Читать книгу Prescription for a Superior Existence - Josh Emmons - Страница 8

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 over 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.

In several respects, though, I was doing poorly and getting worse. My insomnia, for example, was out of control. I’d always had trouble sleeping, but since receiving an email in November from my biological mother, I’d found it nearly impossible. Then came an unfortunate work-related incident in Chicago. Then my break-up with Camilla. Then my surgery, which I feared meant that at heart I was vain and shallow, a slave to the body image stereotypes I’d rejected for so long as demeaning and oppressive. Then my back and wrist pain increased. Then I realized that, unable to change my diet following the surgery, I was on course to quickly regain every one of the eighty pounds I’d lost, that the case for my guilt was about to get stronger.

And my real troubles had not even begun.

On Tuesday, after finishing and sending the Danforth file to Mr. Raven, I asked my coworkers if they wanted to go to a bar after work to unwind, but everyone either had plans or was too tired or had stopped drinking. At eight o’clock, with nothing left to do at the office, which was empty—Alfredo had come and gone early—I went home and downed three tall whiskeys and put a corned beef in the oven, along with rice on the stove. A radio show broadcasted news that Greenland was splitting apart due to softened permafrost from rising annual temperatures; the war had claimed another 107 lives; an earthquake near Seattle was reported, the size and effects of which weren’t known; and there was now consensus among economists that we were in the middle of a recession, housing market slump, and dollar devaluation that hadn’t spurred a consequent rise in demand for U.S. exports. A terrible trifecta. The alcohol relaxed me, and the hours until I could return to work in the morning—when I would again be around people, with a purpose, liberated from my own thoughts—seemed endurable.

As I refilled my glass with ice, the doorbell rang. I thought it might be my brother, Sid, stopping by to borrow money or set me up with another of his girlfriend’s friends (as payback or pay forward), but it was Conrad’s student from the night before. She wore tight brown slacks and a short white blouse with stressed buttons, and her shiny straight black hair brushed the top of her shoulders and cut across her forehead with Cleopatra precision. Her name was Teresa, and she had come to apologize for keeping me awake during her lesson. She knew what I’d suffered because a neighbor of hers who built birdhouses was always hammering something at odd hours. She shouldn’t have agreed to a lesson so late at night.

“It’s not your fault for agreeing,” I said. “It’s Conrad’s for suggesting.”

She tugged on the bottom of her blouse, bringing her nipples into bas relief, and wedged a thumb into her front pants pocket. “Thanks for understanding.”

“Sure.”

“I was afraid I’d have to beg.”

“No.”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Right now?”

“I just drank a big bottle of water.”

Although I usually welcomed the chance to let beautiful young women into my apartment—despite its rarely, actually never, happening—I hesitated. She was lying. I couldn’t say how or why I knew this, only that it was so. Heat gathered around my neck and crept slowly up my face like an allergic reaction.

“I’m in the middle of making dinner,” I said, not widening the door.

“I’ll be half a minute.”

“My toilet isn’t completely reliable.”

“Please.” She smiled and revealed two rows of evenly set, glistening white teeth, evidence of great luck or money or discipline as a child. The radio was an indistinct babble in the background. Maybe, I thought, I was being irrational and drunk, and there was nothing suspicious about this woman or her request. She bit her lower lip and I stepped aside to make way for her.

Back in the kitchen I found milky water bubbling from the rice pot into a moat around the burner’s flame. This was typical of how ineptly I cooked, because of which I had recently contracted with the woman who cleaned my apartment every other week to make and deliver frozen batches of food—enchiladas, chicken mole, lasagnas—on her workdays. The last of her latest delivery was gone, though, and I didn’t remember when she was scheduled to return.

A minute later Teresa stood framed in the kitchen’s entrance, wiping wet hands on her hips, imprinting black finger marks on her slacks like daguerreotype shadows. “I hate leaving someplace and then realizing I should have used the bathroom. My family never went on vacations, so as a kid I wasn’t trained to always go before getting in the car. A lot of what we do instinctively comes from our nine-year-old self.”

