Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

How do you know about the Plotzes?

You told me about them.

I never told you I fell in love with them.

I don’t have psychic powers, Paul. I pieced a few things together from a couple of emails.

I had a hard time falling asleep after my dad died. My mom would close the blinds, turn on my night-light, and tuck me in, and I would settle into the dimness hoping that sleep would come quickly, but it never did. I needed to fall asleep before my mom did, because if I didn’t, I’d be the only one awake in the apartment, and that was as bad as being alone. Being alone was the loneliest and scariest thing. If she fell asleep, all the other people in our building would fall asleep, too, and I would be awake while all the grown-ups were sleeping. I had to fall asleep! But nothing I could do would stop time or keep the night from growing longer and darker. From our building, sleep would spread like a sickness to the other people on the block. Soon everyone in the city would be asleep, and not long after that, everyone in the world. I would be the only person awake in the world.

I was trying so hard to fall asleep that I kept myself awake, and being awake, I felt as though I would never fall asleep. It was a terror that took hold of me quickly as I lay in bed, and everything my mom had done to prepare me for sleep — the books we read, the prayers we said, and the almost-countless number of good-nights I made her say from the doorway before she could leave — was no match for that terror. I was in my room for ten or fifteen minutes at most before I had to call out: “Mom?” Sometimes she would say “Yes?” or “What?” but usually it was “What do you want?” After good-nighting for fifteen minutes, after going away and coming back again to reassure me of some trifle, after her patience had been tested multiple times even before my attempt at sleep had properly begun — and all of this after a long day at work and readying dinner and tidying up — she was running on fumes. She must have also still been grieving. Grieving and trying to make sense of what had befallen her. Trying to make sense of it while trying to hold things together for me. But there is holding things together, and then there is dealing with a nine-year-old who refuses to sleep night after night. “What do you want?” she’d ask, and the edge in her voice was like the hand that takes the arm of a disobedient child. But I pretended not to notice her tone and ignored the encroaching dread of entering the next logical step in a nightly pattern that quickly established itself that year. I cloaked my terror one last time in the pleasantries so natural to exchange just before sleep and responded by calling out through the thin walls, “I just wanted to say good night!” “Go to bed now, Paul,” she’d say. A few minutes later, I’d say, “Good night, Mom!” and she’d say “We’ve said good night plenty of times now, Paul, too many times.” And a few minutes later, although I tried really hard not to, I’d call out again, “Good night, Mom!” “We’ve been over this,” she’d say, “we’ve been over this and over this. Good night for the last time!” You couldn’t blame her, because this happened every night, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. By then, we both knew that we were back inside a recurring nightmare, and the only questions that remained were how long I would keep her up and how mad she would get. I stopped saying “Good night, Mom!” because the pretense was over and started saying, “Mom, are you still awake?” And from a distant room, she would scream, “AAAHHHHH!” Then a little later I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d say, “GO TO SLEEP!” Then, much later, I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, and I’d say, “Mom?” I’d repeat “Mom? Mom? Mom?” afraid that she might have actually fallen asleep, until she’d finally say, “GO TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW! RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!” and that was a terrible relief. I was sorry she was angry with me but happy she was awake, which meant that I was not alone. Eventually, no matter how many times I called out, she stopped answering, so I would have to get up and walk to her doorway and say, a little softer, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t say anything, so I’d walk into the room a little, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and she’d be lying there with her eyes open. “Mom, are you still awake?” I’d ask, although I could see by then that she was. Her eyes were open, and she was staring up at the ceiling, and I’d say, “Mom, are you still awake?” and without turning to look at me, looking up at the ceiling, she’d say, “No.”

When we woke up in the morning, she was either in my bed with me, or I was in her bed with her, or I was on the couch and she was on the floor at my feet, wrapped in my Red Sox blanket.

The day after I engaged Sookhart, an investment banker came in by the name of Jim Cavanaugh. Even the bankers of Wall Street look like infants when they are reclined in the chair and bibbed in blue. It would not be unreasonable to pick them up and rock them in your arms, if that were only part of the early training.

He smelled good. I thought I detected hints of cardamom and white birch. Men like Cavanaugh, in the financial institutions and law firms, always come to my chair floral with designer scents and aftershaves. I pictured these emissions competing, on the molecular level, in a bloody, feral melee with their peers in every conference room and hallway cluster, every private office and chartered plane. One whiff of Cavanaugh and I had no doubt that his pricey little eaus strolled from the battlefield undiluted and triumphant.

He was reading his me-machine when I sat down chairside. His fingers swiped and daubed at the touchscreen, coloring in all the details of a fine landscape of self. A glitch in the soul produced that delay between his breaking off from the machine and his return handshake. He tucked the thing away in his pants pocket, where it buzzed and trilled with approximations of nature. I turned on the overhead as Abby handed me the explorer. Mrs. Convoy’s worries were not exaggerated: his mandibular right second molar was grossly carious, and the sinus was discharging buccally. I bent the light away.

“Are you in any pain?”

“My gallbladder,” he said. “And I have a bad back. But I work through it.”

He was almost indescribably good smelling. Only the most reactionary heterosexual impulses prevented me from burying my nose in his neck.

“I mean in your mouth,” I said.

“My mouth? No, my mouth is fine. Why?”

I percussed the tooth with the gross decay. “No pain here?”

“No, not really.”

“Here?”

“No.”

He should have been in extraordinary pain. That he was not led me to believe that he must be taking something — if not everything under the sun. “Are you on any drugs at the moment?”

“Nothing that hasn’t been prescribed.”

“When was the last time you saw a dentist?”

“Six months ago? No, I’m totally lying. Fifteen years? And I don’t floss, so don’t bother asking. And my diet’s terrible. I drink twenty Cokes a day. On a good day. That’s better than a cocaine habit, though, right? Maybe not for the teeth. I know meth’s bad for your teeth, but cocaine’s not meth, right, when it comes to your teeth? Why all these questions? You’re making me nervous. I’ve never had a cavity in my life.”

“You have one now,” I said.

“But I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“Is this something I can ignore?”

He had six cavities all together, and his gums were receding rapidly on account of periodontal disease.