Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.
By the end of September, we had indeed played such fundamentally bad baseball that we had blown our lead over the crap-ass Rays. On the final day of regular-season play, the Red Sox and the Rays were tied for second place. I still don’t know how to make sense of our late-season performance that year. I was overtaken by physical disgust with each new loss. But that was not my only reaction. How happy I was that the Red Sox were acting once again like the Red Sox: a cursed and collapsing people. I didn’t want my team to lose; I just didn’t want my team to be the de facto winner. We already had a team that swaggered around as the de facto winner, that pinched players and purchased their pennants. It was less our duty, as Red Sox fans, to root for Boston than it was to ensure in some deeply moral way—and I really mean it when I say it was a moral act, a principled act of human decency—that we not resemble the New York Yankees in any respect. The days of trembling uncertainty, chronic disappointment, and tested loyalty—true fandom—felt vitally lacking. I wanted to be a good Red Sox fan, the best possible Red Sox fan, and the only way I knew to do that was to celebrate, quietly and in a devastated key, the very un-Yankee-like collapse of our 2011 September.
At that time I was still paying a nightly visit to my new patient. You and I can go a day without flossing, not without consequence, but without the imminent threat of losing our teeth. Not Eddie. I couldn’t believe he was still alive he was so rickety, bent, toneless, liver spotted, and trembling. He greeted me at the door as grateful as ever. I think he liked me almost as much as he had liked his old dead dentist Dr. Rappaport. We moved into the kitchen where he had a seat on the stepladder. I stood behind him and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. I removed a length of floss, wound it around my fingers, and flossed him. Afterward, he got to his feet and made us both martinis. It was like stopping into a bar for a nightcap, but instead of tipping the bartender I removed bacteria from between his teeth.
Now, after six weeks of consistent flossing, there was no more bleeding. His bone loss had ceased. His gums were holding steady.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to these nightly visits, these uninsured house calls. The last game of the season was scheduled to start in twenty minutes. If I missed the first pitch, I’d have to wait until the game was over, rewind the tape, and watch it from the beginning, and that particular game was too important not to watch in real time. I had left the office late, the trains had moved slowly, and I was still in Eddie’s apartment on the Lower East Side at ten to seven.
He handed me my martini. “Cheers,” he said.
We toasted. I watched him battle the tremor in his hand to dock the unsteady craft upon his lower lip and drink.
“I’m in kind of a pickle, Eddie,” I said to him. “I’m a baseball fan, and in particular”—I touched the brim of my Red Sox cap—“I follow these fellas right here. I don’t know if you follow baseball yourself, but if you do, then you know that no team in the history of the game has ever lost a bigger lead in the final month of the regular season than this year’s Boston Red Sox. It’s truly a historic event. They were in first place ahead of the Yankees, and then they let the Yankees take the lead just when it mattered most. Now that’s actually a time-honored tradition, which you probably know all about if you follow baseball. It’s not the end of the world, and in fact, I don’t mind it personally, because the only way I like to beat the Yankees is when we’re the underdogs. And we were still nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays, which, if you know anything about baseball, they’re a real shit team. We would have to lose in this final month as many games as… well, the only team that even comes close is the 1969 Chicago Cubs. They were in first place basically from the start of the season, and sometimes by as many as nine games. Nobody could have foreseen them losing seventeen games in September of 1969—seventeen games, Eddie—and ending up in second place. As you know if you follow baseball, nobody but the Cubs ever plays that badly. So let me just cut to the chase. We have played as badly as the 1969 Cubs. Worse, in fact, because, as of today, in the month of September alone, we’ve lost nineteen games. Nineteen games, Eddie. While the shit Rays have climbed out of their cesspool to tie us. We are tied with the shit-ass Rays. And tonight, while we play our last regular-season game in Baltimore against the last-place Orioles, the Rays play their last regular-season game against the first-place Yankees. If we win, and the Rays lose, we go to the play-offs. If we lose, and the Rays win, the Rays go to the play-offs. We could be playing our last game of the season tonight. And because I’ve stopped by, and because the train was slow, I might not make it home in time to see the game from the start, which I have to do for superstitious reasons.”
He looked at me steadily despite his faint shake, his eyes wide as a baby’s.
“So I have to ask you a favor,” I said. “Do you have cable? And if so, what kind of package do you have? And if it’s the right package, can I watch the games here—the Red Sox game and the Yankees game—with your absolute guarantee that no matter what happens, if there’s a fire in the apartment, say, or you suddenly find my behavior peculiar, even alarming, you will not kick me out but allow me to finish watching both games, even if either or both of them go into extra innings, and I’m here until three or four in the morning?”
“I have premium cable,” trembled Eddie, “and I’d be delighted by your company.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
“Okay,” I said. “That leaves us twenty minutes to find some chicken and rice.”
He made more martinis while I ran out for food. We ate quickly. Just before the start of the game, Eddie settled into the recliner while I took a seat on the floor, to be closer to the TV. Sometime in the second inning he crinkled open a hard candy and promptly passed out. It was dispiriting, after all those weeks of flossing him, to see his teeth bathing in sugar like that. At the next commercial break, I put on a latex glove, retrieved the candy, and threw it out without Eddie stirring an inch.
