To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Six

AS WE ROUNDED THE midpoint of August, ball in the air and eye on third, I sat down again with Sookhart. I was there to request his services on an official basis by asking him to find me a complete manuscript of the Cantaveticles.

“I’m intrigued,” he said, once again stroking his arm hair. “But I’m also rather skeptical. I’ve spoken of this matter with several of my colleagues, all very learned people, and no one has heard of the thing. Nor has anyone heard of a surviving descendant of the Amalekites. Historians, biblical scholars, curators, dealers like myself — there’s no one.”

“How many of these associates of yours would it take for you to be convinced?” I asked.

“That’s precisely it. I can’t find even one.”

“But if you could, and he or she were a scholar or historian or whatever you require. What I’m asking,” I said, “is how many people does it take to make a thing like this real?”

“My dear fellow,” he said, pausing his self-petting to make a point, “people have believed in the most outlandish claims with all their hearts and souls since the beginning of time. It isn’t a numbers game.”

“But in matters of religion,” I said, “where it’s hard to prove anything empirically, numbers do matter, don’t they? How many people do you need to say that a system of belief is a bona fide system?”

“What system of belief?” he asked. “That Mithras is the sun god? That Ninirta is Marduk of the hoe? That Re repels the serpent Apophis every morning to restore Ma’at? That Iapetus is the father of all Anglo-Saxons because he was the son of Noah? That Yahweh was justified in striking down Uzzah for steadying the ark? That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life?”

“Yes,” I said, “any of them. All of them.”

“The difference between ten believers and ten million is a categorical one,” he said. “We call the one a cult and the other a religion. Personally, I don’t much care for that distinction. But without a certain critical mass, things do sometimes get weird.”

“You ask me,” I said, “the bigger they get, the weirder.”

“Consider the historian,” he said. “With all due respect to my historian friends, the historian is a vulture, and all of his colleagues are vultures, too. You can count on that lot to seize upon the carcass of a new discovery until it’s picked quite clean. I don’t blame them. They have papers to write and tenure to make. So with that in mind, let’s have a look at what you’re suggesting.”

He gazed upon the documents scattered on his desk, printouts of emails I’d sent him, the cantonments from my bio page.

“Someone comes to you with the information that you belong to this tradition, this people. They have a religion, roughly sketched as it may be, and they’re ethnically distinct. In fact they have their own genetic makeup. They constitute a race, and they can prove that scientifically. And despite suffering widespread persecution, a continuous line of existence ties them together from the time of the early Israelites to the modern day. Does that more or less sum it up?”

I nodded.

“Then why has no one heard of them? Why have the vultures in every history department across the world not seized upon them and picked this unique, this truly marvelous history clean for all to see?”

“Because they’ve been forced to keep a low profile.”

He stopped petting himself. He frowned, showing me the inner pink of his lower lip.

“How do you know that?” He glanced down at his desk. “Is that somewhere in… in all this…?”

“No,” I said.

“How have you come to know that they’ve kept a low profile? And how have they possibly managed to keep it so low that they’ve succeeded in escaping the notice of all the world’s historians?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be a dupe. I’m just as sure as you are that what I’m dealing with here is some kind of scam. I’ve brought in a lawyer who specializes in cyberlaw. She’s telling me I’ll have grounds for a lawsuit once everything plays out. People can’t go around stealing other people’s identities. But maybe,” I said, “just maybe we’ve never heard of them because they’ve been persecuted so thoroughly that they hardly exist anymore. Pick anyone you want — the Jews, the Native Americans, the Waldensians — and the Ulms have them beat. And because of their low numbers throughout history, they’ve flown beneath the radar.”

“You know the Waldensians?”

Keep clarity! I thought to myself, down at the lowest register of sound. But I was already committed, had spent so much time emailing back and forth with myself, with the man known online as Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., that now I knew more than the historian. Did I really want to believe? I had half hoped Sookhart would call me back to myself, my old self-respecting self, tell me the Waldensians were just another invention.

“They were mentioned to me as a people who suffered a similar persecution,” I said. “Also the Chukchi of Russia. They’re an example of a people who have lived a long time on the brink of extinction.”

“One more time, with that name?”

“The Chukchi. There’s about five hundred of them.”

He jotted it down. “Who mentioned this to you?”

“Also the Penan, the Innu, and the Enawene Nawe,” I said.

“And who are they?”

“Other endangered peoples.”

“Their names again?”

I spelled them out for him, and he jotted those names down, too.

“And why have they been persecuted?”

“The Chukchi?”

“No, the Ulms.”

“Even the pagans and the heathens believed in something. These people believe in nothing but their obligation to doubt God. It makes people nervous.”

Again that mildly obscene pink of his dubious lower lip showed itself like a petal. Then:

“But again, everybody who’s anybody has at least something to point to in the historical record. Even, I assume, these”—glancing down at his jottings—“Chukchi. Where is this great trampled people of yours in the historical record?”

“Hiding in plain sight,” I said.

“Sounds like you know more than you’re letting on.”

“No, not really.”

“Hiding in plain sight?”

“Read any history book,” I said. “Read about ‘the masses’ and ‘the villagers.’ Read about ‘the natives.’ ‘The serfs’ and ‘the locals’ and ‘the nomads.’ ‘The heretics’ and ‘the blasphemers.’ ”

“And it is the Ulms who are being referred to?”

“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes ‘the masses’ just mean the masses.”

“So throughout history they’re there, just unnamed, unidentified.”

“That’s the suggestion.”

“From this fellow here,” he said, indicating the printouts, “this ‘Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”

I nodded. He dropped his pen and sat back.

“It’s a stretch,” he said. “We still can’t ignore the efficient marketplace that is academia.”

“But knowing what you know about history,” I said, “might there be levels of suppression that should not surprise us when they finally come to light?”

He puckered his lips and massaged his thyroid in contemplation.

“But to imagine a people of the Bronze Age doubting the gods,” he said finally, “when most of them were still spooked by a gathering of dark clouds, praying to wood carvings…” He shook his head.

“Here’s my offer,” I said, handing him a check.

He studied it. His brow bellowed at the sight of the number, and he glanced up at me. Then he stood and extended his hand.

“But it never pays to be a doubting Thomas,” he said.

“The Plotzes know where they came from,” he wrote.

It doesn’t surprise me that you fell in love with them. We are drawn to people rooted in a strong tradition. It’s always the wrong tradition for us, and the results are disastrous. But I don’t blame you. Belonging, fitting in, loving and wanting to be loved in return — they are the most natural things in the world.

How do you know about the Plotzes?

You told me about them.

I never told you I fell in love with them.

I don’t have psychic powers, Paul. I pieced a few things together from a couple of emails.

I had a hard time falling asleep after my dad died. My mom would close the blinds, turn on my night-light, and tuck me in, and I would settle into the dimness hoping that sleep would come quickly, but it never did. I needed to fall asleep before my mom did, because if I didn’t, I’d be the only one awake in the apartment, and that was as bad as being alone. Being alone was the loneliest and scariest thing. If she fell asleep, all the other people in our building would fall asleep, too, and I would be awake while all the grown-ups were sleeping. I had to fall asleep! But nothing I could do would stop time or keep the night from growing longer and darker. From our building, sleep would spread like a sickness to the other people on the block. Soon everyone in the city would be asleep, and not long after that, everyone in the world. I would be the only person awake in the world.

I was trying so hard to fall asleep that I kept myself awake, and being awake, I felt as though I would never fall asleep. It was a terror that took hold of me quickly as I lay in bed, and everything my mom had done to prepare me for sleep — the books we read, the prayers we said, and the almost-countless number of good-nights I made her say from the doorway before she could leave — was no match for that terror. I was in my room for ten or fifteen minutes at most before I had to call out: “Mom?” Sometimes she would say “Yes?” or “What?” but usually it was “What do you want?” After good-nighting for fifteen minutes, after going away and coming back again to reassure me of some trifle, after her patience had been tested multiple times even before my attempt at sleep had properly begun — and all of this after a long day at work and readying dinner and tidying up — she was running on fumes. She must have also still been grieving. Grieving and trying to make sense of what had befallen her. Trying to make sense of it while trying to hold things together for me. But there is holding things together, and then there is dealing with a nine-year-old who refuses to sleep night after night. “What do you want?” she’d ask, and the edge in her voice was like the hand that takes the arm of a disobedient child. But I pretended not to notice her tone and ignored the encroaching dread of entering the next logical step in a nightly pattern that quickly established itself that year. I cloaked my terror one last time in the pleasantries so natural to exchange just before sleep and responded by calling out through the thin walls, “I just wanted to say good night!” “Go to bed now, Paul,” she’d say. A few minutes later, I’d say, “Good night, Mom!” and she’d say “We’ve said good night plenty of times now, Paul, too many times.” And a few minutes later, although I tried really hard not to, I’d call out again, “Good night, Mom!” “We’ve been over this,” she’d say, “we’ve been over this and over this. Good night for the last time!” You couldn’t blame her, because this happened every night, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. By then, we both knew that we were back inside a recurring nightmare, and the only questions that remained were how long I would keep her up and how mad she would get. I stopped saying “Good night, Mom!” because the pretense was over and started saying, “Mom, are you still awake?” And from a distant room, she would scream, “AAAHHHHH!” Then a little later I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d say, “GO TO SLEEP!” Then, much later, I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” I’d repeat “Mom? Mom? Mom?” afraid that she might have actually fallen asleep, until she’d finally say, “GO TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW! RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!” and that was a terrible relief. I was sorry she was angry with me but happy she was awake, which meant that I was not alone. Eventually, no matter how many times I called out, she stopped answering, so I would have to get up and walk to her doorway and say, a little softer, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, so I’d walk into the room a little, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d be lying there with her eyes open. “Mom, are you still awake?” I’d ask, although I could see by then that she was. Her eyes were open, and she was staring up at the ceiling, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and without turning to look at me, looking up at the ceiling, she’d say, “No.”

When we woke up in the morning, she was either in my bed with me, or I was in her bed with her, or I was on the couch and she was on the floor at my feet, wrapped in my Red Sox blanket.

The day after I engaged Sookhart, an investment banker came in by the name of Jim Cavanaugh. Even the bankers of Wall Street look like infants when they are reclined in the chair and bibbed in blue. It would not be unreasonable to pick them up and rock them in your arms, if that were only part of the early training.

He smelled good. I thought I detected hints of cardamom and white birch. Men like Cavanaugh, in the financial institutions and law firms, always come to my chair floral with designer scents and aftershaves. I pictured these emissions competing, on the molecular level, in a bloody, feral melee with their peers in every conference room and hallway cluster, every private office and chartered plane. One whiff of Cavanaugh and I had no doubt that his pricey little eaus strolled from the battlefield undiluted and triumphant.

He was reading his me-machine when I sat down chairside. His fingers swiped and daubed at the touchscreen, coloring in all the details of a fine landscape of self. A glitch in the soul produced that delay between his breaking off from the machine and his return handshake. He tucked the thing away in his pants pocket, where it buzzed and trilled with approximations of nature. I turned on the overhead as Abby handed me the explorer. Mrs. Convoy’s worries were not exaggerated: his mandibular right second molar was grossly carious, and the sinus was discharging buccally. I bent the light away.

“Are you in any pain?”

“My gallbladder,” he said. “And I have a bad back. But I work through it.”

He was almost indescribably good smelling. Only the most reactionary heterosexual impulses prevented me from burying my nose in his neck.

“I mean in your mouth,” I said.

“My mouth? No, my mouth is fine. Why?”

I percussed the tooth with the gross decay. “No pain here?”

“No, not really.”

“Here?”

“No.”

He should have been in extraordinary pain. That he was not led me to believe that he must be taking something — if not everything under the sun. “Are you on any drugs at the moment?”

“Nothing that hasn’t been prescribed.”

“When was the last time you saw a dentist?”

“Six months ago? No, I’m totally lying. Fifteen years? And I don’t floss, so don’t bother asking. And my diet’s terrible. I drink twenty Cokes a day. On a good day. That’s better than a cocaine habit, though, right? Maybe not for the teeth. I know meth’s bad for your teeth, but cocaine’s not meth, right, when it comes to your teeth? Why all these questions? You’re making me nervous. I’ve never had a cavity in my life.”

“You have one now,” I said.

“But I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“Is this something I can ignore?”

He had six cavities all together, and his gums were receding rapidly on account of periodontal disease.

“There’s also some slight mobility,” I said, “here, and here.”

“Mobility?”

“They’re starting to move around on you.”

“My teeth?”

“I think we can probably save them—”

“Probably?”

“But I wouldn’t recommend waiting.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

It’s something you get from time to time. A perplexity. This is happening? To me? With my background, my livelihood, my nationality? I vote Republican. I have full dental. This whole prognosis needs rethinking.

I didn’t enjoy telling a patient that his teeth were in danger, that his health was suffering, and that he would experience discomfort and pain. My enjoyment was restricted to the very real pleasure of watching entitlement end. The immunities of great privilege have expired. You’re no different from the next guy. You’re mortal, and it’s ugly. What it is is you’re small, while the plain is vast and the sky is wide and the food is very far away. Welcome to that world, it’s here to stay. It was never gone. You just couldn’t see it through your driver and your doorman and the Asian dude holding your takeout.

“Listen,” I said. “We can save your teeth. We can restore your gums. We can rid you entirely of these odors—”

“What odors?”

“And if, after we do all that, you floss and use a water pick and a mouth rinse, and you brush twice a day, gently, with an electric toothbrush, and you change your diet, your mouth will be like new, and you should never have these problems again. After fifteen years of neglect,” I said, “wouldn’t you agree that’s a small miracle?”

I spent the better half of the afternoon fixing him up. His me-machine continued to buzz, but he couldn’t answer or reply because he was in with his dentist.

“Thank God he sent me and not somebody else,” Cavanaugh said when I had finished. “I never would have come if it were up to me. Do you think he knew?”

“Who are we talking about?” I asked.

He sat up, and I was treated once again to his aftershave, those subtle fleurs of a lush masculine springtime.

“Pete Mercer,” he said.

“The billionaire?”

“And my boss,” he said. “He’d like you to have this.”

He handed me an envelope. The short note read:

I’d like to speak with you. Jim has been instructed to give you my personal cell phone number. Please call at your earliest convenience. — PM

“We haven’t talked about your father’s suicide yet,” he wrote.

Had he known his true place in the world, he might not have taken his life. Are you ever in danger of taking yours? Does it cross your mind? How often? I know you’re lost, but my God, man! You belong by birthright to a noble tradition!

“What do you want from me?” I asked him. “What do you want, what do you want, what do you want?”

Your help restoring it.

The heat wave rippled and steamed in the atomic air. The sun, everywhere and nowhere, panted down the shafts and corridors of the city, filling the streets with a debilitating throb. It produced pore-level discomfort in me and my fellow pedestrians. Sweat clung to every lip and pit. Taxis thrummed with sunlight. Awnings crackled with it. Tar fillings ran soft and gooey down the streets, while every leaf, stunned into a perfect stillness, lay curled up in terror.

I was meeting Pete Mercer in Central Park. He wanted us to talk outside the office.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never met a billionaire before. Someone disciplined, I thought. Someone who rises before dawn, follows a regimen of weights and cardio without a single deviation from the day before, and successfully consumes the recommended dose of daily fiber. The big winners of this arrangement: his bowels and his bank account. His every minute strictly apportioned, his quantity of drink tightly controlled. Tailored with suit and tie, daily shaved regardless of mood, manicured, perfumed, and lotioned. The kind of man I could never be if given a thousand lives.

But the billionaire waiting for me on the bench was in a pair of worn-out khakis and hiking boots and consuming a five-dollar sandwich purchased from a street vendor. There was no way to look dignified while eating one of those things. He had to lean over with legs apart so that the juices, when they fell, landed on the ground and not his boots. He had ahold of about sixteen napkins in varying stages of saturation, with another half dozen balled up on the seat beside him, and when he stood at my approach, he fumbled around with a full mouth trying to shake my hand with some part of him that was clean.

I took a seat on the bench. His hair was short and conservatively parted. The only signs of age on him were the Earl Grey bags under his half-moon eyes and a neck just starting to loosen. He looked like you or me, except he had enough money to buy all of Manhattan south of Canal.

“Thanks for meeting me,” he said. “I enjoy reading your tweets. ‘We take refuge in the intimacy of marginalization.’ Was that today? Or yesterday?”

My tweets! He thought those were coming from me!

“I was under the impression…” I began. “I thought that you had denied…”

He shrugged. “What is there to deny?” he asked. “No documented history. No evidence of a past. Myths contradicting the Bible. Stories of survival that can’t be corroborated. What did you call it, ‘Suppressed down to nothing,’ or something to that effect? At most, we have… what? A family tree and some corrupted DNA. Is that enough to make anyone deny anything?”

“But your office just issued a denial.”

“If there were rumors circulating that I breathed oxygen, I would instruct my office to issue a denial,” he said. “I value my privacy.”

“I value my privacy, too.”

He handed me a paper bag with a sandwich inside. “Bought you lunch.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure if you were a vegetarian. They all seem to be vegetarians.”

I wondered who this “they” was.

“No,” I said. “I like meat too much.”

“Me, too,” he said.

I opened the bag. Hot juices were leaking from some fault in the foil.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” he repeated. “I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

“No busier than you must be,” I said.

“And thanks for taking care of Jim’s teeth. For that, the whole office thanks you.”

“Jim sure smells nice,” I said, “but he should take better care of himself.”

“We all should,” he said. “What made you want to become a dentist?”

“Oral fixation,” I said.

He howled with laughter. Not everyone thought that joke was funny. It wasn’t even a joke, really. It’s just that people expected you to say something less pervy. Nobody likes to be reminded of the perv potential in a medical professional, especially a dentist, what with his hands in your mouth all day. I appreciated Mercer’s laughter. It showed a sense of humor.

“I fell in love with a girl when I was young,” I said, “and her mouth was a revelation.”

“I’ve fallen in love with a mouth or two,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone into dentistry.”

“The pay may not have suited you.”

He laughed again. “No,” he said. “But making money’s a waste of time.”

“You should try convincing a patient to floss.”

“Not easy, I bet.”

“I question the point of flossing myself sometimes,” I said. “It tends to pass.”

“I never used to floss,” he said. “Then I started doing it and, man, I couldn’t believe the stuff that came out of my mouth. It was like, oh, look, a ham hock. And here’s half a bag of microwave popcorn.”

“You must have large gum pockets.”

“Is that what they call them, gum pockets? Boy, that’s gross.”

“You think that’s gross, I’ll invite you over next time I’m extracting an impacted molar. You grab on tight with your cowhorn and do a bunch of figure eights, then you make that last pull and sometimes it’s like you can see the nerves still wiggling as you set the tooth on the tray.” He looked horrified. “You’re probably better off making money,” I said.

“When you break it down like that,” he said.

He stood and walked his trash over to a bin. I hadn’t expected to like him.

I’d watched the clip the day before. It showed Mercer testifying before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the financial crisis of 2008. He had bet against the system and made a killing. This, he said unironically, was the paradox that proved that the system worked. The representative from California expressed some disagreement and pressed Mercer to explain his “good fortune.” “Good fortune had nothing to do with it,” Mercer countered, and followed with a detailed account of his thinking toward the end of ’07, the folly of an extended period of no-money-down mortgages and the displacement of risk away from its source with unregulated vehicles like credit-default swaps. He was just doing the counterintuitive thing, which, in another paradox dictated by market logic, was really the intuitive thing. “The history of making money in this country is a history of exploiting the policy makers,” he said. “Liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican — it doesn’t matter. Let the policy makers act, and then study the places ripe for exploiting. Are they lending without interest? Attack the asset bubble. Currency pegs? Short foreign debt. The policy makers are there to protect capitalism, and America more generally. We’re there to be smarter than the policy makers,” he said to the policy maker.

He continued: “If I may make an analogy, Mr. Waxman, that must seem very remote to us now, I would suggest that the economic establishment in America, and really everywhere in the developed world, resembles in terms of concentration of power and ease of corruptibility the Catholic Church in the centuries leading up to the Protestant Reformation. It is a system controlled by a small number of insiders who would willingly do anything to continue profiting and to keep those profits as contained as they are substantial. The analogy breaks down only when we ask why those who suffer under such a system have not yet rebelled. In this instance it is not fear of damnation. It is ignorance. The people — I mean people who live more or less paycheck to paycheck, who have car troubles, visit the grocery store, that kind of thing — are ignorant of the magnitude of unfair play. To whatever degree they are not ignorant, they are resigned. If they continue to be ignorant and resigned, they will continue to be used and they will continue to lose.”

The comments piled up below the clip were full of impotent rage.

I fished out my sandwich and assumed the open-legged position. It was too hot to eat that day, but I didn’t want to be rude. He returned from the bin and, as I choked down a chicken shawarma, told me how it happened to him.

He was visiting his mother’s graveside in Rye. On his way back to the car, he found a man standing around, valise in hand, waiting for him. Mercer assumed he was with the press. But upon closer inspection, the man didn’t look like a journalist.

“What do journalists look like?” I asked.

“Frivolous,” he said, “or self-important.”

“And Grant Arthur?”

“Martyred.”

Arthur’s first words to him were, in effect, I know who you are, you’re Peter Mercer, but I also know that Peter Mercer doesn’t know who he is. Maybe it struck Mercer as an interesting thing to say. Or maybe there was enough truth in it to make him stop and wonder if this was somehow different from the usual run of nonsense. Since acquiring his wealth, Mercer had been asked to fund extraterrestrial scholarships in deep space, donate money to free caged elephants, support a campaign to make jousting an Olympic sport, bribe the Russian parliament, and assist a blind woman with a blind dog buy a house in the Hamptons. He wasn’t likely to let someone sit in his car and unfold a fairytale of his lost family and its sundered tradition. But that’s exactly what he did, and Grant Arthur’s research still amazed him.

“I knew nothing about my family before he showed up. My parents’ names, sure, and the names of my grandparents. Arthur had documents going back hundreds of years. It took him forty minutes just to lay them all out. Then we parted, and the first thing I did was have everything verified by an independent genealogist. The name of every descendant, the accuracy of every date. She didn’t find a single fabrication or mistake until around 1650.”

“What happened then?”

“She reached her limit. Arthur’s research took me back to 1474. There’s something very satisfying about discovering that you are a part of a continuous line stretching that far back,” he said. “Is this at all familiar? Or did it happen differently with you?”

I felt… left out. Frushtick had had his continuous line revealed to him, and now Mercer.

“They evidently have something else in mind for me,” I said. “I haven’t been shown anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Not in the way of my genealogy.”

“Have you done the genetic test?”

I shook my head.

“Then how do you know?”

I told him about the website, the Facebook page, and the Twitter account.

“They made you a website without your permission?”

I nodded.

“And you’re not writing those tweets?”

