Prescription for a Superior Existence Read online

  “Why am I here?” I shouted, taking a step out of formation.

  Mihir shook his head at me, and the others, already jumping in unison like young cadets, stopped and looked at Mr. Israel, who came toward me with a concerned expression, as if I were choking and needed his help. Up close his face was dotted with razor nicks that had stopped bleeding in the cold. He was younger than I’d originally thought, no more than twenty-five, and hid whatever Southern amiability was native to him beneath a mask of critical authority.

  “Morning exercises,” he said, a vertical crease deepening between his eyebrows, “are how we begin the day.”

  “I mean why am I at this PASE Wellness Center? I didn’t ask to come and I want to be returned home.” I looked around for sympathy, but with the exception of Mihir, who looked pained on my behalf, everyone shared Mr. Israel’s frown.

  “You’re here like the other guests, to improve.”

  “But I don’t want to improve.”

  Someone yelled out “Ha!” and Mr. Israel’s body tensed and his right arm bowed like a gunslinger’s preparing to draw—he looked ready to hit me—but then he pulled a phone from his utility belt and asked for an escort team to come to Elysian Field. He signaled for everyone else to resume their jumping jacks, but their coordination was off now and they resembled windmills out of sync. Mr. Israel regarded me coolly until two men dressed in navy blue tunics approached and, with a nod from him, led me back to Shoale Hall. I asked them questions on the way, but they were as silent and formal as beefeaters, betraying no hint that they either heard or understood me. My back, which like most parts of my body ached, felt a little better for the brisk walking, and I would have liked to keep up the pace even after we entered the building. Instead they delivered me to the Red Room, which was painted beige and smelled of cinnamon and was furnished with a desk, silver suede sofa, and glass-topped coffee table, on which a pristine copy of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, the religion’s holy book, rested solemnly, thick enough on first glance to seem like a stack of individual books. I sat on the sofa for several minutes, my back and wrists and stomach and head all competing for my attention, like patients crowding a doctor late for his morning appointments, and I wanted a cigarette and drink and muscle relaxant, which is to say I wanted clarity, but a look around the room revealed nothing that could provide it.

  “Not a reader?” The door shut behind a matronly woman in her midfifties wearing a feminine version of the navy blue tunic that seemed to be the uniform. Her hair was short and layered and gray, as thick as sheep’s wool, and she wore a pair of silver-colored feather earrings. Touching her nose with a tissue and then tucking it into her sleeve, she said, “My name is Ms. Anderson, and I’m director of this PASE Wellness Center. I’ve been watching you through the two-way mirror; you didn’t once flip open The Prescription.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Yes you are.” She crossed the room to a shelf laid out with a pitcher of orange juice and a bowl of green and red fruit, from which she took two pears and handed me one. “I signed your involuntary admission papers when you came in. You were unconscious.”

  “Someone shot me.”

  “It was only a tranquilizer gun. Physically you’re fine, if a little weak. One of our resident physicians monitored your reaction to the drug and found it satisfactory; in fact your system was so suffused already with similar substances that he thought it shouldn’t have affected you at all.”

  “That’s—Why was I shot and brought here?”

  Although I spoke with a demanding, inquisitive tone, like my earlier protest this question was disingenuous, for I thought I knew the answer.

  She polished her pear on her sleeve. “Let me ask you a question: Did you consent to go to school when you were a boy?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When your parents took you to kindergarten on the first day, did you run willingly into what must’ve seemed the confinement of the classroom, or did you beg to go back home to all that was familiar?”

  “That’s not the point. I’m an American adult and my rights have been violated.”

  She sat in a wingback chair that would have engulfed a smaller woman. “Mr. Smith, you are being given a great opportunity, a chance to escape from the prison you’re in. And I don’t mean this Center. I mean the larger prison of your desires, the one that makes you so unhappy so regularly.”

  “I’m not unhappy.”