Again I felt a slurred apprehension and concentrated on cleaning the stovetop. The water had evaporated to leave a layer of dried white froth like old sea foam cobwebbed on the beach. From the beginning there had been so much longing that I could hardly bear it. “You remembered to use my bathroom.”

“That’s because of the water. It’s like an alarm clock for me. Did you know that on nights before they were going to wage battle, Native American warriors drank gallons of water so they’d wake up early and get the jump on their enemies?”

I grunted no and pulled from the oven the corned beef, a loaf of grayish meat with a scrim of yellow fat around its sides, as the radio announced that an Amazon-born virus with a thirty-six-hour incubation period had killed twelve people in the last week. Epidemiologists expected it to travel far and wide over the coming months. I flipped on the stove fan and trimmed off the fat and sipped at my whiskey while Teresa picked up a piece of junk mail lying on the counter.

Burning my thumb on the oven pan, I turned to her and shouted, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s my mail.”

“It’s just a PASE brochure.”

“Please leave it alone.”

“Are you a Paser?”

“That’s—Why are you still here?”

“I want to help you clean up.” She indicated the dishes in the sink, torn seasoning packets by the cutting board, blackened hand towels, and a grease-spattered calendar tacked above a sink full of brackish water.

“Why would you do that?”

“To make up for last night. Because I’m nice.”

“I don’t think so.”

She let go of the brochure and lost her veneer of friendliness and the pain in my thumb seemed unimportant. Conrad, when talking on the phone to his first-ever student, would not have vetted her closely, and in the final analysis nobody could safely say what another person wasn’t capable of. She stepped forward and I braced myself, my right hand a foot from the knife block, ready for what might follow, be it loud or quiet, and the moment was starting to feel very drawn out when she leaned in and kissed me. A button of her blouse came undone at the sternum, pressed against my chest.

“There’s no need to be hostile,” she said, pulling back as a thread of saliva bridged our lips, her green eyes as limpid as a secluded pool. She held the intimacy for twenty seconds and I grew painfully erect. “That’s why I came over, so we could be friends.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, wiping my mouth.

“Yes, you do.”

“Women don’t just walk into strangers’ apartments and kiss them.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are.” She turned around. “At this rate, you have a minute to stop me from reaching the front door.”

She walked carefully, one foot precisely in front of the other, as though on a gymnast’s beam, out of the kitchen. A voice told me to let her go and lock the door behind her and return to my dinner and later fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I would go to work and, except for five or ten solitary adventures, forget Teresa as easily as I’d forgotten all the other women who’d taken friendliness with me only so far. You learn to release because otherwise you’re pulled in directions you can’t go. But even as I registered this warning, wondered if being thin could make so much difference in my attractiveness to women, and thought about newspaper accounts of femmes fatales who seduced men in order to rob them or turn their bodies over to the internal organ black market, as well as about the venereal risks involved in sleeping with someone so brazenly pursuing anonymous sex, I ran to the living room and then the front door and then the common space from which both the stairwell entry and the elevator were visible. I was too late. She’d gone.

When I got to work late the next morning at 9:45, having dozed off just before my alarm sounded and then slept for an hour, most of my coworkers were putting on their coats and crowding around the elevator, making quiet conversation and picking hairs from their clothing. One stood motionless off to the side with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall as if asleep or recovering from a dizzy spell. They were all men.

The office, despite its vaulted ceilings with propeller fans, felt particularly warm and close that day, like a ship hold. My cubicle mate, Max, talked on the phone and stared at the kidney-shaped glass bowl between his desk and mine, in which a Japanese fighting fish swam through Neptune reefs and arched castle gates, trailing a gossamer of skin. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top of my starched yellow shirt and, feeling the nausea pangs that stabbed me every morning, held my stomach as if to keep it from swelling back to its former size.

“Max,” I said. He shook his head, switched the phone to his left hand, and wrote “angry girlfriend” on a piece of paper.

