Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

THE MOUTH IS A weird place. Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up.

I encouraged my patients to floss. It was hard to do some days. They should have flossed. Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life up to seven years. Its also time consuming and a general pain in the ass. Thats not the dentist talking. Thats the guy who comes home, four or five drinks in him, what a great evening, ha-has all around, and, the minute he takes up the floss, says to himself, Whats the point? In the end, the heart stops, the cells die, the neurons go dark, bacteria consumes the pancreas, flies lay their eggs, beetles chew through tendons and ligaments, the skin turns to cottage cheese, the bones dissolve, and the teeth float away with the tide. But then someone who never flossed a day in his life would come in, the picture of inconceivable self-neglect and unnecessary pain rotted teeth, swollen gums, a live wire of infection running from enamel to nerve and what I called hope, what I called courage, above all what I called defiance, again rose up in me, and I would go around the next day or two saying to all my patients, You must floss, please floss, flossing makes all the difference.

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be. That hes also half mortician is the secret he keeps to himself. The ailing bits he tries to turn healthy again. The dead bits he just tries to make presentable. He bores a hole, clears the rot, fills the pit, and seals the hatch. He yanks the teeth, pours the mold, fits the fakes, and paints to match. Open cavities are the eye stones of skulls, and lone molars stand erect as tombstones.

We call it a practice, never a business, but successful dentistry is very much a business. I started out with a windowless two-chair clinic in Chelsea. Eventually I moved into a place off Park Avenue. I had half the ground floor of an apartment complex called the Aftergood Arms.

Park Avenue is the most civilized street in the world. Doormen still dress like its 1940, in caps and gloves, opening doors for old dowagers and their dogs. The awnings extend to the curb so that no one gets wet on rainy days stepping in and out of cabs, and a carpet, usually green, sometimes red, runs underfoot. With a certain cast of mind, you can almost reconstruct the horse-and-carriage days when the first of the nabob settlers were maneuvering their canes and petticoats through the Park Avenue mud. Manhattan suffers its shocks. The neighborhoods turn over. The city changes in your sleep. But Park Avenue stays Park Avenue, for better or worse moneyed, residential, quintessentially New York.

I borrowed a lot to refurbish the new place. To pay back that money as quickly as possible, I went against the advice of the contractor, the objections of Mrs. Convoy, my own better instincts, and the general protocol of dentists everywhere and ordered a floor plan without a private office. I installed a fifth chair in that space and then spent the next ten years killing myself tending to five chairs in five rooms while complaining about my lack of privacy and raking in tons and tons of money.

Everything was always something. It did no good to bitch about it. Some days I really held a grudge. Id tell myself to get over myself. What could be better than a thriving practice and a management structure with me on top? My days werent any longer than yours, except Thursdays. Some Thursdays we didnt get out of the office until ten oclock. I almost slept okay those nights, when the pills seemed almost redundant. (First thing to go when you medicate to sleep are the dreams. Look on the bright side, I said to myself, as my dreams first started to fade. Youre being spared, upon waking, the desperate need to convey to someone else the vivid images of a rich inner life.)

Everything was always something, but something and here was the rub could never be everything. A thriving practice couldnt be everything. A commitment to healthy patients and an afternoon mochaccino and pizza Fridays just couldnt be everything. The banjo couldnt be everything, either, unfortunately. Streaming movies directly to the TV was almost everything when first available, but soon fell off to just barely something. The Red Sox had been everything for a long time, but they disappointed me in the end. The greatest disappointment of my adult life came in 2004, when the Red Sox stole the pennant from the Yankees and won the World Series.

For two months one summer, I thought golf could be everything. For the rest of my life, I thought, Ill put all my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, and thats what I did, for two months, until I realized that I could put all my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, for the rest of my life. I dont think Ive ever been so depressed. The last ball I putted circled the hole, and the rimming impression it made as it dropped was that of my small life draining into the abyss.

So work, fun, and total dedication to something bigger than myself, something greater my work, golf, the Red Sox none could be everything, even if each, at times, filled the hour perfectly. Im like that dreamer desperate to describe his dream when I try to explain the satisfactions of replacing a rotten tooth with a pontic so that a patient could smile again without shame. I had restored a baseline human dignity, no small thing. Pizza Fridays were no small thing. And that mochaccino was a little joy. The night in 2004 when David Ortiz homered against the Yankees to jump-start the greatest comeback in sports history made me simply happy to be alive.

I would have liked to believe in God. Now there was something that could have been everything better than anything else. By believing in God, I could succumb to ease and comfort and reassurance. Fearlessness was an option! Eternity was mine! It could all be mine: the awesome pitch of organ pipes, the musings of Anglican bishops. All I had to do was put away my doubts and believe. Whenever I was on the verge of that, I would call myself back from the brink. Keep clarity! I would cry. Hold on to yourself! For the reason the world was so pleasurable, and why I wanted to extend that pleasure through total submission to God, was my thoughts my reasoned, stubborn, skeptical thoughts which always unfortunately made quick work of God.

Non serviam! cried Lucifer. He didnt want to eat the faces off little babies. He just didnt want to serve. If he had served, he would have been just one more among the angels, indistinct, his name hard to recall even among the devout.

Ive tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I cant say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark. It might not be. For all I know, the high-water mark is to be found in, say, the second book of Kings. Imagine making it through the first book of Kings! They dont make it easy. Ill tell you what amazes me. Im practically always sitting down next to somebody on the subway whos reading the Bible, whos smack in the middle of the thing, like on page one hundred and fifty thousand, and every single sentence has been underlined or highlighted. I have to think theres no way this tattooed Hispanic youth has lavished on the remaining pages of his Bible such poignant highlighting so prominently on display here in the hinterlands of 2 Chronicles. Then hell turn the page, and sure the fuck enough: even more highlighting! In multiple colors! With notes in a friars hand! And I dont mean to suggest he simply turned the page. Dude leaped forward three, four hundred pages to reference or cross-check or whatever, and there, glowing in ingot blocks, was the same concentration of highlighting. I swear to God, there are still people out there devoting their entire lives to the Bible. Its either old black ladies or middle-aged black guys or Hispanic guys with neckties or white guys youre surprised are white. Thousands of hours theyve been up studying and highlighting Bible passages while Ive been sleeping, or watching baseball, or abusing myself carnally on a recliner. Sometimes I think Ive wasted my life. Of course Ive wasted my life. Did I have a choice? Of course I did twenty years of nights with the Bible. But who is to say that, even then, my life conscientiously devout, rigorously applied, monastically contained, and effortfully open to Gods every hint and clobber would have been more meaningful than it was, with its beery nights, bleary dawns, and Saint James and his Abstract? That was a mighty Pascals Wager: the possibility of eternity in exchange for the limited hours of my one certain go-round.