To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

One

THE MOUTH IS A weird place. Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate — where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up.

I encouraged my patients to floss. It was hard to do some days. They should have flossed. Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life up to seven years. It’s also time consuming and a general pain in the ass. That’s not the dentist talking. That’s the guy who comes home, four or five drinks in him, what a great evening, ha-has all around, and, the minute he takes up the floss, says to himself, What’s the point? In the end, the heart stops, the cells die, the neurons go dark, bacteria consumes the pancreas, flies lay their eggs, beetles chew through tendons and ligaments, the skin turns to cottage cheese, the bones dissolve, and the teeth float away with the tide. But then someone who never flossed a day in his life would come in, the picture of inconceivable self-neglect and unnecessary pain — rotted teeth, swollen gums, a live wire of infection running from enamel to nerve — and what I called hope, what I called courage, above all what I called defiance, again rose up in me, and I would go around the next day or two saying to all my patients, “You must floss, please floss, flossing makes all the difference.”

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be. That he’s also half mortician is the secret he keeps to himself. The ailing bits he tries to turn healthy again. The dead bits he just tries to make presentable. He bores a hole, clears the rot, fills the pit, and seals the hatch. He yanks the teeth, pours the mold, fits the fakes, and paints to match. Open cavities are the eye stones of skulls, and lone molars stand erect as tombstones.

We call it a practice, never a business, but successful dentistry is very much a business. I started out with a windowless two-chair clinic in Chelsea. Eventually I moved into a place off Park Avenue. I had half the ground floor of an apartment complex called the Aftergood Arms.

Park Avenue is the most civilized street in the world. Doormen still dress like it’s 1940, in caps and gloves, opening doors for old dowagers and their dogs. The awnings extend to the curb so that no one gets wet on rainy days stepping in and out of cabs, and a carpet, usually green, sometimes red, runs underfoot. With a certain cast of mind, you can almost reconstruct the horse-and-carriage days when the first of the nabob settlers were maneuvering their canes and petticoats through the Park Avenue mud. Manhattan suffers its shocks. The neighborhoods turn over. The city changes in your sleep. But Park Avenue stays Park Avenue, for better or worse — moneyed, residential, quintessentially New York.

I borrowed a lot to refurbish the new place. To pay back that money as quickly as possible, I went against the advice of the contractor, the objections of Mrs. Convoy, my own better instincts, and the general protocol of dentists everywhere and ordered a floor plan without a private office. I installed a fifth chair in that space and then spent the next ten years killing myself tending to five chairs in five rooms while complaining about my lack of privacy and raking in tons and tons of money.

Everything was always something. It did no good to bitch about it. Some days I really held a grudge. I’d tell myself to get over myself. What could be better than a thriving practice and a management structure with me on top? My days weren’t any longer than yours, except Thursdays. Some Thursdays we didn’t get out of the office until ten o’clock. I almost slept okay those nights, when the pills seemed almost redundant. (First thing to go when you medicate to sleep are the dreams. Look on the bright side, I said to myself, as my dreams first started to fade. You’re being spared, upon waking, the desperate need to convey to someone else the vivid images of a rich inner life.)

Everything was always something, but something — and here was the rub — could never be everything. A thriving practice couldn’t be everything. A commitment to healthy patients and an afternoon mochaccino and pizza Fridays just couldn’t be everything. The banjo couldn’t be everything, either, unfortunately. Streaming movies directly to the TV was almost everything when first available, but soon fell off to just barely something. The Red Sox had been everything for a long time, but they disappointed me in the end. The greatest disappointment of my adult life came in 2004, when the Red Sox stole the pennant from the Yankees and won the World Series.

For two months one summer, I thought golf could be everything. For the rest of my life, I thought, I’ll put all my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, and that’s what I did, for two months, until I realized that I could put all my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed. The last ball I putted circled the hole, and the rimming impression it made as it dropped was that of my small life draining into the abyss.

So work, fun, and total dedication to something bigger than myself, something greater — my work, golf, the Red Sox — none could be everything, even if each, at times, filled the hour perfectly. I’m like that dreamer desperate to describe his dream when I try to explain the satisfactions of replacing a rotten tooth with a pontic so that a patient could smile again without shame. I had restored a baseline human dignity, no small thing. Pizza Fridays were no small thing. And that mochaccino was a little joy. The night in 2004 when David Ortiz homered against the Yankees to jump-start the greatest comeback in sports history made me simply happy to be alive.

I would have liked to believe in God. Now there was something that could have been everything better than anything else. By believing in God, I could succumb to ease and comfort and reassurance. Fearlessness was an option! Eternity was mine! It could all be mine: the awesome pitch of organ pipes, the musings of Anglican bishops. All I had to do was put away my doubts and believe. Whenever I was on the verge of that, I would call myself back from the brink. Keep clarity! I would cry. Hold on to yourself! For the reason the world was so pleasurable, and why I wanted to extend that pleasure through total submission to God, was my thoughts — my reasoned, stubborn, skeptical thoughts — which always unfortunately made quick work of God.

Non serviam! cried Lucifer. He didn’t want to eat the faces off little babies. He just didn’t want to serve. If he had served, he would have been just one more among the angels, indistinct, his name hard to recall even among the devout.

I’ve tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can’t say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark. It might not be. For all I know, the high-water mark is to be found in, say, the second book of Kings. Imagine making it through the first book of Kings! They don’t make it easy. I’ll tell you what amazes me. I’m practically always sitting down next to somebody on the subway who’s reading the Bible, who’s smack in the middle of the thing, like on page one hundred and fifty thousand, and every single sentence has been underlined or highlighted. I have to think there’s no way this tattooed Hispanic youth has lavished on the remaining pages of his Bible such poignant highlighting so prominently on display here in the hinterlands of 2 Chronicles. Then he’ll turn the page, and sure the fuck enough: even more highlighting! In multiple colors! With notes in a friar’s hand! And I don’t mean to suggest he simply turned the page. Dude leaped forward three, four hundred pages to reference or cross-check or whatever, and there, glowing in ingot blocks, was the same concentration of highlighting. I swear to God, there are still people out there devoting their entire lives to the Bible. It’s either old black ladies or middle-aged black guys or Hispanic guys with neckties or white guys you’re surprised are white. Thousands of hours they’ve been up studying and highlighting Bible passages while I’ve been sleeping, or watching baseball, or abusing myself carnally on a recliner. Sometimes I think I’ve wasted my life. Of course I’ve wasted my life. Did I have a choice? Of course I did — twenty years of nights with the Bible. But who is to say that, even then, my life — conscientiously devout, rigorously applied, monastically contained, and effortfully open to God’s every hint and clobber — would have been more meaningful than it was, with its beery nights, bleary dawns, and Saint James and his Abstract? That was a mighty Pascal’s Wager: the possibility of eternity in exchange for the limited hours of my one certain go-round.

I remember a time when I took part in some of the city’s many walking tours. The entire point of a walking tour is to demonstrate how much has changed, how much is changing, and how much will have changed from some point in time before you were born to some point in time long after you’re dead. Eventually the walking tours became so depressing I stopped cold and took up Spanish. But not before I learned how, as immigration patterns shifted, and one ethnic group supplanted another, houses of worship once vital to the neighborhood lost their significance. This was especially true on the Lower East Side, where a multitude of synagogues ministering to the needs of early Jewish immigrants had been retrofitted into the churches of later Christian arrivals. The architecture of the buildings could not be altered, however, nor the details of their facades. And so there are some churches in the city where the Star of David or the relief of a candelabra or an impression of Hebrew letters sits fixed in the concrete alongside a roof-mounted crucifix and a marble statue of the Holy Mother.

Keep clarity! I cried. Remember how easily one house of worship can be transformed into an opposing house of worship, or risk your soul to changes in demographics and to man’s infinite capacity for practical repurposing.

I was visiting Europe with Connie the last time I was in a church. We must have seen eight to nine hundred churches during our twelve days there. Ask her and it was more like four. Four churches in twelve days! Can you imagine? I was constantly taking off and putting on my Red Sox hat on account of some church. The church was always famous and not-to-be-missed. There was never any difference from one to the next. No matter the time of day or intake of espresso, I was overcome, when entering a church, with an attack of the yawns. Connie insisted that the yawning didn’t need to be quite so vocal. She likened my yawns to the running of lawn equipment. She said she expected to turn and find wood chips shooting from my mouth. I frequently found myself reclined on a pew receiving her looks of outrage. But come on, it was just a yawn! I wasn’t making crude gestures. I never suggested we party in the church. The one time, I said it would be nice to get a blow job behind the church, out by the dumpsters. That was obviously a joke. There weren’t any dumpsters out there! We weren’t at a grocery store. I have a sickness for blow jobs behind grocery stores. You can’t do it very easily in Manhattan. It is most easily done in New Jersey, where it also happens to be legal. Connie took Europe far too seriously, I thought. She somberly studied the frescoes and fine print, worrying the infinite. Poets are a ponderous bunch. (Connie’s a poet.) They’re hypocrites, too. They’d never step foot in a church in America, but fly them to Europe and they rush from tarmac to transept as if the real God, the God of Dante and chiaroscuro, of flying buttresses and Bach, had been awaiting their arrival for centuries. What thrall, what sabbath longing, will overcome a poet in the churches of Europe. And Connie was Jewish! On Day 3, I started calling it “Eurpoe” and didn’t stop until we touched down in Newark. Being in Jersey, I suggested we stop for groceries before heading back into the city, but Connie had had enough of me by then. To me, a church is simply a place to be bored in. I say this with all due respect to believers. I’m not immune to the allure of their fellowship of comforts. I, too, like to take part in sanctifications, hand-holdings, and large-hearted sing-alongs. But I would be damned, literally damned, if any God I might believe in wanted me to go along with the given prescriptions. He would laugh at the wafer. He would howl at the wine. He would probably feel an exquisite pity toward those mortal approximations. Oh, what do I know? Only that the boredom that overtakes me inside a church is not a passive boredom. It’s an active, gnawing restlessness. For some a place of final purpose and easy outpouring; for me, a dead end, the dark bus station of the soul. To enter a church is to bring to a close everything that makes entering church with praise on the lips a right reasonable thing to do.

My name is Paul O’Rourke. I live in New York City, in a Brooklyn duplex overlooking the Promenade. I’m a dentist and board-certified prosthodontist, open six days a week, with extended hours on Thursdays.

There’s no better place on earth to live than New York City. It has the best museums, theaters, and nightclubs, the best variety shows, burlesques, and live-music venues, and the very finest in world cuisine. Its wine stock alone makes of the Roman empire a sad Kansan backwater. The marvels are endless. But who has time to partake of the marvels when you’re busy busting your ass to stay solvent in New York? And when not busting your ass, who has the energy? Since arriving in the city twelve years ago, a proud immigrant from Maine, I had been to a dozen art-house films, two Broadway shows, the Empire State Building, and one jazz concert memorable only for the monumental effort I expended trying to stay awake through the drum solos. I’d been to the great Metropolitan Museum, that repository of human effort mere blocks from my office, exactly zero times. I spent most of my leisure time standing outside the plate-glass windows of real-estate brokers, looking at the listings alongside other priced-out dreamers, imagining brighter views and bigger rooms that would sweeten my nightly escape from the city.

When I was dating Connie, we’d go out for a nice meal three or four times a week. A nice meal in New York might be made for you by a celebrity chef with several Michelin stars, a Rhone Valley boyhood, and/or his own TV show. The celebrity chef was not likely to be in the kitchen, which was usually peopled exclusively by Hispanics of disparate origin. Still, the menu was driven by the freshest seasonal ingredients hand-picked at farmers’ markets or expedited overnight from the sea. The dining rooms were either chic and intimate with striking lighting or loud and packed with exclusive clientele. Both were impossible to get into. We managed only by remaining diligent and keeping up pressure on the phone and calling in favors and making bribes and lying. Connie once told a reservationist that she was dying of stomach cancer and had chosen that restaurant as her last meal out. We sat down at every table excited but exhausted, and we looked over each menu, with its entrées priced with full period stops, and we ordered the things to order and drank the recommended wines. Then we paid and went home and felt wasted and dull, and in the morning we wondered where we should go next.

After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy. Things could be worse, I said not a minute later, I could be that guy. Parading by everywhere were the disfigured, the destitute, the hideously ugly, the walking weeping, the self-scarred, the unappeasably pissed off. Things could be worse. Then a woman would pass by, one of thousands of New York women, coltishly long legged, impossibly high booted, always singly, or in pairs and trios, in possession of that beauty whose greatest cruelty was that it meant no harm, and as I died a little of want and agony, I said to myself, Things could be so much better.

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better — that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

My life didn’t really begin until several months before the fateful Red Sox summer of 2011. Mrs. Convoy came to me one day in January of that year and said that something strange was going on in room 3. I looked in. I vaguely recognized the patient. He was scheduled to have a tooth removed. A botched filling (not one of mine) had invaded the nerve, he’d put off the root canal I’d long ago recommended, and at last he was in great motivating pain. But he was not moaning or crying. No, he was chanting, soft and low. He had placed his hands palms up, with thumbs and middle fingers touching, and was intoning something like, “Ah-rum… ah-rum…”

I sat down chairside. We shook hands, and I asked what he was doing. He had once studied to be a Tibetan monk, he told me, and though that period of his life had ended, when necessary he still applied his meditation techniques. In this case, he was preparing to have his tooth removed without the aid of anesthetic. He had worked under a guru who had mastered the art of eliminating pain.

“I have effected emptiness to the extreme,” he told me. “You just have to remember: though you lose the body, you do not die.”

His canine, in an advanced state of decay, was stained the color of weak tea but was still rooted to active nerves. No dentist in his right mind would pull a tooth without at least applying a local anesthetic. I told him that, and he finally agreed to the local. He resumed his meditative position, I juiced him with the needle, and then I went at his canine with a vigorous swaying grip. Two seconds into it he began to moan. I thought the moaning part and parcel of his effecting emptiness to the extreme, but it grew louder, filling the room, spilling out into the waiting area. I looked at Abby, my dental assistant, sitting across the patient from me, pink paper mask obscuring her features. She said nothing. I took the forceps out of my patient’s mouth and asked if everything was okay.

“Yes. Why?”

“You’re making noise.”

“Was I? I didn’t realize. I’m not actually here physically,” he said.

“You sound here physically.”

“I’ll try to be quieter,” he said. “Please continue.”

The moaning started up again almost immediately, rising to a modest howl. It was inchoate and bloody, like that of a newborn with stunted organs. I stopped. His red eyes were filmed with tears.

“You’re doing it again,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Moaning,” I said. “Howling. Are you sure the local’s working?”

“I’m thinking three or four weeks ahead of this pain,” he said. “I’m four to six weeks removed.”

“It shouldn’t be painful at all,” I said, “with the local.”

“And it’s not, not at all,” he said. “I’ll be completely silent.”

I resumed. He stopped me almost that very second.

“Can I have the full gas, please?”

I put him under and removed the tooth and replaced it with a temporary crown. When the gas wore off, Abby and I were in with another patient. Connie came into the room and informed me that the man was ready to leave but wanted to say goodbye first.

I should have fired Connie after she and I broke up. All she did for me was write the patient’s name on a card with the date and time of the next appointment. That was all she did, eight hours a day, longer on Thursdays. That and help Mrs. Convoy with the scheduling. And some billing, she also did some billing. But I had an outside service for billing. She never did enough billing that I no longer needed the outside service. And oh, right, the phone. Eight hours, sometimes more, of filling out little cards, inputting names into the schedule, doing not enough billing to save me from paying an outside service, and answering the phone. The rest of her time she spent glued to her me-machine.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Over there,” she said.

My patient stood as I entered the waiting room.

“I just wanted to say… thanks! Thanks for everything. This is the last time you’ll see me. I’m off to Israel!”

He was slurring just enough that I thought he might still be feeling the effects of the gas.

“Are you sure you don’t want a few more minutes to rest up?” I asked him.

“Oh, no, I’m not going just yet. I have to take the subway first. I just wanted to say how much I’ll miss you. I’ll miss everyone here. Everyone here is so nice. That lady’s nice. She’s super nice. And she’s super hot. I mean she’s really just, like, oh, fuck me. I would fuck that lady.”

He was pointing at Connie, who was looking on, as was the rest of the waiting room.

“Okay,” I said, “you need to recuperate a little longer. Come with me.”

“Can’t!” he cried, shrugging me off. “No time!”

“Then we’ll be seeing you.”

“No, you won’t!” he said. “I told you. I’m off to Israel!”

I started moving him toward the door. Connie handed me his jacket.

“But I’m not going to Israel because I’m Jewish. That’s probably what you think, isn’t it?”

“Let’s just get you in this other sleeve here…”

“But you’d be wrong!”

I opened the door. He got up close and whispered to me with a sour anesthetic breath.

“I’m an Ulm,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to Israel. I’m an Ulm, and so are you!”

I patted him on the back and then gave him a little prod.

“Congratulations. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you!” he said.

Gas makes people say funny things. I didn’t think another thing of it.

Two

SIX MONTHS LATER, THE morning of Friday, the fifteenth of July 2011, began uneventfully. Cosmetic consultations and a gum graft and one hideously black tongue. “Nowhere Man” played softly four different times, or I was in four separate exam rooms while it played once. Later I caught myself humming it during a crown lengthening. Connie’s chignon slowly dried into the afternoon, filling the office with the scent of her hair. Mrs. Convoy suggested a new solution to the file overflow. Abby was silent.

You don’t have to do much to be a good dental assistant. Commit the instruments to memory and hand them off in anticipation of my needs. It’s not cardiovascular surgery. But it’s not all fun and games, either. Victims of car crashes and bar fights would come in with their mouths wrecked, and in addition to committing the instruments to memory and handing them off when I needed them, Abby had to be a steely professional when they first opened their mouths. You don’t want to be the victim of a car crash. Sure, I can get you eating and drinking again, but you’re never going back to the way it was. You’ve had your run of luck, and now it’s over. From this point forward, it’s all a compromise. From now until death it’s a matter of the best we can do.

To be honest, you can’t get a damn thing done without a good dental assistant. And Abby was very good. She would even hold a patient’s hand. But I thought she had management issues. If she had a complaint or a suggestion or simply wanted an afternoon off, she wouldn’t come to me. She’d go to Connie or Mrs. Convoy. She said it was because she was afraid to disturb me. Afraid to disturb me? We sat across from each other all day long! She probably would have preferred someone else to sit across from, like one of those cheery dentists who love people and make winning remarks that entertain everybody — which is all I’ve ever wanted for myself. I wanted her to stop sitting across from me in silence, constantly judging me. Maybe she wasn’t judging me. Maybe I just couldn’t read her behind that pink paper mask always obscuring her features. Maybe she was simply waiting to hand off the next instrument with the professionalism I required. But you try having a dental assistant follow you around all day and sit across from you when you’re not feeling witty or cheery and see if you don’t feel judged.

“Are all the rooms prepped?” I asked Abby first thing when I came in that morning.

I wanted nothing more than to say good morning first thing in the morning. Saying good morning was good for morale, conveying to everyone in their turn, Isn’t it something? Here we are again, wits renewed, armpits refreshed, what exciting surprises does the day hold in store? But some mornings I couldn’t bring myself to do it. We were a cozy office of four; three good mornings, that’s all that was ever asked of me. And yet I’d withhold my good mornings. Ignoring the poignancy of everyone’s limited allotment of good mornings, I would not say good morning. Or I would in all innocence forget about our numbered opportunities to say good morning, that horrifying circumscription, and simply fail to say it. Or I would say good morning sparingly, begrudgingly, injudiciously, or tyrannically. I would say good morning to Abby and Betsy but not to Connie. Or to Betsy but not Abby or Connie. Or to Abby in front of Betsy, and to Betsy in front of Connie, but not to Connie. What was so good about it anyway, the too-often predictable, so-called new morning? It was usually preceded by a long struggle for a short drowse that so many people call night. That was never sufficiently ceremonial to call for fresh greetings. So instead I’d say to them, “Where’s the day’s schedule?” If I said, “Where’s the day’s schedule?” I was saying that to Connie, who worked the desk. Or I’d say, “Are all the rooms prepped?” as I said that morning, the morning in question, and that would be directed at Abby. I’d say that first thing, at the start of the day, as if I expected the rooms not to be prepped, and for the rest of the day, Abby would sit across the patient from me mutely breathing inside her mask, soberly handing off the instruments, and silently judging me in the harshest of terms. Or I’d say to Betsy, “You’re alone today,” meaning that she would have no help from a temp hygienist, and she would reply, “Somebody’s in a foul mood.” And I wasn’t, in fact, in a foul mood, despite coming off another futile attempt at a good night’s sleep, and seeing again all too soon my same three employees from the day before. I wasn’t in a foul mood until the very moment Mrs. Convoy said, “Somebody’s in a foul mood,” which would invariably set the course for a day spent in the blackest of moods.

But good morning! good morning to ye and thou! I’d say to all my patients, because I was the worst of the hypocrites, of all the hypocrites, the cruel and phony hypocrites, I was the very worst.

Among my patients that Friday morning was a man I’ll call Contacts. Contacts was in for some cosmetic work. More patients were coming in for cosmetic purposes than ever before. They wanted whiter smiles, straighter smiles, less gummy smiles, gum bleachings and lip repositionings, smiles whose architecture was remade tooth by tooth, millimeter by millimeter, until every bad memory from childhood had been eradicated. They wanted George Clooney’s smile or Kim Kardashian’s smile or that beefy knock-kneed smile of Tom Cruise’s, and they brought in clippings of lesser celebrities whose smiles they hoped I could give them so that they, too, could smile like celebrities and walk the streets like celebrities and live forever and ever in the glow of celebrity. These were patients who could afford to indulge themselves, lawyers and hedge-fund managers and their spouses who had no more appetite for imperfection, and socialites who made the rounds of museum galas catching the light of every flash. And then, in contrast, there were those who, with no insurance, came in from complications from a self-pulled tooth yanked with pliers in the kitchen of a rent-controlled walk-up after putting away half a bottle of Jim Beam. They dealt with their growing toothaches not with dental exams but with aspirin, whiskey, and whatever scripts they could get from their disability docs. Some of them had to be immediately referred to the emergency room. These were the same people who were often resented in life for being closed off and hostile because they never smiled, but they never smiled not because of some personality flaw but from a lifelong embarrassment of their yellow stains, rotted grays, and dark edentulous gaps. If, after years of torment and slow savings, they came to see me before catastrophe struck, they often broke down in the chair, men and women alike, and then out it came, everything: their terrible nicknames, their broken hearts, their blown opportunities and arrested lives. All on account of some fucking teeth. There were days I considered myself singularly ill suited to my profession, which required the daily suspension of any awareness of the long game, a whistling past the grave of every open mouth. I spent all my energy on the temporary, the stopgap, and the ad hoc, which made it hard to convince myself that a patient’s biannual maintenance was anything more than a necessary delusion. But when I got to work on those chronic unsmilers, and they came back after the sutures healed and the anchors held steady to thank me for giving them their lives back — indeed for giving them any life at all — I felt good about what I did, and damn the long game to hell.

Anyway, I was bonding a new set of incisors to Contacts when he took out his me-machine and began scrolling through his contacts. It was a simple bond job, it wasn’t brain surgery. Still, it required a little focus and some patient cooperation. Let me tell you something. If brain surgery could be done without anesthesia, you’d have the brain-surgery patients scrolling through their contacts, too. The array of activity people found acceptable in the chair never ceased to amaze me. Mrs. Convoy once had a patient unscrew a bottle of nail polish one-handed during a cleaning and begin to paint her nails. That provoked a passionate sermon on the deplorable state of respect in contemporary society, from which the poor girl could neither escape nor, with Mrs. Convoy’s scraper in her mouth, offer any rebuttal. I asked the guy with the sudden pressing need to scroll through his contacts if he might put his phone away, which he did only after firing off a text. He got me thinking about a certain time in my life. When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym’s racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse. I remembered telling McGowan how I’d been flicking through all my contacts the night before when it occurred to me that many of them couldn’t be considered real friends. I decided to delete a whole bunch, even if they were people I’d known forever. It bothered McGowan that I would do that. “Those are your contacts, man,” he said. “Yeah? So?” “Don’t you care about your contacts?” “Why should I?” “I just don’t get why you do stuff like that,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t do stuff like that. It’s depressing.” I didn’t see why it should be depressing to him. They were my contacts. He avoided me after that. Then one day I got a call out of the blue. “Hello?” I said. “Hey,” replied the voice on the other end. “Who is this?” I asked, not having the number in my contacts. It turned out to be McGowan. We haven’t talked since.

When I looked up from Contacts’s mouth, Mrs. Convoy was standing there. Most of the time Mrs. Convoy looked like an unhappy docent. You got the impression you were about to go on a boring tour of something edifying and that she would make it as punitive as possible. Part of that impression came from her flesh-colored turtleneck, which was tucked severely into her slacks and fit tightly over her splayed AARP breasts, and part of it came from her silvered crew cut, and part of it came from her pale facial down, which stood straight up on her neck and cheeks as if trying to attract balloons. But on this occasion she was beaming at me.

“What?” I said.

“You did it, you!”

“Did what?”

“I thought you were dead set against, but you did it.”

“Tell me what you’re talking about, Betsy.”

“The website.”

“What website?”

“Our website,” she said.

I swiveled away from my patient and snapped off my latex gloves. “We don’t have a website,” I said.

Turns out I was in for a surprise.

Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs. Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints’ days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother.

Say I would come in from outside and go straight to the sink to wash my hands. It didn’t matter which sink, Mrs. Convoy would find me. She’d sniff at me like a bloodhound and then she’d say, “What exactly have you been doing?” I’d tell her, and she’d say, “Why do you feel the need to lie to me?” I’d tell her, and she’d say, “Scrutiny does not kill people. Smoking kills people. What kind of example do you think you’re setting for your patients by sneaking off to smoke cigarettes?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “They do not need a reminder of ‘the futility of it all’ from their dental professional. When did you take up smoking again?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Then why did you tell everyone you quit?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not see how the occasional show of concern is ‘utterly strangulating.’ I would like to see you live up to your potential, that is all. Don’t you wish you had more self-control?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Of course I will not join you. What are you doing? Do not light that cigarette!” I’d put the cigarettes away with an offhand remark, she’d say, “How am I a trial? I am not the trial here. The trial is between you and your addictions. Do you want to ruin your lungs and die a young man?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “You are not already in hell. Shall I tell you what hell will be like?” I’d answer, she’d say, “Yes, as a matter of fact, any conversation can turn into a discussion on the salvation of the soul. It’s a pity more don’t. What are you doing at that window?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “We are on the ground floor. You would hardly manage to sprain an ankle.”