Across the room Elizabeth, Mr. Raven’s secretary, waved me over to her desk. I had invited her out to dinner the week before, and although she’d begun refusing before I’d finished asking, it seemed possible as I walked across the houndstooth carpet that she was one of those women with a default no response that, although it cost her a few good dates, saved her from the many undesirable men who saw deliberation as foreplay, and that, breaking character, she had reconsidered me. In a flattering blue pantsuit, she smiled and poured steaming water from a tulip-decorated teakettle into a matching cup.

“Are those new earrings?” I asked.

“You’re late and—”

“They bring out the auburn in your hair. Where’s everyone going?”

“The sexual harassment sensitivity course at the Prescription for a Superior Existence Station,” she said.

“I forgot that was today. Only men seem to be leaving.”

“That’s the directive.” She squeezed a lemon wedge into her teacup, beside which a pewter condiment caddy held honey, sugar, cream, and echinacea powder. “Mr. Raven asked me to remind you that he needs the Danforth file by four o’clock.” Her eyebrows, sharpened and defined and darkened since I’d last seen them, came together as she looked up and curled a ginger lock of hair behind her ear. She had not reconsidered me.

“I emailed it to him yesterday,” I said.

“He must not have gotten it.”

“I’ll send it again.”

She nodded and I returned to my computer, where I found no record of the email in question. Also, the Danforth file I opened was not the one I’d worked on for eight hours. The date and time of its last modification was Monday afternoon, when Philippe had given it to me.

“We broke up again,” said Max, shutting off his phone.

“My Danforth file has been replaced with an older version,” I said.

“She thinks I hate her brother.”

“This is impossible.”

“Everybody hates him. She says other people just don’t understand him, and since I’ve spent so much time with her family I’m supposed to see past his unattractive qualities, but it’s precisely because I’ve been around him so much that I can’t stand him and don’t want him over for Seder.” He turned off his computer and desk lamp. “Come on, let’s go. We’re the last guys here.”

“I can’t redo Danforth today and go to a training seminar at the same time.”

“You have to go. You’re a man.”

“Mr. Raven wants the file by four.”

“Your absence would be noticed in a big way.”

Discreetly but unmistakably Max was referring to the conference in Chicago I had attended in January with my squadmates, one of whom, Juan, had used a company credit card for our six-thousand-dollar gentlemen’s club bill. Although he later called and finessed the charge down to a more realistic thirty-seven hundred dollars, and in spite of company policy not to reveal employee money matters, the story got out and the four of us were forced to give the Employee Conduct Board a lurid and damning account of our trip.

“Is Mr. Raven still here?”

“He left twenty minutes ago.”

“What about Mr. Grobalski?”

“Gone too.”

Max handed me my coat and I followed him out slowly.

It’s hard to say if I would have been more open to the seminar if Danforth hadn’t hung over me that morning. I knew I could be more sensitive—as much as the next man, certainly—but I was wary of the involvement of Prescription for a Superior Existence. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Beyond what was common knowledge, all I knew then about PASE was that its founder, Montgomery Shoale, a rich venture capitalist, had self-published The Prescription for a Superior Existence, a thousand-page book that introduced and explained the eponymous religion, nearly two decades ago, when it was widely considered a vanity project designed to lend depth and credibility to his company training seminars—he had built a reputation around the Bay Area for speaking about intra-office social cohesion and running more time-efficient meetings—until eventually PASE’s religious bona fides were established and the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a faith-based organization. When the Citadel, the flagship building of its Portrero Hill headquarters called the PASE Station, became the sixth-tallest structure in San Francisco, there was speculation that Shoale would go bankrupt, but instead he expanded the operation by building the Wellness Center, a four-acre campus in Daly City where people could study PASE intensively. Then he started the PASE Process, a charitable organization that infused money and crackerjack administrative staffs into underfunded soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and daycare centers in low-income areas of the city. It also gave grants to arts companies, medical research labs, and neighborhood development centers. At some point within the last couple of years a small but high-profile group of celebrities had begun talking in interviews about their conversion to PASE, and it had made international headlines the previous spring when the French government objected to its building a Wellness Center in Marseilles. That surprised me because I’d thought PASE was strictly a California phenomenon.