  She folded her ring-laden hands together. “Forgive my bluntness, but you certainly are. You overeat and are obsessed with work and can’t maintain romantic relationships. You take pills to fall asleep and wake up and calm down and get energized. You drink too much alcohol and watch too much television and are terrified of being left alone with your thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time.”

  The room’s lights didn’t change, but everything seemed to rise and then drop a shade in brightness, as though an electrical surge had passed through the wiring. “Who told you that?”

  Ms. Anderson sneezed without breaking eye contact with me. “Like most people, you are unhappy because you aren’t fulfilled by what you have. You always want more, and that more is never enough. Throughout your life you’ve desired things, only to find after getting them that contentment lies in the next thing. And the next and the next and the next. Sadly but predictably, the result of all this deferred satisfaction for you and others has been the same: anxiety and depression. And if allowed to continue it will lead finally to the crowning tragedy, ambivalence.”

  “This has nothing to do with me and I want to leave right now.”

  “Some people say the cycle of desire is human nature. They point out that before we can speak we cry for milk and human contact and toys and dry diapers and relief from teething pain, that infancy is little more than I want!, that childhood is no better, that adolescence is worse, and that adulthood is a full-blown epidemic of insatiable neediness. But does it follow that we should forgive desire just because it’s human nature, in spite of its cost? Think of the old people you know, so beaten down by years of disappointment that they have no interests or passions or convictions left, who are content to let television mark time until they die. We at the PASE Wellness Center want to spare you that fate.”

  I shook my head. “You’re trying to kill me.”

  “No.” She smiled beatifically. “We are trying to save you.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and at first nothing came out. “But I’ve become close with Mary Shoale. Aren’t I here because her father thinks I pose a threat to PASE?”

  “It’s safe to say that Mr. Shoale considers you a friend. Besides, although Mary is at heart a good girl, she’s addicted to gratifying her own desires. PASE wouldn’t punish someone else for her folly. No, the man who broke into your apartment was a renegade Paser acting entirely on his own and without the administration’s knowledge. He has since been disciplined.”

  “The giant?”

  “We do not condone or practice violence. Our religion is neither a cult nor simply a nice philosophy to live by. It values all human life and does its best to protect rather than endanger people. You don’t need to look skeptical. Mary’s other playmates have sat where you are now and been just as suspicious and later emerged transformed, improved in every way. I don’t doubt that you will be equally successful. Now eat your pear.”

  My wrists radiated pain and I hyperextended my back as recommended by physical therapists. When I turned around the two escorts leaned in toward each other at the door, blocking passage in or out. The room’s single window, although large enough to jump through, was one story above ground that, from the angle where I sat, appeared to be concrete.

  “So you know about the men she’s been with? And you’ve abducted them all so they don’t embarrass your public relations department?”

  She bit into her own pear and spoke while chewing. “Let’s concentrate on you so that we don’t waste your valuable time here. At this h
our you should already be showering after exercises, though I understand that because this is your first morning at the Center, especially given the state in which you arrived, you have questions and concerns that might interfere with your improvement. The orientation session we’ve set up for you and the other new guests after breakfast will address those more fully, but we can touch on some of them now.”

  I scratched off a section of wax from my pear and said, “This is illegal and you’ll go to jail for keeping me here against my will. I have an excellent lawyer who will destroy you in a civil suit once the state finishes with you.”

  “Please don’t worry about us. We are well aware of the court’s attitude and behavior in California. You need to concentrate on learning about Prescription for a Superior Existence, for that, despite your disinclination, is why you’re here.”

  “I’m here because I was kidnapped. I don’t want to know anything more about PASE.”

  She took another bite of her pear and it was half gone. “What do you think about God?”

  I glanced back again at the escorts, who hadn’t moved.

  She said, “I presume that as an atheist you think of him as a fanciful idea man came up with to get through all the terrors of prehistory. ‘If God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him,’ and that sort of thing. This doesn’t necessarily make you a cynic, but on the measuring stick of faith your notch is nearer the closed than the open end. In a way, we don’t blame you. The god that most of the world recognizes is schizophrenic: either angry, wrathful, and genocidal, or subservient, meek, and fond of easy bromides. We Pasers see through that god, as well, and if we didn’t know about UR God, we might be atheists too.”

