KARI GUTRICH, TALSMAN’S CYBERLAW expert, returned my call the following Wednesday. She informed me that I might be able to sue once the damage was done, but as for stopping it, that was almost impossible. The Internet moved too fast.
“What legal body,” she asked, “governmental agency, or law-enforcement bureau would you appeal to at the moment?”
“The police?” I suggested. “The courts?”
She laughed, I thought a little too heartily. “That’s good for out there,” she said. “But you’re in here now.”
“In here?”
The police, the courts—that was common sense, whereas we were discussing technology and the law. Future legislation might introduce stricter controls governing misappropriations, impersonations, defamations, and other disputes of character and online reputation, she said, but the current laws were vague on how to address those issues in real time. And people don’t have access to the courts just because they’re irritated.
“Irritated?” I said. “They’ve created a website for my practice, started a Facebook page in my name, took unauthorized photographs of me, creepy photographs, and now they’re using my name to comment all over the Internet, implicating me in some kind of religion, and the only legal claim I can make is to being irritated?”
“Do you know who’s doing this to you?”
“I know who registered the site,” I said. I gave her Al Frushtick’s name.
“We can probably get the site to come down,” she said. “But as a legal matter and, more important, as a practical matter, there’s just not much more we can do at the moment.”
I wanted to hit the wall in frustration.
“I can’t sue for defamation?” I asked.
“What damages have you suffered? We don’t fully know yet.”
She counseled me to do nothing, and to do it carefully. For if I did something, I might inadvertently call more attention to my new online existence, a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect: once people knew I was trying to suppress something published on the Internet, they would actively seek it out to see what all the fuss was about, which would create a negative feedback loop, more attention drawing yet more attention.
“Streisand? As in Barbra?”
“We have a best-practices worksheet we advise all our clients to follow,” she said. “Give me your email address and I’ll send it over.”
“Can you just fax it?” I asked.
Don’t engage, she cautioned me, despite how hard that might be, and let matters take their course. Later we could reassess the situation to determine what actionable complaint I might have.
She was looking at the website as we spoke. “You really didn’t make this site?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I really didn’t.”
“Well,” she said, possibly attempting to console. “At least it’s a nice one.”
I stood outside room 3 composing a reply to Seir Design on my me-machine. “Why do you keep asking me what I know about my life, Al?” I wrote.
And what business is it of yours, anyway? You’ve shown the limits of your knowledge by calling the Red Sox an “Activity and Interest.” I have no reason to even consider you so much as a man. You’re a program designed to scam me. Only a database would know that my middle name begins with C.
He (or they, or it) replied quickly:
My name’s not Al, Paul. And what I know about you goes much deeper than any database. I’m not a computer program, but a person with a beating heart, reaching across this divide to say I feel for you. I am your brother.
I wrote:
Betsy?
I deleted that and wrote:
What do you know about me, or think you know about me, “my brother”?
Irritated at receiving no reply, I kept at it.
Am I an indoor person or an outdoor person? Cat or dog man? Do I keep a journal? Watch birds? Collect stamps? Do I plan my weekends all in advance, pack them full of activity, and then sit back and watch them unfold? Or do I wait until they’re here and squander them? You don’t know. And why don’t you know? Because whatever you think you know is subject to change at my whim. I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Watch me break out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a cafe.
Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.
I meant “cage.”
He wrote back:
Here is what I know about your life. You’re an indoor man because your profession demands it. You feel estranged from nature, unable to access it. You’ve replaced it with television and the Internet, which come directly into your home, and supply your need for diversion even as they coarsen your instinct for the spirit. You don’t have kids because you feel untethered and uprooted, and you can’t imagine bestowing that legacy upon a child. You are too much in your own head, trying to unravel the mysteries. Sometimes they make you despair and you give up hope. However, there’s nothing wrong with being in your head. In your head, with your thoughts, you live a rich and complex life, full of anxieties and regrets, yes, but also tenderness, and fancy, and unspoken sympathy for others. There is a lot of emotion coursing through you at any given moment of the day, and maybe nobody knows it because nobody can read your mind, but if they only knew, if they knew, they would say, He’s alive, all right, he’s alive. You can’t ask for much more than that.
Or can you?
“Dr. O’Rourke?” she said. She might have been saying it for a while. “Paul?” she said.
It was Connie. I let the hand with the phone fall to my side.
I nodded. “Everything’s fine,” I said.
I waited until she walked away. Then I wrote:
How do you know all that?
He replied:
I told you. I am your brother.
It might seem that a dental professional can never really get to know his patients because visits are so infrequent and short-lived, but you’d be surprised. When someone is religious about regular checkups, and between those checkups has toothaches and accidents and cosmetic needs and thus requires additional work, a warm rapport can easily develop. Some patients even thank me after the most brutalizing treatments, genuinely grateful for what I do for them. When next they come in, I will ask about their jobs and their families before getting down to business. It’s almost small-town that way.
That morning, when I walked in on Bernadette Marder, despite having worked on her for nearly ten years, I honestly thought she was a first-time patient. She looked so much older than the last time I saw her.
The sight of Bernadette looking old reminded me of a joke. A woman makes an appointment with a new dentist and discovers that he has the same name as someone she went to high school with. She wonders if her new dentist could be the boy she had such a terrible crush on when she was a girl of fifteen. But when he walks in, he’s such an old fart that she quickly comes to her senses. Even so, after the exam is over, she idly asks him what high school he attended… and sure enough, it’s the one she attended! “What year did you graduate?” she asks him, growing excited, and he names the very year she graduated. “You were in my class!” the woman exclaims, and the unsuspecting dentist screws up his eyes and peers at the old hag in the chair and says, “What did you teach?”
My patient, Bernadette Marder, looked so hideously old, so hideously and prematurely aged since the last time I’d seen her, that all her most stressful and trying years might have been crammed into six months. She had gone from forty to sixty-five in a mere hundred and eighty days. Her hair had thinned out and just sort of died on the top of her head. A scaly pink meridian divided one limp half from the other. An array of wrinkles, radiating from her pale lips, had deepened and fossilized, and her face sagged. And yet when I realized (thanks to the name on the chart) that it was Bernadette, my Bernadette, and not some first-time geriatric patient, and asked how she was doing, she told me she’d never been happier. She had just gotten married, in fact, and had been given new responsibility at work, which came with a small raise. I couldn’t comprehend it. Never happier, newly married, making more money, and looking like death. Almost impossible to track on a day-to-day basis, the passage of time is at work on people unremittingly. As a dentist seeing familiar faces only once every six months, I became acutely aware of it. It is the inexorable truth of our existence on earth, and if it is happening to Bernadette Marder, I was made to realize once again, it is also happening to us—to Abby, Betsy, Connie, and me—though it remains elusive, indeed invisible, so that, presumably, we will not all stop in horror and stare and point at one another until the screaming begins. No, we carry on, as Bernadette was doing, dwelling happily in a constant present that persisted day after day even as it continually perished, never demanding a sober assessment, or a sudden outburst of pity, or the radical reconsideration of everything.
Looking at Bernadette in the chair, sallow, wrinkled, bald, and happy, I felt I had no choice but to tell her. But tell her what? I didn’t know. What good would it do, what action could she take? She was being consumed in some way, literally consumed before my very eyes, and no one, probably for fear of offending her, had said anything. As a medical professional, it was my obligation to do so. I just didn’t know how to put it into words. No matter how well intentioned, I might only end up offending her and then losing her as a patient. Did I want to sacrifice Bernadette’s billings to my observation that she appeared to be growing older faster than the rest of us? No, I thought. I will just ignore it. But how can anyone in good conscience ignore it? “Bernadette,” I said, and she turned to me in the chair. You’ve grown old, Bernadette. No, I couldn’t say that! Bernadette, your best days are over, it’s all downhill from here. Good God, no! You’re fucking dying, Bernadette! No! You’re practically decomposing on a cold slab! Oh, God, she was looking at me so intently now, I had to say something.
“Bernadette,” I said, “I mention this only out of…” I stopped and began again, saying, “Bernadette, have you, or your new husband perhaps, noticed that, well, how shockingly—”
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
“Oh, Connie!” I exclaimed.
