Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “I guess.” I looked at him but his chin-length hair curtained his eyes.

  “From what I hear you made a pretty good guess of what UR God looks like,” he said. “Yelling a denial of it at dinner isn’t going to help you get out of here, though. Word to the wise.”

  “I’m not getting out of here anytime soon.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “I am.”

  “But you never know when an opportunity will present itself.”

  “What kind of opportunity?”

  He blew on his bangs with a long low-pitched whistle that got lost in a far-off dog’s howl. “You’re going to like Synergy,” he said.

  “Do you know of an opportunity?”

  We had passed Elysian Field, along the edge of which were small lawn torches lighting our path like a luau, and come to the doors leading into the Synergy Station, a hangar-sized building big enough to swallow a small plane.

  “That’s the North Star right there,” he said, pointing to a crater of light in the firmament brighter than all the others, a droplet of marigold in a black field of white specks. “From it you can find everything else.”

  I would have pressed him for an answer, but we were already in front of two facilitators, on the other side of whom, forming a perfect circle around the inside of the building, were forty Synergy devices spaced at five-foot intervals. Mrs. Rubin had said they looked like gyroscopes, but they more resembled transparent cocoons with gauzy flaps of skin surrounding open fronts through which you could see body-sized holsters. A facilitator directed me to one marked Number 38 and showed me how to board it and then adjust the web of straps and buckles that fastened me as tightly as an astronaut in a space shuttle. After attaching electrodes to my temples and inner wrists, he walked away and I hung suspended in the device alongside the thirty-nine other guests, dangling like a baby in a nursery crib, losing a tiny amount of blood circulation to my extremities.

  Ms. Anderson entered the circle of devices and said, “As many of you know already and some of you are about to discover, Synergy will last for exactly thirty minutes from the time the meditation warm-up ends. It requires no effort on your part, except to stay still. Moving or thrashing about before it begins could give you bruises or skin burns, so just relax and ready your mind. Are there any questions before we get started? No? Good.”

  She raised and then lowered her hand. The lights slowly faded to black, and the walls, floor, and ceiling turned into giant surroundscope video screens, so that every square inch of the building’s interior reflected an unbroken, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, continuous filmed image of the sky taken from over the cloudline. The effect was that we were a mile above the ground, looking at a piercingly thin blue in every direction but down, where a carpet of fleecy white cumuli spread out to infinity. From one corner of the ceiling a pale yellow sun shone brilliantly, gilding the clouds below so that they glowed and sparkled like wet snow. A warm breeze caressed us with a refreshing mist that dried on impact. It was like we were hang gliding at an impossible height, or flying like birds, or floating like gods while Ms. Anderson walked around as a messenger from Hyperion. A thrilling vertigo shot up my spine and then was gone, leaving me empty and cold.

  Ms. Anderson said, in the commanding tone of a high school tennis coach, “The weight of your body is no weight at all, just as the burden of your consciousness is no burden. The world is spinning far below you like it has since the beginning of time. It is a toy top, and its troubles are no more consequential than those in a storybook. The heavens above are swirling like dust in a sunbeam, and whether they collide or spiral off into darkness doesn’t matter, for all of this is a daydream from which you are about to awake restored and, for the first time in what you’ve mistakenly considered your life, truly alive. For you are not of this world or bound to it; your sorrows and pains and disappointments are simple illusions, lies you invented when you forgot the truth so very long ago. Now you are on your way to knowing better. Now you are prepared to know best. UR God is waiting for you to put this knowledge to use, to set aside the cares and concerns of ignorance and fuse into the truth of Him like so many tributaries flowing into the ocean.”