  I thought about getting up to run and crash through the window with the hope of landing on the ground outside with a mere sprained ankle and skinned palms, but when I considered the lacerations this would also incur, provided the glass pane was thin enough to break through and the unlikelihood that I could then reach and scale the perimeter wall, I decided against it. “Ergod?”

  “Ultimate Reality God. Media stories are always so concerned with our stance on sex or our charitable activities that they often neglect to mention Him. When they do, He is wrongly described as ‘a deity without any defining qualities,’ as though we were too lazy to give Him a deep voice or a long white beard. Journalists can be as inattentive as toddlers and as sex-crazed as teenagers. But you will shortly discover that UR God is our focus and that He is the supreme generative force who, cognizant of the Earth’s imminent collapse, gave us the book The Prescription for a Superior Existence so that we can improve enough to fuse into Him.”

  “I thought Montgomery Shoale wrote it.”

  “UR God used him to convey His message.”

  “Did that happen on a mountain?”

  “As I said, a certain amount of cynicism is healthy, but there comes a point where it causes more harm than good. All we ask is that you pay attention and keep an open mind during your stay with us, the length of which depends entirely on you. Put simply, by the time you leave here you will be free from anxiety and depression and anger and self-destructive tendencies, ready to know UR God. This freedom is in you now, buried like a precious metal; we will show you how to mine it.” Ms. Anderson looked at her watch and stood up. She’d eaten her entire pear, including its core. “Now you’d better go; it’s breakfast time.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Before the events leading up to my abduction and placement at the PASE Wellness Center, I had been a capital growth assessment manager at Couvade Incorporated, a midsized financing firm in San Francisco. After eight years with the company I was, as my performance reviews put it, “a self-starting team player who [thought] outside the box but within the realm of possibility.” The case for my promotion to senior manager was therefore strong, and I had, with others’ encouragement, begun to court and, in certain exuberant moments, expect the position. I ran a quick and efficient squad, never took sick days, and had the highest client satisfaction ratings of my peer group. I voluntarily fact-checked other squads’ work and was friendly yet professional with the interns. Following my surgery in December my boss, Mr. Raven, a reserved and laconic man to whom I’d worked hard to draw close during the previous year, and whose passion for presidential biographies and Latin jazz I had come to share, said that I appeared to be as healthy as my best reports and that he looked forward to working in closer tandem with me.

  So when in early February, nearly one month ago from today, my squad was given the Danforth Ltd. project, a standard client profile that would take no more than a week, it seemed to be a victory lap at the finish line of which I would be promoted to senior manager. Passing from Juan to Dexter to Philippe, the file reached me on a Monday, two days before it was due. I opened it at six, after most people had gone home, and, chain-smoking into my air purifier and snacking from a box of shortbread, made great progress. An hour later I ordered Chinese takeout and a six-pack of beer. At eight, already a quarter done, I took a break and lost a game of speed chess to Alfredo, the janitor for my floor, and then spent ten minutes emptying the cubicle trash bins while he read online Mexican newspapers at my desk.

  At 10:30 I made an error—I transposed a 6 into 9—so I packed up and went home. There I took four ibuprofens, three sleeping pills, a muscle relaxant, a shot of whiskey, and four green capsules a homeopath friend had given me for joint trouble in my wrists. My ex-girlfriend Camilla had stopped by to look for a sweater she thought might be there and to write a note on the dry-erase board saying she’d heard about my surgery and wanted to get together for a drink. I rubbed out the note and my surroundings began to spin as gently as a carnival ride beginning its cycle.

