To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (22 page)

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.”

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.