Читать книгу Prescription for a Superior Existence - Josh Emmons - Страница 9

Following my meeting with Ms. Anderson at the Wellness Center, the escorts took me to the dining hall, a high-ceilinged oval room with rectangular metal tables, where, arriving as the others were finishing, I ate a four-egg omelet with sausage links and home fries. Nothing tasted as good as it looked, being made of the sort of low-fat, low-cholesterol ingredients that I’d bought after my surgery and then never again, but I took comfort in the act of eating and didn’t get up from the table until my escorts said that the orientation meeting was about to start in the Celestial Commons building. I would have argued that I didn’t care about missing the beginning—or the middle or the end—if I thought they’d care that I didn’t care; instead I followed them out.

Having felt like an animal caught in a steel trap during my conversation with Ms. Anderson—when I discovered that I lacked the strength to chew off my own foot—just then I felt calm and self-possessed. I walked steadily between my escorts. This was all temporary. Conrad must have understood PASE’s role in my being shot and taken away, meaning either the police or FBI would arrive at any minute to rescue me from this horrible compound. It was important that I not panic, that I keep my wits and be ready to level sane and convincing charges against my captors. A cigarette would have helped, or a stick of nicotine gum, or an assortment of pills with something liquid to chase them, but I made tight fists and clenched my jaw and knew that this was about to be over. Back in the courtyard I looked for signs of disturbance, not knowing if the authorities would drop from a helicopter in a SWAT team raid or storm the front gate, or if their warrant and tact would help them avoid an open and violent confrontation with the Center’s security guards. Everything was quiet. The escorts looked straight ahead, one in front and the other behind me. As a giant clock tower struck eight A.M., I tried not to think of what was delaying my rescuers.

The orientation meeting, in a room on the first floor of the Celestial Commons building, was led by Mr. and Mrs. Rubin—a small, round couple with nearly identical bodies, like two pieces in a Russian doll sequence, Mrs. Rubin could have nested snugly inside her husband—who handed me a notebook and a small bottled water and introduced me to the four other new arrivals at the Wellness Center: Rema, a tax assessor from Seattle; Shang-lee, a chemical engineering graduate student at Stanford; Alice, an obstetrician from Alameda; and Star, a retired “friend to gentlemen” from Key West. I sat in the chair closest to the door and waited for the door behind me to open and my release to be effected.

Mrs. Rubin rolled up her tunic sleeves and stepped forward. “Does anyone have a question before we begin?”

“No,” answered Mr. Rubin immediately. “Okay, first of all, congratulations on taking the first, most difficult step toward improving. The worst is already behind you. From now on, each successive step will be easier than the last until, near the end, your feet will hardly touch the ground as you bound toward the perfection of UR God. But I must warn you that this won’t come at the same time for everyone. Just because you’re here in orientation together does not mean you will progress with identical speed. Some Pasers advance quickly and others slowly, which is okay because we are not in a race. UR God will be as ready for you in fifty years as in fifty days.”

A short but purposeful knock came at the door. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin looked at each other quizzically and then moved in concert toward it. Trembling with relief, I envisioned the squad of armed men about to enter, call my name or even recognize my face, and lead me back to my apartment, where I could expect the law’s full protection until my safety was established. Which wouldn’t take long. Once PASE’s criminal intentions toward me were proven beyond question—a day? two days?—my only concern would be how much to ask for in damages. As far as I knew, Shoale’s private fortune had been blended into PASE’s coffers, meaning I might expect millions—perhaps tens of millions—of dollars, depending on how sympathetic a jury I got. Couvade would probably offer me a vice-presidency or some equally nice sinecure to restore its mainstream image and distance itself from the PASE fallout. Women from all over the Bay Area and beyond would read about me and, their interest piqued in someone who had almost been murdered before being forced into a celibacy camp and then awarded an enormous compensation settlement, seek me out. Yes, for several seconds in that orientation room, at the end of a row of desperately gullible people from whose rank I was about to escape, I foresaw a hasty and lucrative resolution to all of my problems. Part of me even dared to imagine Mary Shoale, whom I loved more with every passing second, seizing the moment to break from her father and make me the happiest of men. What had been my terrible luck was going to be flipped around and turned right side up.

Except that it wasn’t. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin cautiously opened the door, consulted in whispers with a young man and woman in regulation tunics, and then returned to the center of the room, smiling as though they had swallowed a bottle of Percodan.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Mr. Rubin said, “but we’ve just received wonderful news. Tonight, following Synergy, Montgomery Shoale will make a major announcement via a live video address that we’ll watch at the Prescription Palace. You are new here and so can’t appreciate how rare and magnificent an event this is, but to give you some perspective I’ll say that it’s been many months since Mr. Shoale last spoke to us.”

“Five months,” said Mrs. Rubin gently, though with a correcting tone.

“He is close to becoming an ur-savant, and this could be his last public appearance. You will witness history in the making.”

Shang-lee, whose unlined face and glinting gray hairs placed him between twenty and fifty, and who, besides me, was the only one not reflecting the Rubins’ smile, adjusted his small round spectacles, raised a bony hand, and said, “What’s an ur-savant?”

