Joshua Ferris: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

The page begins, “Ulmism is the predominant religious tradition of the Ulms, which began with the revelations of Grant Arthur (1960–2022) during the Third Reawakening.”

The Plotzes must still think that those tweets and postings made in my name really came from me. I don’t know; I haven’t heard from Uncle Stuart since that day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don’t get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz — any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently.

Connie still sends me an email now and then. She and the poet married and had a son. A university press published some of her poems in a chapbook, which I have read over and over again, searching in vain for some sign of me, some mention. I take comfort in knowing that she was never much of an autobiographical writer. She teaches in Kentucky. “We’re all doing really well here in Lexington,” she writes. “How are you and how is Betsy?”

Betsy succeeds every year in dragging me to Nepal on a missionary vacation. We land in Kathmandu and spend our time in nearby Bodhnath tending to the teeth of the poor and malnourished, individuals with nothing more to stimulate their gums than a branch from a banyan tree. You’ve never seen so many robed men in your life, so many heads shaved to the bone in the name of God. They spend their days spinning prayer wheels and peddling yak’s butter. Everywhere I go in Bodhnath, the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha stare down at me from the gilded tower of the stupa, a happy witness to all the suffering. I say as much to Mrs. Convoy. “First of all,” she says, “the Buddha is not a god. It’s more like a self-help thing. And second of all, don’t you see that those eyes are painted on?” Painted on? I will say. “My goodness, young man, you can be so easily duped.”

In the early evenings, after we finish for the day, I walk around the hot dusty uneven streets of Kathmandu, lined with crippled beggars and mounds of trash, and I take pictures with my me-machine of goats’ heads with charred horns and leering smiles. They’re for sale right on the street, arrayed on vendors’ tables like the skulls of executed criminals. I pass whole families dwelling in doorways, trekkers and seekers and sightseers, men on bicycle rickshaws, mangy dogs. All the buildings look condemned, their windows either bare or boarded. There’s advertising everywhere.

On our last day there in 2014, on a solo walk before dinner, I found the one thing I’d never bought in all my years on earth. I’m not talking something exotic and rare, an animal horn or a handicraft found only in the birthplace of the Buddha. I mean something straight off Main Street USA, made in China, and sold throughout the world. I had purchased something like it, but that particular thing I never would have considered right for me. The minute I did, the minute I realized I could buy it and put it on — that I was free, in some intoxicatingly existential way, to make such a radical move, bound no more by superstition and tribalism, by perverse inbred loyalty — I felt an exquisite little shudder run down my back. The object in question, a sun-beaten Chicago Cubs hat, was sitting on quiet display in a smeared window of a shop catering to trekkers not far from the Garden of Dreams. Above the bill, swimming in a sea of blue, the big red C synonymous with bungling and loss. The Cubs had not won the World Series in 105 years. That was not only the longest championship drought in major-league baseball; it was the longest such drought of any professional team in American sports. Imagine it! Joining in the preseason to pray for a good year, watching their performance with genuine suspense, and feeling again the crushing heartbreak that only the perennial, tantalizing possibility of true redemption can provoke. My God! The world new again! Something to desperately want! I went inside, and when I came back out, it was on my head, where my Red Sox hat had been for years. It didn’t fit perfectly; it would take some breaking in. I let a Toyota lorry stacked tall with sacks of rice trundle past, and then I stepped out into the crowd.

“Mista mista!”

A boy in a Fila jersey and grubby jeans was suddenly at my side. I was used to kids crowding me, begging for rupees.

“Want to hit?”

“What?”

He was smiling at me, some kind of wooden plank in his hand. I had a closer look at him. Suddenly I crouched down and took hold of his arms. He was a dark Nepali kid, fat cheeks and a chicken-thin neck. But it was his smile. It was what’s called God given. His teeth were big and white. His gums were pink and full.

“Who’s your dentist?” I asked him.

“You.”

“Me?”

“You the dentist,” he said.

“This is my work?”

“Go ahhh. Open up. Now spit.”

He turned and spat in the street, and all the other kids laughed.

“This is good work,” I said.

“Now you hit. Okay?”

The plank in his hand, I realized, was an improvised cricket bat. I got to my feet.

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“It’s okay! I show you.”

He handed me the bat. The other kids scattered to take up their positions. Behind me, a little urchin made three stacks of dented beer cans. Wickets, or whatever they’re called. I’ve never understood the first thing about cricket.

The kid ran out to pitch. His arms pushed everyone back, back. I was in a Cubs cap; they expected great things from me.

“What’s my goal here?” I called out to the kid.

“Like baseball. You hit.”

“Just hit it?”

“Just hit, just hit.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Ready, steady, go,” he said.

And with that he did a strange and elaborate windup, putting his whole body into it. His arm pinwheeled furiously as he raced forward. The ball came at me fast and low. What the hell, I thought, what the hell, and without any expectation or understanding, doubtful of any hope of success, I swung, one eye on the ball, and one eye on heaven.

Joshua Ferris is the author of two previous novels, Then We Came to the End and The Unnamed. Then We Came to the End received the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. In 2010, Ferris was chosen for The New Yorker ’s “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City.

joshuaferris.com