Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “Admit that you’re a Paser and want me dead.”

  The giant opened his eyes cautiously, like someone peeking in a game of hide-and-seek, and said, “I swear—”

  I cut him off with another discharge, this one longer and trained on his nose and his left ear and his chin. He gagged and coughed and seemed beyond expressing pain in sound, was just a massive writhing body of snorts and convulsions, until eventually, tiring, I turned it off again. Minutes passed before he moved without twitching.

  “Shouldn’t the police be here by now?” I asked Conrad.

  “It’s Friday, the busiest night of the week.”

  “You’d think they’d put more officers on duty.”

  Conrad shrugged.

  Turning my attention back to the giant, I said, “Which Paser are you reporting back to? Denver Stevens?”

  After a moment, looking like a body that has washed ashore after a storm at sea, he whispered, “Yes.” Orange gelatinous matter trickled out of his mouth. His eyelids were swollen shut, his nose was slanted to the right and bruised blue.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” asked Conrad, whose fascination with the spectacle on the ground was now total. “He’s just saying what you want to hear.”

  It is true that at a certain point in interrogations involving torture, you can’t trust a confession. Enough pain has been administered to either addle the victim’s brain or make them say whatever will bring respite. I’d reached an impasse with the giant where the truth could no more distinguish itself than a future president could be selected from a nursery, which made me wonder if the police would believe my story, especially if, as was possible, the giant was a paid mercenary without any demonstrable links to PASE.

  “Well?” said Conrad.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Please take me to a hospital,” the giant murmured. “I could get an infection.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” said my neighbor, swatting him on the back of the thigh before I could prevent it.

  As I considered what to do, and as Conrad stared at the wounded man, the front door crashed open and four armed men took up positions around us. The police! I thought, overjoyed, until a woman strode through the formation to the middle of the room, pointed a gun at the giant, and fired. Then she turned it to me. I dropped the extinguisher.

  “Sorry about this,” she said, her gun going bang.

  CHAPTER 7

  On my third morning at the Wellness Center I again woke up erectionless and pain-free. This time I neither lamented the first condition nor exulted over the second, for the trade-off was at present unimportant, since I had no outlet for my sexuality anyway. There would be time later to resuscitate my libido; now I had to concentrate on my performance.

  It was a sunny morning, the sort that makes San Franciscans think theirs is the most temperate, interesting, blessed city in the world, impervious to the point made by New Yorkers that small people get drunk easily. The fresh air during exercises had a soft merino warmth and a sweet citrus fragrance and an almost mythic texture, like an updraft from the Aegean Sea to the top of Mount Olympus. I jumped and ran and caught and crouched and climbed. Although he hadn’t the day before, Mr. Israel, unlike a drill instructor or coach, worked out alongside us, so that we all moved in tandem, a clutch of people exerting ourselves for health and heartiness, fortifying and raising our metabolisms like a public works project, a barn or civic center or bridge that would carry us to safety.

  Apparently my reserve and caution against the Wellness Center was weakening. In a moment of reflection I scolded myself for the Aegean Sea/Mount Olympus fantasy—such a stupid comparison—but while running laps around Elysian Field I lost sight of whether I was pretending or actually enjoying myself. This worried me until endorphins flooded my brain and I reached the finish line, where Mihir and Tyrone were mock-kickboxing. After catching my breath, I joined the sparring—a few air jabs at Mihir’s ear, a couple of roundhouse swipes at Tyrone’s legs—and the three of us rolled about on the grass, wrestling and putting one another in choke holds. We ended up in a Möbius strip with Mihir’s head stuck between my right arm and chest, Tyrone’s neck clamped between Mihir’s pronged calves, and my left leg held taut by Tyrone’s feet. On the count of 1–2–3 we all let go and I fell on my back, laughing so hard tears streamed down my face. Something—yes, something significant—was going wrong with me.

