To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (14 page)

I handed the explorer back to Abby and held up my hands like a guy who’s just dropped his gun.

“Please say it out loud to reassure me,” he said. “Is it clear?”

“It’s clear,” I said.

He opened his mouth. He probably had six months to live.

After I referred that man to an oncologist, and after our last patient left for the day and blessed silence settled in again, the machines quiet and the TVs turned off, and each of my three employees at her individual tasks, I started cleaning. Cleaning was ordinarily Abby’s job, but I felt like doing some of it that night. I sterilized the chairs and wiped down the lights. I removed everything from the countertops and gave them a thorough bath. I scrubbed the sinks. I removed the medical-waste containers and the regular trash. I walked to the front desk to collect the trash there but got distracted by a stack of old patient charts. They had yet to be filed or had been filed a long time ago and were now displaced by newer files and being readied for storage. I picked one at random: McCormack, Maudie. Date of last appointment: 04/19/04. I
tossed it into the garbage bag. I tossed all the files in that pile. I took a file off the shelf: Kastner, Ryan. Date of last appointment: 09/08/05. It, too, was tossed. I pulled down more patient charts and tossed them. Mrs. Convoy peered in with a cocked head. “What are you doing?” I ignored her. She took a step forward and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” I opened another garbage bag and tossed more files. She fished out a file from the first bag and opened it. “You can’t throw this away,” she said, inspecting it closely. “Do you see the date of last activity on this chart?” I ignored her, tossing more files, and she said, “All patient records must be retained for at least six years in accordance with section 29.2. This file is only four years old.” “I’m tossing it,” I said. “But you can’t. The ADA says…” She went on to tell me all sorts of things about the ADA. I didn’t give a damn about the ADA. I suddenly didn’t give a damn about rules, regulations, continuity of care, or professional liability. “These people need a fresh start,” I said. “I’m giving them all a fresh start.” “A fresh start?” she said. “Have you lost your mind?” I ignored her, tossing more files. Connie stood out on the periphery watching us. Mrs. Convoy had to open each file she rescued, in order to inspect the date of last activity, while I could grab five, six, a dozen at a time and toss them in. “Here is one from 2008,” she said. “You cannot dispose of this file. You have a professional obligation…” She went on to tell me of all my professional obligations. “2008 was a long time ago,” I said. “That clown’s not coming back here.” “How do you know that?” she asked. “You don’t know that.” I tossed more files as she tried to prevent me. I noticed that Abby was now standing just behind Connie, and that the two of them looked on as children do when they find their parents at each other’s throat. “They don’t come back,” I said. “None of them ever comes back. Not in time. Never.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. We have an extraordinary
retention rate. You should be very proud of your retention rate.” She went on to tell me how very good my retention rate was compared with that of other dentists she had worked for and how proud I should be of it. I tossed more files. “Who cares if they come in? What difference does it make if they come in or not? No difference! None!” I grabbed twenty files and tossed them. “Stop!” she said. “What the hell are we doing with all these goddamn files!” I cried. “Paul!” she said. “Please! Stop!” I tossed one last file and then I went home.

KARI GUTRICH, TALSMAN’S CYBERLAW
expert, returned my call the following Wednesday. She informed me that I might be able to sue once the damage was done, but as for stopping it, that was almost impossible. The Internet moved too fast.

“What legal body,” she asked, “governmental agency, or law-enforcement bureau would you appeal to at the moment?”

“The police?” I suggested. “The courts?”

She laughed, I thought a little too heartily. “That’s good for out there,” she said. “But you’re in here now.”

“In here?”

The police, the courts—that was common sense, whereas we were discussing technology and the law. Future legislation might introduce stricter controls governing misappropriations, impersonations, defamations, and other disputes of character and online reputation, she said, but the current laws were vague on how to address those issues in real time. And people don’t have access to the courts just because they’re irritated.

“Irritated?” I said. “They’ve created a website for my practice, started a Facebook page in my name, took unauthorized photographs of me, creepy photographs, and now they’re using my name
to comment all over the Internet, implicating me in some kind of religion, and the only legal claim I can make is to being irritated?”

“Do you know who’s doing this to you?”

“I know who registered the site,” I said. I gave her Al Frushtick’s name.

“We can probably get the site to come down,” she said. “But as a legal matter and, more important, as a practical matter, there’s just not much more we can do at the moment.”

