Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  (Yes, The Prescription said boldly, revealing its major plot twist, we were the wands who’d rebelled against UR God. We were the protagonists of this awful and useless biological saga.)

  Not all wands evolved this far, though. Some had a greater tolerance at the beginning for being worms and so stayed that way, others were not strong enough as fish to crawl out of the water, and still others through confusion or molecular accidents morphed into the variety of lowly life-forms extant today. There were gradations within the self-exiled wand community, zoological tendrils going in every direction.

  The defining trait of those that evolved quickly and intelligently—that is, us—was restlessness, as well as an increasing sense that things were fundamentally wrong. In our epic journey to discover the truth we were in fact distancing ourselves from it; UR God remained where He’d always been as we got further away from our wand selves. Consequently, we devised ways of changing the world around us with the hope of easing our worries. These ways—these technologies—enhanced our lives, but they also, unexpectedly, diminished them. As Homo habilis, for example, we made tools from stone and animal bone and our thick claws were reduced to fingernails. As Homo erectus we gained fire and lost the ability to digest raw meat. As Cro-Magnons we shed enough body hair to live in hot climates and so concomitantly were forced to wear clothes at night and during winter. This quid pro quo continued as we became modern humans and invented language and domesticated agriculture and advanced weaponry.

  By this point our brains had grown large enough for us to comprehend our vulnerability to the weather and the land’s caprices and our own irascible natures, and it dawned on us that life on Earth was difficult, that we would never discover the truth here, and that we needed supernatural help. We had, however, forgotten UR God during the preceding billions of years, as He’d warned would happen, so the poets and philosophers and medicine men among us invented other gods—Zeus, God, Allah, Krishna, etc.—and implored them to save and protect us. Meanwhile we went about our business of battling one another for control of the planet’s resources and building cities and trash heaps and hydroelectric dams and arsenals powerful enough to destroy the whole tottering experiment, ourselves included. This would have gone on forever except that, not long ago, without much worry or fanfare, we crossed an ecological threshold and found ourselves sitting on a ticking time bomb.

  UR God, who had long wanted to intervene but refrained out of respect for our past wish to be left alone, chose that moment to give us a lifeline in the form of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, an instruction manual for rejoining Him and being spared the fate of extinction on this ruined rock. Its message was clear and straightforward. We were to abandon selfishness and pride and dissatisfaction—the qualities that led us to mutiny back when we were quarrelsome wands—and in their place cultivate charity, humility, and self-sufficiency. We were to put others’ needs before our own, eliminate our ego, and conquer desire. We were to dislodge the greediness and narcissism that lay deep within the core of each of us, and therein become like the wands who had stayed behind. None of this would be easy, but by following The Prescription and attending a PASE Station and visiting a Wellness Center, we could grow more in a short period than we had in our entire residence on Earth. We could remake ourselves in the image of UR God by renouncing the trappings of the flesh and becoming divine, able to enter into Synergy with Him free of the desires that had enslaved us for billions of years and that otherwise would prevent us from knowing eternal happiness.

  After finishing the chapter I jotted down a few ready-for-inspection notes: “We got fed up with being fish circa five hundred million years ago. UR God gave us The Prescription when the planet was about to die.”

  Fortunately, a facilitator I didn’t know, an attractive young woman with platinum hair and a strong Roman nose, noticed me doing this and came over to the side of my carrel. “I see you’ve been reading chapter one,” she said.

  “Yes.” I looked up at her.

  Despite the loose fit of her navy blue tunic, the bulging of her breasts was visible. I subtly concentrated on them but felt nothing in my loins. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s very interesting. I didn’t know any of that about the wands.”

  “It can be hard to accept at first.”

  “Maybe a little.” I smiled and thought that she might, beneath a hard crust of belief and commitment, want to sneak off with me, that if I suggested it in a delicate enough way her latent desire might bubble to the surface, and that in a private spot I might respond properly.

  She put a hand on her hip. “When I first read it I thought, ‘Oh really?’ but my teacher put it in context by pointing out that not many people believed Galileo when he proposed that the sun was the center of the universe a mere four hundred years ago.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s not like there aren’t people still today who think Darwinism is a complete myth.”

  “Also true.”

  “And Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was such a blow to rational scientific assumptions in the 1920s that he received death threats from angry scientists!” She smiled like a children’s television show presenter and I pictured her bent over a bright purple building block with her tunic thrown up around her neck, which inspired only a fraction of the erection the image deserved.

  “I hope other religious leaders aren’t sending death threats to Montgomery Shoale,” I said.

  She laughed. “We’d never let that happen.”

  “No, you probably wouldn’t.”

  “My point is that you should let chapter one simmer in your head for a while. The truth of it will reveal itself.”

  “I like to watch things reveal themselves.”

  Her smile faltered for a second and then recovered, like an ice skater coming down badly from a lutz yet determined to carry on, as she left to talk to Shang-lee, who held The Prescription six inches from his face, his left foot sliding in and out of his slipper.