“You will learn about the savant stages later today in class,” said Mrs. Rubin. “Our purpose now is to provide you with background on the Wellness Center, its history and aims and rules of conduct, so that you’ll know what to expect and how to behave while here.”

During the ensuing account, told in alternating sections by the Rubins, I fought against the fear that every passing minute made my rescue less likely, that if the police weren’t there yet it was because Conrad hadn’t told them. Or they disbelieved him. Or they were in league with PASE and, even given proof that I was being held against my will, not going to help me. I closed my eyes and willed the door to open, an amateur’s telekinesis. At nine A.M.—twelve hours since I’d been shot and kidnapped—full of disappointment and desire for pills and alcohol and tobacco, I wiped away two tears caught in my eyelashes and fought down a rumbling nausea.

Mr. and Mrs. Rubin explained that this Wellness Center, a mere three miles from the San Francisco PASE Station, had been built eight years earlier based on a blueprint drawn up by Montgomery Shoale and provided through revelation by UR God. The first of its kind, it provided the model for the other Wellness Centers subsequently established in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York, as well as for those planned in or near Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Tangiers, Marseilles, Utrecht, Riga, Seoul, and Sidney. Mrs. Rubin punched something into a laptop computer and a montage of photos blanketed the wall behind her showing the various stages of each new Center’s completion. Like the Daly City original, they were all set on four acres and would, when completed, have an outdoor park with a botanical garden, a meditation post, two residential dormitories (one for men and one for women), an education building (Celestial Commons), a screening facility (Prescription Palace), a hospital (Freedom Place), a library and administration building (Shoale Hall), a recreation building, a dining hall, and a church (Synergy Station). They would all house forty guests at a time, an even number of men and women, whose activities would be fully integrated.

Although the architecture varied slightly from one Center to another, as did the flowers in the botanical garden and the food served in the dining halls to reflect local produce and culinary traditions, life would follow a set schedule at all of them: 6 A.M. wake up. 6:30 A.M. exercises. 7:15 A.M. breakfast. 8 A.M. reading/studying. 10 A.M. counseling. 12 P.M. lunch. 1 P.M. class. 3:30 P.M. individual research. 4:30 P.M. recreation. 6 P.M. dinner. 7:30 P.M. all-guest activity. 10 P.M. lights-out. On Sundays there was a thirty-minute Synergy session at 7 P.M.

And what exactly was the purpose of a Wellness Center? What did Montgomery Shoale hope it would accomplish? Although in practice its functions and benefits were too many to count, it was designed to speed along neophytes’ and longtime Pasers’ journey toward permanent synergy with UR God, the fusion of everyone into His vast being and thus the end of human strife on Earth. Shoale’s goal was our own. He personally interviewed all the doctors and staff, who then underwent a rigorous training program and six-month probation period before being brought to work at a Center full-time. He kept in close contact with all the individual directors and monitored the progress of their operations worldwide.

In addition to treating the normal range of behaviors that had to be modified and/or eliminated—sexuality, rage, material greed, television, Internet abuse, etc.—the Center was equipped to help people with problems involving addiction, extreme emotional imbalance, and psychiatric disorders. According to its strictly refined physical and spiritual practices, it helped these unfortunate guests using a holistic approach to mind and body and soul wellness taken from The Prescription, which, in its wisdom, recognized that while everyone needed to improve, some were, at the time they reached adolescence or adulthood, at such a deficit that they required extreme and immediate preimprovement treatment. For example, the Center’s hospital included a Seclusion Ward that provided twenty-four-hour care for sufferers from drug withdrawal, during which the guests’ isolation was leavened by audio recordings of Montgomery Shoale lectures, as well as by frequent use of a Synergy device and special stretching techniques favored by UR God and interpreted by Mr. Shoale. PASE enjoyed a hundred percent success rate in curing heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine addiction, as it did with freeing guests of anger, violent tendencies, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, generalized anxiety, misanthropy, boredom, acute narcissism, and—

“What are you doing, Mr. Smith?” Mr. Rubin asked, cutting off his wife’s speech.

I’d gotten up from my seat and walked to a window overlooking the courtyard. “Just checking something.” As when I’d crossed it earlier, there were no policemen or FBI agents visible, though I told myself that they could be talking to Ms. Anderson or some other administration figure, trying to ascertain where I was being kept, on the verge of taking the noncooperative Pasers into custody and beginning an exhaustive hunt around the premises for me. I looked for a latch or lever with which to open the window—thinking I would scream out for help and catch the attention of either the law or someone passing by on the other side of the Center wall—but it was sealed shut.

I heard Mr. Rubin take a few steps toward me and then stop. “During instructional sessions like this one, there is a basic protocol for being excused from your seat to go to the bathroom or attend to another Center-approved activity. Please sit back down and I’ll explain it to you.”

“I’d rather stand here, if you don’t mind.”

Mrs. Rubin said, “We do. We mind very much.”

A door opened in the building across the courtyard and two men emerged, one of whom wasn’t wearing a blue tunic. I tried to make out whether he had a metallic badge on his breast or walked as officiously as someone in the intelligence community, but at that distance I couldn’t tell.

