Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Connie came to work at O’Rourke Dental as a temp. On the first day, I could feel my self going. At the end of the second day, I suggested she leave the temp agency and come to work for me full-time. She would be paid a great salary, receive full health benefits, and enjoy the best dental care at no cost. I proposed paying her much more than your average receptionist would ordinarily be paid. Yes, I was fading fast. But something told me to call myself back, to remember my old self-respecting self, to move slowly this time and with great caution into the orbit of this beautiful temp, so that I would not repeat the embarrassing mistakes of the past. Awareness: that was new. And when Connie accepted my offer and came to work for O’Rourke Dental, I did my best to keep busy, because no small part of my real self was the dentist who tended to patients all day every day, longer on Thursdays, and who had a practice to grow and a staff to oversee and about sixty thousand in monthly billings to protect. It would not be wise, I thought, as I was falling in love with Connie, to compromise any of that with my predictable love shits. And so, though as cunt gripped as ever, I tried a different tack. I stayed silent. I feigned indifference. I acted cool, which is not to say cool cool, but contained, arriving in the morning with an aura of mystery and departing for the day with heartsick dignity. I pivoted cannily to my best self, implementing pizza Fridays, treating Mrs. Convoy with respect, and suppressing my complaints and dissatisfactions as if I were a Christian monk with endless recourse to prayer. I mean, it was a show , man. Love makes you noble. So what if it’s self-directed? So what if, eventually, as love fades, we revert, like the lottery winner and limb loser alike, back to our base selves?

I did not let on about my love for Connie for six agonizing months, until drinks on O’Rourke Dental put us alone at a dive bar one night, and lubricious confessions poured from us both, and after that we were a couple.

I must have looked so with it to her. Dentist. Professional. Owner of real estate. I didn’t let on that my self was gone now that I was with her, and she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t notice until my self reasserted itself. And that’s when things went all to hell.

After watching Connie lotion her hands, I went to work. An old woman with Parkinson’s came in that morning, assisted by her late-middle-aged son who supported her on his arm and eased her down into the chair. Her tremors were unrelenting. She had a hard time holding her mouth open. I used a prop, which made it impossible for her to swallow. Abby kept the evacuation going even as the old woman continued to try to swallow with stubborn regularity, an instinct of pale pink muscle at the back of her throat. She was like a condemned person, my Parkinson’s patient, facing death after a long stay in an unquiet prison. She was in that morning because she had lost a tooth to a piece of toast. Her son had been unable to find the tooth. He apologized profusely, as though he had failed his mother in some way. People bring in their broken teeth all the time as if they are still-warm fingers and toes, believing I might do some kind of quick graft. If you ever lose a tooth, just toss it. Or put it under your pillow. There’s nothing I can do with it. I explained that to him, which put his mind at ease. Then I had a good look inside his mother’s mouth — a mouth that had a year or two left on earth, straining in the agony of its tremors and its thwarted swallows — and what I found was a rare but immediately identifiable condition likely brought about by chemotherapy: osteonecrosis of the jaw. My condemned patient could now add jawbone death to the list alongside whatever cancer she’d had and the Parkinson’s she would die with. Her jawbone was so soft and rotted that her morning piece of toast had managed to push the lost tooth past her gum and into the bone, where it was presently lodged. I took a pair of tweezers and removed it without causing her any pain at all. “Here’s that tooth,” I said.

Connie appeared in the doorway with an iPad.

“Yes?”

“When you get a moment,” she said.

We had iPads by that point. The year before, we’d bought new desktops. And the year before that, the folks from Dentech came out and upgraded our entire system, so that we could do everything electronically better than we could do it electronically before. In almost every respect, purchasing something for the improvement of the office was a rational choice based on a cost-benefit analysis, but when new technology made itself known, it was a mortal terror not to seize it at the first opportunity.

“I just wanted to ask you,” she said as I stepped out into the hallway, “have you read your bio on here?”

“On what?”

“On this website of ours.”

I seized the iPad. “This is maddening,” I said. “They had all weekend to take this thing down. They haven’t even answered my email.”

“Did you read your bio?”

Again I wondered, Who could have done this? Had I been late with a patient? Curt with a temp? An idea struck me. “You know who this might be?”

“Who?”

“Anonymous.”

“Who’s Anonymous?”

I reminded her of the scumbag who had failed to pay for his bridgework and then left nasty reviews of me on Google.

“Wasn’t that, like, two years ago?” she said. “Would he really still be—”

“It’s unfair!” I said. “It really doesn’t take a lot to have a cave dweller.”

“Read your bio,” she said.

Dr. O’Rourke has been practicing dentistry for over ten years. A native of Maine, he is committed to the highest standard of treatment for his patients. His friendly, personable nature combined with his extensive background guarantees you a pleasant, relaxing, and stress-free visit.

I looked up at her. “Whoever did this has an intimate knowledge of me and this office,” I said.

“Have you gotten to the weird part?” she asked.

The bio ended with the weird part.

Come now therefore, and with thee shall I establish my covenant. For I shall make of thee a great nation. But thou must lead thy people away from these lords of war, and never make of them an enemy in my name. And if thou remember my covenant, thou shall not be consumed. But if thou makest of me a God, and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed. For man knoweth me not.

“What the hell is this?” I said, searching her face. “Something from the Bible?”

“Sounds like it.”

“What’s this doing in my bio?”

She shrugged.

“Is there anything like this on your bio page?”

She shook her head.

“Betsy’s? Abby’s?”

“Only yours,” she said.

“I’m not a Christian,” I said. “I don’t want a quote from the Bible on my website. Who did this?”

She relieved me of the iPad. “Maybe you should talk to Betsy,” she said.

Mrs. Convoy came to and from work with a floppy-eared Ignatius — highlighted, of course — with her name, Elizabeth Anne Convoy, inlaid in faux-gold lettering on the green pleather cover. It had been in her possession nearly half a century, since the day of her First Communion. There was nothing that so perfectly embodied my ambivalence toward Mrs. Convoy. First, because she was an expert in goddamned everything, and her authority and its imperious tone were bestowed upon her by that archetype of all knowingness, the Bible. But later, in a casual moment, when she was out of sight, I’d catch a glimpse of that totem resting faithfully inside her open purse, and Mrs. Convoy, head ballbreaker, would reincarnate into Elizabeth Anne Convoy, a perfectly insignificant, irredeemably homely creature who, I could easily imagine, thought so little of herself that to find her name engraved on God’s book would move her to tears. Conjuring that awkward, insecure girl, I wanted to tell her that God loved her. I did not want Betsy Convoy, or anyone else for that matter, believing that down deep they were ugly, worthless, unwanted, inconsequential, and unlovable. If God served no other purpose, I thought, this alone justified Him. Thank God for God! I thought. What work He did, what love He extended, when mortal beings failed. The travails of lonely people, of the disfigured and the handicapped, need not seize the heart of the sympathetic observer with suicidal pity, because God loved them. Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.