Read To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Online
Authors: Joshua Ferris
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General
She sat down and Googled the passage. It returned no exact matches.
“Not from the Bible at all,” she said. “Looks to me like somebody’s fucking with you.”
“Somebody is fucking with me,” I said.
“Now that,” she said, “is a Jewish thing.”
At 11:34 a.m. that morning, I wrote Seir Design:
I’ve been waiting since Friday for you to reply to my email. I assume that people making their living in the IT sector check their email with great regularity, since people in every sector check their email with great regularity. It’s upsetting that you have failed to respond. This is an urgent matter. Someone has
stolen my identity. With your help. As far as I can tell, YOU have stolen my identity. Please be advised that if I do not hear from you, I will report you to the Better Business Bureau.
Please reply ASAP.
“The Better Business Bureau,” said Connie. “The kids on Facebook are going to love that one.”
“Do you have another suggestion?” I asked.
Fifteen minutes later, I wrote again:
Is this Chuck Hagarty, aka “Anonymous,” the guy into me for eight grand in bridgework? One man should not have this kind of power over other people’s lives. But as you have so expertly demonstrated in the past, that’s how things work on the Internet, eh, Chuck?
“Betsy’s done with Mr. Perkins.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming.”
Please explain the quote from the Bible and why it’s on my bio page. I don’t appreciate being associated with any system of belief. I’m an atheist. I don’t want people thinking I run some kind of evangelical operation here. A mouth is a mouth. I will treat it to the best of my ability, no matter what variety of religious horseshit might later come flying out of it. I consider that bio a personal attack on my character. Have it removed or you will hear from my lawyer.
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Perkins is waiting for you.”
This was Betsy. “I know about Mr. Perkins, Betsy. I will be
with Mr. Perkins as soon as possible, but as you can see, I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“What I see is you on the Internet,” she said. “I didn’t know the Internet was more important than Mr. Perkins.”
“I will seat Mr. Perkins’s veneer when I’m good and ready, Betsy. Please mind your own business.”
After seating and shading Mr. Perkins’s veneer:
I don’t need these kinds of distractions when I’m trying to seat and shade a difficult veneer. Maybe you’re dealing with an emergency. I could imagine a scenario in which your kid’s sick and you need to run him to the doctor. But come on. You know as well as I do that you’d have your phone with you, and probably your computer, and you’d be fully operational in the waiting room, because you’re no longer able to sit in the waiting room and not check your email no matter how sick your kid is. I know, I have a waiting room, I see it happen all the time. Even in the emergency room, you’d be texting and emailing and tweeting about how your kid was in the emergency room and how worried you were. So odds are you have read my email and you’re just choosing not to reply. Which is unacceptable. I’m on the Internet all day long and I’m not even in IT.
My relationship with the Internet was like the one I had with the :). I hated the :) and hated to be the object of other people’s :), their :-) and their :>. I hated :-)) the most because it reminded me of my double chin. Then there was :( and :-( and ;-) as well as ;) and *-), which I didn’t even understand, although it was not as mystifying as D:< or >:O or :-&. These simplifications of speech, designed by idiots, resulted in hieroglyphics of such compounded complexity that they flew far above my intelligence. Then came the animated
ones, the plump yellow emoticons with eyelashes and red tongues suggestively winking at me from the screen, being sexy, making me want to have sex with them. Every time I read an email with a live emoticon, I’d feel the astringent sexual frustration ever threatening my workaday equipoise, and the temptation to yank off in the Thunderbox while staring down at the iPad was broken only by the hygienic demands of a mouth professional. I swore never to use the emoticon ever… until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first :) and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance, :) became a regular staple of my daily correspondence with colleagues, patients, and strangers, and featured prominently in my postings in Red Sox chat rooms and on message boards. I was defenseless against the world’s laziest and most loathsome impulses, defenseless against the erosion of principle in the face of technology. Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too, and, after that, the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emoticons with, and requiring them to carry, the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life… and I was still unsure how and when it happened. Even as I stood indignantly hating the emoticon for its facile attempts to capture real emotion, I was using it constantly. It wouldn’t have caused me such grief if my repulsion and eventual capitulation to the emoticon had not mirrored my larger struggle with the Internet itself. I tried my best to fend off the Internet’s insidious seduction, until at last all I did—at chairside, on the F train, supine upon the slopes of Central Park—was gaze into my me-machine and lose myself on the Internet.
