Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

KARI GUTRICH, TALSMAN’S CYBERLAW expert, returned my call the following Wednesday. She informed me that I might be able to sue once the damage was done, but as for stopping it, that was almost impossible. The Internet moved too fast.

“What legal body,” she asked, “governmental agency, or law-enforcement bureau would you appeal to at the moment?”

“The police?” I suggested. “The courts?”

She laughed, I thought a little too heartily. “That’s good for out there,” she said. “But you’re in here now.”

“In here?”

The police, the courts — that was common sense, whereas we were discussing technology and the law. Future legislation might introduce stricter controls governing misappropriations, impersonations, defamations, and other disputes of character and online reputation, she said, but the current laws were vague on how to address those issues in real time. And people don’t have access to the courts just because they’re irritated.

“Irritated?” I said. “They’ve created a website for my practice, started a Facebook page in my name, took unauthorized photographs of me, creepy photographs, and now they’re using my name to comment all over the Internet, implicating me in some kind of religion, and the only legal claim I can make is to being irritated?”

“Do you know who’s doing this to you?”

“I know who registered the site,” I said. I gave her Al Frushtick’s name.

“We can probably get the site to come down,” she said. “But as a legal matter and, more important, as a practical matter, there’s just not much more we can do at the moment.”

I wanted to hit the wall in frustration.

“I can’t sue for defamation?” I asked.

“What damages have you suffered? We don’t fully know yet.”

She counseled me to do nothing, and to do it carefully. For if I did something, I might inadvertently call more attention to my new online existence, a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect: once people knew I was trying to suppress something published on the Internet, they would actively seek it out to see what all the fuss was about, which would create a negative feedback loop, more attention drawing yet more attention.

“Streisand? As in Barbra?”

“We have a best-practices worksheet we advise all our clients to follow,” she said. “Give me your email address and I’ll send it over.”

“Can you just fax it?” I asked.

Don’t engage, she cautioned me, despite how hard that might be, and let matters take their course. Later we could reassess the situation to determine what actionable complaint I might have.

She was looking at the website as we spoke. “You really didn’t make this site?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I really didn’t.”

“Well,” she said, possibly attempting to console. “At least it’s a nice one.”

I stood outside room 3 composing a reply to Seir Design on my me-machine. “Why do you keep asking me what I know about my life, Al?” I wrote.

And what business is it of yours, anyway? You’ve shown the limits of your knowledge by calling the Red Sox an “Activity and Interest.” I have no reason to even consider you so much as a man. You’re a program designed to scam me. Only a database would know that my middle name begins with C.

He (or they, or it) replied quickly:

My name’s not Al, Paul. And what I know about you goes much deeper than any database. I’m not a computer program, but a person with a beating heart, reaching across this divide to say I feel for you. I am your brother.

I wrote:

Betsy?

I deleted that and wrote:

What do you know about me, or think you know about me, “my brother”?

Irritated at receiving no reply, I kept at it.

Am I an indoor person or an outdoor person? Cat or dog man? Do I keep a journal? Watch birds? Collect stamps? Do I plan my weekends all in advance, pack them full of activity, and then sit back and watch them unfold? Or do I wait until they’re here and squander them? You don’t know. And why don’t you know? Because whatever you think you know is subject to change at my whim. I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Watch me break out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a cafe.

Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.

I meant “cage.”

He wrote back:

Here is what I know about your life. You’re an indoor man because your profession demands it. You feel estranged from nature, unable to access it. You’ve replaced it with television and the Internet, which come directly into your home, and supply your need for diversion even as they coarsen your instinct for the spirit. You don’t have kids because you feel untethered and uprooted, and you can’t imagine bestowing that legacy upon a child. You are too much in your own head, trying to unravel the mysteries. Sometimes they make you despair and you give up hope. However, there’s nothing wrong with being in your head. In your head, with your thoughts, you live a rich and complex life, full of anxieties and regrets, yes, but also tenderness, and fancy, and unspoken sympathy for others. There is a lot of emotion coursing through you at any given moment of the day, and maybe nobody knows it because nobody can read your mind, but if they only knew, if they knew, they would say, He’s alive, all right, he’s alive. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Or can you?

“Dr. O’Rourke?” she said. She might have been saying it for a while. “Paul?” she said.

It was Connie. I let the hand with the phone fall to my side.

“Is everything okay?”

I nodded. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

I waited until she walked away. Then I wrote:

How do you know all that?

He replied:

I told you. I am your brother.

It might seem that a dental professional can never really get to know his patients because visits are so infrequent and short-lived, but you’d be surprised. When someone is religious about regular checkups, and between those checkups has toothaches and accidents and cosmetic needs and thus requires additional work, a warm rapport can easily develop. Some patients even thank me after the most brutalizing treatments, genuinely grateful for what I do for them. When next they come in, I will ask about their jobs and their families before getting down to business. It’s almost small-town that way.

That morning, when I walked in on Bernadette Marder, despite having worked on her for nearly ten years, I honestly thought she was a first-time patient. She looked so much older than the last time I saw her.

The sight of Bernadette looking old reminded me of a joke. A woman makes an appointment with a new dentist and discovers that he has the same name as someone she went to high school with. She wonders if her new dentist could be the boy she had such a terrible crush on when she was a girl of fifteen. But when he walks in, he’s such an old fart that she quickly comes to her senses. Even so, after the exam is over, she idly asks him what high school he attended… and sure enough, it’s the one she attended! “What year did you graduate?” she asks him, growing excited, and he names the very year she graduated. “You were in my class!” the woman exclaims, and the unsuspecting dentist screws up his eyes and peers at the old hag in the chair and says, “What did you teach?”

My patient, Bernadette Marder, looked so hideously old, so hideously and prematurely aged since the last time I’d seen her, that all her most stressful and trying years might have been crammed into six months. She had gone from forty to sixty-five in a mere hundred and eighty days. Her hair had thinned out and just sort of died on the top of her head. A scaly pink meridian divided one limp half from the other. An array of wrinkles, radiating from her pale lips, had deepened and fossilized, and her face sagged. And yet when I realized (thanks to the name on the chart) that it was Bernadette, my Bernadette, and not some first-time geriatric patient, and asked how she was doing, she told me she’d never been happier. She had just gotten married, in fact, and had been given new responsibility at work, which came with a small raise. I couldn’t comprehend it. Never happier, newly married, making more money, and looking like death. Almost impossible to track on a day-to-day basis, the passage of time is at work on people unremittingly. As a dentist seeing familiar faces only once every six months, I became acutely aware of it. It is the inexorable truth of our existence on earth, and if it is happening to Bernadette Marder, I was made to realize once again, it is also happening to us — to Abby, Betsy, Connie, and me — though it remains elusive, indeed invisible, so that, presumably, we will not all stop in horror and stare and point at one another until the screaming begins. No, we carry on, as Bernadette was doing, dwelling happily in a constant present that persisted day after day even as it continually perished, never demanding a sober assessment, or a sudden outburst of pity, or the radical reconsideration of everything.