  At counseling I sat next to Mihir, who, while we waited for Mr. Ramsted to come out of a private conversation with Quenlon and Helmut by the door, said that he’d just been studying the prophecies laid out in chapter nine and found hints about the Last Day. Intimations. Suggestions. We could be sure that UR God was not springing this on us, but had been planning it all along. His eyes were bloodshot. Had I thought about what he’d said the day before, that if he could overcome the sexual bravura expected of men then so could I? Admitting my problem to myself ought to be my five-day goal. After that I would admit it to him and then to everyone in counseling. The life I saved would be my own.

  “Before we get started,” said Mr. Ramsted, returning to the table, “let’s thank Rema again for her presentation yesterday. I’m sure we’re all still thinking about it. If there’s time at the end of the session maybe we can go over some of its instructional aspects. First, though, I’d like to give Mr. Smith a chance to revise his position, in case he’s had any new insights in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Please,” said Mihir, “if I may be permitted to speak on Jack’s behalf, it will take a few days for him to improve enough to contribute to counseling. I ask us to be patient. Perhaps now instead we could tackle the next item on our agenda.”

  After a deliberative pause, Mr. Ramsted said, “We could.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’ve given it some thought and want to say that I do feel bad about some of my past sexual activity. Not all of it, but some.”

  Mihir looked at me. “You do?”

  Mr. Ramsted pinched his goatee and nodded as though, having been told he would never train a bear to juggle, his pet grizzly had just done the Cascade in both directions. “I’m delighted to hear it,” he said.

  “Yes, and it’s interesting because—”

  “Stop right there,” he said, holding up a hand. “This illustrates a point I’ve made before that is worth repeating, which is that it’s easy to think we can fool
others if we can fool ourselves. If someone says, ‘Having sex with a stranger is great. So what if they get hurt afterward, or I feel empty, or our potential for friendship is destroyed?’, it’s a practiced lie that comes out easily. But when they think about it, which they can’t help doing, such is the gift and curse of consciousness, they recognize that lie as an affront to the truth, and they must retract it. Just like Jack has. The ease with which people lie means nothing. Sex is so conflicted a topic in our society that they adopt a cavalier attitude toward it in order to smother their guilt. Remember what Jack said yesterday? That he had no qualms with sex? Most adults go to great lengths to accept and approve of what they want to think is a natural, necessary act, though really sex must be renounced not because it’s a transgression but because it’s an obstacle on our path to UR God.”

  I was about to make a production of agreeing that I had been wrongly oriented all my life, that I had indeed tried to fool myself into thinking of sex as harmless fun, in the same way that a murderer, to assuage his conscience, will brag about killing—I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die—when for a split second I believed this contrived speech. For a heartbeat it was true, and I felt dismay, a fear that I’d played the devil’s part in my own deception for years, for decades. This moment passed quickly and my old way of thinking—“the real me,” I thought, taking myself firmly in hand and warning me against losing my bearings—returned, but still I was so shaken by my fleeting agreement with Mr. Ramsted that I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  At lunch I walked past the meat and pasta tables to the salad bar, where I built a colorful plate of spinach, tomatoes, broccoli, red onions, carrots, yellow peppers, and cottage cheese. I selected a sugar-free iced tea from the beverage bar. Sitting at my table, Tonya noticed that the painting I’d done the day before was now hanging on the dining hall wall. I allowed that it might be a portrait of UR God. One man’s humble and unwitting attempt to capture His mighty visage. I felt strangely confident—without knowing of what—and tried not to evaluate the motivation or sincerity of what I was saying. Alastair asked if UR God had implanted the knowledge and talent in me, or if I’d been inspired in a dream. I can’t say, I said, chewing my salad. But you must have some explanation for it, he said. No, I answered, unsure if I was fooling myself, him, or nobody.

  In class Mr. Ortega gave a lecture on renunciation, the necessity of which every religion recognized and extolled and which, outside of The Prescription, had been noted by sages from Pythagoras to Julian of Norwich to Kierkegaard to the Dalai Lama—Augustine had written that one must choose “love of God in contempt of one’s self”—all of whom believed that giving up something we love, of saying no, was, although disguised as a negative, really the ultimate positive, that only when we deny ourselves pleasure can we attain something greater, such as the eternal and irreducible bounty of UR God’s presence.

  “But what’s wrong with pleasure?” I asked. “We all like it.”

  “It ends in itself,” said Mr. Ortega. “It doesn’t point or lead to anything more because it is outside of UR God—that is, it is here—and here is not part of ultimate reality.”

  “It feels like reality to me,” I said.

  “You used to have insomnia and back pain, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you don’t.”

  “Well, today I don’t.”

  “So what was a real condition isn’t real anymore. What you thought was true isn’t true anymore.”

  “That’s—I wouldn’t put it that way. My insomnia and back pain come and go.”

