To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Epilogue

I LIVED AT SEIR, in the compound located in the far south of Israel, for twenty-one days the following year, trying to remain open to everything I had spent my life resisting. I read the Cantaveticles front to back, heard the rest of the story of my family’s flight from Poland, and took my turn in the kitchen preparing dinner for the other reclaimants. I slept on a cot. I visited the Dead Sea. I had the inside of my cheek swabbed to determine the likelihood of my Ulmish descent.

At dusk and at dawn, I watched the Bedouin on their strutting camels glide by in the distance, on their way out to the desert. Hidden away inside layers of dark clothes, moving inexorably and with pathological silence, they struck me as the loneliest people on earth.

I was never lonely, and never had to be lonely again. There were formal classes in the whitewashed buildings and nightly debates around the dinner table. The others with me weren’t lunatics or zealots, or even culty and weird, but reasonably groomed, politically progressive, on average younger than I had expected. They were really into it: the reclaimed history, the theological complexities of doubt, the continual threat of mass extinction. More than a few could talk about such things all night long. By the end of week 3, it had all become exhausting and a little tedious to me, like touring the churches of Europe with Connie. I missed espresso and central air. I wanted to go home.

That doesn’t explain why I returned a year later, or the year after that.

I guess I needed to make myself vulnerable. I was sick of the facts, the bare facts, the hard, scientific facts. I was saying: Look at me, seeking among the dubious. Doing something stupid, something stark raving mad. Look at me, risking being wrong.

Tourism is a big deal in Israel. You can hire a guide to take you to the famous desert of Ein Gedi, to Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and to Masada, where Jewish rebels held off Roman centurions until they could hold them off no longer. Or you can take a tour with Grant Arthur in his Mazda CX-7 and travel to places no one’s heard of and listen, with as much skepticism as you please, as he conjures a history at highway junctions and distant points in the desert. Battles took place just on the other side of that security fence, he’ll tell you. Miracles happened right here at this electrical substation. There are some who express no skepticism at all on such a tour. They believe every word and don’t give a damn about your hard facts. Deal with it.

I never received an apology from Grant Arthur for turning my life upside down. “You wouldn’t be here if you needed an apology,” he said to me. “You’re here. You’re happy. What’s to apologize for?” I wasn’t sure I should just forgive and forget, but he did his best to convince me that there was no reason to hold a grudge, or even to ask him, “Why me?” “Remember, I didn’t reach out to you,” he would say. “You emailed me.” He was suggesting that he might have done nothing more than make a website for a dental practice on which to publish parts of the Cantaveticles if I hadn’t emailed Seir Design and demanded the site be taken down. “The message comes when the message is needed,” he would say. “I didn’t steal your identity, Paul. I returned it.” And: “If you doubt any of this, you are already on the right path.” He always wore a beige vest with mesh pockets and a pair of cargo pants, had a neat little beard and perfect WASP teeth. “Most men live their lives vacillating between hope and fear,” he’d say. “Hope for heaven, on the one hand, fear of nothingness on the other. But now consider doubt. Do you see all the problems it solves, for man and for God?”

The life of the Ulms continued to grow online. I was so wrapped up at the time in the appropriation of my identity that I wasn’t aware until later just how much more was going on. A book was published called A Partial History of the Dispossessed, by Tomas Stover, a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, with chapters on the Jews, the Maori, the Native Americans, as well as less publicized dispossessions — the Akunsi, the Chaggossians of Diego Garcia, and of course the Ulms. Other historians countered with articles and denunciations, which changed the focus of the group’s Wikipedia page. There was an inexorable logic to it all when the main focus became not Amalekite slaughters and the debate over Israeli aggression but the right of some people to make loose claims about their historical legitimacy, to publish books about it and stand by it as established fact. It was this controversy that secured the page’s permanence. Now it’s a more or less stable document, its partisans stalemated in a zero-sum game, in the collapse of absolutes brought to you online. But still they tweak, and correct, and caution one another to remain civil, above all to try and remain neutral.

The page begins, “Ulmism is the predominant religious tradition of the Ulms, which began with the revelations of Grant Arthur (1960–2022) during the Third Reawakening.”

The Plotzes must still think that those tweets and postings made in my name really came from me. I don’t know; I haven’t heard from Uncle Stuart since that day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don’t get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz — any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently.

