Joshua Ferris: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

I was a dentist, not a website. I was a muddle, not a brand. I was a man, not a profile. They wanted to contain my life with a summary of its purchases and preferences, prescription medications, and predictable behaviors. That was not a man. That was an animal in a cage.

She’d say, “When was the last time you attended church?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Never is not an option. Everyone has been to church at least once. Try being honest.” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. No one worships a little blue leprechaun. First of all, leprechauns are not blue. Second of all, you know as well as anyone that leprechauns did not make heaven and earth. I see no reason to believe in leprechauns and every reason to believe in God. I see God in the sky and I see God on the street. Can you really sit there and suggest that you do not feel God at work in the world?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “One cannot feel the work of the Big Bang. Why must you always bring up the Big Bang when we’re trying to have a discussion about God?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “But you can’t be good on account of the Big Bang. You can only be good on account of God. Don’t you want to be good?” I’d tell her, she’d say, “Metaphysical blackmail my patootie. I want you to answer me. Do you think you’re good?” I’d say yes, I thought I was good. And then she’d say, she’d think about it for a minute, and she’d say, her voice would drop and she’d put her hand on my arm, and she’d say, “But are you well?” she’d say. “Are you well?”

Mrs. Convoy and I joined Connie at the computer station. Sure enough, up on-screen was a website for an O’Rourke Dental. So there are two O’Rourke Dentals, I thought at the time, and poor Mrs. Convoy is confused and will be disappointed. Then Connie clicked on the “About” page. There we were, the four of us: Abby Bower, dental assistant; Betsy Convoy, head hygienist; Connie Plotz, office manager; and me, Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S. It wasn’t a second O’Rourke Dental. It was our O’Rourke Dental, my O’Rourke Dental.

“Who did this?” I demanded.

“Not me,” said Connie.

“Not me,” said Betsy.

“Abby?” said Connie.

Abby quickly shook her head.

“Well somebody had to do it,” I said.

They looked at me.

“It certainly wasn’t me,” I said.

“You must have,” said Mrs. Convoy. “Look, there we are.”

We looked back at the screen. There we were.

The picture of Mrs. Convoy on the “About” page of the O’Rourke Dental website was originally a senior-year portrait taken from her 1969 high school yearbook, a black-and-white headshot she found flattering insofar as she did not object to it and one that made her seem, despite a postwar bouffant painfully out-of-date by 1969, young and almost comely. It held absolutely nothing in common with the buzz-cut battle-ax to my immediate right. Abby’s picture was a professional headshot, glossy and airbrushed. Was Abby some kind of actor? How should I know, she never discussed anything with me. The picture made her look glamorous and dramatic — again, nothing at all like her real-life counterpart. Connie had been denied a picture, which upset her unreasonably. She took it as an indication of the disposability of office managers. I said nothing about the fact that no one had ever called her an office manager before. The picture of me was surveillance grade, taken just as I was descending a flight of stairs — specifically, those leading down to the subway stop at Eighty-Sixth and Lex. I looked like a terrorist wanted by the FBI.

“Who did this?” I repeated.

My three employees looked at me blankly.

“This is unacceptable,” I said.

“I think it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Convoy.

“I want it taken down.”

“What? Why? This is exactly what we’ve needed,” she said. “Whoever did this did a wonderful job.”

“Whoever did this,” I said, “did it without my permission and for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom. Who would do such a thing? It’s disturbing. We should all be very disturbed.”

“You must have done it yourself and you just don’t remember. Or maybe you won it at a silent auction. Oh, they must have pulled your business card out of a fishbowl!”

“Not very likely, Betsy. Find out who did this,” I said to Connie.

“How?” she asked.

I had no idea how.

“Can’t you call someone?”

“Who would I call?”

“This is outrageous,” I said.

There was only a name at the bottom of our home page: Seir Design. A Google search for Seir Design yielded a spare website with a brief description of services and an email address: info@seirdesign.com. I emailed them immediately.

“Dear Seir Design,” I wrote.

My name is Paul C. O’Rourke. I own and operate O’Rourke Dental at 969 Park Avenue in Manhattan. I’m writing to ask you to please remove (or take down, or whatever it is you do) a website that you created for my practice without my permission.

Do you ordinarily go around making websites for people who haven’t asked for them? Or did someone represent himself to you as Paul C. O’Rourke? If so, I would like to know who this impostor is. I am the real Paul C. O’Rourke, and I’m telling you that I do not want a website. I hope you can imagine how disturbing it is to find that your dental practice suddenly has a website.

I look forward to your prompt reply.