“We really must insist,” said Mr. Rubin. “Please don’t make this difficult for us and yourself.”

The two men walked in my direction and disappeared under the foliage of a pair of eucalyptus trees shooting up like twin geysers in the middle of the courtyard.

“Go on with what you were saying,” I said, waiting for the non-tunic man to come back into view, when he would be close enough for me to make out his clothing and features. But then four meaty hands gripped my arms, turned me around, and roughly pulled me back to my seat. My escorts withdrew from the room after nodding tersely to Mrs. Rubin, who bit her lower lip and looked at me pityingly.

I stared with dull hatred at the Rubins, who said that they would now go over the basic rules of conduct so that such disciplinary measures wouldn’t be necessary again. Anarchy did not reign at the PASE Wellness Center. Some actions were forbidden and others encouraged. In the first category, we were not allowed to leave the Center or receive visitors without permission. Television, books, and the Internet were okay with some built-in restrictions, for which reason certain programs and periodicals and websites were blocked or made inaccessible. We could not drink alcohol, take non-prescribed drugs, or engage in any sexual activity, including with ourselves. Profanity was prohibited, as was licentious talk and any attempt to leave the Center grounds before the facilitators deemed it appropriate. Disputes between guests were to be taken to a facilitator and should not involve violence or violent intent.

I thought I heard footsteps in the hall outside but it was just my teeth grinding.

Mr. and Mrs. Rubin knew that these restrictions sounded harsh. No one liked to be told they couldn’t do something. But Montgomery Shoale had devised them for our health and safety; otherwise our improvement would be no more possible than rain without clouds. Much was asked of guests at the Center, and in return much was given. We were worthy, infinitely capable people, for we came from UR God and would be with Him again someday. We had to bear in mind that reaching this destination was the most difficult, rewarding journey we would ever undertake.

“Did you say there’s going to be Synergy tonight?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Rubin.

“What is Synergy?” asked Shang-lee.

“So today is Sunday?”

“Synergy,” said Mrs. Rubin, while smoothing out a kerchief she’d held bunched in her left hand, “is the feeling of being fused into UR God.”

Mr. Rubin added, “It can be had on this planet in one of two ways. The first is with a Synergy device, which is like a big gyroscope that you stand in with electrodes connected to your temples. Synergy is, you’ll find, the most wonderful feeling imaginable, and when you become an ur-savant it is the only one you will ever experience again.”

“Sunday the nineteenth?” I said.

Mr. Rubin nodded and I leaned over and tried to throw up. I had been shot on Friday the seventeenth, meaning I had been unconscious for an entire day, meaning any immediate attempt to rescue me from the Wellness Center would already have ended. There was no cavalry on the way, no quick response to my dilemma. And this whole situation was neither a joke nor a social experiment. A camera crew was not filming behind a fake wall, ready to ask me how it felt to believe that I’d been forced into a PASE indoctrination camp. There was no winking host or thoughtful documentarian orchestrating my deception in a cruel and elaborate prank, and I would not have the chance to talk about how similar it was to my childhood fear of being sent to an orphanage full of seemingly well-intentioned people who were in fact bent on destroying my will. This was real.

Unable to vomit, I sat back and the orientation session ended. The Rubins thanked us for being good listeners and handed out information packets with a map of the Center grounds, a personalized schedule listing our counseling session and class locations, a rulebook, a pocket-sized edition of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, and a personal digital assistant with electronic copies of everything. The other guests, eyes on their packets, rose and filed out of the room, and Mrs. Rubin asked me civilly if I needed assistance in getting to my next event.

My itinerary said I was supposed to be in Room 227 of the Celestial Commons building, one floor above, so I left the room and paused to look up and down the hallway, where Shang-lee’s back was receding toward an Exit sign that marked the stairwell and elevator. Single escorts were placed at fifty-foot intervals between us, as motionless and erect as suits of armor. I passed these hollow men in their blue tunics, reached the stairs, and climbed them deliberately, going over problems that configured themselves in my head as a tetrahedron, with my separation from Mary on one side, my present incarceration on a second, my forced sobriety on a third, and my unemployment—with its implications for my debts—on a fourth. The first and fourth sides existed in the outside world, to which I didn’t have access presently, while the second and third affected me then and there, and had to be overcome. Which I didn’t know how to do. Shang-lee, Rema, Alice, and Star were out of sight when I got to the second-floor landing, apparently already in their counseling rooms.

A short man in his midforties with a flat nose, sparse hair, and ruddy complexion met me at the door of Room 227. His name was Mr. Ramsted, and he invited me to sit at an oblong mahogany table with attached seats that slid back and forth on floor tracks, where the other guests—Ang, Brian, Eli, Rema, Quenlon, Amanda, Tyrone, Helmut, Sarah, Summer, and Mihir—introduced themselves. For the benefit of Rema and me, the only newcomers to counseling, Mr. Ramsted explained the sessions’ format: on days not designated for group discussion, a guest told the story of how his or her problem developed up until the time they chose to enter the Wellness Center. Then the other guests would make observations and suggestions and corroborations, and Mr. Ramsted—who throughout his twenties had been a sex addict, practically living in the Castro’s bathhouses, and who therefore possessed authority beyond that of just being an actuated savant—would provide his own insights into what was wrong with us and how we could improve.