I’d come out of the bathroom and she’d be standing right there. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she’d say. “Where have you been?” I’d tell her the obvious, she’d say, “Why must you call it the Thunderbox?” I’d tell her, adding a few details, and she’d grow severe, she’d say, “Please do not refer to what you do in the bathroom as ‘making the pope’s fountain.’ I know the pope is just a joke to you. I know the Catholic Church is nothing but a whetting stone for your wit. But I happen to hold the church in the highest regard, and though you can’t understand that, if you had any respect for me you would mind what you say about the pope.” I’d answer with an apology, but she’d ignore me. “Sometimes I honestly wonder whether you care about anyone’s feelings but your own.” And she’d walk away. I’d never learn why she was standing outside the Thunderbox unless it was to bring grief to us both.

Later, after letting it fester, she’d say, “Well, tell me. Do you care about anyone else’s feelings? Do you have any respect for me at all?”

Of course I had respect for her. Let’s say the day’s scheduling worked out as planned and we had five cleanings to perform all at once. To minimize wait times, and to maximize my turnaround, I would normally require three if not four dedicated hygienists. But I had Betsy Convoy. Betsy Convoy, with the help of one or two rotating temps, could manage all five chairs. She could X-ray, chart, scale, and polish, tutor each patient in preventive treatment, leave detailed notes for my follow-up exams, and still manage to supervise the staff and oversee the scheduling. Most dentists won’t believe that. But then most dentists have never had a truly great hygienist like Mrs. Convoy.

“Well?” she’d say. “Why aren’t you answering me?”

But most days I would have cheerfully stood by and watched her die. Better her dead, I thought, than being around. I would never have found anyone to replace her, but Betsy Convoy being around, there was the true Calvary. Poor Betsy. She was responsible for our efficiency, our professionalism, and a good portion of our monthly billing. Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses. Handing out a toothbrush to a charity patient, she’d tell that person, “Be faithful in small things.” Who does that? But then, out of nowhere, I’d imagine her getting fucked doggy-style by a muscular African on one of the dental chairs.

“Of course I respect you, Betsy. We couldn’t go on without you.”

Later, at the bar, I’d be the last one to leave, she’d be second to last. She’d say, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “How are you going to get home?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Connie’s gone, dear. She left two hours ago. Come on, let’s get you home.” She’d put me in a cab, she’d say, “Can you handle it from here?” I’d tell her, she’d say, to the cabbie she’d say, “He lives in Brooklyn,” and then I don’t know what.

We’d take a one-off trip somewhere far-flung. I’d fight and fight and say no fucking way, but somehow she’d get me on that plane. We once flew from JFK to New Delhi and from New Delhi to Biju Patnaik and from there took a train fifty kilometers inland, where we walked through the cesspool streets in sweltering heat as limbless beggars crutched behind us issuing soft exhortations. The clinic was little more than two armchairs under a luncheon umbrella. We were stationed right next to the cleft-palate folks. It was enough just to see them at work. I’d say to her, “I can’t believe I let you drag me to this goddamned country.” She’d tell me not to take the Lord’s name in vain. I’d say, “Might not be the best time to demand a show of respect for the Lord. How much respect did the good Lord show these kids?” Pulp necrosis, tongue lesions, goiterlike presentations on account of the abscesses. I could go on. I will go on: stained teeth, fractured teeth, necrotic teeth, teeth growing one behind the other, growing sideways, growing from the roof of the mouth, ulcers, open sores, gingival discharge, dry sockets, trench mouth, incurable caries, and the malnutrition that follows from the impossibility of eating. Those tender infant mouths never stood a chance. A sane person doesn’t stick around in the hopes of making a dent. A sane person takes the next plane home. I stayed for tax reasons, that’s it. A solid write-off. And I liked the roasted lamb. You can’t find lamb that good even in Manhattan. Mrs. Convoy said we were there to do God’s work. “I’m here for the lamb,” I told her. As for God’s work, I said, “Seems like we’re undoing it.” She disagreed. This was the reason we had been put on earth. “Pessimism, skepticism, complaint, and outrage,” I said to her. “That’s why we were put on earth. Unless you were born out here. Then it’s pretty clear your only purpose was to suffer.”

A finished biography appealed to Mrs. Convoy more than a work in progress. All the important men in her life were dead: Christ the Savior, Pope John Paul II, and Dr. Bertram Convoy, also a dentist before a fatal stroke. Betsy was only sixty but had been widowed nineteen years. I always considered her alone, if not chronically lonely. But she was never alone. She was in the tripartite company of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as well as the irreproachable presence of the Virgin Mother; in fellowship with saints and martyrs; one in spirit with the pope in Rome; deferential to her bishop; confessional to her priest; and friend and comfort to all fellow members of her parish. If the Catholic Church had come under assault for its many sins, inside the church the bonds had never been stronger, and Betsy Convoy needed no one’s sympathy for widowhood, solitude, or the appearances of a barren life. I was convinced she would never die, but if she did, and though her funeral amount to a very modest affair, she was bound for happy reunions in a better world, in the brotherhood of a loving multitude, while her tombstone was still fresh with wreaths of everlastings.

She’d order a book. It was called Stop the Scheduling Madness or The Way of the Zero-Balance Office or The Million Dollar Dentist. This last was written by someone named Barry Hallow. He wasn’t even a dentist. He was a consultant. Here’s a guy fresh out of business school, he’s desperate for a niche, he hears about the chronic problems that plague a dental practice, and he turns himself into an expert. He sits in Phoenix, Arizona, and writes a book. His proven methods can change your practice, your financial health, and even your life expectancy. Most of all, he writes, he can help you achieve happiness. Hey, who doesn’t want that? Anything less than complete happiness is for complete losers, really depressed people, old people losing their eyesight, and child actors who turn out to be weird looking. It wasn’t going to happen here, not with Barry Hallow. “We schedule inefficiently, treat insufficiently, and bill ineffectively,” Mrs. Convoy concluded, in the words of Barry Hallow. I took exception to the claim that we treated insufficiently. “We do not spend enough time,” she countered, “instructing patients on preventive measures, which in the long run would make them healthier.” “Preventive measures don’t pay the bills,” I said. “We’re running a practice here, not a master class.” “I know we’re not running—” “And besides,” I said, “we do in fact spend a hell of a lot of time on preventive measures, relative to other practices, but remember who you’re talking about here, Betsy. Human beings. Lazy, shortsighted knockbacks who you try rousing to brush after four glasses of Merlot on a Wednesday night. Ain’t gonna happen, no matter how much we preach preventive measures every time they deign to remember an appointment and drag themselves in here like children sent to pick up their toys. Just ain’t gonna happen.” “You have a low opinion of humanity,” she’d say, and ignoring her I’d say, “And it’s not like we’re asking much. The hands take care of themselves, the feet more or less take care of themselves. The nostrils require a little attention from time to time, as does the sphincter — that’s about it. A little oral upkeep ain’t a lot to ask in exchange for the good times. The bonobos spend their days picking themselves free of ticks and lice. They could be the bonobos.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’ve gone off the rails again. Just listen to me for one second, will you? Barry Hallow’s methods are proven, and if you just follow the twelve steps he lays out, then he guarantees… I have it written down here somewhere. ‘Take the time. The teeth will shine. And the patient will sign on the dotted line.’ ” “Swell little poesy,” I said. “That clown’s not even a dentist.” “I would like permission to put some of his methods into practice,” she said. “Will it require any more work from any of us?” “It’s likely to require a little more work from some of us, yes.” “Are any of them me?” “It’s likely,” she said. “No chance,” I said.

I kept a deliberately low profile online. No website, no Facebook page. But I’d Google myself, and what came up every time were the same three reviews: the one I wrote, the one I nagged Connie into writing, and the one Anonymous wrote. Don’t think I didn’t know who Anonymous was. I’d given the guy every opportunity to pay me. Finally I engaged a collection agency. I don’t like collection agents any more than you do. Their strategy is to treat you overtly and in more subtle ways like a fucking loser until you’re so demoralized by their condescension and exhausted by their hectoring that you strike a bargain so that in a couple of years you won’t be declined at Macy’s again. Have you ever met a collection agent in a social setting? Of course not. No one has. They all turn into call-center managers or insurance adjusters. So yeah, I get it. But this guy was in to me for eight grand. I did the work. I made it possible — listen: I made it possible for this jerk to resume eating. I was owed cost at the very least. So what does he do? He gets on a payment schedule of twenty bucks a month and then promptly broadcasts his resentment that someone demanded he act honorably by posting a review calling my work shoddy and overpriced. And on top of that, he says I have cave dwellers! I don’t have cave dwellers. I make it a point to inspect my nostrils in the mirror before I go and hover over a patient. It’s common courtesy. But now the world thinks I have cave dwellers. If somebody’s doing a little research on the Internet for a new dentist, are they likely to choose the guy who might gouge them for lousy work while showering them with his cave dwellers? No. But there is no countering, no appeal, no entity to whom I can plead my case to have the post removed. So I’d Google myself every month or so, and when the review from Anonymous came up, as it did without fail every time, I’d curse out loud and feel the victim of an injustice, and Mrs. Convoy would say, “Stop Googling yourself.”

She’d say, “What do you have against other people?” And I’d say, I’d be sitting at the front desk, in one of the swivel chairs at the front desk, doing paperwork or something, and I’d look up from the paperwork, and I’d say, “What do I have against other people? I have nothing against other people.” And she’d say, “You alienate yourself from society.” And I’d say, I’d turn physically in the chair to look at her, and I’d say, “Who alienates himself from society?” “You don’t have a website,” she’d say. “And you refuse to create a Facebook page. You have no online presence. Barry Hallow says—” “And for this I’m being accused of alienating myself from society? Because I don’t have a Facebook page?” “All I’m trying to say is that Barry Hallow encourages everyone to have an online presence. An online presence guarantees more business. It’s proven. That’s all I’m trying to say.” “No, that’s not all you’re trying to say, Betsy,” I’d say. “That’s not at all all you’re trying to say. If it was, you wouldn’t have accused me of alienating myself from society.” “You have misunderstood my intentions,” she’d say. “I think you have willfully misunderstood me.” “I don’t have anything against other people, Betsy. Do I understand other people? No. Most people I don’t understand. What they do mystifies me. They’re out there right now, playing in the fields, boating, whatever. Good for them. You know what, Betsy? I’d love to boat with them. Yeah, let’s boat! Let’s eat shrimp together!” “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she’d say, “how did we start talking about eating shrimp? I’ll never forgive myself for bringing this up.” “No, don’t walk away, Betsy, let’s hash this out. Do you think I can just willy-nilly without a care in the world go out there and go boating?” “Who said anything about going boating?” she’d say. “Think I can just toss everything aside and go tanning and rock climbing and pick apples and shop for rugs and order salad and put my change in the same place night after night and wash the sheets and listen to U2 and drink Chablis?” “What on earth are you talking about?” she’d say. “I was only trying to convince you to build a website and get on Facebook to improve our billings.” “I have no idea why I can’t do those things,” I’d say, “but I can’t. I want to do them. Those ordinary night-and-weekend things. Holiday things. Vacation things.” “Please stop stepping on my heels,” she’d say. “You know as well as anyone just how small this office is.” “Don’t you know,” I’d say, “how much I’d love to go to a bar and watch a game? Don’t you know how much I’d love a whole bunch of buds, a whole bunch of dude buds hollering ‘yo’ at me when I come through the door, ‘yo’ and ‘mofo’ and ‘beer me’ and ‘hey bro’ and all that, all my best dude buds on barstools drinking beer, watching the game with me?” “I am going inside to tend to a patient now,” she’d say. “I’m afraid we will have to continue this conversation another time.” “I would really like that, Betsy, to cheer and jeer and hoot and root alongside a band of brothers. I would love that. But do you have any idea how much attention you have to pay to a Red Sox game? Even a regular-season Red Sox game?” “I have decided that I am going to stand here and listen to you until you are quite finished,” she’d say, “because I feel I have touched a nerve.” “But just because I choose not to have dude buds, don’t think I don’t worry about what I’m missing out on. Don’t think I’m not haunted knowing that I might be missing out on things that I’d much prefer not to be missing out on. I am haunted, Betsy. You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society. That doesn’t mean I have anything against other people. Envy them? Of course. Marvel at them? Constantly. Secretly study them? Every day. I just don’t get any closer to understanding them. And liking something you don’t understand, estranged from it without reason, longing to commune with it — who’d ask for it? I ask you, Betsy — who would ask for it?” “Are you quite finished now?” she’d ask. “This is turning out to be one of the longest ordeals of my life.” “But do you want to know what I don’t understand even more than I don’t understand the boating and the tanning? Reading about the boating and the tanning online! I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I’m not doing the thing they’re doing reading about them doing it? Streaming all the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I’ve never in my life felt more disconnected. It’s like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks, man, I can’t do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.” “I take back my suggestion that you have something against other people,” she’d say, “and I’ll never suggest a website or a Facebook page ever again.”

I was a dentist, not a website. I was a muddle, not a brand. I was a man, not a profile. They wanted to contain my life with a summary of its purchases and preferences, prescription medications, and predictable behaviors. That was not a man. That was an animal in a cage.

She’d say, “When was the last time you attended church?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Never is not an option. Everyone has been to church at least once. Try being honest.” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. No one worships a little blue leprechaun. First of all, leprechauns are not blue. Second of all, you know as well as anyone that leprechauns did not make heaven and earth. I see no reason to believe in leprechauns and every reason to believe in God. I see God in the sky and I see God on the street. Can you really sit there and suggest that you do not feel God at work in the world?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “One cannot feel the work of the Big Bang. Why must you always bring up the Big Bang when we’re trying to have a discussion about God?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “But you can’t be good on account of the Big Bang. You can only be good on account of God. Don’t you want to be good?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Metaphysical blackmail my patootie. I want you to answer me. Do you think you’re good?” I’d say yes, I thought I was good. And then she’d say, she’d think about it for a minute, and she’d say, her voice would drop and she’d put her hand on my arm, and she’d say, “But are you well?” she’d say. “Are you well?”

Mrs. Convoy and I joined Connie at the computer station. Sure enough, up on-screen was a website for an O’Rourke Dental. So there are two O’Rourke Dentals, I thought at the time, and poor Mrs. Convoy is confused and will be disappointed. Then Connie clicked on the “About” page. There we were, the four of us: Abby Bower, dental assistant; Betsy Convoy, head hygienist; Connie Plotz, office manager; and me, Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. It wasn’t a second O’Rourke Dental. It was our O’Rourke Dental, my O’Rourke Dental.

“Who did this?” I demanded.

“Not me,” said Connie.

“Not me,” said Betsy.

“Abby?” said Connie.

Abby quickly shook her head.

“Well somebody had to do it,” I said.

They looked at me.

“It certainly wasn’t me,” I said.

“You must have,” said Mrs. Convoy. “Look, there we are.”

We looked back at the screen. There we were.

The picture of Mrs. Convoy on the “About” page of the O’Rourke Dental website was originally a senior-year portrait taken from her 1969 high school yearbook, a black-and-white headshot she found flattering insofar as she did not object to it and one that made her seem, despite a postwar bouffant painfully out-of-date by 1969, young and almost comely. It held absolutely nothing in common with the buzz-cut battle-ax to my immediate right. Abby’s picture was a professional headshot, glossy and airbrushed. Was Abby some kind of actor? How should I know, she never discussed anything with me. The picture made her look glamorous and dramatic — again, nothing at all like her real-life counterpart. Connie had been denied a picture, which upset her unreasonably. She took it as an indication of the disposability of office managers. I said nothing about the fact that no one had ever called her an office manager before. The picture of me was surveillance grade, taken just as I was descending a flight of stairs — specifically, those leading down to the subway stop at Eighty-Sixth and Lex. I looked like a terrorist wanted by the FBI.

“Who did this?” I repeated.

My three employees looked at me blankly.

“This is unacceptable,” I said.

“I think it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Convoy.

“I want it taken down.”

“What? Why? This is exactly what we’ve needed,” she said. “Whoever did this did a wonderful job.”

“Whoever did this,” I said, “did it without my permission and for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom. Who would do such a thing? It’s disturbing. We should all be very disturbed.”

“You must have done it yourself and you just don’t remember. Or maybe you won it at a silent auction. Oh, they must have pulled your business card out of a fishbowl!”

“Not very likely, Betsy. Find out who did this,” I said to Connie.

“How?” she asked.

I had no idea how.

“Can’t you call someone?”

“Who would I call?”

“This is outrageous,” I said.

There was only a name at the bottom of our home page: Seir Design. A Google search for Seir Design yielded a spare website with a brief description of services and an email address: info@seirdesign.com. I emailed them immediately.

“Dear Seir Design,” I wrote.

My name is Paul C. O’Rourke. I own and operate O’Rourke Dental at 969 Park Avenue in Manhattan. I’m writing to ask you to please remove (or take down, or whatever it is you do) a website that you created for my practice without my permission.

Do you ordinarily go around making websites for people who haven’t asked for them? Or did someone represent himself to you as Paul C. O’Rourke? If so, I would like to know who this impostor is. I am the real Paul C. O’Rourke, and I’m telling you that I do not want a website. I hope you can imagine how disturbing it is to find that your dental practice suddenly has a website.

I look forward to your prompt reply.

I felt violated, and helpless, and repeatedly checked my email throughout the day, but I did not receive an answer.

Every year I renewed the baseball package offered by DIRECTV and recorded every Red Sox game using an old-fashioned VCR. I had every game the Sox had played since 1984, with the exception of those games lost to power failure. I was on my seventh VCR; out of fear of their discontinuance, I had seven more stacked in a closet. I ate the same meal (a plate of chicken and rice) before every game and did not make plans on game night. I never watched the sixth inning.

“Why the sixth inning?” Connie once asked me.

“It’s just a superstition.”

“But why not the fifth inning, or the seventh?”

“Why not the fourth,” I said, “or the eighth?”

“Why be superstitious at all, is what I’m asking.”

“Because it’s bad luck not to be superstitious,” I said.

If the Red Sox fell nine games or more below the New York Yankees at any time during regular-season play, I took the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, checked into the Howard Johnson hotel in North Bergen, and watched that night’s game outside city limits, in an effort to change my team’s fortunes.

“If you hate the Yankees so much,” Connie asked me, “why did you move to New York?”

“To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.”

Though everything had changed for me since 2004, I still watched the Red Sox whenever they played. I’d been watching the Red Sox for so long that not to watch them was to stand in the middle of my living room and wonder what to do with myself. Oh, there was lots to do. There was more to do at that moment than there had been at any other moment in the history of the world. And there was no city with more to offer than New York City. I could grab a slice. I could eat sushi. I could order a sheep’s-milk cheese at a wine bar and drink Pinot until bohemianism and Billie Holiday worship saturated my soul and I was drunk, drunk, drunk. I could go down to the Brooklyn Inn and have a stout. There were half a dozen bars along the way where I could stop for a drink before reaching the Brooklyn Inn. There were bodegas and Korean grocers where I could shop for fresh organic fruits and vegetables. I could sit at the bar of the new Italian joint with a plate of meatballs and a bottle of wine. Cask beer was a new craze. I could have a pint of cask beer. Or do something totally unexpected, like return to the city, to Thirty-Fourth Street, and buy a ticket to the viewing deck of the Empire State Building — no, the Empire State Building was closed. Many things were closed or starting to close by that time of night: museums, art galleries, bookstores. You had to try not to let it limit you. Think of all the things still available. I could have a Starbucks. Or a bagel. Or a falafel sandwich. Once again it occurred to me that so many of the things I could do in New York involved eating and drinking. Had we been placed here on earth to do nothing more than eat and drink? Was I simply supposed to come home from work and eat and drink my way through the night, piling falafel and hot dog onto chicken curry and washing it all down with copious amounts of beer and endless nightcaps of whiskey, before passing out halfway to the bathroom in my Pride Freedom Mobility Chair? It seemed yes. But no. One had to remember all the many other things the city made available to someone looking to occupy his time and bring significance to his night. Like what? Like see a movie, for one. New York City gets all the best movies. Even better, attend a Broadway play. You could only do that in New York. But it was a Friday night in New York City. There were how many other people wondering what to do with themselves on this Friday night, not to mention all the tourists in town to do in New York what they could only do here. The best shows would already be sold out. And as to getting there, you have to brace yourself weeks in advance to endure the tourists tearing their way through Times Square in anticipation of a show. Then you get there, to your theater, and there are crowds outside the marquee, the interminable first act, and the intermission, when all the lights come up and everyone, standing and stretching and sharing their thoughts about what they’ve just seen, wonders why you are alone with yourself on a Friday night. I was not going to spend my Friday night being gawked at. My Thursday nights never caused me any troubles. It was always my Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights that caused me troubles. On those nights, I was reduced to eating and drinking. The city had almost nothing else to offer, and if this great city had almost nothing else to offer, imagine what it was like in lesser cities, or the suburbs, or the small rural towns where so many people are clerks and farmers, and you will understand, finally, why this country has become a nation of fat alcoholics and the nurses and therapists who tend to them. We amble down our streets, we list. Skin folds turn into body parts not yet named. We are consuming ourselves alive as our physical grotesqueries grow in direct proportion to our federal deficits and discount gun shops. Throughout the land there is nothing to do but eat and drink and shoot, and if you’re restricted by city ordinance to eating and drinking, you might as well turn on the game. So that’s what I did. That’s what I always did: takeout and the game — which wasn’t, after all, such a bad fate. It temporarily took my mind off the website that had been created against my will and periodically made me forget about my helplessness before the webmasters at Seir Design. We were playing the Tampa Bay Rays that night, and I tried my best to concentrate. The real trick was to ignore all of the other possibilities forfeited by falling back on the game, the possibilities that came to mind only now, with the game on and the takeout ordered, the many possibilities involving people, enterprise, and a definite sense of happening. These included the various professional functions I was invited to attend nearly every night of the week. But did I really want to participate in a professional function on a Friday night? The last people I wanted to hang out with were a bunch of dweeby dentists, I always thought the day I received an invitation to participate in a professional function, dismissing it out of hand as a complete waste of time until the night of the function came around and I found myself at home again, alone, the takeout ordered and nothing to do but watch the game. Then I would consider the professional function in a different light. Unlike me, those dweeby dentists had something to do on a Friday night involving more than watching a regular-season baseball game. Unlike me, those dentists might find themselves in an engaging conversation or making a connection with an unlikely someone or even just learning some new technique that improved the health of a patient. That alone would have made the night meaningful. It revealed a closed mind, a crabbed disposition toward the possibilities when, two weeks earlier or even just a week earlier, I received the invitation to the professional function and dismissed it out of hand because there was a game on that night. I never did anything on game night, even though I recorded the games and could always watch them later, because those nights were sacrosanct, and if I gave up the one sacrosanct thing, where would I be and what would I have? Any true devotion is a condition to be suffered. If my devotion to the Red Sox had waned after their extraordinary comeback during the American League Championship of 2004, their truly historic comeback after being down three games to none, and against the Yankees of all teams — probably objectively the most crass and reviled team in the history of sports, with that obnoxious logo so well known, the interlocking N and Y you can find on swag in every city of the world, a symbol so offensive that only the Nazi swastika compares with it, and yet still regarded by so many as benign, something to admire, even worship, revealing the true extent of the human capacity for mass delusion — if my devotion to the Red Sox had waned since they beat the Yankees and swept the Cardinals to win the World Series and end an eighty-six-year title drought, my thirty years of devotion to them would have been a fair-weather devotion if it did not require sacrifice of me, true sacrifice, sacrifice indistinguishable from suffering. So of course I passed on the professional function and sat down in my leather recliner with my beer and my chicken curry to watch us play the Rays. It was only a regular-season game, and against the Rays, of all teams, the middling, third-place Rays. The game’s outcome, while potentially a factor late in the season, if a wild-card situation should develop, was completely inconsequential that night. It was only another regular-season baseball game, one of thousands watched over the course of a lifetime, a game of extraordinarily low stakes and deserving of no genuine emotional investment. Ask any non — sports fan how much yet another regular-season baseball game means to them and they will tell you: nothing. Less than nothing. I only had to consider the multitude of non — sports fans and their rich evening dockets to feel paralyzed by the free world on a Friday night, its alternatives and variations whispering their seductions, while the innings crawled by without urgency or consequence. But then something would happen on the field, it could be as simple as a double play, or the slow development of a no-hitter, and all the old excitement would rush back, all the unbidden excess of mystery and thrill that came at me as a boy of six or seven when I would watch my father watching the game, his eyes on the TV while the Bakelite radio provided the color. All that comfort, all that cushion, and yet he would perch on the edge of his easy chair as if monitoring a tough landing from the space deck. He called me Paulie. “Paulie, run and get me a beer from the fridge.” “Paulie, stay awake, now, it’s the sixth inning, Paulie, you gotta watch the game and tell me what happens.” “We lost, Paulie, it’s another loss, goddamn it, that’s how it is with them losing fucks, they lose on you, the fuckers.” We always began the games with me in his lap, but before the first inning was over, he would no longer be aware of me. In contrast, I was carefully attuned to his every move, to the sounds of the springs inside his gold recliner shrieking with his every shift. Those springs were as tired and tortured as an old flogged horse, but they were just as dependable, singing the song of his unbearable tension, his unbearable despair. He kept track of the game on a scorecard laid upon one flat arm of the chair. Sweat dripped down a can of Narragansett into the carpet’s cheap weave. He might have been in the dugout himself, so physically did he involve himself in a game. Up, down, up, down, pacing, pacing, back and forth: biting a thumbnail in an unnatural twist of the hand; on his feet cursing, which overwhelmed me with alarm; down on his knees and peering up at the TV with me beside him. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I pantomimed his expressions. I calibrated my reactions to match his in mood and degree when anything of moment shook the stadium to its feet. His intensity blanketed me. What was the Boston Red Sox? What was the world? Every pitch was a matter of life and death, every swing a chance to dream. And what are we talking about? A regular-season baseball game. Nothing. Less than nothing. How I loved that frightening man. How he was everything awesome and good, until one day he sat down in the bathtub, closed the shower curtain, and shot himself in the head.