I felt violated, and helpless, and repeatedly checked my email throughout the day, but I did not receive an answer.

Every year I renewed the baseball package offered by DIRECTV and recorded every Red Sox game using an old-fashioned VCR. I had every game the Sox had played since 1984, with the exception of those games lost to power failure. I was on my seventh VCR; out of fear of their discontinuance, I had seven more stacked in a closet. I ate the same meal (a plate of chicken and rice) before every game and did not make plans on game night. I never watched the sixth inning.

“Why the sixth inning?” Connie once asked me.

“It’s just a superstition.”

“But why not the fifth inning, or the seventh?”

“Why not the fourth,” I said, “or the eighth?”

“Why be superstitious at all, is what I’m asking.”

“Because it’s bad luck not to be superstitious,” I said.

If the Red Sox fell nine games or more below the New York Yankees at any time during regular-season play, I took the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, checked into the Howard Johnson hotel in North Bergen, and watched that night’s game outside city limits, in an effort to change my team’s fortunes.

“If you hate the Yankees so much,” Connie asked me, “why did you move to New York?”

“To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.”

Though everything had changed for me since 2004, I still watched the Red Sox whenever they played. I’d been watching the Red Sox for so long that not to watch them was to stand in the middle of my living room and wonder what to do with myself. Oh, there was lots to do. There was more to do at that moment than there had been at any other moment in the history of the world. And there was no city with more to offer than New York City. I could grab a slice. I could eat sushi. I could order a sheep’s-milk cheese at a wine bar and drink Pinot until bohemianism and Billie Holiday worship saturated my soul and I was drunk, drunk, drunk. I could go down to the Brooklyn Inn and have a stout. There were half a dozen bars along the way where I could stop for a drink before reaching the Brooklyn Inn. There were bodegas and Korean grocers where I could shop for fresh organic fruits and vegetables. I could sit at the bar of the new Italian joint with a plate of meatballs and a bottle of wine. Cask beer was a new craze. I could have a pint of cask beer. Or do something totally unexpected, like return to the city, to Thirty-Fourth Street, and buy a ticket to the viewing deck of the Empire State Building — no, the Empire State Building was closed. Many things were closed or starting to close by that time of night: museums, art galleries, bookstores. You had to try not to let it limit you. Think of all the things still available. I could have a Starbucks. Or a bagel. Or a falafel sandwich. Once again it occurred to me that so many of the things I could do in New York involved eating and drinking. Had we been placed here on earth to do nothing more than eat and drink? Was I simply supposed to come home from work and eat and drink my way through the night, piling falafel and hot dog onto chicken curry and washing it all down with copious amounts of beer and endless nightcaps of whiskey, before passing out halfway to the bathroom in my Pride Freedom Mobility Chair? It seemed yes. But no. One had to remember all the many other things the city made available to someone looking to occupy his time and bring significance to his night. Like what? Like see a movie, for one. New York City gets all the best movies. Even better, attend a Broadway play. You could only do that in New York. But it was a Friday night in New York City. There were how many other people wondering what to do with themselves on this Friday night, not to mention all the tourists in town to do in New York what they could only do here. The best shows would already be sold out. And as to getting there, you have to brace yourself weeks in advance to endure the tourists tearing their way through Times Square in anticipation of a show. Then you get there, to your theater, and there are crowds outside the marquee, the interminable first act, and the intermission, when all the lights come up and everyone, standing and stretching and sharing their thoughts about what they’ve just seen, wonders why you are alone with yourself on a Friday night. I was not going to spend my Friday night being gawked at. My Thursday nights never caused me any troubles. It was always my Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights that caused me troubles. On those nights, I was reduced to eating and drinking. The city had almost nothing else to offer, and if this great city had almost nothing else to offer, imagine what it was like in lesser cities, or the suburbs, or the small rural towns where so many people are clerks and farmers, and you will understand, finally, why this country has become a nation of fat alcoholics and the nurses and therapists who tend to them. We amble down our streets, we list. Skin folds turn into body parts not yet named. We are consuming ourselves alive as our physical grotesqueries grow in direct proportion to our federal deficits and discount gun shops. Throughout the land there is nothing to do but eat and drink and shoot, and if you’re restricted by city ordinance to eating and drinking, you might as well turn on the game. So that’s what I did. That’s what I always did: takeout and the game — which wasn’t, after all, such a bad fate. It temporarily took my mind off the website that had been created against my will and periodically made me forget about my helplessness before the webmasters at Seir Design. We were playing the Tampa Bay Rays that night, and I tried my best to concentrate. The real trick was to ignore all of the other possibilities forfeited by falling back on the game, the possibilities that came to mind only now, with the game on and the