To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

by Joshua Ferris

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better — that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

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?”

I did not want Betsy Convoy, or anyone else for that matter, believing that down deep they were ugly, worthless, unwanted, inconsequential, and unlovable. If God served no other purpose, I thought, this alone justified Him.

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.

But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

“So for the sake of your identity,” she said, “you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.”

Don’t you know the disservice you do to yourself when you let joy pass you by and hold on to the ugliness and pain?”

I guess it was like any other funeral ceremony that way, a periphery of noise surrounding a nucleus of grief.

Millions of others just like me, taking an interest. Not “Coronaries and Rehabilitations.” Not “Dedications and Forfeitures.” Not “Life and Death.” “Activities and Interests.” This was how it was presented, in terrifying simplicity. What it was all reduced to, the thirty years, and the stupid tears, and every extra inning. An activity and an interest.

pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.

I had nothing left: no Santacroce dream, no Plotz homecoming. My parents were gone. Connie had left. My patients refused to floss, some even to fill their cavities. I had … my will, that was all. My will not to follow Mercer and my father down the hole. My will to be something more than a fox.