“Jack,” he said, “since this is your first day, why don’t you start our session by telling us the history of your problem?”

“What problem?”

“With sex.”

“I don’t have one.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“Let’s not waste everyone’s time, please.”

This echo of my exchange with Ms. Anderson was an effective piece of psychological torture. I slid my chair back to the end of its groove. The faces around the table looked at me impatiently, as though I were an actor who’d come onstage in costume and makeup to say that the evening’s performance would not go on because I didn’t look the part.

“I don’t belong here,” I said.

Addressing the rest of the table as a prosecutor would a jury, Mr. Ramsted said, “Are you saying you’re completely satisfied with your sexual history?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“All of it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s amazing. I’ve met confirmed libertines, people who would rather have sex than bring about world peace, who can’t say as much.”

The walls were a creamy orange and air ducts in the ceiling circulated a cool breeze. The windows’ shades were drawn and I pictured what was happening on the other side of them—nothing. I felt as though I were tumbling down a mountain while the static world spun around me. My lower back was alight with discomfort and I placed my wrists gingerly on the tabletop, where they glowed yellow in the reflected varnish, thinking that if I remained completely still the pain in them would settle down to an acceptable throb.

“What do you want to hear?”

Mr. Ramsted pursed his lips and rubbed his nose, the divot in the bridge of which suggested an old fracture. “I want an explanation of the incredible statement you just made. I want you to confirm that you’ve never made an unwanted pass or offended a partner in bed. That you’ve never had an inappropriate dream about a family member or friend. That you’ve never lusted after someone too young or too old. That you’ve never had erectile dysfunction or gotten an erection when you shouldn’t have. That you don’t fantasize too much or too intensely. And that you think back on all your sexual encounters with approval and sanguinity.”

“I do.”

After a pause Mr. Ramsted said, “Rema, let’s hear about your experiences.”

“From the time I was a kid?” she said.

He rose and began slowly circling the table. “Just be honest. Without honesty no one can hope to grow or improve or come to know the truth.” He looked at me and continued his orbit. “You know what Alexander Pope said: ‘An honest Man’s the noblest work of God.’ And Emily Dickinson wisely wrote: ‘Truth is as old as God, / His twin identity—and will endure as long as He, / A co-eternity …’ And Jesus said, ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ Honesty is the bedrock of Prescription for a Superior Existence, as it is the policy of every right-thinking adult who aspires to succeed in this life and the next.”

Rema then gave a nearly two-hour account of her sexual biography, starting full throttle at age thirteen and accelerating through twenty years of rogue-gallery men and dithyrambic women, in bedrooms and public parks and water closets and interstate train bathrooms, in and out of schools, in and out of jobs, in and out of in and out. It was a smoldering, exhaustive, unpredictable, and inventive monologue that, had it been told breathily instead of with evident pain and shame and self-censure, could have been turned into a podcast sensation. I was enthralled and uncomfortably aroused throughout most of it, and my problems seemed as small as dust mites.

“I have to cut this short,” Mr. Ramsted finally said, giving me another reason to resent him, “and forgo our chance to comment, which is unfortunate because this tragic story puts into stark relief the misery caused by our libidos, in exemplary fashion, but it’s time for lunch. I’d like to thank Rema for her brave, unstinting account of two decades’ worth of mistakes. I asked for honesty and she provided it generously.”

Mihir fell in line beside me on the way to the dining hall and said that despite my obstinate behavior during exercises and counseling, I hadn’t ruined my chances at the Wellness Center. I could yet make up for it. At the serving line as I selected six pieces of pepperoni pizza and a tall fruit juice, he said he understood my attitude, which, although counterproductive and immature, was to be expected at first. Men were brought up to brag about their exploits, not confess them, so we felt cognitive dissonance when learning that our every sexual thought from the moment puberty stretched and dropped our genitals was a debasement of our truest self. It had taken him five days to work up the courage and to develop the perspective to tell his story.

“Is that right?” I said, disappointed by the pizza before even tasting it.

He ladled salad dressing over a plate of tomatoes. “Now I love to tell my story. Every time I do I feel such relief and gratitude that I changed before it was too late. As recently as one month ago I was like a person eating red meat three meals a day without any thought for his cholesterol level, as though I had a good reason to be cavalier about my diet, as though heart attacks were as uncommon as Huntington’s disease! One month. Perhaps you would like to hear my story now.”

We stopped, holding our trays of food, to look around the room for a place to sit.

“I just want to eat.”

“That is not a problem. I will give you the abridged version, not go into the painstaking exact details. You will get more from it than you did from Rema’s, because as a woman her methods and goals of seduction were necessarily different from yours, her experience more complicated and harder to relate to. My story, on the other hand, coming from a man’s perspective, will show that you aren’t alone in your depravity, that sex does not actually prove your power and virility, and that you must step out of the orgasm rut.”

