Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Mercer made his initial money in gold in the late seventies. Inflation was high, the gold standard was gone, and people were scared. When people are scared, Mercer had purportedly told a confidant, they grow primitive in their thinking, and shiny metals reassure them. It was the financial equivalent of praying to the sun, but unlike the Sun God, gold still held currency and rose and fell with the fear level. Mercer had a feel for it. He saw extraordinary returns with gold early in his career. In the eighties he shifted to equities. He was out of the market in January of ’87, nine months before Black Monday, again harboring in gold, a move Forbes called “supernatural.” By year’s end, instead of facing bankruptcy, he had a hundred million to convert back into equities. He went on an extraordinary ten-year run. He got out again in ’97, spooked by the currency crisis in Asia. People thought he was mad: by the time the crisis had lifted, the Internet was printing money. Mercer had missed it. But within a few short years, the dot-com bubble burst, and it came to light that half of Mercer’s holdings were once again parked in gold. He looked like a prophet.

Another beauty materialized to catwalk me down the hall to Mercer’s well-removed sanctuary. He was sitting in a chair at the far wall opposite his desk, watching two men and a supervisor remove a Picasso framed in heavy glass. “Hello,” he said when he saw me, patting the chair beside him. “Come watch the Met claim a gift.” The men were extricating it from the wall with slow-motion care. The supervisor, in suit and tie, looked on nervously, making tentative gestures as the crating began. It was the world’s most expensive nude and bust and curlicue of green flowers.

“Yours?” I said.

“Was,” said Mercer. “But you know what they say about a picture.”

“What do they say?”

“After you see it once, you never see it again.”

He smiled at me in a way that seemed entirely private. It certainly contained no mirth or happiness.

He turned back to the men and the painting’s meticulous packing up. They set it on a high-tech contraption and steered it out of the room as if it were a man headed around the bend to post-op. The man in suit and tie spent several minutes conveying once again the museum’s gratitude for such an extraordinary gift, which Mercer accepted with grace. Then the man left, and Mercer sat back down.

“Things might start winding down around here,” he said. “The last thing you want to do is forget a Picasso on the wall.”

“Winding down?”

“I’m tired of making money,” he said. “I’m more interested in what brought us together.”

“I thought you said that was a hoax.”

Again he smiled that inward smile.

After Clara’s visit to my office, I had my Internet connection restored both at home and at work. I retrieved all my old email from the trash folder. I bought a new me-machine. The pictures and contacts and apps were returned to their rightful place via my laptop. The voice mail Mercer left for me, asking me to come by his office, had been sitting in an in-box still up and running and none the wiser. Everything was as it had been. I had tried to escape it, but I could not escape it. It blanketed the world.

I didn’t know why Mercer had called and asked to see me a second time. By his own admission, he was a private man. Maybe he wanted to sound me out, secure my silence in some way, swear me to secrecy. He had left the park with such resolve.

But that resolve wasn’t any stronger than mine. He’d visited a mall of his own making since we’d parted, and his rueful smile was full of admission.

“Have you been there yet?” he asked.

“Where?”

“Seir.”

“It exists?”

“It exists,” he said. “It’s kind of a shit hole, smells of goat piss, but it exists.”

“Is it really in Israel?”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I can’t imagine they let just anyone in.”

“No,” he said. “That’s a country with its permits in order.”

“So how did they manage it?”

“At Davos last year,” he said, “I saw my old friend the deputy minister of finance. I asked him, ‘What’s this I hear about an irredentism pact in the Negev?’ He looks at me as cold as a fish on ice and says, ‘I’m not sure what you’re asking.’ Now whenever we have the occasion to meet, he spends all his time avoiding me. So maybe they arranged an irredentism pact, what the hell do I know?”

“What is an irredentism pact?”

“The return of land to those to whom it rightfully belongs.”

“They have a claim to the land?”

“As the first victims of genocide,” he said.

I was reminded of my initial conversation with Sookhart. He’d also called the war against the Amalekites a genocide. But was it possible that a feud as old as the Bible could have some kind of current-day geopolitical consequence?

“Is that very likely?” I asked Mercer.

“You can’t deny they’re there. You can only ask how. And if there’s one country likely to be sympathetic to a request for reparations for genocide…”

“Even one so long ago?”

“I’m just telling you what I’ve been told,” he said.

The agreement had been brokered, according to Mercer, between Grant Arthur and officials of an Israeli coalition government a bit more progressive than the current one. They were in the country not with, but not without, the state’s permission. As far as Israel was officially concerned, they simply didn’t exist.

“I have plans to go back,” he said.

“Back to the shit hole?”

“I felt at home there. I’ve never felt at home. I’m welcome everywhere I go, of course. And I can go anywhere. But that’s different from feeling at home.”

“What was it that made you feel that way?”

“The others, I guess. The people.”

“You need people?” I said, thinking of the beauties and the traders and all the people his money could buy.

“The right people,” he said.

Mercer’s secretary knocked at the door. She brought in a bag from McDonald’s. There was one for me, too.

“It’s no good for you, but what the hell,” he said. “It’s what I grew up on. Don’t feel obliged to join me.”

“I never pass up a free lunch,” I said.

He laughed. “Remember, there’s no such thing. And you’re into me for two now.”

We started in, bags rustling, and took the first few bites in silence. Then: “I’m glad you agreed to another meeting,” he said. “I feel I owe you an apology for the other day.”

“Not at all.”

“I’m always too eager to dismiss it as a hoax.”

“Even after being there?”

“A little infrastructure does not a tradition make,” he said.

“Did they ever ask you for money?”

“Part of me wishes they had. It would confirm all my cynical suspicions and I could dismiss them. I could put them out of my mind. But it’s been over a year now, and all they’ve asked for is discretion.”

“Discretion?”

“They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. There’s a fear that it would disrupt the arrangement they have with their host country. At least there was. Now I don’t know. Something must have changed if they’re all over the Internet.”

“What are the people there like?”

He took a bite of his burger and chewed thoughtfully. “Like the Jews who founded Israel, I imagine,” he said, “before technology killed the kibbutz. Warm, unified. Hard workers. Scrapers. Some bad eggs, but not too many. Professionals, typically, intellectuals of one kind or another. Doubters. Skeptics. They’re happy to belong to a tradition that doesn’t require them to believe in God.” He reached down into the bag for a handful of fries. “The other day, in the park. When I asked if you’d done the genetic test. You told me they had something else in store for you. What did you mean by that?”