We were losing that night. We were in first place in the American League East, ahead of the Yankees by a game and a half, and losing to the middling Rays. It sucked, but it was only right. It gave us the chance to come back from behind, which was the only way I cared to win. But in the end we failed to come back. Nine to six we lost to the crap-ass Rays on the fifteenth of July 2011. I turned off the TV absolutely disgusted. I pressed STOP on the VCR, rewound the cassette, ejected it, labeled it, and filed it away with all the other tapes. Then I went to bed.

When I woke, it was a quarter to three in the morning. I couldn’t believe it. Almost four hours of continuous sleep. It was really only a little over three hours of continuous sleep, but I chose to think of it as four. That much continuous sleep hadn’t come my way in what, three or four weeks? and I lay in bed happy, almost rested. But then I had to decide: get up, or struggle to fall back asleep? Every three or four weeks I could struggle my way back to sleep for another hour or two, for a total of five or six hours. It was only ever a total of four or five, but that’s not how I chose to think of it, and on mornings like that, it was always, “Good morning, Abby. Good morning, Betsy. Good morning, Connie.” So I lay in bed struggling to fall back asleep, diverted from sleep by thinking, first, of how frustrating it was when we lost to a team like the crap-ass Rays, and then of how I alone had chosen to spend the previous night. I’d forfeited all other possibilities to another regular-season baseball game, and now, at quarter to three in the morning, it was too late for me and my onetime options. The night was now as dark as it could get, and from thinking of how dark the night was and of my forfeited options, I proceeded to think of how alike this one night might be to my last night on earth, when all options, and not just one night’s options, expired. Every night was a night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed opportunity to expand, explore, risk, hope, and live. These were my thoughts as I tried falling back asleep. Inside my head, where I lived, wars were breaking out, valleys flooding, forests catching fire, oceans breaching the land, and storms dragging it all to the bottom of the sea, with only a few days or weeks remaining before the entire world and everything sweet and surprising we’d done with it went dark against the vast backdrop of the universe. The chances of me falling back asleep were nil once again. I got out of bed. I checked my email. There was still no answer from Seir Design. I made some coffee and eggs. I sat in my kitchen eating and drinking again, eating and drinking to sustain myself another few hours, always sustaining myself by eating and drinking, or eating and drinking in order to distract myself from how ultimately pointless it was to sustain anything. I was, if not the only person awake in the city, the only person awake at that hour who’d fallen asleep at the hour I’d fallen asleep, and who was now unable to get back to sleep. Perhaps, by a series of miracles, the night had worked out for the other insomniacs, and now it was only me awake among them, alone at my kitchen table, hours from daybreak, absent of options, and wondering what to do with myself. I considered calling Connie, but that would have required me to look at my me-machine and discover that Connie had not called me, or even so much as texted, and then I would have had to wonder what she was doing when she was not sending me a text or trying to call. I would have had to conclude that at the moment she might have been calling or sending me a text, not only was she doing neither, in all likelihood she wasn’t even thinking about me. It hardly mattered that she was probably just sleeping. And anyway, if I called her, what would I say? There was nothing more to say. Everything that could be said had been said. Calling Connie wasn’t an option. I called her anyway, but she didn’t pick up. It was early. She was probably still sleeping. I hung up. Then I took down the game tape from the night before, popped it into the VCR, and watched the game again until the light of dawn, forwarding through all the bullshit and wondering all over again how we could lose so badly to the crap-ass Rays.

Three

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I sat down next to Connie at the front desk. I almost never sat down next to Connie when she wasn’t just starting to rub lotion into her hands. I watched her rub her hands together. Her hands were like lubed animals doing a mating dance. And she was hardly alone: people everywhere kept bottles of lotion in and around their desks, people everywhere that morning were just starting to rub lotion into their hands. I missed the point. I hated missing the point, but I did, I missed it completely. If I could just become a lotioner, I thought, how many other small, pleasurable gestures made throughout the day might click into place for me, and all that exile, all that alienation and scorn, simply vanish? But I couldn’t do it. I despised the wet sensation that refused to subside even after all the lotion had been rubbed in and could be rubbed in no farther. I hit that terminal point and wanted nothing more to do with something either salutary or vain but never pleasant. I thought it was heinous. That little hardened dollop of lotion right at the lip of the squirter, that was really so heinous. But it was part of the point, the whole point. Why was I always on the outside looking in, always alien to the in? As I say, Connie was not alone. In medical offices, law firms, and advertising agencies, in industrial parks, shipping facilities, and state capitols, in ranger stations and even in military barracks, people were moisturizing. They were in possession of the secret, I was sure of it. They slept soundly. They played softball. They took walks, sharing with one another in the soft fall of night the events of the day while the dog trotted alongside them. It was terrifying. Their leisure was a terror to me. So at ease it was, so natural. And yet you had to wonder: whence this mania, this scampering frenzy to lotion yourself throughout the workday? Connie’s hands were dancing and copulating, working the wet lotion down to an evenly distributed film across the surface of her hands. It was really almost a kind of grotesquerie that should have been done only in private. And unnecessary. Connie had good hands. Old-people hands are the only hands that seem to the naked eye in urgent need of a new coat of moisturizer. They are liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, tendony, and dying. I will be sitting across the patient from Abby, who is just waiting to pass off an instrument, and I will point at the patient’s hands, the hands of an old person distracted by trying to keep her mouth open under the light, and I will say, pointing at the old poxed and spotted hands, “Is that what Connie is trying to forestall?” Abby being Abby, she’d have no opinion on the matter. Oh, she had plenty of opinions, I’m sure, but none she cared to express through her pink paper mask. Though I think she would have happily expressed them had I not been present. At some point every day, I’m sure that Abby wanted me to be the victim of a disabling stroke. Then she would be free to unleash at last. My rolling eye, my sunken cheek, my mouth unable to call back spit, would only encourage her, and from the floor I would hear for the first time every last unedited truth. Still tending to the woman in the chair, I asked her, “Do you moisturize, Abby?” She looked at me like, Do I moisturize? “It’s very important to lubricate your hands, apparently,” I said. “And other parts, too.” And other parts, too! My mouth was constantly pouring out the stupidest shit! The stupidest, always-innocent, all-too-easily-misinterpreted shit! She would never say it, but of course that’s what she was thinking, what the two of us were thinking, probably also what the old broad in the chair was thinking.

At some point in Connie’s moisturizing, her hands downshifted. All that manic whipping around turned into something gentler, more deliberate. She had reached that point when the lotion, absorbed into the skin, ceased being a sloppy slick and now retarded as much as lubricated motion. She was no longer just applying the lotion. She was working it in with more attentive strokes, concentrating on one finger at a time and on the little blond webbing between fingers. She conjoined her hands as if in sensuous prayer and then unconjoined them to make a pass across the spur of a thumb, all of this as patiently as a player working oil into a new ball glove. She concluded (her attention half turned now to something new) with a series of ritualized, perfectly silent hand embraces, one hand clasping the other, the other hand clasping the first, the first on top again, and so on, conveying to anyone watching an indescribable sense of satisfaction at another satisfying job complete. I tell you without exaggeration that I was brought to tears. I admit, it could not have been just anyone. I would not have been brought to tears watching Big Jim the Ranger hydrate his hands. It was Connie who brought me to tears and always made me sorry that I did not understand in a more intuitive and personal way the multitude of minor banes people everywhere around me were trying to soothe in what were so easy to dismiss as vain and empty rituals of comfort.

“You’re doing it again,” she said, without looking over.

“What?”

“Staring at me. Objectifying me.”

“I’m not objectifying you.”

“You’re always objectifying me,” she said. “You idealize me, and then you’re disappointed when it turns out I’m not perfect. You blame me for not being godlike. It’s tiresome.”

“Trust me,” I said. “If somebody knows you’re not perfect, it’s me.”

“Then why do you do it? Why do you scrutinize me? Aren’t you sick of it by now? Especially when you’ve made it painfully clear just how far I fall short?”

“I used to think you were perfect, but those days are long past.”

“So please, stop looking.”

“I wish I had let you teach me about lotion,” I said.

“Teach you about lotion?”

“Yeah, the reasons for it.”

“The reasons for lotion are self-evident,” she said. “You put it on, you feel better.”

“I never feel better. I always feel icky.”

“Not after you rub it in. After you rub it in, you feel good. Your hands feel good. They feel moisturized.”

“But what does that matter when they’re just going to become all liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, and tendony?”

“Because it’s what you do with them in the meantime,” she said, turning at last and slapping my forehead with her palm. She turned back and, peering up at God, made a vigorous full-armed gesture of supplication that might have been comedic if it didn’t go on so long. “Now take a squirt and rub it in and see if your hands don’t feel better.”

“I don’t think I will,” I said.

“No,” she said, “because if you did that, you might like it. And heaven forbid you should like something, knowing what’s coming, knowing they just turn liver spotted and die. Better never do it at all than do it, enjoy it, and lose it in the end.”

I stood up and walked away. Then I came back.

“You didn’t return my call,” I said.

“You have to stop calling, Paul.”

“It’s the time of night. I’m not in my right mind.”

“The time of night is half the problem.”

“I try just to text.”

“I’ve never once received a single text from you.”

“Texting is for children, I hate texting, it hurts my fingers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.”

“A call or a text, Paul. At that hour, they’re pretty much signaling the same thing.”

“I wasn’t calling to get back together,” I said. “We said we could be friends. Friends call friends.”

“We can’t get back together,” she said. “We will never get back together.”

“And that wasn’t why I was calling.”

“Why, then?”

“Night.”

She looked over at me for the second time.

“It’s not my problem anymore,” she said.

The phrase “pussy whipped” gets the job done, I guess. It evokes. You picture a milquetoast, a little pansy boy. He takes his balls off, like a pair of dentures, and places them on the nightstand before snuggling up to Queen Nefertiti to watch Sleepless in Seattle. If that’s your thing, God bless. Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever, and the potential for incarceration. I don’t get pussy whipped. I get cunt gripped. I get cunt gripped and just hope to get out alive. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as the saying goes — so that you can look forward to that one irrecuperable battering ram of a ballbreaker that will finally do you in.

To be cunt gripped means to show up at the door unannounced. It means calling at all hours. It means saying “I love you” far too soon, on or around the second date, and saying it all too frequently thereafter. When they caution that I might be moving too fast, I double down and send them flowers and fruit. To be cunt gripped is to believe that I have found everything heretofore lacking in my life. They fill an enormous void, the women I fall in love with, and I will revert to nothing — to less than nothing, now that I know consummation — unless they remain filling it forever. Fear of losing them provokes me to act desperate in a whole host of ways that inevitably sends them scrambling for the door. I’ve only been properly cunt gripped four times, not counting a dozen or so partial or short-lived cunt grippings: once when I was five, once when I was twelve, a third time at nineteen, and finally with Connie, who came to work for me when I was thirty-six and she was twenty-seven. Each time — with the possible exception of that first time, when I was still so new to the world that it’s hard to remember much beyond her name (Alison), our hand-holding, and a long cry under trash-strewn bleachers — I have never been able, once cunt gripped, to hold on to my essential self. I mean by that whatever makes me me: a success at school, a dedication to the Red Sox, a determined belief in the nonexistence of God. It all vanishes, leaving… what? Was there a person there? All I could ever find was untethered want. The girl, or woman — first Alison, then Heather Belisle, then Sam Santacroce, and finally Connie — consumed me to the extent that I could say of myself only that I was Paul-who-loves-Alison or Paul-who-loves-Connie. It was flattering to them at first, of course, that someone should take such a dire interest, but the flattery was soon smothered under a shit-storm of need, jealousy, irrepressible and indiscriminate praise, and an obsession that scared parents and friends. Everything I held in high regard before falling in love dropped away, and I appeared to myself, and no doubt to the objects of my desire, as a tiresome refrain offering them nothing to love in return. Needless to say, it never lasted long. Of Alison I’ve already recounted everything I remember. I fell in love with Heather not long after my father died, and as I look back on it now, that love affair was as much about Roy Belisle, Heather’s dad, who coached our coed baseball team and drove a pickup truck and had really cool arm veins, as it was about the wet new thrill of Heather’s tongue. (I couldn’t picture Mr. Belisle in a dry bathtub with his clothes on, staring for hours at the browning grout, and then rushing me off to the mall to buy ten pairs of running shoes, which he’d hide from Mrs. Belisle by digging a large hole in the back of the apartment complex.) I spent a long Presidents’ Day weekend making out with Heather in her garage and, during meals, admiring Mr. Belisle’s arm veins while watching him turn the dials of his police scanner. It all came to a swift end when school resumed on Tuesday and Heather dropped me for a boy with a bad haircut. I was stunned, hurt, and embarrassed, in withdrawal from Heather’s tongue — the first tongue I’d tasted and the reason, at least in part, that I became a dentist, awakened to the mouth and all its marvels — and angry that first my dad and now Mr. Belisle had been taken from me by a fickle and irreconcilable force. I did what anyone would do: I walked twelve miles to the mall, got into the backseat of an unlocked car, drove with my unsuspecting chaperone another dozen or so miles, waited in the garage a long time before entering his house, found a closet, masturbated, fell asleep, and in the morning came full upon all the family at breakfast.

The cunt gripping I underwent at the hands of Samantha Santacroce was a much more involved ordeal, ending with my transfer out of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, with certain restrictions on my freedom to reenter campus grounds. Sam and I spent eleven weeks together, during which we both understood our souls to have awakened at last and our hearts to have been filled for the first time. We were instantly inseparable, arranging our walking patterns to and from class to minimize the time we had to spend apart. We ate together, studied together, and slept together, whispering late into the night so as not to disturb her roommates. We shared the same coffee cup, the same straw, the same toothbrush. We fed each other watermelon from our mouths. We watched movies and football games under the same blanket and sat together doing our homework in the student union, looking up at regular intervals to moon at each other with shameless abandon. Sammy was always sucking on a lollipop. I loved nothing more than to hear that sugary globe knock against her sturdy white teeth while the stick grew moist and pulpy at her lips, until at last she took the nub of candy between her molars and cracked it to smithereens. She swished the clattering shards around, melting them down to oblivion. When she was finished, and the stick had been deposited with others inside an empty bottle of Diet Coke (which also contained wrappers and wads of gum), she ran her tongue over her upper lip in search of some minuscule overlooked crystal and, if she found one, drew it in and pinned it between the cairn of her canines. Then she sucked her lips clean of their sugary coats — first the upper lip, plump and double peaked, followed by the lower one, seated upon a more perfect plumb line. Of the character and true nature of Samantha Santacroce, I knew essentially nothing, but that I wanted to live forever on the edge of her glossy red lower lip, that crimson promontory, warmed in the winter by her syrupy breath and bathed with the same summer heat that brought out her freckles, I had no doubt.

What I did know about Samantha Santacroce, because she impressed it upon me at every turn, was the fierce and unconditional love she felt for her parents. This stood in stark contrast to my impulse to hide my parents away in a closet of shame. Sammy talked about hers as if they were the people with whom she willingly planned to spend the rest of eternity, college being less a time of rebellion and self-discovery than a temporary parting in a lifelong affair. I was almost jealous of them. Bob Santacroce was a big man with fair hair who had done well in the furniture business and now spent many of his mornings on the back nine. Barbara had raised Sam (and her little brother, Nick) and now remained busy with tennis and charities. I heard so much about them before we met that they grew incomparable within a few short days and mythical within the week, so that by the time Sam and I showed up at their house for Thanksgiving, when I planned to announce my intentions of marrying their daughter (“Wait, wait,” Sam had said, “you plan to do what?”), I was intimidated, nervous, and as in love with them as I was with Sam herself. The Santacroces were a picture-perfect family of Catholics whose tidy garage, sturdy oak trees, and family portraits through the ages would absolve all the sins and correct all the shortcomings of my childhood. Like my infatuation with Heather Belisle, my infatuation with Sam Santacroce had this extraneous element that had nothing to do with our shared love of dogs and Led Zeppelin, her blond pageboy, or the taste of her red mouth. There were no poorly attended funerals in the Santacroce family, no scrounging for quarters under the car seats, no runs to the recycling center for macaroni money, no state-appointed psychologists, no suicides. I loved Sammy and wanted to marry her, but I also loved Mr. and Mrs. Santacroce and wanted to be adopted by them and live under the spell of their blessed good fortune forever and ever. I would affirm God and convert to Catholicism and condemn abortion and drink martinis and glory the dollar and assist the poor and crawl upon the face of the earth with righteousness and do everything that made the Santacroces so self-evidently not the O’Rourkes.

But Sam had a change of heart. We were running hand in hand at breakneck speed toward the cliff of endless love, but she stopped short just as I upshifted, so that I ran straight off without her and hung there for a second like in a cartoon, trying to find the ground beneath me, but there was no ground, and I plummeted. I failed to see it coming, or willed myself not to see it, despite half noticing that my heavy and fatal proclamations of love were no longer being returned with the same frequency and then not at all. I tried to understand what had happened, what I’d done. It appeared that what I’d done was nothing more than continue to do what Sam and I had been doing together for eleven straight weeks, which was making of the other our everything. Abruptly she stopped while I went on, and on, and my going on made her more certain that her stopping had been the right thing to do. I no longer had a self of my own, except the one full of love for her, and as everyone knows, that’s a self that invites abuse quicker than it does affection.

I guess I began to menace her. All I did, for the most part, was sit on the outdoor stairs leading to her apartment and cry, and when at last she let me in, try to get a grip on myself so that I could talk over the tears that, now in her presence, were less hysterical but still ongoing. Once or twice they found me inside the apartment, her and her roommates, when they returned home. I was waiting in Sam’s room, on the bed, facedown, crying into her unwashed pillow, no harm to anyone. But they didn’t like finding me there. The first time was scary and weird, and I surrendered my key and promised not to do it again. But of course I had a spare and did do it again, addicted as I was to Sam’s bedsheets and sick to death at the idea of her out in the world without me. I was unable simply to sneak in and breathe in the sheets and touch her things and smell her lotions and look through her Santacroce photo albums and then leave, because I couldn’t leave. Her room was the only place I cared to be, with or without her. And because she didn’t want to be with me, I was in her room without her, and when she found me there a second time, she called campus police. My mother had to come get me. She was afraid for me, they were all afraid for me, and they should have been, because I was nothing, I was Paul-who-loves-Sam, now Paul-who-loves-Sam-without-Sam, and so less than nothing. I had seen God, but God was gone.

A few years later, when I was more or less over her and had completed two semesters of premed at a different branch of UMaine, Sam found me and told me that she looked back on our time together with regret. She was sorry she’d lost me because no boy before or after had loved her as I once had. At last she knew the importance of that and wanted a second chance. She asked if I still loved her and I said I did. Six months later we were living together — not with her parents’ blessing, but I didn’t care and neither did Sam. I wasn’t cunt gripped this time, merely in love. More than anything, I was amazed: amazed that I had Sam Santacroce back and that she was more in love with me than before. What a reversal!

It lasted for about a year, during which time we made a few trips to the Santacroces’ and I tried my best to see them as I once had. But I had ruined my chances with them, and they didn’t know forgiveness. They didn’t approve of me, and now that I was love-sober, not to approve of me was not to approve of the world. And in fact they didn’t approve of the world: they judged and condemned the world. They made donations and participated in food drives, but they despised the poor. They blamed homosexuals for the spoliation of America, and probably African Americans and working women, too. Old Santacroce, Sam’s grandfather, held a bewildering grudge against FDR, widely considered one of America’s greatest presidents and dead by then over fifty years. When Bill Clinton came on the TV, Sam’s mother would have to leave the room. I understood so little of it, and slowly my old self reasserted itself. I found it impossible to believe that I had once considered converting to Catholicism for these troglodytes, and in retaliation I made poor Sam sit through long diatribes on the hypocrisy of Catholics and the stupidity of Christianity in general. And then one night I confessed my atheism at the Santacroce dinner table, and the Santacroces all turned to me in horror. Sam ran after her mother, who, from the other room, called me Satan himself and forbade me from ever entering the house again. That was fine by me. Sam and I didn’t last much longer. Her parents were asking her to choose between me and them, and she was not going to give up the two people who had nurtured and loved her more than anyone in the world. I was sad to lose Sam, whom I was all wrong for and who was all wrong for me, but I was pleased to know that after the cunt gripping eased, I returned to my former self: that there was, however nebulous and prone to disappear, a self to return to.

Connie came to work at O’Rourke Dental as a temp. On the first day, I could feel my self going. At the end of the second day, I suggested she leave the temp agency and come to work for me full-time. She would be paid a great salary, receive full health benefits, and enjoy the best dental care at no cost. I proposed paying her much more than your average receptionist would ordinarily be paid. Yes, I was fading fast. But something told me to call myself back, to remember my old self-respecting self, to move slowly this time and with great caution into the orbit of this beautiful temp, so that I would not repeat the embarrassing mistakes of the past. Awareness: that was new. And when Connie accepted my offer and came to work for O’Rourke Dental, I did my best to keep busy, because no small part of my real self was the dentist who tended to patients all day every day, longer on Thursdays, and who had a practice to grow and a staff to oversee and about sixty thousand in monthly billings to protect. It would not be wise, I thought, as I was falling in love with Connie, to compromise any of that with my predictable love shits. And so, though as cunt gripped as ever, I tried a different tack. I stayed silent. I feigned indifference. I acted cool, which is not to say cool cool, but contained, arriving in the morning with an aura of mystery and departing for the day with heartsick dignity. I pivoted cannily to my best self, implementing pizza Fridays, treating Mrs. Convoy with respect, and suppressing my complaints and dissatisfactions as if I were a Christian monk with endless recourse to prayer. I mean, it was a show, man. Love makes you noble. So what if it’s self-directed? So what if, eventually, as love fades, we revert, like the lottery winner and limb loser alike, back to our base selves?

I did not let on about my love for Connie for six agonizing months, until drinks on O’Rourke Dental put us alone at a dive bar one night, and lubricious confessions poured from us both, and after that we were a couple.

I must have looked so with it to her. Dentist. Professional. Owner of real estate. I didn’t let on that my self was gone now that I was with her, and she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t notice until my self reasserted itself. And that’s when things went all to hell.

After watching Connie lotion her hands, I went to work. An old woman with Parkinson’s came in that morning, assisted by her late-middle-aged son who supported her on his arm and eased her down into the chair. Her tremors were unrelenting. She had a hard time holding her mouth open. I used a prop, which made it impossible for her to swallow. Abby kept the evacuation going even as the old woman continued to try to swallow with stubborn regularity, an instinct of pale pink muscle at the back of her throat. She was like a condemned person, my Parkinson’s patient, facing death after a long stay in an unquiet prison. She was in that morning because she had lost a tooth to a piece of toast. Her son had been unable to find the tooth. He apologized profusely, as though he had failed his mother in some way. People bring in their broken teeth all the time as if they are still-warm fingers and toes, believing I might do some kind of quick graft. If you ever lose a tooth, just toss it. Or put it under your pillow. There’s nothing I can do with it. I explained that to him, which put his mind at ease. Then I had a good look inside his mother’s mouth — a mouth that had a year or two left on earth, straining in the agony of its tremors and its thwarted swallows — and what I found was a rare but immediately identifiable condition likely brought about by chemotherapy: osteonecrosis of the jaw. My condemned patient could now add jawbone death to the list alongside whatever cancer she’d had and the Parkinson’s she would die with. Her jawbone was so soft and rotted that her morning piece of toast had managed to push the lost tooth past her gum and into the bone, where it was presently lodged. I took a pair of tweezers and removed it without causing her any pain at all. “Here’s that tooth,” I said.

Connie appeared in the doorway with an iPad.

“Yes?”

“When you get a moment,” she said.

We had iPads by that point. The year before, we’d bought new desktops. And the year before that, the folks from Dentech came out and upgraded our entire system, so that we could do everything electronically better than we could do it electronically before. In almost every respect, purchasing something for the improvement of the office was a rational choice based on a cost-benefit analysis, but when new technology made itself known, it was a mortal terror not to seize it at the first opportunity.

“I just wanted to ask you,” she said as I stepped out into the hallway, “have you read your bio on here?”

“On what?”

“On this website of ours.”

I seized the iPad. “This is maddening,” I said. “They had all weekend to take this thing down. They haven’t even answered my email.”

“Did you read your bio?”

Again I wondered, Who could have done this? Had I been late with a patient? Curt with a temp? An idea struck me. “You know who this might be?”

“Who?”

“Anonymous.”

“Who’s Anonymous?”

I reminded her of the scumbag who had failed to pay for his bridgework and then left nasty reviews of me on Google.

“Wasn’t that, like, two years ago?” she said. “Would he really still be—”

“It’s unfair!” I said. “It really doesn’t take a lot to have a cave dweller.”

“Read your bio,” she said.

Dr. O’Rourke has been practicing dentistry for over ten years. A native of Maine, he is committed to the highest standard of treatment for his patients. His friendly, personable nature combined with his extensive background guarantees you a pleasant, relaxing, and stress-free visit.

I looked up at her. “Whoever did this has an intimate knowledge of me and this office,” I said.

“Have you gotten to the weird part?” she asked.

The bio ended with the weird part.

Come now therefore, 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.

“What the hell is this?” I said, searching her face. “Something from the Bible?”

“Sounds like it.”

“What’s this doing in my bio?”

She shrugged.

“Is there anything like this on your bio page?”

She shook her head.

“Betsy’s? Abby’s?”

“Only yours,” she said.

“I’m not a Christian,” I said. “I don’t want a quote from the Bible on my website. Who did this?”

She relieved me of the iPad. “Maybe you should talk to Betsy,” she said.