  Because the weather was so fair, after a breakfast of papaya, mango, and muesli, the reading period was held in the courtyard instead of the library. I found an empty bench and sat down with my copy of The Prescription, staring for a moment at the bodies lounging on the grass, alone or in clusters, as they would on a college quad. The difference, though, was that they were not arranged in sectarian cliques; I might have sat with any of them and been welcomed. The self-consciousness around my peers I’d had growing up, a condition that went into remission once I began my career and formed the sort of work-related bonds with people like Max and Juan that in adulthood replace youth’s more cutthroat and idealistic friendships, yet that never fully disappeared, responded to this scene as to penicillin. Rema caught me looking at her and erupted into a great uncomplicated smile. I smiled back, realizing that for the first time since I was a child there were no sexual undertones in my smiling at her or her smiling at me, that although we were a man and woman we could regard each other in strictly platonic terms, without either of us wanting more or feeling imposed upon or questioning our own or the other’s intentions. I felt that throughout my adult life the world had been tilted but now it was level. I didn’t have to compensate anymore for my tendency to list in one direction or the other, a victim of sexual magnetism. I could walk in a straight line.

  Chapter two of The Prescription began with UR God’s forgiveness: “I forgive you any lies you’ve told to protect yourself or others, for although each was an abomination, you had not yet looked at the truth.” It went on to apply the same formula to hitting, cheating, ignoring someone in distress, stealing, and a slew of other misdeeds. UR God wanted us to know that everything prior to the moment we began reading The Prescription didn’t count. It was all preseason. Before then we had had a number of fine moral traditions to choose from—almost any religion, as well as secular humanism dating back to Socrates—but none that had prepared us properly or introduced us to the truth. The Prescription promised that if we kept our eyes open now, we would see it and never again be unsure of how to act.

  I liked not being asked to go back and enumerate each of my past sins and apologize for them, as I had neither the memory nor the patience for so large an undertaking. Chapter two was a dry baptism. Although meaningless in the sense that Montgomery Shoale had no more authority writing under the pseudonym UR God than he did under his own to forgive my and others’ moral lapses, it was a nice sentiment, an act of compassion so different from what had happened to me lately—those occasions when I was accused of things I hadn’t done—that I felt an invisible cord draw tight between me and the author of The Prescription and everyone else currently reading the same thing. It was a fable, yes, a flight of fancy by a peculiar venture capitalist who may have been—probably was—non compos mentis, but I was finding things in it to like. Laudable qualities. There were worse vanity projects out there, political and cultural platforms designed to divide and conquer the world, whereas Shoale’s sought to improve it. Given its role in my recent troubles, I ought to have kept my approval to a minimum—or to nothing at all—but there was no way to fight it just then, and I was tired of full-bore resistance, and I was feeling magnanimous. But only for a moment, I told myself. Only for now.

  During counseling Mr. Ramsted asked if I was ready to share my story. I could, he said, in a more conciliatory mood than on my first day, start out slow by describing my past sexual encounters without condemning them, as I would instances of any other activity, like job-hunting or housecleaning. I could do a short warm-up. Mihir didn’t interject and I began tentatively t
o list the times I’d bought drinks for women in bars and exaggerated my salary, intelligence, penis size, and endurance, which, when exposed as deceptions, led to more and less terrible scenes. Then I recounted the occasions on which this approach had not succeeded, a chronicle of failure depressing in its length and repetitiveness, so that if I’d been a lab rat my handler would have put away the cheese long before my hundredth or thousandth electric shock. I discussed the problems sex had caused in my few long-term relationships, stemming from my badly executed cunnilingus to my too-dirty dirty talk to my partners’ reluctance to role-play or film ourselves. I described my porn collection—the boxes of magazines and videos, the terabytes of computer files—and the hours I’d lodged at strip clubs downing tequila shots and stuffing dollar bills into feline women’s G-strings. I told them about the half-dozen prostitutes I’d picked up in the inner Mission district when barred from bars or alone at four A.M. or on long lunch breaks. I told them about Chicago. It was an orgy of disclosure, and the longer it went on the freer I felt, released from a pressure I hadn’t known weighed on me.

