Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

One of my patients that day was a man with a case of Bell’s palsy. He had woken up in the night with a collapsing face on account of that inexplicable neurological condition that usually strikes the obese and the old. My patient was a little overweight but still a young man, and yet I got the impression that he was not taking good care of himself. He looked like your typical overworked substance-binging New Yorker whose nerves, by way of an especially public form of revenge, had poxed him with a temporary facial deformity. It had happened a few days ago and would take its own sweet time in resolving itself. In the meantime he was dealing with an abscess. The Bell’s palsy had something special in mind for him when, instead of making his face droop, it pried back the right cheek and suspended it there, turning his expression into a mad dog’s snarl. That snarl had opened up a little window into the current state of his oral health, which at that most inopportune time had taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they were related, the Bell’s palsy and the suddenly pregnant abscess endangering his first molar. Or maybe my patient had fudged his timeline — patients are the most unreliable people — and he had been living with the abscess but had chosen to ignore it, as he claimed it wasn’t causing him any pain. Ignore it, that is, until the Bell’s palsy drew back the curtain on his infection for everyone to see, everyone who was already gaping at the poor man for viciously smiling like a Doberman at the gate.

One of his accessory canals was weirdly branched, and clearing out that last bit of rot was like trying to hook my hand around the back of a refrigerator to plug the cord in. As I was finishing up, Connie came in to tell me I had a call.

“Talsman’s on the phone,” she said.

“It’s Talsman,” said Talsman, when I picked up. Talsman called himself Talsman.

The site was registered to an Al Frushtick.

“Frushtick,” I said. “That name’s familiar.”

“Sounds like ‘fish stick’ to me,” said Talsman, ever helpful.

I got off the phone. “See if we have a patient named Frushtick,” I said to Connie.

She came back ten minutes later with Al Frushtick’s file. I’d last seen him in January, when he told me he was leaving for Israel.

“This guy!” I said. “I know him. He’s the one who said he wanted to fuck you.”

“What?”

“Yeah! He was all hopped up on gas. Betsy!” I cried. “It’s our patient!”

She was in with a patient. “What patient?”

“The one with the meditation techniques! Remember?”

“Who?”

“The Tibetan! He wanted me to yank his teeth without — oh, never mind. Al Frushtick,” I said to Connie. “That’s who’s doing this to me!”

“What did you ever do to Al Frushtick?”

“What did I ever do to any of them?” I said. “Fixed his rotten teeth. But then he said something to me. When I was showing him out the door, he said something…”

“What was it?”

“He said he was going to Israel, but not because he was Jewish. I was helping him on with his coat. He said he was something… something ethnic, or something. I thought it was just the gas talking.”

“Something ethnic?”

I tried my best to remember, but it was lost.

“Hi, Al Frushtick,” I wrote.

This is how you repay a man for repairing your teeth?

The site changed the next day, and now my bio page hosted a more extensive biblical or Bible-like passage that almost told a story or homily or parable or something. It started with one of those endless genealogies that always does me in when I try reading the actual Bible, this one and that one begating first with the wife, then with the concubine, and then, after too many hins of wine, with the daughters. All the characters of the tale possessed the names of Star Wars figurines you find arranged upon the walls of toy stores, accessories sold separately. One guy was named Tin, who had a son, Mamucam, who had a wife called Gopolojol. Not another word on Tin and his kin, but they no doubt carried some kind of weight as we made our way down the conga line of middlemen and bit players to arrive at Agag, king of the Amalekites. The Amalekites were a strong tribe of noblemen, traceable to Abraham and dwelling peacefully upon the pastures of a place called Hazazon. They had stocks of cattle, camel, sheep, and oxen. “And such as went forth to battle, with all instruments of war, there were one hundred thousand and twenty and four thousand and five hundred, which could keep rank; and they were not of double heart,” my bio page reported.

One day the Amalekites were attacked by the Israelites, who came upon them from the west. The Israelites targeted a party of weak and infirm Amalekites who could not defend themselves, seized their camels, and fled. In retaliation, the Amalekites readied their armies for war. But then Moses showed up. “Moses came forth and bowed before Agag with a trespass offering, saying unto him, Hearken unto my voice, I pray thee; lay not the sin on Israel, for Pharaoh hath kept us in bondage four hundred years and thirty.” Moses tells Agag about the Israelites’ long captivity in Egypt, the terrible travails of their desert wanderings, and their covenant with a single God who seems to have abandoned them. He begs Agag’s forgiveness for taking that cheap swipe at them, explaining that they’re hungry, tired, and scared. “And the people of Israel had pity in the eye of Agag, and he took butter, and milk, and the calf he had dressed, and set it before them, and they did eat. And Israel parted laden with ephahs of flax and measures of barley, and of spices very great store.”

And all was well until the Israelites amassed a huge army and attacked the Amalekites again. “The Israelites took the war upon them, and blew with trumpets, and dashed to pieces all their enemies.” Agag, king of the Amalekites, fearing the wrath of a pitiless people driven by a bloodlust to take all of Canaan “from Dan even to Beersheba” so that they might fulfill their God’s covenant, says to his people, “Let us fetch the gods of the Egyptians, and the gods of the Canaanites, and the gods of the Philistines, and make covenant with them, that they may save us out of the hand of our enemy.” When word spreads through camp that the gods of every tribe in Canaan have arrived to defend the Amalekites, a great cry goes up, and the earth rings. But little good the gods do them once the fighting begins. The Israelites reduce the Amalekite army from a hundred twenty thousand men to seventy thousand in three days. They flee back to camp and then abandon Hazazon for the safe haven of Rephidim. I was making a real effort to follow along.

Who should come after the Amalekites in no time at all but the muscular, divinely inspired Israelites. This time Agag says to his people, Okay, well, obviously that last strategy needs a rethink. Not much luck to be had bringing all those gods together. Maybe they were jealous of one another. Maybe the powers of one canceled out the powers of another. I can’t really tell you what happened because I’m not a god, I’m just a king. But one thing’s for sure. We got our butts handed to us on a tabernacle back there. “Hear my voice; ye children of Amalek, hearken to my speech: Ye have gone a whoring after every god that dwelleth in the land, and have made false covenant with them. And every god hath made of you a carcase unto the fowls of the air, and the wild beasts of the earth. And your children have grown strange.”

So here’s what we’re going to do, he tells them, and sketches out a little plan he’s been devising, to bring into camp another god. But this time just one god, per the Israelites, because the one-single-god thing sure seems to be working out for them. The god’s name is Molek, and Molek has promised a whole bunch of things if the Amalekites just keep his covenant, the particulars of which include various prayers and sacrifices, walking thrice around a temple laden with wheat and gold, and the superbizarre practice of removing the pinkie finger from ten willing warriors who aren’t likely to heal in time for battle. “And he will take you to him for a people, and he will be to you a god; and ye shall know that he is Molek your god, which bringeth you out from under the burden of the Israelites,” reported my bio page. And they go into battle and lose another thirty thousand men.