takeout ordered, the many possibilities involving people, enterprise, and a definite sense of happening. These included the various professional functions I was invited to attend nearly every night of the week. But did I really want to participate in a professional function on a Friday night? The last people I wanted to hang out with were a bunch of dweeby dentists, I always thought the day I received an invitation to participate in a professional function, dismissing it out of hand as a complete waste of time until the night of the function came around and I found myself at home again, alone, the takeout ordered and nothing to do but watch the game. Then I would consider the professional function in a different light. Unlike me, those dweeby dentists had something to do on a Friday night involving more than watching a regular-season baseball game. Unlike me, those dentists might find themselves in an engaging conversation or making a connection with an unlikely someone or even just learning some new technique that improved the health of a patient. That alone would have made the night meaningful. It revealed a closed mind, a crabbed disposition toward the possibilities when, two weeks earlier or even just a week earlier, I received the invitation to the professional function and dismissed it out of hand because there was a game on that night. I never did anything on game night, even though I recorded the games and could always watch them later, because those nights were sacrosanct, and if I gave up the one sacrosanct thing, where would I be and what would I have? Any true devotion is a condition to be suffered. If my devotion to the Red Sox had waned after their extraordinary comeback during the American League Championship of 2004, their truly historic comeback after being down three games to none, and against the Yankees of all teams — probably objectively the most crass and reviled team in the history of sports, with that obnoxious logo so well known, the interlocking N and Y you can find on swag in every city of the world, a symbol so offensive that only the Nazi swastika compares with it, and yet still regarded by so many as benign, something to admire, even worship, revealing the true extent of the human capacity for mass delusion — if my devotion to the Red Sox had waned since they beat the Yankees and swept the Cardinals to win the World Series and end an eighty-six-year title drought, my thirty years of devotion to them would have been a fair-weather devotion if it did not require sacrifice of me, true sacrifice, sacrifice indistinguishable from suffering. So of course I passed on the professional function and sat down in my leather recliner with my beer and my chicken curry to watch us play the Rays. It was only a regular-season game, and against the Rays, of all teams, the middling, third-place Rays. The game’s outcome, while potentially a factor late in the season, if a wild-card situation should develop, was completely inconsequential that night. It was only another regular-season baseball game, one of thousands watched over the course of a lifetime, a game of extraordinarily low stakes and deserving of no genuine emotional investment. Ask any non — sports fan how much yet another regular-season baseball game means to them and they will tell you: nothing. Less than nothing. I only had to consider the multitude of non — sports fans and their rich evening dockets to feel paralyzed by the free world on a Friday night, its alternatives and variations whispering their seductions, while the innings crawled by without urgency or consequence. But then something would happen on the field, it could be as simple as a double play, or the slow development of a no-hitter, and all the old excitement would rush back, all the unbidden excess of mystery and thrill that came at me as a boy of six or seven when I would watch my father watching the game, his eyes on the TV while the Bakelite radio provided the color. All that comfort, all that cushion, and yet he would perch on the edge of his easy chair as if monitoring a tough landing from the space deck. He called me Paulie. “Paulie, run and get me a beer from the fridge.” “Paulie, stay awake, now, it’s the sixth inning, Paulie, you gotta watch the game and tell me what happens.” “We lost, Paulie, it’s another loss, goddamn it, that’s how it is with them losing fucks, they lose on you, the fuckers.” We always began the games with me in his lap, but before the first inning was over, he would no longer be aware of me. In contrast, I was carefully attuned to his every move, to the sounds of the springs inside his gold recliner shrieking with his every shift. Those springs were as tired and tortured as an old flogged horse, but they were just as dependable, singing the song of his unbearable tension, his unbearable despair. He kept track of the game on a scorecard laid upon one flat arm of the chair. Sweat dripped down a can of Narragansett into the carpet’s cheap weave. He might have been in the dugout himself, so physically did he involve himself in a game. Up, down, up, down, pacing, pacing, back and forth: biting a thumbnail in an unnatural twist of the hand; on his feet cursing, which overwhelmed me with alarm; down on his knees and peering up at the TV with me beside him. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I pantomimed his expressions. I calibrated my reactions to match his in mood and degree when anything of moment shook the stadium to its feet. His intensity blanketed me. What was the Boston Red Sox? What was the world? Every pitch was a matter of life and death, every swing a chance to dream. And what are we talking about? A regular-season baseball game. Nothing. Less than nothing. How I loved that frightening man. How he was everything awesome and good, until one day he sat down in the bathtub, closed the shower curtain, and shot himself in the head.