In general, though, I didn’t think about it. The West Coast gives birth to several religions annually, and although PASE had lasted longer and was better financed and more diversified than most, like them it seemed destined to struggle for a place on the country’s spiritual landscape before fading into the same horizon that had swallowed New Thought, the I AM movement, and hundreds of indigenous American faiths before it. If anything, it was at a disadvantage to the others because it condemned sex in every form; I couldn’t imagine it attracting more than a few thousand followers at any one time. Yes, PASE looked likely to burn through a dry distant swath of the population without threatening the green habitable land in which I lived.

Max and I pulled into a thirty-story parking garage at the Station and found a space sliced thin by two flanking armor-plated vans on the top floor. In the street-level lobby of the adjacent Citadel we joined our coworkers grazing on donuts and coffee, waiting for the seminar to begin. Max stopped to talk to someone and I went in search of the bathroom, along the way grabbing two maple bars and an apple strudel from the buffet table, which I ate crouched down in a stall. I returned to find Max with Dexter and Ravi at the orientation booth discussing the unemployment figures that had just been released and the crippling effect these would have on next quarter’s accounts retention.

“You guys seen Mr. Raven?” I asked.

Max pointed to a wall covered with pamphlets and book displays, beneath a giant video banner that said “Keep the PASE,” where Mr. Raven was talking to a member of the board of directors I’d only seen at weekend retreats and regional conferences. He was walking two fingers across his open palm as if to illustrate a story about someone running.

Deciding to wait for a more private moment to talk to him, I studied an orientation packet until the loudspeakers announced that the seminar was about to begin, whereupon we filed into a vast auditorium with sloped stadium seating that ringed an oval stage on which a thick wooden podium stood like a tree trunk. I sat between Max and Ravi and arranged my handheld devices on the pull-out desktop. Calibrated the personal light settings. Stretched and cracked my neck. Max ate a thick chocolate donut and held a cheese Danish in his lap.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You could have gotten your own.”

“I’ve quit eating sweets as part of my post-surgery diet.”

On the stage down below a man in a dark brown suit approached the podium and clipped a microphone to his tie just below the knot. Tapping it twice, he said, “Good morning. My name is Denver Stevens, and I’m the PASE corporate activities director. I’d like to begin today’s events by saying that although they are open to men of all faiths and creeds, our approach will use techniques and ideas developed in Prescription for a Superior Existence. This powerful spiritual system, parts of which will become familiar to you today, can help liberate you from the dangers of overintimacy at the workplace.”

There was so much work to do on Danforth in so little time. Either my computer and email programs had randomly and momentarily malfunctioned or someone had sabotaged them. If the latter, who would do it and why? No one personally benefited if the report was late. Our computer system’s firewall was the best in the industry. I had no enemies.

When Denver Stevens stopped talking and left the stage to respectful applause, the lights dimmed and people shifted around in their seats. I began to feel panicky, as though stuck in traffic going to the airport, and I might have snuck back to the office if at that moment a spotlight hadn’t interrupted the darkness to shine on a man climbing the steps to the stage. Like a wax figure, Montgomery Shoale too perfectly resembled images of him I’d seen in the media: short and barrel-chested, wearing a perfectly tailored suit, with a relaxed executive presence. Around the base of his bald skull a two-inch band of white hair angled down into a trim Viennese beard.

“Hello,” he said in a soft baritone that through the room’s space-age acoustics sounded everywhere at once. “We’re delighted to have you with us today. When your chief executive operator, Mr. Hofbrau, called me to arrange this seminar, I was saddened but not surprised to hear about recent events at Couvade, and I assured him that our primary concern here is with helping people—with helping you—more fully appreciate what it means to have a personal and a professional self, and how to improve in each until perfection is inevitable. As the great Russian doctor and writer Anton Chekhov once observed, ‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’ We hope that after today’s activities you will know yourselves better and so be better.”

One of the other candidates for the senior manager promotion might have wanted to hurt my prospects in order to bolster his or her own, but I couldn’t think of any who had both the refined Machiavellian instincts and the technological skill to intercept my email and override my password file protection.