Had he been so friendly, bought me that sandwich, laughed at my jokes, had he wanted to meet me solely for my tweets?

“I’m afraid not.”

“So you might not belong. They might simply be using you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

He turned and looked off. When he turned back, it was to slap his thighs in preparation of standing. “Well,” he said, rising.

“Are you leaving?”

“I don’t want to take up any more of your time.” He extended his hand. “You’ve been an immense help.”

I stood at last and accepted his handshake. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how have I been of help?”

“Serious people don’t go around impersonating others online. They don’t steal a man’s identity and proselytize in his name. If I were you,” he said, “I’d hire a good lawyer. I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a hoax, as have I. It was compelling,” he added, before walking off. “Too bad it’s over.”

He was probably right, I thought. It was a hoax. His swift departure from the park reminded me that it was possible to see that clearly again, and to leave the whole ridiculous fantasy behind without another thought.

I went to the mall that weekend to work through some things. Was I relieved it was a hoax? Disappointed? Returned to outrage?

When I decided to stop buying things, years ago, I started saving my money with the intention of doing some good for the world. Rather than buy whatever I had my eye on, I tallied up its suggested retail price, and at the end of the year added everything together and made a big donation to a cause I believed in. Haiti. Hunger. Starting families off with some farm animals. As far as I could tell, it never got us anywhere. Haiti was still a mess, malnutrition was on the rise. I didn’t expect to cure every ill, but the only real difference I saw was an uptick in my junk mail. Better living through economy was one thing, but trying to improve the world through a few donations just highlighted the futility and put me in a funk.

Now buying was back on. It made me feel better to buy, it reassured and comforted me. In light of my recent gullibility, I needed to be reassured. But walking the mall corridors, I had a hard time finding something I needed, wanted, and/or didn’t already own. I stepped into the Hallmark store, to set the bar low, subjecting myself to an onslaught of sentimental cards, heart-shaped vases, and inspirational plaques (HERE’S THAT SIGN YOU WERE LOOKING FOR: LOVE, GOD). Next I went into Brookstone, the high-end novelty store, and sat in the massage chair. I also test-drove the latest in pillow technology. But I already had the massage chair, or had had it at one time, before getting rid of it, and with respect to the pillow, I preferred the old technology to the new.

I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn.

Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair.

I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends — impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds — were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy? To scatter the clouds of your cynicism with its innocent delights in the simplest pleasures? That’s what I’d come to the mall to buy, I realized at once: a dog. I’ll liberate one of these cute bastards from cellblock 9 here and never be lonesome again.

But then I remembered a time, preparatory to having children, when Connie and I decided to buy a dog, and after we took it home, I couldn’t stop thinking of how short a dog’s life expectancy is. It wasn’t right to talk about one day having to watch our new puppy die with Connie down on the floor playing with him and laughing, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to revel in the new puppy while it was still a puppy, because puppies become dogs all too quickly. And that was exactly my point: he’d be a dog in no time, and while he would appear to the human eye to remain unchanged for years, every day he’d be getting older, slowly but inexorably approaching death. When he died Connie and I would be bereft, which was, aside from being dead ourselves, the worst of all human things to be. Why ask for it? What had we done, impulsively purchasing this puppy without giving due consideration to its demise? I told Connie I thought we should return it. I couldn’t even get down on my hands and knees. I was up on the sofa crying, imploring her to take the puppy back. I could no longer so much as call it a puppy, and certainly not Beanie — no way could I call it Beanie. I just called it “the dog.” Connie got up on the sofa with me. She tried her best to understand. Inevitably she thought it had to do with my dad. But Beanie Plotz — O’Rourke and Conrad O’Rourke were apples and oranges. It wasn’t very likely that Beanie was going to put a bullet in his head because another round of electroconvulsive therapy had failed to take. Beanie just wanted to delight in the simple things. Do you know how embittering it is to watch something delight in the simple things while you’re consumed by the subject of death? Connie ended up keeping Beanie at her place. I’d stroke its fur occasionally when I was over, but that was about it. I left the Best Friends Pet Store empty-handed.

By then, the other people at the mall had started to wear me down. Not just the handicapped but the sickly, the stunted, and the debt-soaked diabetics. At first, I tried to convince myself that they weren’t representative. I was at the ass-end of a cross-section, and soon sprites of health and beauty would come floating by, bare breasted, their outspread arms wrapped in banners of silk. But those who kept passing me were identical in every way: terribly misshapen people, whale fat or rat thin, trailed by homely broods while screaming at deaf elders in open psychological warfare. My countrymen. I took refuge in a single, healthy-looking woman on her way to pick out a high-end handbag or maybe a pair of shoes. She moved with purpose, free of the discord of the poor and the lost, and was gone in the blink of an eye. I gave up and went to dinner at a T.G.I. Friday’s.

The waiter who came over to take my order was decked out from top to bottom in branded swag. Heavily mocked across America, swag was a comfort to me, because I had never forgotten how special it was to eat at a T.G.I. Friday’s when I was a kid. The swag brought back the memory of my mom and dad and the rigor with which we stuck to the least expensive items on the menu. Now that I had money, I always ordered more than one appetizer, the most expensive steak, something for dessert, and a Day-Glo cocktail or two. I wasn’t hungry. I was never hungry anymore. But it never got old. The Pottery Barn and Rubber Soul had gotten old, but my ability to order more than the chicken fingers with honey mustard from T.G.I. Friday’s would always provide me with a sense of accomplishment.

As I ate, I wondered if what applied to the Pottery Barn and to Rubber Soul might also apply to people. It applied, I had to admit, to Sam and the Santacroces, who had been everything to me at one time and now were nothing. Would it also apply to Connie and the Plotzes? I didn’t like to think of Connie as pure utility now all used up, and most days I was able to frame our split as so much more than that. But that day at the mall, surrounded by the melancholy redundancy of everything on offer, I wondered if it was really Connie I longed for when I longed for Connie or only the novelty of being in love again, of being estranged from my self and enchanted by her family, by the Plotzes and by Judaism — which was lost to me now, if it was ever mine.

On my way home, I stopped for beer at a package store. Whenever I stopped at a package store, I always looked for Narragansett, the beer my father drank while watching the Red Sox. It was during my cursory search for Narragansett, along a dusty aisle of niche beers, that I came across a warm six-pack of Ulm’s, a lager brewed in Ulm, Germany, and distributed out of Hoboken. It’s no hoax, I thought.

“Hey, it happens. You don’t need to apologize,” he wrote.

Think you’re the first one to go hmmm, this evidence is just a little too thin? Well, you’re not. We’ve all turned our backs on it at some point. Nobody wants to be a dupe. We’d be a bunch of gullible idiots if we didn’t have serious misgivings at some point. It’s a test of faith, Paul. A test of faith, and you passed. What it will do in the end is just make you stronger. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a religion founded on doubt asks you to take so much on faith?

How many are there? One hundred? Two hundred?

My rough estimate puts that figure somewhere between two and three thousand. But all very scattered.

As Mrs. Convoy stood in the open doorway calling “McKinsey?” Connie turned to me and said, “I have a confession to make.”

I drew closer. In the small confines of the front desk, crowded by the swivel chairs and shoulder to shoulder with blockades of files, drawing closer really only meant turning around. She sat on the chair, dressed entirely in shades of gray — a gray skirt over darker gray tights starting to fade at the knees, a gray T-shirt with darker gray bird — except for a diaphanous blue scarf twisted wildly around her neck. She wore a pair of flat blue tennis shoes that lacked all pretense to athletic utility. Her hair was set in bobby pins imprecisely arrayed, like a train yard seen from the sky.

How inimitable the bobby pin is! The coppery crimp on the one prong and the other prong straight, the two dollops of hard amber at the endpoints. The bobby pin has not changed since it was worn by good-hearted nurses in virtuous wars. Though they held her hair down with old-fashioned severity, on Connie bobby pins were the very edge of fashion. I recalled the pleasure I took whenever I had the opportunity to remove them from her hair, one pin after the other, and to place them on the nightstand in a neat little pile, taking out one as carefully as the next so as not to pull the hair with it, until down came a storm of curls gently scented and still a little damp.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to say it. Remember how I told you that I was a nonpracticing atheist? Well, I’m not, really. I mean, I sort of was for a while, but now I think I’m not. An atheist, I mean. What I mean is, I’m not a hundred percent certain that God doesn’t exist, and sometimes, I’m almost certain that He does.”

“As in, you believe?” I said. “You’re a believer?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

I was shocked.

“Sometimes?”

“Most of the time.”

I was beside myself. On how many occasions had she expressed her skepticism about God? On how many occasions had she rolled her eyes along with me when some idiot on TV was telling women what was best for their bodies in the name of God? Or condemning gay marriage in the name of God? Or denying evolution and restricting scientific research in the name of God? Or defending assault weapons with hundred-round clips because God wanted us all to have guns? On how many occasions had she nodded along in implicit agreement while I went off on some Hitchensian rant?

“Have you always been a believer?”

“Not always.”

“When weren’t you one?”

“Around the time we got together.”

“You were a believer when we first met?”

“You made some very convincing arguments,” she said. “You can be very convincing.”

“You mean… I convinced you to be an atheist?”

“I was swept up!” she cried. “I was in love! I was willing to change!”

“You lied to me?”

That first year with Connie, year and a half even, I can hardly remember for how in love we were. We were just all love, morning and night, and all day, and love, and love. The only thing that gave me pause was her poetry. From what I could tell, she was a decent poet. Her poems never made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but neither did any of the published ones that she read aloud to me in bed, and in the park, and in bookstores, and in empty bars on winter afternoons. Not making sense seemed to be what it meant to be a good poet. Which was fine. But in that first year, year and a half, she stopped writing altogether. I thought it was important, if you called yourself a poet, to write poetry. I didn’t totally mind that she stopped, because I wanted her to be with me more than I wanted her to be actually writing poetry. But as time went by, and she still wasn’t writing, I asked her why. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m just happy.” “You have to be sad to write?” “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Maybe. I guess maybe I do. Because when I’m happy, I don’t feel compelled to write. I’m just happy being happy.” “So when you start writing again, I’ll know you’re unhappy?” “You’ll know that I’m stable. That I can write because I can think about something other than you, us. I can think about poetry again.” That made sense, I supposed. But I still had to wonder, what was she if she wasn’t writing poetry? She wasn’t a poet. Poets write poetry. She was really just a receptionist at a dental office. A receptionist and the girlfriend of a dentist, her employer.

Suffice it to say, she was doing plenty of writing these days. But now I had confirmation that there was something wrong with Connie on the same order as there was something wrong with me. All that time not writing poetry, downplaying her family affections, putting Connie-Who-Loves-Paul ahead of her own essential self. Poor girl, she was cunt gripped. She had loved me so much that she felt compelled to lie to me just as I had lied to her. A sadness settled into me as solid as the one I had churned through in the weeks following our final breakup. As it turned out, we were perfect for each other.

“No wonder you didn’t want to spend time with your family in the beginning,” I said. “You were living a lie.”

She didn’t answer.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I want you to know that it’s okay to believe in God,” she said.

She swiveled closer along the plastic runner, a few inches at most, but enough so that she might have easily taken my hand. I thought she might. But the most she did was put her hands on her knees.

“It doesn’t make you weak or stupid,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t think so.”

“As long as you believe for the right reasons.”

“And what reasons are those?”

“You tell me,” she said.

I stared at her. I suddenly realized that this wasn’t just a confession.

“Whatever’s going on with you—”

“What’s going on with me?” I asked.

“—as long as you’re choosing God for the right reasons—”

“I’m not choosing God for any reason.”

“Then what are you doing, getting wrapped up in this thing?”

“What thing? It’s not a thing. It has nothing to do with God. It’s a tradition,” I said. “It’s a people. A genetically distinct people. And I’m not wrapped up in it.”

“Why is our website still live? Why have you stopped pestering that Internet lawyer to do more? Why is it that every time I turn around, you’re composing a new email? Whatever you’re not wrapped up in, Paul, why does it seem to be so much more pressing than your patients?”

I walked away, leaving her in that claustrophobic enclosure. I went down the corridor and through the door, into the waiting room. I walked up to the front desk and stuck my head in the window. She had thrown her head back but was sitting otherwise unmoved.

“Let’s do this,” I said.

She swiveled abruptly.

“Let’s agree to stay out of each other’s business. What’s the point in meddling now, anyway? Who knows,” I said. “Maybe if we can keep to ourselves, we can both finally be honest with each other.”

I withdrew from the window and went back to work.

“Do I have to doubt God?” I asked. “It’s not that I want to believe. God knows. I’d rather just avoid God altogether.”

It’s important to doubt.

But why? You’re not doubting all gods, or God in general. You’re doubting a very specific God — the one that literally appeared before His prophet to decree that he doubt. How can anyone doubt a God that has appeared?

Get rid of doubt? You have no idea what you’re suggesting. Where would the Jews be without faith? The Jews renouncing their faith, the bedrock of their morality, the very thing that makes them Jews — this is the equivalent of the Ulms who cease doubting. Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral. And like the Jews, once you take away our morality, you take away our purpose for being, you take away our advantage and our essence. What the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims have tried to achieve through violence will come about naturally through our own abdication: we will disappear from the face of the earth. Doubt, or complete the first genocide in human history. Doubt, or enter the war of death among other religions. Doubt, or die. Those are your options.

But goddamnit — how can anyone doubt a God that has appeared?

The paradox of God asking people to doubt is resolved in the Cantaveticles, cantonment 240. We know it as the Revelation of Ulmet.

I was in the Thunderbox when I came across the fourth, or maybe the fifth, iteration of the Wikipedia entry for “Ulm.” Unlike earlier attempts, this one had been approved for publication by Wikipedia’s editors. What happened to trekkieandtwinkies, I wondered, and his strenuous objections to sanctioning an entry for the Ulms? I clicked around and found them alive and well on the entry’s “Talk” page. Reserved for editorial debate, the “Talk” page gave editors a place to scream and shout at one another about the relevancy of this and that while keeping their rifts and outrage hidden away from the main entry to preserve its authority. The debate on the “Talk” page for “Ulm, or Olm” was in full swing and involved EDurkheim, drpaulcorourkedds, BalShevTov, HermanTheGerman, abdulmujib, openthepodbaydoorshal, Jenny Loony, and others, none of whom could agree on the facts any more than Mrs. Convoy and I could agree on what it meant to “know” God. Trekkieand-twinkies savaged the entry’s legitimacy, but several others were persuaded of it by the entry’s most significant claim, which had to do with “Contemporary Israeli Aggression.” Israel, it was purported, was no friend of the Ulm. The introduction of Israel attracted a good deal of attention to the entry under debate, and the participating editors quickly assembled into one of two competing camps: those in favor of publishing the entry were generally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, while those objecting to the entry posted pro-Israeli arguments that were unrelated in every way to the question of the Ulms. The pro-Ulm, anti-Israeli faction provided seventeen footnotes linked to news articles and press releases that outlined examples of this “Contemporary Israeli Aggression” against Palestinians, Egyptians, Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Americans — practically everyone with the exception of the people under debate. “The Ulms were expelled from Seir (Israel) in 1947,” the main entry read, “in further proof of Israeli aggression^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].”}

I drifted out of the Thunderbox still reading the entry, which, though now primarily a political tool, was much more than that. I dispatched a patient in room 1 and returned to my me-machine to continue reading. I did that half the morning: pulled out my phone between patients and read and reread the entry, memorizing its finer points.

The Ulms’ origins were well documented by references to those books of the Bible where the Amalekites were mentioned, from Genesis through the Psalms. It was said that the Greeks called the Ulms metics and were known to them as anthropoi horis enan noi, or “the people without a temple.” There was a list of ways the Ulms had been systematically suppressed since the advent of Christianity: grand-ducal ordinances, council decrees, forced observances, sumptuary laws, fines, torture, and death. The Cantaveticles was described on behalf of this nomadic people as a “portable fatherland.” Cutting the hair at thirteen was a rite of passage for boys. There was a brief sketch of their fate map, or where in Europe during the Middle Ages the last of the Ulms had died out. The final meaningful documentation placed them in Upper Silesia as purveyors of salines.

It was with the purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia on my mind that I came to, so to speak, with an explorer in one hand and a drill in the other. That was unexpected. Why was I holding both? If I was about to explore, why did I need the drill, and if I was about to drill, why did I need the explorer? And in fact I was about to drill, because it was turning on the drill that halted my thinking about purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia. But what was I drilling? I sat elevated above my patient’s mouth, its darkest parts throbbing involuntarily under the unforgiving light. I looked down the length of the chair, over a skirt suit and tights capped with black flats in need of a shine. A female, I concluded. Possibly a professional of some kind. When I turned back, her eyes, miming a wild animal’s flight, had skittered to the far corners of their sockets, removing me and my doings to the periphery. I glanced at the computer screen. It read “Merkle, Doris.” Mrs. Merkle had been a patient for years, but I couldn’t even recall saying hello to her that morning. (“Hello to ye and thou!”) I glanced over at Abby, who gave me an uncharacteristically aggressive look. I could only make out her eyes on account of the pink paper mask, but they were so alarmed, so interrogating, that I had to look away. I’d never seen her like that before. Are you at a momentary loss? her eyes seemed to be asking me. How can you be at a momentary loss when you have a live drill in your hand? I set the explorer down and returned the drill to the rack in order to read Mrs. Merkle’s chart. I quickly discovered that Mrs. Convoy had put nothing in her chart that morning. Of course it was possible that Mrs. Convoy hadn’t seen Mrs. Merkle, that Mrs. Merkle had come straight to me without a cleaning in need of some emergency procedure. I looked over at the tray to see how it was laid out. You can usually tell what you’re doing from a properly laid-out tray. It wasn’t just a momentary loss, I realized, trying to interpret the tray. No, I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing for Mrs. Merkle. This is what happens, I thought, trying to divine the tray for some sign of direction, when you let your mind wander at work. It hardly mattered that I had let my mind wander about purveyors of salines in Upper Silesia and not the wretched history of trades by the Boston franchise, or why I liked clowns in my pornography. I had a duty to be focused on the patient in the chair. But the tray was telling me nothing or, rather, it was telling me many things, all of them conflicting. What is this? I almost demanded of Abby. Look at how sloppily you’ve laid out this tray! Since when is a dental tray akin to some basement toolbox or allocated junk drawer where we just go digging around in hopes of finding what we need? But I didn’t dare say anything or even so much as look over at Abby, because too much time had passed since I turned off the drill, and now I was afraid that we were all conscious — me and Abby and Mrs. Merkle, too — that I had no fucking clue what I was supposed to be doing for Mrs. Merkle. And things just got worse when I decided to have a look inside her mouth. An incisor and its neighboring canine were gone. Had I just pulled them? Of course not — there’d be blood and gauze, and I’d still be feeling it in my arm. I must have been doing a reconstructive procedure for Mrs. Merkle, putting in a double crown or a partial denture or some other pontic. But if that were the case, why did I have a drill in my hand? And what in hell were the gutta-percha points doing out on the tray alongside Peeso reamers and the butane? I tell you this much, it was that rare day on which you raise your glass to the malpractice insurers. It would be great, I thought, if I could just let her go. “Up you go, Mrs. Merkle. You’re all set!” But that was absurd! She still had two missing teeth! I wasn’t likely to get off the hook just by letting her leave. Her eyes returned from their sojourn in a safe place to search me out, as so much time had passed since my last (first?) sure-footed gesture. Why the pause, her eyes seemed to be asking me, why that stricken, dim-witted look on your face? I couldn’t even say if Mrs. Merkle was numb or not. I was running straight at the woman with a spinning drill and didn’t even know if she was numb! I gestured across Mrs. Merkle’s body for Abby to follow me out into the hall. I had no choice: the chart told me nothing, the tray told me too much, and the mouth only compounded my confusion. We huddled close together. “Look, Abby,” I said, “between you and me, I don’t mind telling you, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing for that patient in there.” Abby pulled down the mask covering her face and said, “I’m not Abby.” It wasn’t Abby! She didn’t even have Abby’s eyes! She certainly didn’t have Abby’s mouth. And she was much shorter than Abby. I had never consciously realized just how tall Abby was. “What do you mean you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing?” she asked. “Aren’t you the dentist?” I had no intention of admitting to a complete stranger that I had no idea what I was doing. “Who are you?” I demanded. “Where’s Abby?” “Who’s Abby?” she inquired. “Who’s Abby?” I cried. “Abby! My dental assistant!” “Oh,” she said, “she’s on an audition.” “An audition?” “That’s what I was told,” she said. My neck began to hurt, I had to look down on her so severely. She couldn’t have been more different from Abby had she lived among gremlins in a tree house. “Why is Abby going on auditions?” I asked. “How should I know,” said the tiny temp. “I don’t work here.” Mrs. Convoy walked by. I confided in her my predicament. She said, “How on earth could you arrive at that point?” I told her, she said, “Bagwell going to the Astros again! How many times have I told you not to think about Bagwell while treating a patient? What room is she in?” She left and came back. “Not one of mine,” she said. If Mrs. Convoy hadn’t seen Mrs. Merkle that morning, Mrs. Merkle must have been in for an emergency procedure. But which one? “I think you have no choice but to ask the patient,” concluded Abby’s replacement. Mrs. Convoy didn’t notice her there at first, she was so small. The two of us peered down at her. “Although she’s really numb. I doubt she can make herself understood.” “She’s numb?” I said. “Who numbed her?” Connie appeared. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Who numbed her?” said the temp. She looked up at Connie and then over at Mrs. Convoy. “Is everyone sure this is the dentist here?” she asked, gazing up at us with the vicious smallness of a doglike goblin. I turned to Connie. “Do you remember checking in a Mrs. Merkle?” “Of course,” she said. “She called first thing this morning.” “She did?” I cried. “What’s wrong with her? What am I doing to her?”

An old bridge had plunged headfirst into Mrs. Merkle’s breakfast cereal that morning, for no other reason than its time had come, and any idiot with a little focus could see that the poor woman just needed to have it replaced.

After Mrs. Merkle, I knew something had to be done, something radical. None of these half measures, like visiting the mall.

I began by deleting my email. Everything “Paul C. O’Rourke” sent me was gone, followed by all the correspondence between YazFanOne and the many strangers curious to learn more about the Ulms. Then everything from Connie. Then a brief exchange with Sam Santacroce (“We’re very happy in Pittsburgh,” she wrote of her and her husband and their two children). Emails to and from my friend McGowan. And finally everything else.

I called my phone company and terminated my contract. Then I removed the SIM card, bent it back and forth enough times that the plastic was irreparable, ran a hot tap over my me-machine for several minutes, and used an excavator to pry into it and disassemble its parts, which I threw partly into sewer grates and partly into the East River during a walk on my lunch hour.

