paper was of an antiquated consistency, brittle. Colonial cursive spilled across the documents; they were thick with “wherefores” and “in testimony ofs.”

  “James’s paternal grandfather was Isaac Boruch, B-o-r-u-c-h. Isaac was a citizen of Białystok and the first of your family to come to America. His name went from Boruch to Rourch as a result of a transposition at immigration, as you can see from this… and this.”

  I studied the two documents. An Isaac Boruch before, an Isaac Rourch after. A before-and-after snapshot of family history.

  “I’m from Poland?” I said.

  “It’s easy enough to imagine how these changes happened,” she said. “The insanity of immigration, the carelessness of clerks, deaf and lazy bureaucrats.”

  “How much time did this take you?”

  “I’m only the assistant,” she said. “Now, none of these documents is essential. It is all essential, of course, but only as a preliminary to what you were before you became Boruch, what Boruch disguised to ease your passage here. America did not let just anyone in.”

  “We could have been kept out?”

  “If it had come to light, yes.”

  “If what had come to light?”

  “What you were before you became Boruch.”

  “What were we before Boruch?”

  “I don’t have that document.”

  “Who does?”

  “It’s waiting for you. But you’ll have to go to it.”

  “Waiting for me where?”

  “Seir.”

  “Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do I have to go to it?”

  “He’d like to see a show of faith.”

  “Who would?”

  “We all would.”

  “And that means I have to go to Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  She began to strap the buckles on her leather bag.

  “Are you leaving?”

  She returned her sunglasses to her face. “My job is over.”

  “Can I see you again?”

  “What for?”

  “It’s just… it’s so much to take in.”

  “If you have any questions,” she said, “I believe you know who to contact.”

  “I would prefer to contact you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “It was nice to meet you, Dr. O’Rourke.”

  She extended her hand. I took it in mine. It was everything I thought it would be, and more.

  Seven

  UP I FLEW IN a glass carriage past matrices and hives. I stepped out on the penthouse floor into an open plan of traders in white oxfords determining the world’s fate. It was the dollar’s sowing and its ruthless harvest. A beauty of exotic birth offered me coffee or cold water infused with cucumber. I chose instead to read the Forbes on the coffee table, the one with Mercer on the cover. The headline: “He’s Not Talking.”

  Mercer made his initial money in gold in the late seventies. Inflation was high, the gold standard was gone, and people were scared. When people are scared, Mercer had purportedly told a confidant, they grow primitive in their thinking, and shiny metals reassure them. It was the financial equivalent of praying to the sun, but unlike the Sun God, gold still held currency and rose and fell with the fear level. Mercer had a feel for it. He saw extraordinary returns with gold early in his career. In the eighties he shifted to equities. He was out of the market in January of ’87, nine months before Black Monday, again harboring in gold, a move Forbes called “supernatural.” By year’s end, instead of facing bankruptcy, he had a hundred million to convert back into equities. He went on an extraordinary ten-year run. He got out again in ’97, spooked by the currency crisis in Asia. People thought he was mad: by the time the crisis had lifted, the Internet was printing money. Mercer had missed it. But within a few short years, the dot-com bubble burst, and it came to light that half of Mercer’s holdings were once again parked in gold. He looked like a prophet.

  Another beauty materialized to catwalk me down the hall to Mercer’s well-removed sanctuary. He was sitting in a chair at the far wall opposite his desk, watching two men and a supervisor remove a Picasso framed in heavy glass. “Hello,” he said when he saw me, patting the chair beside him. “Come watch the Met claim a gift.” The men were extricating it from the wall with slow-motion care. The supervisor, in suit and tie, looked on nervously, making tentative gestures as the crating began. It was the world’s most expensive nude and bust and curlicue of green flowers.

  “Yours?” I said.

  “Was,” said Mercer. “But you know what they say about a picture.”

  “What do they say?”

  “After you see it once, you never see it again.”

  He smiled at me in a way that seemed entirely private. It certainly contained no mirth or happiness.

  He turned back to the men and the painting’s meticulous packing up. They set it on a high-tech contraption and steered it out of the room as if it were a man headed around the bend to post-op. The man in suit and tie spent several minutes conveying once again the museum’s gratitude for such an extraordinary gift, which Mercer accepted with grace. Then the man left, and Mercer sat back down.

  “Things might start winding down around here,” he said. “The last thing you want to do is forget a Picasso on the wall.”

  “Winding down?”

  “I’m tired of making money,” he said. “I’m more interested in what brought us together.”

  “I thought you said that was a hoax.”

  Again he smiled that inward smile.

  After Clara’s visit to my office, I had my Internet connection restored both at home and at work. I retrieved all my old email from the trash folder. I bought a new me-machine. The pictures and contacts and apps were returned to their rightful place via my laptop. The voice mail Mercer left for me, asking me to come by his office, had been sitting in an in-box still up and running and none the wiser. Everything was as it had been. I had tried to escape
it, but I could not escape it. It blanketed the world.