“When you have a moment,” she said.
I looked happily down upon Bernadette. “That’s Connie,” I said. “I must go and talk to her.”
But on my way over, I saw that she was holding her iPad, which could only mean more unpleasantness.
“What is it this time?” I said.
“Twitter,” she said.
In the last week, the comments, messages, and postings made in my name continued to appear on respectable sites like ESPN, HuffPost, National Geographic, while expanding into darker recesses, into fringe chat rooms, unmoderated forums unfurling sex and death, my brand proliferating across platforms, burrowing ever deeper into the shallows… and now, two weeks after the O’Rourke Dental website appeared, “my” first tweet entered the world. It came from the account of @PaulCORourkeDental (New York, NY • www.drpaulcorourke.com) and it read:
Error and misfortune arise in the world from the belief that God’s chief aim for creation is universal belief
Connie and I puzzled over that one awhile.
“I think you’re saying you shouldn’t believe.”
“I’m not saying anything,” I said.
“I know it’s not you, Paul,” she said. “You don’t have to keep insisting.”
“I just want to make clear—”
“I know it’s not you. There’s no reason to be defensive.”
“I’m not being defensive, I’m being pissed off!”
“You sound defensive,” she said.
I read the tweet again. I thought she was right. I was advocating, or my impostor was advocating, possibly on behalf of God, against belief. I fired off another email while Connie watched.
Twitter now, huh? Why are you doing this to me?
I handed the iPad back to her, and she read the tweet again.
“You know what it sounds like to me?” she asked, before walking away.
“What?”
“Something an atheist would say.”
I knew I was in love with the Plotzes when I felt embarrassed to be an atheist, and instead of insisting upon it as a declaration of my essential self, around them I kept it under wraps. Rejecting God seemed an affront to their entire way of life, at least as I understood it: to the prayers sung on Friday night, to the commandments kept on the Sabbath, to every God-directed effort made throughout the week. They worked hard at their faith. They made it as much about the body as the soul. Sure, the Catholics crossed themselves upon entering the church, they touched holy water, they knelt before climbing into the pew, but these were but the throat clearings of a proper Plotz. The old-timey sway-and-song of charismatic Protestants was a set of Plotz knee bends. That’s why it came as such a surprise when Connie told me that Ezzie, another uncle, was an atheist. I was really shocked. I’d watched the guy. He looked as devout as the rest. “He doesn’t believe in God?” I asked. “Nope.” “Why not?” “Because… I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask him.” I wasn’t going to ask any Plotz about atheism. “Is it because of the Holocaust?” I asked. She looked irritated by the question. “Not every Jew who doesn’t believe doesn’t believe because of the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t have a specifically Jewish set of reasons for not believing. Hello?” she said, pointing to herself. “Sometimes we just don’t believe.” “But Ezzie acts like he believes,” I said. “He bows his head. He wears the whatchamacallit. He goes to synagogue.” “But that’s different,” she said. “What’s different?” “Of course he does those things.” “Why?” “Because it’s important to him. He’s a Jew, it’s important.” “Because of the Holocaust?” “What is it with you and the Holocaust? Do you think everything we do centers around the Holocaust?” “No.” “The Holocaust, sure, a very big deal. But it was a while ago. We don’t wake up every morning asking ourselves what we should or shouldn’t be doing on account of the Holocaust.” “Sorry,” I said. “It’s new to me.” “Ezzie’s an atheist,” she said. “Why? I don’t know. Why are you an atheist?” “Because God doesn’t exist.” “Well, there you have it. That’s probably what Ezzie would say, too.”
But why did it remain important for him to go through the motions? More than that: to actively and willingly participate in customs and rituals whose essential purpose was the glorying of God?
Who cared! What a way to be an atheist! When you were born a Christian and raised a Christian and then slowly awoke from the dream song of Christianity to face its philosophical absurdities and moral outrages, you stopped doing everything you once did (which was very little to begin with, maybe a little prayer, a little Bible study, a little church on Palm Sunday) and sat alone with your disbelief—conscientious, yes, and principled, but also a little bereft, left to make meaning on your own and to locate a source of continuity somewhere in the structureless secular world. Not Ezzie. Ezzie could pop by Rachel and Howard’s house on a Friday night and just jump in and do it all and then pop out again, spiritually restored but still on firm ground. He wanted to do such things. He had an obligation, as a Jew, if only out of loyalty, to continue a tradition that had received its share of knocks, or more practically to remain connected to his family, his childhood, his forefathers, his people. To remain connected! I didn’t know why he did it, but that, I thought, would be reason enough. And reason enough to make an atheist like me envious of all Ezzie could discard and still hold dear to his heart.
It was different with Mrs. Convoy. With Mrs. Convoy, I was a big loud brawling debunker. I wanted her to confront the follies of the Bible and to face the plain reality of a world without God. So I’d avail myself of the arguments, and she’d say to me, “But how do you know?” I’d avail myself of more of the arguments, and she’d say, in a slightly different tone, “But how do you know?” And I’d avail myself of still more of the arguments, and still she’d say, “But how do you know?” What we were really arguing about, of course, was how we should define the word “know.” But in the heat of debate we skipped right over that. She knew I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that I knew as she insisted I know (a higher standard of knowing than she demanded of herself), which left the door cracked open to the most maddening of counterarguments: “How—do—you—know?”
So I asked her one time, I said, “Okay, Betsy.”
We were having dinner at an Olive Garden in a mall in New Jersey. She was sipping her customary glass of Chardonnay, I was on my fourth beer. I liked going to the Olive Garden now and then. It reminded me of my childhood. I liked going to the mall for the same reason. I no longer went to the mall to buy things, as Mrs. Convoy did. Nowhere in America would I find that one thing I had not yet purchased at least once in my life. No, I was done buying, I was done wanting. Wanting all the time, for everything, it’s numbing. But I still went to the mall with Mrs. Convoy. In the vast whirring spaces of a mall, overlooking the sloping carpeted ramps, I felt at home more than I did anywhere in Manhattan. Whenever I was homesick or nostalgic, when others left for Long Island or upstate New York, I visited the malls in New Jersey and sometimes went as far as the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia, where I walked the wide aisles with the hordes and bargain hunters. I liked nothing more than to sit on a bright mesh bench in the middle of all that sack rustle and watch people come and go from the Foot Locker, I liked nothing more than to stroll along the kiosks of sunglasses and affordable jewelry, I liked nothing more than a food court. Here is where, growing up, I had made the most of things. Here at the mall every August my mother bought me back-to-school clothes, here at Christmastime I coveted the toys we couldn’t afford, here I filled my empty summer hours with something more than strife and television and the smell of dogs. The mall was always beckoning, and I had wandered it with purpose. The mall itself was my purpose. If I had a few coins to scratch together, I could turn them into a Coke or a high score on a video game or an illicit smoke in the parking lot. And now a mall returned me to a time when desire was easy to resolve. Look, it was still working for so many of them! There they were, with their lists and missions, their handbags and gift cards, moving with oblivion in and out of the stores. A mall can make you feel alive again if you go there only to watch and if you watch without judgment, looking kindly upon the concerted shoppers, who have no choice about buying or not buying, it would seem, and who would not want that choice—not if it meant no longer knowing what to want.
“According to you,” I said to Mrs. Convoy at the Olive Garden, “and correct me if I’m wrong here, but according to you, the only way into the kingdom of heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. Now Connie, as you know, is Jewish. Her whole family is. Which means, among other things, they reject Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. And I happen to be very fond of the Plotzes,” I said to her. “I’ve never met a family like theirs before. There’s about four hundred of them, while in my family, there was just the three of us, and then, kaplow, just the two. But anyway, you would, if I’m not mistaken, have the Plotzes burn in hell because they don’t accept the divinity of Jesus Christ. Is that correct?”
Mrs. Convoy sipped her Chardonnay, then set the glass down, reclined back in her chair, and narrowed her eyes at me.
“It’s not a trick question,” I said. “You insist, do you not, that Connie, with all her family, will be pitched into the boiling waters of hell upon death because they don’t believe in Christ.”