Mrs. Convoy came to and from work with a floppy-eared Ignatius — highlighted, of course — with her name, Elizabeth Anne Convoy, inlaid in faux-gold lettering on the green pleather cover. It had been in her possession nearly half a century, since the day of her First Communion. There was nothing that so perfectly embodied my ambivalence toward Mrs. Convoy. First, because she was an expert in goddamned everything, and her authority and its imperious tone were bestowed upon her by that archetype of all knowingness, the Bible. But later, in a casual moment, when she was out of sight, I’d catch a glimpse of that totem resting faithfully inside her open purse, and Mrs. Convoy, head ballbreaker, would reincarnate into Elizabeth Anne Convoy, a perfectly insignificant, irredeemably homely creature who, I could easily imagine, thought so little of herself that to find her name engraved on God’s book would move her to tears. Conjuring that awkward, insecure girl, I wanted to tell her that God loved her. I did not want Betsy Convoy, or anyone else for that matter, believing that down deep they were ugly, worthless, unwanted, inconsequential, and unlovable. If God served no other purpose, I thought, this alone justified Him. Thank God for God! I thought. What work He did, what love He extended, when mortal beings failed. The travails of lonely people, of the disfigured and the handicapped, need not seize the heart of the sympathetic observer with suicidal pity, because God loved them. Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.

“I already told you,” she said when I confronted her. “It wasn’t me. Do you think I would lie to you?”

“I don’t know what to think, Betsy. First I find somebody’s gone against my express wishes and made a website for my practice, and then I find a bunch of biblical gobbledygook on my bio page. And you’re somebody who knows the Bible.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, that doesn’t mean I know how to make a website.”

“I’m not suggesting you made it personally.”

“I did not make that website any way at all,” she said. “I am not responsible for it, and I did not put quotes from the Bible on it. And if I had, that’s certainly not the passage I would have chosen.”

“What passage is it?” I asked.

She looked again at the iPad. Whenever Mrs. Convoy read something to herself, the small contracted hairs around her pursed lips went wiggling up and down with the consumption of every word, as if she were a caterpillar working through a leaf.

“ ‘If thou makest of me a God,’ ” she said, reading aloud the last bit slowly, “ ‘and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed.’ I don’t think Jesus ever said anything like that,” she said.

“So where’s it from?”

“The Old Testament would be my guess,” she said. “It’s a very stern, Jewish thing to say.”

She handed the iPad back to me.

“Maybe you should talk to Connie,” she said.

I would be less annoyed to be portrayed as a Jew online than a Christian. Still annoyed, because I was not Jewish, but it would be better somehow. You could be a nonpracticing Jew, and while I was not a nonpracticing Jew, because I had not been born a Jew and converting to Judaism just to persist in nonpractice would have been pointless, I could not be a nonpracticing Christian in any respect. You either believed or did not believe in Christ the Savior and all His many miracles and prophesies. It was ironic, I thought, to talk about “practicing” Christians when, to be a Christian, you didn’t have to do much of anything at all, you just had to profess your faith, while Jewish people, even nonbelieving ones, did more in a single Seder than a full-bore Christian obedient in his pew might do all year. Whether you were born a Christian or a Jew seemed tantamount to the same thing from the perspective of the newborn, but growing up made all the difference in the world. A Christian could slough off his inherited Christianity and become an atheist or a Buddhist or a plain old vanilla nothing, but a Jewish person, for reasons beyond my understanding, would always be Jewish, e.g., an atheist Jew or a Jewish Buddhist. Some of the Jews I knew, like Connie, hated this primordial fact, but as a non-Jew, I had the luxury of envying the surrender to fate that it implied, the fixed identity and tribal affiliations — which is why I minded the slander of being Jewish online less than the outrageous and vile insult of being Christian.

I knew nothing about Judaism before Connie. Before Connie I didn’t even know if I could say the word “Jew.” It sounded very harsh to me, to my Gentile ears, maybe particularly inside my indisputably Gentile mouth. I was afraid that if someone Jewish heard me say it, they would hear a reinforcement of stereotypes, a renewal of all the old antagonisms and hate. It was a minor but significant legacy of the Holocaust that non-Jewish Americans born long after World War II with little knowledge of Judaism or the Jewish people had a fear of offending by saying the word “Jew.”

My interactions with Jewish people before Connie were limited to looking inside their mouths. A Jewish person’s mouth is identical in every way to a Christian’s. It was all one big mouth to me — one big open, straining, gleeking, unhappy, discomfited, slowly decaying mouth. It was all the same cavity, the same inflammation, the same root infection, the same nerve pain, the same complaint, the same failure, the same fate. Look, here’s what I knew, all I cared to know, and for that matter, all I thought I’d ever need to know, about the Jews: they’d given the world a son, a southpaw by the name of Sandy Koufax, who pitched three Cy Young seasons for the Dodgers and hated the Yankees like a true American hero.

Connie came from a family of Conservative Jews, and to my surprise I found I liked attending the High Holidays, participating in the atonement, and even sitting through the absurdly long services, because they weren’t played out for me. They were plenty played out for Connie, who was no longer an active Jew and felt pretty much as I did on the subject of religion, even if she could not yet bring herself to say, “I do not believe in God.” Not on account of a superstition, or some vestigial faith, but rather a quibble with definitive statements. She preferred to call herself a nonpracticing atheist. This, she thought, would not totally close out the religious impulses that a poem sometimes demanded.

She was an interesting contrast to Sam Santacroce, who thought that Catholicism was tops and that her family dwelled in a three-dimensional holiday card of matching sweaters and Titleist health. Although years had passed since I’d been disabused of Santacroce nuclear perfection, having discovered, beneath a Huxtable veneer, their cynicism, venality, and prejudice, I still regarded Sam’s open love for her family as a demonstration of remarkable poise. I wanted us all to have such unchecked hearts. I wanted it for Connie above all, because her family, I thought, might actually deserve it. But she hesitated. The traditions were dull. Her family was nuts. And there was so much God. Wouldn’t the God stuff get to me?

The God stuff did not get to me because it had nothing to do with a guy on a cross. The God of the Jews and His effect on His people were blessedly free of punishment and priggishness, the Savior and His rising from the dead on the third day, the Eucharist, the logical contortions brought about by the Trinity, a long history of bloodshed and torture, looming threats of damnation, sexual prudery and guilt, stubbornly persisting Puritan mores, smugness and the foreclosure of curiosity, and, above all, the warrior mind-set ready to kill for Christmas trees and the Ten Commandments. In place of all that, the Plotzes had prayers and songs whose dogmas were disguised by the Hebrew they were sung in; rituals and traditions with a provenance of thousands of years and a persistence against great odds; heated debate at the Sabbath table; distant relatives as at ease with one another as the closest of siblings; debates in which bits of food flew from impassioned mouths; deeply learned references casually tossed into the conversation; and, at the end of the night, a parting so spirited it alone might leave you hoarse. I had no problem with any of it, and that was the problem.

Connie never gave me reason to break and enter or masturbate in a stranger’s closet or call her mother, as I had once called Samantha Santacroce’s mother, and make desperate, cryptic remarks like “The voices… the voices.” Connie returned my love as no one who had cunt gripped me ever had, and while that came with its own problems — namely, my suspicion that for the sake of love she was muting her true self as effectively as I was mine and that a day of reckoning awaited us — I was able to act more or less like a self-respecting adult aware of personal boundaries and in possession of his mind. I did not fall in love with Rachel and Howard Plotz as I had fallen in love with Bob and Barbara Santacroce or with Roy Belisle and his arm veins before them. I behaved. But for a while I was in danger of becoming a little too fixated on Connie’s entire extended family, and the feeling was not dissimilar to the one I had had in the company of the Belisles and the Santacroces: the ingratiating, slightly unhinged desire to belong to them, to be one of the family, to fit in with self-assurance, to reach without apology across the table for a baby carrot or a potato chip, to sprawl out upon their carpeted floors and speak my mind (which would accord perfectly with their innermost thoughts), to initiate hugs readily returned, and to hear, from the doorway, at the end of the night, “We love you, Paul.” It was really that “we” I wanted more than anything else. For all my proud assertions of self, I really only wanted to be smothered in the embrace of an inclusive and coercive singular “we.” I wanted to be sucked up, subsumed into something greater, historical, eternal. One of the unit. One with the clan. Connie’s extended family was the very essence of such a “we.” It had a central core — her mother, father, a brother and two sisters — and then offshoots and branchings of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and great-uncles and — aunts: a family like none I’d ever known. Inside that sprawling mass of humanity hummed a tightly coiled heart of unified purpose whose signal achievement, it seemed to me, was a defense against loss. There were deaths, of course, and apostates among the young who acted out, smoked pot, and disliked being Jewish. But those were exceptions. Most of the time they took good care of each other. They kibitzed and gossiped and worried over this one and that, rescued one another from trouble, and of course gathered together, come hell or high water, for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, wedding anniversaries, important birthdays, Passover, and the High Holidays.

Though Connie initially rolled her eyes and feigned dread when we had to spend time with her family, I gave her license to love them freely, without embarrassment, and soon enough I witnessed the special closeness between her and her mom and the tenderness that passed between her and her dad. She teased her siblings and laughed with her cousins, and she tended to her elders as if taught to do so in a small hamlet in the Pale of Settlement. But she was also fiercely protective of me, her shegetz. If she ended up marrying a non-Jew, it would not be cause for family celebration. They would accept it, just as they had “accepted” Connie’s secularizing, but they would hold out hope that we would move closer to Judaism and that I would convert — which I never would, of course, because I didn’t believe in God. For my part, I refrained from insulting them with cold declarations of my atheism, as I had failed to do with the Santacroces, because I loved them. I tried not to let on that I loved them, both because I didn’t want to look desperate in Connie’s eyes, and because I thought it was a kind of sickness in me, how I always fell in love with the close-knit and conservative families of the girls who stole my heart. I was tired of putting myself at the mercy of these unsuspecting recipients of irrational love. I wanted to be one of those criminal-looking boyfriends put-upon at family gatherings for having to take part. Dudes like that basked in a cool reticence and never gave a damn what was being said behind their backs, and the girls loved them all the more for it. If I managed not to wear that goofy smile of mine whenever a Plotz opened his or her mouth, if I refrained from laughing the loudest at their witticisms, and if I resisted the urge to send gifts in the mail following a gathering, I could never be that shining example of male surliness. Irrepressible enthusiasm still made me feel like a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table. Womanish tears still spilled out during Connie’s sister’s wedding. I still got drunk at the wedding feast and went from Plotz to Plotz telling this one how much I liked her shoes and that one how impressed I was with his medical-supply business. I danced the hora, the traditional celebration dance in which the bride and groom are lifted into the air on chairs and dipped up and down on a tide of dancers. I really got in there, I really lifted the groom’s chair (I hardly knew the groom) and went round and round the room and had a blast.

When the dance ended, I couldn’t find Connie, so I got another drink and sat down to take a breather. Her uncle Stuart came up to me. “Hey, Stu,” I said. I instantly regretted it. To call such a man Stu! I had this obnoxious tendency of shortening certain men’s names in a transparent bid to fast-track a friendship. It was never the name that prompted it, but the man who bore the name. Connie’s uncle Stuart was small in stature but loomed large in the room. He was quiet by nature, but when he spoke he was heard. The eldest brother, the patriarch, the leader of the Passover service.

Now, maybe my calling him Stu didn’t have a thing to do with what happened next. Maybe he overheard some of the compliments I had paid Connie’s relatives throughout the night and found them excessive. Or maybe he just didn’t care for my abandon out on the dance floor. He sat down at the table, keeping a chair between us, and leaned in slowly. I had no prior evidence that he had so much as noticed me.

“Do you know what a philo-Semite is?” he asked.

I said, “Someone who loves Jewish people?”

He nodded slowly. His yarmulke, arced far back on his thinning hair, adhered to his head as if by magic. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

I didn’t consider him the sort of man who would tell a joke. Maybe he knew I liked jokes?

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”

He looked at me a long time before beginning, so long that, in memory, the blaring music faded to near inaudibility, and his eyes eclipsed the light.

“A Jew is sitting at a bar when a Jew-hater and a Jew-lover walk in,” he said at last. “They have a seat on either side of the Jew. The Jew-hater tells the Jew that he’s been arguing with the philo-Semite about which of the two of them the Jew prefers. The Jew-hater believes the Jew prefers him over the philo-Semite. The philo-Semite can’t believe that. How can the Jew prefer somebody who hates the Jews with a murderous passion over someone who throws his arms open for every Jew he meets? ‘So what do you say,’ says the Jew-hater. ‘Can you settle this for us?’ And the Jew turns to the philo-Semite, jerks his thumb back at the Jew-hater, and says, ‘I prefer him. At least I know he’s telling the truth.’ ”

Uncle Stuart didn’t laugh at the conclusion of his joke. He didn’t even crack a smile. My laughter, which was excessive but almost entirely polite, stuck in my throat as he got up and left the table.

“Why me?”

“She says it’s not something Jesus would say,” I said. “She thinks it’s a Jewish thing.”

“A Jewish thing?”

“Something from the Old Testament.”

“Well, if it’s a Jewish thing,” she said, “it must be me, right? I mean, I am the Jew here.”

“Will you please just take another look and tell me if you think it’s from the Old Testament?”

“I have the Bible memorized?”

“You had how many years of Hebrew school?” I said.

“And look where it got me: to this great think tank dedicated to all things Hebraic.”

“Connie,” I said. “Please.”

She took another look at the passage.

“Still sounds to me like one of those ass-backward things Christ is always saying to make the people go ‘Ohh, ahh, wow,’ ” she said. “But who knows. Maybe it is a Jewish thing. Why don’t you Google it?”

Connie was a big one for Googling things. It helped out enormously with all sorts of crises and brought relief to the most pressing concerns. At a restaurant, the two of us would momentarily forget the difference between rigatoni and penne, and she would Google “difference between rigatoni and penne” and provide us the answer. We no longer had to listen to the idiosyncratic replies of the waitstaff on the differences between rigatoni and penne, which were always so full of human approximations and stabs at essences. We had hard definitions straight from the me-machine. Or while we were drinking our wine, I might ask Connie, who knew more about wine than I did, “Do white wines need time to breathe like red wines?” She wouldn’t know the answer, or had known it at one time but had forgotten it and now needed to know it again very badly, so she’d look it up right then and there, at the dinner table, while I waited, and learn not only about aeration effects on white wines but also quite a lot about grapes, tannins, and oxidation techniques — random snippets of which, with her eyes cast down on the phone, she would share with me across the table, distractedly and never coherently. She’d also forget who starred in what, who sang this or that, and if so-and-so was still dating so-and-so, and for those things, too, she’d abandon our conversation to secure the answer. She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time Out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Couldn’t we just be wrong? We fought about that goddamn me-machine more than we fought about where to go and what to do, sex and its frequency, my so-called addiction to the Red Sox, and a million other things combined. (With the exception of kids. We fought most about kids.) I’d had enough and would say things like “The moon is really just a weak star” or “Flour tortillas have ganja in them” or “My favorite Sean Penn movie is Forrest Gump” and then really dig in until she’d Google it and waggle the screen before my eyes as if the thing itself were saying na na na na na, and I’d say, “Tom Hanks my ass! It was Sean Penn!” and she’d say, “It’s right fucking here, look! Tom Hanks,” and I’d say, “I can’t believe you needed the Internet for that!” and the night would descend from there.

She sat down and Googled the passage. It returned no exact matches.

“Not from the Bible at all,” she said. “Looks to me like somebody’s fucking with you.”

“Somebody is fucking with me,” I said.

“Now that,” she said, “is a Jewish thing.”

At 11:34 a.m. that morning, I wrote Seir Design:

I’ve been waiting since Friday for you to reply to my email. I assume that people making their living in the IT sector check their email with great regularity, since people in every sector check their email with great regularity. It’s upsetting that you have failed to respond. This is an urgent matter. Someone has stolen my identity. With your help. As far as I can tell, YOU have stolen my identity. Please be advised that if I do not hear from you, I will report you to the Better Business Bureau.

Please reply ASAP.

“The Better Business Bureau,” said Connie. “The kids on Facebook are going to love that one.”

“Do you have another suggestion?” I asked.

Fifteen minutes later, I wrote again:

Is this Chuck Hagarty, aka “Anonymous,” the guy into me for eight grand in bridgework? One man should not have this kind of power over other people’s lives. But as you have so expertly demonstrated in the past, that’s how things work on the Internet, eh, Chuck?

“Betsy’s done with Mr. Perkins.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming.”

Please explain the quote from the Bible and why it’s on my bio page. I don’t appreciate being associated with any system of belief. I’m an atheist. I don’t want people thinking I run some kind of evangelical operation here. A mouth is a mouth. I will treat it to the best of my ability, no matter what variety of religious horseshit might later come flying out of it. I consider that bio a personal attack on my character. Have it removed or you will hear from my lawyer.

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Perkins is waiting for you.”

This was Betsy. “I know about Mr. Perkins, Betsy. I will be with Mr. Perkins as soon as possible, but as you can see, I’m a little busy at the moment.”

“What I see is you on the Internet,” she said. “I didn’t know the Internet was more important than Mr. Perkins.”

“I will seat Mr. Perkins’s veneer when I’m good and ready, Betsy. Please mind your own business.”

After seating and shading Mr. Perkins’s veneer:

I don’t need these kinds of distractions when I’m trying to seat and shade a difficult veneer. Maybe you’re dealing with an emergency. I could imagine a scenario in which your kid’s sick and you need to run him to the doctor. But come on. You know as well as I do that you’d have your phone with you, and probably your computer, and you’d be fully operational in the waiting room, because you’re no longer able to sit in the waiting room and not check your email no matter how sick your kid is. I know, I have a waiting room, I see it happen all the time. Even in the emergency room, you’d be texting and emailing and tweeting about how your kid was in the emergency room and how worried you were. So odds are you have read my email and you’re just choosing not to reply. Which is unacceptable. I’m on the Internet all day long and I’m not even in IT.

My relationship with the Internet was like the one I had with the:). I hated the:) and hated to be the object of other people’s:), their:-) and their:>. I hated:-)) the most because it reminded me of my double chin. Then there was:(and:-(and;-) as well as;) and *-), which I didn’t even understand, although it was not as mystifying as D:< or >:O or:-&. These simplifications of speech, designed by idiots, resulted in hieroglyphics of such compounded complexity that they flew far above my intelligence. Then came the animated ones, the plump yellow emoticons with eyelashes and red tongues suggestively winking at me from the screen, being sexy, making me want to have sex with them. Every time I read an email with a live emoticon, I’d feel the astringent sexual frustration ever threatening my workaday equipoise, and the temptation to yank off in the Thunderbox while staring down at the iPad was broken only by the hygienic demands of a mouth professional. I swore never to use the emoticon ever… until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first:) and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance,) became a regular staple of my daily correspondence with colleagues, patients, and strangers, and featured prominently in my postings in Red Sox chat rooms and on message boards. I was defenseless against the world’s laziest and most loathsome impulses, defenseless against the erosion of principle in the face of technology. Soon I was incorporating:(and;) and;(too, and, after that, the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emoticons with, and requiring them to carry, the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life… and I was still unsure how and when it happened. Even as I stood indignantly hating the emoticon for its facile attempts to capture real emotion, I was using it constantly. It wouldn’t have caused me such grief if my repulsion and eventual capitulation to the emoticon had not mirrored my larger struggle with the Internet itself. I tried my best to fend off the Internet’s insidious seduction, until at last all I did — at chairside, on the F train, supine upon the slopes of Central Park — was gaze into my me-machine and lose myself on the Internet.

Which is to say that, after emailing Seir Design, and even as Mr. Perkins was waiting, I took a moment to surf the Internet, clicking when I found something worthy of clicking on… Taliban Assault—… Rebel Gains—… Weak Ec—… Red Sox Kick Into High Gear… South Sudan Declares—… Adele Debuts—… Bangla—… BoSox Making Big July Impression… Prosecutors Seek—… Insure again—… Hot Girls Showing Off There Legs in Heels… Like Us on—… Protect Your—… Free Shipp—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie. “Yes?”

“Abby says something’s off with Mr. Perkins’s veneer.”

“Why can’t Abby come and tell me that herself?” I asked. “Why can’t Abby tell me anything?”

“You intimidate her,” she said.

“Intimidate her? We sit across from each other all day long!”

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said.

I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. There was nothing wrong with his veneer.

You want to know the irony here? My staff has been telling me that my desire to avoid the privacy risks and the ugliness of the Internet and blah blah blah could never be endangered by a little shop-around-the-corner website that told people when we were open and how to reach us. But guess what? My privacy concerns look pretty damned justified right now on account of a little shop-around-the-corner website! That you made! So how about you fucking respond!

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Betsy. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to intrude on your schedule like this,” she said. “I can see how busy you are. I just wanted to let you know that I am done with Mrs. Deiderhofer.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Betsy?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry I was short with you earlier. I’m on edge.”

“Why are you on edge?”

“Have you forgotten about that website? Have you forgotten that my identity has been stolen?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Let’s not blow things out of proportion.”

“Why aren’t you more disturbed?” I asked. “They went to the trouble of finding your high-school-yearbook picture.”

“I have never minded that picture.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You now have a wonderful little website for your practice,” she said. “I hardly think that constitutes identity theft.”

“Then you and I will never understand each other, Betsy.”

She walked away. I wrote:

This is sick, what you’re doing.

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie again. “Yes?”

“Mr. Perkins refuses to leave. He says the color’s off.”

“The color isn’t off.”

“He says it is.”

“Christ,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. The color wasn’t off.

You created a website for me that I did not ask for. That needs to be remedied. Quickly. Before this gets out of hand. Are things already out of hand? Is it possible to stop “my” website from existing? What is a website and how does it get online and how do you take it down? I’m sure those are stupid questions that will make you laugh at me for how little I understand of the modern world, but so be it. Is there somewhere I can go to get at the physical thing that reflects the code that creates the design that throws up the images you’ve dreamed up for my website and remove that thing and destroy it? Would that mean it was off the Internet for good, or does it somehow live on? I have a vague notion that it lives on. Is that what people call “cached”? Is “my” website “cached” for all eternity? A website I did not ask for?

Usually I’m sitting there doing something to a patient and I’m thinking something like Ross and what’s her name, what’s her name, it’s Ross and… what’s her name, it’s, starts with a, what’s it start with, shit, can’t, was it, uh… oh, wait, right, of course, duh, how stupid can you get, it was Ross and Rachel! Ross and Rachel, everyone remembers that. It’s catchy, Ross and Rachel. And Ross’s sister’s name was… the girl who’s friends with Rachel… well, they’re all friends, obviously, but specifically the one who was also Rachel’s roommate, unless that was the other girl, the dumb blond, Lisa Kudrow, she hasn’t had much luck careerwise since that show ended, actually none of them have, although they’re bajillionaires, so you might ask what does it matter. But the truth is, once you’re on a popular TV show, you’d better just enjoy yourself, because you’re never going to act again. You are that role. Depressing, when you think about it, because though each of them will live a life of luxury, it will be one increasingly devoid of purpose. I can’t imagine a life where I can’t do what I was put on earth to do, tending to patients, like this one here whose tooth broke off in the night during a dream… name started with a… I don’t know what it started with, I could run down the alphabet, see if that jogs my memory, that works sometimes, not always, but, why not, what else do I have going on… A, no, B, no, C, no, but C… why does C… C definitely… someone on that show’s name started with a… ah, Chandler! And Monica was the name of the friend Chandler was dating. Monica was Rachel’s friend… well, they were all friends, obviously. It was Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler, and the other two… I can’t believe I can’t remember the other two, although the one, the Italian guy, his name’s right here, I mean right here, right on the tip of my… was it Joey? I think it was Joey. I wonder if Abby knows. She probably does. Just look at her. Of course she knows. But think she would tell me? If I asked her, she’d be like, Huh, what, me? I really think it was Joey. But then what was the name of the—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“When you have a minute,” she said.

“Connie, what was the name of that third girl on Friends? The dumb blond one? The actress hasn’t had much luck since the show ended?”

“Phoebe?”

“Phoebe! Damn! That’s it! Phoebe! Okay, Mrs. Deiderhofer,” I said to my patient, “you’re free to spit.” Mrs. Deiderhofer spent about ten minutes spitting. I walked over to Connie.

“You got a reply,” she said.

She handed me the iPad.

How well do you know yourself?

“That’s it?” I said. “All those emails, and all he writes back is how well do I know myself? That’s totally unacceptable.”

“There’s also…”

“What?”

“Your bio’s changed.”

“Changed how?”

They had taken the site down or offline or whatever, made changes to it, and then put it back up again. Everything was the same, with one exception. A new weird quote had been added to the old weird quote.

And Safek gathered us anew, and we sojourned with him in the land of Israel. 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.

“More religion!” I cried. “Betsy! Who’s Safek?”

“Who’s who?” she answered from the other side of the wall. You can always hear everything everyone is doing in a dental office because for reasons that even your most seasoned dentist can’t explain, the walls always terminate, as in cubicles and bathroom stalls, a foot below the ceiling.

“Safek!” I said.

What good was all her reading and highlighting if she couldn’t tell me who the characters were?

“There’s no one by that name in the New Testament,” she cried out.

“I’ve never heard of anyone named Safek,” said Connie. “But,” she said, “I do know the word.”

“The word?”

“Safek is a Hebrew word.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Doubt,” she said.

“Doubt?”

“It’s the Hebrew word for ‘doubt.’ ”

“How well do I know myself?” I wrote to Seir Design.

Go fuck yourself. That’s how well I know myself.

My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if they heard a playmate had pulled baby’s hair. I looked at Mom, late thirties, Volvo-and-breast-milk type, purees her own veggies, etc. I looked at Dad, trimly bearded in a tech button-down, knows all the microbrews. I wasn’t going to turn them away just because they overburden the medical system with their hair-trigger fears. If it weren’t for hair-trigger fears, my monthly billings would be cut in half. (On the other hand, if it weren’t for dental dread, I could double my salary.) If these fretters felt the need to bring their kid in because of a loose baby tooth, I’d happily humor them. Which is what I thought I was doing when I focused the overhead inside the girl’s mouth. But then I found seven cavities. Five years old and she had seven cavities. The loose tooth wasn’t falling out because it was time. It was straight up rotted out. I told them I had no choice but to pull it. Mom started crying, Dad looked ashamed. They were giving the kid a lollipop every night to help her go to sleep. “It was so hard to hear her cry,” said Mom. “It really worked to calm her down,” said Dad. They wouldn’t let the kid drink out of the tap, they wouldn’t feed her anything without an organic label on it, they wouldn’t even consider a sugar-free lollipop because anything sugar-free was full of artificial sweetener and that shit caused cancer, but they let her lie in bed ten hours a night rotting her mouth out so that she’d stop crying and fall asleep. People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.