Back at the office, I called my Internet provider and terminated service at home and at the shop. Within the hour, we went completely dark. I couldn’t believe it. There was still a way to opt out after all. You just had to be willing to go the distance.

“Why am I not able to log on to the World Wide Web?” Betsy asked, glowering at an iPad.

“It’s not working,” said Connie. “I’ve unplugged the router, or whatever. If that doesn’t work, I’ll give them a call.”

In no time at all, they were going out of their minds. Mrs. Convoy jabbed at the touchscreen with an unforgiving finger before giving up and shaking her head at the device, as if it had proved to be not just a frustration but a personal disappointment, something on the order of a moral failure. She abandoned it only to return five minutes later, like your most weathered smoker, whereupon she jabbed at it again, with feeling this time, finger practically recoiling with every tap, the taps growing louder and steadier as if she were knocking at a door begging to come in. Meanwhile, Connie was on hold with the Internet provider, trying to multitask with the phone in the crook of her neck, but too often drawn, as if by a spell, back to the desktop, to squint inches from the screen while clicking on the same unresponsive icon.

It was a thoroughly pleasant afternoon. No composing. No replying. No anticipation. No distraction. Just me and the drills, bores, bits, glues, plasters, pastes, etchants, sprays, crowns, amalgams, resins, pins, explorers, excavators, hand mirrors, picks, pliers, and forceps of my profession. I noticed the rich wonders of these dental accoutrements as if for the first time. They were burnished, immaculate, and spellbinding. Without the seductions of the online world, I was reintroduced to my chairs, my cabinetry, my tile floors.

Half an hour later, they cornered me in room 2 just as I was finishing filling the best cavity I’d filled in two months, if not ten years. They came bearing iPads and me-machines and looks of murderous rage, as if I had done actual physical damage to a child or a pet.

“You’ve got to be joking,” said Connie.

“Is it true?” said Mrs. Convoy, with the tragic tone employed to confront a man long harboring a criminal past. “Have you cut off service?”

“How long were you planning on letting us make fools of ourselves?”

“I wasn’t trying to be cruel,” I said, hands in the air to defend myself. “I was planning to tell you, both of you.”

“Oh?”

“But then I started watching you guys. Did you see yourselves? You’re addicted! Both of you! This is for your own good! Betsy, remember what you’re always telling me about the world and its beauty? You’re not looking at it anymore! The beauty, it’s lost on you! I’m doing this for you,” I said, “so that you don’t forget God’s world.”

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I have not forgotten God’s world.”

“I’m sorry, Betsy, but you have. I saw you. There was no getting out of God’s world and into that other one, and it was driving you nuts.”

“That’s a false distinction,” she said. “Whether it’s online or offline, it’s God’s world. He made everything there just as He made everything here.”

“ ‘Ebony Teases Her Brownie’?” I said. “Is that God?”

“What does that mean?” she asked me. She turned to Connie. “What in heavens does that mean?”

“Paul, why did you cancel our Internet service?”

“It’s a distraction we don’t need,” I said. “I haven’t had such a nice, stress-free afternoon since 2004.”

“And how are we going to get anything done around here?”

“Dentech still works,” I said. “That’s all we need.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Betsy. “No sirree bob. It might let you chart just fine, but for everything else, you need a connection.”

“Well, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to go back to doing things the old-fashioned way.”

“But we’ve never done things the old-fashioned way.”

“No,” I said, “but I bet Betsy has. She was around before technology.”

“The pleasures of your wit notwithstanding,” she said, “this is absurd. I haven’t worked in a dental office that hasn’t depended on computers since… can’t even remember. You’re out of your mind if you think we can go back. Should we also go back to whiskey and hand drills?”

“What do we do here?” I asked them. “We clean and polish. We fill cavities. We take out old teeth and put new ones in. What part of any of that requires us to be online?”

“But there’s HIPAA compliancy!”

“And claims submissions!”

“And the billing!”

“And email!”

There was no better place to find McGowan than the gym. He went there religiously. And though I hadn’t darkened the gym’s doorway in over a year and a half, my membership was still current, because I had never found the wherewithal to cancel. They just kept withdrawing month after month, and every month I would remind myself to cancel, and every month I would fail to muster the energy.

I wanted to apologize to McGowan for letting our friendship lapse. At one time, McGowan and I had been really tight. We were both dentists, and we both loved the Red Sox. I looked around for him when I arrived, but he wasn’t there, so I got on a treadmill. It felt good to be doing something physical again. A year and a half had gone by during which I hadn’t lifted a finger. I was really out of shape, so I started slowly. I gradually increased my speed until, twenty minutes in, I was clocking seven-minute miles. It felt great. I kept it up for two hours, twenty-nine minutes, and fifty-seven seconds. It was an approximately twenty-one-mile run. I burned three thousand one hundred and nineteen calories. My failure to exercise might be contributing to my vulnerability, I thought, and if I pushed myself, I would be set right again by massive infusions of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, the Three Stooges of the brain.

By the time my run ended, McGowan had arrived and was over by the free weights. I didn’t know if he would welcome seeing me or not. But I had nothing to fear. Never in his life had McGowan known an imbalance in his neurotransmitters. He gave me a jiveshake and a smile, then made a big face at the alarming quantities of sweat my body was producing. He asked me how the indoor lacrosse was going.

“The what?”

“Didn’t you quit the gym to do indoor lacrosse?”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That was pretty short-lived.”

He and I talked throughout his workout as though no time had passed at all. I was pleased that he wasn’t angry. I was also a little perplexed. Did he not remember being hurt that I had removed him from my contacts? Was my betrayal so minor to him, our friendship so slight, that it really didn’t matter? As we talked, me sitting on some machine intended for something, and McGowan lifting and setting things down again, I had the sudden feeling that I could be anyone to McGowan, that I was only another guy at the gym who happened to be within earshot, and that our connection went no deeper than a shared profession and a preference for Boston baseball. I remembered all over again why I had once deleted him from my contacts. It made me unreasonably sad. I started crying, but not wanting McGowan to see me cry, I kept my face as emotionless as possible while allowing the tears to fall as drops of sweat, and for the two or three minutes that I was staring straight at him and crying, he kept lifting and didn’t notice. Once I had collected myself, I tried to stand and leave, but I found it impossible. That run had done something to me. I literally could not move. McGowan had to practically carry me into the men’s locker room and then out to the street, where he held me up while hailing a cab. He rode with me all the way into Brooklyn and helped me up the stairs and into my apartment. Only then did I realize that McGowan really was a good friend, and that it was essentially easy to be a good friend, and that, by that simple formula, I had probably never been a good friend to anyone, or to too few people, at any rate.

I spent the next day limping from room to room, patient to patient. The pain in my legs was easily explained, but why did it hurt to clench my jaw? To open and close my fingers? I could hardly hold the explorer and eventually had to cancel all my afternoon appointments.

She was my last appointment of the day. She had on a Red Sox cap over her long, sandy-brown hair. The cap was well worn: it was easy to envision how, in the course of its lifetime, it had been torn off, stretched out, kicked around, lost for good and found again, its bill molded to form, its band boiled in sweat, the whole thing stomped on and run over and chewed up. Now the stitching around the B was coming loose. It was a prized possession, that hat, a family heirloom, as priceless as anything on an auctioneer’s block. The woman wearing it had my heart.

She turned when I entered the room and said, “I’m not here for an exam.”

I shut the door.

“What are you here for?”

She stepped away from the window, into my arms. No, she stopped far shy of that, at the sink, even as I urged the echo of her heels to continue. She undid the twin buckles of a leather valise laid flat upon the counter. She removed her sunglasses, disentangling from one plastic corner the delicate loose strands of her lovely hair. She suggested I have a seat. I immediately pulled up a stool.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She removed a sheaf of papers from the leather bag. “A research assistant.”

“To whom?” I asked. “For what?”

“For the general effort.”

She was really very tall, over six feet, and when I sat down, under her weather, as it were, full of breeze and light, and watched her concentrate, ordering and straightening the papers in her possession, I almost said, being insanely cunt gripped, “I love you.” Somehow I kept it to myself. But that’s exactly how it happens, every time, that quickly, that easily, and there is nothing I can do about it.

“Let’s start here,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘the general effort’?”

She handed me my birth certificate.

“Okay?” she said to me.

“What are you asking?”

“Does that document look familiar to you?”

“It’s my birth certificate,” I said. “Hey,” I said, “how’d you get my birth certificate? Who notarized this?”

“And this is a certificate of marriage between Cynthia Gayle and Conrad James, the fifth of November 1972.”

She handed me my parents’ marriage certificate. It had been stamped by the county clerk’s office and initialed.

“Are those your parents?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

Next, in rapid succession, came each of my parents’ birth certificates, as well as the certificate of death for my father; the birth certificates of my four grandparents; their marriage certificates; and finally each of their death certificates. There was Earl O’Rourke and Sandra O’Rourke, née Hanson, and there was Frank Merrelee and Vera Merrelee, née Ward. I didn’t recognize the names on the next generation of documents. They belonged, according to her, to my great-grandparents.

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

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

She handed me the next document.

“What is your name?”

“Clara,” she said.

“Clara.”

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

She handed me his death certificate attesting to that claim.

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

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

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

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

She handed me two more documents.

“Is this your job?” I asked her.

“No.”

“What is your job?”

“I don’t have a job. I go to school.”

“What do you study?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m from Poland?” I said.

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

“How much time did this take you?”

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

“We could have been kept out?”

“If it had come to light, yes.”

“If what had come to light?”

“What you were before you became Boruch.”

“What were we before Boruch?”

“I don’t have that document.”

“Who does?”

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

“Waiting for me where?”

“Seir.”

“Israel?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I have to go to it?”

“He’d like to see a show of faith.”

“Who would?”

“We all would.”

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

“Yes.”

She began to strap the buckles on her leather bag.

“Are you leaving?”

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

“Can I see you again?”

“What for?”

“It’s just… it’s so much to take in.”

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

“I would prefer to contact you.”

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

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

Seven

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

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

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

“Yours?” I said.

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

“What do they say?”

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

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

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

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

“Winding down?”

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

“I thought you said that was a hoax.”

Again he smiled that inward smile.

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

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

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

“Have you been there yet?” he asked.

“Where?”

“Seir.”

“It exists?”

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

“Is it really in Israel?”

“You sound skeptical.”

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

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

“So how did they manage it?”

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

“What is an irredentism pact?”

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

“They have a claim to the land?”

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

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

“Is that very likely?” I asked Mercer.

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

“Even one so long ago?”

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

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

“I have plans to go back,” he said.

“Back to the shit hole?”

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

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

“The others, I guess. The people.”

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

“The right people,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Not at all.”

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

“Even after being there?”

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

“Did they ever ask you for money?”

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

“Discretion?”

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

“What are the people there like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You might never be.”

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

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

“Here we sit,” I said.

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

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

What do you do there?

Do?

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

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

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

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

“Where’d you get this?” asked Sookhart, looking up from his desk. “I check your bio page every day. I haven’t seen this on there.”

“It was emailed to me.”

“By whom?”

“ ‘Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”

Sookhart was reading a printout of the attachment “Paul C. O’Rourke” had included in his last email: a scan of two columns of text laid out on a yellowing parchment scroll, composed, according to Sookhart, in Aramaic, and frayed, or nibbled at, along the uppermost edge. The translation came in a separate attachment, numbered according to cantonment and verse, with the names of people and places done up in diacritical marks. Safek was “Să-fĕk” The Amalekites were “Ă-măl-ė-kītes.”

“What’s interesting,” he said, and dropped off as he resumed studying the printouts. “What’s interesting,” he said, a second time. He lifted the hair from his arm and held it erect between his fingers, as if to snip its tips like a barber, before burrowing in again. After a full five minutes, he peeled off his reading glasses, sat forward, and peered across the desk at me.

“There’s always been a vigorous debate surrounding Job’s authorship,” he said. “Certain terms and expressions are undoubtedly Aramaic in tone, and the lack of any reference in the book of Job to historical events leads many scholars to argue it had non-Hebraic origins. The writer almost certainly predated Moses. What’s interesting to me is this man Eliphaz. He’s the only one besides Job who appears in the biblical account and… whatever account it is you have here. They’re characterized differently, of course, but the name’s the same.”

“Why is that interesting?”

“Well, you see, Eliphaz came from the city of Teman, which was in Edom. And Amalek was the grandson of Esau, who was the chief of the Edomite tribe. The Edomites and the Amalekites were related.”

I looked at him stupidly. He tried again.

“The account of creation in Genesis, as you may know, is rather like that of the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish. And of course the story of the Flood had its origins in the Epic of Gilgamesh, possibly even Hindu mythology. They are cruder accounts than the ones we know from the Bible. Nevertheless, they came first. They are urtexts, prototexts.”

“Sure,” I said. “This one borrows from that one, that one steals from the other one. It’s all a crock of shit.”

“No, now, listen,” he said, rocking his butt cheeks to scoot the chair closer to the desk. “If the book of Job was originally written in Aramaic, as we suspect, and if it’s an Edomite text, as we have reason to believe, because Eliphaz was born in an Edomite town, and if the two tribes, the Edomites and the Amalekites, were as closely connected as we think they were, both at war with the children of Israel, both harboring at Mount Seir, then what you have here… in the scan of this scroll, this rather poor scan… if it’s an original, the scroll, I mean, and if the translation is indeed faithful, it could very well be…”

He paused.

“What?” I said.

“The first draft of Job,” he said.

Connie wasn’t really all that beautiful. Sure, she had all the trappings of beauty: that hair, those speckled brown eyes. And she had beautiful breasts whose perfection was happily suggested by every variety of blouse and blazer and winter jacket you can imagine, to say nothing of the summertime wonders of T-shirts and bikini tops. To watch Connie cook eggs topless, which she did only once, at my request, while I took pictures I had every intention of deleting, was to live happily ever after for an entire afternoon. She was also extraordinarily well proportioned in a classical way, so she could wear anything just as well as the models and mannequins and not have to forgo that year’s trends because of a bummer body type. She was never just plain shit out of luck for a season because of an awkward waist or hip thing and didn’t have to hate other women on principle and talk about them being bitches and sluts because they wore a size 2. Her skin was as tight and tanned as parfleche, and her belly button went ovoid when she stretched naked. But if you got up close, or studied her closely night after night, year after year, you could see that her nose was too closely placed to her upper lip, the effect being a foreshortened or miniature upper lip and a nose that was slightly elephantine in comparison, which wrecked the perceived harmony and symmetry of her other features. It was a problem. I could ignore it when we were together, because not to ignore it while we were together would have been ungenerous. It would have put the focus on the superficial things and permitted the superficial things to diminish the substantial things, the delicate things that required careful nurturing like respect and friendship, and to fault her for something she essentially had no control over. She just had the misfortune of favoring her father in that one respect. On Howard Plotz there was practically no upper lip there at all.

Whenever I found myself concentrating too much on this particular aspect of her, and her likeness to a male, even one I admired as much as I did Howard, I consciously diverted my thinking. I thought of something else: her breasts, her wit, her tenderness toward me. But after we broke up, her truncated upper lip and flarey-nostril nose were practically all I noticed. They jumped out at me every time I talked to her, and instead of turning my attention away, I deliberately studied them, congratulating myself on escaping the fate of having to suffer them for the rest of my days.

And now on top of the lip, she was a believer in God.

I came back to the shop after my meeting with Sookhart and sat briefly inside my waiting room where I took a long hard look at Connie. Her facial disharmony was totally out of control that day. I almost had to look away. And I used to find it so endearing! It was that one incontestable piece of evidence that she was as human as the rest of us. If I had known that she secretly harbored a belief in God, I wondered, watching her at her various tasks, would I have romanticized that, too? If she had been honest about her theism, and if I had made myself more available, more vulnerable, as I had with Sam and the Santacroces, might I have opened my heart, as they say, to an impassioned plea or two and inquired honestly and without judgment how I might allow God to enter my life and love me? Might I have been the one all swept up and willing to change?

But she had not been honest, I had not made myself vulnerable, and now I felt relief. I had made a fool of myself with the Plotzes, sure, but it could have been a lot worse. I could have converted. I could have auditioned to become a cantor. But what were the Plotzes to me now? What was Judaism? What was Job to its first draft? And who was Connie next to Clara, the girl in the weathered Red Sox cap who had lovingly collected and shared with me the details of my family tree? I recalled Clara only vaguely, through a dreamlike haze. Compared with Connie at the front desk, roughed up by office light, in the humdrum backdrop of medical files, and possessed of a huge proboscis hovering above a withered lip, Clara possessed a spectral, perfectly proportioned beauty. All at once, I knew I was no longer in love with Connie. I was finally over her. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even remember how I felt in the final minutes of our last breakup, when I was crying and crying and wholly unsure of how to go on.

My thoughts were interrupted when someone took a seat beside me. I looked over… it was Connie! I looked back to the front desk; there was no one there. She had stood, entered the waiting room, and sat down next to me, all while I was intently scrutinizing her. Sometimes I thought myself fully present when in fact I was so coiled up inside my own head that I was blind to whatever was happening before my very eyes.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

And then she did something unexpected. She reached around my elbow, which was planted on the arm of the chair, and took my hand, then turned it over and placed her other hand on top, holding my hand between hers. Her knees were turned so that her right knee was touching my left knee, while her left knee was jutting out so that she could face me better. She smiled, but the smile had nothing good to say. It required a lot of effort just to briefly raise the one side of her lip. “There’s something I think you should know,” she said. Whenever someone thinks you should know something, it’s usually something you really don’t want to know. “I’m seeing someone,” she said.

A music of everyday magic ceased forever, at once.

His name was Ben. He was a poet. They were kind of serious.

I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “What does ‘kind of serious’ mean?”

And she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “You know. Kind of serious.”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Are you in love with him?”

And she didn’t say anything, long enough for me to know that she was. Then she said, “I don’t know, it hasn’t been that long.”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Is he Jewish?”

She didn’t say anything. I thought the question might be an irritating one and that she might let go of my hand, but she actually held it a little firmer and said, “Does it matter?”

It did matter, it did. He probably believed in God, too. But I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “I’m happy for you.”

And she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Are you okay?”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Of course.” And I looked at her and smiled. But I had no control over the smile and everything it told her.

I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

Eight

A FEW MONTHS AFTER starting my first private practice in Chelsea, I wrote Samantha Santacroce an old-fashioned letter and mailed it to her parents’ house, confident that it would find its way to her because she was living, I assumed, just down the block, or at most across town, if not in her very childhood bedroom. I tell myself I don’t know why I wrote to her, but I do: I wanted her to know that I had a private practice, that I was a success, that I had put the misery of my childhood behind me and made it out of Maine. She would have been so lucky, I was telling her by way of that letter, to have stuck by me after I’d admitted that I was an atheist at the Santacroce dinner table, and to have married me. A few weeks later, I received a reply, via email — my YazFanOne account, which I’ve had since the days of dial-up — a reply I read so many times that you would have thought I was off at war. “What do you mean,” she asked, “you only wanted to be a part of things? You had every opportunity to be a part of my family. Didn’t you know that? You just had to accept my parents, and you never seemed interested in that. They weren’t going to stop being Catholics for you, Paul, which I think is the least you would have settled for, back then. You wanted everyone to come around to your way of thinking. You had really strong opinions, and you never gave an inch. As I remember it, you were more interested in being yourself than being ‘a part of things.’ And sometimes you’re not always, or at least back then you weren’t, the easiest guy to get along with. I’m sure now, with all your success, things have changed.”

I wasn’t at all sure, and so didn’t write back.

I’d seen a headline on one of the celebrity magazines while sitting with Connie in my waiting room. “Harper and Bryn Are Huge Family People,” it read. Harper’s heterosexuality was in hot dispute, while Bryn had had that bad stumble when her first three kids were removed by court order on the season finale of Bryn. But now they were together, according to a “source” and a “pal,” and expecting a child. I was happy that things had worked out for them when for so long they were such a national shitshow. I also admit to feeling jealous. Harper and Bryn were huge family people. For them, nothing was more important — not the haters, not the paparazzi, not the weight gain, not even the LAPD — whereas I had given up all the families I had known. I’d given up Sam and the Santacroces, and now, I thought, I’ve given up Connie and the Plotzes. Connie had moved on to Ben, and I would never be a Plotz and would never again have them for a family. Which was an absurd thing to think, because I’d never really had the Plotzes to begin with. The only people who ever had the Plotzes were the Plotzes. I was never going to have the Plotzes even if Connie and I had married, because I was an O’Rourke. The Plotzes would never accept an O’Rourke — not because I was not a Jew, but because, as an O’Rourke, I acted in ways that were weird and distancing. And now I had to contend with the fact that I wasn’t even an O’Rourke. I was a Boruch from Białystok, whatever the hell that was, and, according to the goddess in the Red Sox hat, not even a Boruch from Białystok but something even more removed. Harper and Bryn knew who they were, they were huge family people. Who was I?

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

I finished up with my patient and walked over to her.

“My uncle’s here to see you,” she said.

“Your uncle?”

“Stuart,” she said.

“Your uncle Stuart?” I said, taking off my white smock. “He’s here? Your uncle Stuart is here? I haven’t seen Stuart in how long? What’s he doing here?”

“I didn’t say a thing. He found out on his own.”

“Found out what?”

“I tried to explain.”

I was only half listening. The other half was wondering how I looked, if I looked put together, if I looked self-respecting.

When my father was manic, he would lift me off the ground and squeeze me in a big bear hug. Upon first spying Stuart, from the vantage point of the front desk, I wanted to do the same to him. He was sitting alone, hands folded in his lap, waiting patiently. I told myself not to hug. Look at him. You don’t hug a man like that, no matter the impulse. As I backed away from the desk, I almost stepped on Connie’s foot. Finding her there watching me watch Stuart through the front-desk window, and just after hearing that she was dating someone new, I knew that she took the full measure of me, and saw me for what I was, and knew the relief of being rid of me. I also knew that my excitement was absurd. The sight of Stuart should have brought me more sadness, nothing more.

He stood to greet me as I entered the waiting room. Just stop and hold out your hand, I instructed myself. Anything more would be inappropriate. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I kept moving forward. I put my arms around him. He had none of my father’s bulk, and he hardly hugged back. I held on for as long as was acceptable — none of it was acceptable — a total of three or four seconds at most, being sure, before I let go, to slap him twice on his back, as if he was just an old buddy from the golf course and not the man I had hoped to sit next to during the Passover Seder.

“Stuart,” I said. “It’s good to see you again.”

He smiled, and perhaps only on account of my enthusiasm, his smile seemed warm and genuine.

“What brings you in?”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” he asked.

“Of course!”

As I took him back, I explained, in a voice that was suddenly too loud, that when I moved out of my two-room clinic in Chelsea, I designed the new place, to my eternal regret, without a private office.

“So we’ll have to talk in here,” I said, gesturing him inside an open exam room.