Which is to say that, after emailing Seir Design, and even as Mr. Perkins was waiting, I took a moment to surf the Internet,
clicking when I found something worthy of clicking on… Taliban Assault—… Rebel Gains—… Weak Ec—… Red Sox Kick Into High Gear… South Sudan Declares—… Adele Debuts—… Bangla—… BoSox Making Big July Impression… Prosecutors Seek—… Insure again—… Hot Girls Showing Off There Legs in Heels… Like Us on—… Protect Your—… Free Shipp—
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Connie. “Yes?”
“Abby says something’s off with Mr. Perkins’s veneer.”
“Why can’t Abby come and tell me that herself?” I asked. “Why can’t Abby tell me anything?”
“You intimidate her,” she said.
“Intimidate her? We sit across from each other all day long!”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said.
I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. There was nothing wrong with his veneer.
You want to know the irony here? My staff has been telling me that my desire to avoid the privacy risks and the ugliness of the Internet and blah blah blah could never be endangered by a little shop-around-the-corner website that told people when we were open and how to reach us. But guess what? My privacy concerns look pretty damned justified right now on account of a little shop-around-the-corner website! That you made! So how about you fucking respond!
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Betsy. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to intrude on your schedule like this,” she said. “I can see how busy you are. I just wanted to let you know that I am done with Mrs. Deiderhofer.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Betsy?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry I was short with you earlier. I’m on edge.”
“Why are you on edge?”
“Have you forgotten about that website? Have you forgotten that my identity has been stolen?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Let’s not blow things out of proportion.”
“Why aren’t you more disturbed?” I asked. “They went to the trouble of finding your high-school-yearbook picture.”
“I have never minded that picture.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You now have a wonderful little website for your practice,” she said. “I hardly think that constitutes identity theft.”
“Then you and I will never understand each other, Betsy.”
She walked away. I wrote:
This is sick, what you’re doing.
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Connie again. “Yes?”
“Mr. Perkins refuses to leave. He says the color’s off.”
“The color isn’t off.”
“He says it is.”
“Christ,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. The color wasn’t off.
You created a website for me that I did not ask for. That needs to be remedied. Quickly. Before this gets out of hand. Are things already out of hand? Is it possible to stop “my” website from existing? What is a website and how does it get online and how do you take it down? I’m sure those are stupid
questions that will make you laugh at me for how little I understand of the modern world, but so be it. Is there somewhere I can go to get at the physical thing that reflects the code that creates the design that throws up the images you’ve dreamed up for my website and remove that thing and destroy it? Would that mean it was off the Internet for good, or does it somehow live on? I have a vague notion that it lives on. Is that what people call “cached”? Is “my” website “cached” for all eternity? A website I did not ask for?