This was what I had tried to impress upon Connie. She wanted kids, I didn’t. I thought I wanted them when we first started dating. Now there was something that could be everything, I thought: kids. From the moment they’re born, until the time is nigh for them to gather around you for your final word, and every milestone in between. But for them to be everything, they would also have to be everything: no more restaurants, Broadway plays, movies, museums, art galleries, or any of the other countless activities the city made possible. Not that that was an insurmountable problem for me, given how little I’d indulged in them in the past. But they lived in me as options, and options are important. With options came freedom, and having kids would nullify those options and restrict that freedom, and I wondered if I would resent them for it. I didn’t want to resent my kids for a decision entirely my own, the one I’d made to bring them into the world. Too many people already felt such a resentment. They’d bring their kids into the shop, and you could see it in their harried, hateful eyes. “Hey,” I wanted to say to them, “it wasn’t this kid’s choice to have teeth. It was yours. And now those teeth are here on earth and need to be cleaned, so how about you just resign yourself to it and hold the fucking kid’s hand?” But easy for me to say. I didn’t have kids.

It would be nice, though, I thought, from time to time, to have a son and heir. I’d imagine Connie calling out, “Jimmy O’Rourke!” or “Paulie Junior! You better get your butt down here this instant!” And I’d think, me with a namesake! A son and heir! I have a son and heir! But I’d be pretty old by then, past forty for sure, and I’d start thinking less about that son and heir and more about how goddamn old I was, more than halfway to death, while that kid being called to, with his steel-cut bowels, in the flower of health, made happy by trifles, was steadily outliving me. Fuck that, I thought. I’m not having kids if they’re just going to remind me of my dying every living day.

I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d try to explain why that approach was all wrong. I’d never actually feel that way once the kid was here, among us, part of our family.

That sounded nice. But just as I didn’t want to resent my kids, I also didn’t want to find myself too much in love with them. There are parents who don’t like to hear their little girl crying at night, at the vast approaching dark of sleep, and so in their torment think why not feed her a lollipop, and a few years later that kid’s got seven cavities and a pulled tooth. This is how we’ve arrived at the point where we give every kid on the team a trophy in the name of participation. I didn’t want to love my kids so much that I was blind to their shortcomings, limitations, and mediocre personalities, not to mention character flaws and criminal leanings. But I could, I thought, I could love a kid that much. A kid really could be everything, and that scared me. Because once a kid is everything, not only might you lose all perspective and start proudly displaying his participation trophies, you might also fear for that kid’s life every time he leaves your sight. I didn’t want to live in perpetual fear. People don’t recover from the death of a child. I knew I wouldn’t. I knew that having a kid would be my chance to improve upon my shitty childhood, that it would be a repudiation of my dad’s suicide and a celebration of life, but if that kid taught me how to love him, how to love, period, and then I lost him as I lost my dad, that would be it for me. I’d toss in the towel. Fuck it, fuck this world and all its heartbreak. I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d tell me that if that was how I felt I was already a slave to the fear, and good luck.

There was a final reason I didn’t want to have a kid. This one I never shared with Connie. I never seriously considered killing myself, but once you have a kid, you take that option off the table. And like I said, options are important.

Four

THE FIRST THING WE had to do, according to my lawyer, Mark Talsman, of Talsman, Loeb, and Hart, was find out who registered the site. The site’s URL was www.drpaulcorourkedental.com and would be registered with the WHOIS database, which required the registrant to list his (or her) personal contact information.

The C in that muddle came from my middle name, Conrad, which was my father’s name. I hated the name Conrad. I especially hated that Conrad had been called Connie all his life. Connie wasn’t a man’s name. It was a woman’s name — specifically, as far as I was concerned, the name of the woman I once believed I would marry but who now was only another reminder of a terminal hopelessness. For a time I failed to make the connection, so wildly at odds were the two Connies. One I hardly knew at all, the other I knew every intimate inch of. No one, I mean no one, not even Connie, knew about the C in my name. It was not listed on my license or on any of my professional certificates or other official documents. The only time that a middle name came up in conversation between Connie and me, I lied straight to her face. I told her my middle name was Saul.

She looked at me quizzically. “Your name is Paul Saul O’Rourke?”

It had come out so naturally, and no wonder. I had chosen the only name that rhymed with my actual name. In the ensuing seconds, I let any chance to correct myself simply pass by and saw no choice but to push on through.

“Weird,” I said, “isn’t it?”

“I know a few Sauls,” she said. “You don’t look much like a Saul.”

“That’s what my second-grade teacher always used to say,” I said, really doubling down. Why did I have to lie? “What can I tell you,” I added, “I had strange parents.”

“Were they hippies?”

“No,” I said. “Just poor.”

At least that part was true.

Anyway, whoever had created www.drpaulcorourkedental.com knew more about the biographical me than even Connie, who knew more than anyone else. Although she still thought my full name was Paul Saul O’Rourke.

Where was I when I lied? I mean the essential me, the self I knew and was proud of, the straight talker, advocate of truth and destroyer of illusions? Nowhere to be found. Boy, if that’s not how you knew I was surely cunt gripped, a big old fat fucking lie. Trying to make its way into the world by way of a lie was a better version of myself, a person who had grown up in Florida and went to space camp or in Montana and broke horses or in Hawaii where he windsurfed in tournaments; whose father played for the minor-league Red Sox before dying in Vietnam; and whose mother, after losing the love of her life in the Battle of Suoi Bong Trang, was still sharp as a tack and playing tennis all day. A better biographical me. But I never liked the liar, despite his starburst past, as much as the me who might have been had I only told the truth and been myself. I had no choice but to flee the relationship or break down and come clean. Or, as in the case of Connie, always do something in between.

There was a macadam ashtray outside the Aftergood Arms that I shared with the building’s residents. One or two of my fellow smokers enlisted my professional services, but no more — it’s never easy to trust your dentist after you’ve seen him debase himself over the macadam with two quick final drags. Whenever I went out to smoke, I could always count on being asked again about the glove. I had a theory, whether true or not I don’t know, that it cut down on that just-smoked smell. I wanted to avoid that smell as much as possible, to keep Mrs. Convoy off my back after returning inside. And so with my left hand unclad, my right hand brought the cigarette to my lips inside a powdery new latex glove, which the residents of the Aftergood Arms, all wizened and in need of intubation, kept eyeing as if memorizing it for the eventual police report.

The day after the website appeared, a heat wave curled up out of the calm waters of hell, blanketing the Eastern Seaboard. I was clammy with a creeping headache after returning inside. That cyanide stick left my capillaries all tied up in knots, and my temples were tight and hot. The medicinal smell of a dental office, antiseptic and colloidal, prevalent everywhere but penetrating nothing, floated above the central air conditioning. I loved my waiting room. I loved the paired chairs, the framed folk art. I loved the discriminate occupancy. I never wanted my waiting room to appear overtaxed. We weren’t some Appalachian drill-and-bill shop where the meth heads twitched in terror while the cries of their children went choral during another round of punch tag. This was Park Avenue, the Upper East Side. The waiting rooms of Park Avenue must be civilized. They must be boutique. Mine was boutique, full (but not too full) of a reassuring age spread, of faces (if not mouths) of advertorial good health. One had the immediate impression from my boutique waiting room of clean contoured surfaces and a steady professional hand. I often considered it a great shame not to spend more time in my waiting room, admiring the comfortable and curated space all too frequently traversed as a mere afterthought.

I sat down in one of the chairs. Things were buzzing on the other side. Mrs. Convoy was in with a hygiene patient; I could envision the flavored polish flying up into the light streams. Abby was no doubt in with a second patient and wondering where I was. I was here, in my waiting room, hiding behind my me-machine to better watch Connie. Her hair had been pulled back tightly that morning, as if she were about to perform for the Bolshoi. But when she turned, you could see how, in back, after coming together at the hairband, her curls exploded, ringlets shimmering along the continuum from chestnut to caramel. Connie dyed her hair, but its thickness and curliness were products of her own genetic good fortune, as was the way her smaller curls had of crimping at the hairline around her ears and neck. Boy, I tell you, it was one good God-almighty head of hair. Sometimes, her bun sat on top of her head like a minitwister; other times it possessed a greater Oriental orderliness, in which case it was situated farther back. I watched her redo it. Parking her hairband around a wrist, she brought her right hand to her brow and began to feather back the hair in front, which her left hand kept secure. She worked one side until that hair was thoroughly collected, and then she worked the other side, and finally the hair in the middle. She did this all very quickly, with elbows raised, as if preparatory to flight. She stopped only to work out a tangle, some missed curl that lay like a spur under the otherwise smoothed-back hair. And then, just as I thought she might be finished, she switched hands and let her left hand have a go at capturing even more hair while her right hand kept the hair in back contained. Finally, with great speed, she removed the hairband from her wrist and whipped it on. She expanded the elastic and threaded her voluminous curls yet again through the band’s tightening bottleneck. She did this once more, and then a fourth and final time. By then the opening in the hairband had become impossibly small, the action slowed, and her hair resisted every inch of the way. She winced briefly at what I imagined were little cries of pain at the roots of her hair. Then came that part where, her hair caught now, and her hands free, she made little adjustments, easing the pressure here and there, but always carefully, so as not to undo all the work, the work of ten or fifteen seconds at most, that had gone into getting her hair into place. Then, with her unruly hair utterly tamed, she was free to carry on with her various activities.

Connie was always complaining that I objectified her and idealized her physical beauty and then, when she turned out to be a mere mortal, went around pissing and moaning about being sold a bill of goods. She thought I stacked the deck against her, and most other people, too, by beginning every new relationship with exalted opinions that no one, in the long run, could possibly live up to. My problem was that I was too romantic. People impressed me in one way or another on first blush, but once I’d scratched the surface and detected a flaw, it was all over. She said this basic stance toward life had made me misanthropic and chronically unhappy. I disagreed. But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

That morning was a little different, though, because while I took great pleasure in watching her reconstruct her ponytail, I soon found myself paying more attention to what she was doing than how she looked. One minute, she was standing over the desk; the next, she was balancing on tiptoe to pull a file from the shelf; she was reaching for the ringing phone; she was handing off an appointment-reminder card with a smile (her white canines just half a millimeter longer than her front teeth); she was readying a clipboard for a new patient.

During that time I began to feel that I, too, was being watched. I turned and saw a patient of mine, whom I had worked on half a dozen times or more, scrutinizing me, trying to place me. I think she believed that I might be her dentist.

I smiled and turned away, raising my me-machine back to eye level and directing my attention to the Internet. I glanced at the message boards to get boggswader’s reaction to last night’s game. Then I read Owen from Brookline’s sabermetrics analysis and EatMeYankees69’s play-by-play breakdown. Then I watched a few (muted) highlights and then posted a comment or two of my own on one or two of the blogs and the message boards. Then I carefully refocused my attention on Connie.

She was now receiving a package from the UPS man. She also called the missed appointments, managed the reschedules, picked up the desk flowers I only ever half noticed, kept the water cooler full, and changed the ink cartridge in the printer. And she was the one who had to eat the patient’s shit when he or she came out miserable with a bloody mouth and the first thing we did was demand a copayment.

I looked back at my me-machine. I continued to be discreetly scrutinized by my patient, who was still trying her best to place me. I scrolled farther down on one of the message boards — and that’s when I saw the next thing they’d done.

They’d put me on the message boards and on the blogs.

I posted regularly to both, but always incognito, as YazFanOne. I never posted as Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. But now a Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., had made his first appearance on the message boards and blogs.

He was saying things like, “Amazing third inning. Go Ellsbury. Click here for more commentary.”

And “What a crushing eighth. Three RBIs for McDonald. And take a look at this.”

The links “Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S.” provided were entirely unrelated to the Red Sox. The first was an article reporting on an alarming new development between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The second involved endangered tribes and other marginalized peoples.

When I looked up some indeterminate time later, I found the three of them, Abby, Connie, and Mrs. Convoy, staring at me from behind the front desk.

“Really?” said Connie. “Again?”

Mrs. Convoy shook her head gravely. Abby glanced away, hurrying off somewhere to judge me in private.

I smiled at my patient: the jig was up, it was me, her dentist. I approached the front desk with my me-machine.

“Look at this,” I said, “look! They’ve outed me. I’m on the message boards, the blogs. I’m all over the place!”

Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, “And how is the ‘complete experience’?” I told her, she said, “And do you think the ‘complete experience’ might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?” I told her, she said, “We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown.”

She walked away in frustration. I went around and sat down next to Connie. I showed her the comments and postings by YazFanOne. “That’s me,” I said. “Who else would complain about Francona like that?” Then I showed her the newest member of the message boards and the most recent poster to all the blogs, Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. “That’s me, too,” I said, “but that’s not me posting. ‘Great third inning’? ‘Go Ellsbury’? That’s some dumb bullshit. I don’t post dumb bullshit.”

“You say this is you?” she said, pointing at my name on the me-machine.

“My name, yeah, but that’s not me posting, because I would never post dumb bullshit like that, and certainly never under my real name.”

“Why never under your real name?”

“For the sake of privacy,” I said.

“And so you post under this other name here, this YazFanOne?”

“Right, YazFanOne. That’s me. This Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., he’s someone else. Except not, because that’s also me. I’m Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S.”

“So for the sake of your identity,” she said, “you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.”

She looked at me as blank as a stapler while waiting for my response.

“You don’t seem to be getting the point,” I said.

“Oh, I think I get it,” she said.

“First it was the website. Now it’s this. I know you think I’m paranoid when it comes to the Internet, but look at this. Does this not justify everything I’ve been warning you about? This is a revolution, Connie. Everyone assumes that the new world order will be benign, but it won’t be. Just look at what they’re doing to me — and who am I? I’m a nobody.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. She was scrutinizing the screen. “Your name is Paul C. O’Rourke?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the C stand for?”

“What?”

“The C. What’s it stand for? I thought your middle name was Saul.”

“Paul Saul O’Rourke?” I said. “That doesn’t sound very likely.”

“Then why did you tell me that that was your name?”

“I seriously doubt I ever told you that my name was Paul Saul O’Rourke,” I said, laughing understatedly at the absurdity so clearly on display.

“But you did.”

“If so,” I said, “I must have been joking.”

“You weren’t joking,” she said.

“Can we please, please focus on what’s important here? Someone is impersonating me. They’re posting to the blogs and message boards using my real name. They’re pretending to be me, but it’s not me.”

“And who are you, exactly, if not Paul Saul O’Rourke?”

“Paul Conrad,” I said.

“Your father’s name?”

“It was my mom’s doing. He would not have thought enough of himself to want anyone to have his name. Except when he was manic, when he probably would have happily named me Conrad Conrad Conrad.”

“Let me see that thing,” she said. I handed her my me-machine. “What are these links to?”

“One’s an article in the Times about Israel and Palestine, and the other’s, I don’t know, something about endangered peoples or something.”

She started clicking around.

“You’ve commented on this article,” she said.

“I’ve what?”

“The one in the Times. You’ve commented at the end of it.”

We read it together:

Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., Manhattan, New York

At the turn of the millennium, they were just one of many mystery cults, almost indistinguishable from Christianity, which was being heavily persecuted at the time. But unlike Christianity, they had no apostles, no campaigns, and none of Paul’s passionate intensity walking the footpaths of the Roman empire. They were a people risen out of the ashes of the exterminated Amalekites, and when the tide of Christianity broke over the world, their message was drowned and their people destroyed. The Cantaveticles reads as one long serial extinction. They die out, “a portion weeping, a portion smiling, a portion on their knees refusing to pray.” And yet a remnant always reappears, to be hunted down and extinguished totally in some later, more distant episode.

July 18, 2011 at 8:04 p.m.

“That’s a weird comment,” she said.

“It wasn’t me!”

“Calm down. I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying it’s weird. It doesn’t have anything to do with the article.” She read the comment once more. “I know the Amalekites,” she said. She typed the word into Google. “ ‘Name of a nomadic nation south of Palestine,’ ” she read. “ ‘That the Amalekites were not Arabs, but of a stock related to the Edomites (consequently also to the Hebrews), can be concluded from the genealogy in Genesis, chapter thirty-six, verse twelve, and in first Book of Chronicles, chapter one, verse thirty-six. Amalek—’ ” She stopped herself. “Amalek,” she said, turning to me. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

“Who’s Amalek?”

“The ancient enemy of the Jews,” she said. “The most enduring enemy. He never dies, he just reincarnates.” She turned back to the me-machine. “ ‘Amalek is the son of Esau’s first-born son Eliphaz and of the concubine Timna, the daughter of Seir…’ ”

“Seir?” I said. “Like Seir Design?”

“ ‘That they were of obscure origin is also indicated in Numbers, chapter twenty-four, verse twenty, where the Amalekites are called “the first of the nations.” The Amalekites were the first to come in contact with the Israelites… vainly opposing their march at Rephidim, not far from Sinai.’ ”

“Sinai, Amalekites — this has nothing to do with me,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

She handed the phone back. She didn’t know, and shrugged.

Identity theft was intended to separate a man from his money. When and how did they come for my money? Was it Anonymous, or someone beyond even his malignant skill set? Or was it something else altogether, something yet unfathomable, taking shape behind a firewall securely blocking my view of things, to make me not the victim of some nefarious online activity, but the perpetrator?

The things written in my name seemed to carry significance, some ancient charge. If I didn’t turn away with rage, I would have turned away with… what? Embarrassment, I guess. An absurd sense of responsibility. It wasn’t the real Paul C. O’Rourke talking. It was an impostor, a more determined and mysterious Paul C. O’Rourke who, unlike me, had something urgent to say. I didn’t comment on the Internet, with the exception of my remarks about the Red Sox, because, to be perfectly honest, the real Paul C. O’Rourke didn’t have anything to say.

“Found my comment on the Times,” I wrote Seir Design.

Also found my posts on the Red Sox message boards. I got news for you, pal: I don’t post dumb bullshit. Your impersonation attempts aren’t going to fly. Everyone who knows me knows that when I post, I post gold. They also know that I don’t give a damn about mystery cults, Sinai, or the Amalekites, fun as all that sounds.

I went back to work. I never wanted to go back to work. That’s not to say I didn’t like work, but that getting back into work, sitting down chairside again, receiving the explorer from Abby, restarting the machinery of diagnosis and repair — no. It was all too familiar. But then, five or ten minutes into it, something clicked, and again I was focused, moving from patient to patient — making patter, replacing a tooth, designing a new smile for a bride-to-be. Trapped inside all day telling people to floss didn’t always eliminate the fleeting sensation of being alive. Beyond the oppression of my familiar surroundings, the irrepressible persistence of self among my staff, and the accusation in the eyes of many of my patients that I was at best a colossal inconvenience, there were reasons to cheer. Widows interested in braces. Children overcoming terror. And all those who had brushed, flossed, and water-picked according to schedule, who needed little work and no lecture, and who left with the smiles they deserved. Work wasn’t a struggle then. It was a gift, really the best defense I knew against the chronic affliction of my self-obsession.

One of my patients that day was a man with a case of Bell’s palsy. He had woken up in the night with a collapsing face on account of that inexplicable neurological condition that usually strikes the obese and the old. My patient was a little overweight but still a young man, and yet I got the impression that he was not taking good care of himself. He looked like your typical overworked substance-binging New Yorker whose nerves, by way of an especially public form of revenge, had poxed him with a temporary facial deformity. It had happened a few days ago and would take its own sweet time in resolving itself. In the meantime he was dealing with an abscess. The Bell’s palsy had something special in mind for him when, instead of making his face droop, it pried back the right cheek and suspended it there, turning his expression into a mad dog’s snarl. That snarl had opened up a little window into the current state of his oral health, which at that most inopportune time had taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they were related, the Bell’s palsy and the suddenly pregnant abscess endangering his first molar. Or maybe my patient had fudged his timeline — patients are the most unreliable people — and he had been living with the abscess but had chosen to ignore it, as he claimed it wasn’t causing him any pain. Ignore it, that is, until the Bell’s palsy drew back the curtain on his infection for everyone to see, everyone who was already gaping at the poor man for viciously smiling like a Doberman at the gate.

One of his accessory canals was weirdly branched, and clearing out that last bit of rot was like trying to hook my hand around the back of a refrigerator to plug the cord in. As I was finishing up, Connie came in to tell me I had a call.

“Talsman’s on the phone,” she said.

“It’s Talsman,” said Talsman, when I picked up. Talsman called himself Talsman.

The site was registered to an Al Frushtick.

“Frushtick,” I said. “That name’s familiar.”

“Sounds like ‘fish stick’ to me,” said Talsman, ever helpful.

I got off the phone. “See if we have a patient named Frushtick,” I said to Connie.

She came back ten minutes later with Al Frushtick’s file. I’d last seen him in January, when he told me he was leaving for Israel.

“This guy!” I said. “I know him. He’s the one who said he wanted to fuck you.”

“What?”

“Yeah! He was all hopped up on gas. Betsy!” I cried. “It’s our patient!”

She was in with a patient. “What patient?”

“The one with the meditation techniques! Remember?”

“Who?”

“The Tibetan! He wanted me to yank his teeth without — oh, never mind. Al Frushtick,” I said to Connie. “That’s who’s doing this to me!”

“What did you ever do to Al Frushtick?”

“What did I ever do to any of them?” I said. “Fixed his rotten teeth. But then he said something to me. When I was showing him out the door, he said something…”

“What was it?”

“He said he was going to Israel, but not because he was Jewish. I was helping him on with his coat. He said he was something… something ethnic, or something. I thought it was just the gas talking.”

“Something ethnic?”

I tried my best to remember, but it was lost.

“Hi, Al Frushtick,” I wrote.

This is how you repay a man for repairing your teeth?

The site changed the next day, and now my bio page hosted a more extensive biblical or Bible-like passage that almost told a story or homily or parable or something. It started with one of those endless genealogies that always does me in when I try reading the actual Bible, this one and that one begating first with the wife, then with the concubine, and then, after too many hins of wine, with the daughters. All the characters of the tale possessed the names of Star Wars figurines you find arranged upon the walls of toy stores, accessories sold separately. One guy was named Tin, who had a son, Mamucam, who had a wife called Gopolojol. Not another word on Tin and his kin, but they no doubt carried some kind of weight as we made our way down the conga line of middlemen and bit players to arrive at Agag, king of the Amalekites. The Amalekites were a strong tribe of noblemen, traceable to Abraham and dwelling peacefully upon the pastures of a place called Hazazon. They had stocks of cattle, camel, sheep, and oxen. “And such as went forth to battle, with all instruments of war, there were one hundred thousand and twenty and four thousand and five hundred, which could keep rank; and they were not of double heart,” my bio page reported.

One day the Amalekites were attacked by the Israelites, who came upon them from the west. The Israelites targeted a party of weak and infirm Amalekites who could not defend themselves, seized their camels, and fled. In retaliation, the Amalekites readied their armies for war. But then Moses showed up. “Moses came forth and bowed before Agag with a trespass offering, saying unto him, Hearken unto my voice, I pray thee; lay not the sin on Israel, for Pharaoh hath kept us in bondage four hundred years and thirty.” Moses tells Agag about the Israelites’ long captivity in Egypt, the terrible travails of their desert wanderings, and their covenant with a single God who seems to have abandoned them. He begs Agag’s forgiveness for taking that cheap swipe at them, explaining that they’re hungry, tired, and scared. “And the people of Israel had pity in the eye of Agag, and he took butter, and milk, and the calf he had dressed, and set it before them, and they did eat. And Israel parted laden with ephahs of flax and measures of barley, and of spices very great store.”

And all was well until the Israelites amassed a huge army and attacked the Amalekites again. “The Israelites took the war upon them, and blew with trumpets, and dashed to pieces all their enemies.” Agag, king of the Amalekites, fearing the wrath of a pitiless people driven by a bloodlust to take all of Canaan “from Dan even to Beersheba” so that they might fulfill their God’s covenant, says to his people, “Let us fetch the gods of the Egyptians, and the gods of the Canaanites, and the gods of the Philistines, and make covenant with them, that they may save us out of the hand of our enemy.” When word spreads through camp that the gods of every tribe in Canaan have arrived to defend the Amalekites, a great cry goes up, and the earth rings. But little good the gods do them once the fighting begins. The Israelites reduce the Amalekite army from a hundred twenty thousand men to seventy thousand in three days. They flee back to camp and then abandon Hazazon for the safe haven of Rephidim. I was making a real effort to follow along.

Who should come after the Amalekites in no time at all but the muscular, divinely inspired Israelites. This time Agag says to his people, Okay, well, obviously that last strategy needs a rethink. Not much luck to be had bringing all those gods together. Maybe they were jealous of one another. Maybe the powers of one canceled out the powers of another. I can’t really tell you what happened because I’m not a god, I’m just a king. But one thing’s for sure. We got our butts handed to us on a tabernacle back there. “Hear my voice; ye children of Amalek, hearken to my speech: Ye have gone a whoring after every god that dwelleth in the land, and have made false covenant with them. And every god hath made of you a carcase unto the fowls of the air, and the wild beasts of the earth. And your children have grown strange.”

So here’s what we’re going to do, he tells them, and sketches out a little plan he’s been devising, to bring into camp another god. But this time just one god, per the Israelites, because the one-single-god thing sure seems to be working out for them. The god’s name is Molek, and Molek has promised a whole bunch of things if the Amalekites just keep his covenant, the particulars of which include various prayers and sacrifices, walking thrice around a temple laden with wheat and gold, and the superbizarre practice of removing the pinkie finger from ten willing warriors who aren’t likely to heal in time for battle. “And he will take you to him for a people, and he will be to you a god; and ye shall know that he is Molek your god, which bringeth you out from under the burden of the Israelites,” reported my bio page. And they go into battle and lose another thirty thousand men.