Once in the room I pulled up a stool for him. He settled down quickly, leaning forward with his hands gathered serenely together. I folded my arms and leaned against the patient chair. I was reminded once again of how austere and commanding his quiet presence could be. I blurted out something stupid, of course.

“Are you here to take me up on my offer?”

“What offer is that?” he asked.

“A good cleaning. X-rays. Make sure everything’s in order.”

“No,” he said.

No, he had come to discuss what was being written in my name online. I shifted against the chair.

“I hope Connie told you that I’m not writing those things,” I said. “That’s not me.”

“She did.”

“Good,” I said. “Because that’s not me writing those things.”

He was preternaturally still on that stool, which begged to be swiveled at least a little.

“Do you know who is?”

“Specifically?”

“It must be someone,” he said. “Do you have a name or something else to go by?”

It was probably whoever I was emailing with, I thought. But that person’s name was my own, and I didn’t want to tell Stuart that, and hoped Connie hadn’t.

“No,” I said. “It just… happened. First the website, then Facebook, then everything on Twitter.”

“Connie also mentioned that you seem… maybe a little persuaded by some of what’s being said.”

“Me?”

“Suggestions that the Amalekites survived and underwent a transformation.”

“I am an avowed atheist,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “But any opinion you might have about God would not necessarily be brought to bear on the question of the existence of a people like this. Do you know who the Amalekites are?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Not really.”

“When we invoke the name Amalek today,” he said, “we are invoking not just the ancient enemy of the Jews but an eternally irreconcilable enemy. Anti-Semitism in whatever form or manifestation that happens to take. Defaced synagogues. Suicide bombs. Hate speech. You might compare them to the Nazis. Amalek was the very first Nazi,” he said.

He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then returned the handkerchief to his pocket. I have always admired a man who can blow his nose gracefully while another man looks on.

“Amalek lives today in the radicals and the fundamentalists. He also has a more metaphorical meaning. Amalek can be temptation. It can be apostasy. It can be doubt.”

“Doubt?”

“I hope that doesn’t offend you,” he said. “I don’t think you hate the Jews like an Amalek just because you doubt God.”

“I don’t hate the Jews at all,” I said.

“It never occurred to me that you did,” he assured me.

“So you know it’s not me writing those things?”

“If you say it isn’t, I believe you.”

“It isn’t.”

“But what’s being written in your name remains upsetting to me and to others,” he said.

He removed his me-machine and in the silence that followed called up my Twitter account. Without a word, he passed the phone to me.

The Jew’s problem is that his suffering has made him double down on an absent God

The Jew refuses the enlightenment of doubt because without God his suffering would be meaningless

I gave the phone back.

“Stuart, I find those remarks abhorrent.”

“But you are an atheist,” he said. “You must agree with their substance.”

“No, I find them abhorrent.”

“Why?”

“The Jew this, the Jew that,” I said. “I’m not even Jewish, and it makes me cringe.”

“Well,” he said, “somebody has made those remarks.”

“I don’t know who,” I said.

“Do you believe you descend from these people?”

“No,” I said, “no, of course not, it’s… no, it’s unlikely.”

“Do you remember when you came to see me at my office?” he asked.

I hesitated. I wondered if Connie was listening. I was sure she was. The incomplete dental walls invited it. Mrs. Convoy was probably standing right next to her.

“I do,” I said in a very low voice.

“When you asked about Ezra?”

I nodded. I never wanted Connie to know about my visit to Stuart’s office to discuss how I might be more like Ezzie. I mean, on a formal basis: a practicing, atheistic Jew. Nothing came of it except a little embarrassment on my part, a little shame at my grotesque misapprehension of the most basic ways of Judaism and the world more broadly. What made me think I could emulate Ezzie? I had apologized to Stuart for any offense I might have caused and quickly left. Then for months and months afterward I lay in bed at night, and just as I was about to fall asleep, I’d recall this misbegotten inquiry and Stuart’s patient suffering of it, and my heart would jump and I would rise with a shock, incinerating with horror and shame.

“You had learned a few things about Judaism by that time,” he said. “Do you remember what a mitzvah is?”

Suddenly I felt like we were back at Connie’s sister’s wedding, at that deserted table in the dimness as the music faded, when he asked me if I knew what a philo-Semite was. After that, I never again wanted anyone who knew more about Judaism than I did to ask me basic questions about Judaism.

“I think so,” I said, “but can I be honest with you, Uncle Stuart?”

Uncle Stuart! It just came out! And there was nothing I could do about it! I couldn’t retract it any more than I could retract “Time to take a stool sample.” And this time there was no way of saying it was just a joke. My face went hot. I stopped breathing. I wanted to weasel out of the room, but I waited, wondering if he would acknowledge it or take mercy on me and let it pass.

“Please,” he said. “Honesty is best.”

He took mercy on me. “Thank you, Stuart,” I said. “Sorry,” I said. “What were we talking about again?”

“A mitzvah,” he said.

“Oh, right. I think I know what that is, but I’m guessing you know better than I do.”

“A mitzvah is a law,” he said. “There are 613 mitzvot to follow in accordance with the Torah. We take them very seriously, you understand. Every one of them, every day. They are moral laws, but also divine commandments. And three of them,” he said, putting his thumb and two fingers in the air, “concern Amalek.”

His fingers remained in the air.

“Remember what Amalek did to you out of Egypt,” he said, touching his thumb. Touching his forefinger, he said, “Never forget the evil done to you by Amalek. And destroy the seed of Amalek,” he concluded, touching the final finger. “They sound harsh, which is why so many go to such lengths to soften them, to turn them into metaphors. But others believe we face a real enemy, an existential threat, in every generation. Every generation must recognize who Amalek is for that generation, and every generation must prepare to fight it any way it can. Now,” he said, “can you tell me who Grant Arthur is?”

“Who?”

“It’s a name Connie gave me. You don’t know it?”

“I’ve heard it a few times.”

He stood up from the stool and took a step toward me. He let a minute of silence pass between us while I was still cringing at having called him “Uncle.”

“Grant Arthur had his name changed to David Oded Goldberg in 1980,” he said.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“The Internet,” he said. “How else? Now, do you know why he had his name changed?”

“I don’t really even know who he is,” I said.

He went on to tell me a few things about Grant Arthur. I shrugged. He looked away. When he looked back, he wore a modest, patient smile. The calm passage of air in and out of his nostrils was audible in a grave way. He extended his hand, and I took it. Then he thanked me and left the room.

“I know who you are now,” I wrote.

I have friends who figured it all out. Your name is Grant Arthur. You were born in New York in 1960. Your family had money. You moved to Los Angeles and changed your name to David Oded Goldberg in 1980. Not long after that, you were arrested for harassing an Orthodox Jewish rabbi named Osher Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn had taken out a restraining order against you. I want to know why. Why did you change your name? Why did a rabbi need protection against you?

That night I drove to a place in New Jersey called the Seehorse. I’d been there once or twice before. It was a windowless block structure on the outskirts of Newark. The cars washed by on the highway a hundred feet away, past a parking lot of broken glass and a garroted pay phone. Inside, the regulars stared up at a rotation of three seahorses: the fat one, the black one, and the one with tattoos. A one-armed DJ in a Hawaiian shirt and POW/MIA hat clapped the microphone against his chest at the end of every song. He encouraged everyone to tip. “These ladies aren’t dancing the cueca,” he said. “They have mouths to feed.” Terrific, I thought. Strippers with mouths to feed.

The music transitioned from hard rap to solo Sting. Chest claps issued from the mic. I approached the tattooed one. She was sitting half naked at an empty table, her face lit from below by the white light of her me-machine. I introduced myself. “Steve,” I said. “Narcy,” she said. We shook hands. A few minutes later, when she was through with her texting, she arrived at my table to give me a lap dance. She had Bettie Page bangs and a belly ring. Across her spine on her lower back was a tattoo of a chess piece, a bishop in black ink. As the dance progressed, she acquired a rigid look of concentration. It gave the impression that she would be just as surprised as anyone else by whatever move her body made next. “Where are you from, Narcy?” I asked her, and she began to sing. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. She reared back and flashed me her tits. They were ringed underneath by a Celtic design. I think she was relieved when enough time had passed that she could begin undressing in good conscience. She took off her top and began to treat her breasts roughly. I didn’t know how that could be pleasurable. I almost asked her to stop. “So you’re from the pines,” I said. She pressed her chest into my nose and put my hands on her ass, then pulled her body away in an awkward slink. Watching her strip was like receiving an inexpert massage from a blind lady. “But where are you from really?” I asked. “I mean your family. What are your family origins?” She stopped dancing. “Do you want the dance or don’t you?” she asked. I nodded. She turned around and gave me a shake of her ass while her split ends swept the concrete floor.

I spent the rest of the night splitting my attention between the girls onstage and the regulars arrayed around it. They were muttlike men minding their treasures of single-dollar bills, awash in purple light and heading toward midnight without purpose or prayer. They were generic remnants of a gene pool drifting out with the tide, leaving them naked and lost beneath the moon’s blank guidance. And I was sitting beside them feeling sorry for myself, still cringing inwardly at having called Stuart “Uncle.”

My cell rang at 3:00 that morning—10:00 a.m. Tel Aviv time. It was Grant Arthur.

The next morning I leaned against the front desk and started telling Connie about the headline I’d seen the day before.

“If I had been more like Harper,” I began.

“Sorry,” she said. “More like who?”

“Harper,” I said.

“Who’s Harper?”

“Of Harper and Bryn.”

“Who’s Bryn?”

“You don’t know Bryn? Bryn from Bryn?”

She looked at me like I was trying to talk through a stroke. “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” she said.

“Harper was gay for a while? Bryn was the porn star who found God? The ‘Porn-Again’? None of this rings a bell?”

“It’s like you live in a parallel universe,” she said.

“I’ll go show you the magazine,” I said. “But let’s say I had been more like Harper, you know… more family oriented.”

“Harper’s a family man?”

“Huge family man. They’re huge family people. And we’re not talking model citizens here. You don’t expect them to give a damn about family. You really don’t know Harper and Bryn?”

“I really don’t know Harper and Bryn,” she said.

“Well, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion. When I saw how much family meant to those two, and read about it in the cover story?—”

“You don’t believe what you read in those magazines, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Because it sort of sounds like you do.”

“Can I make my point, please?”

“Make your point.”

“If I had been more willing to have kids,” I said, “do you think it might have worked out between us?”

“Wait, what?”

“If I had been more willing—”

“But what does it matter?” she said. “You didn’t want them. And you weren’t going to change your mind. Why ask hypothetical questions about something predetermined? I mean, you wouldn’t even talk about it. So to ask now if it would have made a difference when it was never really an option is like asking… like asking if things would have worked out if you were someone entirely different. The answer is yes. If you were someone entirely different, and that someone had been willing to have kids with me, you bet, there might have been a chance that things between you and me would have worked out.”

I walked away. Then I came back.

“That’s who Ben is,” she continued unabated from where she left off. “He’s like you, except an entirely different person. He’s at least hypothetically willing to have kids. He’s at least willing to talk about it. So there’s your answer. Your answer’s yes, and his name’s Ben.”

“You expect me to believe that you didn’t tell your uncle about those tweets?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Paul, I didn’t.”

“I specifically asked you not to tell Stuart,” I said. “I thought he might have come in for a checkup, but no. He’d come because somebody told him I was a huge anti-Semite on Twitter.”

“I told him no such thing,” she said. “Do you want to know what I told him? I told him that someone was taking advantage of you. That’s all I told him.”

“Who gave him the name Grant Arthur?”

“Well, me, obviously. But that’s because somebody is taking advantage of you, Paul. And for some reason, all of your fury, all that outrage you had when this first started, has just, like, disappeared, and you spend all your time emailing, you can’t concentrate at the chair, I bet you’re not even paying attention to the Red Sox. Can you tell me their standing right now?”

I was quiet.

“Win-loss record?”

I was quiet.

“So that’s why I told him the name. I overheard Frushtick say it, so I passed it on to Stuart, who found out about all this shit not because he’s related to me, hard as that is to believe, but because there are people who pay attention when crazy people say incendiary things on the Internet about Jews. And in this particular instance, that crazy person happens to look a lot like you.”

I bent down to be level with her chair. “I know all about Grant Arthur,” I said. “I know more than your uncle. I know why he moved to Los Angeles. I know who he fell in love with there and why he tried to convert to Judaism. And I know that when he got his heart broken, he did some stupid things that got him in a little trouble with the police.”

“How do you know this?”

“He was lost. He didn’t know who he was. He’s not a criminal. He’s just a sap who fell in love with the wrong girl. I can relate to a guy like that.”

I walked away. Then I came back.

“And just so you know,” I said. “I’m also dating someone new. Her name is Narcy. She’s a dancer.”

I went back to work. Then I went out to the waiting room where I looked for the magazine with Harper and Bryn on the cover so I could show it to Connie. But somebody must have stolen it. It sucks being a dentist. People are always stealing your magazines.

Mercer had just finished telling me what his time at Seir was like and of his plans to return. We were sitting in a quiet bar, no TV screen in the corner, our me-machines stowed away, nothing before us but the booze and the bartender and a distant tune on the jukebox. Everyone spoke in the same low key as a little ice in a glass. I told him that I’d gotten a call from Grant Arthur. I asked him if he knew about his thwarted love for the rabbi’s daughter.

“Mirav Mendelsohn,” he said. “Sure, I know. It’s the first thing he tells you about himself.”

“Sounds like he was really in love.”

“He didn’t know himself back then. He didn’t know a thing about his past, his family.”

“Have you ever been in love like that?” I asked him.

“You mean, with someone ill suited for me?”

“Someone you chose unwisely, because you were searching for something more than, you know, just a girlfriend.”

“Have you?”

I told him about Sam and the Santacroces and Connie and the Plotzes.

“They claim it’s a common thing,” he said. “Maybe it is. What the hell do I know? Sure, I was in love like that once.”

He had been new to the city, virtually penniless, without friends, when he found himself one day at a storefront fire temple in Queens.

“A fire temple?”

“It’s Zoroastrian,” he said. “Are you familiar with the Zoroastrians?”

“No more than the rest of us,” I said.

He’d gone there after reading up on the world’s religions and finding that Zoroastrianism held some primal appeal. According to the Zoroastrians, there was light, and there was darkness, and the light and the darkness did battle. At least that was his crude understanding at the time. He hung around the place talking to the head priest, a man named Cyrus Mazda, who tended to a fire they kept burning in a pit. He liked Mazda’s mustache, the two halves of which repelled each other as if by the work of magnets. Before long, Mercer caught sight of a girl who belonged to the congregation, and he fell head over heels. The girl was a second-generation Americanized Iranian who rebelled against her parents in big ways and small. She and Mercer snuck around, made out on the subways. They connived and hatched plans. Then reality set in. Conservative Zoroastrians didn’t go for mixed marriages. Marriage was arranged, new world or not. Mercer’s love was married off by the time he was twenty, and he took his wrecked heart and ruined spirit to the markets. His goal was to return to the fire temple as a millionaire and make a donation, to make them rue what they had spurned. Attrition wasn’t the only Zoroastrian woe: they had no money for outreach, education, expansion out of Queens.

“Did you do it?” I asked.

“Not after a million,” he said. “I was too busy by then, and my heart was healed. Calloused, maybe, poor me. But when I had, oh, a hundred, I bought them a temple in New Jersey. But anonymously.”

“You took your revenge out anonymously?”

“I had nothing to prove by then, and no desire to take credit. And like I said, it wasn’t the girl I fell in love with first. It was the light defeating the darkness. It was the man with the mustache in the white robe and gold sash who kept the fire alive. And Dari,” he said. “I loved to hear Dari spoken.”

He motioned to the bartender. We watched the mute man pull a bottle from the shelf, pour out our little gemstones, and retreat back to his me-machine.

“So I take it you weren’t a Christian,” I said.

“Born and raised,” he said.

At the age of thirteen he had been baptized and confirmed in the name of Jesus Christ and given a Bible with his name on it. There was never an imperative or moral duty to read it, so it was put away and never opened. Jesus Christ was a birthright and a friend. He personally looked out for Mercer. When Mercer was scared, He hovered nearby, protecting him. When Mercer did something bad, He looked down upon him in shame and heartache. When Mercer sought forgiveness, He granted it. To maintain this love, only one thing was required of Mercer: faith. No sacrifice, no ritual, no way of life counted more than that simple statement of his heart’s intent, and upon him was conferred all of God’s grace. It didn’t matter that he didn’t really know his own heart and wouldn’t know it for years. With a declaration of faith came absolution on earth, heaven when he died, and presents on Christmas Day.

“I have some fond memories of church,” he said. “People who were nice to us. And I remember trying to pray after my mother died. I brought my hands together, I bowed my head. But then I thought, Let’s just say it is Jesus Christ up there. He’s not likely to be a fucking idiot, is He? He knows. He knows all right. So do the both of you a favor and get the hell off your knees.”

The door opened, and a loud group entered. They got drinks and retreated to the pool room, and for the rest of our conversation we heard billiard balls clinking in discreet silence, sometimes followed by roars and moans.

“To be honest,” he said, “I’ve tried just about all of them.”

“All what?”

“Religions.”

This included a long time devoted to Zen Buddhism, with annual retreats to Kyoto to study with a master who fought as a foot soldier in World War II. Mercer, who steadily grew his fortune over three decades, yearly submitted himself to a complete divestiture for ten days and did nothing but meditate on tatami mats and beg in the streets for alms. He was seeking, he said, always seeking, seeking so strenuously as to guarantee he’d never find. “Twelve years I went back and forth to Kyoto. It helped me see the bigger picture, but it left me cold in the end. You know what I think of Buddhism? It has good answers to all the wrong questions.”

He looked into Jainism, into anthroposophy, into Krishnamurti. He liked Judaism. He admired the Koran. He chuckled through Dianetics. He had no respect for what he called the Churches of Welcoming All: Unitarian, Baha’i, the rest of humanity’s tender mercies. He required something that looked evil in the eye, that understood the meaning of mercy to be justice commuted by grace, and that contended with the fact that death was nothing he was going to adjust to, make amends with, or overcome.

“I’m exempt from the worst of it,” he said. “I’ll never know suffering. I’ll never again know discomfort, if I so choose. But I die in the end. I still die, and maybe fucking horribly. And who knows what after.”

In the meantime, nothing sufficed, nothing was equal to the question, Why am I here?

“I wish I could have been a Christian,” he said. “I’d have had someone to the left of me and someone to the right always ready with an answer, whatever the problem, amens and potlucks, little talks with Jesus, and peace for life everlasting.”

He gestured to the bartender, who poured him another.

“The most interesting thing I’ve done was a five-day… what was it called,” he asked himself. “It was a deprogramming, but they never used that word.”

“A deprogramming?”

“At a certain point, I just said fuck it, you know? I’m hounded day and night, the seeker has become the sought, I’m wasting my life worrying about this crap. So I wanted to get rid of what I’d always called the Jesus Christ in my head. I mean God, God’s voice, but because I was raised a Christian, it was Jesus. Jesus judging, Jesus protecting, Jesus saying, ‘You might want to rethink that.’ Whatever the case may be. Big or small. Jesus was always there. Making little marks. Tallying it all up. Do you have that voice, always telling you right from wrong?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s usually off the mark.”

“Rechanneling, that’s what they called it. It’s like a recovery center. They’re in California. Everything that’s not in Asia is in California. I went out there to ‘rechannel.’ They have people on staff, behavioral therapists, neuroscientists, philosophers, atheists. The idea is to stop thinking that that voice was given to you by God to do His work and to start thinking of it for what it is: old-fashioned conscience. Something naturally acquired. Evolution’s gift. They hook you up to monitors, do brain scans. You role-model God. You study atrocities. They show you time-lapse videos of decaying animals. ‘Codependence to Aliveness’ was their motto.”

“Are you making this up?” I asked.

“How could I make this up?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did it work?”

“For a while. But old habits die hard, you fall back into your familiar patterns, and then you fly out for a tune-up. They recommend once a year. Look it up on the Internet. People swear by it. They have a beautiful view of the ocean.”

He gestured again.

“What makes you do all this?” I asked.

“Ho,” he said. He gave me a sidewise glance. “You really want to know?”

“I really do,” I said.

He was waiting for the C train to pull into the station one day when suddenly he dropped to his knees. He was eighteen, broke, a freshman at Columbia studying economics. It was a day in late winter, and the trains were slow. The platform was crowded. Those nearest him parted as he went down, forming a small circle around him. What was indisputably a bowing down felt to Mercer like levitation. He was looking down on that little crowd looking down on him. Behind him, lifting him, making him light as a cloud, was the presence that touched him, which he knew he could not turn to look at. It was suffused light. He peered down with a smile on that little crowd wary of his contagion. They didn’t see the smile. They saw a kid fall first to his knees and then onto his back. Mercer, above them, where everything had fused into palpable spirit, knew everything about them: their agitations, their rancors, their grudges against the city, and his smile was merciful. He even knew their names and where they lived. He dwelled in eternity’s single instant, a dimensionless black dot on the one hand (that was the best part, he said, being nothing, being a black dot) and, on the other, centuries of void and fire, glacial eras, the enduring silence of undiscovered caves. In the common parlance, it was an epiphany, a revelation, a religious experience. Run of the mill, probably, by his own admission. The train approached. The people debated internally. Alert someone? Or ignore and board? A few of the more concerned moved him back, closer to safety. Who, or what, Mercer touched, and what touched him back through his own hovering figure, now broke away. He was no longer floating. He felt his back against the platform, the chill through the coat. Trains came and went. The start of God’s absence from his life began.

“When I was twenty-eight,” he said, “I did something I had resisted doing since that day on the platform. I took the train out to Brooklyn, to an address I had never been to. I didn’t expect to find the woman I was looking for, but there was her name on the buzzer. I said to her, ‘Do you remember me?’ and she nodded, but she couldn’t place me. It had been ten years, after all.”

“What had been ten years?”

“Since we had seen each other on the platform. She was among the crowd that day.”

“How did you know where she lived?”

“I told you,” he said. “I knew their names and addresses.”

He should have just left — apprehended her, confirmed her, and walked away. But she invited him inside, and he followed her up the stairs. They sat down with coffee, and she asked him if the man had ever been found.

“The man?” he said.

“The man who hit you,” she said.

He had torn through the platform half naked, hit Mercer with a brass kettle, and down he went. “Just minding your own business,” said the woman, “and he came running right at you.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” he said.

“How do you remember it?” she asked.

“I know your name, don’t I?” he said. “How do I know your name and address? Explain that.”

“I gave all my information to the police,” she said. “You must have gotten it from them.”

Twenty years later, when Grant Arthur explained the origin of the Ulms, Mercer was prepared to listen. God had never reappeared to them, either. Not to reprimand them. Not to instruct them. Not to comfort them. Not to reassure them. Not to redeem them.