  Mr. Ortega turned to the others. “Pay attention, everyone, because this question of reality is crucial to understanding PASE. We were brought up to think about it as the world around us, as everything we can touch, hear, see, taste, and feel, but those things change over time, like the circumstances of life itself. Our hair changes color, our bodies grow and shrink, we are well sometimes and sick at other times. Accordingly, we’ve been trained to view reality as fluctuating, ebbing and flowing. As Jack said, we think that it comes and goes. The Prescription, however, tells us that reality is in fact constant. It is always true. Consequently we are not in it. If we want to see through the illusions of illness and death and unhappiness, we must embrace the permanence of UR God. Only then will we earn—and return to—our place within Him.”

  “If UR God never changes,” I said, “how did we break away from Him in the first place? Wouldn’t that have caused a change in His being, just like us fusing back into Him would?”

  Mr. Ortega pressed his palms together. “What appears to us to be a paradox is in UR God a consistency. This is a difficult part of PASE doctrine and won’t become clear until you reach the master actuated savant stage of learning.”

  “What about Him wanting us back? Isn’t that the same as desiring us?”

  “He doesn’t want us back. He is complete with or without us.”

  “But he gave us The Prescription so we could return to Him.”

  “That too is a puzzle you mustn’t hope to solve yet.”

  During the research period I watched a video parable about a woman who changed into a tree to escape a lustful coworker, and whose roots burrowed to the center of the Earth while her trunk grew up into space, and who then allowed people not carrying or wearing anything to climb her “all the way to UR God.” It was done in the psychedelic style of sixties art-house cartoons, with loud, garish colors and bubble figure grotesqueries, and a Crumby Yellow Submarine, and when it ended I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Returning to my seat I passed Warren at the water fountain.

  “What did you think of Synergy?” he asked, straightening as the arc of water died down the drain.

  “It was pretty good,” I said, stopping to look around. The other guests and facilitators were engrossed in their projects.

  “Yeah?” Warren folded a PASE pamphlet in half and ran his fingers along its crease to create a sharp edge. “But not enough to change your mind about getting out of here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  In a low voice he said, leaning toward me, “I’ve got a plan but it’s not a one-person job.”

  “Is here the place to talk about this?”

  “Talk about what?” Mihir, though he’d been across the room staring at a computer tablet just a second before, was standing between us, a manufactured look of innocence on his face. He glanced at a facilitator sitting behind a desk twenty feet away, who with his head lowered was staring at us and organizing stacks of pamphlets.

  “I was telling Jack about how hard it is to control my anger sometimes,” said Warren, cracking his knuckles, “and how I get the urge to beat up people who annoy me because they’re loud or stupid or interfering.”

  Mihir’s upper body tensed and he closed the gap between himself and Warren. “In that case I wonder if the Wellness Center is the right place for you. Maybe you would find the Adjustment Facility more helpful. Maybe we should go right now to Ms. Anderson and tell her that you would like to be transferred.”

  “What’s the Adjustment Facility?” I asked, stepping into and widening the small breach between them.

  Mihir said, “It’s a more structured place than here, with more hands-on guidance, designed for people who require extra discipline to improve. Not everyone responds best to positive inducement, you know.”

  “Why don’t you let Jack and me finish our conversation?” Warren said. “Doesn’t seem like you have much to contribute.”

  “I have something more edifying to share with my mentee than tales of ignorance and aggression. Jack, please come with me for a moment, if you don’t mind, and then you must want to return to your videos.”

  With a light hand on my back, Mihir steered me to his desk while Warren stayed behind with his arms folded. Once we were seated, Mihir warned me again about the company I kept. What did it take to get me to grasp the gravity of the situation? Then, brightening, he read aloud the op-ed piece he p
lanned to send to newspapers all over the country. Warren was gone when I looked over at the fountain.

  “Were you listening closely?” Mihir asked when he finished, studying my face.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is most persuasive about it, in your opinion?”

  His article was an impassioned defense of UR God’s selection of Montgomery Shoale to be His spokesman for the truth. Businessmen, Mihir wrote, were in the same relationship to money that kites were to air, which made them natural enemies of the truth that desire, in whose service money had been created, had to be stamped out. Knowing this, we might find it hard to accept that Mr. Shoale, a venture capitalist, had been chosen to be the prophet for this message. But UR God had an excellent reason for his choice. Mr. Shoale’s inappropriateness for the job made him an ideal candidate, because if one of the most desire-oriented people on Earth could change and follow the truth, so could we. Mihir Singh, the author, himself a successful businessman, had discovered this personally and invited readers everywhere to explore the ultimate wisdom of PASE.

  I told Mihir that its sincerity was undeniable, its reversal of expectations clever, and its style accessible. Then I went back to my seat, where the facilitator had deposited a stack of pamphlets. I read them all in turn.

  During the recreation period I played a board game in which the object was to get one’s stand-in piece (mine was a coal miner) past a series of temptations: a lonely housewife, a pyramid scheme to get rich, a double cheeseburger, an interest-free cash loan in Las Vegas. At dinner I had a bunless vegetarian hotdog and a side salad.