So they leave Rephidim for a place called Hazor, where they bicker and cower, licking their wounds and wondering what the hell to do next. The Israelites seem really determined, and the God of the Israelites is not the least bit fickle and is always really focused and effective. You get the impression that He’s really looking after these people, which gives Agag an idea, and he gathers the people around him. Gathering the people around him is getting to be a familiar trope by now, and one can’t help but fear for the fate of those eager to do the gathering around. “Every covenant hath utterly destroyed the cities of Amalek; every voice hath wrought sore destruction. Now even one god can save ye, the one living God that hath delivered unto your enemy a land flowing with milk and honey, and hath made of them a great nation, and given them ordinances of heaven and earth, and a Sabbath day, and hath sanctified and purified them, and bound them by a covenant, that they shall possess it forever, from generation to generation. Now I tell ye, all ye children of Amalek,” Agag continues in a new verse, which appeared line for line on my bio page, “the living God is with Israel, with all the children of Ephraim. And if ye take good heed to go with the living God of Israel, ye shall be spared the sword.”

Can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Sounds like a good strategy to the desperate Amalekites, who enlist one of their own, a dead ringer for an Israelite, to steal into the Israelite camp, sniff around, and learn what he can learn. He comes back after the third day and tells them that, in order to be like the Israelites, they have to build an ark, and it should be made out of shittim wood so many cubits high and so many cubits long, and there are rules about the ark and the temple, and if anyone sins they’ll need to find a young bullock without blemish for a sin offering, and you can’t compel your brother to serve as a bond servant, and a whole bunch of other things. Oh, and everyone needs to get circumcised. And everyone’s like “Circumcised? What’s circumcised?” And the young Israelite-looking guy tells them what it means, and they’re all like “Jesus Christ, are you kidding?” And the Israelite-looking guy says he wishes. So all the men circumcise themselves, and they send messengers to the tribes of Israel to tell them what they’ve done, and they pray to the God of the Israelites that they be spared the sword.

When the Israelites hear that the Amalekites have circumcised themselves “and were sore,” they crossed the valley boldly and slew them. “And there escaped not a man of the children of Amalek save four hundred, which rode upon camels to Mount Seir, and fled.”

My bio page ended with the words, “From the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25–29.” I turned to Connie, who had been reading along with me.

“That’s not how I remember it from Hebrew school,” she said.

“Me again,” I wrote.

Don’t think I’m not wondering why I’m still writing to you, Al. Look where it’s gotten me so far. But now that I know who you are, and can begin legal proceedings against you, maybe it’s time for you to cease any and all activity of this kind. The religious shit in particular. I’d rather you come for my money. Adult circumcision? A dude named Agag? I hope you hold this shit sacred, so that in the extreme unlikelihood that there is a God, you burn in hell.

I’d say something off the cuff, like “I’d rather kill myself” or “Let me just slit my wrists” or “The only solution is to do ourselves in,” and she’d grow very somber, acquire a stillness, and with a passionate zeal in her voice, she’d say, “I hope you are not serious. Suicide is nothing to joke about.” And while I’d ponder that — she hoped I wasn’t serious but chastised me for joking — she’d say, “God alone is the arbiter of life and death. Suicide is a rejection of everything He has created, all the beauty and meaning in the world. Aren’t you capable of finding anything beautiful in the world?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not want to know about those websites. Please keep those disgusting websites to yourself. What I’m talking about is the sunrise, the sunset, the moon and the stars, the flowers in the botanical garden, the babies in their strollers. Isn’t there something besides grown women defiling themselves on the Internet you find beautiful?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Freedom is a concept, but I will accept it in the place of nothing else. But not the freedom to kill yourself. That is not freedom. That is the ultimate prison. My goodness, young man,” she’d say, “do you not look at the world around you? Do you never say to yourself, Look up! look up! on the chance that you might see a bird or a cloud, something that fills your heart with joy?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Yes, I agree, it passes too quickly. But good heavens, Paul, what is the point if we don’t possess it fully while it lasts? Everything is fleeting. Even ugliness. Even pain. Don’t you know the disservice you do to yourself when you let joy pass you by and hold on to the ugliness and pain?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I do not call that being honest. I call it failing to live a full life. Don’t you want to live the fullest life possible?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “You are not alone in feeling that way. If you want a name for it, it is called despair. I have known many people who, before they found God—” I’d cut her off right there as I’d done a thousand times before, and she’d say, “Fine. Forget God for the moment, if we must. It is the ultimate mistake, but for the sake of argument let us just forget God. But do consider, if we are here for such a brief time, and if there’s only so much opportunity, consider looking for the good. Shouldn’t we all look for the good, if only to keep our spirits up?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I understand there is not much good to be found looking at infection and neglect all day long. But what about coming to and from the subway? What about the walking tours you take? Is there not plenty of opportunity to look around you then and see… I don’t know what, something to help you carry on?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I know the subway is full of unhappy people, Paul. Oh,” she’d sigh, exasperated. But she’d persevere regardless, lovely, irrepressible Betsy. “I’m not talking about all the beaten-down people on the subway,” she’d say, and I’d make a few additions, and she’d say, “Or the deformed or the burned or the homeless. I’m asking about your walks to and from the subway station.” I’d answer, she’d say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Put the phone away once you enter the street and take a look around you. Why must you always be reading your phone?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “If you know it is merely a distraction from the many things you don’t want to think about, why let yourself be a slave to it?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “That is the most blasphemous thing I have ever heard. A little technology could never take the place of the Almighty. We are talking about the Almighty, for heaven’s sake. Mobile phones or no mobile phones, we still have the primal need to pray, do we not?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Sending and receiving email and texts are not a new form of prayer. Do you not understand that that little machine, by taking your attention away from God and the world He created, is only increasing your despair?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “I don’t give a fig for the world it’s created. It will never rival God’s.” I’d ask her what I should be looking at, then, if not my phone, offering a few preemptive suggestions, and she’d say, “Yes, at the concrete. Yes, at the buildings. Yes, at the people. You might just be surprised,” she’d say, “by all the beauty and joy you find. Don’t you want to be surprised?” I’d tell her, she’d say, she’d cock her head a little and purse her lips a little, and she’d say, reaching out her hand, “It is not too late for you, dear. Dear me, no, young man. It’s never too late.”

Connie came up to me later that day and said, “Did you ever tell a joke about a priest and a rabbi to my uncle Michael?”

Her uncle Michael was married to her mother’s sister Sally. He had a real-estate inspection business. Sally had stayed home with the kids, all grown now. They lived in a small house in Yonkers, but it was the right house, the perfect house. Somehow you knew that the minute you walked in. Considerate, warm people live here, you thought, people who know they have enough. It’s some kind of gift to realize you have enough and need no more. I was only in the house once, when Uncle Michael’s mother passed away and they sat shiva. I’d never sat shiva before. I’d hardly known about the practice and had to look it up on the Internet so as not to appear hopeless before Connie. So many people gathered nightly to sit shiva for Uncle Michael’s mother in Michael and Sally’s modest house that it was almost a shock when, after an hour or so, the Mourner’s Kaddish was sung, reclaiming the solemnity of the occasion from an almost-festive atmosphere. It was never festive in the immediate proximity of Uncle Michael or Aunt Sally or their children or any of Michael’s brothers and sisters, but for those of us out on the margins, where I was lurking, there was a lot of small talk and friendly conversation. I guess it was like any other funeral ceremony that way, a periphery of noise surrounding a nucleus of grief. But I also knew that it was unlike anything I’d experienced before, the act of sitting shiva. An Irish son attends a wake and buries the dead and then sits at home in private despair, but a Jewish son has seven nights to share his burden and his broken heart with his family and friends.

“A priest and rabbi joke?” I said. “Where’s this coming from? I haven’t seen Michael in, what? Six months?”

“This would have been a long time ago.”

“Why are you bringing it up now?”

“There was a rumor. I ignored it at the time. I thought people were just being difficult. Do you know a joke about a priest and a rabbi or not?”

I was quiet. “I know lots of jokes.”

“How many concern a priest and a rabbi?”

I pretended to think about it.

“Let me hear one,” she said.

I cleared my throat. “A priest and a rabbi… ahem… excuse me. Okay, a priest and a rabbi hit the links bright and early one morning for a round of golf, but the foursome ahead of them keep holding them up.” I paused. “I learned this joke back when I was playing golf. That was a lifetime ago, Connie. I haven’t played golf in… Why do you want to know this?”

“I want to hear the joke you told my uncle Michael.”

“I’m not sure I would have told your uncle Michael this joke.”

“Tell me the joke, Paul.”

I preferred to be called Dr. O’Rourke inside the office, or even Dr. Paul, but I made no mention of this breach in protocol.

“So they call the ranger over — actually, come to think of it, it’s a priest, a reverend, and a rabbi, the three of them together are going golfing. Like I said. It’s been a long time.” She gestured as if I were driving too slowly in the car in front of her. “Anyway, they call the ranger over, and the priest says, ‘We’ve been waiting to tee off for twenty minutes now, but those fellows ahead of us are taking an eternity. What gives?’ The ranger apologizes. ‘I can see why you men of God would be irritated,’ he says, ‘but have patience. Those poor men ahead of you are blind.’ The priest replies with a Hail Mary and a blessing, while the reverend says a prayer.”

I stopped.

“Why are you stopping?”

“Should I go on?”

“Is that the punch line?”

“No.”

“Tell me the punch line.”

“But the rabbi, he takes the ranger aside and he says, ‘They can’t play at night?’ ”

“That’s good,” she said, without smiling.

“You’re not smiling.”

“I’m curious to know why you thought it was an appropriate joke to tell my uncle Michael.”

If I told Michael that joke, it was because I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted him to like me. I wanted them all to like me. I wanted to be a Plotz. I wanted to be a Jewish Plotz who sat shiva and went to shul and made babies with Connie behind the bulwark of safety that was the Plotz extended family.

“Why,” I said, “is it anti-Semitic? It’s not anti-Semitic, is it?”

I was always paranoid that I might be saying something anti-Semitic.

“The man was sitting shiva for his mother,” she said.

“What?”

“Didn’t it occur to you that it might be bad timing?”

“No, Connie,” I said, “that’s not when I told him that joke. I wouldn’t have told him that joke then. I wouldn’t have told him any joke then. Who told you I did that?”

“I told you, it was a rumor. I didn’t give it a second thought.”

“And you shouldn’t now! Connie, come on, I wouldn’t have told Michael a joke while the man was sitting shiva. I have better sense than that.”

“Is that right, Paul Saul?” she said. “Tell me, please, all about your better sense.”

I left her to tend to a patient.

I had passed Carlton B. Sookhart’s Rare Books and Antiquities just off Park Avenue many times over the years and never dreamed I’d have reason to stop in. I did so that Friday. His office was part rare-books showcase, part cabinet of wonders. The main room was dressed in double-wide planks of Brazilian hardwood that howled underfoot like a splintering ship. A rolling ladder of matching hue tracked along the tall bookshelves where whispered all the dead and vital moments of human history. His desk was set off by a single step and a railing of twisting balusters as delicate as blown glass. Suspended behind him in Plexiglas sat an ancient sword with a gem-encrusted handle—“from the Crusades,” he said — and in the display case directly to his right, skulls aligned on one shelf obediently peered out into eternity. Our conversation began with an explanation of the rock on his desk, which looked like your average rock, no bigger than a baseball, but was in fact from a famous archaeological dig in Jerusalem. It now served Sookhart as paperweight. I felt sorry for any rock forced to leave a kingdom of buried secrets to sit on top of invoices in a cloistered room on Eighty-Second Street.

I told him about the appearance of an unsolicited website for my dental practice and the fraudulent postings made in my name.

“Have you heard of something called the Cantaveticles?” I asked him.

“The Cantaveticles,” he said. “What’s that?”

“A collection of cantonments?”

“And what is a cantonment?” he asked.

Every word was an inflection shy of a phony British accent. His shirtsleeves were turned up and his arms exposed to the elbow; as we talked, he stroked, a little obscenely, I thought, the copious white curls of his arm hair.

Sookhart had brokered many high-profile transactions over the years: one between a Jordanian and the Israel Museum for a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a second involving an original Gutenberg Bible. He served as seller’s agent in both deals. In the late nineties, his reputation suffered a blow when a private collector and thermal chemist accused Sookhart of forgery. Carbon testing proved his dating of a leaf of the Aleppo Codex (from the long-missing Torah section) was off by several centuries. The Internet is a treasure tomb.

I handed him a printout of my bio page, which prompted him to pat himself down before finding his reading glasses on his desk.

“No, no, this is all wrong,” he said once he’d finished and removed his glasses. “The Israelites didn’t attack the Amalekites. The Amalekites attacked the Israelites.” Quickly licking his thumb and index finger, he flicked through the King James on his desk with Google speed. “ ‘Remember what Amalek did unto thee… when ye were come forth out of Egypt; how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee… when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.’ ”

“My bio page says something about them attempting to convert.”

“To Judaism? Not likely. The Amalekites were godless savages. They only knew camel thieving.”

“What happened to them?”

“What happened to any of them?” he said, resuming running his fingers through his hair. “The Hittites, the Hivites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Edomites, the Jebusites, the Moabites. Did they assimilate into the dominant tribes? Did they evolve into Indo-Europeans? Or did they simply die out?”

“But there are four hundred left at the end of the story,” I said.

“According to this,” he said, indicating the printout. “But this is quite at odds with the biblical account, quite at odds indeed.”

“What’s the biblical account?”

“Those four hundred men are blotted out.”

“Blotted out?”

He smiled at me in a way that suggested pleasure in ancient bloodshed. “Extinguished. Exterminated. At God’s command, of course.”

He swiped his thumb across his wet tongue once more and shuffled again through his King James.

“ ‘And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon,’ ” he recited, “ ‘went to mount Seir… and they smote the rest of the Amalekites.’ ” He sat back. “The first genocide in documented history.”

I called up “my” comment on the Times website and read it to him.

“ ‘A people risen out of the ashes of the exterminated Amalekites,’ ” Sookhart repeated slowly. He stared at me while pensively finger-combing his flossy pets. “Now who’s that supposed to be?”

When I was in love with Sam Santacroce, I took an interest in Catholicism. I learned how the word “popish” became a slander and of all the prejudices Catholics faced when they first came to America. This was not a popish country, and the settlers and revolutionaries, who were almost exclusively of one Protestant stripe or another, openly doubted the patriotism of Catholics, because Catholics were naturally loyal only to Rome. Protestants did everything they could to keep Catholics out, and when that didn’t work, they kept them contained to (if memory serves) the newly formed state of Maryland. I was shocked. I never realized that there was such a violent divide between Christians, whose central figure was found most often (when not hanging dead from a cross) in the company of lambs and children. But in fact the Christians really distrusted and hated one another, and because the Santacroces were Catholic, because they were for me everything honest and good, with their epic egg hunts and shiny foreign sedans and a succession of dead dogs fondly recalled — everything, in other words, that America promised — I sided with the Catholics.

One night, after Sam and I had gotten back together, when I was more prone to finding fault with the Santacroces and yet still smitten with the idea of becoming one myself in flesh and spirit, of transforming myself into pure Santacroce sanctity, I said to Bob Santacroce, while a holiday party raged all around us, “I can’t believe how the Catholics have been treated over the years.” I proceeded to share with him some of the history I had learned when Santacroce mania was at its zenith. I cited the execution of Thomas More, the Whore of Babylon slander against the see of Rome, and the loyalty oaths designed to keep Catholics from holding local office here in America. “Then there was that whole Philadelphia Nativist Riot of 1844,” I said casually. I had yet to mention the unprecedented reassurances that candidate John F. Kennedy had had to offer the country that he would not be beholden to the pope. Bob Santacroce was a big man with dark blond hair and restless blue eyes who called me, with no intent to offend, I was assured, but for reasons I never comprehended, Hillary. “Yes,” he said, his eyes finding me again, there in front of him, which suddenly sparked a thought. “Hey, how’s the apartment working out for you?”

For all intents and purposes, Sam and I lived together, but to ease the complications of explaining to friends and family this scandalous premarital arrangement, the Santacroces offered to pay the rent on an apartment let in my name, which would sit empty but would provide her parents with some much-needed cover. When, however, the Santacroces would come to visit us — or when friends of Sam’s who had parents who were friends with the Santacroces, and who might spread gossip where it was least wanted, came to visit — I would be asked to spend some time at “my” apartment. I might be asked to spend the entire night there if it meant the Santacroces didn’t have to part with us in the evening with me still loitering around “Sam’s” apartment and be forced to reckon with the sinful implications. I agreed to maintain this illusion — me, of all people! — at Sam’s urging and under the passing influence of a sympathy for monstrous distortions. Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

“It’s working out fine,” I said to Bob. “It was nice of you guys to buy me the bed.”

“Well,” he said, “we figured you probably didn’t have much money left over after schoolbooks and whatnot.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I’m pretty broke most of the time.”

“And you don’t want to be sleeping on the floor.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t fun.”

“Hillary,” he said, “it’s time for me to find a new martini.”

Later on at the party, we listened to him share stories with a pair of old fraternity brothers of all the ways they had cheated on tests and papers during their days at Drexel University.

It was preposterous to expect a man so at ease in the world, so unburdened by its concerns, as Bob Santacroce to worry about wronged Catholics of a bygone era. He didn’t give a good goddamn about anti-Catholicism, which had never hindered him from making friends or acquiring wealth. That I felt these injustices keenly — that I took them personally because I looked at the Santacroces and failed to comprehend how such good people could be the target of anyone’s hate — was a confession of love I could not reasonably expect Bob Santacroce to puzzle out. And obviously I knew nothing about good timing or common sense. He was really just a simpleminded man with a winning personality who grabbed hold of opportunity and rode to fortune with a smile. And he had four martinis in him. If only I had been the kind of person who talked baseball at parties, I might have become his son-in-law.

When I met the Plotzes, I was determined to talk sports, weather, celebrity gossip, new car models, political scandals, the price of gasoline, the right putter, and a thousand other things of perfect inconsequence. I had taken a vow of restraint with Connie, which meant a vow of restraint with her family, which prohibited me from acting like a horse’s ass. And why not? I was thirty-six, an educated man, a successful dentist with a thriving practice. What did I have to prove? Before I came along, Connie had brought around a chigger’s feast of unwashed musicians and poets manqué who, I learned from offhand remarks, plundered the wine and felt up the sofa cushions. At least I drew a salary. All that was required of me to be tolerated at the Plotz family table was to smile and be respectful. In time that might lead to being accepted, even embraced. If I remained faithful to that simple approach, I told myself, they may even one day come to love me.

But the Plotzes were not predisposed to the peanut chatter of a Santacroce cocktail party. At Plotz gatherings, one Plotz talked over a second only to be shot down by a third. No casual approach to life here. They were thick in the politics of the day, both ours and Israel’s, and had opinions. Each opinion was offered more vigorously and with a fuller throat than the last, and each was a matter of life and death. Even trifles like books and movies and recipes and who parked where and why and how much time was put on the meter were matters of life and death. These were people who, their ancestors having worked as peddlers and merchants on the Lower East Side to put the next generation through night school, took nothing they’d earned for granted. They weren’t frivolous. I liked them for that and respected them more than I did the Santacroces. And so while I was disposed, by age and my own success and by lessons learned the hard way, to be more restrained, I was also completely taken by this excitable clan, by their lively talk, and by their solidarity — by my first experience with a family of American Jews.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn’t the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God — no small things — but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order. And so while it was not a word I used, when I fell in love with Connie and became acquainted with the Plotzes, I felt blessed.

Although I mostly kept myself in check, I did do one or two questionable things. I’ve already mentioned the compliments I handed out at Connie’s sister’s wedding and my enthusiasm dancing the hora. Then there was the time, with Connie just out of earshot, when I impulsively offered her uncle Ira and aunt Anne free dental care for life.

“Come in anytime,” I said, handing Ira my business card. “You don’t even need to make an appointment.”

Ira turned the business card over, scrutinizing the blank side, before handing it off to his wife.

“I have a dentist,” said Ira. “I need two?”

“The man is just trying to be nice, Ira,” said Anne, who waved off her husband’s remark and thanked me for my offer. “But it’s true,” she added. “We’ve been seeing the same dentist for twenty years. Dr. Lux. Do you know Dr. Lux?”

I shook my head.

“There’s no reason you should, he’s in New Jersey. They don’t make them any finer than Dr. Lux.”

“Well,” I said, “consider it a standing offer. You might need someone in an emergency.”

“If I had an emergency,” said Ira, “I’d call Lux.”

Anne frowned. “What he means to say is thank you,” she said to me.

Around that time I started studying Judaism. I would go to the library and read whenever I had the chance. It was never stories of the Romans (too remote) or the Nazis (too familiar) that got to me, but episodes of a smaller scale: a handful of Jews falsely accused of something absurd and killed and all their earthly goods immediately converted into cash by the local clergy; fifty Jews burned on a wooden platform in the cemetery, and their cries reported clinically in a Christian’s journal; children taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their mothers and fathers who were forced to watch as they burned. The world never seemed so wicked, so rabid, or so diseased, as in the pages of the history of the Jews. The world never seemed so irredeemable. And I’d want to say something to someone about it, something inadequate and likely to go over as well as my misbegotten attempt to connect with Bob Santacroce over anti-Catholicism, which, in the context of the history of anti-Semitism, was a luncheon on a riverboat. I wanted most of all to say something to Connie’s uncle Stuart. I don’t know why. His dignity, maybe, his prepossession. The strange impression he gave of eating very little, of having transcended food, of finding nourishment in other, higher-order things, in Torah and in silence. But I resisted these urges. Connie’s uncle Stuart didn’t need my apologies for historical injustices for which I could not reasonably be held to account. And I didn’t want him to think I was attempting to apologize or that I was pitying him and all the Jews that came before him. I just wanted him to know that I knew. But what did I know, exactly? Even if I knew everything — absolutely everything of Jewish history, Jewish suffering, Jewish theology, which was impossible — so what? I could go up to Uncle Stuart, I thought, and say, “I’ve been reading about the Crusades,” or “I’ve been reading about the pogroms,” or “I’ve been reading about the forced conversions.” But would I be saying something about the Crusades, the pogroms, and the forced conversions, or only something about myself? I suspected that, just as I had so earnestly done earlier with Bob Santacroce, I was really only saying something about myself. Unlike Bob Santacroce, however, Stuart Plotz gave a damn. I was afraid I’d start in soberly on these subjects, and Uncle Stuart would hear only, “The Crusades, hey! The pogroms, hey! The forced conversions, wow!” as if it were some kind of hit parade of outrage easy to be on the right side of at this late stage in history. I had vowed to keep a leash on my romantic empathies, and the history of anti-Semitism, the expulsion of Jews from France and Spain and England, the death of millions in the Holocaust — their magnitude encouraged that restraint, made it an imperative.

Then one night at a birthday celebration for Theo, a cousin of Connie’s, I made an error.

It’s not strictly true that I’ve been an atheist my whole life. Before my dad died, my parents were very indifferent parishioners of a Protestant church we attended maybe a handful of times, with no operating principle behind when we did or did not attend — except for one time when I was eight and we went six consecutive weeks, including Sunday school and Wednesday potlucks. It was my father’s idea, one of his lurching efforts to avoid an accident by running us all off the road. It was probably suggested to him that God was the answer to what ailed him, including his tendency to bring home all the irons for sale at the Sears and then stand over the sink and cry while my mom returned them. (Picture me during these episodes watching him from a healthy distance, as puzzled by adult behavior as I was unsettled by his crying.) Then, after his death, my mom, in what I imagine now to be one of many desperate attempts to organize her response to the inconceivable, cycled through a series of churches — the Baptist church, the Lutheran church, the Episcopal church, the Assemblies of God church, and the Disciples of Christ church, vanilla churches and evangelical churches, churches preaching damnation and churches preaching donation… and then back home again to sit on the sofa and mourn in the everyday way of most Americans: in the communal privacy of the TV.

During that time, however, I came to learn, from women who bent down and put their hands on their knees, from men in black who were always stacking chairs, and from old deacons who encouraged me to climb into their laps, that God was alive and present and looking over me. God was almighty and kind and took away all bad things. He had sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins, and Jesus would love me if only I let Him. If I loved Jesus with all of my heart, He would give me my dad back in a sweet place called heaven. Dad’s wounds would be healed and his sins forgiven. He would never again know sadness, Mom would love him and never cry, and in the afterlife the three of us would never be parted. And because I wanted to believe it so badly, for a time I believed.

It was around then that I learned a thing or two about Martin Luther. During Sunday school we were encouraged to consider Luther a kind of hero, the man who stood up to the pope and took back the Bible on behalf of the people. If I thought less of him during the brief time I sided with the Catholic Santacroces, I came to understand that Luther’s legacy was no less than America itself, with all its variegated Protestant creeds. In the context of the Jews, however, Luther was no hero. Luther believed that once he reclaimed scripture from the vice of the papacy and unleashed the full power of the Word at last, the Jews would immediately convert en masse. You almost had to admire the man’s giant ballsack. The Jews had not converted in the presence of Jesus, during the oppression of the Romans and the pillage of Jerusalem, inside the fires of the Crusades, or when Europe’s royalty stripped them of their wealth and sent them and their children to die in exile — but, thought Luther, if I hand them their own personal copy of the Gospels, that’ll do the trick. When the Jews failed to convert, he changed his opinion and sat down to write “On the Jews and Their Lies,” the title of which pretty much summed up his true feelings.

I really wanted to ask Connie’s uncle Stuart if he knew how irresponsibly and hatefully Luther had spoken of the Jews and how his writings had set the stage for roughly five centuries of unrepentant anti-Semitism and eventually the Holocaust. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Martin Luther’s outrageous pair of sweaty German balls. But he was too forbidding even then — and that was before he sat down beside me at Connie’s sister’s wedding and told me that joke. But I could not just say nothing, not after reading what I’d read about Luther and now seeing what I was seeing, the Plotz family in celebration. Here were all the Jews and their lies, here they were, those “poisonous envenomed worms,” in Luther’s words, gathered together to celebrate Theo’s birthday: Connie’s grandmother Gloria Plotz, blind from macular degeneration but smiling benignly at her grandchildren; her cousin Joel with his booming laugh; the baby sleeping in the arms of her sister Deborah; and her uncle Ira, who was standing off on his own, eating a cookie. “We are at fault in not slaying them,” Luther had concluded, speaking of people like these: aunts and uncles and cousins, present givers, drinkers of punch. I walked over to Ira.

