Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

I spent the next day limping from room to room, patient to patient. The pain in my legs was easily explained, but why did it hurt to clench my jaw? To open and close my fingers? I could hardly hold the explorer and eventually had to cancel all my afternoon appointments.

She was my last appointment of the day. She had on a Red Sox cap over her long, sandy-brown hair. The cap was well worn: it was easy to envision how, in the course of its lifetime, it had been torn off, stretched out, kicked around, lost for good and found again, its bill molded to form, its band boiled in sweat, the whole thing stomped on and run over and chewed up. Now the stitching around the B was coming loose. It was a prized possession, that hat, a family heirloom, as priceless as anything on an auctioneer’s block. The woman wearing it had my heart.

She turned when I entered the room and said, “I’m not here for an exam.”

I shut the door.

“What are you here for?”

She stepped away from the window, into my arms. No, she stopped far shy of that, at the sink, even as I urged the echo of her heels to continue. She undid the twin buckles of a leather valise laid flat upon the counter. She removed her sunglasses, disentangling from one plastic corner the delicate loose strands of her lovely hair. She suggested I have a seat. I immediately pulled up a stool.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She removed a sheaf of papers from the leather bag. “A research assistant.”

“To whom?” I asked. “For what?”

“For the general effort.”

She was really very tall, over six feet, and when I sat down, under her weather, as it were, full of breeze and light, and watched her concentrate, ordering and straightening the papers in her possession, I almost said, being insanely cunt gripped, “I love you.” Somehow I kept it to myself. But that’s exactly how it happens, every time, that quickly, that easily, and there is nothing I can do about it.

“Let’s start here,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘the general effort’?”

She handed me my birth certificate.

“Okay?” she said to me.

“What are you asking?”

“Does that document look familiar to you?”

“It’s my birth certificate,” I said. “Hey,” I said, “how’d you get my birth certificate? Who notarized this?”

“And this is a certificate of marriage between Cynthia Gayle and Conrad James, the fifth of November 1972.”

She handed me my parents’ marriage certificate. It had been stamped by the county clerk’s office and initialed.

“Are those your parents?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

Next, in rapid succession, came each of my parents’ birth certificates, as well as the certificate of death for my father; the birth certificates of my four grandparents; their marriage certificates; and finally each of their death certificates. There was Earl O’Rourke and Sandra O’Rourke, née Hanson, and there was Frank Merrelee and Vera Merrelee, née Ward. I didn’t recognize the names on the next generation of documents. They belonged, according to her, to my great-grandparents.

She zeroed in on one specific branch of my family tree, that of my paternal great-grandfather’s.

“You will see you were not always an O’Rourke,” she said.

She handed me the next document.

“What is your name?”

“Clara,” she said.

“Clara.”

“Yes, Clara,” she said. “You have in your hand the birth certificate of Oakley Rourke. Oakley was your grandfather’s grandfather. Notice how his name is spelled: R-o-u-r-k-e . He became the first O ’Rourke after a ruling by a district judge in a criminal matter. Your great-great-grandfather was a convicted horse thief, as you can see… here.” She handed me a warrant for arrest from the state of Colorado. “ ‘O. Rourke’ became ‘O’Rourke’ on this document here,” she said, “most likely by a common elision. That’s how it happens: errors, omissions, transpositions. Oakley must have approved of his name change, because he was O’Rourke when he moved to Maine and bought land, here—” She handed me a property deed. “Maybe he needed a fresh start. He remained an O’Rourke all the rest of his days.”

She handed me his death certificate attesting to that claim.

“This is my family tree,” I said. “You’re showing me my family tree.”

“Before Oakley, there was Luther Rourke, his father.”

“I’m so pleased that you’re showing me my family tree.”

“And before Luther, his father, James Rourke. He would have been your great-great-great-great-grandfather. But he was not a Rourke. He was the last of the Rourches, R-o-u-r-c-h . Have a look here… and here.”

She handed me two more documents.

“Is this your job?” I asked her.

“No.”

“What is your job?”

“I don’t have a job. I go to school.”

“What do you study?”

“Forensic anthropology. Please have a look at what I’ve handed you.”

There was nothing new looking now, nothing computer generated. The paper was of an antiquated consistency, brittle. Colonial cursive spilled across the documents; they were thick with “wherefores” and “in testimony ofs.”

“James’s paternal grandfather was Isaac Boruch, B-o-r-u-c-h . Isaac was a citizen of Białystok and the first of your family to come to America. His name went from Boruch to Rourch as a result of a transposition at immigration, as you can see from this… and this.”

I studied the two documents. An Isaac Boruch before, an Isaac Rourch after. A before-and-after snapshot of family history.

“I’m from Poland?” I said.

“It’s easy enough to imagine how these changes happened,” she said. “The insanity of immigration, the carelessness of clerks, deaf and lazy bureaucrats.”

“How much time did this take you?”

“I’m only the assistant,” she said. “Now, none of these documents is essential. It is all essential, of course, but only as a preliminary to what you were before you became Boruch, what Boruch disguised to ease your passage here. America did not let just anyone in.”

“We could have been kept out?”

“If it had come to light, yes.”

“If what had come to light?”

“What you were before you became Boruch.”

“What were we before Boruch?”

“I don’t have that document.”

“Who does?”

“It’s waiting for you. But you’ll have to go to it.”

“Waiting for me where?”

“Seir.”

“Israel?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I have to go to it?”

“He’d like to see a show of faith.”

“Who would?”

“We all would.”

“And that means I have to go to Israel?”

“Yes.”

She began to strap the buckles on her leather bag.

“Are you leaving?”

She returned her sunglasses to her face. “My job is over.”

“Can I see you again?”

“What for?”

“It’s just… it’s so much to take in.”

“If you have any questions,” she said, “I believe you know who to contact.”

“I would prefer to contact you.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “It was nice to meet you, Dr. O’Rourke.”

She extended her hand. I took it in mine. It was everything I thought it would be, and more.

UP I FLEW IN a glass carriage past matrices and hives. I stepped out on the penthouse floor into an open plan of traders in white oxfords determining the world’s fate. It was the dollar’s sowing and its ruthless harvest. A beauty of exotic birth offered me coffee or cold water infused with cucumber. I chose instead to read the Forbes on the coffee table, the one with Mercer on the cover. The headline: “He’s Not Talking.”