  I didn’t know why Mercer had called and asked to see me a second time. By his own admission, he was a private man. Maybe he wanted to sound me out, secure my silence in some way, swear me to secrecy. He had left the park with such resolve.

  But that resolve wasn’t any stronger than mine. He’d visited a mall of his own making since we’d parted, and his rueful smile was full of admission.

  “Have you been there yet?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “Seir.”

  “It exists?”

  “It exists,” he said. “It’s kind of a shit hole, smells of goat piss, but it exists.”

  “Is it really in Israel?”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “I can’t imagine they let just anyone in.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s a country with its permits in order.”

  “So how did they manage it?”

  “At Davos last year,” he said, “I saw my old friend the deputy minister of finance. I asked him, ‘What’s this I hear about an irredentism pact in the Negev?’ He looks at me as cold as a fish on ice and says, ‘I’m not sure what you’re asking.’ Now whenever we have the occasion to meet, he spends all his time avoiding me. So maybe they arranged an irredentism pact, what the hell do I know?”

  “What is an irredentism pact?”

  “The return of land to those to whom it rightfully belongs.”

  “They have a claim to the land?”

  “As the first victims of genocide,” he said.

  I was reminded of my initial conversation with Sookhart. He’d also called the war against the Amalekites a genocide. But was it possible that a feud as old as the Bible could have some kind of current-day geopolitical consequence?

  “Is that very likely?” I asked Mercer.

  “You can’t deny they’re there. You can only ask how. And if there’s one country likely to be sympathetic to a request for reparations for genocide…”

  “Even one so long ago?”

  “I’m just telling you what I’ve been told,” he said.

  The agreement had been brokered, according to Mercer, between Grant Arthur and officials of an Israeli coalition government a bit more progressive than the current one. They were in the country not with, but not without, the state’s permission. As far as Israel was officially concerned, they simply didn’t exist.

  “I have plans to go back,” he said.

  “Back to the shit hole?”

  “I felt at home there. I’ve never felt at home. I’m welcome everywhere I go, of course. And I can go anywhere. But that’s different from feeling at home.”

  “What was it that made you feel that way?”

  “The others, I guess. The people.”

  “You need people?” I said, thinking of the beauties and the traders and all the people his money could buy.

  “The right people,” he said.

  Mercer’s secretary knocked at the door. She brought in a bag from McDonald’s. There was one for me, too.

  “It’s no good for you, but what the hell,” he said. “It’s what I grew up on. Don’t feel obliged to join me.”

  “I never pass up a free lunch,” I said.

  He laughed. “Remember, there’s no such thing. And you’re into me for two now.”

  We started in, bags rustling, and took the first few bites in silence. Then: “I’m glad you agreed to another meeting,” he said. “I feel I owe you an apology for the other day.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m always too eager to dismiss it as a hoax.”

  “Even after being there?”

  “A little infrastructure does not a tradition make,” he said.

  “Did they ever ask you for money?”

  “Part of me wishes they had. It would confirm all my cynical suspicions and I could dismiss them. I could put them out of my mind. But it’s been over a year now, and all they’ve asked for is discretion.”

  “Discretion?”

  “They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. There’s a fear that it would disrupt the arrangement they have with their host country. At least there was. Now I don’t know. Something must have changed if they’re all over the Internet.”

  “What are the people there like?”

  He took a bite of his burger and chewed thoughtfully. “Like the Jews who founded Israel, I imagine,” he said, “before technology killed the kibbutz. Warm, unified. Hard workers. Scrapers. Some bad eggs, but not too many. Professionals, typically, intellectuals of one kind or another. Doubters. Skeptics. They’re happy to belong to a tradition that doesn’t require them to believe in God.” He reached down into the bag for a handful of fries. “The other day, in the park. When I asked if you’d done the genetic test. You told me they had something else in store for you. What did you mean by that?”

  I repeated what Frushtick had told me about the next wave of reclaimants, about how they needed to find some way to make Arthur’s research and Lee’s science less essential, and about how that might come down to the people making a leap of faith based on the message in the Cantaveticles.

  I also told him that I had had a visitor recently who shared with me the details of my family tree. I was relieved to tell him that. I couldn’t say that I wrote those tweets, but a family tree was something, even if the vital piece was still waiting for me in Israel.

  “I’m pleased to hear that they weren’t using you,” he said. “I can’t tell you just how pleased. A man can be cheated out of more than just money.”

  He wiped grease from his fingers and then tossed the napkin in the bag. The office, with the desk bare and the Picasso gone, was perfectly generic in spite of its endless treetop view. Nothing like the high-tech cockpit I’d pictured for the seventeenth-richest man in America.

