by Josh Emmons
“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.
After wading through a cold undercurrent of criticism all day, Mr. Ortega’s warmth was a welcome change. His conclusions—like everything he’d said on every subject—were wrong, but I liked his kindliness and support, like that of a math teacher for a student who, despite his indifference or even hostility to calculus, instinctually gets at the heart of a problem. I decided I liked Mr. Ortega, and for that matter I also liked Mihir, whose friendliness, however stained by zealotry, was genuine. I made another resolution on the spot to treat my time there as no more than a minor inconvenience. Perhaps I should even view it as an opportunity to study, at a proximity not allowed to nonbelievers, a strange and soon-to-be-short-lived subculture. Yes, I faced loneliness, professional uncertainty, and prolonged abstinence from painkillers—which would lead to both withdrawal symptoms and a bold reassertion of my body’s underlying pain, and which had been perpetrated on me by this selfsame subculture that had in its brief lifespan done a great deal of damage—but I would also witness firsthand how a small portion of Americans were going crazy. Someday I would have an interesting story to tell.
My schedule listed the individual research period next, at the library. I followed my map and was met at the building’s Gothic entrance, a great Carnegian archway, by a facilitator, the willowy Ms. Kim, who explained that I was free during research to explore the book collection and media center, both of which had rich educational tools covering every aspect of PASE’s history and practice. Or I could work on my own or join a small study group. Or collaborate with others on projects like planning PASE parties for the outside world. Or write letters to newspaper and magazine editors in defense or celebration of PASE. Or send personal emails to friends and family, pending approval by Center officials. Basically, the time was mine to do what I wanted. She left and I wandered toward the videos, next to which several people sat upright in deep-cushioned downy chairs, watching portable viewing screens while wearing headphones. One held a magazine with dog-eared pages. I grabbed a viewing screen and sat among them and closed my eyes to take a quick nap.
After a minute, however, I felt someone’s presence and looked up to see Ms. Anderson standing in front of me, her feather earrings illuminated from the ceiling light shining above her. She squatted down, rested a hand on each of my armrests, so that I was enclosed by her, and said in a gentle voice, such as nurses adopt in triage, “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“I heard you chose not to share in counseling.”
“Right.”
“And that you asked some tough questions in class.”
I shrugged.
“Perhaps it’ll ease your mind a little to know that we’ve talked to your boss at Couvade, Mr. Raven, and he has agreed to rehire you at a promoted level as soon as you�
�re back on the outside. Should you want to return to work, that is.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“As a senior capital growth assessment manager?”
“Yes.”
My aches all subsided at once, as though the switch connected to my pain receptors had been thrown, and my eyes moistened and I grabbed and squeezed Ms. Anderson’s hand before quickly releasing it. Her smile grew in radiance and I shared it, letting the video screen fall into a crack between the bottom seat cushion and the chair’s arm. For ten seconds we grinned at each other like children in a staring contest, as though this were an elective game that we both might win.
Then she stood up and walked away, saying hello to the guests and facilitators she passed, gliding out of the room like a fairy godmother. I was employed again. And promoted. I wanted to shout and slap people on the back but took a minute to let my giddiness settle; I was impressed, almost overwhelmed, by PASE’s benevolence and power, by the thought that rather than crush me it had decided to protect me. The tetrahedron lost a side and became a simple triangle. I would be able to continue paying off my debts and not go bankrupt and resume my professional climb to Couvade’s upper ranks. I was 25 percent better.
Of course this spasm of gratitude didn’t erase my feelings of disorientation and impotence as an internee at the Wellness Center, nor did I forget the grievous wrong being done to me, or the fact that PASE was responsible for my having been fired in the first place, meaning I should no more thank it than I should someone who’d struck me on the head and then force-fed me an aspirin. And yet PASE hadn’t had to help me out with Mr. Raven. It could have withheld its influence at Couvade and allowed me after my release to scramble for rent and food money while looking, perhaps forever, for an elusive job. Nor was it under any obligation to save me from my sex drive, which, however errant a crusade, was, from PASE’s perspective, an act of kindness. They believed they were helping me and I, although fundamentally against such help, appreciated the sentiment.
Yet I hadn’t asked for any of its attentions, which had been, on balance, more destructive than constructive, a series of interferences that, even if I were allowed to go home and start working the next day, had already wounded me so much that I might never wholly recover. Just two nights before, for example, they’d broken open my door to drug and abduct me. And I had to bear in mind that they wanted to keep me from Mary Shoale, with whom I’d had a deep, albeit brief, interaction, and about whom I harbored long-term hopes and fantasies. And if they had their way with my beliefs I would never again do anything enjoyable; I would become a sort of urban gelding bent on eliminating my appetite for life.
So the situation was not entirely black or white—forces of good and evil that originated from the same pool were swimming beside one another—but it did, in the final analysis, speak against PASE, and I took Ms. Anderson’s news like a prisoner of war hearing that peace talks were about to commence, as helpful signs that were not helpful enough.
When a bell sounded in the library, Ms. Kim announced that research period was over and we were to go to the Festival Parlor for recreation. I walked with Tyrone and Mihir to a large slate-floored room in Shoale Hall where seven small workstations were set up in a star pattern. The greeting facilitator, Mr. Hirotaka, found my name on a list and sent me to a station near the far corner of the room beside the walk-in airport-style bathrooms, where Ms. Bentham, a bony facilitator in her early sixties with shiny brown hair that lay like an animal pelt over her left shoulder, gave me an easel, paint palette, and cup full of brushes. Today’s recreation activity was freestyle painting, she said. Two women I’d seen at lunch were already sketching outlines, studiously absorbed in their creations. I sat across from them and had a vivid, disturbing flashback of sitting on the hard, splintery wood stool Rick and Ann gave me as a child during our two-hour family paint-alongs, when I had to draw fruit bowls and ballerinas that ended up looking like no fruit or dancer on Earth, before enduring technical criticism from my parents that was both incomprehensible and demoralizing. This recreation period was mandatory, though, so I went through the motions by running a few brushstrokes over the canvas, waiting for it to end.