  A slight vibration began in my machine, a tremor that at first seemed like a malfunction, as when a car sputters after running out of gas, but when I saw the other guests’ devices also vibrating I realized that they had been programmed to do so. It was pleasant. Ms. Anderson led the facilitators out through a side door—what appeared to be a tractable rectangle of sky—leaving us in a simulated midair environment without further instructions. I didn’t know what to think about the stratosphere and clouds and sun stuttering all around for no purpose. A minute went by and I began to feel embarrassed for PASE. Mrs. Rubin had said that Synergy was the most wonderful feeling imaginable, and although it was no surprise that she’d oversold the experience, in keeping with the Center’s habit of overselling everything, this seemed especially silly and one-dimensional and cheap. I felt a headache coming on and would have called for a facilitator to return and take me down—I would have explained about my back and nausea and asked them to make an exception in the no-nonprescription drugs rule for me, if only for tonight—but just then a tingling started in my toes and spread from my feet to my legs to my torso to my neck and finally bloomed in my head like fireworks. I felt, in a euphoric rush, Synergy, which worried me for about two seconds, until I abandoned thought and gave myself over to it and lost all track of time and space.

  Most religions, like most societies, use a combination of reward and punishment to keep their followers in line, variations on heaven and hell that I’d always discounted because the first seemed like a fairy tale and the second a nightmare. Both represented farcical extremes, with seventy-two willing virgins awaiting the righteous in heaven and an ever-ablaze landscape of torture awaiting infidels. With the gold carrot and the spiky stick. It seemed as if many of religion’s architects had figured that a desire for happiness and fear of pain, along with a childlike devotion, at least in theory, to fairness, were enough to compel people’s faith and obedience, that ultimately few would risk damnation when for the small price of faith they might receive eternal blessedness after death. Standing inside the Synergy device while Ms. Anderson talked I had expected, at best, a parlor trick, something like the sensation of flight mixed with aural stimulation, an episode that might impress the video game set but couldn’t have lasting appeal for normal people. When, a half hour after she left the room and Synergy began, a facilitator turned off my device and helped me down, I said nothing. I needed to recover. I needed to pry loose the smile from my face and make my peace with the suddenly vacant walls and floor and ceiling and people and devices all around, the vertiginous return to Earth after soaring so far above it.

  Mrs. Rubin had, if anything, been conservative in her praise of Synergy. Every atom of my mind and body tingled from the incomparable depth and profundity and ecstasy and joy and wonder of it. The other guests and I rubbed our arms and stumbled around like survivors of a plane crash, recognizing one another as so many walking miracles. My only negative thought was that I didn’t think there should be an afterward to Synergy, that what went up should not have to come down. For it had been—to provide a list of inadequate comparisons—like coming home from a war, an infatuation, slaked thirst, a nighttime massage, floating on a river, winning a prize, a third drink, rescue from drowning, an inspired joke, being forgiven, sated hunger, offering forgiveness, falling asleep, a cup of coffee, the applause of an audience, cool water on a hot day, found art, a Christmas bonus, and being born with an idea of what it all means. It was as though the division I’d always felt between me and other people, objects, and ideas was a great misunderstanding, that the truth consisted of unity and belonging and intense encapsulating thankfulness. I wanted to laugh and prostrate myself and swear allegiance to the confraternity of humankind. For the first time all day—for the first time in years—I didn’t need
or want alcohol and painkillers. I was wholly content.

  “What did Warren say to you before Synergy?” Although I hadn’t seen him coming, Mihir was standing in front of me, the concern in his voice as jarring as a sharp note at the end of a lullaby. “I thought it was clear that you are to avoid him. He is guilty at least of irreverence and carelessness, and perhaps of worse things besides. We are the company we keep, you know, and as your mentor I don’t want to see your improvement imperiled by bad influences.”

  We were being swept along with the crowd outside the Synergy Station, where Shoale’s name was on everyone’s tongues, a great rustling leaves-across-the-forest-floor sound, and then toward the Prescription Palace to hear his address.

  “Is it true that we only use the Synergy device once a week?” I asked.

  “He mistakenly sees in you an ally, which he will try to exploit. You must be too vigilant against such a maneuver. You must guard your mind against men like him the way young women should guard their chastity against base seducers.”