“It has been over three thousand years, and God has not returned for them,” he said. “It has been over thirty for me. Who better to understand the virtues of doubt than someone who once stood in the direct presence of God and had that memory taken away?”

He looked off.

“I must sound insane to you.”

“Strange things happen,” I said.

He turned to me with heavy eyes. I was reminded that he had arrived before me and that I wasn’t likely to catch up now.

“But I was still skeptical. I even hired a private detective to look into Grant Arthur. Asian woman. Come to think of it, she might still be on the payroll.”

“How does anyone doubt God when He supposedly appeared?” I asked him.

“You haven’t read it?”

“Read what?”

“Cantonment 240.”

“No.”

“Read it,” he said. “Your questions go away.”

“What happens in cantonment 240?”

He drank his drink and called for another.

“I can’t do it justice,” he said.

“Give me the gist.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t. And I wouldn’t try. I wouldn’t do that to you. It’s not an experience you want secondhand. You’ll have to go to Seir.”

He picked up his glass. He swung it like a cradle between his fingers, gently moving the liquid, peering into it, through it.

“I don’t want to have any more questions,” he said. “I have questioned myself out of too much. It’s only made me unhappy.” He turned to look at me, head a little loose on its stem. “Not a Christian, not a Buddhist. Zoroastrian no, atheist no. Not waiting for the mothership.” He downed the drink. “I’m a whore, Paul,” he said. “A whore who has bent her head into every car window that would lower itself. I’m tired of that. I want to be who I am.”

He gestured for the bartender.

“To be passed over by God in the final days, that must be a terror,” he said. “But to feel like you’ve been passed over by God all your days on earth? That, my friend, is hell.”

The weekend came, and I hung out with McGowan. We went to a bar and had a few beers. He caught me up with the Red Sox. I told him I couldn’t shake the image of Harper and Bryn going to the mall together, swinging the kids on swings, making them mac-and-cheese and giving them baths. He didn’t know who Harper and Bryn were. It was so easy to find yourself out of touch these days, I said to him.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Strip away the celebrity, and they’re just normal people,” I said. “Why can’t I be more like normal people?”

“Because you’re not normal,” he said. “You’re totally fucked up.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You are, Paul, you’re totally fucked up. You struggle with depression. Your idea of engaging with the world is watching a Red Sox game. And you take the job too personally.”

“I don’t take the job too personally. I take the job as it comes.”

“You think about the people,” he said. “You can’t do that. Their failings, their misfortunes. You have to think of it as one big disembodied mouth.”

“That’s what I try to do.”

“You try,” he said, “but you fail.”

I thought he was being a little hard on me. I just wanted to thank the guy for helping me out of the gym.

“You’re right,” I said. “I am fucked up.”

On Sunday I drove up to Poughkeepsie, to the Sarah Harvest Dodd Home for the Elderly, to see my mom. I’d like to say that we had a nice chat and a rewarding visit, but she hadn’t had anything resembling a functioning brain for five and a half years. She couldn’t piss, shit, or eat on her own. She hummed a lot and stared at the TV. She always looked the same: noticeably older. She sat in a wheelchair in a room with long floral curtains and a netless Ping-Pong table. I sat down next to her and started asking all the questions I always asked. “How are you feeling?” I said. No response. “Are you comfortable?” No response. “You want this pillow?” No response. “Have you missed me?” No response. “What did you have to eat today?” No response. “What are you watching?” No response. “Are they treating you well?” No response. “What can I do for you, Mom? Anything?” No response. I started telling her about myself. “I’m doing well,” I said to her. “The practice is going well. Everyone seems to be pretty happy. I do have some bad news, I guess. Connie and I broke up. We’ve been broken up for a while now, but this time it’s for good. She’s seeing someone new. I’m happy for her, as happy as I can be. Which is off the charts happy, Ma. Do you remember Connie? Of course you don’t,” I said. “You have no fucking clue who Connie is. She came up to visit you a few times. She liked you. She did, she combed your hair. She does shit like that. It breaks your fucking heart.” I took her hand. No response. “Mom,” I said. No response. Her head was cocked almost in the direction of the TV. “Remember when I couldn’t sleep?” No response. “Dad died and I couldn’t sleep?” No response. “And then one night, you happened to tell me about Chinese people?” No response. “I was so scared that I’d be the last person awake in the world. I don’t know why that was so scary to me, but it was. But you said I couldn’t be the last person awake in the world, because just as we were going to sleep, all the people in China were waking up. Do you remember telling me that?” No response. “That helped,” I told her. “Did I ever tell you that?” No response. “Even though Chinese people were strange to me then, you know, because of their eyes. I hope I told you that before you lost all your fucking marbles,” I said. No response. “I’m sorry I kept you up. You were trying to hold things together,” I said. “You did a good job. Did I tell you that, that you did a good job holding things together?” No response. “Did I ever thank you?” No response. “Can I thank you now?” No response. “Can I kiss you, Mom? Can I kiss you right here on your forehead?” No response. I kissed her. No response. “Even now,” I said, “when I can’t sleep, it helps me to think about the Chinese. All thanks to you. And then, when I do fall asleep, I sleep like a baby, Ma. Every night, I sleep like a dream.”

Nine

SOOKHART CALLED WITH NEWS. “I’ve found a copy,” he said.

“Of the Cantaveticles?”

“I’m as surprised as you. Astonished, in fact. Never in a million years… well, what follows from this is… the implications are rather far reaching, aren’t they?”

“How’d you find it?”

“The seller contacted a colleague of mine who was making inquiries on my behalf.”

“Who’s the seller?”

“He wishes to remain anonymous. That is frequently the case with transactions of this nature,” he said. “I’m sure you can understand.”

“But it’s real?”

“It’s real, and it’s complete. My understanding is that it is of Hungarian origin and dates roughly to the middle of the eighteenth century.”

“Written in Aramaic?”

“Curiously,” he said, “it appears to be written in Yiddish.”

That surprised me.

“Can you read Yiddish?”

“My dear boy,” he said, “no one can read Yiddish. But don’t let that worry you. We’ll find you a Yiddishist, and you can have it translated to your heart’s content. So long as you share what it says with the rest of us.”

He went quiet.

“Well?” he said. “Shall I proceed with the purchase?”

“Today was a tough day,” he wrote.

The man who takes care of us around here came to see me. He keeps the grounds, does the repair work. He knows how to strip mold from the walls and put in new lighting, but he can also recite Kierkegaard and the Psalms. He’s been here seven happy years. But lately he’s been having dreams. In them, he sees his wife again. She tells him things about God. She tells him what heaven is like. The dreams are vivid. He wakes up and can’t shake them. He feels her in the room with him. He asks me my opinion of the dead. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. The dead are dead. He nods. He’s a thoughtful man, I can see he’s struggling. He knows some cultures believe that the dead are alive and well. They hover, they hold sway over the living. He wants to know if I agree that it would be better that way, better to be separated from the dead only by a thin membrane that the dead can pierce when necessary. What’s called miracles. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. There are no miracles, only men. But I can’t help him shake the dreams.

He will leave, I think. It has happened this way before. We are our own worst enemy. We abandon doubt. We become believers. Even now our numbers are dwindling.

Please consider my proposal to pay us a visit.

That same afternoon I saw a new patient, an old man with poor gums. He introduced himself as Eddie — an odd name, I thought, for an octogenarian. But, hey, if you’re Eddie at ten, you’re still Eddie at eighty. Eddie let me know the minute I sat down that he had been seeing the same dentist for over thirty-seven years. A Dr. Rappaport. I knew Dr. Rappaport. He had a good reputation. He also had — and this was the reason we all knew Dr. Rappaport — an unusual hygienist, whose habit it was to enter the room and ask her patients to hold certain instruments while she worked. “Hold this,” she’d say, handing the patient an instrument while in the middle of a cleaning, and “Hold this,” which the patient did dutifully, if not wholly comprehendingly, one instrument after the other — only to discover later, upon closer inspection, that she had only one arm. She was a one-armed hygienist. She was a very good hygienist, from everything I heard, even compared to hygienists with both arms. You can be a one-armed golfer and a one-armed drummer — why not a one-armed hygienist? The variety of determination in the world never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, about three weeks before my new patient was scheduled to see Dr. Rappaport, Dr. Rappaport’s office called to inform him that Dr. Rappaport had died. My new patient was going to have to find a new dentist. But after thirty-seven years, Eddie — who, at eighty-one, and weighing in at about a hundred pounds, was no spring chicken himself — didn’t want to find a new dentist. He was happy with Dr. Rappaport. Dr. Rappaport had taken fine care of his teeth for nearly half his life. It was inconceivable to him that Dr. Rappaport could die. That tall, youthful man with the lab coat and tan, how could he die? “He must have been a full twenty years younger than me,” said Eddie, who, I recognized, was one of those patients who found in his biannual checkup an opportunity to unburden some of his loneliness. He was a talker, and although I was busy that afternoon, that poor old dad was going to be dead in six months, and so I rested the hand that held the explorer and let him talk. I looked over at Abby, to nonverbally share in the conclusion that we had a talker on our hands — only to find her gone again, replaced by that diminutive temp I disliked. Where was Abby? She was there that morning. She never came to me, not even when all she needed was an afternoon off. She went to Connie instead. To Abby I was more like some creepy janitor, with his leer and mop bucket, than I was the man in charge. I didn’t care for the way the temp looked at me when I looked at her thinking I was looking at Abby; it was, I thought, the natural expression of her face at rest, but it made me feel vaguely accused all the same. Why is she not wearing a paper mask? I wondered. Does she not care if flecks of dental scum invade her membranes and nostrils? Abby would never not wear a mask, I thought. I peered back down at Eddie, whose face — though not at rest, as he was still going on and on about Dr. Rappaport — appeared melancholy, beautiful, and lost. His eyes were much wider than eyes typically are at that age, swimming in a pure whiteness. It was one more indignity of old age, he was saying, like chemo, or incontinence, to have your dentist die on you. Whose dentist just ups and dies? Old people’s. But not even old people expect it. Among the most basic guarantees that life goes on, that life is ever going on, is the promise that after the passage of six months’ time, your dentist will be alive and ready to receive you. When my patient learned that Dr. Rappaport had had a sudden heart attack, despite his relative youth and vigor, and was no longer receiving anyone, he realized that he, too, was bound to die. He’d always known it in an offhand way, but if it could happen to Dr. Rappaport, death was coming for Eddie, too. It was one of an accumulation of things that sent him spiraling into depression. He stopped taking care of himself, stopped going to the doctor, stopped doing any of the exercises necessary to keep his rheumatoid arthritis in check, and stopped flossing at night. Only at the urging of a physician friend did he get on an antidepressant and resume making an effort. But by then, his health had deteriorated. His rheumatoid arthritis was much worse, and as a result, it was virtually impossible for him to pull the floss out, wrap it around his fingers, and manipulate it between his teeth and gums. He couldn’t even use a floss pick. He’d flossed every day for nearly fifty years before Dr. Rappaport’s death, and now he had lost the necessary dexterity. A casual glance at his hands and anyone could see why. Each of his fingers veered at the knuckle like the end of a hockey stick. I didn’t know how it was possible to do anything at all with hands like that, even so little as turning a doorknob or opening a jar. Eventually, I thought, those fingers are going to meld into one, as teeth sometimes do in the mouths of the super old, and his two finger chunks, one on his right hand and one on his left, will be useless for anything but sitting in his lap pointing at each other. I should bring Connie in here, I thought, and show her Eddie’s hands and ask her if she still sees the point of lotioning every ten minutes. Lotion an inch thick, to this favor you must come. And Mrs. Convoy, too, I should bring Mrs. Convoy in here and demand to know why I shouldn’t immediately go outside and smoke a cigarette and continue smoking throughout the afternoon, since we all arrive at the same conclusion. After the hands, I’ll show them Eddie’s teeth and tell them his absurd predicament: half a century of flossing, only to be knocked on his ass by news of a dead dentist.

When I finally got inside his mouth and had a look around, I confirmed Mrs. Convoy’s notes: bone loss, gum pockets measuring sevens and eights. I never put odds on teeth with gum pockets of sevens and eights. But I vowed then and there to do everything I could to help him resume his fifty years of flossing. I removed the explorer and smiled down on him, placing my hand on his child’s shoulder. “Eddie?” I said. “Eddie, just what are we going to do with you, I wonder.”

Connie was at the front desk doing some filing.

“Where’s Connie?” I asked her.

“I’m right here,” she said.

“Ah! My brain’s going. I mean Abby, where’s Abby? She was here this morning.”

Connie suddenly got real busy.

“Connie?”

“Huh?”

“Where’s Abby?”

“She quit,” she said.

“She what?”

“She quit,” she said. “Abby quit.”

“What the hell for?”

She wasn’t looking at me.

“Connie, stop filing and look at me. Look at me! Stop!” She stopped filing. “What do you mean she quit? What did she quit for?”

“She took a new job,” she said. “She’s pursuing new opportunities.”

“New opportunities?” I said. “Abby?”

“Yeah, Abby,” she said. “Is that so outrageous?”

“What new opportunities?” I said. “Did she give notice? Most people give notice. It would be unlike Abby not to give notice,” I said.

“She didn’t give notice,” she said. “Unless you count lunch. Which she had off anyway.”

“Is this a joke?”

“She quit, Paul. She’d had enough.”

“She’d had enough? Hold on,” I said. “Having enough is totally different from pursuing new opportunities.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” she said.

It was time for Abby to get serious about being an actress, Connie explained, and to do that, she needed a job with greater flexibility. This was not the first time I’d heard rumors that Abby was some kind of aspiring actress. I should have let it suffice. People quit all the time and on the flimsiest of pretexts, and intelligent people have learned not to poke at those pretexts too closely, for fear of what might come flying out. But I couldn’t shut up about it. I couldn’t comprehend Abby not giving notice. It was common courtesy to give notice. Abby was taciturn but not discourteous. I pressed Connie and pressed her until finally she admitted that among Abby’s stated reasons for quitting was that I could be a bit much to work for. No news flash there. Also, said Connie, Abby had looked at what I was posting on Twitter, and not liking what she’d found there, not liking my so-called online persona, decided to quit right away rather than give notice.

“But that’s not me! Doesn’t she know that’s not me?”

“Apparently not.”

“Didn’t you tell her?”

“I told her.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“She either didn’t believe me, or she didn’t care.”

“But Abby’s not even Jewish,” I said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“If somebody should be quitting, it’s you,” I said, “not Abby. Abby’s a Presbyterian, or a Methodist, or something.”

“A Presbyterian or a Methodist?” she said. “You didn’t even know she was an actress until five minutes ago.”

“How long has she been an actress?”

“And you don’t have to be Jewish to dislike anti-Semitic remarks. That’s a pretty universal sentiment in America these days.”

“But if anything,” I said, “if you read my tweets all at once, they’re really more anti-Muslim. Or anti-Christian. Antireligion in general, if you read them all at once.”

“When you’re hiring for her replacement,” she said, “you can post that in the ad.”

“Does Abby even know anything about the history of Judaism? Is she aware of what real anti-Semitism even looks like?”

“Real anti-Semitism?”

She looked at me like I’d lost it.

“What?” I said.

“Do you know what this bizarre little identity theft of yours has taught me?”

I sighed, then gestured for her to give it to me.

“The only people qualified to judge what ‘real’ anti-Semitism is and what it’s not are Jews. Which excludes you.”

I went back and sat across from Darla, the diminutive temp, who apparently had no objections to working for an anti-Semite. How badly Abby and I must have misjudged each other, I thought, and after so long being day after day only a few feet apart for hours at a stretch. It was inconceivable that she could be gone, and without so much as a goodbye. That afternoon, she must have just drifted out, or slipped out purposefully, and I thought nothing of her sudden absence, even welcoming it as that break in the continuity so commonly referred to as lunch. I had no idea that it would be the last chance I’d have to take her aside and apologize for being such a moody bastard. I was sorry for being so moody. I was sorry for being terse, cold, stern, dismissive, withholding, and unremittingly indifferent to every aspect of her being. No wonder she never came to me, no wonder she was gone.

Abby gone!

I worried about losing Mrs. Convoy next. I could not lose Mrs. Convoy and keep O’Rourke Dental running smoothly. In so many ways, Betsy Convoy was O’Rourke Dental.

When I found her, she had already begun the day’s sterilizing. “Betsy,” I said, “I’d like to talk to you about why Abby quit.”

She set everything down, reached out, and took me by the hand. I could feel the expert little bones inside her fingers.

“Have I ever told you what a fine dentist you are?” she asked.

During Betsy’s first year at O’Rourke Dental, when her superhuman skills still had the power to awe, I wanted nothing more than some sign of her opinion of me. I hoped that she considered herself to be working alongside a worthy partner. She was the best hygienist I’d ever known. Over time, I took her excellence for granted, and she simply became Betsy Convoy, devout R.C. and double-wide ballbreaker. But here she was, years later, giving me what I had once longed for.

“Thank you, Betsy,” I said.

“My husband, may he rest in peace, was also a good dentist. But he was not of your caliber. I’ve worked with a number of good dentists over the years. None of them has been of your caliber.”

“I’m honored to hear you say that.”

She smiled at me.

She released my hand and resumed sterilizing.

“But about Abby quitting,” I said.

“She’s pursuing new opportunities,” she said. “She’s always wanted to be an actress.”

“But that’s not the only reason she quit,” I said.

I told her what was being said in my name on Twitter. I removed my me-machine and read her my most recent posts.

“Aren’t you curious about all that?” I asked her.

“Why should I be?”

“Because those posts are in my name.”

“Did you write them?”

“No, but shouldn’t you wonder if I did?”

“What for?”

“What for? Betsy, many of these comments can be construed as anti-Semitic. Which would seem to imply that I’m an anti-Semite.”

“Are you an anti-Semite?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But the Internet sort of implies I am. Isn’t it important to you, to know if I am or not?”

“But you just said you weren’t.”

“But I had to come to you and tell you that. Once you heard why Abby quit, shouldn’t you have come to me? Shouldn’t you have voiced some concern? We’re talking about one of the ugliest prejudices in the history of mankind.”

“But I know you. You aren’t that way.”

“But shouldn’t you question just a little the possibility that maybe you don’t know me?”

“I don’t understand what your point is, Paul. Are you an anti-Semite, or aren’t you?”

“The point is you’re not curious! You’re not showing any concern! What if I am an anti-Semite?”

“But you’ve said that you’re not.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I’m going to finish the sterilizing now,” she said. “If you wish to tell me that you’re an anti-Semite, I’ll be right here.”

“Prove I’m not!” I cried. “Have a look online and prove it!”

She left the room. That was all she and I said on the subject.

My last patient of the day was a marketing executive with three cavities in need of filling. I conveyed that information to him and then was called away momentarily. When I returned, the marketing executive said, “I don’t think I’m going to have them filled.”

His X-rays were still on-screen. He could see his cavities as well as anyone. I looked again at his chart. He was well insured. There was no financial reason not to have his cavities filled. And I took it on faith that oral upkeep was at least of some concern to him. Otherwise, he would not have made the appointment.

“Okay,” I said. “But I do strongly recommend having those cavities filled at some point. They’re just going to get worse over time.”

He nodded.

I said, “Is it the pain you’re worried about?”

He looked puzzled. “It’s not painful to have a cavity filled, is it?”

“No,” I said, “that’s why I ask. It’s not painful at all. We numb you.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “No, it’s not the pain.”

“So just out of curiosity,” I said, “if it’s not the pain, why not have them filled? They’re just going to get worse over time, and then you really will be in pain.”

“Because I feel fine right now,” he said. “I don’t feel like I have any cavities.”

“But you do have cavities,” I said. “I just showed you where your cavities are. Look, they’re right here.”

I started to show him a second time.

“You don’t have to show me again,” he said. “I saw them the first time. I believe you.”

“So if you believe me, and you see there’s a problem, why not get it fixed? You have three cavities.”

“Because I don’t feel like I have them.”

“You don’t feel like you have them?”

“I don’t feel like I have them,” he said.

I was growing a little frustrated.

“Okay,” I said, “but indulge me for a moment. Look here, at the screen. Do you see the areas in shadow? One, two, three. Three cavities.”

“According to your X-rays,” he said. “And that’s fine. But I’m just telling you how I feel.”

“How you feel?”

“Right now I just don’t feel like I have any cavities. I feel fine.”

“But cavities aren’t something you always feel. That’s why we take the X-rays. To show you what you can’t feel.”

“That might be your way,” he said, “and that’s fine, but it’s not my way.”

“Not your way?” I said. “They’re X-rays. They’re everyone’s way. They’re science’s way.”

“And that’s fine,” he said. “But my way is how I feel, and right now I feel fine.”

“Then why did you come in? If you feel so fine and you don’t care what the X-rays say, why come in?”

“Because,” he said, “you’re supposed to. Every six months, you’re supposed to see the dentist.”

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“Will you excuse me?” I asked the marketing executive.

I went straight over, never happier to see her. “That guy in there,” I whispered, “won’t take my advice and get his cavities filled, because he says he doesn’t feel like he has any. He says he feels fine, so why should he have them filled? I’m showing him his cavities on-screen, and he tells me that’s just my ‘way.’ X-rays are my ‘way,’ he says. Science is my ‘way.’ His way is to feel around with his tongue and everything feels fine so just ignore the X-rays and the expert opinion. And when I ask him why he came in if he feels so fine, he tells me it’s because he’s supposed to! Every six months, you’re supposed to see your dentist! Is this really how people think? Is this really how they get along? Is it that easy?”

“My uncle Stuart’s here to see you,” she said.

I was quiet. “Again?”

The waiting room was empty with the exception of Stuart and an Asian woman sitting next to him, sunglasses perched on her head. They stood, the sunglasses came down, and Stuart introduced her. Her name was Wendy Chu, and she worked for Pete Mercer.

“You know Pete Mercer?” I said to Stuart.

“Not me personally,” he said. “I only know Wendy.”

Wendy was so petite and youthful looking behind the sunglasses that she might have been struggling for straight As in the seventh grade. She handed me a business card. Reading it, I was reminded of what Mercer had said in passing about having hired a private detective. The card read “Chu Investigations.” I looked back at her. We’ve come a long way, baby, from fedoras and frosted-glass doors.

“And how do you know Wendy?” I asked Stuart.

Wendy answered for him. “Funny things happen when two people go looking for the same woman.”

“What woman?”

“Paul,” said Stuart, “we’re here to ask you a favor. Would you accompany us into Brooklyn when you’re finished for the night?”

“What for?”

“There’s someone Mercer would like you to meet,” said Wendy.

“Where is Mercer?” I asked.

“He’s no longer involved,” she said.

“Involved in what?”

She looked at me blankly behind her sunglasses.

“I still have a patient,” I said.

“We can wait,” she said, sitting down.