I wanted to hit the wall in frustration.

“I can’t sue for defamation?” I asked.

“What damages have you suffered? We don’t fully know yet.”

She counseled me to do nothing, and to do it carefully. For if I did something, I might inadvertently call more attention to my new online existence, a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect: once people knew I was trying to suppress something published on the Internet, they would actively seek it out to see what all the fuss was about, which would create a negative feedback loop, more attention drawing yet more attention.

“Streisand? As in Barbra?”

“We have a best-practices worksheet we advise all our clients to follow,” she said. “Give me your email address and I’ll send it over.”

“Can you just fax it?” I asked.

Don’t engage, she cautioned me, despite how hard that might be, and let matters take their course. Later we could reassess the situation to determine what actionable complaint I might have.

She was looking at the website as we spoke. “You really didn’t make this site?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I really didn’t.”

“Well,” she said, possibly attempting to console. “At least it’s a nice one.”

I stood outside room 3 composing a reply to Seir Design on my me-machine. “Why do you keep asking me what I know about my life, Al?” I wrote.

He (or they, or it) replied quickly:

I wrote:

I deleted that and wrote:

Irritated at receiving no reply, I kept at it.

Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.

He wrote back:

“Dr. O’Rourke?” she said. She might have been saying it for a while. “Paul?” she said.

It was Connie. I let the hand with the phone fall to my side.

“Is everything okay?”

I nodded. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

I waited until she walked away. Then I wrote:

He replied:

It might seem that a dental professional can never really get to know his patients because visits are so infrequent and short-lived, but you’d be surprised. When someone is religious about regular checkups, and between those checkups has toothaches and accidents and cosmetic needs and thus requires additional work, a warm rapport can easily develop. Some patients even thank me after the most brutalizing treatments, genuinely grateful for what I do for them. When next they come in, I will ask about their jobs and their families before getting down to business. It’s almost small-town that way.

That morning, when I walked in on Bernadette Marder, despite having worked on her for nearly ten years, I honestly thought she was a first-time patient. She looked so much older than the last time I saw her.

The sight of Bernadette looking old reminded me of a joke. A woman makes an appointment with a new dentist and discovers that he has the same name as someone she went to high school with. She wonders if her new dentist could be the boy she had such a terrible crush on when she was a girl of fifteen. But when he walks in, he’s such an old fart that she quickly comes to her senses. Even so, after the exam is over, she idly asks him what high school he attended… and sure enough, it’s the one she attended! “What year
did you graduate?” she asks him, growing excited, and he names the very year she graduated. “You were in my class!” the woman exclaims, and the unsuspecting dentist screws up his eyes and peers at the old hag in the chair and says, “What did you teach?”

My patient, Bernadette Marder, looked so hideously old, so hideously and prematurely aged since the last time I’d seen her, that all her most stressful and trying years might have been crammed into six months. She had gone from forty to sixty-five in a mere hundred and eighty days. Her hair had thinned out and just sort of died on the top of her head. A scaly pink meridian divided one limp half from the other. An array of wrinkles, radiating from her pale lips, had deepened and fossilized, and her face sagged. And yet when I realized (thanks to the name on the chart) that it was Bernadette, my Bernadette, and not some first-time geriatric patient, and asked how she was doing, she told me she’d never been happier. She had just gotten married, in fact, and had been given new responsibility at work, which came with a small raise. I couldn’t comprehend it. Never happier, newly married, making more money, and looking like death. Almost impossible to track on a day-to-day basis, the passage of time is at work on people unremittingly. As a dentist seeing familiar faces only once every six months, I became acutely aware of it. It is the inexorable truth of our existence on earth, and if it is happening to Bernadette Marder, I was made to realize once again, it is also happening to us—to Abby, Betsy, Connie, and me—though it remains elusive, indeed invisible, so that, presumably, we will not all stop in horror and stare and point at one another until the screaming begins. No, we carry on, as Bernadette was doing, dwelling happily in a constant present that persisted day after day even as it continually perished, never demanding a sober assessment, or a sudden outburst of pity,
or the radical reconsideration of everything.