  At one point I blurted out that my pursuit of sex was largely directed by advertisements, bar counter conversations, and expectations placed on adult males. Although an obvious, outlandish lie on its face, it seemed true on a deep unexplored level. After all, I thought, setting aside my regular rationality, how did I know that I would’ve worked so hard all my life to procure sex if it weren’t an obsession in society? How did I know what was natural when everything had been altered by mankind, from bodies to brain chemistry?

  Although I didn’t go so far as to agree that sex ought to be eliminated in order for us to leave the Earth for UR God, when the counseling session ended and I was walking with Mihir and Tyrone to lunch, in a dull trampled mood akin to sobering up after a three-day bender, I wondered what had moved me to say so much more than a few general remarks, why I had instead gone on for two hours about the guilt and evil and sad redundancy of sex. It was an award performance and I was not an actor. Why? What had I been thinking? Early in my story I had stopped consciously faking it and spoken as earnestly as if I were drunk with a friend.

  It occurred to me, because nothing else explained it, that I was being brainwashed by the PASE facilitators, and perhaps even by my fellow guests, or that I had developed Stockholm syndrome or one of its variants. This was a dark thought. I’d always considered mind control tricks like brainwashing and hypnosis scams on the order of faith healing and levitation, and now I had possibly become a victim of them. True, I’d only been there two days and no one had threatened me with pendulous stopwatches or violence, and I’d successfully reasoned away my gratitude for Ms. Anderson’s professional help. Could the facilitators have changed my mind via honest legitimate means in so short a time? Was I that mentally weak? That suggestible?

  No, something else had to account for my slippage. As we neared the dining hall I decided that my newfound sympathy for PASE was a correction for past erroneous thinking. Having been considered unattractive and largely ignored by women since the dawn of my sexuality, no doubt because of my weight and other factors, I had viewed sex, when it came my way, as an unmitigated good, an all-too-rare and wonderful occasion on which I was desired. I’d ignored its drawbacks and defects, the underside of the act that so plainly existed, because it made me feel better about myself. The blistering critique I had just laid out in counseling was thus a long-overdue swing of my judgment in the opposite direction, and I’d soon come to rest in a middle position.

  But what about the porn, prostitutes, and strippers? How did they fit into my poor-fat-man-feeling-okay-about-himself revisionist theory? Easily. I’d been drawn to the seedy world of sex commerce as a temporary substitute for true human connection, when and where it wasn’t available to me, which was almost always and almost everywhere. There was mixed into my murky pathology some self-loathing, a feeling that as a person who couldn’t control his appetite I deserved the humiliation and abasement that redounds upon patrons of adult video stores and burlesque clubs and low-watt red-light districts. At the Wellness Center I was simply developing a fuller understanding that sex could be both magnificent and hateful—that it was shot through with ambiguity—neither all this nor all that. I would leave the place wiser but essentially unchanged.

  After a lunch of squash risotto, a whole-grain roll, and an orange wedge more rind than flesh, I walked out of the dining hall by myself and ran into Paul. A recovering heroin addict, he was a scrawny young man with a close-shaven head and fidgety hands moving about in his pockets like mice looking for a way out. We descended a flight of stairs and he used the handrail for support, a little unsteady with each step. I offered him an arm and he accepted it.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Better than when I first got out of the Seclusion Ward,” he said. “I had to use the electric rail chair to get up and down steps.”

  I opened the door leading outside after his light push failed to budge it.

  “My muscles are pretty atrophied. It’s why I sit on the sidelines during morning exercises instead of joining.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “I hate not being able to do anything.”

  “It’ll come back to you.”

  “You think?”