Usually I’m sitting there doing something to a patient and I’m thinking something like Ross and what’s her name, what’s her name, it’s Ross and… what’s her name, it’s, starts with
a,
what’s it start with, shit, can’t, was it, uh… oh, wait, right, of course, duh, how stupid can you get, it was Ross and Rachel! Ross and Rachel, everyone remembers that. It’s catchy, Ross and Rachel. And Ross’s sister’s name was… the girl who’s friends with Rachel… well, they’re all friends, obviously, but specifically the one who was also Rachel’s roommate, unless that was the other girl, the dumb blond, Lisa Kudrow, she hasn’t had much luck careerwise since that show ended, actually none of them have, although they’re bajillionaires, so you might ask what does it matter. But the truth is, once you’re on a popular TV show, you’d better just enjoy yourself, because you’re never going to act again. You are that role. Depressing, when you think about it, because though each of them will live a life of luxury, it will be one increasingly devoid of purpose. I can’t imagine a life where I can’t do what I was put on earth to do, tending to patients, like this one here whose tooth broke off in the night during a dream… name started with a… I don’t know what it started with, I could run down the alphabet, see if that jogs my memory, that works sometimes, not always, but, why not, what else do I have going on…
A,
no,
B,
no,
C,
no, but
C
… why does
C
…
C
definitely… someone on that show’s name started with a… ah, Chandler! And Monica was the name of the friend Chandler was dating. Monica was Rachel’s friend… well, they were all friends, obviously. It was Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler, and the other two… I can’t believe I can’t remember the other two, although the one, the Italian guy, his name’s right here, I mean
right here,
right on the tip of my… was it Joey? I think it was Joey. I wonder if Abby knows. She probably does. Just look at her. Of course she knows. But think she would tell me? If I asked her, she’d be like, Huh, what, me? I really think it was Joey. But then what was the name of the—
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
Connie was standing in the doorway.
“When you have a minute,” she said.
“Connie, what was the name of that third girl on
Friends
? The dumb blond one? The actress hasn’t had much luck since the show ended?”
“Phoebe?”
“Phoebe! Damn! That’s it! Phoebe! Okay, Mrs. Deiderhofer,” I said to my patient, “you’re free to spit.” Mrs. Deiderhofer spent about ten minutes spitting. I walked over to Connie.
“You got a reply,” she said.
She handed me the iPad.
How well do you know yourself?
“That’s it?” I said. “All those emails, and all he writes back is how well do I know myself? That’s totally unacceptable.”
“There’s also…”
“What?”
“Your bio’s changed.”
“Changed how?”
They had taken the site down or offline or whatever, made changes to it, and then put it back up again. Everything was the same, with one exception. A new weird quote had been added to the old weird quote.
And Safek gathered us anew, and we sojourned with him in the land of Israel. 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.
“More religion!” I cried. “Betsy! Who’s Safek?”
“Who’s who?” she answered from the other side of the wall. You can always hear everything everyone is doing in a dental office because for reasons that even your most seasoned dentist can’t explain, the walls always terminate, as in cubicles and bathroom stalls, a foot below the ceiling.
“Safek!” I said.
What good was all her reading and highlighting if she couldn’t tell me who the characters were?
“There’s no one by that name in the New Testament,” she cried out.
“I’ve never heard of anyone named Safek,” said Connie. “But,” she said, “I do know the word.”
“The word?”
“
Safek
is a Hebrew word.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Doubt,” she said.
“Doubt?”
“It’s the Hebrew word for ‘doubt.’ ”
“How well do I know myself?” I wrote to Seir Design.
Go fuck yourself. That’s how well I know myself.
My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if they heard a playmate had pulled baby’s hair. I looked at Mom, late thirties, Volvo-and-breast-milk type, purees her own veggies, etc. I looked at Dad, trimly bearded in a tech button-down, knows all the microbrews. I wasn’t going to turn them away just because they overburden the medical system with their hair-trigger fears. If it weren’t for hair-trigger fears, my monthly billings would be cut in half. (On the other hand, if it weren’t for dental dread, I could double my salary.) If these fretters felt the need to bring their kid in because of a loose baby tooth, I’d happily humor them. Which is what I thought I was doing when I focused the overhead inside the girl’s mouth. But then I found seven cavities. Five years old and she had seven cavities. The loose tooth wasn’t falling out because it was time. It was straight up rotted out. I told them I had no choice but to pull it. Mom started crying, Dad looked ashamed. They were giving the kid a lollipop every night to help her go to sleep. “It was so hard to hear her cry,” said Mom. “It really worked to calm her down,” said Dad. They wouldn’t let the kid drink out of the tap, they wouldn’t feed her anything without an organic label on it, they wouldn’t even consider a sugar-free lollipop because anything sugar-free was full of artificial sweetener and that shit caused cancer, but they let her lie in bed ten hours a night rotting her mouth out so that she’d stop crying and fall asleep. People have all this
resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.