  “In orientation Mrs. Rubin said that there’s another way besides the device to feel Synergy.”

  “You should think more about what I said concerning the scorpion.” He let out a sigh and stepped on the heel of a man walking in front of us, who sped up. “I am serious.”

  We came to a halt as a bottleneck formed up ahead in line.

  “Can the other way be done alone, or is it a group thing?”

  “Through meditation one can tap into Synergy,” Mihir relented. “It requires enormous effort and doesn’t last much longer than you can hold your breath—it is really a mere stopgap for the device, not a replacement—but as you progress through the savant stages you will develop the ability. Just don’t get the idea that here on Earth you can be always in the happy throes of Synergy, for that will be so only when you become an ur-savant.”

  We were moving again, and found ourselves next to Tyrone, who picked at a swollen pimple on his neck. “Have you heard?” he said. “Montgomery Shoale is going to talk about the Last Day.”

  In the distance I saw an ornate building with a striking Pekingese façade; its bronze roof was supported by two gigantic coral red columns, between which a wrought-iron dragon mask was stretched. At the base of each column sat stone replicas of the Heaven Dog statues that guard Mann Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Searchlights swerved back and forth from the ground, bathing the building’s copper-topped turrets in soft yellow, adding luster to the arabesque neon marquee. It was a glamorous sight.

  “Who told you that?” asked Mihir.

  “Everyone’s saying it.”

  “What last day?” I asked.

  “The cutoff point in time for fusing into UR God,” Mihir said.

  “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “Officially there isn’t, but rumors from the PASE Station say that Montgomery Shoale has received a further revelation from UR God reversing this.”

  On our way into the Palace a facilitator gave us a small fig bar and a cup of pomegranate juice, and another shone a flashlight on the seats we were to take, three adjoining chairs upholstered with green brushed velvet. I leaned back and a spring-loaded footrest popped up to support my legs, and as I sipped my juice a holographic image of Montgomery Shoale standing at a podium flickered into view on the stage in front of us, giving me an unwelcome déjà vu of the sexual harassment training seminar. Next to me Mihir cleared his throat.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Shoale looked thinner than he had the previous week, and despite the theater’s crystalline sound system his words ended with a strange tremolo effect. “Written seventy years after the French Revolution began in 1789, this famous first sentence of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities recognizes truths that are too rarely acknowledged: namely, that the past has never been a Golden Age, that progress always coexists with its opposite, and that in every era going back to the dawn of mankind there has been as much reason to be optimistic as to be pessimistic. Those of us who reach a certain age in life often lose sight of these truths, however, and oppress the young with rosy-hued reminiscences of a better, kinder, cleaner world than the one in which we now live. Time polishes our rough memories into smooth sleek surfaces, like a pumice stone removing unsightly skin from our hands, giving them the appearance of being healthier and more attractive than in fact they are. This is a tragedy because it nurtures nostalgia for periods and places that did not exist; it asks us to believe that society was once marked by political wisdom and aesthetic greatness and moral distinction, that in every important way it was once better than it is.

  “Any trained historian will tell you that their period of expertise, be it revolutionary France or Aztec Mexico or Ancient Greece, flourished with medical and scientific and artistic advances at the same time that it rotted with pestilence and war and political corruption. No civilization has ever achieved greatness without demonstrating that it was just as barbarous as the savage lands beyond its borders. After the French Revolution swept away the excesses of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, for example, and introduced the metric system and made education gratis and instituted a thousand positive reforms for the proletariat, it began a Reign of Terror against three hundred thousand political dissidents that bathed the streets of Paris in guillotined blood, launched a vicious assault on organized religion, and set in motion a power grab that allowed Napoleon to crush the country’s fragile democracy, declare himself emperor, and conduct a fifteen-year war that engulfed all of Europe and killed millions of men, women, and children.”

