To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (20 page)

“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:

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

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

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.