We found an empty table beside a bay window facing the Center entrance, and Mihir shook the salt and pepper dispensers over his plate. “I am married,” he said, “and have cheated on my wife, according to a conservative estimate I made just last Tuesday, more than eight hundred times in the twelve years of our marriage, beginning within twenty-four hours of our wedding vows, when my driver’s daughter took me to the office while her father saw a dentist, and ending the day before I came here. I intimately knew a dozen prostitutes in my neighborhood and fathered seven children out of wedlock, one of whom is the finest junior cricketer in southeast New Delhi. All seemed to be going well, with of course some minor problems, until three weeks ago, when after an afternoon dalliance with two British backpackers I came home from work and found my wife threatening to castrate my eldest son, who shares my name, unless I agreed never to have sex with anyone but her again. You should have seen the cold resolve of this woman, such as she had never shown before, ready to mutilate her own child to restore a fidelity that I considered to be an impossible dream. Well, here, look, this is a picture of her taken at the airport the next day. She made calm accusations that were all true and I denied them fiercely—I tell you I felt no guilt about my past behavior or my present lies and thought that the only injustice would be if I were forced to admit wrongdoing and then forswear doing it again, for yes I was a sociopath!—but she had hired a private detective, and she produced video footage and compiled written testimony from my disgruntled former mistresses. I was caught and would you believe that even then I feebly tried to explain away the evidence as either having happened before our marriage or been part of my job? According to my pathetic story many women clients of my company would have gone with a rival had I refused to sleep with them. My wife grabbed the knife sharpener in the middle of these excuses and my son cried and swayed in place like a hungry beggar. Ten minutes later, with my son’s pants around his ankles and his penis pulled taut in her hand, seeing that she was not bluffing, I acknowledged everything. I told her about all the women and all the occasions and do you know what, instantly this had a remarkable effect on both of us. She went from composed resolution to tears, and I went from being an indignant child weighed down by complicated lies and self-justifications to being for the first time in my life an adult able to look at myself, if not dispassionately, at least from another’s point of view. I felt a type of levity then, almost an ecstasy, and as my wife’s tears fell I apologized and comforted her and explained truthfully that my former life was over, that I would not go back to covering up and misleading and hurting those who meant most to me. By decree I ended the lies and recriminations and performance enhancement supplements that had compromised me for years, during which time sex had so darkened my perspective that I felt just then as if I were stepping out of a cave and into the light of day. By evening time we were discussing our future together, and my son was happily doing his homework. It was the rebirth of our love. Yet I knew even as we made new pledges that my body could betray me and my resolve could falter and that I needed more than self-help, so I looked into programs that fostered celibacy and found information about the PASE Wellness Center.”

The pizza tasted like air. “Your wife must be happy.”

“At first, yes, she was overjoyed, but now that I have learned the truth of PASE and know that all sex is unnecessary, including with her, she is less supportive. In fact we have had some trying conversations on the phone and it’s clear to me that she must come here herself, for I am worried about her own salvation. At present, however, she refuses to even consider it. This causes me great disquietude.”

By then five other people had joined our table. One of them, seventeen-year-old Tyrone, who was in our counseling group, said that he wished to have a tenth of Mihir’s resolve. A pimply boy with crowded teeth and a slightly hunched back, he confessed that he was a chronic masturbator who had backslid the day before and been forced, as part of the treatment, to send a picture of himself in midact—taken by one of the microscopic cameras planted all over the Wellness Center—to everyone in his email address book, with exaggerated close-ups of his face and hands reserved for his teachers, grandparents, and parents’ friends. If he slipped again the picture would be delivered to any schools and employers he approached in the future.

“Why don’t you take an inhibitor?” asked Warren, a dark-haired Bostonian with a sharp widow’s peak who, Mihir whispered to me, due to his rage issues had beaten up a small Filipino woman for not crediting his expired coupon at a supermarket, and was at the Wellness Center in lieu of serving half his prison sentence.

“As if they’re around,” said Tyrone, forking a cherry tomato that squirted onto his hand.

“What’s an inhibitor?” I asked.

“A chemical injection that lowers your sperm count and prevents you from achieving and sustaining an erection,” said Mihir, with a forbidding shake of his head. “It’s a type of antiaphrodisiac and PASE does not allow it.”

“Out of fear,” said Warren.

Mihir said, looking at Warren as he would a stranger cutting ahead in line, “One doesn’t conquer desire and become compatible with UR God by taking inhibitors.”

“UR God cares about ends, not means.”

Mihir raised his voice. “You can’t achieve lasting synergy with Him if you’ve merely put desire into a closet instead of throwing it out for good. Any declared Paser can tell you that; it is basic teaching.”

Warren cut the remainder of his steak into diamond-shaped bites, the muscles of his forearms moving independently like machine parts. “If you don’t get in fights or have sex or whatever, you’re going to mainline UR God without any problem. It’s all about results and there’s no point in having this debate like we’re too stupid to know as much.”

Mihir set down his clean silverware, folded his napkin, and said, dropping his voice to a chilly undertone, “You are prattling on stupidly in front of a new guest who is my mentee. I’d rather you not confuse or dishearten him, so if you must speak rubbish perhaps you could do it at another table.”

“Are you going to say that when someone on the outside challenges you? Are you going to ask them to go away? That won’t bring one more person to UR God.”