“I’ve been reading about Martin Luther,” I said to him. He looked at me. “Did you know he wrote a pamphlet called ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’?” He raised his brows and kept them raised while he stared at me, chewing his cookie. “I’ve been reading it.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Why?”

“Because I had never read him before.”

He casually wiped at his beard with a paper napkin as he stared at me.

“He was a serious anti-Semite.”

After a while, he said, “And?”

“And he said terrible things. Look. I jotted some of them down.”

I took out the slips of paper the library had made available, upon which I had written some of Luther’s choicest quotes. I handed them to Ira.

“ ‘Whenever you see or think about a Jew,’ ” read Ira, “ ‘say to yourself as follows: Behold, the mouth that I see there has every Saturday cursed, execrated, and spit upon my dear Lord, Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; and also prayed and cursed—’ ” He cut himself off and looked at me. “Why did you write this down?”

I’d written it down because I was outraged that such things had ever been written down — that indeed they remained a matter of public record. But here I was writing them down myself on little scraps of library paper, and carrying them around with me, and taking them out to show people at parties. Suddenly I saw it through Ira’s eyes, and what I saw looked insane.

“You go around with these quotes in your pocket?”

“Not always,” I said.

“Nice quotes,” he said, and handed them back to me. Turning away, he spoke volumes of his opinion of me with just a little effort of his brows.

I could have said or done anything during that time. So it was possible, I thought later, wide-eyed with terror at three in the morning, that I did in fact tell Michael Plotz that joke, possibly even while he was sitting shiva for his mother.

While standing in line to buy cigarettes the morning I saw Sookhart, I noticed a headline on the cover of a celebrity magazine. “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” it read in big print, and my mind returned to it later that day while I worked on a patient. I didn’t know that Daughn and Taylor had gotten together, to mention nothing of them breaking up, and now, possibly, getting back together again. More troubling still, I didn’t know who Daughn and Taylor were. Daughn and Taylor… I thought to myself, Daughn and Taylor… who are Daughn and Taylor? It was clear that I should know them, given the significant real estate their debatable reconciliation had commanded on the cover of one of the more reputable celebrity magazines. But I didn’t know them, and not knowing them, I realized I was once again out of touch. I would be in touch for a while, and then a headline like “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” would come along to let me know that I was out of touch again. Why was I so out of touch? Well, I was old, for one. Also, I didn’t engage with the TV shows and movies and music videos of people like Daughn and Taylor. And I had a hard time finding and streaming the illicit sex tapes of people like Daughn and Taylor. Yet regardless of how little I cared to know about Daughn and Taylor, I felt left out. I now had an urgent need to know who Daughn and Taylor were. At the very least, I thought, I must find out if Daughn is the man in the relationship or if the man is Taylor. You can’t just make assumptions with names like Daughn and Taylor. I felt pretty confident that Daughn was the man, but I thought “Daughn” might be an alternative spelling of “Dawn.” Then Daughn would be the woman and Taylor the man. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, they were both men, or both women. In this day and age, the first-name-only couples coming under scrutiny on the covers of celebrity magazines don’t always consist strictly of a man and a woman. It could easily be a same-sex couple, like Ellen and Portia. Ellen and Portia I knew. Brad and Angelina I knew. Before Brad and Angelina, I knew Brad and Jen, and before Brad and Jen, I knew Brad and Gwyneth, just as before Tom and Katie, I knew Tom and Nicole, and before Tom and Nicole I knew Tom and Mimi. I also knew Bruce and Demi, Johnny and Kate, and Ben and Jennifer. How many celebrity couples I’d known and how out of date all of them had become! For the people now following Daughn and Taylor, Bruce and Demi were an ancient artifact of the 1980s. The 1980s were thirty years ago. The people now following Daughn and Taylor thought of the 1980s as I used to think of the 1950s. The 1980s had, overnight, become the 1950s. It was unimaginable. I might as well have been wearing a Davy Crockett hat and cowering under my desk for fear of a Soviet attack, according to the people now following Daughn and Taylor. Soon the 2010s would become the 1980s, and no one would remember even Daughn and Taylor, and after that, we’d all be dead. I had to find out who Daughn and Taylor were immediately, with great haste, my patient be damned. (I was suturing the mandibular gums during a badly needed graft.) I looked over at Abby. Abby would know who Daughn and Taylor were, I thought. I should ask her. But I can’t ask her, not if she’s so intimidated that she can’t even speak to me. No doubt she would just judge me for not knowing who Daughn and Taylor were, when everyone knew who Daughn and Taylor were. I could just picture her thinking, “He doesn’t know Daughn and Taylor? He’s so sadly out of touch. He is so sadly old and on his way out and depressing to even think about.” No way I was asking Abby. I’ll just have to sit here, I thought, finish these sutures, and feel the exile of age in America for another fifteen minutes until I can take up the me-machine and get myself back in—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie with her iPad.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

“Connie, it’s killing me,” I said. “Who are Daughn and Taylor?”

She looked at me like I’d just drunk a box of chlorine. “You don’t know Daughn and Taylor?”

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

She told me who they were. They were so minor!

I finished sewing up my gum graft and met her in the hallway.

“I just got a friend request,” she said.

“You mean on Facebook?”

“Yes, on Facebook.”

“Why are you telling me? What do I care? Listen, you want my advice? Friends are wonderful. Irreplaceable, really. Probably ultimately better than family. But next time you find yourself flicking through the contacts on your phone, ask yourself how many of those people are really your friends. You’ll find one, maybe two. And if you really start to scrutinize even those two, you may find that it’s been forever since you last talked, and now, in all likelihood, you’ve drifted apart and have nothing to say to each other. So if you’re asking my opinion, I say decline. Who’s it from?”

She held out the iPad. “You,” she said.

The picture of me on Facebook was another surveillance-grade photo. A telephoto lens had poked its eye through the window of room 3 while I was chairside with a patient.

My name was there, too: Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., Manhattan, NY.

Under “Activities and Interests,” it was written “Boston Red Sox.”

The Boston Red Sox, an activity and an interest. Not a devotion to be suffered. Not a solemn vow in the off-season. Not a memorial to a dead man. Not a calling beyond reason. Just an interest. I take an interest in when they play, whether home or away, whether they win or lose — things like that. Maybe read about it in the paper the next morning. Millions of others just like me, taking an interest. Not “Coronaries and Rehabilitations.” Not “Dedications and Forfeitures.” Not “Life and Death.” “Activities and Interests.” This was how it was presented, in terrifying simplicity. What it was all reduced to, the thirty years, and the stupid tears, and every extra inning. An activity and an interest.

I wasn’t just mad about the injustice done to my relationship with the Red Sox. Did I not have other interests? What about the banjo? Indoor lacrosse? Spanish? Before retiring my clubs, I’d paid an ironworks guy to remove three feet of railing from my balcony overlooking the Brooklyn Promenade, and on nights of chronic insomnia, I drove balls into the East River until the Port Authority boat came by with its telescoping light. Where was “river golf” under “Activities and Interests”?

In the summer of 2011, Facebook had only one toll-free number for users and nonusers alike to call if they encountered a problem or wished to voice a concern. The caller was greeted with this helpful message: “Thank you for calling Facebook User Operations. Unfortunately, we do not offer customer service over the phone at this time.”

I pressed a lot of buttons in hope of an extension, a human voice, but got nowhere.

No invention in the world, not the printing press or the telegraph, not the post office or the telephone, had done more to get people communicating than the Internet. But how did one person, the inaudible and insignificant single human voice, communicate with the Internet itself? To whom did it appeal an error? How did it seek redress?

“Why are you calling?” said Connie. “Who calls Facebook?”

“Shouldn’t they have some kind of customer service?”

“They don’t have customers.”

“A hotline? A complaint center? Shouldn’t you be able to pick up the phone and call your friends?”

“Let’s go to the site and see what they suggest,” she said.

“The site!” I cried. “This is outrageous. An activity and an interest! These soul-flattening fuckers!”

“Hey!”

I was screaming in Dolby. She nodded in the direction of the waiting room.

“Calm down.”

“Calm down how?” I whispered.

She looked at the screen a long time. “What is an Ulm?” she asked.

“A what?”

“An Ulm. You’re listed here as an Ulm.”

I looked at the iPad again. Fixated as I’d been on my “Activities and Interests,” I’d missed what “I” had listed as my religious affiliation: Ulm.

“That’s the thing Frushtick called me!”

“Who?”

“My patient! The guy who registered the website.”

“The one who said he was leaving for Israel?”

“He called himself an Ulm. He said I was one, too.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, but they’re going to think I am one.”

“Who is?”

“Anyone. Everyone. I’ve lost control, Connie. I’m helpless. Look at this! They’ve hijacked my life!”

“Just online,” she said.

I thought about the difference between my life and my life online.

“You can’t opt out,” I said.

“Opt out?”

“I tried to opt out, but you can’t opt out. Not anymore. I’m in it,” I said, looking down at my Facebook page. “And this is what I am.”

I called Talsman, who referred me to someone specializing in cyberlaw.

Then I wrote to Seir Design, forgoing anger, threats, promises of retaliation, for an appeal to the heart.

I don’t know what I’ve done to you, but it must have been really something, because you’re ruining my life.

I soon received this reply, only the second one, and much like the first.

What do you really know of your life?

I called Sookhart. He’d heard of Ulm, Germany, birthplace of Albert Einstein. But an ancient people descended from the Amalekites? He was doubtful.

“A second Semitic clan surviving from biblical times…” He trailed off. “I just don’t find it very likely.”

I asked him if he’d found out anything about this holy book, the Cantaveticles.

“I had a cursory look,” he said. “There’s nothing online, and I’ve never heard of it. I’ve made a few inquiries on your behalf, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I will give you this, though,” he added. “It almost sounds like something real.”

Late in the day I sat down chairside with a new patient who immediately informed me of his aversion to pain. We all have an aversion to pain, he said, but his was greater than most. As a rule he didn’t go to the dentist. The plastic doohickeys we put in his mouth for the X-rays were too much to bear, and he never let anyone clean or polish his teeth for fear of the pain. He just wanted to open his mouth, have me shine a light into it and assure him that he didn’t have mouth cancer. He had woken up a few months prior with what he thought was a canker sore or some other temporary whatever, which he expected to go away as mysteriously as it had appeared, but it had not gone away. It may have even grown some, he thought, over the days and weeks he’d been worrying it with his tongue. When I asked him exactly how many months he had been aware of the growth, he said a total of maybe six or seven. “Okay,” I said, “let’s have a look.” But he didn’t open his mouth. I’d never had anyone not open his mouth after I’d said, “Okay, let’s have a look.” He even sort of locked his jaw and pursed his lips and commenced to stare at me as if we had just met, sweaty and sexually deprived, in the middle of a ring. “I hope I’ve made myself clear,” he said. “I’m not here to see a dentist. I don’t give a damn if I have plaque buildup or gingivitis. I know it’s a wreck in there. You’ll want to do this and that. I don’t care. That’s the number one thing I want you to understand. I do not tolerate even the smallest bit of pain. And I don’t buy the anesthesia argument, either. After the anesthesia wears off, there’s pain, and I really, really can’t tolerate it. Is that absolutely clear?”

I handed the explorer back to Abby and held up my hands like a guy who’s just dropped his gun.

“Please say it out loud to reassure me,” he said. “Is it clear?”

“It’s clear,” I said.

He opened his mouth. He probably had six months to live.

After I referred that man to an oncologist, and after our last patient left for the day and blessed silence settled in again, the machines quiet and the TVs turned off, and each of my three employees at her individual tasks, I started cleaning. Cleaning was ordinarily Abby’s job, but I felt like doing some of it that night. I sterilized the chairs and wiped down the lights. I removed everything from the countertops and gave them a thorough bath. I scrubbed the sinks. I removed the medical-waste containers and the regular trash. I walked to the front desk to collect the trash there but got distracted by a stack of old patient charts. They had yet to be filed or had been filed a long time ago and were now displaced by newer files and being readied for storage. I picked one at random: McCormack, Maudie. Date of last appointment: 04/19/04. I tossed it into the garbage bag. I tossed all the files in that pile. I took a file off the shelf: Kastner, Ryan. Date of last appointment: 09/08/05. It, too, was tossed. I pulled down more patient charts and tossed them. Mrs. Convoy peered in with a cocked head. “What are you doing?” I ignored her. She took a step forward and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” I opened another garbage bag and tossed more files. She fished out a file from the first bag and opened it. “You can’t throw this away,” she said, inspecting it closely. “Do you see the date of last activity on this chart?” I ignored her, tossing more files, and she said, “All patient records must be retained for at least six years in accordance with section 29.2. This file is only four years old.” “I’m tossing it,” I said. “But you can’t. The ADA says…” She went on to tell me all sorts of things about the ADA. I didn’t give a damn about the ADA. I suddenly didn’t give a damn about rules, regulations, continuity of care, or professional liability. “These people need a fresh start,” I said. “I’m giving them all a fresh start.” “A fresh start?” she said. “Have you lost your mind?” I ignored her, tossing more files. Connie stood out on the periphery watching us. Mrs. Convoy had to open each file she rescued, in order to inspect the date of last activity, while I could grab five, six, a dozen at a time and toss them in. “Here is one from 2008,” she said. “You cannot dispose of this file. You have a professional obligation…” She went on to tell me of all my professional obligations. “2008 was a long time ago,” I said. “That clown’s not coming back here.” “How do you know that?” she asked. “You don’t know that.” I tossed more files as she tried to prevent me. I noticed that Abby was now standing just behind Connie, and that the two of them looked on as children do when they find their parents at each other’s throat. “They don’t come back,” I said. “None of them ever comes back. Not in time. Never.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. We have an extraordinary retention rate. You should be very proud of your retention rate.” She went on to tell me how very good my retention rate was compared with that of other dentists she had worked for and how proud I should be of it. I tossed more files. “Who cares if they come in? What difference does it make if they come in or not? No difference! None!” I grabbed twenty files and tossed them. “Stop!” she said. “What the hell are we doing with all these goddamn files!” I cried. “Paul!” she said. “Please! Stop!” I tossed one last file and then I went home.

Five

KARI GUTRICH, TALSMAN’S CYBERLAW expert, returned my call the following Wednesday. She informed me that I might be able to sue once the damage was done, but as for stopping it, that was almost impossible. The Internet moved too fast.

“What legal body,” she asked, “governmental agency, or law-enforcement bureau would you appeal to at the moment?”

“The police?” I suggested. “The courts?”

She laughed, I thought a little too heartily. “That’s good for out there,” she said. “But you’re in here now.”

“In here?”

The police, the courts — that was common sense, whereas we were discussing technology and the law. Future legislation might introduce stricter controls governing misappropriations, impersonations, defamations, and other disputes of character and online reputation, she said, but the current laws were vague on how to address those issues in real time. And people don’t have access to the courts just because they’re irritated.

“Irritated?” I said. “They’ve created a website for my practice, started a Facebook page in my name, took unauthorized photographs of me, creepy photographs, and now they’re using my name to comment all over the Internet, implicating me in some kind of religion, and the only legal claim I can make is to being irritated?”

“Do you know who’s doing this to you?”

“I know who registered the site,” I said. I gave her Al Frushtick’s name.

“We can probably get the site to come down,” she said. “But as a legal matter and, more important, as a practical matter, there’s just not much more we can do at the moment.”

I wanted to hit the wall in frustration.

“I can’t sue for defamation?” I asked.

“What damages have you suffered? We don’t fully know yet.”

She counseled me to do nothing, and to do it carefully. For if I did something, I might inadvertently call more attention to my new online existence, a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect: once people knew I was trying to suppress something published on the Internet, they would actively seek it out to see what all the fuss was about, which would create a negative feedback loop, more attention drawing yet more attention.

“Streisand? As in Barbra?”

“We have a best-practices worksheet we advise all our clients to follow,” she said. “Give me your email address and I’ll send it over.”

“Can you just fax it?” I asked.

Don’t engage, she cautioned me, despite how hard that might be, and let matters take their course. Later we could reassess the situation to determine what actionable complaint I might have.

She was looking at the website as we spoke. “You really didn’t make this site?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I really didn’t.”

“Well,” she said, possibly attempting to console. “At least it’s a nice one.”

I stood outside room 3 composing a reply to Seir Design on my me-machine. “Why do you keep asking me what I know about my life, Al?” I wrote.

And what business is it of yours, anyway? You’ve shown the limits of your knowledge by calling the Red Sox an “Activity and Interest.” I have no reason to even consider you so much as a man. You’re a program designed to scam me. Only a database would know that my middle name begins with C.

He (or they, or it) replied quickly:

My name’s not Al, Paul. And what I know about you goes much deeper than any database. I’m not a computer program, but a person with a beating heart, reaching across this divide to say I feel for you. I am your brother.

I wrote:

Betsy?

I deleted that and wrote:

What do you know about me, or think you know about me, “my brother”?

Irritated at receiving no reply, I kept at it.

Am I an indoor person or an outdoor person? Cat or dog man? Do I keep a journal? Watch birds? Collect stamps? Do I plan my weekends all in advance, pack them full of activity, and then sit back and watch them unfold? Or do I wait until they’re here and squander them? You don’t know. And why don’t you know? Because whatever you think you know is subject to change at my whim. I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Watch me break out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a cafe.

Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.

I meant “cage.”

He wrote back:

Here is what I know about your life. You’re an indoor man because your profession demands it. You feel estranged from nature, unable to access it. You’ve replaced it with television and the Internet, which come directly into your home, and supply your need for diversion even as they coarsen your instinct for the spirit. You don’t have kids because you feel untethered and uprooted, and you can’t imagine bestowing that legacy upon a child. You are too much in your own head, trying to unravel the mysteries. Sometimes they make you despair and you give up hope. However, there’s nothing wrong with being in your head. In your head, with your thoughts, you live a rich and complex life, full of anxieties and regrets, yes, but also tenderness, and fancy, and unspoken sympathy for others. There is a lot of emotion coursing through you at any given moment of the day, and maybe nobody knows it because nobody can read your mind, but if they only knew, if they knew, they would say, He’s alive, all right, he’s alive. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Or can you?

“Dr. O’Rourke?” she said. She might have been saying it for a while. “Paul?” she said.

It was Connie. I let the hand with the phone fall to my side.

“Is everything okay?”

I nodded. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

I waited until she walked away. Then I wrote:

How do you know all that?

He replied:

I told you. I am your brother.

It might seem that a dental professional can never really get to know his patients because visits are so infrequent and short-lived, but you’d be surprised. When someone is religious about regular checkups, and between those checkups has toothaches and accidents and cosmetic needs and thus requires additional work, a warm rapport can easily develop. Some patients even thank me after the most brutalizing treatments, genuinely grateful for what I do for them. When next they come in, I will ask about their jobs and their families before getting down to business. It’s almost small-town that way.

That morning, when I walked in on Bernadette Marder, despite having worked on her for nearly ten years, I honestly thought she was a first-time patient. She looked so much older than the last time I saw her.

The sight of Bernadette looking old reminded me of a joke. A woman makes an appointment with a new dentist and discovers that he has the same name as someone she went to high school with. She wonders if her new dentist could be the boy she had such a terrible crush on when she was a girl of fifteen. But when he walks in, he’s such an old fart that she quickly comes to her senses. Even so, after the exam is over, she idly asks him what high school he attended… and sure enough, it’s the one she attended! “What year did you graduate?” she asks him, growing excited, and he names the very year she graduated. “You were in my class!” the woman exclaims, and the unsuspecting dentist screws up his eyes and peers at the old hag in the chair and says, “What did you teach?”

My patient, Bernadette Marder, looked so hideously old, so hideously and prematurely aged since the last time I’d seen her, that all her most stressful and trying years might have been crammed into six months. She had gone from forty to sixty-five in a mere hundred and eighty days. Her hair had thinned out and just sort of died on the top of her head. A scaly pink meridian divided one limp half from the other. An array of wrinkles, radiating from her pale lips, had deepened and fossilized, and her face sagged. And yet when I realized (thanks to the name on the chart) that it was Bernadette, my Bernadette, and not some first-time geriatric patient, and asked how she was doing, she told me she’d never been happier. She had just gotten married, in fact, and had been given new responsibility at work, which came with a small raise. I couldn’t comprehend it. Never happier, newly married, making more money, and looking like death. Almost impossible to track on a day-to-day basis, the passage of time is at work on people unremittingly. As a dentist seeing familiar faces only once every six months, I became acutely aware of it. It is the inexorable truth of our existence on earth, and if it is happening to Bernadette Marder, I was made to realize once again, it is also happening to us — to Abby, Betsy, Connie, and me — though it remains elusive, indeed invisible, so that, presumably, we will not all stop in horror and stare and point at one another until the screaming begins. No, we carry on, as Bernadette was doing, dwelling happily in a constant present that persisted day after day even as it continually perished, never demanding a sober assessment, or a sudden outburst of pity, or the radical reconsideration of everything.

Looking at Bernadette in the chair, sallow, wrinkled, bald, and happy, I felt I had no choice but to tell her. But tell her what? I didn’t know. What good would it do, what action could she take? She was being consumed in some way, literally consumed before my very eyes, and no one, probably for fear of offending her, had said anything. As a medical professional, it was my obligation to do so. I just didn’t know how to put it into words. No matter how well intentioned, I might only end up offending her and then losing her as a patient. Did I want to sacrifice Bernadette’s billings to my observation that she appeared to be growing older faster than the rest of us? No, I thought. I will just ignore it. But how can anyone in good conscience ignore it? “Bernadette,” I said, and she turned to me in the chair. You’ve grown old, Bernadette. No, I couldn’t say that! Bernadette, your best days are over, it’s all downhill from here. Good God, no! You’re fucking dying, Bernadette! No! You’re practically decomposing on a cold slab! Oh, God, she was looking at me so intently now, I had to say something.

“Bernadette,” I said, “I mention this only out of…” I stopped and began again, saying, “Bernadette, have you, or your new husband perhaps, noticed that, well, how shockingly—”

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

“Oh, Connie!” I exclaimed.

“When you have a moment,” she said.

I looked happily down upon Bernadette. “That’s Connie,” I said. “I must go and talk to her.”

But on my way over, I saw that she was holding her iPad, which could only mean more unpleasantness.

“What is it this time?” I said.

“Twitter,” she said.

In the last week, the comments, messages, and postings made in my name continued to appear on respectable sites like ESPN, HuffPost, National Geographic, while expanding into darker recesses, into fringe chat rooms, unmoderated forums unfurling sex and death, my brand proliferating across platforms, burrowing ever deeper into the shallows… and now, two weeks after the O’Rourke Dental website appeared, “my” first tweet entered the world. It came from the account of @PaulCORourkeDental (New York, NY www.drpaulcorourke.com) and it read:

Error and misfortune arise in the world from the belief that God’s chief aim for creation is universal belief

Connie and I puzzled over that one awhile.

“I think you’re saying you shouldn’t believe.”

“I’m not saying anything,” I said.

“I know it’s not you, Paul,” she said. “You don’t have to keep insisting.”

“I just want to make clear—”

“I know it’s not you. There’s no reason to be defensive.”

“I’m not being defensive, I’m being pissed off!”

“You sound defensive,” she said.

I read the tweet again. I thought she was right. I was advocating, or my impostor was advocating, possibly on behalf of God, against belief. I fired off another email while Connie watched.

Twitter now, huh? Why are you doing this to me?

I handed the iPad back to her, and she read the tweet again.

“You know what it sounds like to me?” she asked, before walking away.

“What?”

“Something an atheist would say.”

I knew I was in love with the Plotzes when I felt embarrassed to be an atheist, and instead of insisting upon it as a declaration of my essential self, around them I kept it under wraps. Rejecting God seemed an affront to their entire way of life, at least as I understood it: to the prayers sung on Friday night, to the commandments kept on the Sabbath, to every God-directed effort made throughout the week. They worked hard at their faith. They made it as much about the body as the soul. Sure, the Catholics crossed themselves upon entering the church, they touched holy water, they knelt before climbing into the pew, but these were but the throat clearings of a proper Plotz. The old-timey sway-and-song of charismatic Protestants was a set of Plotz knee bends. That’s why it came as such a surprise when Connie told me that Ezzie, another uncle, was an atheist. I was really shocked. I’d watched the guy. He looked as devout as the rest. “He doesn’t believe in God?” I asked. “Nope.” “Why not?” “Because… I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask him.” I wasn’t going to ask any Plotz about atheism. “Is it because of the Holocaust?” I asked. She looked irritated by the question. “Not every Jew who doesn’t believe doesn’t believe because of the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t have a specifically Jewish set of reasons for not believing. Hello?” she said, pointing to herself. “Sometimes we just don’t believe.” “But Ezzie acts like he believes,” I said. “He bows his head. He wears the whatchamacallit. He goes to synagogue.” “But that’s different,” she said. “What’s different?” “Of course he does those things.” “Why?” “Because it’s important to him. He’s a Jew, it’s important.” “Because of the Holocaust?” “What is it with you and the Holocaust? Do you think everything we do centers around the Holocaust?” “No.” “The Holocaust, sure, a very big deal. But it was a while ago. We don’t wake up every morning asking ourselves what we should or shouldn’t be doing on account of the Holocaust.” “Sorry,” I said. “It’s new to me.” “Ezzie’s an atheist,” she said. “Why? I don’t know. Why are you an atheist?” “Because God doesn’t exist.” “Well, there you have it. That’s probably what Ezzie would say, too.”

But why did it remain important for him to go through the motions? More than that: to actively and willingly participate in customs and rituals whose essential purpose was the glorying of God?

