Four

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

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

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

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

“Weird,” I said, “isn’t it?”

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

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

“Were they hippies?”

“No,” I said. “Just poor.”

At least that part was true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” said Connie. “Again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why never under your real name?”

“For the sake of privacy,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I think I get it,” she said.

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

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

“Yeah?”

“What’s the C stand for?”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“But you did.”

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

“You weren’t joking,” she said.

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

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

“Paul Conrad,” I said.

“Your father’s name?”

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

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

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

She started clicking around.

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

“I’ve what?”

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

We read it together:

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

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

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

“That’s a weird comment,” she said.

“It wasn’t me!”

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

“Who’s Amalek?”

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

“Seir?” I said. “Like Seir Design?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Talsman’s on the phone,” she said.

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

The site was registered to an Al Frushtick.

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“The one with the meditation techniques! Remember?”

“Who?”

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

“What did you ever do to Al Frushtick?”

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

“What was it?”

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

“Something ethnic?”

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

“Hi, Al Frushtick,” I wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me again,” I wrote.

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

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

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

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

“This would have been a long time ago.”

“Why are you bringing it up now?”

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

I was quiet. “I know lots of jokes.”

“How many concern a priest and a rabbi?”

I pretended to think about it.

“Let me hear one,” she said.

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

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

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

“Tell me the joke, Paul.”

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

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

I stopped.

“Why are you stopping?”

“Should I go on?”

“Is that the punch line?”

“No.”

“Tell me the punch line.”

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

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

“You’re not smiling.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

I left her to tend to a patient.

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

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

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

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

“A collection of cantonments?”

“And what is a cantonment?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to them?”

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

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

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

“What’s the biblical account?”

“Those four hundred men are blotted out.”

“Blotted out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t fun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Why?”

“Because I had never read him before.”

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

“He was a serious anti-Semite.”

After a while, he said, “And?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Not always,” I said.

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

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

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

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie with her iPad.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

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

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

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

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

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

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

“You mean on Facebook?”

“Yes, on Facebook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They don’t have customers.”

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

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

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

“Hey!”

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

“Calm down.”

“Calm down how?” I whispered.

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

“A what?”

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

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

“That’s the thing Frushtick called me!”

“Who?”

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

“Who is?”

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

“Just online,” she said.

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

“You can’t opt out,” I said.

“Opt out?”

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

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

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

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

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

What do you really know of your life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s clear,” I said.

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

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