An hour later Ms. Bentham went around examining our work. I’d dabbed on small clumps of Maimeri oils and mixed and smeared them together in a cornucopian swirl—a few dozen overlapping circles—and when she saw it she choked on thin air and said, “Your color combination is superb.” Then, leaning in closer so that her hair crawled onto my shoulder, she said, in a confidential whisper that tickled my ear, her breath herring-like, “That’s UR God, isn’t it?” I started to answer but she interrupted me, standing up as if jolted by electricity. “It’s the most extraordinary likeness I’ve ever seen!” She stepped back and called for the other facilitators to come over. I explained that the painting was nothing, the visual equivalent of radio static, a doodle not meant to represent UR God or anything else, but she was lost in the mess and not listening. Four facilitators arrived and, after a mute appraisal from up close and far away and then one side and the other, excitedly agreed that this was the UR God they’d always envisioned, His apotheosis in art. One wondered if, as in the Jewish mythology, one would not be allowed to live after seeing Him. Ms. Bentham assured them that there was no such precedent in The Prescription.
How do you feel? they asked, crowding around my wooden artisan’s chair. Inhabited by truth? Bowed toward the infinite? I said I would love a few extra-strength ibuprofens and told them that my painting was meaningless, that it deserved the disclaimer novels had about any resemblance to people living or dead being entirely coincidental. But one by one, hesitantly at first and then with growing conviction, the facilitators, with Ms. Bentham directing their line of thought, decided that I didn’t know what I’d done, that like the poets whom Plato asked to explain their work and who obliged with boorish dilettantism—bards who hadn’t the faintest idea of what their work actually signified—I was the last person to be trusted about my accomplishment. A whiskery redhead noted that Montgomery Shoale, when sitting down to write The Prescription for a Superior Existence, had originally thought it would be a self-help book for business executives. He had not known at first that UR God wanted him to be His spokesman, that everything he would write would come from Him.
I wanted them to go away and forget their embarrassing projection, but instead by dinner, forty-five minutes later, they had spread the word and the other guests, with their mouths full of bland food, looked at me curiously and with some dubiousness, as bodybuilders would at an apparent weakling said to have benched six hundred pounds. A few pointed. Less hungry than I’d been at lunch, I nibbled at a lean ham sandwich and stared at my table. When Tyrone asked me if he could see the portrait, I repeated for the last time that it was a nonsense painting, conceived and executed without thought or skill, and that he should ignore what the facilitators were saying, for it wasn’t true. I had neither the desire nor the presumption to paint UR God.
“You are a sly one,” said Mihir with an admiring grin that seemed like a leer. “All day long you act so detached and even opposed to PASE, as though nothing could be less palatable to you, and then you channel UR God during recreation. Oh yes, I can see our relationship is about to change. The student will teach the teacher, the son becomes father to the man, etcetera.”
Shang-lee said, “You don’t need to deny it because you’re afraid we’ll be jealous. We’re all just trying to improve, and if you have special talents or insights you should share them.”
The others at the table nodded in agreement, and Eli, placing his fingerless hand atop mine solicitously, said, his eyes as cloudy as if he’d been high all day, “Those blessed with gifts should give them away freely.”
“Aren’t you listening?” I yelled, unable to control myself any longer, dropping my sandwich into a dollop of no-calorie mayonnaise on my plate. “I’m not being deceitful or modest because I have nothing to be deceitful or mod
est about! If my scribbling looks like UR God it’s an accident, a coincidence!”
“That’s just your conscious mind talking,” said Mihir. “Perhaps your unconscious guided your brush, and you do not know about it even now. You think it was all just claptrap; you are ignorant of your own design. And of UR God’s.”
Unable to respond, boxed in by twilight zone reasoning, I put my sandwich back together and tried eating, though I had even less appetite than before. The coping strategies I’d come up with during the day—treating the Center like work, approaching it as a sociologist would, going into mental hibernation—were buckling and faced collapse. The dam was under too much strain, and soon I would crack and my sanity would gush out by the gallon. For what purpose? A question asked too much and answered too little.
With dinner ending the table talk turned to the evening’s activities, first Synergy and then Montgomery Shoale’s live broadcast. A double feature of concentrated bliss and unmediated wisdom awaited us, by far the high point of our stay at the Center. After building on one another’s excitement, Mihir and Tyrone and the others sprang from the table like schoolboys on a field trip, and raced to drop off their trays on the conveyor belt that rotated into the kitchen. I let a few seconds pass before following suit, and when I got outside they were already off in the distance. I walked by myself until Warren appeared next to me.
“Beautiful night,” he said, craning his head back. “There’s not a lot of city glare and you can see Cassiopeia, Orion, everything. Do you know the constellations?”
“No,” I said.
“You can learn them from a guidebook, real easy. I recommend it, gives extra value to stargazing when there’s nothing else to do.”
“I’m sure.”
“Learning keeps the mind fresh and agile. That’s the general motto around here, in case you haven’t noticed. Gather the right knowledge and your mind can fit into anything.”