“How do you know,” she asked me, leaning forward, whispering her thoughtful reply across the table, a reply that chilled me to the bone, “how do you know that at the very last second of Connie’s life, Jesus Christ doesn’t open her heart and she converts?”
For the record: I did not become an atheist to be smug. I did not become an atheist so that I could stand above believers and shout my enlightenment down at them. I become an atheist because God didn’t exist. The only god I cared to entertain, which came to mind in the Olive Garden when Mrs. Convoy confided in me her private solution to the Jewish problem, had personally approved a bumper sticker I once saw on the back of an old Saab parked in downtown Boston. BELIEVERS MADE ME AN ATHEIST, it read.
“Why am I doing this to you?” he wrote at last. “Because you’re lost.”
“Lost?” I replied.
What business is it of yours if I’m lost? You don’t know me. You’re just saying things to make me think you do. The most obvious things. All that stuff about being alive inside my head, feeling intensely though no one knows it—that’s so obvious. This is some kind of scam you’re running and I want to know why. Unless it’s you, Betsy. Is it you? Connie, is this you?
I promise you, Paul. It’s no scam. Please, be patient. I know it must be uncomfortable for someone to pop up out of nowhere and diagnose your troubles with pinpoint accuracy. I don’t think you’re an animal in a cage—far from it. You’re the full measure of a man, thoroughly contemporary, at odds with the American dream of upward mobility and its empty material success, and in search of real meaning for your life. I should know, Paul, I was there once, too. In fact, you might even say that you and I are one and the same.
As I was reading, I had the feeling that something was off. An unease just under the skin. I had the weird sensation that he was in the room with me. Or on a computer on the other side of the wall. I looked closely at his email address.
“He’s writing to me under my own name,” I said.
“Who is?”
“He’s created an email in my name. This person… or… program… whatever it is who… he’s pretending to be me in his private correspondence. He sent me an email from myself.”
I looked up. I had said all of this to Mrs. Convoy.
“Who are you talking about?”
If I didn’t know from her physical proximity when the email from “Paul C. O’Rourke” landed in my in-box that it was not Mrs. Convoy, I knew it from her guileless and unblinking stare.
“I don’t know,” I said.
A few days later Connie came up to me and said, “Have you really never used Twitter before?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve really never used Twitter before.”
“How many characters do you have to work with?”
“In Twitter?”
“Yes, in Twitter.”
“A hundred and forty.”
“So you know that much.”
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Connie. Everyone knows that much.”
“Have you been following your tweets the last couple of days?”
“Kari Gutrich told me not to engage.”
“Who’s Kari Gutrich?”
“Kari Gutrich, Esquire. Talsman’s cyberlaw expert. She said engaging could only make things worse. So that’s what I’m doing, not engaging.”
“You mean you’re just going to let someone say whatever he wants in your name and not even keep track of it?”
“That lawyer was very frightening,” I said. “I don’t want to make matters worse than they already are.”
“You’re not going to make them worse just by looking.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know how the Internet works.”
“What do you mean you don’t know how the Internet works? You’re on your phone every five seconds.”
“That’s you! That’s not me! That’s you!”
She took a step back using only her neck. “Okay,” she said, “calm down.”
“We couldn’t go to dinner without you spending half the meal reading your goddamn phone!”
“Okay, okay, I know,” she said. “We’ve cataloged my failings. I checked my phone too often. Can we move on?”
She looked down at the iPad in her hand. I could see that she was on Twitter, not because I was a Twitter user, but because I sometimes went to Twitter to read boggswader’s pithy commentaries and Owen from Brookline’s statistical revelations.
“I’ll just take a few at random,” she said, and she began to read.
Of all the species of vanity man indulges in, none is so vain as worship
“What do you make of that?” she asked.
“I said that?”
“ ‘You’ said that. ‘You’ also said: ‘Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.’ ”
“Is that really under a hundred and forty characters?”
“Are you starting to see?” she asked me.
“See what?”
“This person on Twitter who’s not you? He sounds an awful lot like you.”
“You think it’s me? You think I’m doing this?”
“I’m just saying,” she said.
“Nobody who says she’s just saying is ever just saying,” I said. “It’s not me, Connie. I’m not even engaging.”
“You’ve been on your phone all morning.”
“It just so happens,” I said, “that we lost to Kansas City last night. It’s important for us all to debrief, okay? Let me see that thing.”
She handed me the iPad. I read:
The world whips us with scorn, we are chased to the edges, we approach the brink of extinction
“Did I write that, too?” I asked. She didn’t respond.
If you must bathe, do so no more than twice weekly, and never by full immersion
“How about that one?” I asked.
“That one…” She trailed off.
“I just hate it when people fully immerse,” I said.
“That one’s less likely,” she conceded.
“It’s not me, Connie,” I said, handing the iPad back to her.
But could I blame her? All those tweets were in my name.
The only Plotz to take me up on my offer for free dental care was Jeff, a distant cousin of Connie’s. Or so I thought when I made him the offer. As it turned out, he was just a neighbor from a long time ago. But he was still close to the Plotzes—or his family was close to the Plotzes. Stuart Plotz and Jeff’s father, Chad, were in business together (they owned a stationery store or manufactured paper or something).
Jeff was a reformed drug addict who now counseled fellow druggies at a state facility. The condition of his mouth was pretty much what you’d expect. It wasn’t the worst boca torcida I’d seen, but it wasn’t a bouquet of roses, either. Treating patients with a history of chemical dependence is no walk in the park. You can’t load them up on nitrous oxide and then send them off with a month’s supply of Percocet and Vicodin. Jeff and I agreed to keep his pain management confined to nonopioid analgesics, which meant he winced his way through an hour’s repair work while his lower body squirmed about like a zombie’s twitching back to life. I kept up a running commentary to calm him down. I told him who I was, I mean who I really was, in case he was interested, which I thought he might be, seeing how I was dating his cousin. (She wasn’t his cousin.) I hadn’t been able to tell any of the Plotzes who I really was, I mean the me who was himself when not around the Plotzes, because they were always busy being themselves, which is to say vociferous, strong willed, and insular. They were extraordinarily polite and welcoming, but in the long run there wasn’t much they cared to know about the new guy. If I had been part of a family like theirs, odds are I would not have had much time for the new guy, either. What could the new guy do for me that was not already being done by a dozen family members always ready to offer me their encouragement, criticism, advice, censure, and love, often in the same breath?
With Jeff in the chair, I could finally assert myself with a captive audience, albeit one bleeding excessively and staring in wide-eyed terror. I told him that I was first and foremost a Red Sox fan. I told him that my love of the Red Sox wasn’t uncomplicated. The single happiest night of my life came in October of 2004 when Mueller forced extra innings with a single to center field and, more spectacularly, David Ortiz homered in the bottom of the twelfth, halting a Yankees’ sweep of the American League Championship and initiating literally the most staggering comeback in sports history, culminating in a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to take the World Series. It was a validation of all those years of suffering, the cause of an unexpected euphoria, and a total cataclysm. Sometime in 2005, I told Jeff, the unlikely fact that the Red Sox had won finally sank in, and a malaise crept over me. I wasn’t prepared for the changes that accompanied the win—for instance, the sudden influx of new fans, none of them forged, as it were, in the fires of the team’s eighty-six-year losing streak. They were poseurs, I thought, carpetbaggers. With this new crop of fans I worried that we would forget the memory of loss across innumerable barren years and think no more of the scrappy self-preservation that was our defining characteristic in the face of humiliation and defeat. I worried we would start taking winning for granted. And I didn’t care for us poaching players and wielding power in the fashion of our enemy. It was difficult, I told Jeff, to find myself ambivalent, even critical, toward a team that had for years received from me nothing but unconditional devotion. We were underdogs, we knew only heartbreak and loss: how could I be expected to shift, practically overnight, to an attitude of entitlement? There was an Edenic weirdness to the whole thing, the same feeling that must have dogged Adam after Eve’s arrival: what should I wish for now? What should I want? I wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series more than anything in the world, I told Jeff, whose gum pockets were as loose as the dentures on a dockside whore, until they crushed the Yankees in truly historic fashion and swept the Cardinals, and then I wanted everything to go back to the way it was, so that I would know who I was, what made me, and what it was I’d always wanted.