“I don’t know you all as individuals. Sitting beside a vegetarian might be a carnivore. Next to a pacifist, a war-supporter. There may be two men among you who claim nothing in common but an employer, and even that may be a bone of contention. As human beings, however—and more specifically as men—you are in many crucial ways the same. You eat and sleep and wear clothes. You use language to communicate. You feel joy and anger and love. You were born and you are going to die.” He took a sip of water. “From these common traits we can draw certain conclusions: eating reflects a common desire for food, sleep meets a desire for rest, and clothes answer a desire for warmth and propriety.” He paused and I looked for Mr. Raven in the audience. “We could spend a whole day—a whole lifetime, perhaps—talking about your desires and what is done to gratify them, but today we’re interested in one in particular: your desire for sex.”

I asked Max in a low voice if he would give me the Danish, and he said no.

“You might ask what is wrong with sex and point out that no one, with the exception of a few test-tube babies, would be here without it. You might say that it is a fundamental part of us. That would be understandable. At one time I myself would have said the same things, for I too once knew the full force and function of sexual desire, the urge that begins with the sight of a pair of legs or a bawdy joke or a warm object held in one’s lap, and grows until nothing matters but the satisfaction of that urge. And like many of you here today, I believed that I was fine.” Shoale took another sip of water. “But was that true? Are you fine? Your eyes, like mine were, are forever restless in their sockets; you covet your neighbors’ wives and sisters and daughters and mothers; you fidget from the time you wake up until you go to sleep, and even then the fidgeting doesn’t stop. You’re like live wires that can’t be grounded for more than a few hours at a time.” He let this sink in for a moment. “The majority of sexual attraction takes place in the mind, where you are, in a word, distracted. Deeply so. And what are the consequences of this distraction?” A few hands rose timidly in the air. “You contract costly, disfiguring, sometimes even deadly diseases; your marriages break up; your job performance suffers; you hurt others and subsidize prostitution and make false promises. You become dissatisfied with life and lose the respect of your friends, families, and coworkers. You don’t say hello to someone without figuring the odds of getting them into your useworn bed. You spend idle, obsessive hours poring over Internet pornography like prospectors burning with gold fever, and in the end a sad onanist looks out at you from the mirror.” Next to me, Max was breathing heavily. “This is a sickness as debilitating as tuberculosis or emphysema. You are aware of its symptoms, yet you don’t try to get well.”

My thoughts swung between Danforth and Shoale’s speech and my fatigue from not having had any replenishing sleep in three months. With a small cough Max stood up and stalked out to the aisle, ignoring the grunts of men whose knees he banged.

“Is he okay?” I whispered to Dexter, who’d sat on the other side of him.

Dexter shrugged.

Max ran up the aisle and out the door. I thought about going after him but spotted Mr. Raven seven rows down and twelve columns over, staring at me with eyes as dark and cold as two black moons, so I returned my focus to the stage and tried to concentrate on what was being said.

This opening speech made me wonder why our CEO thought the seminar would be helpful. Some of the incidents Shoale had alluded to at Couvade were serious—a vice-president was being sued by his secretary for telling her inappropriate jokes, an accounts manager had downloaded a virus-infected pornography file onto his work computer that immobilized our entire system for two days, a field representative had been arrested for buying a child bride in Indonesia, and of course there was my squad’s own ill-executed trip to Chicago—but such a stridently antisex message seemed farcical and doomed to fail with the men of Couvade, whom I’d seen at bachelor parties and after-work clubs and company retreats to Florida.

The rest of the day’s content, however, was more effective. After Shoale’s talk we watched a documentary about sex crimes and one about the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases that featured disturbing footage of a syphilitic man having his nose surgically removed. Then we had lunch and came back to form small discussion groups and role-play exercises—when alone with someone we found attractive, we were to talk only about work-related subjects, even if that person tried to make things personal—before concluding the day with a lecture from Shoale that took a more positive, empowering tone than his first: “You have the ability to be as great as anyone who ever walked the Earth,” he said. “Gandhi, Buddha, and even Jesus suffered the same temptations and trembled from the same desires that you do. What made them different—what can make you different—is that they heeded the call of their best selves. They made the choice, as you can, to rise above the squalor of desire.”

