Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“There’s also some slight mobility,” I said, “here, and here.”

“Mobility?”

“They’re starting to move around on you.”

“My teeth?”

“I think we can probably save them—”

“Probably?”

“But I wouldn’t recommend waiting.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

It’s something you get from time to time. A perplexity. This is happening? To me? With my background, my livelihood, my nationality? I vote Republican. I have full dental. This whole prognosis needs rethinking.

I didn’t enjoy telling a patient that his teeth were in danger, that his health was suffering, and that he would experience discomfort and pain. My enjoyment was restricted to the very real pleasure of watching entitlement end. The immunities of great privilege have expired. You’re no different from the next guy. You’re mortal, and it’s ugly. What it is is you’re small, while the plain is vast and the sky is wide and the food is very far away. Welcome to that world, it’s here to stay. It was never gone. You just couldn’t see it through your driver and your doorman and the Asian dude holding your takeout.

“Listen,” I said. “We can save your teeth. We can restore your gums. We can rid you entirely of these odors—”

“What odors?”

“And if, after we do all that, you floss and use a water pick and a mouth rinse, and you brush twice a day, gently, with an electric toothbrush, and you change your diet, your mouth will be like new, and you should never have these problems again. After fifteen years of neglect,” I said, “wouldn’t you agree that’s a small miracle?”

I spent the better half of the afternoon fixing him up. His me-machine continued to buzz, but he couldn’t answer or reply because he was in with his dentist.

“Thank God he sent me and not somebody else,” Cavanaugh said when I had finished. “I never would have come if it were up to me. Do you think he knew?”

“Who are we talking about?” I asked.

He sat up, and I was treated once again to his aftershave, those subtle fleurs of a lush masculine springtime.

“Pete Mercer,” he said.

“The billionaire?”

“And my boss,” he said. “He’d like you to have this.”

He handed me an envelope. The short note read:

I’d like to speak with you. Jim has been instructed to give you my personal cell phone number. Please call at your earliest convenience. — PM

“We haven’t talked about your father’s suicide yet,” he wrote.

Had he known his true place in the world, he might not have taken his life. Are you ever in danger of taking yours? Does it cross your mind? How often? I know you’re lost, but my God, man! You belong by birthright to a noble tradition!

“What do you want from me?” I asked him. “What do you want, what do you want, what do you want?”

Your help restoring it.

The heat wave rippled and steamed in the atomic air. The sun, everywhere and nowhere, panted down the shafts and corridors of the city, filling the streets with a debilitating throb. It produced pore-level discomfort in me and my fellow pedestrians. Sweat clung to every lip and pit. Taxis thrummed with sunlight. Awnings crackled with it. Tar fillings ran soft and gooey down the streets, while every leaf, stunned into a perfect stillness, lay curled up in terror.

I was meeting Pete Mercer in Central Park. He wanted us to talk outside the office.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never met a billionaire before. Someone disciplined, I thought. Someone who rises before dawn, follows a regimen of weights and cardio without a single deviation from the day before, and successfully consumes the recommended dose of daily fiber. The big winners of this arrangement: his bowels and his bank account. His every minute strictly apportioned, his quantity of drink tightly controlled. Tailored with suit and tie, daily shaved regardless of mood, manicured, perfumed, and lotioned. The kind of man I could never be if given a thousand lives.

But the billionaire waiting for me on the bench was in a pair of worn-out khakis and hiking boots and consuming a five-dollar sandwich purchased from a street vendor. There was no way to look dignified while eating one of those things. He had to lean over with legs apart so that the juices, when they fell, landed on the ground and not his boots. He had ahold of about sixteen napkins in varying stages of saturation, with another half dozen balled up on the seat beside him, and when he stood at my approach, he fumbled around with a full mouth trying to shake my hand with some part of him that was clean.

I took a seat on the bench. His hair was short and conservatively parted. The only signs of age on him were the Earl Grey bags under his half-moon eyes and a neck just starting to loosen. He looked like you or me, except he had enough money to buy all of Manhattan south of Canal.

“Thanks for meeting me,” he said. “I enjoy reading your tweets. ‘We take refuge in the intimacy of marginalization.’ Was that today? Or yesterday?”

My tweets! He thought those were coming from me!

“I was under the impression…” I began. “I thought that you had denied…”

He shrugged. “What is there to deny?” he asked. “No documented history. No evidence of a past. Myths contradicting the Bible. Stories of survival that can’t be corroborated. What did you call it, ‘Suppressed down to nothing,’ or something to that effect? At most, we have… what? A family tree and some corrupted DNA. Is that enough to make anyone deny anything?”

“But your office just issued a denial.”

“If there were rumors circulating that I breathed oxygen, I would instruct my office to issue a denial,” he said. “I value my privacy.”

“I value my privacy, too.”

He handed me a paper bag with a sandwich inside. “Bought you lunch.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure if you were a vegetarian. They all seem to be vegetarians.”

I wondered who this “they” was.

“No,” I said. “I like meat too much.”

“Me, too,” he said.

I opened the bag. Hot juices were leaking from some fault in the foil.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” he repeated. “I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

“No busier than you must be,” I said.

“And thanks for taking care of Jim’s teeth. For that, the whole office thanks you.”

“Jim sure smells nice,” I said, “but he should take better care of himself.”

“We all should,” he said. “What made you want to become a dentist?”

“Oral fixation,” I said.

He howled with laughter. Not everyone thought that joke was funny. It wasn’t even a joke, really. It’s just that people expected you to say something less pervy. Nobody likes to be reminded of the perv potential in a medical professional, especially a dentist, what with his hands in your mouth all day. I appreciated Mercer’s laughter. It showed a sense of humor.

“I fell in love with a girl when I was young,” I said, “and her mouth was a revelation.”

“I’ve fallen in love with a mouth or two,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone into dentistry.”

“The pay may not have suited you.”

He laughed again. “No,” he said. “But making money’s a waste of time.”

“You should try convincing a patient to floss.”

“Not easy, I bet.”

“I question the point of flossing myself sometimes,” I said. “It tends to pass.”

“I never used to floss,” he said. “Then I started doing it and, man, I couldn’t believe the stuff that came out of my mouth. It was like, oh, look, a ham hock. And here’s half a bag of microwave popcorn.”

“You must have large gum pockets.”

“Is that what they call them, gum pockets? Boy, that’s gross.”