Jeff said nothing in reply to this information, which was to be expected, given his circumstances. Now we were almost finished, and it occurred to me that he was going to walk out with one hell of a sore mouth. He would remember, not the free dental care, but the hour of torture he’d endured in my chair, and any report he’d make about me to another Plotz would dwell on my dispensation of pain. What I needed to do, I thought, was make him laugh. That way, he might remember that he and I had had some fun together.
“Do you know the one about the two German Jews who devised a plan to kill Hitler?” I asked.
He looked at me with his olive-gray eyes, the whites they swam in marred by red lightning from his years as a wastoid. I read in the look a sign to continue.
“These two fellows had it on good authority that Hitler was going to be at a particular restaurant in Berlin for a luncheon at noon sharp. So at eleven forty-five, they positioned themselves outside the restaurant and waited with guns hidden inside their pockets. Soon it was noon, but there was no sign of him. Five after twelve and there was no sign of him. Ten after, and then a quarter after, and still no sign of him. So the first guy says to the second guy, ‘He was supposed to be here at noon sharp. Where do you think he could be?’ ‘I don’t know,’ says the second guy, ‘but I sure hope he’s okay.’ ”
I thought I detected a smile from Jeff, but it’s always hard to tell through the instruments. Soon after, a tear fell from the corner of his eye, but it was probably more on account of discomfort. Abby, of course, was masked and nonresponsive, just waiting to hand off the instruments.
Afterward, Connie and I stood at the front desk, watching Jeff leave.
“I hated that guy growing up,” she said. “Fucking crackhead.”
I was taken aback. “You hated Jeff?”
“What an asshole,” she said.
That’s when she set me straight about who he really was (neighbor versus cousin).
“He used to call us all dirty Jews,” she said.
I was further surprised.
“But isn’t he…”
“What?”
“Jewish, too?”
“Who, Jeff?” She laughed.
“I thought his father and your uncle were business partners.”
She looked at me, confused. “They delivered newspapers together when they were kids,” she said.
He wasn’t related to her, his father wasn’t in business with a Plotz, and he’d called her a dirty Jew. I’d just treated that anti-Semite to a thousand dollars in free dental care.
The trouble with these revelations wasn’t the free work or the wasted time. It was the laying bare of the extent of my desperation. I returned to the room where I had worked on Jeff and reflected on my folly. I wanted the Plotzes to come to know me, even if only through word of mouth, as a dedicated Red Sox fan, a man with a sense of humor, and a generous health-care provider for their family. But how could I expect the Plotzes to get to know me when I couldn’t settle down long enough to separate out the Plotzes from the rest, when I went around hysterically offering everyone free dental care, and when, with the exception of Connie, I never really got to know any of them? You see, I never really saw any of the Plotzes as people. I only ever really saw them as a family of Jews.
On the first of August I received an email from an Evan Horvath asking me to fill him in on what I was talking about on Twitter. I could be a little oblique on Twitter, he wrote, which he wasn’t blaming me for. That was the nature of Twitter, and my tweets were always compelling. But now he was looking for more substance.
It was one thing to get messages from the impersonator “Paul C. O’Rourke,” because I’d sent emails to Seir Design from my YazFanOne account. But how did Evan Horvath get my YazFanOne email address? “It’s on your website,” he wrote. I looked around the O’Rourke Dental website but found nothing. An ominous feeling came over me. “What website?” I wrote back. “Seirisrael.com,” he replied.
I had another site! And on the site called seirisrael.com, someone had posted my YazFanOne email address, together with pictures of a dusty, sun-bleached compound called Seir located in the Israeli desert. The captions beneath the photos of the cinder-block buildings said things like “Meeting House,” “Community Hall,” “Old Stone Hut.” “I’m sorry,” I wrote back to Evan. “I don’t know anything about this.” “I just want to know about the doubter’s sacrament,” he replied. “What is the doubter’s sacrament?” I asked. “That’s what I’m asking you,” he wrote. “Is it real?” “I don’t know anything about the doubter’s sacrament,” I told him.
“What is the Feast of the Paradox?” asked one Marcus Bregman.
Marianne Cathcart asked, “Would you call the K-writer and the P-writer ‘prophets,’ or does that imply that the Cantaveticles was written by God? And if it was written by God, how do you reconcile that with doubting Him?”
“I’ve seen a few times now where it says that Pete Mercer is an Ulm,” read another email. “Is that THE Pete Mercer?”
Pete Mercer, according to Forbes.com, was a “publicity-shy hedge-fund manager” and the seventeenth-wealthiest person in America. Within the month, his fund would take the extraordinary step of issuing a statement on his behalf. “Unfortunately Pete Mercer of PM Capital has been the victim of a hoax. He categorically denies the bizarre allegations that he is an ‘Ulm,’ and respectfully requests that the online rumors currently circulating about him cease immediately.”
Connie was upset that I didn’t want to have kids and believed that my decision had to do with her. After all, when we fell in love, I, too, thought that we would get married and have kids. I even got excited about it. So it was easy to understand why she would think that my change of heart had more to do with her than it did my own dawning realization that I could not bear to think of having a child. I kept this to myself at first, hoping it was just some passing fear, some typically male reservation about confronting the end of youth, or some shit. But it didn’t go away and didn’t go away, and when I finally told her I was having second thoughts, she was disbelieving and pissed off and accused me of wasting her time. Men can waste all the time in the world, but not women. The last thing I thought I was doing at the time was wasting her time. I had no idea that my impulse to have a child would reverse course and that dread would set in. Not reservations. Not fear of change or responsibility. Dread. Dread on behalf of the unborn. Dread of its terrible power of love. What if I failed that child? What if I failed Connie? What if she died and I was left to fail the baby alone? What if I died and failed them both through my absence?
It broke my heart. It might seem unlikely, because it was my decision, and I made it consciously and deliberately, but it broke my heart. All I had to do to begin anew and keep Connie in my life forever with what I could forever call my own was start a family with her. Starting a family with Connie, I would become, in a sense, whether certain Plotzes liked it or not, a Plotz. And I wanted to be a Plotz. I wanted to be a Plotz more than I ever wanted to be a Santacroce. Anything to be a Plotz. Except making another O’Rourke.
“Your name is O’Rourke,” “Paul C. O’Rourke’s” next email to me began.
What does that mean to you? Are you a good Irish lad who sings “Danny Boy” at your local, shoulder to shoulder with the other pseudo-Irish who have never left New York? Or do you hate parades and think green beer is a bad idea? These are vital questions, Paul, having to do with your sense of heritage, your religious affiliation, your place in the world. Do you feel something is missing? Does it gnaw at you at night?
If you feel disconnected, if you feel displaced, I’m here to tell you that there’s a reason for that. And it’s not because you’re “difficult,” or “moody,” or whatever else people have called you throughout your life. Your “difficulty” is explained by your displacement. The more intense the displacement, the more difficult you become. This is a pattern I’ve very much noticed. Is any of that accurate? My apologies if it’s not. You might have found a way to be perfectly happy despite all.
Yours,
Paul
A few days later, I began to really think about the email exchange I was having with myself. I wondered what Connie would make of it. “It’s not actually you you’re emailing with, is it?” I imagined her asking. She had her suspicions that the Paul C. O’Rourke on Twitter was actually me; why not, then, the one with whom I appeared to be exchanging emails?