Connie still sends me an email now and then. She and the poet married and had a son. A university press published some of her poems in a chapbook, which I have read over and over again, searching in vain for some sign of me, some mention. I take comfort in knowing that she was never much of an autobiographical writer. She teaches in Kentucky. “We’re all doing really well here in Lexington,” she writes. “How are you and how is Betsy?”

Betsy succeeds every year in dragging me to Nepal on a missionary vacation. We land in Kathmandu and spend our time in nearby Bodhnath tending to the teeth of the poor and malnourished, individuals with nothing more to stimulate their gums than a branch from a banyan tree. You’ve never seen so many robed men in your life, so many heads shaved to the bone in the name of God. They spend their days spinning prayer wheels and peddling yak’s butter. Everywhere I go in Bodhnath, the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha stare down at me from the gilded tower of the stupa, a happy witness to all the suffering. I say as much to Mrs. Convoy. “First of all,” she says, “the Buddha is not a god. It’s more like a self-help thing. And second of all, don’t you see that those eyes are painted on?” Painted on? I will say. “My goodness, young man, you can be so easily duped.”

In the early evenings, after we finish for the day, I walk around the hot dusty uneven streets of Kathmandu, lined with crippled beggars and mounds of trash, and I take pictures with my me-machine of goats’ heads with charred horns and leering smiles. They’re for sale right on the street, arrayed on vendors’ tables like the skulls of executed criminals. I pass whole families dwelling in doorways, trekkers and seekers and sightseers, men on bicycle rickshaws, mangy dogs. All the buildings look condemned, their windows either bare or boarded. There’s advertising everywhere.

On our last day there in 2014, on a solo walk before dinner, I found the one thing I’d never bought in all my years on earth. I’m not talking something exotic and rare, an animal horn or a handicraft found only in the birthplace of the Buddha. I mean something straight off Main Street USA, made in China, and sold throughout the world. I had purchased something like it, but that particular thing I never would have considered right for me. The minute I did, the minute I realized I could buy it and put it on — that I was free, in some intoxicatingly existential way, to make such a radical move, bound no more by superstition and tribalism, by perverse inbred loyalty — I felt an exquisite little shudder run down my back. The object in question, a sun-beaten Chicago Cubs hat, was sitting on quiet display in a smeared window of a shop catering to trekkers not far from the Garden of Dreams. Above the bill, swimming in a sea of blue, the big red C synonymous with bungling and loss. The Cubs had not won the World Series in 105 years. That was not only the longest championship drought in major-league baseball; it was the longest such drought of any professional team in American sports. Imagine it! Joining in the preseason to pray for a good year, watching their performance with genuine suspense, and feeling again the crushing heartbreak that only the perennial, tantalizing possibility of true redemption can provoke. My God! The world new again! Something to desperately want! I went inside, and when I came back out, it was on my head, where my Red Sox hat had been for years. It didn’t fit perfectly; it would take some breaking in. I let a Toyota lorry stacked tall with sacks of rice trundle past, and then I stepped out into the crowd.

“Mista mista!”

A boy in a Fila jersey and grubby jeans was suddenly at my side. I was used to kids crowding me, begging for rupees.

“Want to hit?”

“What?”

He was smiling at me, some kind of wooden plank in his hand. I had a closer look at him. Suddenly I crouched down and took hold of his arms. He was a dark Nepali kid, fat cheeks and a chicken-thin neck. But it was his smile. It was what’s called God given. His teeth were big and white. His gums were pink and full.

“Who’s your dentist?” I asked him.

“You.”

“Me?”

“You the dentist,” he said.

“This is my work?”

“Go ahhh. Open up. Now spit.”

He turned and spat in the street, and all the other kids laughed.

“This is good work,” I said.

“Now you hit. Okay?”

The plank in his hand, I realized, was an improvised cricket bat. I got to my feet.

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“It’s okay! I show you.”

He handed me the bat. The other kids scattered to take up their positions. Behind me, a little urchin made three stacks of dented beer cans. Wickets, or whatever they’re called. I’ve never understood the first thing about cricket.

The kid ran out to pitch. His arms pushed everyone back, back. I was in a Cubs cap; they expected great things from me.

“What’s my goal here?” I called out to the kid.

“Like baseball. You hit.”

“Just hit it?”

“Just hit, just hit.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Ready, steady, go,” he said.

And with that he did a strange and elaborate windup, putting his whole body into it. His arm pinwheeled furiously as he raced forward. The ball came at me fast and low. What the hell, I thought, what the hell, and without any expectation or understanding, doubtful of any hope of success, I swung, one eye on the ball, and one eye on heaven.