To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel by Joshua Ferris

Author:Joshua Ferris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

“Dear Paul,” he wrote.

I’m sorry you’re so upset. There’s so much you have yet to grasp. We have nothing against the Jews. Anti-Semitic? No. When in our history would we have had the freedom to pursue hate of any kind? No one in history is more qualified to identify with the Jews and their considerable tragedies than the Ulms. We aren’t the Jew’s enemy, Paul. We are the Jew’s Jew.

The Jew’s Jew? What is that?

Do you know of the escépticos driven into hiding by Alfonso the Wise? Has the Lodz Massacre been brought to your attention? Have the Ulm! Ulm! Riots of 1861 been discussed in your history classes? Has the execution, by British forces, of all Ulms living in Israel, to inaugurate the Jewish state in accordance with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, been so much as a faint shadow in your most distant dream? Do you know how close we are and ever have been to extinction? Say what you will about the tragedies of the Jews. At least they have been documented.

The next morning, I was working on a patient while thinking about a headline in one of the celebrity magazines. It was actually more like a subheadline, which read, in response to Rylie’s announcement that she was pregnant with twins, “Rylie has always wanted to have two babies at once.” They had interviewed Rylie (“Exclusive!”), who confessed that for as long as she could remember, she had always wanted to have two babies at once. Not just one, and not two at different times, but two at once, boom boom. Even when she was three, when she was seven, and then when she was ten, Rylie had wanted to have two babies at one time. It was a childhood dream that kept persisting even as she turned sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, and now, believe it or not, she was pregnant with twins. At last Rylie’s dream was coming true, having two babies at once at last. And how better to share that dream come true with the world than on the cover of a celebrity magazine, under the larger headline “Twins!”

I was thinking about Rylie and her twins and the subheadline announcing the fulfillment of her lifelong dream when Connie appeared in the doorway. I pretended not to see her.

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

I pretended not to hear her.

“Dr. O’Rourke, when you get a minute,” she said.

“Okay, Mr. Shearcliff,” I said, after dithering in Mr. Shearcliff’s mouth a little longer and finding nothing to detain me. “You can sit up and spit now.”

Reluctantly I walked over to Connie. She wanted to discuss my latest tweet.

My dream is to overcome my terrifying inhibitions one day, and sing on the subway with my banjo

“You’ve said that to me,” she said. “You’ve used those very words.”

I didn’t know where to begin.

“This is maddening!” I said. “That’s not me!”

“Who else could it be?”

“I swear to God, Connie.”

“This is you, Paul.”

“No, it’s not, I swear to God.”

“Is this some weird game you’re playing to get me back?”

“Get you back? I broke up with you.

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