I sat back down, continuing to familiarize myself with his alien remotes. I was toggling between the game between the Red Sox and the Orioles and the game between the Yankees and the Rays. I was rooting for the Yankees, which ate me alive. But I had no choice. The Yankees had to beat the Rays to put the Rays behind, just as the Red Sox had to beat the Orioles to move ahead, if we were going to advance to the postseason—and when push came to shove, despite the discomforts of victory, I rooted unreservedly for the Red Sox. A win for the Red Sox was a win for my father. No matter that winning never did any magical good. Even clinching the 2004 World Series had failed to bring him back. That was the real adjustment. At last we had done the impossible, the curse was broken, we were champions again after eighty-six years… and nothing changed. He was still gone, he was still dead. What had I been hoping for? Why had I been rooting for them for so many years?
The Red Sox scored in the third. I let out a shout, and Eddie awoke with a start. He looked at me with a blank expression. I think he was wondering who I was and why I was in his apartment. Minutes later the Orioles went up 2–1. I sat there rocking a little. Then it was Boston’s turn. Scutaro scored in the fourth, and then Pedroia hit a homer into deep left to put us up 3–2. Meanwhile, the Rays were getting creamed by the Yankees. Everything was sort of okay for the moment.
If my father were alive, he would have been tracking the game on a scorecard. He started the practice as a boy, listening to Jim Britt on a Zenith Consoltone. I brought his old scorecards out during games sometimes, ran my fingers over the nicks and numbers made with a pencil in his little hand, long before his troubles began: a partial history
of baseball told in the hieroglyphics of a dead man.
Bottom of the fifth, I walked over to Eddie. He was talking in his sleep. I put my ear close to his mouth. “Sonya…” he was saying. “Sonya…”
“Eddie,” I said. “Hey, Eddie.”
Eddie opened his eyes and searched my face again.
“It’s almost the sixth inning,” I said. “I have to go into the other room soon, because I never watch the sixth inning. So I need you to watch the game for me and tell me what happens. Can you do that for me?”
“Who’s that?” he said.
“It’s Dr. O’Rourke,” I said. “Your new dentist. Can you watch the sixth inning for me, Eddie, and tell me what happens?”
A few minutes later, I was standing in his bedroom, near the door.
“Still awake, Eddie?”
“Huh?”
“You have to keep your eyes open,” I said. “I need you to watch the inning for me, top and bottom.”
There was a rain delay in the seventh. I was back in front of the TV, listening to Eddie whisper in his sleep for his Sonya. When I toggled over to the Yankees game, I was shocked. Ayala had replaced Logan on the mound, and the Rays had gone on a tear. Soon they had tied the Yankees. A home run by the Rays’ Evan Longoria secured the win. We had to win now just to stay alive.
I switched back to the Red Sox game. Papelbon struck out Jones. He struck out Reynolds. Davis came to the plate. Poised on the mound, fierce eyes shaded under the brim of his cap, Papelbon received pitch signals from his battery mate. It was the bottom of the ninth. We were only one out shy of victory. Davis’s bat inscribed nervous little arcs in the air as he waited for the pitch. The entire stadium held its breath.
If Papelbon failed to put Davis away, I realized, we would complete the worst September collapse in the history of baseball. That would restore a necessary order, repairing some of the damage of the previous decade’s extraordinary victories. But a loss was still a loss. I’d still feel miserable. But if we won, I’d feel even worse. I would be shut out of victory by the moral collapse that would follow, and it would fail once again to bring him back. So if we lost, I lost, and if we won, I lost. I had abided by strict superstitions all my life—for what? I wore the hat, ate the chicken, skipped the sixth, taped every game… for what? For the right to suffer one way or the other. That was no way to live. There had to be hope, no matter how hopeless. There had to be effort that might not be doomed. I had nothing left: no Santacroce dream, no Plotz homecoming. My parents were gone. Connie had left. My patients refused to floss, some even to fill their cavities. I had… my will, that was all. My will not to follow Mercer and my father down the hole. My will to be something more than a fox.
It was a full count. Papelbon eased into his windup. I turned off the TV and walked out of Eddie’s apartment.
Epilogue
I LIVED AT SEIR, in the compound located in the far south of Israel, for twenty-one days the following year, trying to remain open to everything I had spent my life resisting. I read the Cantaveticles front to back, heard the rest of the story of my family’s flight from Poland, and took my turn in the kitchen preparing dinner for the other reclaimants. I slept on a cot. I visited the Dead Sea. I had the inside of my cheek swabbed to determine the likelihood of my Ulmish descent.
At dusk and at dawn, I watched the Bedouin on their strutting camels glide by in the distance, on their way out to the desert. Hidden away inside layers of dark clothes, moving inexorably and with pathological silence, they struck me as the loneliest people on earth.
