Eight

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

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

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

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

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

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

“Your uncle?”

“Stuart,” she said.

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

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

“Found out what?”

“I tried to explain.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What brings you in?”

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

“Of course!”

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

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

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

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

“What offer is that?” he asked.

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

“No,” he said.

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

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

“She did.”

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

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

“Do you know who is?”

“Specifically?”

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

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

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

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

“Me?”

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

“I am an avowed atheist,” I said.

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

“Sort of,” I said. “Not really.”

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

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

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

“Doubt?”

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

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

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

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

“If you say it isn’t, I believe you.”

“It isn’t.”

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

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

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

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

I gave the phone back.

“Stuart, I find those remarks abhorrent.”

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

“No, I find them abhorrent.”

“Why?”

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

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

“I don’t know who,” I said.

“Do you believe you descend from these people?”

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

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

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

“I do,” I said in a very low voice.

“When you asked about Ezra?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Please,” he said. “Honesty is best.”

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

“A mitzvah,” he said.

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

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

His fingers remained in the air.

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

“Who?”

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

“I’ve heard it a few times.”

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

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

“How do you know that?” I asked.

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

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

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

“I know who you are now,” I wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” she said. “More like who?”

“Harper,” I said.

“Who’s Harper?”

“Of Harper and Bryn.”

“Who’s Bryn?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Harper’s a family man?”

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

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

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

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

“Of course not.”

“Because it sort of sounds like you do.”

“Can I make my point, please?”

“Make your point.”

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

“Wait, what?”

“If I had been more willing—”

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

I walked away. Then I came back.

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

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

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

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

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

“Who gave him the name Grant Arthur?”

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

I was quiet.

“Win-loss record?”

I was quiet.

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

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

“How do you know this?”

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

I walked away. Then I came back.

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

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

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

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

“Sounds like he was really in love.”

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

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

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

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

“Have you?”

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

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

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

“A fire temple?”

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

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

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

“Did you do it?” I asked.

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

“You took your revenge out anonymously?”

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

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

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

“Born and raised,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“All what?”

“Religions.”

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

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

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

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

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

He gestured to the bartender, who poured him another.

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

“A deprogramming?”

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

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

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

“Are you making this up?” I asked.

“How could I make this up?”

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

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

He gestured again.

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

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

“I really do,” I said.

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

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

“What had been ten years?”

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

“How did you know where she lived?”

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

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

“The man?” he said.

“The man who hit you,” she said.

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

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

“How do you remember it?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

He looked off.

“I must sound insane to you.”

“Strange things happen,” I said.

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

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

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

“You haven’t read it?”

“Read what?”

“Cantonment 240.”

“No.”

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

“What happens in cantonment 240?”

He drank his drink and called for another.

“I can’t do it justice,” he said.

“Give me the gist.”

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

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

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

He gestured for the bartender.

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

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

“Who are they?” he asked.

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

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

“Thanks,” I said.

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

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

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

“That’s what I try to do.”

“You try,” he said, “but you fail.”

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

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