“Okay, Tommy,” I said to the patient I was finishing up with while thinking about the email exchange I was having with myself. Ordinarily, after saying “Okay” to a patient, I almost invariably said, “You can go ahead and spit now” or “You’re free to spit” or some other invitation involving spit, but this time, I said, “Time to take a stool sample.” A stool sample! I honestly have no idea why I said such a thing. Can you imagine a dentist ever needing to take a stool sample? It just sort of appeared, like an aura, and before I even knew what I was saying, out came the seizure. “Time to take a stool sample.” It was the last thing on my mind, a stool sample, but apparently the first thing out of my mouth, for reasons far beyond my comprehension. I was thinking about my email correspondence with myself and what Connie would think if she found out about it, and then boom! I hardly knew how to recover. I looked over at Abby. Above the mask, her brows had bent into those bat wings she wore whenever I said something stupid or incomprehensible. I peered back down at my patient, whose eyes gazed up at me, mute with worry. What could I possibly mean, his eyes seemed to be asking me. What about his mouth could call for a stool sample? What had I seen? And what would I do with it, what would I be looking for in the stool sample? I will tell you, even I was stumped. The only way out of it, I thought, was to start laughing and to pretend that I had always intended to say what I had said about the stool sample because I had such a wicked sense of humor. I had to pretend that basically all day long, all I did was sit there scratching my funny bone, lighting up the people around me in a spirit of pranksterism and joy. So that’s what I did. I started laughing, patted Tommy on the knee, and told him that I was just joking and that he could sit up and spit. Then I acquired a preoccupied air while, still laughing to myself, I turned back to the tray to avoid anyone’s sight, especially Abby’s, because Abby of course knew that I was the last person with the spirit of a prankster. I was lost in my attempt to hide when Connie said, “Dr. O’Rourke?”
I turned.
“When you have a minute,” she said.
I had grown downright wary of Connie standing there with her iPad, preparing to show me God-knows-what new development, but at that moment, I was more relieved than when she had rescued me from telling Bernadette Marder that she was aging uncontrollably. I could stand and put some distance between me and Tommy and his inexplicably conjured stool.
“What is it now?”
She handed me the iPad. Twitter again:
There are levels of suppression that even this far along in history should not surprise anyone when they finally come to light
I looked up from the screen. “If you’re asking what suppression they’re talking about, Connie, I honestly have no idea. A massacre? A conspiracy? It could mean anything.”
“Not that one,” she said, pointing. “This one.”
Imagine a people so wretched that they envy the history of the Jews
“Oh,” I said.
“ ‘Imagine a people so wretched that they envy the history of the Jews’?” she said. She repeated it to indicate how little she understood what it meant and to appeal to me for guidance.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” I said. “That’s not me. I’m not the author.”
“Who are they talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why bring up the Jews?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whose history is worse than ours?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She left. A few minutes later I followed her to the front desk.
“You’re not going to tell your uncle about this, are you?”
“My uncle?”
“Because I’m not sure he’d understand.”
“Which uncle?”
“Stuart,” I said. “Any of them, actually. But Stuart especially. I get the feeling he wouldn’t like it.”
“Like what?”
“That tweet. The tweet you just showed me. About imagining a people whose history is more wretched than the Jews’. I think it would bother him.”
“Why should that bother you? If it’s really not you doing the tweeting, who cares?”
“Because it’s in my name. What’s he going to think when he sees it’s in my name?”
“He’s going to think you wrote it.”
“Exactly.”
“But here’s the thing,” she said. “It seems a little weird that at one time you were obsessed with Jewish history, and next we know, on Twitter, someone with your name is making comparisons between his history and the history of the Jews.”
“First of all, I’m not sure I was ever ‘obsessed’ with Jewish history. And it’s not really ‘next we know’ because it’s been a while since I did any reading on Judaism.”
“Still a strange coincidence, is it not?”
“It is what it is,” I said. “I have no control over it either way.”
“And then for you to come up and ask me not to tell my uncle about it, when telling my uncle never even crossed my mind, that’s a little weird, Paul.”
“You know,” I said, “when we’re at work, it would really be best if we all called me Dr. O’Rourke.”
“Why are you changing the subject?”
“I’m not changing the subject. I’m responding to something you said.”
“Why don’t you want my uncle Stuart to know about that tweet?”
“Because your uncle Stuart already thinks I’m an anti-Semite. Is he more likely to believe that someone is impersonating me, or that I’ve gone off the deep end again?”
“When did you go off the deep end?” she asked.
I went back to finish up with Tommy.
And can you stop tweeting in my name? Connie’s starting to think it might actually be me.
Who’s Connie?
“Connie’s my office manager,” I replied. Then immediately wrote again:
What do you mean, “Who’s Connie?” You know who Connie is. No one called her an “office manager” until you came along and made that website. She’s not an office manager. All she really does is write out appointment cards after scheduling new appointments.
Why did I even send that? Before I knew it, I was writing back a third time.
That’s not true. I sat in my waiting room recently and watched her work. It turns out she does a lot around here. At any moment she could be juggling ten different things. When I saw her the other day, I realized that she deserves a lot of credit for keeping things running smoothly.
I quickly regretted hitting SEND. What was wrong with me? I didn’t owe him an explanation.
Have you told her any of that?
No.
No! “No” was one word too many.
Probably.
Then why don’t you? You’ve noticed something. That’s a huge success, Paul. Daily awareness is our biggest challenge. But it will come to nothing unless you share it with her. It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it’s inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.
Connie came into the room as I was reading. As casually as possible, I returned my me-machine to my pocket.
“Who are you always emailing?” she asked.
“I’m not emailing,” I said. “I’m reading about last night’s game.”
I removed the me-machine from my pocket and pretended to carry on reading about last night’s game. She didn’t move.
“They didn’t play last night,” she said.
I looked up. “Who didn’t?”
“The Red Sox,” she said. “They were off last night.”
“I’m not talking about the Red Sox,” I said. “I’m talking about a different team.”
“What team?”
“What does it matter, what team? The Yankees.”
“The Yankees were rained out last night,” she said. “Fifth inning.”
“That doesn’t mean there was no analysis of those five innings,” I said. I shook my head in dismay at the ignorance of non–sports fans.
“The Yankees weren’t rained out last night,” she said. “They played Chicago and won eighteen to seven.”
I left the room. I came back.
“By the way,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I appreciate everything you do around here. The billing, and breaking down all the UPS boxes. And getting the desk flowers,” I said. “The flowers really make a difference.”
She dimmed her eyes to fine crystal points, trying to discern my motive.
“Since when do you notice flowers?” she asked.
“That’s it,” I wrote.
I’m done talking to you.
My website changed the next day and now included cantonments 30–34 of the Cantaveticles. They picked up where the story had left off, with the fleeing of four hundred Amalekites to Mount Seir.
“And David King of the Israelites pursued the Remnant unto Mount Seir,” my bio page read, “and he slew of them in Seir all the children of the tribes of Amalek, all four hundred still living; not withstanding Agag, the king of the tribes of Amalek in every generation, for he hid himself behind the cypress tree, to witness all that Israel had done to the Amalekites, from Hazazon even to Seir. And Agag wept for Amalek, whose blood wetted the beds of dry stone, and compassed around him like the willows of the brook, and came down like a rain from heaven.”
On it went. Agag weeps until he has no more power to weep, whereupon he takes to cursing the God of the Israelites, whom he’d tried to win over in Hazor by basically subscribing to every tenet and custom his messenger boy managed to smuggle out of the Israelite campsite. “What hath thou wrought, ye God of Israel?” he cries in the thick of a lot of dead bodies and bloody camel remains. You picture something worse than Antietam, an undulant wave of body parts, torsos, heads of bloody hair starting to coagulate in the heat, in the middle of which the sole survivor of an exterminated people falls to his knees to curse a god he really thought might be God. “Did they not bow down before thee, and serve thee, and seek mercy in thy eye?” he asks. “And did they not keep all thy ordinances and statutes, and cease eating swine and coney, and circumcise themselves, and put on clean raiments? And did I not love thy daughter,” he asks, “and learn Hebrew for thee?”