  “I was impressed by you,” he said. “They approached you in a way that would have put me off forever, but you remained open to it.”

  “I’m still not without my doubts,” I said to him.

  “You might never be.”

  “I was impressed by you as well,” I said. “You heard what they’d done to me, and you dismissed everything without a second thought.”

  “I did,” he said. He nodded. “And yet,” he added, “here we sit.”

  “Here we sit,” I said.

  “Of course we’re in Israel,” he wrote in response to the email I sent after meeting with Mercer.

  Did you think I was in a basement in Tucson sitting around waiting for you to return my emails? Believe it or not, Paul, I have other things going on. It takes a little effort, what we’re doing. Otherwise I’d pop by your shop, say hi. Show you what you’d look like with a little self-knowledge.

  What do you do there?

  Do?

  Yeah, do. You don’t go to church, do you? You don’t pray.

  No, we don’t pray. We commune. Look, it sounds hippy-dippy, but it’s not. First things first: we go over the family records. Then we show you what scant pieces of history remain. (See attached.) Then we do our best to make you feel at home. Granted it’s not the Ritz. Most people are just here to visit. We’re not asking anyone to uproot their lives. We just want the reclaimed to be aware. There are holidays and so forth, but only two days are of any real importance. The Annunciation and the Feast of the Paradox. Otherwise, our base crew farms and our visitors study. We live for our nights. It’s at night we share in the feeling of having come home, of being with others who have known all their lives that they’ve been missing out on this, and that this is theirs at last. We light the candles, we enjoy each other’s company, we sing and talk at the table. It’s about the people, Paul, you understand. People sitting around the table, talking. That is what we do here at Seir.

  One gets the impression, from later cantonments, that the group Safek the Ulm—formerly Agag, king of the Amalekites—finally manages to gin up with his message of doubt consists of misfits, rejects, ex-slaves, heret
ics, whores, knuckledraggers from the Neolithic, and a few of your more comely lepers, all atop dehydrated camels and traipsing across the Bible’s inhospitable terrain. The weird thing is, nobody bothers them. They’re out there, not exactly inconspicuous, passing campsites and caravans full of Amorites, Hittites, Jebusites, Perizzites, Girgashites—a smorgasbord of Canaan’s worst scumbags and psychopaths ready to seize upon the first sign of weakness—and Safek and his followers just go whistling by, occasionally enjoying returned greetings, sometimes even being invited to partake of goat bones and a hin or two of wine. Safek, whose erstwhile experience in the neighborhood was an unrelieved nightmare of bloodshed and warfare, finds it downright eerie, until he remembers it’s just what God promised him. “And we had no city to give us name; neither had we king to appoint us captains, to make of us instruments of war; neither had we laws to follow, save one. Behold, make thine heart hallowed by doubt; for God, if God, only God may know. And we followed Safek, and were not consumed.”

  And here—at cantonment 42, emailed to me as an attachment—a digression takes place, wherein one of Safek’s followers undergoes exponentially increasing pain and suffering. He’s a stand-up guy among the company he keeps, and nobody really understands why he of all people must lose his wife and children before he’s set upon by boils, fever, blindness, suicidal tendencies, the ravings of a madman, and a generally negative outlook on life, the particulars of which he’s in the middle of expounding upon when he’s suddenly struck by lightning, a lion pounces, and his heart explodes. Nobody can quite believe what they’ve just witnessed, and they all turn to Safek for an explanation. After all, he’s been telling them that if they follow God’s covenant, they’ll be fine, but what just happened to—you guessed it—Job here gives them all the distinct impression that nobody’s looking out for nobody. They’re all tempted to stop what they’re doing and pray like the dickens, because not praying obviously had no effect on Job’s fate. Better to pray and be safe than doubt and be sorry. Boy, does that piss Safek off. Not even as King Agag witnessing all his people being hacked to pieces on Mount Seir was the man this exercised. He storms about, putting to the sword anyone who refuses to rise from the prayer position. Into the story at this point comes a new man, one Eliphaz, described as Safek’s brother. That’s right, out of the blue Safek acquires a brother. Keeping God’s covenant, brother Eliphaz explains calmly, as Safek continues to kick the dust and slap the repentant upside the head, protects them from marauders, thieves, and warmongers, but as for affliction, poverty, starvation, suffering, grief, and just plain dumb luck, well, nothing was ever promised them about any of that. They’re subjects of fate no less than anyone else, the difference being they’re spared the offense of ascribing it to God’s will. What do they know about God, asks Eliphaz, other than that He obviously doesn’t exist, for if He did, would He have allowed all that crazy shit to befall poor Job? He follows this train of thought with a long litany of enigmas like “Hast Thou given the horse strength? Hast Thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst Thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is terrible,” whereupon a great silence settles over the camp, as flies do over Job’s dead body.