“What’s going on?” I asked Stuart.

“As a personal favor,” he said, “come with us to Brooklyn.”

I returned to my marketing executive, who was sitting in the chair, patiently waiting. I sat down chairside and gave him a long look before throwing up my hands. “What are you still doing here?”

He was perplexed. “You told me to wait,” he said.

“But why listen to me?”

“Because you’re my dentist.”

“So you’ll wait when I tell you to wait, but when I tell you to have your cavities filled, you refuse?”

“I told you, I don’t feel like I have cavities.”

“But you do!” I cried. “You do have cavities!”

“According to the X-rays.”

“Yes, precisely! According to the X-rays!”

“But not according to how I feel,” he said.

We took Wendy’s car into Brooklyn, to the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights. Hebrew dominated the storefronts and awnings. Identically dressed women walked the streets pushing prams (not strollers but those upright pram things with big metal wheels), men in black hats, black suits, and black beards stepped into and out of minivans while talking on cell phones, and innumerable children of all ages defied the austerity of their sidelocks and somber dress to play as children will on the stoops and street corners. The sun was setting and the streets were orderly. With the exception of the tinted windows passing by shuddering with bass, we might have been back in the seventeenth century.

On the way over, I learned that I would be meeting with Mirav Mendelsohn, the woman with whom Grant Arthur had once been in love. I didn’t understand why. I told Stuart that I already knew all about her. Mirav had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Los Angeles before she fell in love with Arthur. When her family found out she was seeing a Gentile, they expelled her from the community. They eventually sat shiva for her as though she were dead. Over time, Arthur made one discovery, and then another, and another and another about his ancestry, and about who he really was. He felt duty-bound to leave Mirav and the life they had made together in Los Angeles, to devote himself to the arduous task of re-establishing a community of diasporic Ulms.

“Sounds pretty,” said Wendy. “But maybe not the whole story.”

Stuart told me that Mirav abandoned Judaism, married a materials magnate, and was divorced after raising two children. Responding to an ever-growing urge, she changed her name back to Mendelsohn in 2007 and reentered the Orthodox community. She was now living at a Hasidic center and teaching traditional Jewish practices to female proselytes.

We arrived at a kind of campus or housing network, with synagogue, school, and dormitory, where those individuals committed to a new life as Orthodox Jews received instruction. Mirav was teaching a night class. The women concluded class by singing. We stood outside, waiting and listening. I will never forget that one unbroken song of shifting melody and tempo changes and the novices’ imperfect command of both, while one voice remained steady: a strong, joyous voice, a guiding and correcting voice, a voice glorying her Maker while leading those unsteady faltering voices, derailing and dying and devolving into laughter, to the ringing harmony of a pure instant or two. It was Mirav’s.

Once class was over, Wendy made introductions, and Mirav led us to a commons room. It smelled of old books and burnt coffee. The walls were adorned with a variety of Jewish folk art: playful illustrations of menorahs and dreidels, Hebrew letters trotting colorfully across Torah scrolls. There were bent figures at the Western Wall, roughly sketched; prayer shawls aswirl on magical gusts of wind; exultant feasts; dancing families. My favorite was an enormous paper cutout of Noah’s ark, laden with every animal, and a dragon, too, floating in what looked like a calm Caribbean Sea.

Mirav wore a silk head scarf patterned with paisley and a long black skirt. I found her to be open and forthright, speaking to us with earnest intent until she cast off that earnestness with an easy laugh. She gave me the impression of being a joyful person, not unaware of the shit and the misery and yet still joyful. I was always startled to encounter such people. I liked them instantly and all out of proportion to our acquaintanceship.

“Can I get anyone coffee?” she asked as we sat down.

We all declined.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with us,” Stuart said. “I know you’ve done this already for Mr. Mercer, but would you mind doing it one more time, for my sake and for Paul’s?”

“Sure,” she said. “That should be easy enough.”

And with that she took us back to 1979.

Her uncle owned a small grocery in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood not far from her parents’ house. She would walk there in the afternoons to get things for her mother. On her way home one day, Grant Arthur came up to her and offered to carry her bags. He was dressed in bell-bottom jeans and the kind of shirt that only John Travolta wore. He asked her if she was Jewish. She said she was. He asked what that life was like, where she went to church, and if she minded not celebrating Christmas. She told him that her father was the rabbi at Shalom B’nai Israel and that Christmas was something she had cared about only as a little girl. He wanted to know if the Jews really ate so differently from Christians. What exactly did Jews eat?

“At first,” Mirav told me, Uncle Stuart, and Wendy Chu in the commons room, “I thought he might be mocking me. But he wasn’t. That boy, he was so guileless. So eager. He was really just so innocent.”

The next time she went to her uncle’s grocery, he came up to her the minute she left the store. She suspected that he was watching her, but she never knew how or from where. He told her that he had found a rabbi, Rabbi Youklus of Anshe Emes, who had agreed to oversee his conversion to Judaism. Rabbi Youklus was going to teach him everything there was to know. He had already learned about Shabbat, which happened every Saturday. That was a big difference between Judaism and Christianity, he said. Christians always worshipped on Sunday and never had a big meal the night before, unless it was a dinner party or a fund-raiser. Rabbi Youklus had promised to invite him over for Shabbat. Did she know by heart the blessings made when the candles were lit? And all the other blessings and songs? He said he liked, as he put it, “all those rituals and prayers and things” Jewish people were always doing. He couldn’t wait to sit inside the rabbi’s house and see how it was all done. She liked listening to him. He animated her everyday world, and it made her feel special for the first time. She was seventeen.

“It never occurred to me to ask which came first,” she said, speaking directly to me, “his interest in Judaism or his interest in me. I’m not sure it matters, even now — if I ‘inspired’ him, or however you want to put it. Deranged him!” She laughed with a lot of spontaneous heart. She turned to Stuart. “Isn’t that what we do when we fall in love, derange each other?” He smiled at her as I had never seen him smile, as if he, too, knew what it meant to be deranged by love. “But no, I never thought that Judaism was just a convenience for him—‘a way in.’ Or the other way around: that I was a convenience for whatever he was ultimately seeking. I think he saw me and he liked me, but I also think that he was in that neighborhood, that specific neighborhood, for a reason. He wanted to be a Jew.”

“I already know all this,” I said. “He told me himself.”

Mirav looked from me to Stuart. “Should I continue?”

“Please,” he said.

On one such trip from the grocery to her house, they took a detour so that they could continue talking. He said he didn’t know how anybody could be Jewish because of everything you had to know. You had to know the Bible. You had to know the Talmud. You had to know the laws — so many laws. You had to know the history. You had to know how to say the blessings and the prayers. And if you really wanted to do things right, you had to know Hebrew. He had thought Hebrew was just an old language the Bible had been written in, but the rabbi told him that Hebrew was the language of Israel, the language of the Jews. And then there was Yiddish. He asked Mirav if she knew Yiddish. He asked her what the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew was.

“They’re just two different languages,” she said.

“Do you see what I mean? You have to know two different languages and study the Old Testament and know all the holidays and how they started and why they’re important — that’s a lot.”

“You don’t have to know Yiddish,” she said.

“That’s okay, I’m going to learn it.” He pointed to a bungalow on the corner. “I live there,” he said.

It sat up on a little slope of lawn. Azaleas bloomed below the front windows. Flagstones rose from gate to door flanked by rows of tulips. It was a grown-up’s house.

“With your parents?” she asked.

“No.”

“With anyone?”

“No,” he said. “Just me.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he said.

It would take her three months to gain the courage to walk there on her own and ring the bell. By then there would be a mezuzah by the door. In the meantime, there were more walks from the grocery, more detours, longer detours, questioning looks from her mother when she finally made it home. She knew not to utter a word. This was not the kind of boy they had in mind for her. Her father was only going to approve of someone born south of West Hollywood or north of Wilshire or on a kibbutz in Kinneret. She confided in her cousins, whose lies and complicity helped her keep him a secret for longer than anyone would have imagined.

“We were a close-knit community,” she said. “You could say closed off, or even closed minded. And look where I am now!” she said, and she laughed at herself. “Right back in it!” She laughed again. “But it was different then. You have to remember the times. A generation of shtetl Jews was still alive. They didn’t mingle with too many John Travoltas. They had that ‘once-a-goy-always-a-goy’ mentality that we no longer have, even here in Crown Heights. They didn’t know what to make of converts.”

He began to call things by their proper names: not “church” but “temple,” not “Old Testament” but “Torah.” He changed out of his street clothes and bought a plain black suit. He stopped shaving. He wore a kippah, and later the tallit katan. After she graduated from high school, she worked for her uncle in the office of the grocery store, while he spent his days reading Torah and the commentary. He proved to be a quick study. One day he greeted her in Hebrew. He had changed rabbis — he was now studying with Rabbi Repulski of Temple Elohim, who was a better fit and who talked to him about Israel. He was fascinated with the country, wanted to visit, wanted to live there. He couldn’t comprehend how it had willed itself into being in such short order. But that’s what happens, he supposed, when you lose six million people in a holocaust.

“It’s like how you drive down the highway,” he said, “and you see this enormous thing tied down to a big rig, with the sign on back, you know, that says OVERSIZE LOAD, and it’s hard to believe, but as you get closer, you realize, that’s a house they have on that truck, an actual house, and they’re driving it down the highway! That’s Israel — the house they drove down the highway.”

“I haven’t seen one of those,” she said. She had never once, even in Los Angeles, been on a highway.

A few days later, after more study, he said to her, “But, Mirav, the Holocaust wasn’t the reason for the state of Israel. Israel got started a lot earlier than that. And not even as a religious movement. It was secular Jews, intellectuals, who saw the importance of it. They knew haskalah was a death sentence. Do you know about haskalah? It was guys like Moses Hess who started Israel — Hess and Pinsker and Herzl.”

She had heard of Herzl, but not the others. She had spent seventeen years under the tutelage of Osher Mendelsohn, but in a matter of a few short months, Grant Arthur knew more history than she did.

“The fact of the matter is,” she said to us thirty years later in the commons room, “the man was brilliant. I honestly think he was fluent in Hebrew in six months. I was simply amazed by that, and I remember saying so, and I remember his reply. He said, ‘If Ben-Yehuda can invent it in a year, I can learn it in six months.’ He had been to exactly one Shabbat dinner in that time.”

She couldn’t invite him over. She couldn’t introduce him to her parents. No matter how long he studied Torah or how well he mastered Hebrew, he would never be a Jew. The liberals, the congregations with mixed seating, they could convert him. But in the eyes of Osher Mendelsohn, the rabbi of Shalom B’nai Israel, a man of tradition, with a long memory of Europe’s madness, and born into that generation when the chasm between Jew and non-Jew had never been greater, Grant Arthur would never be a Jew, because he hadn’t been born a Jew.

One day Grant Arthur said to her, “I’m going to become a rabbi.”

By then she had entered the house. She had seen his bedroom (from the doorway only) and the mattress that lay on the floor. There was a white sheet thrown over it. That sheet was the only sheet, that mattress the only bed. He had a lawn chair in one room and a beanbag in the other, some mismatched dinnerware. The cabinets were bare, the closets were empty. She could manage to adjust only slowly to the evidence before her eyes that this was how a person her age might live. Without linens, without china, without furniture, without siblings, without a dozen cousins always in the kitchen. The curious maturity of his owning a home coupled with his complete ignorance of how to properly make one could bring tears to her eyes in an offhand moment. So it was left to her to smuggle in what little touches the house would acquire: lace curtains, a menorah for the mantel, a coverlet, a serving bowl, a pair of matching wineglasses. For her trouble he cried and kissed her. He had never been loved, he said, and she expected some addition or qualification, but that was it: he had never been loved. She cried and kissed him. Whenever she left him in that house, that set of rooms, in that hermitage of books, she took with her the rhythm of his breathing. It was the closest she had ever come physically to someone else; it felt as if he were breathing from within her.

It was the house with nothing inside until one day she walked in to find a painting on the wall mounted in an ornate frame. It was a Marc Chagall. There was a cow and a fiddle, goats’ heads, a dark blue sky, the moon and its halo, a knockabout set of curving, teetering, upsloping houses, a fallen chair, a curled-up woman on a cloud. She knew nothing about painters or their schools or styles, but she knew Marc Chagall. She knew him from her father. She also knew that Marc Chagalls lived on the walls of museums.

“What’s it doing here?” she asked.

“Do you like it?”

“Is it real?”

“Of course it’s real.”

“Where did you get it? What did it cost?”

“My grandmother bought it,” he said. “Well, my grandmother’s dead. But I used the money she left me. Do you think your father will like it?”

He had, said Mirav, trying to express the shock of walking in and seeing an original Chagall, about fifty dollars in furnishings scattered around that house and then a priceless work of art on the wall. She knew he was unusual; she hadn’t known he came from such crazy wealth. His father was a lawyer in Manhattan, and his mother was a socialite. He hadn’t spoken to either of them in over a year.

“He was very heavy into the history by then,” she said. “The shtetls, the Pale. Cossacks and Tartars. He was deeply affected by them in a way I found hard to understand. They filled him with revulsion, and with pity — and with something… I think the word might be romance. Not for Jewish persecution, I don’t mean to suggest he romanticized that. But he had a strange affinity for that time. I think the Chagall was his way of owning part of it.”

And of impressing her father. By then he had spoken to Rabbi Blomberg of Yad Avraham about going to seminary after his conversion. He was keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and following the 613 mitzvot maintained by traditional practicing Jews. He thought that his conversion and his course of study, his sympathies and his Chagall, would prove his devotion to the man he wanted for a father-in-law. He may not have been born a Jew, but even among the Orthodox, according to the law, a convert was an equal in the eyes of God.

“But it doesn’t matter what the law says,” Mirav told him, “or what’s right in the eyes of God. He’s not going to approve.”

They were sitting at the far corner of a dining room table that had been recently delivered, made of cherrywood and large enough to hold sixteen, upon which he had promptly rested not only the menorah but the dream of a thousand Sabbath dinners, with his bride beside him, and all his court.

“So to God, and the state of Israel, I qualify as a Jew, but to Rabbi Mendelsohn, father of Mirav, I was born a Gentile and a Gentile I will die? It doesn’t make any sense, Mirav. Does the man have no respect for Halakhah?”

“Halakhah! But you aren’t listening, Grant. It has nothing to do with the law. You want to marry his daughter. His daughter. My father will want that man to be born a Jew. And if you want the law to weigh in, I guarantee you he will quote the mitzvah that forbids intermarriage with a Gentile.”

“I’m no longer a Gentile,” he said.

“Until you go before the Beth Din,” she said, “you’re a Gentile.”

It had been almost a year, and while he was not yet a Jew, he had the beard of one greatly devout, covered his head everywhere he went, and had had himself circumcised. He spoke as if he had been one all his life, a life whose sole purpose was its devotion to Judaism.

“So it doesn’t matter,” he said to her calmly, “that I do this of my own free will, that I do it eagerly, that I do it lovingly, that I love nothing on earth as I do the Jews, that I am happier nowhere more than in shul, and that I came to Judaism because of its wisdom and beauty and swear to live by those things until my last day? And it doesn’t matter,” he continued, “that I want to bring more children into the world, more Jews, grandchildren for your father, who I will raise according to the custom and law of the Jews? I elect all of this, but you’re telling me in your father’s eyes it would be better for you to marry some Jew-by-the-numbers, so long as he was born a Jew?”

“Do you know the men he stands in front of during service?” she asked him. “Some of them just barely made it out of Europe before the Nazis marched in. One of them survived the camps. These are people who remember their villages being attacked just because they were Jews. My father came here from Kiev—”

“I know he came here from Kiev.”

“He saw things happen to his family — to his father, to his uncles. He was just a boy. You know the history, Grant, but they’ve lived it.”

“That shouldn’t disqualify me.”

“In the eyes of my father and the men of his congregation, it does.”

“And in your eyes?”

“In my eyes, no,” she said. “We’ll go to Israel. We’ll raise a family.”

“But lose the one you have?”

“What does it matter if we have our own?”

“No invitation to your house,” he said. “No Shabbat. No Seders. No holidays with your aunts and uncles. No place for me at Shalom B’nai Israel.”

“I know him,” she said. “He won’t allow it.”

“What’s it all been for, then,” he asked, “if we don’t have that?”

She wasn’t at all sure what he meant, and it confused her. Was he worried about her losing her family, or about it being lost, somehow, to him? But how could he lose something he never had? Aside from two complicit cousins, he’d never met any of them.

Then one afternoon Rabbi Mendelsohn appeared outside the house on the corner, rang the bell, and asked to see his daughter.

Despite the time they had had to prepare for the confrontation, neither of them was ready. Her father asked Mirav to introduce him to the young man who’d answered the door. Then he asked the young man if his parents were at home.

“My parents live in New York, sir,” he said.

“You live here alone?”

He nodded.

“Would you be kind enough to invite me in?”

“Of course.”

Osher Mendelsohn stood in the foyer and complimented the boy on the house. He gave no indication of what he thought of its spare interior or of the Chagall that hung conspicuously from the living room wall. They watched silently as he peered into the room with the fireplace, at the beanbag and the books on the floor.

“Do you mind if we sit down?” asked the rabbi.

“Only the two of us, sir? Or Mirav as well?”

“Would you care to join us, young lady?”

“If you want me to, Papa.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think you should.”

They had a seat at the new dining room table while Grant Arthur raced off to the kitchen. He wanted to offer the rabbi a variety of things to drink. If he knew anything as intimately as Mirav knew the traditional women’s prayer at candle lighting, it was how to host a party. That was his inheritance, the legacy given him by his parents. But there was only a little milk in the fridge. So he left the house through the back door and ran down to the grocery that belonged to the rabbi’s wife’s brother, where he bought three kinds of juice, two kinds of soda, and tea and coffee. But on his run home he found that the back gate had fallen shut, locking him out, and he had to enter through the front door, to the surprise of Mirav and her father, who were sitting in silence, waiting for him to return from the kitchen. He excused himself once more, unpacked the groceries, and returned to the doorway to ask what they would have to drink. Mirav wanted nothing, and her father asked only for a glass of water.

“I understand,” the rabbi began, after Grant Arthur had settled down at the head of the table he had purchased for his family, the rabbi to the right of him, Mirav to his left, “that you know Rabbi Youklus of Anshe Emes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rabbi Youklus tells me that you want to be a Jew.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“A very bright young man, says Rabbi Youklus. Maybe even a genius. He was very impressed by you.”

“I have devoted myself day and night to the study of Judaism, sir. I plan to continue to do so. I hope to live up to the Jewish scholars I admire the most. Rabbi Akiva, Spinoza.”

“A noble thing.”

“I’ve learned some Hebrew, and I study Torah at least six hours a day. And my favorite poet is Heinrich Heine. He wasn’t a good Jew, but he wrote lovely verses.”

“I also understand,” said the rabbi, “that you have legally changed your name, is that correct? I believe Rabbi Blomberg of Yad Avraham told me that.”

“I’m in the process of doing so right now, Rabbi Mendelsohn.”

“And who are you studying with now?”

“Rabbi Rotblatt, sir. Of Temple Israel.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Rabbi Rotblatt, who tells me that you wish to go to seminary after your conversion is complete.”

“Yes, sir, I do. I hope to be a rabbi,” he said, “like yourself.”

“A noble thing,” repeated the rabbi. He took a sip of his water and placed the glass back on the table. “This is a very nice table,” he said, pausing a moment to admire it.

“Thank you, sir.”

“And the painting on your wall, that is a fine reproduction.”

“Oh, that isn’t a reproduction, sir.”

The rabbi lingered on it before withdrawing his eyes.

“Do you wish to marry my daughter?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“I wonder,” he said, “if you would mind me asking you a question or two about your studies — not to interrogate you, I hope you understand. We are in your house, and I have no wish to be rude to you in your own home. I only want to know a little of what you know, considering that you would like to join my family.”

“You may ask me anything,” he said.

“Do you know what a Seder is?”

“The Seder is the major ritual of Pesah, or Passover, when we commemorate the Exodus from Egypt and mark the start of the covenant between God and the Jewish people.”

“Have you been to a Seder?”

“I should also add that the word ‘Seder’ means ‘order,’ and this order, or ritual, is to be found in the Haggadah, or ‘telling.’ I have only been to one Seder, sir, at the invitation of Rabbi Greenberg, and it was a transformative experience.”

“Rabbi Greenberg?”

“Of Temple Sinai, in Long Beach.”

“Rabbi Greenberg I don’t know,” said the rabbi.

“He was kind enough to invite me to my first Seder,” he said. “I wish I could convey to you even a portion of what it meant to me.”

“And may I ask you about the holiday of Shavuot, and what, if anything, it means to you?”

“Shavuot marks the end of the Counting of Omer, which begins at the end of Passover and lasts for seven weeks. It commemorates the Revelation at Sinai, when God bestowed the miracle of the Torah upon the Jewish people and marked them forever as His Chosen Ones. I participated in an overnight study session during Shavuot this year. It was meant to demonstrate our love and embrace of Torah, and was one of the most moving experiences of my life.”

“Was that also with Rabbi Greenberg?”

“No, sir,” he said. “That was with Rabbi Maddox.”

“You have come to know quite a few rabbis,” said the rabbi.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

Rabbi Mendelsohn sat back in his chair. “I wonder if I can ask you just one more question.”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Do you believe in God?”

Never would it have occurred to Mirav to ask him that. He had transformed himself into a Jew. What for, if not God?

“No, sir, I do not,” he said.

“You don’t?” she said.

“You are an atheist,” said the rabbi, “is that correct?”

“Is that what Rabbi Youklus told you?”

“Youklus,” he said, “Blomberg, Rotblatt, Maddox, Repulski. None of them could recommend you to a Beth Din because you do not believe in God. If you did, you would be a Jew by now, and on your way to seminary.”

He was quiet. Through the long silence they stared at each other.

“How can you believe in God, sir,” he asked the rabbi, “knowing the history of your people as you do?”

“The history of my people is their struggle to keep God’s covenant,” said the rabbi. “Without Him, we are nothing.”

“God is what got you into this mess.”

“God is my every breath,” the older man said, losing the poise he had maintained throughout the conversation until, as Mirav put it thirty years later, Grant Arthur presumed to inform him that he was in a mess of some kind, and on account of God. He failed to collect himself. “You have no business in a synagogue,” the rabbi said, rising from the table, “and you make a mockery of the Torah.”

“I’m not the only nonbelieving Jew,” he said.

“You are no Jew at all,” said her father, “and never will be.”

Rabbi Mendelsohn turned and told his daughter that if she was not home within the hour, she would not be welcome in his house again.