Then, lo and behold, who should appear before him, “moving upon a cloud of blood,” which was a little hard to visualize, but, you know, whatever, semantics—it’s God Himself, the First and Last. “Draw nigh hither,” says God, “and be not afraid.” But there’s little chance of that. Agag cowers upon the charnel cliff, wondering—in a twist on this type of story, in which the prophet always knows from the first gust of heavenly wind on his cheek just who’s talking—if it’s really God he’s seeing or, considering all the shit he’s been through, just a hallucination, the first documented case of PTSD. But there’s no doubting for long, as God seems really confident. “Ye shall know me as the Lord thy God,” He says, “who hath kept a dominion of silence unto this day.” That silence, He explains, was a practical one: He saw no profit in adding to the roster of all the other gods—the God of the Israelites, the God of the Egyptians, the God of the Philistines, etc. etc.—running around Canaan contributing to the bloodshed or, as He puts it, “commanding war among the factions, to vie for the firstfruits of every nation.” Why He doesn’t just wipe those gods clean from memory and usher in peace on earth is a question neither asked nor answered, but it’s made plain that He is, in fact, the one and only God, and He’s there to deliver Agag from the hand of strife. “Come now therefore,” He says, “and with thee shall I establish my covenant. For I shall make of thee a great nation. But thou must lead thy people away from these lords of war, and never make of them an enemy in my name. And if thou remember my covenant, thou shall not be consumed. But if thou makest of me a God, and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed. For man knoweth me not.” There follows a lot of demurral from Agag—who am I to be a prophet, I’m slow of tongue, the people will laugh at me, etc.—but in time he picks himself up and descends the slopes of Mount Seir, the first Ulm.
“So you see,” he wrote. “An Ulm is someone who doubts God.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I replied:
It’s not logical. How can you doubt a God who appears?
You’re not using the correct part of your brain, Paul—the atrophying part, the part that’s hungry.
But that’s just it, I AM using my brain, and will always use my brain, and so this looks just as dumb as any other religious bullshit.
Every religion brushes up against the illogical. The Buddhist discovers Nirvana only by realizing that the self does not exist, but it’s the self that must discover its nonexistence. The Hindu traverses the universe saying neti, neti—“not this, not this”—and when everything is negated, there stands God. The Jew believes that God made him in His image, but man is full of evil. The Christian believes that God was also a man of flesh and blood. The illogic tests faith—without it, there’s just party time.
I prefer party time.
I don’t think you do. Listen, Paul: the blessings of doubt have not excused us from the burdens of faith. We must suffer our contradictions as those who believe in God suffer theirs. With this difference: doubt is the most enlightened approach to God ever articulated to man. Monotheism is by comparison a pagan slaughter. It is the Ulms, Paul, not the Jews, who are the true Chosen People.
A few hours later, I wrote back:
You HAVE to doubt? I mean, it’s actual doubt, literal doubt?
Literal doubt.
The next few weeks went by in a blur. I couldn’t identify, for instance, when exactly the Wikipedia page on the Ulms first appeared. I don’t even remember what it said, except that some of it mimicked what “I” had written in my comment on the New York Times, including there being no Saint Paul of the Ulms to walk the footpaths of the Roman empire. The page was quickly nominated for deletion by trekkieandtwinkies, one of Wikipedia’s self-appointed editors, on the grounds of an insufficient something or other. At the time I believed it was possible to create a Wikipedia page for practically anything, like your newly formed metal band or your pet, not knowing that there were people out there like trekkieandtwinkies who policed all the new pages and did away with the bogus and/or frivolous ones. Every unmerited entry was dispatched into the dustbin of history in a day or two, as that first page on the Ulms was. Nor can I remember specifically when I first heard from Mikel Moore who worked at Starbucks, Joanna Skade of Microsoft, and Zander Chiliokis, all of whom were looking for more information on the Ulms. I remember the proliferation of comments and links, Twitter followers, new Facebook friends. I remember my repeated attempts to wring from my impostor why he was doing this to me, his continual evasions, and my growing rage. I remember a conversation with Kari Gutrich informing her of the others reaching out to me, and I remember the process of attempting to freeze the online accounts in my name, which required me to mail by post photocopies of my government-issued driver’s license along with a notarized affidavit testifying to my true identity—a frustratingly analog experiment. I also remember collecting a sample of what’s called whole saliva from Mr. Tomasino, whose salivary gland was failing; tending to a stoic little boy in camo shorts who split a tooth on a cherry pit; and referring a walk-in to Lenox Hill for an inhaled tooth. But what I remember most is Connie standing in the corridor with her iPad, looking pissed.
“What?”
“Can you come with me, please?”
We went into one of the unoccupied rooms, and she handed me the iPad. In addition to looking pissed, she looked good. She was wearing a turtleneck, not the convent kind Mrs. Convoy favored, but a light, summery one, with the turtleneck part like an inverse turtleneck, big and loose and tilted like a cocked tulip out of which her head peeked, and the fabric wasn’t fabric so much as a billion little stitches of sparkling thread all woven together, silver and pink and red. Her taut bottom was nestled inside a snug pair of old jeans.
“Read that,” she said, pointing.
I read the tweet in question.
“Know anything about that?”
“No,” I said.
“But you do know how offensive it is, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
She walked away. I read the tweet again. Written in my name, it said:
Enough about the 6 million! No more about the 6 million until OUR losses and OUR suffering and OUR history have finally been acknowledged
“I don’t know why you’ve chosen me,” I wrote.
But you have some real balls, fucker. Stop claiming to be Paul O’Rourke. All this religion crap? Hey, guess what! I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT. Stop talking about it in my name. If it’s really important to you, grow some balls and Twitter it up in your own fucking name. ABOVE ALL, STOP TALKING ABOUT THE JEWS IN MY NAME!! Stop talking about the Holocaust and the six million. People get real worked up about that, for good reason. Then they come and ask me to clarify, and I can’t clarify the first fucking thing. Nobody cares about your wretched history, especially when you compare it to the history of the Jews. What do you have against the Jews? Are you just another anti-Semitic Internet troll? You might also consider not giving history lessons over Twitter. Imagine Abraham Lincoln doing the Emancipation Proclamation via Twitter. Are you not a man? Do you not have loftier ambitions for the miracle of speech than the dispatch of a hundred and forty characters from an undisclosed location? A man is full of things you simply cannot tweet. I have dreams of one day overcoming my terrifying inhibitions and singing on the subway. Tweet that, you fuck.
I once confided in Connie my fantasy of playing the banjo on the subway and singing along. I’d never told anyone that. I also told her that if she found me doing it, she would know that I was either (1) a changed man or (2) an entirely different person altogether. But to change so much that, with all my inhibitions and musical insecurities, I’d sit down with the banjo on the F train and start singing “San Antonio Rose”—no, that sort of change would render me unrecognizable to myself, so I would necessarily have to be an entirely different person, meaning I would have to suffer a blow to the head and return from the tunnel of beckoning light with better odds and a bigger heart. For me to sing on the subway, I told her, as much as I wanted to, was impossible, because forever standing between me and my singing on the subway was the essential, reluctant, ineradicable, inhibited core of me. “But don’t you believe in the possibility of change? Of self-improvement?” she asked. And I told her what I believed: that genuine self-improvement, actual fundamental change, was exceedingly rare—was, in fact, more like a myth in line with that of a divine Creator. We are who we are, for better or worse, with the exception of a few uncharacteristic gestures and sudden moments of vulnerability. This I did not tell her: if I could have summoned the courage to sing on the subway, I could have also confessed to Uncle Stuart that I loved him, him and all his brothers and all the Plotzes, and vowed never to fail or disappoint them.
My favorite children’s book is called Doctor De Soto, by William Steig. Dr. De Soto is a mouse dentist who will fix the mouth of any animal who doesn’t eat mice. It says so right on the sign hanging outside his shop: CATS & OTHER DANGEROUS ANIMALS NOT ACCEPTED FOR TREATMENT. It’s a reasonable policy. (It has led me to wonder if I have ever done work on the mouth of a murderer.) One day a fox shows up outside Dr. De Soto’s office, weeping with pain. Hippocratically bound and inherently kind, Dr. De Soto is predisposed to help the fox, and his wife, who works as his assistant, encourages him to take pity on the poor beast. So Dr. De Soto, the brave hero dentist, climbs into the fox’s mouth and finds a rotten bicuspid and unusually bad breath. (This is how you know that Steig wasn’t a dentist: it’s all unusually bad.) The fox is grateful to Dr. De Soto. Yet even knowing that his redeemer is in his mouth at that very moment working to remedy the pain, the fox itches to eat the tasty little morsel. Dr. De Soto puts the fox under to extract the tooth, and the fox, laying bare his irrepressible nature, drunkenly mutters how he best likes his mice prepared. That night, Dr. De Soto has his misgivings about the next day’s follow-up. A fox is a fox is a fox. However, he must go through with it. Once he starts a job, he always finishes it. His father, he says, was the same way. (My father, too: he’d start to redo the bathroom grout or lay new linoleum in the kitchen with any other man’s new-project gusto, and when it was exactly one-third complete he’d leave, drive some distance, sell the car for a low figure, and walk home and hand the money to my mother, weeping.) I won’t spoil the ending for you, but needless to say, a fox is a fox is a fox. The foremost heroism on display in Doctor De Soto isn’t the mouse’s noble determination to help despite the mortal dangers all around but the touching suggestion, briefly entertained, that the fox might have an innate capacity to change.
