Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

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

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

“You know the Waldensians?”

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

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

“One more time, with that name?”

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

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

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

“And who are they?”

“Other endangered peoples.”

“Their names again?”

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

“And why have they been persecuted?”

“The Chukchi?”

“No, the Ulms.”

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

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

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

“Hiding in plain sight,” I said.

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

“No, not really.”

“Hiding in plain sight?”

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

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

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

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

“That’s the suggestion.”

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

I nodded. He dropped his pen and sat back.

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

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

He puckered his lips and massaged his thyroid in contemplation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you know about the Plotzes?

You told me about them.

I never told you I fell in love with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you in any pain?”

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

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

“I mean in your mouth,” I said.

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

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

“No, not really.”

“Here?”

“No.”

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

“Nothing that hasn’t been prescribed.”

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

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

“You have one now,” I said.

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

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“Is this something I can ignore?”

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

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

“Mobility?”

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

“My teeth?”

“I think we can probably save them—”

“Probably?”

“But I wouldn’t recommend waiting.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

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

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

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

“What odors?”

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

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

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

“Who are we talking about?” I asked.

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

“Pete Mercer,” he said.

“The billionaire?”

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

He handed me an envelope. The short note read:

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

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

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

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

Your help restoring it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My tweets! He thought those were coming from me!

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

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

“But your office just issued a denial.”

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

“I value my privacy, too.”

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

“Thanks,” I said.

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

I wondered who this “they” was.

“No,” I said. “I like meat too much.”

“Me, too,” he said.

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

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

“No busier than you must be,” I said.

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

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

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

“Oral fixation,” I said.

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

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

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

“The pay may not have suited you.”

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

“You should try convincing a patient to floss.”

“Not easy, I bet.”

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

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

“You must have large gum pockets.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do journalists look like?” I asked.

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

“And Grant Arthur?”

“Martyred.”

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

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

“What happened then?”

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

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

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

“Nothing?”

“Not in the way of my genealogy.”

“Have you done the genetic test?”

I shook my head.

“Then how do you know?”

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

“They made you a website without your permission?”

I nodded.

“And you’re not writing those tweets?”

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

“I’m afraid not.”

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

“Maybe,” I said.

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

“Are you leaving?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many are there? One hundred? Two hundred?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sometimes, yes.”

I was shocked.

“Sometimes?”

“Most of the time.”

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

“Have you always been a believer?”

“Not always.”

“When weren’t you one?”

“Around the time we got together.”

“You were a believer when we first met?”

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

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

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

“You lied to me?”

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

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

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

She didn’t answer.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And what reasons are those?”

“You tell me,” she said.

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

“Whatever’s going on with you—”

“What’s going on with me?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s do this,” I said.

She swiveled abruptly.

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

I withdrew from the window and went back to work.

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

It’s important to doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But there’s HIPAA compliancy!”

“And claims submissions!”

“And the billing!”

“And email!”

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

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

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

“The what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shut the door.

“What are you here for?”

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

“Who are you?” I asked.

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

“To whom?” I asked. “For what?”

“For the general effort.”

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

“Let’s start here,” she said.

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

She handed me my birth certificate.

“Okay?” she said to me.

“What are you asking?”

“Does that document look familiar to you?”

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

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

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

“Are those your parents?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

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

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

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

She handed me the next document.

“What is your name?”

“Clara,” she said.

“Clara.”

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

She handed me his death certificate attesting to that claim.

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

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

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

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

She handed me two more documents.

“Is this your job?” I asked her.

“No.”

“What is your job?”

“I don’t have a job. I go to school.”

“What do you study?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m from Poland?” I said.

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

“How much time did this take you?”

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

“We could have been kept out?”

“If it had come to light, yes.”

“If what had come to light?”

“What you were before you became Boruch.”

“What were we before Boruch?”

“I don’t have that document.”

“Who does?”

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

“Waiting for me where?”

“Seir.”

“Israel?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I have to go to it?”

“He’d like to see a show of faith.”

“Who would?”

“We all would.”

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

“Yes.”

She began to strap the buckles on her leather bag.

“Are you leaving?”

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

“Can I see you again?”

“What for?”

“It’s just… it’s so much to take in.”

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

“I would prefer to contact you.”

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

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