“As if you care about Him or yourself or the goal of improving! You care only for appearances, not substance. Reality Fact Number Thirty-two in The Prescription states clearly: ‘Not everyone will embrace the truth.’ On the outside I will not bother trying to convince such persons as yourself, who are incapable of the necessary sacrifices.”

Warren smiled. “I think you’re forgetting Reality Fact Number Twelve: ‘He who thinks he knows the nature of UR God is like a child convinced he can speak a foreign language after hearing it once.’”

“Reality Fact Number Eight: ‘The way to UR God can no more be shortened than can a ladder stretching from the ground to the moon.’”

“Reality Fact Number Five: ‘There is room for every aspirant in the body of UR God, as there is for every note in the body of music.’”

“Reality Fact Number Three: ‘Desire has a thousand faces; take care to destroy the one that most resembles yours.’”

“All right,” said Eli, a leathery old man from our counseling group, a retired fisherman from the Puget Sound area who’d built a crystal meth lab in his basement and blown off all his left-hand fingers in an explosion the year before, and who’d managed to keep using the drug for a week before someone found him sleeping in their driveway and sent him to the first of four rehabilitation centers he would attend in advance of this Wellness Center. “Let’s just enjoy our food. We can settle this in class.”

Mihir leaned over and told me that nearly everyone—99 percent of the guests—would and could improve, but that sometimes a wastrel such as Warren came through who was doomed to failure and I was to ignore him and his crude, perhaps intentional misunderstandings. Those full of poison delight in infecting others. Just ask the scorpion.

Mihir seemed in earnest and no more open to talk of escape or insurrection than a freshman at Harvard. I tried catching Warren’s eye to see if by a wink or glance he might acknowledge that we were on the other side of the looking glass, but, however heretical Mihir considered him, he had a serene expression, as though internecine squabbles at the Center—and PASE itself—were great fun and in no way a sign of the religion’s inanity.

When a Brazilian man named Caetano, sitting to Tyrone’s left, launched into a description of how his former girlfriend had wanted him to do “unspeakable” things to her, which at first he had done willingly, thereby eclipsing his best self behind a “grunting, squealing” animal self, and which set in motion a sense of defilement that “spread like a cancer” and made part of him feel relieved when her death the previous December in a car crash released both of them from their sick physical entente—although she, dying without any contact with PASE, was suffering the agonies of nonbeing—a bizarre declaration that ought to have repelled everyone at the table but instead brought out their warmest sympathy, I concentrated on my pizza.

After lunch came the class period. While walking together to Celestial Commons, where all classes were held on the third floor, Mihir told me that I was in Introductory Level A with Mr. Ortega, who focused on the mechanics of the PASE hierarchy and simple exegeses of The Prescription, things that were self-evident and not challenging to intelligent persons such as ourselves. Luckily, it lasted for only five days and then I would move on to Introductory Level B, helmed by the inspiring, ethereally beautiful Ms. Webley, to whom I, like all guests, would form an intense nonsexual attachment that might show up in my dreams.

When I got to class, Mr. Ortega, a potbellied man with oversized hands and head, rolled up his sleeves and crossed his bandy legs and took no notice of me. Instead of sitting around an oblong table, we—all four guests from my orientation, a freckled and too-muscular Englishman named Alastair, a slender black woman with tight cornrows named Tonya, a skinny Italian woman named Suzanne, and a zaftig blonde named Emma—sat in fold-out chairs arranged in a semicircle, with Mr. Ortega at the opening. If the seating arrangement was meant to satisfy our need for variety, it failed, but I was determined to treat this class like a work seminar, an occupational hazard to be endured quiescently, signifying nothing in itself. I may have been tumbling down a mountain but I would not worry anymore about the ground below. I was collecting my bearings.

“Today,” Mr. Ortega said, tugging on his thick forearm hair—for this and his sloping forehead, rounded shoulders, and other simian qualities I felt a kinship with him—“we’re going to talk about the six Paser stages. Can anyone begin by describing the difference between a declared Paser and a savant?”

Everyone looked at their hands or laps uncomfortably until Alastair, in the posh accent that Americans affect to tell British jokes, said, “Isn’t a savant basically like a more advanced declared Paser, in that he professes faith in UR God but takes it a step further by giving up sex? He walks the walk, in other words.”

“Correct,” said Mr. Ortega, “if sex is his or her favorite activity. It’s important to note that you become a savant by giving up whatever you most love to do, which isn’t always sex. Many people live happily without that and therefore renounce nothing by renouncing sex. They need to look elsewhere in order to achieve savant status, such as to chocolate or gambling or cocaine or shoe shopping. The essence of being a savant is self-control; it demonstrates the beginning of your independence from the false joys of this world and shows your affinity with UR God.”