Looking at Bernadette in the chair, sallow, wrinkled, bald, and happy, I felt I had no choice but to tell her. But tell her what? I didn’t know. What good would it do, what action could she take? She was being consumed in some way, literally consumed before my very eyes, and no one, probably for fear of offending her, had said anything. As a medical professional, it was my obligation to do so. I just didn’t know how to put it into words. No matter how well intentioned, I might only end up offending her and then losing her as a patient. Did I want to sacrifice Bernadette’s billings to my observation that she appeared to be growing older faster than the rest of us? No, I thought. I will just ignore it. But how can anyone in good conscience ignore it? “Bernadette,” I said, and she turned to me in the chair.
You’ve grown old, Bernadette.
No, I couldn’t say that!
Bernadette, your best days are over, it’s all downhill from here.
Good God, no!
You’re fucking dying, Bernadette!
No!
You’re practically decomposing on a cold slab!
Oh, God, she was looking at me so intently now, I had to say something.

“Bernadette,” I said, “I mention this only out of…” I stopped and began again, saying, “Bernadette, have you, or your new husband perhaps, noticed that, well, how shockingly—”

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

“Oh, Connie!” I exclaimed.

“When you have a moment,” she said.

I looked happily down upon Bernadette. “That’s Connie,” I said. “I must go and talk to her.”

But on my way over, I saw that she was holding her iPad, which could only mean more unpleasantness.

“What is it this time?” I said.

“Twitter,” she said.

In the last week, the comments, messages, and postings made in my name continued to appear on respectable sites like ESPN,
HuffPost, National Geographic, while expanding into darker recesses, into fringe chat rooms, unmoderated forums unfurling sex and death, my brand proliferating across platforms, burrowing ever deeper into the shallows… and now, two weeks after the O’Rourke Dental website appeared, “my” first tweet entered the world. It came from the account of @PaulCORourkeDental (New York, NY • www.drpaulcorourke.com) and it read:

Connie and I puzzled over that one awhile.

“I think you’re saying you shouldn’t believe.”

“
I’m
not saying anything,” I said.

“I know it’s not you, Paul,” she said. “You don’t have to keep insisting.”

“I just want to make clear—”

“I know it’s not you. There’s no reason to be defensive.”

“I’m not being defensive, I’m being pissed off!”

“You sound defensive,” she said.

I read the tweet again. I thought she was right. I was advocating, or my impostor was advocating, possibly on behalf of God, against belief. I fired off another email while Connie watched.

I handed the iPad back to her, and she read the tweet again.

“You know what it sounds like to me?” she asked, before walking away.

“What?”

“Something an atheist would say.”

I knew I was in love with the Plotzes when I felt embarrassed to be an atheist, and instead of insisting upon it as a declaration of my essential self, around them I kept it under wraps. Rejecting God seemed an affront to their entire way of life, at least as I understood it: to the prayers sung on Friday night, to the commandments kept on the Sabbath, to every God-directed effort made throughout the week. They worked hard at their faith. They made it as much about the body as the soul. Sure, the Catholics crossed themselves upon entering the church, they touched holy water, they knelt before climbing into the pew, but these were but the throat clearings of a proper Plotz. The old-timey sway-and-song of charismatic Protestants was a set of Plotz knee bends. That’s why it came as such a surprise when Connie told me that Ezzie, another uncle, was an atheist. I was really shocked. I’d watched the guy. He looked as devout as the rest. “He doesn’t believe in God?” I asked. “Nope.” “Why not?” “Because… I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask him.” I wasn’t going to ask any Plotz about atheism. “Is it because of the Holocaust?” I asked. She looked irritated by the question. “Not every Jew who doesn’t believe doesn’t believe because of the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t have a specifically Jewish set of reasons for not believing. Hello?” she said, pointing to herself. “Sometimes we just don’t believe.” “But Ezzie acts like he believes,” I said. “He bows his head. He wears the whatchamacallit. He goes to synagogue.” “But that’s different,” she said. “What’s different?” “Of course he does those things.” “Why?” “Because it’s important to him. He’s a Jew, it’s important.” “Because of the Holocaust?” “What is it with you and the Holocaust? Do you think everything we do centers around the Holocaust?” “No.” “The Holocaust, sure, a very big deal. But it was a while ago. We don’t wake up every morning asking ourselves
what we should or shouldn’t be doing on account of the Holocaust.” “Sorry,” I said. “It’s new to me.” “Ezzie’s an atheist,” she said. “Why? I don’t know. Why are you an atheist?” “Because God doesn’t exist.” “Well, there you have it. That’s probably what Ezzie would say, too.”