Who cared! What a way to be an atheist! When you were born a Christian and raised a Christian and then slowly awoke from the dream song of Christianity to face its philosophical absurdities and moral outrages, you stopped doing everything you once did (which was very little to begin with, maybe a little prayer, a little Bible study, a little church on Palm Sunday) and sat alone with your disbelief — conscientious, yes, and principled, but also a little bereft, left to make meaning on your own and to locate a source of continuity somewhere in the structureless secular world. Not Ezzie. Ezzie could pop by Rachel and Howard’s house on a Friday night and just jump in and do it all and then pop out again, spiritually restored but still on firm ground. He wanted to do such things. He had an obligation, as a Jew, if only out of loyalty, to continue a tradition that had received its share of knocks, or more practically to remain connected to his family, his childhood, his forefathers, his people. To remain connected! I didn’t know why he did it, but that, I thought, would be reason enough. And reason enough to make an atheist like me envious of all Ezzie could discard and still hold dear to his heart.

It was different with Mrs. Convoy. With Mrs. Convoy, I was a big loud brawling debunker. I wanted her to confront the follies of the Bible and to face the plain reality of a world without God. So I’d avail myself of the arguments, and she’d say to me, “But how do you know?” I’d avail myself of more of the arguments, and she’d say, in a slightly different tone, “But how do you know?” And I’d avail myself of still more of the arguments, and still she’d say, “But how do you know?” What we were really arguing about, of course, was how we should define the word “know.” But in the heat of debate we skipped right over that. She knew I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that I knew as she insisted I know (a higher standard of knowing than she demanded of herself), which left the door cracked open to the most maddening of counterarguments: “How — do — you — know?”

So I asked her one time, I said, “Okay, Betsy.”

We were having dinner at an Olive Garden in a mall in New Jersey. She was sipping her customary glass of Chardonnay, I was on my fourth beer. I liked going to the Olive Garden now and then. It reminded me of my childhood. I liked going to the mall for the same reason. I no longer went to the mall to buy things, as Mrs. Convoy did. Nowhere in America would I find that one thing I had not yet purchased at least once in my life. No, I was done buying, I was done wanting. Wanting all the time, for everything, it’s numbing. But I still went to the mall with Mrs. Convoy. In the vast whirring spaces of a mall, overlooking the sloping carpeted ramps, I felt at home more than I did anywhere in Manhattan. Whenever I was homesick or nostalgic, when others left for Long Island or upstate New York, I visited the malls in New Jersey and sometimes went as far as the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia, where I walked the wide aisles with the hordes and bargain hunters. I liked nothing more than to sit on a bright mesh bench in the middle of all that sack rustle and watch people come and go from the Foot Locker, I liked nothing more than to stroll along the kiosks of sunglasses and affordable jewelry, I liked nothing more than a food court. Here is where, growing up, I had made the most of things. Here at the mall every August my mother bought me back-to-school clothes, here at Christmastime I coveted the toys we couldn’t afford, here I filled my empty summer hours with something more than strife and television and the smell of dogs. The mall was always beckoning, and I had wandered it with purpose. The mall itself was my purpose. If I had a few coins to scratch together, I could turn them into a Coke or a high score on a video game or an illicit smoke in the parking lot. And now a mall returned me to a time when desire was easy to resolve. Look, it was still working for so many of them! There they were, with their lists and missions, their handbags and gift cards, moving with oblivion in and out of the stores. A mall can make you feel alive again if you go there only to watch and if you watch without judgment, looking kindly upon the concerted shoppers, who have no choice about buying or not buying, it would seem, and who would not want that choice — not if it meant no longer knowing what to want.

“According to you,” I said to Mrs. Convoy at the Olive Garden, “and correct me if I’m wrong here, but according to you, the only way into the kingdom of heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. Now Connie, as you know, is Jewish. Her whole family is. Which means, among other things, they reject Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. And I happen to be very fond of the Plotzes,” I said to her. “I’ve never met a family like theirs before. There’s about four hundred of them, while in my family, there was just the three of us, and then, kaplow, just the two. But anyway, you would, if I’m not mistaken, have the Plotzes burn in hell because they don’t accept the divinity of Jesus Christ. Is that correct?”

Mrs. Convoy sipped her Chardonnay, then set the glass down, reclined back in her chair, and narrowed her eyes at me.

“It’s not a trick question,” I said. “You insist, do you not, that Connie, with all her family, will be pitched into the boiling waters of hell upon death because they don’t believe in Christ.”

“How do you know,” she asked me, leaning forward, whispering her thoughtful reply across the table, a reply that chilled me to the bone, “how do you know that at the very last second of Connie’s life, Jesus Christ doesn’t open her heart and she converts?”

For the record: I did not become an atheist to be smug. I did not become an atheist so that I could stand above believers and shout my enlightenment down at them. I become an atheist because God didn’t exist. The only god I cared to entertain, which came to mind in the Olive Garden when Mrs. Convoy confided in me her private solution to the Jewish problem, had personally approved a bumper sticker I once saw on the back of an old Saab parked in downtown Boston. BELIEVERS MADE ME AN ATHEIST, it read.

“Why am I doing this to you?” he wrote at last. “Because you’re lost.”

“Lost?” I replied.

What business is it of yours if I’m lost? You don’t know me. You’re just saying things to make me think you do. The most obvious things. All that stuff about being alive inside my head, feeling intensely though no one knows it — that’s so obvious. This is some kind of scam you’re running and I want to know why. Unless it’s you, Betsy. Is it you? Connie, is this you?

I promise you, Paul. It’s no scam. Please, be patient. I know it must be uncomfortable for someone to pop up out of nowhere and diagnose your troubles with pinpoint accuracy. I don’t think you’re an animal in a cage — far from it. You’re the full measure of a man, thoroughly contemporary, at odds with the American dream of upward mobility and its empty material success, and in search of real meaning for your life. I should know, Paul, I was there once, too. In fact, you might even say that you and I are one and the same.

As I was reading, I had the feeling that something was off. An unease just under the skin. I had the weird sensation that he was in the room with me. Or on a computer on the other side of the wall. I looked closely at his email address.

“He’s writing to me under my own name,” I said.

“Who is?”

“He’s created an email in my name. This person… or… program… whatever it is who… he’s pretending to be me in his private correspondence. He sent me an email from myself.”

I looked up. I had said all of this to Mrs. Convoy.

“Who are you talking about?”

If I didn’t know from her physical proximity when the email from “Paul C. O’Rourke” landed in my in-box that it was not Mrs. Convoy, I knew it from her guileless and unblinking stare.

“I don’t know,” I said.

A few days later Connie came up to me and said, “Have you really never used Twitter before?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve really never used Twitter before.”

“How many characters do you have to work with?”

“In Twitter?”

“Yes, in Twitter.”

“A hundred and forty.”

“So you know that much.”

“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Connie. Everyone knows that much.”

“Have you been following your tweets the last couple of days?”

“Kari Gutrich told me not to engage.”

“Who’s Kari Gutrich?”

“Kari Gutrich, Esquire. Talsman’s cyberlaw expert. She said engaging could only make things worse. So that’s what I’m doing, not engaging.”

“You mean you’re just going to let someone say whatever he wants in your name and not even keep track of it?”

“That lawyer was very frightening,” I said. “I don’t want to make matters worse than they already are.”

“You’re not going to make them worse just by looking.”

“I don’t know that. I don’t know how the Internet works.”

“What do you mean you don’t know how the Internet works? You’re on your phone every five seconds.”

“That’s you! That’s not me! That’s you!”

She took a step back using only her neck. “Okay,” she said, “calm down.”

“We couldn’t go to dinner without you spending half the meal reading your goddamn phone!”

“Okay, okay, I know,” she said. “We’ve cataloged my failings. I checked my phone too often. Can we move on?”

She looked down at the iPad in her hand. I could see that she was on Twitter, not because I was a Twitter user, but because I sometimes went to Twitter to read boggswader’s pithy commentaries and Owen from Brookline’s statistical revelations.

“I’ll just take a few at random,” she said, and she began to read.

Of all the species of vanity man indulges in, none is so vain as worship

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

“I said that?”

“ ‘You’ said that. ‘You’ also said: ‘Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.’ ”

“Is that really under a hundred and forty characters?”

“Are you starting to see?” she asked me.

“See what?”

“This person on Twitter who’s not you? He sounds an awful lot like you.”

“You think it’s me? You think I’m doing this?”

“I’m just saying,” she said.

“Nobody who says she’s just saying is ever just saying,” I said. “It’s not me, Connie. I’m not even engaging.”

“You’ve been on your phone all morning.”

“It just so happens,” I said, “that we lost to Kansas City last night. It’s important for us all to debrief, okay? Let me see that thing.”

She handed me the iPad. I read:

The world whips us with scorn, we are chased to the edges, we approach the brink of extinction

“Did I write that, too?” I asked. She didn’t respond.

If you must bathe, do so no more than twice weekly, and never by full immersion

“How about that one?” I asked.

“That one…” She trailed off.

“I just hate it when people fully immerse,” I said.

“That one’s less likely,” she conceded.

“It’s not me, Connie,” I said, handing the iPad back to her.

But could I blame her? All those tweets were in my name.

The only Plotz to take me up on my offer for free dental care was Jeff, a distant cousin of Connie’s. Or so I thought when I made him the offer. As it turned out, he was just a neighbor from a long time ago. But he was still close to the Plotzes — or his family was close to the Plotzes. Stuart Plotz and Jeff’s father, Chad, were in business together (they owned a stationery store or manufactured paper or something).

Jeff was a reformed drug addict who now counseled fellow druggies at a state facility. The condition of his mouth was pretty much what you’d expect. It wasn’t the worst boca torcida I’d seen, but it wasn’t a bouquet of roses, either. Treating patients with a history of chemical dependence is no walk in the park. You can’t load them up on nitrous oxide and then send them off with a month’s supply of Percocet and Vicodin. Jeff and I agreed to keep his pain management confined to nonopioid analgesics, which meant he winced his way through an hour’s repair work while his lower body squirmed about like a zombie’s twitching back to life. I kept up a running commentary to calm him down. I told him who I was, I mean who I really was, in case he was interested, which I thought he might be, seeing how I was dating his cousin. (She wasn’t his cousin.) I hadn’t been able to tell any of the Plotzes who I really was, I mean the me who was himself when not around the Plotzes, because they were always busy being themselves, which is to say vociferous, strong willed, and insular. They were extraordinarily polite and welcoming, but in the long run there wasn’t much they cared to know about the new guy. If I had been part of a family like theirs, odds are I would not have had much time for the new guy, either. What could the new guy do for me that was not already being done by a dozen family members always ready to offer me their encouragement, criticism, advice, censure, and love, often in the same breath?

With Jeff in the chair, I could finally assert myself with a captive audience, albeit one bleeding excessively and staring in wide-eyed terror. I told him that I was first and foremost a Red Sox fan. I told him that my love of the Red Sox wasn’t uncomplicated. The single happiest night of my life came in October of 2004 when Mueller forced extra innings with a single to center field and, more spectacularly, David Ortiz homered in the bottom of the twelfth, halting a Yankees’ sweep of the American League Championship and initiating literally the most staggering comeback in sports history, culminating in a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to take the World Series. It was a validation of all those years of suffering, the cause of an unexpected euphoria, and a total cataclysm. Sometime in 2005, I told Jeff, the unlikely fact that the Red Sox had won finally sank in, and a malaise crept over me. I wasn’t prepared for the changes that accompanied the win — for instance, the sudden influx of new fans, none of them forged, as it were, in the fires of the team’s eighty-six-year losing streak. They were poseurs, I thought, carpetbaggers. With this new crop of fans I worried that we would forget the memory of loss across innumerable barren years and think no more of the scrappy self-preservation that was our defining characteristic in the face of humiliation and defeat. I worried we would start taking winning for granted. And I didn’t care for us poaching players and wielding power in the fashion of our enemy. It was difficult, I told Jeff, to find myself ambivalent, even critical, toward a team that had for years received from me nothing but unconditional devotion. We were underdogs, we knew only heartbreak and loss: how could I be expected to shift, practically overnight, to an attitude of entitlement? There was an Edenic weirdness to the whole thing, the same feeling that must have dogged Adam after Eve’s arrival: what should I wish for now? What should I want? I wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series more than anything in the world, I told Jeff, whose gum pockets were as loose as the dentures on a dockside whore, until they crushed the Yankees in truly historic fashion and swept the Cardinals, and then I wanted everything to go back to the way it was, so that I would know who I was, what made me, and what it was I’d always wanted.

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.

What does that mean to you? Are you a good Irish lad who sings “Danny Boy” at your local, shoulder to shoulder with the other pseudo-Irish who have never left New York? Or do you hate parades and think green beer is a bad idea? These are vital questions, Paul, having to do with your sense of heritage, your religious affiliation, your place in the world. Do you feel something is missing? Does it gnaw at you at night?

If you feel disconnected, if you feel displaced, I’m here to tell you that there’s a reason for that. And it’s not because you’re “difficult,” or “moody,” or whatever else people have called you throughout your life. Your “difficulty” is explained by your displacement. The more intense the displacement, the more difficult you become. This is a pattern I’ve very much noticed. Is any of that accurate? My apologies if it’s not. You might have found a way to be perfectly happy despite all.

Yours,

Paul

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:

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 which 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.

When I was filling a cavity or doing a root canal or extracting a tooth that was beyond repair, I’d think, This could have been prevented. I’d fall back on my old cynical view of human nature: they don’t brush, they don’t floss, they don’t care. A fox is a fox is a fox. But when they did brush and floss and still lost a tooth, I had to blame something else, and just as predictably, I’d point the finger at cruel nature or an indifferent God. I was always saying bad oral health was entirely in their control, unless I was saying that it was entirely out of their control. Then one day I had a patient come in, lived around the corner in one of the few remaining low-income housing complexes on the Upper East Side, worked construction, his hands the hands of a blind strangler, no effort beforehand to remove the chewing tobacco encrevassed between his teeth, and while I was at work on a little local train wreck in the upper-left quadrant, I let my mind wander. This guy probably had poor genes, ignorant parents, a mean childhood. He was never going to take care of his teeth. He never stood a chance of taking care of them. He was going to neglect them until they fell out or he died. Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings — God knows I’d tried — and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant. The man in the chair was lord over his best impulses no more than he was king of his worst instincts. Change or no change, his fate was out of his hands. The only question that ever remained was: are you a fox, or something better?

“Dear Paul,” he wrote.

I’m sorry you’re so upset. There’s so much you have yet to grasp. We have nothing against the Jews. Anti-Semitic? No. When in our history would we have had the freedom to pursue hate of any kind? No one in history is more qualified to identify with the Jews and their considerable tragedies than the Ulms. We aren’t the Jew’s enemy, Paul. We are the Jew’s Jew.

The Jew’s Jew? What is that?

Do you know of the escépticos driven into hiding by Alfonso the Wise? Has the Lodz Massacre been brought to your attention? Have the Ulm! Ulm! Riots of 1861 been discussed in your history classes? Has the execution, by British forces, of all Ulms living in Israel, to inaugurate the Jewish state in accordance with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, been so much as a faint shadow in your most distant dream? Do you know how close we are and ever have been to extinction? Say what you will about the tragedies of the Jews. At least they have been documented.

The next morning, I was working on a patient while thinking about a headline in one of the celebrity magazines. It was actually more like a subheadline, which read, in response to Rylie’s announcement that she was pregnant with twins, “Rylie has always wanted to have two babies at once.” They had interviewed Rylie (“Exclusive!”), who confessed that for as long as she could remember, she had always wanted to have two babies at once. Not just one, and not two at different times, but two at once, boom boom. Even when she was three, when she was seven, and then when she was ten, Rylie had wanted to have two babies at one time. It was a childhood dream that kept persisting even as she turned sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, and now, believe it or not, she was pregnant with twins. At last Rylie’s dream was coming true, having two babies at once at last. And how better to share that dream come true with the world than on the cover of a celebrity magazine, under the larger headline “Twins!”

I was thinking about Rylie and her twins and the subheadline announcing the fulfillment of her lifelong dream when Connie appeared in the doorway. I pretended not to see her.

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

I pretended not to hear her.

“Dr. O’Rourke, when you get a minute,” she said.

“Okay, Mr. Shearcliff,” I said, after dithering in Mr. Shearcliff’s mouth a little longer and finding nothing to detain me. “You can sit up and spit now.”

Reluctantly I walked over to Connie. She wanted to discuss my latest tweet.

My dream is to overcome my terrifying inhibitions one day, and sing on the subway with my banjo

“You’ve said that to me,” she said. “You’ve used those very words.”

I didn’t know where to begin.

“This is maddening!” I said. “That’s not me!”

“Who else could it be?”

“I swear to God, Connie.”

“This is you, Paul.”

“No, it’s not, I swear to God.”

“Is this some weird game you’re playing to get me back?”

“Get you back? I broke up with you.”

She cocked her head.

“The first time I did.”

“Why are you writing these things?”

“I’m not! Look, I can prove it.”

I dug out my me-machine and showed her the email exchanges between me and my double. I made sure she saw the part where I confessed to him my desire to get on the subway and sing.

“How do I know this isn’t you?”

“Emailing with myself?”

“It’s not hard to create an email account.”

“That’s my point! He created one in my name and used it to write me.”

“Why did you write back?”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “You think I’m emailing with myself. I’m not emailing with myself.”

“What’s this one?” she asked.

She held the phone up so I could read.

“Is that why you thanked me for the desk flowers?” she said. “Because some stranger pretending to be you told you to in an email? Paul,” she said, “do you need help?”

I took the phone out of her hand.

“It’s not me, Connie, honest to God.”

She walked away. Then she came back.

“If that’s the case,” she said, “if it’s really not you saying all this crap, then what’s happened to your outrage? You were out of your mind when you thought they had made you into a Christian. Now you’re this other thing, this weird other thing, and somehow that’s okay? You’re emailing back and forth with the guy? You’re letting him tweet in your name? You have a Facebook page, for God’s sake! Where’s the old you, Paul? I wouldn’t question it if I could locate the old Paul somewhere.”

“He’s right here,” I said. “He’s still outraged.”

“If your fight against the modern world was going to end, and you were always going to tweet and blog and all the rest of it, why not tell everyone who you really are — a great dentist, and a true Red Sox fan — and not this… this…?”

She threw up her hands and walked away.

Mrs. Convoy was in room 2 prepping an impacted molar while in room 3 a chronic bruxer with a hypertrophied jaw was waiting for me to treat the eroding effects of his grinding and clenching. I couldn’t find an iPad. You buy the newest technology for the office, and then you spend the rest of your time trying to locate it. Or figure out how it works. Finding it or figuring it out becomes more important than tending to patients. It becomes a personal imperative, finding and using the thing you’ve spent thousands of dollars on or figuring out how to work the thing that’s so invaluable to your practice. Who gives a shit about the patient? It’s like the patient just disappears. You’re not even there yourself, really. You’re in this weird hermetic world where it’s just you and the machine, and the question is, who’s gonna win?

I entered room 5 and came upon another patient. He was obviously in a lot of pain, telling from the moaning. Looking high and low for a spare iPad, I heard him take a deep breath and then go, “Ah-rum… ah-rum.” I turned slowly, and sure enough, it was him. “You!” I cried.

I reached down, grabbed Al Frushtick by the collar, and lifted him into the air.

“Dr. O’Rourke!” he hollered. “God help me, I’m in so much pain!”

I refused to treat him until he explained everything.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Israel?”

“It didn’t work out! I came back. And now I’m in big trouble! You’re the only dentist I trust. You have to help!”

“I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Why did you create a website in my name?”

“Are you kidding me? I couldn’t create a website in my own name! This is just some big misunderstanding!”

“My lawyer looked into it, pal. You’re listed as the registrant. And before you left, you called yourself an Ulm and said I was one, too. So don’t act dumb.”

“Treat me first,” he cried, “oh, please!”

I still had his collar balled in my hand and his shoulders raised well off the chair. I grabbed a pair of forceps with my spare hand and started probing his nostrils.

“Okay,” he muttered weepily. “Okay, okay.”

I set him down.

He smoothed out his rumpled shirt and winced again at the aching tooth.

“I’m sure they have your family records,” he said, “and I’m sure they’re as thorough as anyone’s.”

“My family records?”

“Everything you’ve wanted to know,” he said, “whether you’ve known it or not: who you are, where you come from, to whom you belong. To whom you belong, Doctor.” Forgetting the tooth, he smiled at me, then quickly resumed wincing. “But that’s not how they’re going about things now. By now they have enough reclaimants. They’re interested in finding out who among the reclaimed will elect the old way of life on the strength of the message alone.”

“What is a reclaimant?”

“Someone reclaimed from the diluted bloodlines and forced conversions of the diaspora. Haven’t they been in touch with you?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s irresponsible,” he said and, with one swipe to the left and one swipe to the right, expressed dismay in the crisping up of his wilting mustache hairs. “I think that’s irresponsible. But they have their reasons. Listen,” he said. “If they won’t tell you, I will. You belong to a lost heritage. A counterhistory. Your genes prove it: that’s where our history resides. It’s inescapable, it extends back hundreds of years. I don’t have your specific details, but I’m sure Arthur does.”

“Who’s Arthur?”

“Grant Arthur. He’s the one who found you. You belong,” he said. “You’re as old as the Egyptians and even older than the Jews.”

“I should knock your teeth out for the things you people are saying about the Jews!”

“Wait!” he cried, gripping the arms of the chair and throwing his body back, away from my fists. “What are we saying about the Jews? Nothing bad! We feel a kinship with the Jews. We use the Jews as a point of reference, that’s all. Do you think we should use the Native Americans? I find them more apropos, personally. The accusation of heathenry, the mass slaughters, the subsequent history of alcoholism and suicide. The squalor of a once-great nation. But they lack a global reach. The history of the Jews is a helpful comparison, that’s all. Suffering shouldn’t be a competition.”

“It sounds like a competition when you read about it on Twitter,” I said.

“On Twitter,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Hey, this outreach is really happening.” He ruminated a moment, scratching, with nervous automation, the pale groove that ran between the two halves of his mustache from nose to lip. “There was a lot of debate about the dangers of calling attention to ourselves. But Twitter… that’s significant. Well,” he said. “Anyway. Does that help clarify things?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Why are you here?”

He shot me a look full of incomprehension. “Why am I here? Why am I here?! Doctor, turn on that light and look inside this poor mouth!”

“You said you were leaving for Israel. What happened?”

He shook his head and sighed and reached up for his mustache again, stroking it this time with deliberate melancholy.

“You’re a sadist, Doctor. A real sadist. I come in here, a Scud missile bearing down on my nerve, and you demand that I share the story of my greatest spiritual failure. Is this what you call compassion?”

I leaned back against the sink, crossed my arms, and swung one ankle over the other.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “In the end, I couldn’t do it. It’s been too long. I was raised a Christian. All those years of prayer. I have the God gene, I guess, for good or ill.”

“You mean you couldn’t doubt?”

“I had every reason to.” He sat up and tucked his feet under his legs in some kind of Eastern position. “Have you heard of Cliff Lee, the geneticist? Dr. Clifford Lee, of Tulane University?”

Frushtick explained that Dr. Clifford Lee had held the Howard Rose Professorship at the Hayward Genetics Center of Tulane University in New Orleans for years until Grant Arthur revealed to him that he was an Ulm. A year later, Lee relocated his family to Israel to work on isolating the genetic particulars of the Ulms. His work, according to Frushtick, who suddenly spoke with all the technical command of a scientist, centered around modal haplotypes, microsatellites, and unique event polymorphisms: difficult genetic data necessary to prove Ulm-specific ancestry.

“He devised a test that’s sixty to seventy-five percent accurate,” he said. “Eighty percent if you came north out of the Sinai into the Rhine Valley prior to the Ashkenazi migration. There was some intermingling between the two groups, obviously, but given their bitter history, not enough to affect the testing.”

“Testing of what?”

“Ulmish descent. There are no guarantees, just ballpark figures — he’s very clear about that. For me personally, there was a seventy percent chance. But whatever Lee’s test lacks, Arthur supplements with a case file.”

“What does that do?”

“Haven’t you been listening, Doctor? It proves that you’re an Ulm.”

Grant Arthur’s research was exhaustive. Frushtick still recalled the amazement that overtook him as Arthur laid out his file for the first time. The names of ancestors, place and date of births and deaths, eternal branchings of an ancient family tree. Arthur went out into the world, to all its repositories of records, contracts, military conscriptions, cadastres, in the name of finding the lost. He wasn’t just reclaiming souls; he was restoring an order too grievously out of whack to ever be put right in his lifetime. It gave him a certain zeal.

“There were wills, land records, census records,” Frushtick said. “He had documents from government registries, hospitals, foreign courts. Licenses in foreign languages — many of which he speaks fluently. Port records, notary records, ship logs. I picture him on trains shunting across the tundra, landing in propjets in unstable countries, carrying his overstuffed valise with the portable scanner, sleepless again, hair rumpled, unhappy, but on his way to a library and some new name. It will give him just enough of what he needs to reaffirm his purpose, and he’ll go on like that, on and on, until he takes his last breath between two obscure points on the map. Make no mistake,” he said, “Grant Arthur is one of the great men. A mere mortal will never know how he does it. He carried my lineage back to the 1620s. Can you imagine? Before him, I thought I was half German and… God knows what else.”

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores. But I was impressed by 1620.

“He started with my mother’s maiden name, Legrace. From Legrace he moved back to DeWitt, and from DeWitt to Strickland, to Short, to Kramm, to Kramer. He went back to Bohr, to Moorhaus. Names I never knew existed, the names of my family, my people… I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have someone lay out for you how you extend back through time like that. I’m haunted to think that I could have died without knowing the satisfaction of it. I would have remained lost, skating over the surface of life, knowing nothing of any importance.”

“How did Grant Arthur know that he was a reclaimant?”

“From his father. But not until that man was on his deathbed, because he was ashamed. He gave his son the name of a man in Quebec, where there was a small community. The Quebecois told him about the escépticos, so he went to Spain. There was a man in Castile — La Mancha who had just lost his parents and who thought he was burying not only the last of his family but the final two speakers of a language they spoke only at home. Grant Arthur tracked the man down in Albacete, and when he greeted him in his mother tongue, the man wept.”

“What is an escéptico?”

“He will tell you about them when he shows you your family names. I’m sure he has them. All of them, going back to… who knows how far. He will lay them out for you, generation by generation, until you see how you connect, how you belong.”

“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.”