When I was filling a cavity or doing a root canal or extracting a tooth that was beyond repair, I’d think, This could have been prevented. I’d fall back on my old cynical view of human nature: they don’t brush, they don’t floss, they don’t care. A fox is a fox is a fox. But when they did brush and floss and still lost a tooth, I had to blame something else, and just as predictably, I’d point the finger at cruel nature or an indifferent God. I was always saying bad oral health was entirely in their control, unless I was saying that it was entirely out of their control. Then one day I had a patient come in, lived around the corner in one of the few remaining low-income housing complexes on the Upper East Side, worked construction, his hands the hands of a blind strangler, no effort beforehand to remove the chewing tobacco encrevassed between his teeth, and while I was at work on a little local train wreck in the upper-left quadrant, I let my mind wander. This guy probably had poor genes, ignorant parents, a mean childhood. He was never going to take care of his teeth. He never stood a chance of taking care of them. He was going to neglect them until they fell out or he died. Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings—God knows I’d tried—and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant. The man in the chair was lord over his best impulses no more than he was king of his worst instincts. Change or no change, his fate was out of his hands. The only question that ever remained was: are you a fox, or something better?
“Dear Paul,” he wrote.
I’m sorry you’re so upset. There’s so much you have yet to grasp. We have nothing against the Jews. Anti-Semitic? No. When in our history would we have had the freedom to pursue hate of any kind? No one in history is more qualified to identify with the Jews and their considerable tragedies than the Ulms. We aren’t the Jew’s enemy, Paul. We are the Jew’s Jew.
The Jew’s Jew? What is that?
Do you know of the escépticos driven into hiding by Alfonso the Wise? Has the Lodz Massacre been brought to your attention? Have the Ulm! Ulm! Riots of 1861 been discussed in your history classes? Has the execution, by British forces, of all Ulms living in Israel, to inaugurate the Jewish state in accordance with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, been so much as a faint shadow in your most distant dream? Do you know how close we are and ever have been to extinction? Say what you will about the tragedies of the Jews. At least they have been documented.
The next morning, I was working on a patient while thinking about a headline in one of the celebrity magazines. It was actually more like a subheadline, which read, in response to Rylie’s announcement that she was pregnant with twins, “Rylie has always wanted to have two babies at once.” They had interviewed Rylie (“Exclusive!”), who confessed that for as long as she could remember, she had always wanted to have two babies at once. Not just one, and not two at different times, but two at once, boom boom. Even when she was three, when she was seven, and then when she was ten, Rylie had wanted to have two babies at one time. It was a childhood dream that kept persisting even as she turned sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, and now, believe it or not, she was pregnant with twins. At last Rylie’s dream was coming true, having two babies at once at last. And how better to share that dream come true with the world than on the cover of a celebrity magazine, under the larger headline “Twins!”
I was thinking about Rylie and her twins and the subheadline announcing the fulfillment of her lifelong dream when Connie appeared in the doorway. I pretended not to see her.
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
I pretended not to hear her.
“Dr. O’Rourke, when you get a minute,” she said.
“Okay, Mr. Shearcliff,” I said, after dithering in Mr. Shearcliff’s mouth a little longer and finding nothing to detain me. “You can sit up and spit now.”
Reluctantly I walked over to Connie. She wanted to discuss my latest tweet.
My dream is to overcome my terrifying inhibitions one day, and sing on the subway with my banjo
“You’ve said that to me,” she said. “You’ve used those very words.”
I didn’t know where to begin.
“This is maddening!” I said. “That’s not me!”
“Who else could it be?”
“I swear to God, Connie.”
“This is you, Paul.”
“No, it’s not, I swear to God.”
“Is this some weird game you’re playing to get me back?”
“Get you back? I broke up with you.”
She cocked her head.
“The first time I did.”
“Why are you writing these things?”
“I’m not! Look, I can prove it.”
I dug out my me-machine and showed her the email exchanges between me and my double. I made sure she saw the part where I confessed to him my desire to get on the subway and sing.
“How do I know this isn’t you?”
“Emailing with myself?”
“It’s not hard to create an email account.”
“That’s my point! He created one in my name and used it to write me.”
“You’re missing the point,” I said. “You think I’m emailing with myself. I’m not emailing with myself.”
“What’s this one?” she asked.
She held the phone up so I could read.
“Is that why you thanked me for the desk flowers?” she said. “Because some stranger pretending to be you told you to in an email? Paul,” she said, “do you need help?”
I took the phone out of her hand.
“It’s not me, Connie, honest to God.”
She walked away. Then she came back.
“If that’s the case,” she said, “if it’s really not you saying all this crap, then what’s happened to your outrage? You were out of your mind when you thought they had made you into a Christian. Now you’re this other thing, this weird other thing, and somehow that’s okay? You’re emailing back and forth with the guy? You’re letting him tweet in your name? You have a Facebook page, for God’s sake! Where’s the old you, Paul? I wouldn’t question it if I could locate the old Paul somewhere.”
“He’s right here,” I said. “He’s still outraged.”
“If your fight against the modern world was going to end, and you were always going to tweet and blog and all the rest of it, why not tell everyone who you really are—a great dentist, and a true Red Sox fan—and not this… this…?”
She threw up her hands and walked away.
Mrs. Convoy was in room 2 prepping an impacted molar while in room 3 a chronic bruxer with a hypertrophied jaw was waiting for me to treat the eroding effects of his grinding and clenching. I couldn’t find an iPad. You buy the newest technology for the office, and then you spend the rest of your time trying to locate it. Or figure out how it works. Finding it or figuring it out becomes more important than tending to patients. It becomes a personal imperative, finding and using the thing you’ve spent thousands of dollars on or figuring out how to work the thing that’s so invaluable to your practice. Who gives a shit about the patient? It’s like the patient just disappears. You’re not even there yourself, really. You’re in this weird hermetic world where it’s just you and the machine, and the question is, who’s gonna win?
I entered room 5 and came upon another patient. He was obviously in a lot of pain, telling from the moaning. Looking high and low for a spare iPad, I heard him take a deep breath and then go, “Ah-rum… ah-rum.” I turned slowly, and sure enough, it was him. “You!” I cried.
I reached down, grabbed Al Frushtick by the collar, and lifted him into the air.
“Dr. O’Rourke!” he hollered. “God help me, I’m in so much pain!”
I refused to treat him until he explained everything.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Israel?”
“It didn’t work out! I came back. And now I’m in big trouble! You’re the only dentist I trust. You have to help!”
“I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Why did you create a website in my name?”
“Are you kidding me? I couldn’t create a website in my own name! This is just some big misunderstanding!”
“My lawyer looked into it, pal. You’re listed as the registrant. And before you left, you called yourself an Ulm and said I was one, too. So don’t act dumb.”
“Treat me first,” he cried, “oh, please!”
I still had his collar balled in my hand and his shoulders raised well off the chair. I grabbed a pair of forceps with my spare hand and started probing his nostrils.
“Okay,” he muttered weepily. “Okay, okay.”
I set him down.
He smoothed out his rumpled shirt and winced again at the aching tooth.
“I’m sure they have your family records,” he said, “and I’m sure they’re as thorough as anyone’s.”
“My family records?”