  He put a hand to his temple and lowered his head. “If looked at from a far enough remove in time and space, any era can be shown to have been a seamless blend of good and bad. But when it is nearer at hand, when it falls within our personal past or present, we tend to overlook its nuances. We say things like, ‘The 1960s were a time of war and protest,’ and ‘The 1980s were soaked in greed and nuclear fears,’ and ‘The world today is defined by ideological conflict between the Middle East and the West, the threat of environmental disaster, and a deep cultural divide within individual countries.’ It’s as though our species suffers from a historical farsightedness and ought to wear reading glasses to see clearly what’s going on right in front of it.

  “Unfortunately, religious eccentrics have long been able to take advantage of this collective hyperopia. Using obscure mathematical formulas from the Book of Revelation or their own supposed clairvoyance, they have at various times convinced people that on a specific date, at a specific hour, the world would come to an end. They’ve pointed out unmistakable signs and told whomever would listen to prepare their hearts and minds, that soon everyone would be destroyed save for the righteous among them. This phenomenon, called millennialism, always seemed amusing to people outside its sway, but to those trusting souls who sold their houses and cut off ties to their families and got ready for the planet’s dramatic finale, the uneventful passing of this or that specific date and hour was a terrible disappointment. The world, to which they had already said good-bye, kept on turning, and by doing so proved, again and again, that it could not have been otherwise. Millennialism has always been wrong, and it has always inspired mixed feelings in observers, for while every disgrace of a deluded religious leader is an unqualified good, one must at the same time pity those who were taken in.

  “What does this mean for us here tonight? Why should we care about past hysteria surrounding the dreaded end of the world? Surely not to emulate it. No, given that history shows civilization never to have been uniformly damned or blessed, to always have hung in a delicate balance; given our resilience as both a species and a planet; and given the numerous occasions on which the end has been prophesied without coming to pass, it would seem prudent never again to speak in apocalyptic terms. It would seem like the essence of sense to reserve judgment on our own age, to acknowledge the visual impairment that prevents us from seeing it in focus, and, if pressed for specifics, to po
int out that for every terrorist attack on the United States, thousands of people work to promote understanding and peace between observant Islam and the secular West, and that for every newly discovered disease a scientist concocts a vaccine to eradicate an old one, and that for every freshly extinct animal species redoubled efforts are made to protect and secure the habitats of those that remain. Because there have always been natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes and droughts. And there have always been heroes and villains in positions of power. And the poor, as Jesus pointed out two thousand years ago, have always been with us.

  “Yes, until recently this equivocal response would not only have been prudent, it would have been necessary. Too often, those not anticipating a wild conclusion like the Rapture have used fearmongering and faulty logic to promote their destabilizing ideas. ‘Invade any country that has powerful weapons and dislikes America,’ these opportunists have said. ‘Ban all fossil fuels. Bomb societies that have a different god or tolerate moral laxity or give women too much freedom. Imprison people who question a government’s right to do whatever it pleases.’ Until recently we would all have done well to step back from the precipice and acknowledge that we, like everyone everywhere, are too strongly guided by self-interest, and that it is foolish to blame others for the very actions we would take in their place. Until recently we ought to have advocated understanding, restraint, and relativity.

  “I stand before you tonight, however, with a heavy heart because our situation has changed. The sidewinding march of time is drawing to a close, and we can no longer justify such guarded hopefulness for our present and future. No, we now find ourselves irreversibly embarked on a road to self-annihilation, and we lack the ability to stop. Because of us, the polar ice caps are melting, the coral infrastructure of the Great Barrier Reef is dying, and severe deadly weather is becoming normal. Temperatures are soaring and plummeting to dangerous extremes. Hitherto forest-bound viruses are, through deforestation, entering the human population. Vital links in the global food chain are going extinct, the ripple effect of which will cause starvation among animals we care about while doing nothing to stop disease-carrying insects.