“It was my first experience with someone who denied the existence of God,” she continued in the commons room, thirty years later, “and he had done so in the presence of my father. That was much more shocking — more violent — than if he’d reared back and punched the man. And I felt as you might expect me to feel if my father had come over to call me a slut and a whore — but worse. Much dirtier. Strange, isn’t it? I was deeply ashamed and scandalized and yet in love and hurt in some way, betrayed, and so I was very confused.”

“Did you go home that night?” asked Stuart.

“I did,” she said. “I looked at him differently when he admitted that he didn’t believe. There was an immediate estrangement. I’ve been married and divorced — I know from estrangement!” she said, laughing. “But with marriage, it takes time. With Grant it was instant. In my world, God was a fact of life, plain and simple. How could you be a good person and not believe in God?”

But the next day on lunch break, she found herself against all better judgment following her confusion back to its source. He answered the door in skullcap and beard — a Jew like any other but stripped now of some essential core, so that he looked costumed, a parody. She saw the clownish impiety her father must have seen when he stood where she was standing just the day before. Why was he wearing those clothes?

“Please come inside,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Please,” he said. “Last night was the worst night of my life.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a Jew.”

“Mirav, please,” and he opened the door wide.

She felt like Jezebel entering the house of Satan, bound to be torn to pieces by dogs until only her hands and feet remained.

“I want to know why,” she said. “Why you pretend.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing, pretending?”

“What do you call it?”

“Devotion.”

“Devotion?” she said. “To what?”

“To you,” he said. “To your father. To the Jews.”

“But the Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to God.”

“The Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to the Jews,” he said.

“I think you’re confused,” she said.

“Mirav, do you have any idea how much more is required of me to be a Jew, how much more is demanded of me than of your father? How much more I must sacrifice—”

Instinct took over, and she pushed him. He fell back but steadied himself.

“He has Kiev,” he said, “and the birthright, and the upbringing.”

“And you have a Marc Chagall on your wall! You can have everything you want!”

“Not everything,” he said.

The first incident took place a few nights later, when he stood on the Mendelsohns’ front lawn and called out to the rabbi. “Rabbi Mendelsohn,” he said, “Rabbi Mendelsohn. Do I not follow the commandments as God demands? Do I not tithe? Do I not fast? Do I not celebrate the Revelation at Sinai? Have I not had myself circumcised for you? Learned Hebrew for you? Changed my name? Let my hair grow? Whether He is or is not, do I not make a good and righteous person in the eyes of God? Look out your window and tell me what you see. What of me is not a Jew?”

The rabbi called the police.

“Why do you deny me?” he continued. “What have I done? Do you love Judaism and want to protect it? You should be a Christian! Stand out here, Rabbi Mendelsohn, with me, with the Christian, and look in at the Jews. At the candles that light up the faces of your loved ones. At the verses that bind you together. At the fellowship that makes you Jews. Then you would love Judaism!”

Siren lights flickered down the street. He didn’t run. The police gave him a stern warning and told him not to return.

“Why do you study the Torah?” she asked. “Isn’t it just a waste of your time?”

“Do you think that without God, the Torah is without beauty? Do you think it’s without wisdom?”

“But God is everywhere in the Torah.”

“The goodness of the Jews is everywhere,” he said. “Their temptations, their folly, their humanity. Their intelligence, their compassion. Their struggle. Their charity. You don’t need God for those things.”

“But God is what inspires them.”

“The greatness of the Jews is what inspires them,” he said. “God only inspires fear.”

The next time he stood on the lawn, he asked Rabbi Mendelsohn to please forgive him for any rudeness. “But where is He now?” he asked, and his voice came clearly through the open windows. “Let Him strike me dead if my actions displease Him. If I am not a Jew, let Him strike me dead.” He paused. “Now why has He not struck me dead? Does it mean that I am a Jew? Or is He simply not there? Or is He standing by yet again while the Jews suffer another insult at the hands of a Gentile? How many insults do you endure before you turn your back on Him, Rabbi Mendelsohn? William of Norwich wasn’t enough? The Inquisition — that wasn’t enough? The pogroms, the gas chambers? Let Him strike me dead, Rabbi, if I do not hate the anti-Semite as much as you. Let Him strike me dead if I do not love you like a brother. Can’t you see why I love you, Rabbi? Or are you blind to it because you were born to it?”

This time he was gone when the police arrived. They told the rabbi they would go to the man’s house and have a talk with him. But if the rabbi really wanted to keep him away, they suggested he find a lawyer and seek a protective order.

“All your life you’ve been told to believe,” he said to her. “Your father’s a rabbi, a pious man. You go to services. You are given little lessons. You’re taught to fear Him, to love Him, to respect Him, to obey Him. It doesn’t surprise me that you look at me like a stranger, like you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You come five minutes, ten minutes at most.”

“But I do come.”

“You won’t kiss me.”

“I can’t kiss you because I don’t understand you,” she said.

“It’s simple,” he said. “God is a relic you don’t need.”

“You say that. What does it mean?”

“Why do you need God when you have Judaism? Why mar something so beautiful?”

“There would be no Judaism without Him!”

“Do you know the true meaning of the blowing of the shofar?” he asked her.

She hated his arcane questions.

“Of course,” she said. “It announces the start of holidays, and… it awakens the soul—”

“No,” he said. “You are in Los Angeles in the twentieth century. Blowing the shofar in Los Angeles in the twentieth century has the same meaning as blowing the shofar in Gezer and Dibon in the First Temple period. That’s the true meaning of the shofar: to connect the Jews of Los Angeles to the Jews of Gezer whenever it is blown. It is about the people, not God.”

“No,” she said. “That’s not correct.”

“Why did you keep going back to him?” Stuart asked her in the commons room.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I was compelled to, I was drawn to him. I was still in love. He’d lied to me, or misled me, if you want to be kind, and I wanted answers. I was a little scared of him, but I liked listening to him, listening to him thrilled me. And now that he was free to be honest, he had a lot more to say. I was young; I was naïve. I was shocked by most of the things he said, and I was made to think. Was it necessary that the person I loved believe? Why? Because I believed? Did I believe? What did I believe? Or was it enough that he be a Jew? Was he a Jew? He was different, I’ll tell you that. And determined. And he wanted me. I was seduced. I was very sheltered, and I discovered I liked people who acted freely. Why did I go back to him?” she said. “Because he knew how to make me.”

She still worked in the office of her uncle’s grocery. One day her father entered the office, and the two cousins who worked alongside her stood up from their desks in silence and left the room. Then her uncle stood and left, too. Her father sat down on a chair halfway across the room. He looked at her a long time. When he spoke, it was only loud enough to convey the words across the distance.

“You hear from his own mouth that he doesn’t believe, and still you see him?” He paused, and the room was silent. “He comes to our house, he disrupts our peace, he makes a spectacle of us, he menaces us like we live in the ghetto a hundred years ago, and still you choose to disgrace yourself and your family?”

“It’s not that easy, Papa.”

“You give yourself to a man before you’re married.”

“No, Papa, we never—”

“You give yourself to this profane man who’s not your husband,” he said, “and still you see him when you know who he is and what he believes? Tell me who he is, this man, if not Satan dressed up as a Jew?”

“He’s confused, Papa. And I think he’s lost.”

“He’s a fraud, Mirav. And you should have the sense to see it.” He stood. “You will make your choice,” he said. “The fraud, or your family.” And with that he left the room. A few minutes later everyone was back to typing.

His third and final visit took place on a Friday night after services, just before the Shabbat meal. The Mendelsohn family was sitting down when Grant Arthur’s voice entered the house. “I want to be included,” he cried. “I want to be God’s chosen. I want to break bread with the Mendelsohns. Welcome me into your home, Rabbi. Give me your traditions, I will carry them forward. Give me your riches, I will safeguard them all my days. You Jews!” he cried. “How lucky God has made you! With your wives and your daughters and your fathers and sons! How blessed you are with life!” Rabbi Mendelsohn was calling the police while the others looked out the window at the figure on the lawn. Mirav saw that he had brought the Chagall. “Let me buy the challah! Let me join the minyan! Let me read from the scroll! Let me in! Will you keep me out because of an accident of birth? When so many others have used that same excuse to oppress and murder you? It was an accident of birth! It was not my fault! I love the Jews!” He continued to implore them until the police arrived. He held up the Chagall and said, “I bought this for you, Rabbi Mendelsohn,” and then he leaned it carefully against a tree. “I believe I saw you admiring it.” The cops stepped out and cuffed him. He had violated the protective order he had been served two days earlier.

Mirav Mendelsohn lived with Grant Arthur in the house on the corner during the five months of his probation. She ran the errands and bought the groceries. She furnished the house with the necessary things. On Fridays they went to services, for which he had special dispensation from the judge, at a synagogue in the Valley, and then they came home, blessed each other, and celebrated the Sabbath with a meal, after which they sang traditional songs out of the siddur.

But it was never easy, Mirav told us in the commons room, and it was doomed from the start.

By logic, persuasion, and force of character, he made her question her belief in God. With argument, appeals to common sense, and intellectual bullying, he showed her how brittle her faith was. With evidence drawn from history, he revealed her faith’s foolishness. Let us go atrocity by atrocity, he said to her. A critical mass of God’s absence accumulated. Bit by bit, he reversed almost twenty years of received wisdom.

Without God, she had even less reason to go home. When you wake, you don’t return to dreams and superstitions. You begin your adjustment, not without bitterness, to uncompromising truth, and bitterness turns to contempt.

“I treated them terribly,” Mirav said of her family thirty years later. “And I suppose they didn’t treat me all that well, either. But the way they treated me was customary, it was to be expected. That doesn’t excuse it, but it explains it. There was no earthly way to explain how I treated them.”

Her secularizing, when it came, was swift and brutal. It was only a matter of time before she took her education in skepticism to its logical conclusion, and started wondering why she should persist in wearing the clothes she had been made to wear since time immemorial, why she should cover her hair or attend services or bless the candles or sing the songs. These struck her suddenly as among a thousand empty gestures of increasing absurdity. He had only himself to blame as, one by one, she stopped doing the things that connected her to her past, finding in them no purpose and no reward. That hadn’t been a part of his agenda. She might refuse to dress appropriately or declare that she wouldn’t be joining him at synagogue or plan nothing to eat for the Sabbath meal, and he would say to her, “Why are you doing this to us?”

“What am I doing? I’m doing nothing.”

“But you have obligations.”

“To whom?”

“To me,” he said. “To the others.”

“What others? What others do you see around here?”

“You’re a Jew!” he cried. “You have obligations to the Jews!”

“What makes me a Jew?” she asked.

“You were born a Jew!”

“And now I’ve grown up,” she said. “So tell me, please: what makes me a Jew?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. If he’d come to Judaism as an atheist to seek fellowship among the Jews and found the rituals and customs he needed to order and enrich his desolate young life, she came to atheism to find nothing where once there had been everything, vertigo where there had once been structure, and freedom where there had once been rule. She knew why she was a Jew narrowly defined: she was born of a Jewish mother. But without God, what did Judaism have to do with her life?

If she no longer knew what made her a Jew, she knew even less what made him one. One day, after a year of living together, she looked over and saw him in kippah, prayer shawl, and phylacteries, reading Torah while tightly rocking. A common sight, a practice whose reasons were self-evident, programmatic, and beyond scrutiny, so unquestioned that she had never really seen it before. But now she could only gape in wonder. It was deeply strange: the nonbelieving non-Jew in the middle of a devout Jewish prayer.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice full of contempt.

“Praying,” came the reply.

“But why?”

He ignored her. She couldn’t interrogate his assumptions and motivations as he had so freely interrogated hers. He wouldn’t let her. But she knew he wasn’t Jewish. There was no word for what he was, unless that word was “Jewish-ish.” Everything before he became Jewish-ish — family neglect, loneliness, alienation — was off-limits. It had been discarded. He put on a skullcap and was born. Her father was right, she realized, even if they had arrived at the same conclusion from positions now diametrically opposed. He was a fraud.

“There was something desperately fraudulent about him,” she told us.

“Did Grant Arthur ever talk to you about a people in the Bible called the Amalekites?” asked Wendy.

“Yes.”

“And a people called the Ulms?”

“Yes. After his father died. He returned to New York, and when he came back, he was different. He stopped reading Torah and started spending time at the library. He was looking into his personal history, researching his family tree. He had discovered that he belonged to a people, some kind of lost history or something.”

It was the last straw. The only cousin still willing to speak to her found a way to loan her two hundred dollars. She boarded a bus and never saw him again. She arrived in New York in a pair of blue jeans and one of those honky-tonk shirts Debra Winger wore in Urban Cowboy, with buttons of fake pearl.

“Here’s a question I wanted to ask you this morning,” said Wendy, “when you were explaining all of this to Pete. Why did you return to Judaism?”

“Oh, Lord!” cried Mirav, and her laughter dispelled some of the tension in the room. “That’s such a long, dreary story. How can I sum it up for you without boring you to tears? Let’s see: husband, divorce, mistakes, regrets. Thirty years of spiritual emptiness.” She laughed. “I guess I just realized that he was right after all. Life is best when it’s lived as a Jew.”

“This thing you’re mixed up in,” Stuart began.

“I’m not mixed up in anything,” I said.

“Aren’t you?”

“Is it me you’re worried about? Have you gone to all this trouble just for me? Because I never got the impression that you liked me very much.”

“The truth has to start somewhere.”

“And what is the truth?”

“Haven’t you just heard it?”

“I heard the details of a love affair that I’d been made aware of already. You heard her — he was nineteen. A kid, just some lost kid.”

“Well, he’s not a kid anymore,” said Wendy. “And he’s certainly not lost.”

“Do you even know who you’re talking about?” I asked her. I turned to Stuart. “Do you?”

“He’s the mastermind,” said Wendy.

“The mastermind? He spends his time in libraries, in archives, assembling family trees,” I said. “Some mastermind.”

“He’s been told,” she said to Stuart. “That puts me right with Mercer. I’m done.” And with that, she left the room.

Stuart turned to Mirav. “Would you mind giving me a moment alone with Paul?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She stepped out. I felt weird being alone with Stuart in the commons room of an Orthodox religious center in Crown Heights.

“It doesn’t bother you, the things you’ve just heard?”

“I keep telling you,” I said. “I’ve heard it already.”

“Everything? As she presented it?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Maybe not exactly as she presented it,” I said. “But there are always two sides to every story.”

“The truth isn’t simply ‘one side of the story,’ ” he said. “The truth isn’t a partisan choice.”

“And you have a monopoly on the truth? You know that you should side with her over the differences between their stories?”

“What are those differences?”

“He left her, for one. She didn’t leave him, he left her. And everything she just told us, that happened before his father died, before he confessed on his deathbed. Arthur was lost when he was in love with Mirav. It was only after they parted that he discovered the truth about himself.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“That’s what he has told me. He doesn’t keep Mirav a secret.”

He looked at me with what I felt keenly to be disappointment. “Believe what you want to believe,” he said. “But the suffering does not belong to them. It belongs to the Jews who experienced it. It belongs to the dead and nameless who have gone unrecorded in history and who the world has long forgotten. They can’t borrow that suffering and make what they want of it. They can’t adopt it and turn it into a farce.”

“I never wanted to disappoint you,” I said.

“Let’s be perfectly clear — this has nothing to do with you. This is much bigger than you. A man broke with reality. He took an old legend from the Bible and made a myth from it, and now he tells the myth like it’s truth. This is how it happens.”

I arrived home that night during the fifth inning. I ordered takeout, poured a drink, and waited for the game to end so that I could rewind the tape and start from the beginning. I called Mercer, not for the first time that day. There was again no answer.

After the game I took the bottle onto the balcony. I had a seat on a canvas chair and looked out on the Brooklyn Promenade. There’s almost nothing better than the Promenade and its walkers, benchwarmers, and late-night lovemakers to further estrange you from a Friday night. I poured a drink and toasted them. I toasted the whole city. “Here’s to your picnics and suntans,” I said. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, that luminous glow just across the river. People were still hard at work. “Here’s to your war rooms and coronaries,” I toasted the people inside that honeycomb of industry. “Here’s to your dress socks and divorce papers.” I had a toast for practically everyone that night. “To you, young couple overlooking the river,” I said, “here’s to your frittatas and sex tapes.” “To you, picture taker with the endless flash,” I said, “here’s to your personal-brand maintenance with every uploaded image.” “To you, beautiful youth, wasting your life behind your me-machine,” I said, “here’s to your echo chamber and reflecting pool.” I toasted them all. I drank and toasted. “To you, Yankees fan with the Jeter shirt,” I said, “here’s to your aftershaves and rape acquittals.” I poured and I drank. “To you, corporate citizen, failing to bag up your Pomeranian’s warm shit,” I said, “and to all your fellow derivatives traders and quant douche bags: here’s to your anonymous faces and unlisted numbers,” I said. “Here’s to your sinking of America, you scumbags. May you end up in cold cells where rats go to die.” “Here’s to you, Mrs. Convoy,” I said, “here’s to your catechisms and your turtlenecks.” “Here’s to you, Abby. Thanks for the notice. Good luck on your new opportunities.” “And here’s to you, Connie. Here’s to your poet, your Ben, and all your future smiling babies of life.” I didn’t toast Uncle Stuart. I tried not to think of him, or of Mirav or Grant Arthur. I was drinking, and toasting, to forget. I continued in this vein until I had only enough toast left for one last drink. “And to you,” I said, “asshole on the balcony, here’s to your curried flatulence and your valid fears of autoerotic asphyxiation. Here’s to your longing, your longing for the company of others, and all your bighearted efforts to secure it. Cheers,” I said. I toasted myself and drank. I must have been saying much of this aloud, as a neighbor of mine, standing on her balcony, was peering over at me. I toasted her. She went inside. I was done with the bottle, I was done toasting and drinking. For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings — the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline — and I thought, Why couldn’t those cunts have flown into that building? Then I passed out, and when I woke, there was nobody, I mean absolutely nobody, out on the Promenade. I searched and searched, I waited and waited. Surely someone would walk by any minute now. But no one did.

What terrifying hour was this, and why was I made to wake to it? Where were they, the strangers I had just been toasting? Never before had the Promenade emptied out so entirely, so finally, and instead of the familiar, noisy, peopled landmark of one of the biggest cities on earth, where you are promised never to be alone, it seemed now like a colony on the moon floating in an eternal night, with me as its only inhabitant. All of this hit me literally within the first second or two of waking up, and that moment was unbearable. I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. The solution at desperate moments like this was always to find something to do, and I mean anything, as quickly as possible. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose. Maybe Connie had called or texted or emailed, or Mercer, or… but no. No one had called or emailed or texted. I would do practically anything, I thought, to have them back — I mean the strollers and lovers of a few hours earlier, so that I might have another chance to stroll alongside them, to look out in wonder at the skyline, to lick carefully at the edges of my ice cream, and, after a while, to leave the Promenade, off to bed for a good night’s sleep — or to that one vital thing among the city’s offerings that night, that one unmissable thing that makes staying up all night a treasure and not a terror — and then to rise again at a decent hour, to walk the Promenade in the light of a new morning, eating a little pastry for breakfast and having coffee on one of the benches while looking out at the brightened waters. Oh, come back, you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts. The day is hard enough. Don’t leave me alone with the night. Finally I was able to move. I sat up in the chair and listened. There was the hum of the river, and the island across the river, and the last desultory traffic of the night washing by on the expressway below. I can only suggest the effect it had on me, that is, the feeling that my life, and the city’s, and the world’s every carefree, winsome hour, were perfectly without meaning.

Ten

“THERE YOU ARE, MY boy,” Sookhart said as he handed me the book.

I took it, studied it, turned it over in my hands. The worn leather cover was blank from front to back, without author or title, inconspicuous. I opened it. The ancient spine cracked like a nut. By all appearances, it was as old as Sookhart claimed. It naturally fell open to cantonment 240—or something 240, at any rate: the strange characters squiggled before my eyes incomprehensibly. I ran my finger down the stitching that held the pages together. But as for making sense of the words, there was no way.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“How do I know it’s real?”

“My boy, look at it. It’s the strangest curio I’ve ever encountered in all my career. I don’t recognize a single proper name in it. Safek and Ulmet and Rivam and all the rest. It’s like it burrowed its way up from the center of the earth.”

“Is this Yiddish?”

He nodded.

“And can you confirm that it’s as old as you say it is?”

“It’s one hundred fifty years old if it’s a day,” he said.

“How can I be sure?”

“Do you doubt me?”

He looked offended.

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

For some reason, out of habit maybe, as I was leaving, I asked him for a bag. He had to unpack his breakfast, a banana and a yogurt, and I carried the book out in a plastic sack from Whole Foods.

“Have I not been honest with you from the beginning?” he asked.

From the moment you inquired, did I not tell you about Mirav? And did I not explain that my involvement with her happened before I learned the truth of my history, of our history? Yes, I fell in love, and yes, I was devoted to Judaism. But it was a mistake, Paul. It was misdirected passion.

Come, Paul, and see what remains to be seen. Take the genetic test, and claim the final piece of your family history. Don’t take their word over ours.

The following Monday morning, in the middle of September, the unwinding of PM Capital began, and Pete Mercer withdrew from the financial markets. He sold off his holdings and returned his clients’ money — at a significant profit, according to the Wall Street Journal, which also reported that one of the fund’s every two dollars had been parked in gold since the start of the Great Recession.

He had not returned any of a dozen messages I left on his phone.

What will he do? I wondered, after I read about him in the news. Now that the models have been dismantled, the portfolios liquidated, the traders paid off and sent home, the desks cleared, and the screens made dark, what will the man do?

The Journal’s disclosure that his personal payout from PM Capital amounted to 4.9 billion dollars offered a possible answer: anything he wants. He had considerable money to watch. Maybe, I thought, he just wants to do it from home, surrounded by computer banks and a wall of competing images, never leaving, turning from eccentric into full-blown recluse. Or maybe he will be like one of the country’s nouveau riche, today’s tech billionaires, and take up causes, campaigns, pursuits, and hobbies: yachting, sports-franchise ownership, the eradication of malaria. Or maybe he’ll simplify, I thought, down to a backpack and a new pair of boots, and trek, as searchers before him have trekked, across India, Nepal, and Tibet, to sit at the feet of crouching figures, under trees overlooking snow-tipped landscapes. Despite language barriers, he will find, bestowed upon him at the rise of dawn, the inner peace that eluded him all his desk-bound days. His existence as one of the wealthiest hedge-fund managers in history will be recalled only as a former life low on the chain of karmic rebirth. Or maybe he’ll marry, start a family, and center his days around the mundane realities that define most people’s lives: diapers and birthdays and playdates. By partaking of these unspectacular delights, he will find a place for himself that fits and sustains him, to his eternal surprise. Or maybe he will go to Israel and live at Seir as he said he would. Maybe that was still on. He’ll make it habitable, even extravagant. After all, what can’t be accomplished with five billion dollars? He could literally change the world.