“Everything you’ve wanted to know,” he said, “whether you’ve known it or not: who you are, where you come from, to whom you belong. To whom you belong, Doctor.” Forgetting the tooth, he smiled at me, then quickly resumed wincing. “But that’s not how they’re going about things now. By now they have enough reclaimants. They’re interested in finding out who among the reclaimed will elect the old way of life on the strength of the message alone.”
“What is a reclaimant?”
“Someone reclaimed from the diluted bloodlines and forced conversions of the diaspora. Haven’t they been in touch with you?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s irresponsible,” he said and, with one swipe to the left and one swipe to the right, expressed dismay in the crisping up of his wilting mustache hairs. “I think that’s irresponsible. But they have their reasons. Listen,” he said. “If they won’t tell you, I will. You belong to a lost heritage. A counterhistory. Your genes prove it: that’s where our history resides. It’s inescapable, it extends back hundreds of years. I don’t have your specific details, but I’m sure Arthur does.”
“Who’s Arthur?”
“Grant Arthur. He’s the one who found you. You belong,” he said. “You’re as old as the Egyptians and even older than the Jews.”
“I should knock your teeth out for the things you people are saying about the Jews!”
“Wait!” he cried, gripping the arms of the chair and throwing his body back, away from my fists. “What are we saying about the Jews? Nothing bad! We feel a kinship with the Jews. We use the Jews as a point of reference, that’s all. Do you think we should use the Native Americans? I find them more apropos, personally. The accusation of heathenry, the mass slaughters, the subsequent history of alcoholism and suicide. The squalor of a once-great nation. But they lack a global reach. The history of the Jews is a helpful comparison, that’s all. Suffering shouldn’t be a competition.”
“It sounds like a competition when you read about it on Twitter,” I said.
“On Twitter,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Hey, this outreach is really happening.” He ruminated a moment, scratching, with nervous automation, the pale groove that ran between the two halves of his mustache from nose to lip. “There was a lot of debate about the dangers of calling attention to ourselves. But Twitter… that’s significant. Well,” he said. “Anyway. Does that help clarify things?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Why are you here?”
He shot me a look full of incomprehension. “Why am I here? Why am I here?! Doctor, turn on that light and look inside this poor mouth!”
“You said you were leaving for Israel. What happened?”
He shook his head and sighed and reached up for his mustache again, stroking it this time with deliberate melancholy.
“You’re a sadist, Doctor. A real sadist. I come in here, a Scud missile bearing down on my nerve, and you demand that I share the story of my greatest spiritual failure. Is this what you call compassion?”
I leaned back against the sink, crossed my arms, and swung one ankle over the other.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “In the end, I couldn’t do it. It’s been too long. I was raised a Christian. All those years of prayer. I have the God gene, I guess, for good or ill.”
“You mean you couldn’t doubt?”
“I had every reason to.” He sat up and tucked his feet under his legs in some kind of Eastern position. “Have you heard of Cliff Lee, the geneticist? Dr. Clifford Lee, of Tulane University?”
Frushtick explained that Dr. Clifford Lee had held the Howard Rose Professorship at the Hayward Genetics Center of Tulane University in New Orleans for years until Grant Arthur revealed to him that he was an Ulm. A year later, Lee relocated his family to Israel to work on isolating the genetic particulars of the Ulms. His work, according to Frushtick, who suddenly spoke with all the technical command of a scientist, centered around modal haplotypes, microsatellites, and unique event polymorphisms: difficult genetic data necessary to prove Ulm-specific ancestry.
“He devised a test that’s sixty to seventy-five percent accurate,” he said. “Eighty percent if you came north out of the Sinai into the Rhine Valley prior to the Ashkenazi migration. There was some intermingling between the two groups, obviously, but given their bitter history, not enough to affect the testing.”
“Testing of what?”
“Ulmish descent. There are no guarantees, just ballpark figures—he’s very clear about that. For me personally, there was a seventy percent chance. But whatever Lee’s test lacks, Arthur supplements with a case file.”
“What does that do?”
“Haven’t you been listening, Doctor? It proves that you’re an Ulm.”
Grant Arthur’s research was exhaustive. Frushtick still recalled the amazement that overtook him as Arthur laid out his file for the first time. The names of ancestors, place and date of births and deaths, eternal branchings of an ancient family tree. Arthur went out into the world, to all its repositories of records, contracts, military conscriptions, cadastres, in the name of finding the lost. He wasn’t just reclaiming souls; he was restoring an order too grievously out of whack to ever be put right in his lifetime. It gave him a certain zeal.
“There were wills, land records, census records,” Frushtick said. “He had documents from government registries, hospitals, foreign courts. Licenses in foreign languages—many of which he speaks fluently. Port records, notary records, ship logs. I picture him on trains shunting across the tundra, landing in propjets in unstable countries, carrying his overstuffed valise with the portable scanner, sleepless again, hair rumpled, unhappy, but on his way to a library and some new name. It will give him just enough of what he needs to reaffirm his purpose, and he’ll go on like that, on and on, until he takes his last breath between two obscure points on the map. Make no mistake,” he said, “Grant Arthur is one of the great men. A mere mortal will never know how he does it. He carried my lineage back to the 1620s. Can you imagine? Before him, I thought I was half German and… God knows what else.”
I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores. But I was impressed by 1620.
“He started with my mother’s maiden name, Legrace. From Legrace he moved back to DeWitt, and from DeWitt to Strickland, to Short, to Kramm, to Kramer. He went back to Bohr, to Moorhaus. Names I never knew existed, the names of my family, my people… I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have someone lay out for you how you extend back through time like that. I’m haunted to think that I could have died without knowing the satisfaction of it. I would have remained lost, skating over the surface of life, knowing nothing of any importance.”
“How did Grant Arthur know that he was a reclaimant?”
“From his father. But not until that man was on his deathbed, because he was ashamed. He gave his son the name of a man in Quebec, where there was a small community. The Quebecois told him about the escépticos, so he went to Spain. There was a man in Castile–La Mancha who had just lost his parents and who thought he was burying not only the last of his family but the final two speakers of a language they spoke only at home. Grant Arthur tracked the man down in Albacete, and when he greeted him in his mother tongue, the man wept.”
“What is an escéptico?”
“He will tell you about them when he shows you your family names. I’m sure he has them. All of them, going back to… who knows how far. He will lay them out for you, generation by generation, until you see how you connect, how you belong.”
“How did he know to find me? How does he know to find anyone?”
“His research. It leads naturally from one to the next. We are all connected, Doctor. He just has to untie the knots. You’ll see how your ancestors’ names were changed. How they became anglicized, how they adapted to different homelands, how they were shed of their essential identities—you will see. But you will have to do something for him first.”
“What?”
“What message?”
“That God has instructed His people to doubt. If a new reclaimant can accept that on faith, he doesn’t need to secure the ancestral records of each and every one of us. Do you know how much work goes into that? The travel? The painstaking research? It’s killing him. He’s going blind. And that puts more pressure on Lee to perfect the genetic test. For Lee and Arthur both,” he said, “it would be a relief if the message were enough.”
There was a commotion at the door. I opened it to find Connie eavesdropping. She righted herself.
“Yes?”
“We’ve been wondering where you’ve been.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and Abby and Betsy,” she said. “Who are you talking to in there?”
“Nobody,” I said. “A patient. Will you go back to work, please?”
She departed reluctantly. I looked back in at Al Frushtick. He was playing on his mustache like it was some bluesy harp. I’d had my identity stolen by that nut, and he was in there feeling sorry for himself for some vague spiritual defeat. I closed the door on him. The least I could do was make him and his abscess wait a little longer.
Connie turned back. “Who’s Grant Arthur?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d stop eavesdropping. And, hey,” I said, “find me an iPad, will you?”
I took care of my impacted molar and my chronic bruxer, believing I was punishing Al Frushtick. But I wasn’t punishing him alone. As I worked, questions occurred to me, and more questions, things I wanted clarified, possibilities. I hurried through the bruxer’s treatment with a growing sense of urgency. I was being foolish and proud. Something was near at hand. I had to act. I rushed back to room 5, but the chair was empty. The fox was gone.
He left a note. “I would have stayed,” he wrote. “But I don’t deserve to have my tooth fixed.”