Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I’m intrigued,” he said, once again stroking his arm hair. “But I’m also rather skeptical. I’ve spoken of this matter with several of my colleagues, all very learned people, and no one has heard of the thing. Nor has anyone heard of a surviving descendant of the Amalekites. Historians, biblical scholars, curators, dealers like myself — there’s no one.”

“How many of these associates of yours would it take for you to be convinced?” I asked.

“That’s precisely it. I can’t find even one.”

“But if you could, and he or she were a scholar or historian or whatever you require. What I’m asking,” I said, “is how many people does it take to make a thing like this real?”

“My dear fellow,” he said, pausing his self-petting to make a point, “people have believed in the most outlandish claims with all their hearts and souls since the beginning of time. It isn’t a numbers game.”

“But in matters of religion,” I said, “where it’s hard to prove anything empirically, numbers do matter, don’t they? How many people do you need to say that a system of belief is a bona fide system?”

“What system of belief?” he asked. “That Mithras is the sun god? That Ninirta is Marduk of the hoe? That Re repels the serpent Apophis every morning to restore Ma’at? That Iapetus is the father of all Anglo-Saxons because he was the son of Noah? That Yahweh was justified in striking down Uzzah for steadying the ark? That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life?”

“Yes,” I said, “any of them. All of them.”

“The difference between ten believers and ten million is a categorical one,” he said. “We call the one a cult and the other a religion. Personally, I don’t much care for that distinction. But without a certain critical mass, things do sometimes get weird.”

“You ask me,” I said, “the bigger they get, the weirder.”

“Consider the historian,” he said. “With all due respect to my historian friends, the historian is a vulture, and all of his colleagues are vultures, too. You can count on that lot to seize upon the carcass of a new discovery until it’s picked quite clean. I don’t blame them. They have papers to write and tenure to make. So with that in mind, let’s have a look at what you’re suggesting.”

He gazed upon the documents scattered on his desk, printouts of emails I’d sent him, the cantonments from my bio page.

“Someone comes to you with the information that you belong to this tradition, this people. They have a religion, roughly sketched as it may be, and they’re ethnically distinct. In fact they have their own genetic makeup. They constitute a race, and they can prove that scientifically. And despite suffering widespread persecution, a continuous line of existence ties them together from the time of the early Israelites to the modern day. Does that more or less sum it up?”

I nodded.

“Then why has no one heard of them? Why have the vultures in every history department across the world not seized upon them and picked this unique, this truly marvelous history clean for all to see?”

“Because they’ve been forced to keep a low profile.”

He stopped petting himself. He frowned, showing me the inner pink of his lower lip.

“How do you know that?” He glanced down at his desk. “Is that somewhere in… in all this…?”

“No,” I said.

“How have you come to know that they’ve kept a low profile? And how have they possibly managed to keep it so low that they’ve succeeded in escaping the notice of all the world’s historians?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be a dupe. I’m just as sure as you are that what I’m dealing with here is some kind of scam. I’ve brought in a lawyer who specializes in cyberlaw. She’s telling me I’ll have grounds for a lawsuit once everything plays out. People can’t go around stealing other people’s identities. But maybe,” I said, “just maybe we’ve never heard of them because they’ve been persecuted so thoroughly that they hardly exist anymore. Pick anyone you want — the Jews, the Native Americans, the Waldensians — and the Ulms have them beat. And because of their low numbers throughout history, they’ve flown beneath the radar.”

“You know the Waldensians?”

Keep clarity! I thought to myself, down at the lowest register of sound. But I was already committed, had spent so much time emailing back and forth with myself, with the man known online as Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., that now I knew more than the historian. Did I really want to believe? I had half hoped Sookhart would call me back to myself, my old self-respecting self, tell me the Waldensians were just another invention.

“They were mentioned to me as a people who suffered a similar persecution,” I said. “Also the Chukchi of Russia. They’re an example of a people who have lived a long time on the brink of extinction.”

“One more time, with that name?”

“The Chukchi. There’s about five hundred of them.”

He jotted it down. “Who mentioned this to you?”

“Also the Penan, the Innu, and the Enawene Nawe,” I said.

“And who are they?”

“Other endangered peoples.”

“Their names again?”

I spelled them out for him, and he jotted those names down, too.

“And why have they been persecuted?”

“The Chukchi?”

“No, the Ulms.”

“Even the pagans and the heathens believed in something. These people believe in nothing but their obligation to doubt God. It makes people nervous.”

Again that mildly obscene pink of his dubious lower lip showed itself like a petal. Then:

“But again, everybody who’s anybody has at least something to point to in the historical record. Even, I assume, these”—glancing down at his jottings—“Chukchi. Where is this great trampled people of yours in the historical record?”

“Hiding in plain sight,” I said.

“Sounds like you know more than you’re letting on.”

“No, not really.”

“Hiding in plain sight?”

“Read any history book,” I said. “Read about ‘the masses’ and ‘the villagers.’ Read about ‘the natives.’ ‘The serfs’ and ‘the locals’ and ‘the nomads.’ ‘The heretics’ and ‘the blasphemers.’ ”

“And it is the Ulms who are being referred to?”

“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes ‘the masses’ just mean the masses.”

“So throughout history they’re there, just unnamed, unidentified.”

“That’s the suggestion.”

“From this fellow here,” he said, indicating the printouts, “this ‘Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”

I nodded. He dropped his pen and sat back.

“It’s a stretch,” he said. “We still can’t ignore the efficient marketplace that is academia.”

“But knowing what you know about history,” I said, “might there be levels of suppression that should not surprise us when they finally come to light?”

He puckered his lips and massaged his thyroid in contemplation.

“But to imagine a people of the Bronze Age doubting the gods,” he said finally, “when most of them were still spooked by a gathering of dark clouds, praying to wood carvings…” He shook his head.

“Here’s my offer,” I said, handing him a check.

He studied it. His brow bellowed at the sight of the number, and he glanced up at me. Then he stood and extended his hand.

“But it never pays to be a doubting Thomas,” he said.

“The Plotzes know where they came from,” he wrote.

It doesn’t surprise me that you fell in love with them. We are drawn to people rooted in a strong tradition. It’s always the wrong tradition for us, and the results are disastrous. But I don’t blame you. Belonging, fitting in, loving and wanting to be loved in return — they are the most natural things in the world.