Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

If she no longer knew what made her a Jew, she knew even less what made him one. One day, after a year of living together, she looked over and saw him in kippah, prayer shawl, and phylacteries, reading Torah while tightly rocking. A common sight, a practice whose reasons were self-evident, programmatic, and beyond scrutiny, so unquestioned that she had never really seen it before. But now she could only gape in wonder. It was deeply strange: the nonbelieving non-Jew in the middle of a devout Jewish prayer.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice full of contempt.

“Praying,” came the reply.

“But why?”

He ignored her. She couldn’t interrogate his assumptions and motivations as he had so freely interrogated hers. He wouldn’t let her. But she knew he wasn’t Jewish. There was no word for what he was, unless that word was “Jewish-ish.” Everything before he became Jewish-ish — family neglect, loneliness, alienation — was off-limits. It had been discarded. He put on a skullcap and was born. Her father was right, she realized, even if they had arrived at the same conclusion from positions now diametrically opposed. He was a fraud.

“There was something desperately fraudulent about him,” she told us.

“Did Grant Arthur ever talk to you about a people in the Bible called the Amalekites?” asked Wendy.

“Yes.”

“And a people called the Ulms?”

“Yes. After his father died. He returned to New York, and when he came back, he was different. He stopped reading Torah and started spending time at the library. He was looking into his personal history, researching his family tree. He had discovered that he belonged to a people, some kind of lost history or something.”

It was the last straw. The only cousin still willing to speak to her found a way to loan her two hundred dollars. She boarded a bus and never saw him again. She arrived in New York in a pair of blue jeans and one of those honky-tonk shirts Debra Winger wore in Urban Cowboy, with buttons of fake pearl.

“Here’s a question I wanted to ask you this morning,” said Wendy, “when you were explaining all of this to Pete. Why did you return to Judaism?”

“Oh, Lord!” cried Mirav, and her laughter dispelled some of the tension in the room. “That’s such a long, dreary story. How can I sum it up for you without boring you to tears? Let’s see: husband, divorce, mistakes, regrets. Thirty years of spiritual emptiness.” She laughed. “I guess I just realized that he was right after all. Life is best when it’s lived as a Jew.”

“This thing you’re mixed up in,” Stuart began.

“I’m not mixed up in anything,” I said.

“Aren’t you?”

“Is it me you’re worried about? Have you gone to all this trouble just for me? Because I never got the impression that you liked me very much.”

“The truth has to start somewhere.”

“And what is the truth?”

“Haven’t you just heard it?”

“I heard the details of a love affair that I’d been made aware of already. You heard her — he was nineteen. A kid, just some lost kid.”

“Well, he’s not a kid anymore,” said Wendy. “And he’s certainly not lost.”

“Do you even know who you’re talking about?” I asked her. I turned to Stuart. “Do you?”

“He’s the mastermind,” said Wendy.

“The mastermind? He spends his time in libraries, in archives, assembling family trees,” I said. “Some mastermind.”

“He’s been told,” she said to Stuart. “That puts me right with Mercer. I’m done.” And with that, she left the room.

Stuart turned to Mirav. “Would you mind giving me a moment alone with Paul?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She stepped out. I felt weird being alone with Stuart in the commons room of an Orthodox religious center in Crown Heights.

“It doesn’t bother you, the things you’ve just heard?”

“I keep telling you,” I said. “I’ve heard it already.”

“Everything? As she presented it?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Maybe not exactly as she presented it,” I said. “But there are always two sides to every story.”

“The truth isn’t simply ‘one side of the story,’ ” he said. “The truth isn’t a partisan choice.”

“And you have a monopoly on the truth? You know that you should side with her over the differences between their stories?”

“What are those differences?”

“He left her, for one. She didn’t leave him, he left her. And everything she just told us, that happened before his father died, before he confessed on his deathbed. Arthur was lost when he was in love with Mirav. It was only after they parted that he discovered the truth about himself.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“That’s what he has told me. He doesn’t keep Mirav a secret.”

He looked at me with what I felt keenly to be disappointment. “Believe what you want to believe,” he said. “But the suffering does not belong to them. It belongs to the Jews who experienced it. It belongs to the dead and nameless who have gone unrecorded in history and who the world has long forgotten. They can’t borrow that suffering and make what they want of it. They can’t adopt it and turn it into a farce.”

“I never wanted to disappoint you,” I said.

“Let’s be perfectly clear — this has nothing to do with you. This is much bigger than you. A man broke with reality. He took an old legend from the Bible and made a myth from it, and now he tells the myth like it’s truth. This is how it happens.”

I arrived home that night during the fifth inning. I ordered takeout, poured a drink, and waited for the game to end so that I could rewind the tape and start from the beginning. I called Mercer, not for the first time that day. There was again no answer.

After the game I took the bottle onto the balcony. I had a seat on a canvas chair and looked out on the Brooklyn Promenade. There’s almost nothing better than the Promenade and its walkers, benchwarmers, and late-night lovemakers to further estrange you from a Friday night. I poured a drink and toasted them. I toasted the whole city. “Here’s to your picnics and suntans,” I said. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, that luminous glow just across the river. People were still hard at work. “Here’s to your war rooms and coronaries,” I toasted the people inside that honeycomb of industry. “Here’s to your dress socks and divorce papers.” I had a toast for practically everyone that night. “To you, young couple overlooking the river,” I said, “here’s to your frittatas and sex tapes.” “To you, picture taker with the endless flash,” I said, “here’s to your personal-brand maintenance with every uploaded image.” “To you, beautiful youth, wasting your life behind your me-machine,” I said, “here’s to your echo chamber and reflecting pool.” I toasted them all. I drank and toasted. “To you, Yankees fan with the Jeter shirt,” I said, “here’s to your aftershaves and rape acquittals.” I poured and I drank. “To you, corporate citizen, failing to bag up your Pomeranian’s warm shit,” I said, “and to all your fellow derivatives traders and quant douche bags: here’s to your anonymous faces and unlisted numbers,” I said. “Here’s to your sinking of America, you scumbags. May you end up in cold cells where rats go to die.” “Here’s to you, Mrs. Convoy,” I said, “here’s to your catechisms and your turtlenecks.” “Here’s to you, Abby. Thanks for the notice. Good luck on your new opportunities.” “And here’s to you, Connie. Here’s to your poet, your Ben, and all your future smiling babies of life.” I didn’t toast Uncle Stuart. I tried not to think of him, or of Mirav or Grant Arthur. I was drinking, and toasting, to forget. I continued in this vein until I had only enough toast left for one last drink. “And to you,” I said, “asshole on the balcony, here’s to your curried flatulence and your valid fears of autoerotic asphyxiation. Here’s to your longing, your longing for the company of others, and all your bighearted efforts to secure it. Cheers,” I said. I toasted myself and drank. I must have been saying much of this aloud, as a neighbor of mine, standing on her balcony, was peering over at me. I toasted her. She went inside. I was done with the bottle, I was done toasting and drinking. For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings — the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline — and I thought, Why couldn’t those cunts have flown into that building? Then I passed out, and when I woke, there was nobody, I mean absolutely nobody, out on the Promenade. I searched and searched, I waited and waited. Surely someone would walk by any minute now. But no one did.