I was never lonely, and never had to be lonely again. There were formal classes in the whitewashed buildings and nightly debates around the dinner table. The others with me weren’t lunatics or zealots, or even culty and weird, but reasonably groomed, politically progressive, on average younger than I had expected. They were really into it: the reclaimed history, the theological complexities of doubt, the continual threat of mass extinction. More than a few could talk about such things all night long. By the end of week 3, it had all become exhausting and a little tedious to me, like touring the churches of Europe with Connie. I missed espresso and central air. I wanted to go home.
That doesn’t explain why I returned a year later, or the year after that.
I guess I needed to make myself vulnerable. I was sick of the facts, the bare facts, the hard, scientific facts. I was saying: Look at me, seeking among the dubious. Doing something stupid, something stark raving mad. Look at me, risking being wrong.
Tourism is a big deal in Israel. You can hire a guide to take you to the famous desert of Ein Gedi, to Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and to Masada, where Jewish rebels held off Roman centurions until they could hold them off no longer. Or you can take a tour with Grant Arthur in his Mazda CX-7 and travel to places no one’s heard of and listen, with as much skepticism as you please, as he conjures a history at highway junctions and distant points in the desert. Battles took place just on the other side of that security fence, he’ll tell you. Miracles happened right here at this electrical substation. There are some who express no skepticism at all on such a tour. They believe every word and don’t give a damn about your hard facts. Deal with it.
I never received an apology from Grant Arthur for turning my life upside down. “You wouldn’t be here if you needed an apology,” he said to me. “You’re here. You’re happy. What’s to apologize for?” I wasn’t sure I should just forgive and forget, but he did his best to convince me that there was no reason to hold a grudge, or even to ask him, “Why me?” “Remember, I didn’t reach out to you,” he would say. “You emailed me.” He was suggesting that he might have done nothing more than make a website for a dental practice on which to publish parts of the Cantaveticles if I hadn’t emailed Seir Design and demanded the site be taken down. “The message comes when the message is needed,” he would say. “I didn’t steal your identity, Paul. I returned it.” And: “If you doubt any of this, you are already on the right path.” He always wore a beige vest with mesh pockets and a pair of cargo pants, had a neat little beard and perfect WASP teeth. “Most men live their lives vacillating between hope and fear,” he’d say. “Hope for heaven, on the one hand, fear of nothingness on the other. But now consider doubt. Do you see all the problems it solves, for man and for God?”
The life of the Ulms continued to grow online. I was so wrapped up at the time in the appropriation of my identity that I wasn’t aware until later just how much more was going on. A book was published called A Partial History of the Dispossessed, by Tomas Stover, a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, with chapters on the Jews, the Maori, the Native Americans, as well as less publicized dispossessions—the Akunsi, the Chaggossians of Diego Garcia, and of course the Ulms. Other historians countered with articles and denunciations, which changed the focus of the group’s Wikipedia page. There was an inexorable logic to it all when the main focus became not Amalekite slaughters and the debate over Israeli aggression but the right of some people to make loose claims about their historical legitimacy, to publish books about it and stand by it as established fact. It was this controversy that secured the page’s permanence. Now it’s a more or less stable document, its partisans stalemated in a zero-sum game, in the collapse of absolutes brought to you online. But still they tweak, and correct, and caution one another to remain civil, above all to try and remain neutral.
The page begins, “Ulmism is the predominant religious tradition of the Ulms, which began with the revelations of Grant Arthur (1960–2022) during the Third Reawakening.”
The Plotzes must still think that those tweets and postings made in my name really came from me. I don’t know; I haven’t heard from Uncle Stuart since that day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don’t get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz—any one of them could have been something that w
as almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently.
Connie still sends me an email now and then. She and the poet married and had a son. A university press published some of her poems in a chapbook, which I have read over and over again, searching in vain for some sign of me, some mention. I take comfort in knowing that she was never much of an autobiographical writer. She teaches in Kentucky. “We’re all doing really well here in Lexington,” she writes. “How are you and how is Betsy?”
Betsy succeeds every year in dragging me to Nepal on a missionary vacation. We land in Kathmandu and spend our time in nearby Bodhnath tending to the teeth of the poor and malnourished, individuals with nothing more to stimulate their gums than a branch from a banyan tree. You’ve never seen so many robed men in your life, so many heads shaved to the bone in the name of God. They spend their days spinning prayer wheels and peddling yak’s butter. Everywhere I go in Bodhnath, the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha stare down at me from the gilded tower of the stupa, a happy witness to all the suffering. I say as much to Mrs. Convoy. “First of all,” she says, “the Buddha is not a god. It’s more like a self-help thing. And second of all, don’t you see that those eyes are painted on?” Painted on? I will say. “My goodness, young man, you can be so easily duped.”
In the early evenings, after we finish for the day, I walk around the hot dusty uneven streets of Kathmandu, lined with crippled beggars and mounds of trash, and I take pictures with my me-machine of goats’ heads with charred horns and leering smiles. They’re for sale right on the street, arrayed on vendors’ tables like the skulls of executed criminals. I pass whole families dwelling in doorways, trekkers and seekers and sightseers, men on bicycle rickshaws, mangy dogs. All the buildings look condemned, their windows either bare or boarded. There’s advertising everywhere.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel Page 30