Several men around me nodded thoughtfully while gathering together their things.

From there I raced back to the office and finished Danforth at four A.M. Then I went home, slept for three hours, and by nine the next morning was seated at my cubicle, where I opened an email from Mr. Raven. I felt a burning sensation in my right wrist and popped two homeopathic pills that went on to have no effect.

“Mr. Raven?” I knocked lightly on his door.

“Come in,” he said, pushing aside his keyboard. Commemorative posters of marathons and charity races covered the wall space not taken up with shelves of corporate histories, mambo primers, and presidential biographies. Through the window I could see latticed scaffolding in front of a former hotel being converted to office space. Mr. Raven patted his gelled gray hair, which lay frozen across his scalp like a winter stream.

“Sit down,” he said, moving things around on his desk—a box of chocolate mints, a pair of Mongolian relaxation balls, a penknife—and fingering a reddish birthmark on his chin. “I assume you know why I want to see you.”

“Is it about Danforth Ltd.?”

Mr. Raven appreciated candor about painful or difficult subjects, as well as when bold action was required. We’d discussed Harry Truman once and, while acknowledging and finding fault with his faults, we’d approvingly measured the strength of his character—its unflinching directness—because of which he could say without hypocrisy that the buck stopped with him. A true leader saw, identified, and accepted mistakes while learning how not to repeat them.

“Please tell me why it was late.”

“I first sent it to you on Tuesday and didn’t know that you hadn’t received it until yesterday morning. I would have done it again right away except that the sensitivity training seminar was about to start.”

“Which your actions largely occasioned.”

“That’s—”

A questioning look settled on Mr. Raven’s face.

I drew my left ankle up onto my right knee and pulled at the pant leg material. “As you know, there were four of us in Chicago. I didn’t see the credit card Juan used and figured it was his personal one, and we’d pay him back later. This isn’t to say I’m blameless—the whole thing reflected bad judgment, including my own—but I’ve already had my wages garnished to make up my quarter of the expense account item, and I formally addressed the Employee Conduct Board last week and volunteered to do community service as well as—”

Mr. Raven leaned forward with a hard, penetrating look and said, “Let’s cut the folderol.”

“Excuse me?”

“We both know you’re a sick man.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your performance at Couvade has been greatly compromised lately, and you now have a choice. You can take a leave of absence and get healthy. Check into a sex addiction clinic like the PASE Wellness Center in Daly City. Work on this problem and beat it. Or you can accept the ten demerit points I’ll have to issue you for Danforth Ltd., which combined with your ten demerits from the Employee Conduct Board would total the twenty required for me to fire you.”

I swallowed thickly and felt the beginning of a sinus headache, of my tear ducts opening and throat constricting. Mr. Raven pushed a box of tissues toward me. I rose and then sat back down.

“The Board is giving us ten demerits?”

“You’ll get a copy of their written decision.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mr. Raven’s voice softened and his forehead relaxed, lowering his hair a quarter inch. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll undergo treatment and then, following a probationary period of not less than eighteen months, I’ll review your case and consider your coming back to work for Couvade.”

“No, this is wrong. Danforth was a mysterious accident, and I’d like to appeal to the Conduct Board for a reduced penalty.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“You’re telling me this for the first time right now!”

Mr. Raven, still holding the base of the tissue box, pulled it away from me and then picked up his phone. “Don’t make me call security.”

“But I’m being railroaded. You can’t—What if you call the system administration department and ask them to recover my Tuesday computer profile and they’ll tell you that I’m not lying about Danforth? In a situation this serious, you have to!”

I quit yelling and Mr. Raven set down his phone and we stared at a midway point between us for the seventy-three seconds it took two building security officers to arrive and lift me to my feet. I weighed a thousand pounds in their arms.