Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

I repeated what Frushtick had told me about the next wave of reclaimants, about how they needed to find some way to make Arthur’s research and Lee’s science less essential, and about how that might come down to the people making a leap of faith based on the message in the Cantaveticles.

I also told him that I had had a visitor recently who shared with me the details of my family tree. I was relieved to tell him that. I couldn’t say that I wrote those tweets, but a family tree was something, even if the vital piece was still waiting for me in Israel.

“I’m pleased to hear that they weren’t using you,” he said. “I can’t tell you just how pleased. A man can be cheated out of more than just money.”

He wiped grease from his fingers and then tossed the napkin in the bag. The office, with the desk bare and the Picasso gone, was perfectly generic in spite of its endless treetop view. Nothing like the high-tech cockpit I’d pictured for the seventeenth-richest man in America.

“I was impressed by you,” he said. “They approached you in a way that would have put me off forever, but you remained open to it.”

“I’m still not without my doubts,” I said to him.

“You might never be.”

“I was impressed by you as well,” I said. “You heard what they’d done to me, and you dismissed everything without a second thought.”

“I did,” he said. He nodded. “And yet,” he added, “here we sit.”

“Here we sit,” I said.

“Of course we’re in Israel,” he wrote in response to the email I sent after meeting with Mercer.

Did you think I was in a basement in Tucson sitting around waiting for you to return my emails? Believe it or not, Paul, I have other things going on. It takes a little effort, what we’re doing. Otherwise I’d pop by your shop, say hi. Show you what you’d look like with a little self-knowledge.

What do you do there?

Do?

Yeah, do. You don’t go to church, do you? You don’t pray.

No, we don’t pray. We commune. Look, it sounds hippy-dippy, but it’s not. First things first: we go over the family records. Then we show you what scant pieces of history remain. (See attached.) Then we do our best to make you feel at home. Granted it’s not the Ritz. Most people are just here to visit. We’re not asking anyone to uproot their lives. We just want the reclaimed to be aware. There are holidays and so forth, but only two days are of any real importance. The Annunciation and the Feast of the Paradox. Otherwise, our base crew farms and our visitors study. We live for our nights. It’s at night we share in the feeling of having come home, of being with others who have known all their lives that they’ve been missing out on this, and that this is theirs at last. We light the candles, we enjoy each other’s company, we sing and talk at the table. It’s about the people, Paul, you understand. People sitting around the table, talking. That is what we do here at Seir.

One gets the impression, from later cantonments, that the group Safek the Ulm — formerly Agag, king of the Amalekites — finally manages to gin up with his message of doubt consists of misfits, rejects, ex-slaves, heretics, whores, knuckledraggers from the Neolithic, and a few of your more comely lepers, all atop dehydrated camels and traipsing across the Bible’s inhospitable terrain. The weird thing is, nobody bothers them. They’re out there, not exactly inconspicuous, passing campsites and caravans full of Amorites, Hittites, Jebusites, Perizzites, Girgashites — a smorgasbord of Canaan’s worst scumbags and psychopaths ready to seize upon the first sign of weakness — and Safek and his followers just go whistling by, occasionally enjoying returned greetings, sometimes even being invited to partake of goat bones and a hin or two of wine. Safek, whose erstwhile experience in the neighborhood was an unrelieved nightmare of bloodshed and warfare, finds it downright eerie, until he remembers it’s just what God promised him. “And we had no city to give us name; neither had we king to appoint us captains, to make of us instruments of war; neither had we laws to follow, save one. Behold, make thine heart hallowed by doubt; for God, if God, only God may know. And we followed Safek, and were not consumed.”

And here — at cantonment 42, emailed to me as an attachment — a digression takes place, wherein one of Safek’s followers undergoes exponentially increasing pain and suffering. He’s a stand-up guy among the company he keeps, and nobody really understands why he of all people must lose his wife and children before he’s set upon by boils, fever, blindness, suicidal tendencies, the ravings of a madman, and a generally negative outlook on life, the particulars of which he’s in the middle of expounding upon when he’s suddenly struck by lightning, a lion pounces, and his heart explodes. Nobody can quite believe what they’ve just witnessed, and they all turn to Safek for an explanation. After all, he’s been telling them that if they follow God’s covenant, they’ll be fine, but what just happened to — you guessed it — Job here gives them all the distinct impression that nobody’s looking out for nobody. They’re all tempted to stop what they’re doing and pray like the dickens, because not praying obviously had no effect on Job’s fate. Better to pray and be safe than doubt and be sorry. Boy, does that piss Safek off. Not even as King Agag witnessing all his people being hacked to pieces on Mount Seir was the man this exercised. He storms about, putting to the sword anyone who refuses to rise from the prayer position. Into the story at this point comes a new man, one Eliphaz, described as Safek’s brother. That’s right, out of the blue Safek acquires a brother. Keeping God’s covenant, brother Eliphaz explains calmly, as Safek continues to kick the dust and slap the repentant upside the head, protects them from marauders, thieves, and warmongers, but as for affliction, poverty, starvation, suffering, grief, and just plain dumb luck, well, nothing was ever promised them about any of that. They’re subjects of fate no less than anyone else, the difference being they’re spared the offense of ascribing it to God’s will. What do they know about God, asks Eliphaz, other than that He obviously doesn’t exist, for if He did, would He have allowed all that crazy shit to befall poor Job? He follows this train of thought with a long litany of enigmas like “Hast Thou given the horse strength? Hast Thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst Thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is terrible,” whereupon a great silence settles over the camp, as flies do over Job’s dead body.

“Where’d you get this?” asked Sookhart, looking up from his desk. “I check your bio page every day. I haven’t seen this on there.”

“It was emailed to me.”

“By whom?”

“ ‘Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”

Sookhart was reading a printout of the attachment “Paul C. O’Rourke” had included in his last email: a scan of two columns of text laid out on a yellowing parchment scroll, composed, according to Sookhart, in Aramaic, and frayed, or nibbled at, along the uppermost edge. The translation came in a separate attachment, numbered according to cantonment and verse, with the names of people and places done up in diacritical marks. Safek was “Să-fĕk” The Amalekites were “Ă-măl-ė-kītes.”

“What’s interesting,” he said, and dropped off as he resumed studying the printouts. “What’s interesting,” he said, a second time. He lifted the hair from his arm and held it erect between his fingers, as if to snip its tips like a barber, before burrowing in again. After a full five minutes, he peeled off his reading glasses, sat forward, and peered across the desk at me.