To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (16 page)

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.

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?”

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:

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.”

“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.