This was all very boring and I remembered counseling wistfully and with a new fondness. I thought about Rema’s various exploits, their audacity and imaginativeness, which, now that she’d joined PASE, would cease, and I grieved for their passing. Then, despite my earlier conclusion that half of what had gone wrong in my life was externally unchangeable and the other half internally so, and that I should not worry about where I was going—the bottom of the mountain toward which I was barreling—the tetrahedron of my problems rose up in my mind’s landscape like a terrible portentous obelisk. It eclipsed everything else in my line of sight, so that I barely saw Shang-lee sitting next to me, his hands folded in his lap in bodhisattva fashion, and feared that I might pass out from terror at any minute. I badly wanted—I needed—a sedative and drink and cigarette and pornography and coffee and chocolate and lasagna and assurance that I would not languish here forever, that my absence meant something in the world at large.

Shang-lee asked me if I was all right and I nodded.

Mr. Ortega opened his hands questioningly at us, cocked an eyebrow, and then continued, “After you’re a savant you become a functioning savant. In this stage you branch out beyond desire in its most active sense to work on curtailing your vanity and self-focus, the two biggest impediments to improvement. As a functioning savant you will think less about yourself and how others perceive you. To do this requires reducing the time and money you spend on clothes, cosmetics, hair care, entertainment, etc., and at the same time increasing your charitable contributions and your study of The Prescription. Both your reductions and your increases need to be substantial. For example, you can’t buy four lipsticks instead of five and call that cutting back, nor can you spend eight hundred instead of nine hundred dollars on a new season’s wardrobe. You must feel the deprivation of having less than you used to.”

“How long does it take to go from being a savant to a functioning savant?” asked Tonya. Midway through Mr. Ortega’s speech she had put down the emery board with which she’d been filing her nails, as though even this act of grooming might be unPASElike.

“The Rubins must have told you in orientation,” said Mr. Ortega, “that everyone advances at their own speed, but I’ll warn you that it’s possible to go too slowly or too quickly. You can’t become a functioning savant overnight, nor can you drag it out over ten years. The good news is that when you reenter the outside world you’ll be able to consult with advanced Pasers at any PASE Station to come up with an appropriate timeline. Just remember that your improvement has to be real and consistent. You can’t take breaks to do things you’re not supposed to.”

“Do you get a badge or a certificate when you move up a level?” Tonya asked.

“No.”

“Then how’s anyone supposed to know you’re a functioning savant and not some starting-out type?”

“UR God will know and you will know. Nothing else matters.”

“But it wouldn’t be bad—you wouldn’t get in trouble, right—if you wore a shirt that said ‘functioning savant’ on it or a button or a belt buckle.”

“That would be fine. Now, after the functioning savant stage you will graduate to the master savant stage, which is defined by fewer desires, smaller meal portions, a commitment to buying only used clothes and no-brand hygienic items, further engagement with The Prescription, taking a leadership role in a local Paser study group, and active volunteering with the PASE Process, such as at one of its soup kitchens or homeless shelters or hospital terminal wards.”

“I’d like to do something with the blind,” said Alastair. “I’d like to read to them or take them to a museum.”

Mr. Ortega made a displeased face and said, “Next you’ll become an actuated savant. I, for example, got to this stage a year ago by memorizing large sections of The Prescription, whittling down my desire, eating modest meals without appetizers or desserts or alcohol, dressing mainly in my tunic, and making large contributions to the PASE Process.”

“Does everyone have to be an actuated type to get a job here?” asked Tonya.

“It’s a necessary prerequisite, yes, for becoming a facilitator, along with taking a test and undergoing an apprenticeship training program. The whole process takes about two months, and only a third of the applicants are then hired to be on staff.”

“Are the tests hard?”

“They’re challenging, yes.”

“Did you have to know lots of names and dates? Because my intelligence isn’t geared toward those per se. I’m more of a conceptual thinker, and I’m wondering if there’s a type of test that would capitalize on that aspect of the mind as opposed to the dates.”

“The tests are very concept-oriented, yes.”

Mr. Ortega and Tonya went on for a while and to distract myself I drew up a mental list of people from whom I might ask to borrow money to pay my creditors until I found a job: my parents, though they’d retired the year before and were cash poor; my brother, Sid, who owed me three thousand dollars but wouldn’t have it; Max, who carried almost as much credit card debt as I did; Supritha, whose family was wealthy but not fond of me; and Juan, who, having sold me out at Couvade, would probably avoid me forever. Mr. Ortega was nodding at Tonya and Alastair was scrawling notes and I was having revelations I’d had many times before. At age thirty-four you don’t have the thousand options you had at twenty-four. If barred from the world of capital growth assessment, I effectively had none. Anxiety fell on me in droplets as corrosive as acid rain, and Mr. Ortega told a joke that made everyone laugh, and I saw no shelter big enough to cover me.

“Next,” Mr. Ortega said, “comes the master actuated savant stage. This is the penultimate step you take before becoming an ursavant. In it you renounce all desires beyond those necessary for maintaining a physical body, such as for food, water, heat, sleep, and oxygen. You have to know The Prescription backward and forward, give away whatever money and objects you don’t immediately need, work with the sickest and most hobbled people in the vicinity, advocate nonviolence and universal tolerance, and take care of any unfinished business you may have in anticipation of becoming an ur-savant.” He paused and cracked his knuckles. “I’m not going to lie or sugarcoat it: this is a difficult level. It requires a great deal of commitment—a superhuman control over your corporeal reality—so don’t worry if it sounds impossible to you right now. No one when they first start jogging attempts an ultra marathon.”