  “When I had a weight problem I thought my days of exercise were over, but here I’ve been running two miles and doing the relays. You know what might help? Positive visualization. While you’re sitting there in the mornings, imagine your body doing the same things everyone else is doing.”

  “We did that in Seclusion. Visualizing a life without heroin.”

  “Exactly.”

  He licked his chapped lips and stopped when a bee flew in front of him, lingering by his feet on its way from one flower patch to another. “You have any plans for recreation?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Because some of us are forming a discussion group to talk about our recovery without an instructor or facilitator or anybody to give official opinions, and I was wondering if you want to sit in.”

  “I talked a lot during counseling this morning. I don’t know how much more I can say.”

  “Ms. Anderson said that these independent groups usually help guests become savants quicker.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah. You’d be a good fifth, because you came as an involuntary admission and at first had a contrary vibe, but then right away you painted that portrait of UR God and it seems like you understand the idea of improving.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  I was a minute late to class and found Mr. Ortega asking for responses to the previous evening’s film, PASE in the World. Not waiting for an answer and rubbing his enormous hands together, he said it had bothered him. He detested seeing Monsieur Pissoud’s rabid attack on the truth again, even if it was juxtaposed with more recent, educated footage of the statesman, because it was so typical and provincial and infuriating. Mr. Ortega was sick of the bullying and hatemongering that went on in supposedly tolerant, democratic societies. Without the right to pursue the truth in whatever form it takes—and yes he did mean the infinite expanse of Ultimate Reality God—was anyone free? Was our world civilized?

  “I’m not just talking about a few loose cannons in France,” he said. “There are people in our own country, enemies of PASE who have forgotten that the Pilgrims came here to escape persecution from officials accusing them of bad faith. They conveniently ignore that Jesus and his disciples were considered a cult first by the Pharisees and then by the Romans. These people are outraged at how their own martyrs were treated but don’t see that their actions parallel the Pharisees’ and the Romans’ and the Church of England’s. The fact is that every established religion in the world has gone through a period of demonization and ridicule.”

  Mr. Ortega spoke as though each word burned his tongue, and his face turned a cochineal red. No one responded, presumably, like me, because they were unsure of
what to make of his changed demeanor. Gone were his normal flat affect and daycare mien, and in their place was high dudgeon, almost fury.

  “But it’s not just the PASE critics’ disregard for history or their efforts to destroy us that upsets me, it’s the condescension they use in talking about us. People on the outside will say they don’t understand why anyone would join a hierarchy that demands belief and fidelity and conformity with certain shared beliefs. They call us automatons and sheep and mindless followers, as if to subscribe to PASE is proof that we haven’t the sense to take care of ourselves. That we’ve renounced our free will. You may not know this, but there are frightened, reactionary people out there who think that the lifestyle practiced here at the Wellness Center constitutes grounds for shutting down PASE.”

  This elicited gasps from two of the guests and solemn expressions from the others. I myself was bothered. Someone out there felt so much vitriol and hatred that they wanted to forcibly stop people from worshipping freely? Monsieur Pissoud’s first speech had suggested this to me, but I hadn’t extrapolated from it to the idea that PASE had active opponents working toward its demise. Why? Even I, who understood as well as anyone how unethical PASE could be—I was Exhibit A—thought that destroying the whole religion because of a few judgment lapses was excessive. If I were a real Paser I’d have considered it discriminatory.

  Mr. Ortega’s face returned slowly to a sandy brown. “The United States military expects just as much behavioral conformity from its members as PASE does—more, actually, given that recruits have to sign up for years and be willing to kill and injure people. And governments and corporations make their citizens and employees look and act a certain way. If you work for a private business, for instance, you wear a suit, just like at a fast-food chain you wear a uniform. And you memorize your company’s bylaws and sign on to its mission statements. And promote it over and above rival companies. And spend the majority of your time thinking about and acting on behalf of it. And bend your free will in the service of an organization the priorities and dictates of which you had no hand in crafting.”