Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“That’s not the point.”

“You now have a wonderful little website for your practice,” she said. “I hardly think that constitutes identity theft.”

“Then you and I will never understand each other, Betsy.”

She walked away. I wrote:

This is sick, what you’re doing.

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie again. “Yes?”

“Mr. Perkins refuses to leave. He says the color’s off.”

“The color isn’t off.”

“He says it is.”

“Christ,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. The color wasn’t off.

You created a website for me that I did not ask for. That needs to be remedied. Quickly. Before this gets out of hand. Are things already out of hand? Is it possible to stop “my” website from existing? What is a website and how does it get online and how do you take it down? I’m sure those are stupid questions that will make you laugh at me for how little I understand of the modern world, but so be it. Is there somewhere I can go to get at the physical thing that reflects the code that creates the design that throws up the images you’ve dreamed up for my website and remove that thing and destroy it? Would that mean it was off the Internet for good, or does it somehow live on? I have a vague notion that it lives on. Is that what people call “cached”? Is “my” website “cached” for all eternity? A website I did not ask for?

Usually I’m sitting there doing something to a patient and I’m thinking something like Ross and what’s her name, what’s her name, it’s Ross and… what’s her name, it’s, starts with a, what’s it start with, shit, can’t, was it, uh… oh, wait, right, of course, duh, how stupid can you get, it was Ross and Rachel! Ross and Rachel, everyone remembers that. It’s catchy, Ross and Rachel. And Ross’s sister’s name was… the girl who’s friends with Rachel… well, they’re all friends, obviously, but specifically the one who was also Rachel’s roommate, unless that was the other girl, the dumb blond, Lisa Kudrow, she hasn’t had much luck careerwise since that show ended, actually none of them have, although they’re bajillionaires, so you might ask what does it matter. But the truth is, once you’re on a popular TV show, you’d better just enjoy yourself, because you’re never going to act again. You are that role. Depressing, when you think about it, because though each of them will live a life of luxury, it will be one increasingly devoid of purpose. I can’t imagine a life where I can’t do what I was put on earth to do, tending to patients, like this one here whose tooth broke off in the night during a dream… name started with a… I don’t know what it started with, I could run down the alphabet, see if that jogs my memory, that works sometimes, not always, but, why not, what else do I have going on… A, no, B, no, C, no, but C … why does C … C definitely… someone on that show’s name started with a… ah, Chandler! And Monica was the name of the friend Chandler was dating. Monica was Rachel’s friend… well, they were all friends, obviously. It was Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler, and the other two… I can’t believe I can’t remember the other two, although the one, the Italian guy, his name’s right here, I mean right here, right on the tip of my… was it Joey? I think it was Joey. I wonder if Abby knows. She probably does. Just look at her. Of course she knows. But think she would tell me? If I asked her, she’d be like, Huh, what, me? I really think it was Joey. But then what was the name of the—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“When you have a minute,” she said.

“Connie, what was the name of that third girl on Friends ? The dumb blond one? The actress hasn’t had much luck since the show ended?”

“Phoebe?”

“Phoebe! Damn! That’s it! Phoebe! Okay, Mrs. Deiderhofer,” I said to my patient, “you’re free to spit.” Mrs. Deiderhofer spent about ten minutes spitting. I walked over to Connie.

“You got a reply,” she said.

She handed me the iPad.

How well do you know yourself?

“That’s it?” I said. “All those emails, and all he writes back is how well do I know myself? That’s totally unacceptable.”

“There’s also…”

“What?”

“Your bio’s changed.”

“Changed how?”

They had taken the site down or offline or whatever, made changes to it, and then put it back up again. Everything was the same, with one exception. A new weird quote had been added to the old weird quote.

And Safek gathered us anew, and we sojourned with him in the land of Israel. And we had no city to give us name; neither had we king to appoint us captains, to make of us instruments of war; neither had we laws to follow, save one. Behold, make thine heart hallowed by doubt; for God, if God, only God may know. And we followed Safek, and were not consumed.

“More religion!” I cried. “Betsy! Who’s Safek?”

“Who’s who?” she answered from the other side of the wall. You can always hear everything everyone is doing in a dental office because for reasons that even your most seasoned dentist can’t explain, the walls always terminate, as in cubicles and bathroom stalls, a foot below the ceiling.

“Safek!” I said.

What good was all her reading and highlighting if she couldn’t tell me who the characters were?

“There’s no one by that name in the New Testament,” she cried out.

“I’ve never heard of anyone named Safek,” said Connie. “But,” she said, “I do know the word.”

“The word?”

“ Safek is a Hebrew word.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Doubt,” she said.

“Doubt?”

“It’s the Hebrew word for ‘doubt.’ ”

“How well do I know myself?” I wrote to Seir Design.

Go fuck yourself. That’s how well I know myself.

My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if they heard a playmate had pulled baby’s hair. I looked at Mom, late thirties, Volvo-and-breast-milk type, purees her own veggies, etc. I looked at Dad, trimly bearded in a tech button-down, knows all the microbrews. I wasn’t going to turn them away just because they overburden the medical system with their hair-trigger fears. If it weren’t for hair-trigger fears, my monthly billings would be cut in half. (On the other hand, if it weren’t for dental dread, I could double my salary.) If these fretters felt the need to bring their kid in because of a loose baby tooth, I’d happily humor them. Which is what I thought I was doing when I focused the overhead inside the girl’s mouth. But then I found seven cavities. Five years old and she had seven cavities. The loose tooth wasn’t falling out because it was time. It was straight up rotted out. I told them I had no choice but to pull it. Mom started crying, Dad looked ashamed. They were giving the kid a lollipop every night to help her go to sleep. “It was so hard to hear her cry,” said Mom. “It really worked to calm her down,” said Dad. They wouldn’t let the kid drink out of the tap, they wouldn’t feed her anything without an organic label on it, they wouldn’t even consider a sugar-free lollipop because anything sugar-free was full of artificial sweetener and that shit caused cancer, but they let her lie in bed ten hours a night rotting her mouth out so that she’d stop crying and fall asleep. People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.