Normally when a person in a meeting lays out a preposterously hopeful forecast, when they talk about doubling a company’s clients or tripling its revenue in a year, the realists in the room hasten to point out the obstacles to such a development, from the scarcity of potential new clients to increased competition to insufficient staffing, and quash the fantasy before anyone besides the initial speaker decides to believe in such nonsense. I listened to this description of a master actuated savant and expected someone to point out the patent absurdity of anyone—much less hundreds or thousands of Pasers—fulfilling its ascetic criteria, and when Alastair raised his hand, I looked to him as a mute would his advocate.

“That does sound like a difficult level,” he said, tightening his mouth and closing his eyes halfway to suggest deep concentration. “One really has to change one’s life around, it seems. More so than on the previous levels.”

“That’s what PASE is about,” said Suzanne, tapping her foot against the leg of her chair. “If you’re too weak or noncommittal to make it, you drop out and that’s that. No one’s forcing you to fuse into UR God.”

“I’m not weak or noncommittal,” said Alastair. “I’ll make the changes necessary to improve; I’m just pointing out that there’s a wider chasm between the actuated and the master actuated stages than what’s come before.”

“That’s a defeatist’s point.”

Mr. Ortega cut in by saying, “Then, lastly, most wonderfully, you will attain ur-savant status and be ready for eternal synergy with UR God. At this stage you will be totally self-contained and perfect in every way. You will have no more need of this planet or your body. You will be what you were in the beginning and will be forever after, a wand waving about inside of UR God as an ecstatic part of the truth, a sliver of true harmolodic vibration.”

Silence followed. I pulled at a thread coming from my chair’s seat cushion and the clock ticked as loudly as a metronome. It became clear after a minute that no one would respond, that Alastair had been at best a semirealist and was now, following Suzanne’s comment, even less of one. My standard aches and pains performed their dirge and my need for alcohol and a sealed bottle of anything swelled in my head and I knew not to speak—it didn’t matter what these people told themselves, and I didn’t want a repeat of my confrontation with Mr. Ramsted—but as the silence continued I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Are you saying,” I asked, “that ur-savants don’t eat or drink or breathe?”

“That’s correct.”

I yanked the thread free and wrapped it around my left pinkie, turning its tip pink. A fly landed on Alastair’s knee, and he slapped his hand down and missed and it buzzed away at an angry pitch. “Then they must be dead.”

“On the contrary, it is they who are truly alive, as part of UR God, fused synergistically into His being.”

“But to everyone on planet Earth they must appear to be corpses.”

The fly landed on Mr. Ortega’s knee and was not lucky a second time. “You must understand that our bodies are holding vessels that no more own our spirit forever than a balloon does the air it contains. For example, you, Jack Smith, consider sex to be an integral part of yourself, whereas really it’s a pointless pressure that, once released, will leave you free in its absence.”

“I don’t see how you can say that, or how you can say that an ursavant isn’t just a dead person. If sex isn’t an integral part of me, nothing is.” I was beginning to feel engaged and defensive against my will, for it seemed that this was more than a bidding war between common sense and uncommon belief; I wished someone else would play my part.

“You only think so because you’ve been brought up to expect to feel that way. Surely you know by now that much of what we’re taught is wrong or misleading, that there are specious biological justifications floating around for our worst behavior.”

“That’s—I don’t know what exactly you’re talking about.”

“Take meat eating, for example. People say our incisors are designed for cutting and our molars for crushing and tearing meat, which supposedly gives us the right to inhumanely raise and then slaughter millions of animals a year.”

“What does that have to do with people deciding not to breathe or drink anymore?”

“I presume you haven’t read The Prescription.”

“No.”

“It explains exactly what happens when we break free of our bodies and, if we’ve proven ourselves worthy of UR God, rise into Him. Its eloquence and truth are irrefutable.”

“I refute them.”

“You haven’t read them yet.”

“I refute Mein Kampf and a hundred other stupid manifestos I’ve never read.”

“Those were all written by mortals. The Prescription was written by UR God.”

“The Bible was written by the regular God, and I imagine it contradicts The Prescription all over the place.”

“The temptation to endow a man-made book with legitimacy by saying that a higher power wrote it—whether it’s the Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, or what have you—has often tempted its authors.”

“Like it did Montgomery Shoale.”

“I recommend that you read The Prescription and then tell us what you think. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

When class ended Mr. Ortega took me aside and said he appreciated my dynamism in class, the way I fought to understand what PASE was really about and challenged hearsay. Most guests quibbled over trivia or blindly accepted whatever he said, which was fine at the Center, but later, when back among the general population, they would be vulnerable to others’ lies and misinformation. Because I poked and prodded PASE, my belief would be deeper, more substantial and harder won. I would be immune to the hucksters and charlatans who preyed on the spiritually defenseless and only cared about power and money and their own aggrandizement. I would earn my place in PASE hierarchy and would see clearly how false prophets and gurus and religious leaders in the so-called real world plied their sham religions and took advantage of everyone they could. He said that I would be a savant before I knew it.