  In the living room I landed on my red velvet couch, which just then felt like a flying carpet, but instead of falling asleep I heard broken snatches of piano music coming from the apartment next door. I struggled to sit up and listen. Scales. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti. Do-re-fa. Stop. Start over. This was interesting because Conrad, who was a piano teacher, had not had a student in the three years he’d lived there. He blamed this dry spell on the rising quality and falling prices of piano lesson software—people, he said, would rather learn from a computer program than from a live human being, resulting in the spread of rote, mechanical musicians who hadn’t had the individual instruction necessary to play Chopin or Satie with integrity and impact—but the more likely reason was that he charged two hundred dollars an hour. It was too much for someone as unknown as him. I’d recommended that he lower his rate to be competitive with other nonprofessional teachers’, but he thought that the more expensive a service was, the more people would value it; until this happened he was content to live on monthly disability checks from the military for an injury he’d sustained to his right leg in Iraq.

  Hearing the scales, I was glad for Conrad and hoped this would begin a busy chapter in his career, but I also needed sleep and could easily be kept awake by the noise, so I went over to ask him to end the lesson. What remained of his dyed-blond hair was slicked back in a casino operator clamp, and he leaned against his doorway with a new ivory-handled cane in his right hand. Just thirty more minutes, he said, looking over his shoulder and thanking me for my patience. He would have closed the door then had not a young woman, the student, appeared behind him and said she was ready to quit. Conrad gripped the handle of his cane tightly. I mumbled thanks and retreated to my apartment and in a wobbly swoon lost consciousness at the foot of my bed.

  I could do this—black out in the middle of a room at midnight—because I lived alone, as I had ever since taking my first one-bedroom apartment, in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, because neither of the two women I’d dated seriously in that period had wanted to move in with me. Supritha, the first, had ended our seven-month relationship over a fiery south Indian breakfast when I mentioned the time and money we would save—not to mention the love we would generate—by living together. “I don’t know why,” she’d explained, ladling dal o
ver a pancake and frowning as though her fickleness were as mysterious to her as to me. I died a little. The second, Camilla, had in the six months we dated cheated on me “with tons of guys,” which was, she decided, given that I hadn’t been enough for her sexually, partly or perhaps largely my fault. I died a little again.

  What brought me back to life on both occasions was the thought that someday I would meet the woman of my dreams and we would fall in love and these early false starts would provide all the contrast I needed to appreciate what at last I had found.

  In the meantime I tried to make the best of being a bachelor. My married or otherwise engaged friends put a positive spin on it by pointing out that I never had to eat with boring couples, bicker, clean up after myself, shop, talk about my feelings, talk about her feelings, or be anywhere besides work and home. I didn’t have to remember birthdays or anniversaries or Valentine’s Day, nor did I have to think about the toilet bowl lid or hide my pornography or apologize. This last point was especially important to them. Being alone, they said, meant never having to say you were sorry.

  But I would gladly have paid for the upsides of romance with its downsides, because to me, in addition to being a source of human connection and joy and security, relationships were a health matter—almost a survival issue—and I looked and hoped for one constantly. That is, on my own, undisturbed and unapologetic, I had a dangerous amount of freedom that allowed for all kinds of abuses that, even while committing them, I regretted but could not stop. There were points on which Ms. Anderson would later be correct. Alone and without the regulatory oversight of a companion, I had license to eat, drink, and watch anything at any time. I could treat my body as a chemical processing plant or a temple, filling it with whatever brought relief from or an end to my daily stresses, which led to grand solitary debauches, nights when I would stare at an empty pizza box or Playboy care package ordered by and for myself, in a drug- and alcohol-induced fugue, forced to consider that overeating and binge drinking and perpetual masturbation were signs of deep and abiding unhappiness, and that I ought to do something about them right away. At those times I would say aloud, “If I keep doing this I won’t last much longer,” without daring to answer the follow-up question: “Would that be any great loss?” A little while later, calmed by the exhaustion that follows worry, I would find myself seminaked on the couch with five barbiturates and a half-bottle of scotch sluicing through my bloodstream, watching East European adult television at four A.M., and I would tell myself that there were many versions of a full life and this was mine. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, said Shakespeare.