But I didn’t know what he would do, because I didn’t really know him. I’d had lunch with him twice and a drink with him once. Each time he opened up a little more. His despair, as it slowly revealed itself, took me aback. He was free to bark and command, to covet, to conquer, to advance, to own, to borrow and bend and leverage and take, to conduct himself with the implacable autism of obscene wealth. But his choice of lunch was sloppy and cheap. Dreaming of a shit hole smelling of goat piss, he gave away a Picasso. And he wasn’t above getting drunk at a dive bar with the likes of me. He believed that he and I shared something in common. And maybe we did. All the money in America could not have made the man happy. For me, Rubber Soul; for him, the dollar bill. But if we were alike, what he chose to do after hearing Mirav’s story and dismantling his operation served to put my back up against the wall. He didn’t retreat into eccentricity or start a family. He bought a gun, walked out into the woods, and shot himself in the head. It may not have been productive or charitable or imaginative or fun, but the act did make plain the extent of his despair. He was found by children following the trail of the gunshot.

I read the news on my me-machine between patients. I drifted over to the front desk, where I sat down next to Connie. She was sorting through a mug full of pens, attaching the correct pen cap to the corresponding pen, and winnowing out those pens that had no caps, had emptied or gone dry, or had accumulated gunk at their ballpoints. It was, as conducted by her, a rigorous and thorough enterprise. Connie always gave the impression of being so sane, but inside her lush blondyed exterior, minor pathologies were operating at code-red level day and night. I expected her to ask me what I was doing there. Was I pestering her? Was I crowding her in her limited space? What did I want? I was holding my me-machine in my hand, unable to speak. The news of Mercer’s death had not yet sunk in. He and I were sitting at a bar together only two weeks ago. He was sitting next to me as I was now sitting next to Connie. He was telling me about the living hell he was in before Grant Arthur showed up to explain the source of his restlessness. He must have soured on that explanation when Wendy Chu brought him together with Mirav Mendelsohn. But why? He knew about Mirav from Grant Arthur. “It’s the first thing he tells you about himself,” he said to me when, at the bar, I asked him about Grant Arthur’s doomed love for the rabbi’s daughter. Grant Arthur made no attempt to conceal the affair. An affair of that sort, of outsize passion and unreasonable longing, was a symptom of the spiritual exile into which men like him had fallen. Didn’t a similar fate await Mercer when he got involved with a Zoroastrian girl? I had intended to talk all this over with Connie when I sat down next to her, but I had not yet said the first thing, and for her part, she had not so much as turned to acknowledge my sudden presence, consumed as she was by the long overdue task of sorting and organizing the pens. I watched her but not really. Mercer had given Wendy explicit instructions to have Mirav tell me the story of her relationship with Grant Arthur, and from that moment forward, I heard nothing more from him. Did he think he was doing me a favor? Did he think of me as a fellow dupe in need of the truth? And what was I supposed to do with his so-called truth — follow him out into the woods with it?

By now, I expected at least a “What?” from Connie, if not a second and more exasperated “What?” followed by a full turn and, at the sight of my shock, a softer “What is it?” But she didn’t turn, and I didn’t speak. Work is supposed to guarantee, just as the city is, that you are never alone, but in retrospect, the day I learned of Mercer’s suicide and went to sit beside Connie was no different from the night I woke to an empty Promenade, when something failed, without warning or premonition, and I was left to my own devices. It was, I thought in retrospect, the same isolation Mercer must have felt on the hard earth with a gun barrel in his mouth, the stupid bastard, wondering who might miss him in the end and concluding that no one would miss him in any meaningful way, his final thought before pulling the trigger. Is that what my father thought in the bathtub when he took his last breath? Was it possible that I could have helped Mercer? Could I have taken ahold of him as we were saying goodbye outside the bar, grabbed his arm and refused to let go, and whispered, in desperate, sodden intimacy, “Doubt! No matter what! He’s hit on some metaphysical truth — who cares how? Run with it! Why not? What choice do you have? Suicide?”

It was really as if no matter what I did, even though I was sitting there doing nothing, I would never elicit Connie’s attention, maybe now no longer merited it. I’d come to sit next to her not only to unburden the news but because I wanted to be near her. For comfort and reassurance, there was really no one else. Yes, there was Mrs. Convoy, but knowing Mrs. Convoy, she would fixate on the nature of Mercer’s death, which was a mortal sin in her eyes, deserving only eternal damnation, and I didn’t care to subject his memory to that kind of sanctimony. But I also chose Connie because Connie rebuked death body and soul. Her charisma, her curls, the little vein on her left temple pulsing with iron and heat — Connie reaffirmed for me in some very basic ways why Mercer acted stupidly by walking out into those woods and killing himself. I took comfort in her proximity, in the loudness of her limbs, in the aura of her hair, in the gesture of her scent, in the stupor of her smile, in the revel of her speech, in the trigger of her mind. I wanted to talk to her about Mercer’s suicide and to take the edge off a sudden, hard fact by the simple act of beholding her. Little did I know that I would sit there, unable to speak, and that she would not turn to me, her mind focused on ordering the pens gone riot inside the first and then the second mug. I was unable to fix on some particular aspect of her beauty that might be of comfort in the immediate wake of Mercer’s suicide. Her beauty seemed irrelevant, unequal to the task or, more distressing still, ineffectual, as if it were lost on me, transcended at last. Had he really walked into the woods and taken his own life, when there was still so much to do? Just do, I thought. Do to occupy, to divert, to ignore, to defy. But he didn’t want to just do. He wanted to be: a Buddhist, a Christian, an Ulm, anything that might connect him to the like-minded, to the equally lost, to the ultimately found. And when he could be nothing but Pete Mercer, alone with his money and his gift for making it, he walked out into the woods with a loaded gun. Why not earlier? I wondered. Why now, after the appearance of Mirav Mendelsohn, and not after his failure with the Zoroastrians, or his disillusionment with Kyoto or his attempted “rechanneling”? It was the compounded delusions and disappointments that did him in. Money and possibility and time — they were nothing without the will. The will was everything, and he’d lost his.

Connie had yet to speak, and I had yet to speak, though we were still sitting there together, as Mercer and I had done that day at the bar. We had just started a friendship, Mercer and I, and now it had gone silent, a silence like the one passing between Connie and me. I was there to unburden, to reaffirm in one generous glance every argument against self-slaughter, and for another reason, too, more primitive and instinctual than even my need to behold her. That reason lay beyond my full understanding at the time, as most things do, but became clearer to me in retrospect. I’m talking about my need to bring someone else into my orbit the second I learned of Mercer’s suicide, to reaffirm my existence through the presence and shared space of another person, to reach out and touch her if I had to, annoy her, flatter her, forgive her, beg her forgiveness, even get her to insult me, anything at all to tell me I was alive and not alone. But during all that time, which must have been a full four or five minutes, not a single word passed between us. She broke off from the last mug abruptly, swiveling away from the desk, and sneezed loudly into her elbow. She waited, preparing to sneeze again, as she always sneezed in pairs. After the second sneeze, she hunted in vain for a tissue. Then she stood and headed for the restroom. I watched the door close behind her. A minute later, I was back in with a patient and unable to stop myself from wondering if she had noticed me out there at all, sitting within arm’s reach. What had stood between us, against us, in those four or five minutes? How had we grown so far apart? It was possible to believe, in the wake of Mercer’s suicide, that what separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.

But then something happened to dispel that dark thought, and I almost rushed from chairside back to Connie at the front desk, to shout her name and bring us back to life.

My patient informed me that she was pregnant just as I entered the room. She was in her first trimester and only now beginning to show, but it was self-evident from the fullness of her cheeks and the rosy flush of her skin. A new and plumper blood was making her pulse at the neck. She had the glow of an apple.

I can’t help but be attracted to pregnant women. Unless they’re malnourished. I’ll see a malnourished pregnant woman on the subway sometimes, big in the belly but with stick-figure arms and hair like a rat’s, and I want to buy her a space heater. I want to yell at her parents. I remember going up to this real malnourished-looking pregnant lady on the G train one time and asking her if she’d like a free dinner at Junior’s. She couldn’t believe I was trying to pick her up on the G train, a pregnant woman with a ring on her finger. I hadn’t noticed the ring. It was one hell of a big ring. I tried to convince her that I wasn’t trying to pick her up. I offered to give her fifty bucks for cooking oil. That just made matters worse. Turns out she was a famous model. I’ve seen her on billboards.

I asked my patient when she was due. She said April. Then asked her to open wide. I percussed what I thought was the start of a cavity.

“Any pain here?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“You might have the start of a cavity,” I said to her, “but we’ll just have to wait until April, after the baby comes. If there’s no pain, it’s nothing to worry about right now.”

Well, how about that, I thought, hearing my own words. If there’s no pain, it’s nothing to worry about right now. You’ve got plenty of time. Worry about it later. Until then, enjoy yourself. You’ve got so much to look forward to. Really: you’re flush with good health, and there’s new life on the way. What’s the point of dwelling on all the shit and the misery?

That was how other people thought, I thought. I was having a thought that was identical to other people’s. I was on the inside with this thought. No longer alien to the in, but in the in. I was in the very in. Afraid of losing it, I took up the explorer again, ostensibly to have another look inside my patient’s mouth, but in actual fact to dwell in the in. I wanted to go in even deeper. The people who thought like this, the regular everyday people who walked their dogs and posted their updates and put off going to the dentist, happily allowed the inevitable to just sort of slide right off their backs. Some of them, like my patient the marketing executive, didn’t even let themselves get worked up by what was upon them in the here and now. If he didn’t feel like he had a cavity, he didn’t treat it. If a patient was pregnant, she waited until April. If someone else didn’t feel like flossing, they said screw it, I’ll do it a different day. Not interested in hearing all the ways you’ve failed to maintain optimum health? Skip your appointment with the dentist. Have a drink instead. See a movie. Pet the dog. Give birth to a baby and go in and watch the baby as she sleeps in the crib. My God, I thought. This is how they think. This is why it comes so easily to them. It’s this simple.

“Will you excuse me?” I asked my patient.

I stood up with the intention of heading straight for Connie, but she was already standing there, just outside the room, looking in at me.

“Do you need me?” I asked when I reached the doorway.

“No,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not standing there like it’s nothing,” I said.

“Let’s talk about it later,” she said.

“There’s an it? What’s the it?”

“Later,” she said.

“No, now.”

“You’re in with a patient now. It can wait.”

“I’m done with that patient,” I said. “There’s never been a healthier patient in this office. I was just coming to tell you that. I know you hate it when I drag you over to look at patients, but it’s not sickness or age or death this time. Look at her,” I said. “Have you ever seen anyone healthier or happier in your entire life?”

She peered inside. “What am I missing?” she asked.

“Don’t you see it?”

“I see a woman in a chair,” she said.

“She’s pregnant,” I said. “Don’t you see? Well, okay, just take my word for it. What’s important is her plan of action. She’s got the start of a cavity, but she’s going to wait until after the baby comes to have it filled.”

“Isn’t that standard procedure?”

“If there’s no pain, sure, for pregnant ladies. But not for the rest of us.”

“I’m not following.”

“Why shouldn’t it be that way for the rest of us?” I asked. “Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn’t do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I’m not mentally ill.”

She looked at me.

“I’m not,” I said. “Listen, do me a favor. Go out with me. On a date, I mean. Give me a second chance. Give me… what would this be, the sixth chance? I’m a changed man. I mean it. Let’s not even date. Do you want to get married? I do. I really do. What’s that look? Why that look, Connie? I really do want to marry you. I want us to have kids. I know I said I never wanted to have kids, but that was before. I get it now. I want you to be as healthy and happy as that woman in there.”

“I’m quitting, Paul,” she said.

“You’re what?”

“Quitting.”

Everything got quiet.

“Quitting?” I said. “What for?”

“Do you really have to ask what for?”

“But you’re the office manager,” I said. “And I love you.”

She didn’t respond.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” I said. “What about everything I just said? You won’t give me another chance?”

She smiled one of those smiles that are so quick to disappear that when you think about them later it’s what puts you over the edge. I hated how feelingly she reached out for my arm, how sweet her grip was.

“Let’s just get some things squared away,” she said, “and then I’ll start looking for my replacement.”

I moved like a zombie through the rest of the day. Connie posted an ad online within an hour of her announcement, and by the end of the week, she had half a dozen candidates lined up. There was no talking her out of it. She was moving to Philadelphia with Ben. He had a job there teaching poetry.

“You don’t think you’re making a mistake?”

“No,” she said. “Do you want to look at these résumés?”

“This is really what you want? To live with a poet?”

“Yes,” she said.

“With the hot plate? And the lice?”

“What hot plate? What are you talking about?”

“Can he afford the rent?”

“Are you going to look at these résumés or not?”

At night I went home and watched the games. I had neglected all of August and now half of September. I couldn’t both catch up with the old games and watch the new ones without dedicating myself entirely. I drank and ordered takeout and watched them back-to-back-to-back into the early morning hours.

“I can’t give you any more time,” she said toward the end of September. “I’ve quit, Paul. I have to go. Do you want to look at these résumés, or should I do it?”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

But I never did.

We had a solid summer that year, maintaining a lead over the Yankees all of July and most of August. We saw some heroic play from Pedroia and Ellsbury and, despite injuries, some solid pitching. Heading into September, there was no reason to doubt that we would clinch the pennant and enter not the first, and not the second, but the third World Series in seven years. But then something of an ancient order began to impose itself.

On September 1, we had a half-game lead over the Yankees. By September 2 we’d given up that lead, never to reclaim it. But a play-off berth, by way of the wild card, was a virtual lock, as we stood, on September 3, firmly in second place in the American League East, nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays. We just had to stay ahead of the middling Rays to make the play-offs. To fall behind the Rays in the three weeks that remained of regular-season play, we would literally need to deliver the worst end-of-season performance in the history of baseball — and by history of baseball, I’m talking over one hundred seasons of professional play.

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.

By the end of September, we had indeed played such fundamentally bad baseball that we had blown our lead over the crap-ass Rays. On the final day of regular-season play, the Red Sox and the Rays were tied for second place. I still don’t know how to make sense of our late-season performance that year. I was overtaken by physical disgust with each new loss. But that was not my only reaction. How happy I was that the Red Sox were acting once again like the Red Sox: a cursed and collapsing people. I didn’t want my team to lose; I just didn’t want my team to be the de facto winner. We already had a team that swaggered around as the de facto winner, that pinched players and purchased their pennants. It was less our duty, as Red Sox fans, to root for Boston than it was to ensure in some deeply moral way — and I really mean it when I say it was a moral act, a principled act of human decency — that we not resemble the New York Yankees in any respect. The days of trembling uncertainty, chronic disappointment, and tested loyalty — true fandom — felt vitally lacking. I wanted to be a good Red Sox fan, the best possible Red Sox fan, and the only way I knew to do that was to celebrate, quietly and in a devastated key, the very un-Yankee-like collapse of our 2011 September.

At that time I was still paying a nightly visit to my new patient. You and I can go a day without flossing, not without consequence, but without the imminent threat of losing our teeth. Not Eddie. I couldn’t believe he was still alive he was so rickety, bent, toneless, liver spotted, and trembling. He greeted me at the door as grateful as ever. I think he liked me almost as much as he had liked his old dead dentist Dr. Rappaport. We moved into the kitchen where he had a seat on the stepladder. I stood behind him and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. I removed a length of floss, wound it around my fingers, and flossed him. Afterward, he got to his feet and made us both martinis. It was like stopping into a bar for a nightcap, but instead of tipping the bartender I removed bacteria from between his teeth.

Now, after six weeks of consistent flossing, there was no more bleeding. His bone loss had ceased. His gums were holding steady.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to these nightly visits, these uninsured house calls. The last game of the season was scheduled to start in twenty minutes. If I missed the first pitch, I’d have to wait until the game was over, rewind the tape, and watch it from the beginning, and that particular game was too important not to watch in real time. I had left the office late, the trains had moved slowly, and I was still in Eddie’s apartment on the Lower East Side at ten to seven.

He handed me my martini. “Cheers,” he said.

We toasted. I watched him battle the tremor in his hand to dock the unsteady craft upon his lower lip and drink.

“I’m in kind of a pickle, Eddie,” I said to him. “I’m a baseball fan, and in particular”—I touched the brim of my Red Sox cap—“I follow these fellas right here. I don’t know if you follow baseball yourself, but if you do, then you know that no team in the history of the game has ever lost a bigger lead in the final month of the regular season than this year’s Boston Red Sox. It’s truly a historic event. They were in first place ahead of the Yankees, and then they let the Yankees take the lead just when it mattered most. Now that’s actually a time-honored tradition, which you probably know all about if you follow baseball. It’s not the end of the world, and in fact, I don’t mind it personally, because the only way I like to beat the Yankees is when we’re the underdogs. And we were still nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays, which, if you know anything about baseball, they’re a real shit team. We would have to lose in this final month as many games as… well, the only team that even comes close is the 1969 Chicago Cubs. They were in first place basically from the start of the season, and sometimes by as many as nine games. Nobody could have foreseen them losing seventeen games in September of 1969—seventeen games, Eddie — and ending up in second place. As you know if you follow baseball, nobody but the Cubs ever plays that badly. So let me just cut to the chase. We have played as badly as the 1969 Cubs. Worse, in fact, because, as of today, in the month of September alone, we’ve lost nineteen games. Nineteen games, Eddie. While the shit Rays have climbed out of their cesspool to tie us. We are tied with the shit-ass Rays. And tonight, while we play our last regular-season game in Baltimore against the last-place Orioles, the Rays play their last regular-season game against the first-place Yankees. If we win, and the Rays lose, we go to the play-offs. If we lose, and the Rays win, the Rays go to the play-offs. We could be playing our last game of the season tonight. And because I’ve stopped by, and because the train was slow, I might not make it home in time to see the game from the start, which I have to do for superstitious reasons.”

He looked at me steadily despite his faint shake, his eyes wide as a baby’s.

“So I have to ask you a favor,” I said. “Do you have cable? And if so, what kind of package do you have? And if it’s the right package, can I watch the games here — the Red Sox game and the Yankees game — with your absolute guarantee that no matter what happens, if there’s a fire in the apartment, say, or you suddenly find my behavior peculiar, even alarming, you will not kick me out but allow me to finish watching both games, even if either or both of them go into extra innings, and I’m here until three or four in the morning?”

“I have premium cable,” trembled Eddie, “and I’d be delighted by your company.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Okay,” I said. “That leaves us twenty minutes to find some chicken and rice.”

He made more martinis while I ran out for food. We ate quickly. Just before the start of the game, Eddie settled into the recliner while I took a seat on the floor, to be closer to the TV. Sometime in the second inning he crinkled open a hard candy and promptly passed out. It was dispiriting, after all those weeks of flossing him, to see his teeth bathing in sugar like that. At the next commercial break, I put on a latex glove, retrieved the candy, and threw it out without Eddie stirring an inch.

I sat back down, continuing to familiarize myself with his alien remotes. I was toggling between the game between the Red Sox and the Orioles and the game between the Yankees and the Rays. I was rooting for the Yankees, which ate me alive. But I had no choice. The Yankees had to beat the Rays to put the Rays behind, just as the Red Sox had to beat the Orioles to move ahead, if we were going to advance to the postseason — and when push came to shove, despite the discomforts of victory, I rooted unreservedly for the Red Sox. A win for the Red Sox was a win for my father. No matter that winning never did any magical good. Even clinching the 2004 World Series had failed to bring him back. That was the real adjustment. At last we had done the impossible, the curse was broken, we were champions again after eighty-six years… and nothing changed. He was still gone, he was still dead. What had I been hoping for? Why had I been rooting for them for so many years?

The Red Sox scored in the third. I let out a shout, and Eddie awoke with a start. He looked at me with a blank expression. I think he was wondering who I was and why I was in his apartment. Minutes later the Orioles went up 2–1. I sat there rocking a little. Then it was Boston’s turn. Scutaro scored in the fourth, and then Pedroia hit a homer into deep left to put us up 3–2. Meanwhile, the Rays were getting creamed by the Yankees. Everything was sort of okay for the moment.

If my father were alive, he would have been tracking the game on a scorecard. He started the practice as a boy, listening to Jim Britt on a Zenith Consoltone. I brought his old scorecards out during games sometimes, ran my fingers over the nicks and numbers made with a pencil in his little hand, long before his troubles began: a partial history of baseball told in the hieroglyphics of a dead man.

Bottom of the fifth, I walked over to Eddie. He was talking in his sleep. I put my ear close to his mouth. “Sonya…” he was saying. “Sonya…”

“Eddie,” I said. “Hey, Eddie.”

Eddie opened his eyes and searched my face again.

“It’s almost the sixth inning,” I said. “I have to go into the other room soon, because I never watch the sixth inning. So I need you to watch the game for me and tell me what happens. Can you do that for me?”

“Who’s that?” he said.

“It’s Dr. O’Rourke,” I said. “Your new dentist. Can you watch the sixth inning for me, Eddie, and tell me what happens?”

A few minutes later, I was standing in his bedroom, near the door.

“Still awake, Eddie?”

“Huh?”

“You have to keep your eyes open,” I said. “I need you to watch the inning for me, top and bottom.”

There was a rain delay in the seventh. I was back in front of the TV, listening to Eddie whisper in his sleep for his Sonya. When I toggled over to the Yankees game, I was shocked. Ayala had replaced Logan on the mound, and the Rays had gone on a tear. Soon they had tied the Yankees. A home run by the Rays’ Evan Longoria secured the win. We had to win now just to stay alive.

I switched back to the Red Sox game. Papelbon struck out Jones. He struck out Reynolds. Davis came to the plate. Poised on the mound, fierce eyes shaded under the brim of his cap, Papelbon received pitch signals from his battery mate. It was the bottom of the ninth. We were only one out shy of victory. Davis’s bat inscribed nervous little arcs in the air as he waited for the pitch. The entire stadium held its breath.

If Papelbon failed to put Davis away, I realized, we would complete the worst September collapse in the history of baseball. That would restore a necessary order, repairing some of the damage of the previous decade’s extraordinary victories. But a loss was still a loss. I’d still feel miserable. But if we won, I’d feel even worse. I would be shut out of victory by the moral collapse that would follow, and it would fail once again to bring him back. So if we lost, I lost, and if we won, I lost. I had abided by strict superstitions all my life — for what? I wore the hat, ate the chicken, skipped the sixth, taped every game… for what? For the right to suffer one way or the other. That was no way to live. There had to be hope, no matter how hopeless. There had to be effort that might not be doomed. I had nothing left: no Santacroce dream, no Plotz homecoming. My parents were gone. Connie had left. My patients refused to floss, some even to fill their cavities. I had… my will, that was all. My will not to follow Mercer and my father down the hole. My will to be something more than a fox.

It was a full count. Papelbon eased into his windup. I turned off the TV and walked out of Eddie’s apartment.