Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

I really wanted to ask Connie’s uncle Stuart if he knew how irresponsibly and hatefully Luther had spoken of the Jews and how his writings had set the stage for roughly five centuries of unrepentant anti-Semitism and eventually the Holocaust. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Martin Luther’s outrageous pair of sweaty German balls. But he was too forbidding even then — and that was before he sat down beside me at Connie’s sister’s wedding and told me that joke. But I could not just say nothing, not after reading what I’d read about Luther and now seeing what I was seeing, the Plotz family in celebration. Here were all the Jews and their lies, here they were, those “poisonous envenomed worms,” in Luther’s words, gathered together to celebrate Theo’s birthday: Connie’s grandmother Gloria Plotz, blind from macular degeneration but smiling benignly at her grandchildren; her cousin Joel with his booming laugh; the baby sleeping in the arms of her sister Deborah; and her uncle Ira, who was standing off on his own, eating a cookie. “We are at fault in not slaying them,” Luther had concluded, speaking of people like these: aunts and uncles and cousins, present givers, drinkers of punch. I walked over to Ira.

“I’ve been reading about Martin Luther,” I said to him. He looked at me. “Did you know he wrote a pamphlet called ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’?” He raised his brows and kept them raised while he stared at me, chewing his cookie. “I’ve been reading it.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Why?”

“Because I had never read him before.”

He casually wiped at his beard with a paper napkin as he stared at me.

“He was a serious anti-Semite.”

After a while, he said, “And?”

“And he said terrible things. Look. I jotted some of them down.”

I took out the slips of paper the library had made available, upon which I had written some of Luther’s choicest quotes. I handed them to Ira.

“ ‘Whenever you see or think about a Jew,’ ” read Ira, “ ‘say to yourself as follows: Behold, the mouth that I see there has every Saturday cursed, execrated, and spit upon my dear Lord, Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; and also prayed and cursed—’ ” He cut himself off and looked at me. “Why did you write this down?”

I’d written it down because I was outraged that such things had ever been written down — that indeed they remained a matter of public record. But here I was writing them down myself on little scraps of library paper, and carrying them around with me, and taking them out to show people at parties. Suddenly I saw it through Ira’s eyes, and what I saw looked insane.

“You go around with these quotes in your pocket?”

“Not always,” I said.

“Nice quotes,” he said, and handed them back to me. Turning away, he spoke volumes of his opinion of me with just a little effort of his brows.

I could have said or done anything during that time. So it was possible, I thought later, wide-eyed with terror at three in the morning, that I did in fact tell Michael Plotz that joke, possibly even while he was sitting shiva for his mother.

While standing in line to buy cigarettes the morning I saw Sookhart, I noticed a headline on the cover of a celebrity magazine. “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” it read in big print, and my mind returned to it later that day while I worked on a patient. I didn’t know that Daughn and Taylor had gotten together, to mention nothing of them breaking up, and now, possibly, getting back together again. More troubling still, I didn’t know who Daughn and Taylor were. Daughn and Taylor… I thought to myself, Daughn and Taylor… who are Daughn and Taylor? It was clear that I should know them, given the significant real estate their debatable reconciliation had commanded on the cover of one of the more reputable celebrity magazines. But I didn’t know them, and not knowing them, I realized I was once again out of touch. I would be in touch for a while, and then a headline like “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” would come along to let me know that I was out of touch again. Why was I so out of touch? Well, I was old, for one. Also, I didn’t engage with the TV shows and movies and music videos of people like Daughn and Taylor. And I had a hard time finding and streaming the illicit sex tapes of people like Daughn and Taylor. Yet regardless of how little I cared to know about Daughn and Taylor, I felt left out. I now had an urgent need to know who Daughn and Taylor were. At the very least, I thought, I must find out if Daughn is the man in the relationship or if the man is Taylor. You can’t just make assumptions with names like Daughn and Taylor. I felt pretty confident that Daughn was the man, but I thought “Daughn” might be an alternative spelling of “Dawn.” Then Daughn would be the woman and Taylor the man. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, they were both men, or both women. In this day and age, the first-name-only couples coming under scrutiny on the covers of celebrity magazines don’t always consist strictly of a man and a woman. It could easily be a same-sex couple, like Ellen and Portia. Ellen and Portia I knew. Brad and Angelina I knew. Before Brad and Angelina, I knew Brad and Jen, and before Brad and Jen, I knew Brad and Gwyneth, just as before Tom and Katie, I knew Tom and Nicole, and before Tom and Nicole I knew Tom and Mimi. I also knew Bruce and Demi, Johnny and Kate, and Ben and Jennifer. How many celebrity couples I’d known and how out of date all of them had become! For the people now following Daughn and Taylor, Bruce and Demi were an ancient artifact of the 1980s. The 1980s were thirty years ago. The people now following Daughn and Taylor thought of the 1980s as I used to think of the 1950s. The 1980s had, overnight, become the 1950s. It was unimaginable. I might as well have been wearing a Davy Crockett hat and cowering under my desk for fear of a Soviet attack, according to the people now following Daughn and Taylor. Soon the 2010s would become the 1980s, and no one would remember even Daughn and Taylor, and after that, we’d all be dead. I had to find out who Daughn and Taylor were immediately, with great haste, my patient be damned. (I was suturing the mandibular gums during a badly needed graft.) I looked over at Abby. Abby would know who Daughn and Taylor were, I thought. I should ask her. But I can’t ask her, not if she’s so intimidated that she can’t even speak to me. No doubt she would just judge me for not knowing who Daughn and Taylor were, when everyone knew who Daughn and Taylor were. I could just picture her thinking, “He doesn’t know Daughn and Taylor? He’s so sadly out of touch. He is so sadly old and on his way out and depressing to even think about.” No way I was asking Abby. I’ll just have to sit here, I thought, finish these sutures, and feel the exile of age in America for another fifteen minutes until I can take up the me-machine and get myself back in—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie with her iPad.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

“Connie, it’s killing me,” I said. “Who are Daughn and Taylor?”

She looked at me like I’d just drunk a box of chlorine. “You don’t know Daughn and Taylor?”

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

She told me who they were. They were so minor!

I finished sewing up my gum graft and met her in the hallway.

“I just got a friend request,” she said.

“You mean on Facebook?”

“Yes, on Facebook.”

“Why are you telling me ? What do I care? Listen, you want my advice? Friends are wonderful. Irreplaceable, really. Probably ultimately better than family. But next time you find yourself flicking through the contacts on your phone, ask yourself how many of those people are really your friends. You’ll find one, maybe two. And if you really start to scrutinize even those two, you may find that it’s been forever since you last talked, and now, in all likelihood, you’ve drifted apart and have nothing to say to each other. So if you’re asking my opinion, I say decline. Who’s it from?”