Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “In what seems like the blink of an eye to history, the human race has multiplied so quickly—we have gone so far along the road—that the world soon will not be able to support us. We are becoming too many and we are wanting too much. Whereas in the past our insatiable desire for more—more food, more clothes, more land, more money, more toys, more leisure—could be met by the provisions of planet Earth, those provisions will soon reach the point of exhaustion. The world then will not end in a fireball or with God lifting up the faithful and casting down the sinners—no—it will slowly and painfully turn barren, and with this turn will come a scene too terrible to contemplate, for as people eat and consume what’s left they will gradually behave as animals do whenever demand overtakes supply: They will turn on themselves and fight and to the victor will go the spoils, until those too are depleted. Then they will one by one disappear, and nothing will be left of our tenure here but ruins.”

  He looked directly at whatever camera was recording this address, and his eyes were sorrowful. “Some among you are perhaps asking yourselves if this doomsday scenario must come to pass. Perhaps you think we’ll devise a solution or series of solutions to our problems, just as we always have. Surely, you’ll say, our planet’s dire fate can be avoided, if not as easily as former prophecies of doom then at least with great effort and determination, of which our species is more than capable. It is true that such efforts are being applied even at this very moment, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that ultimately they will work, that they simply have to. We are hardwired with the notion that everything will turn out all right. For this reason children’s stories have happy endings. For this reason we are drawn to the idea that good will win out over evil; for this reason we believe a touching, beautiful lie.

  “The reality is that we have careened off track and don’t have much time before we smash into the hard unforgiving wall of our selfishness and mutual distrust. We are now well past the best and worst of times, and we must decide as individuals whether to achieve eternal happiness through Prescription for a Superior Existence or give in to the forces of entropy and dissolution that are set to destroy the material world.

  “Not long ago UR God communicated with me directly for the first time since dictating The Prescription. He said that the window of opportunity that He opened seventeen years ago is about to close due to our expedited waste. Originally He had hoped this would not be necessary, but we are fast approaching a tipping point beyond which so many will perish that He feels He must give us an ultimatum. We don’t have much more time to improve and become worthy of Him. The Last Day will soon be here. After it passes those who haven’t become ur-savants will continue to live as they always have, but in a rapidly decaying world from which they will not be able to escape. As many of you know, I am almost an ur-savant, and so almost gone. I will not personally oversee the conversion of every single one of you into ur-savants, but someone else will. Do not despair; if you continue to improve you will be with Him. UR God told me that although it is too late for our planet, it is not too late for our souls.”

  Like a spell breaking, the end of Shoale’s speech tore me out of the horrified, credulous lull I’d slipped into. My mental fog lifted with the lights coming up, and the clatter of applause from my fellow guests sounded as foolish and even repugnant as a Nuremberg rally. Why had I listened so raptly to that paranoia? Shoale had a certain charisma—his face and voice improved in my estimation the more I saw and heard them—but his message had been ludicrous, as rhetorically flimsy and self-serving as any plutocrat’s op-ed piece in the company newsletter. The sky was falling? In T-minus so many years it would all be over? Admitting that end-of-the-world proclamations were as common as miracle diets and get-rich-quick schemes, that spiritual mountebanks going back to the first bipeds had used them to sway fearful hearts and minds didn’t mean he wasn’t their latest incarnation. He couldn’t dismiss the charge that he was naked by merely acknowledging that past emperors had also thought they were wearing new clothes. Mihir and Tyrone and everyone else around me seemed to be both troubled and grimly determined, as though what they’d heard, while alarming, had only strengthened their prior resolve. Facilitators greeted us as we filed out of the theater with somber good-night wishes.

  After returning to the residence hall and brushing my teeth, I lay in my cot as the men around me began to snore, building in variety and volume like crickets at dusk, and the stars glimmered around a satellite inching across the skylights, cutting through stellar figures I could not name. Shoale’s impersonation of Cassandra had lent new urgency to my plight. I needed to do something. I needed to formulate a plan that would propel me beyond the past forty-eight hours and out of my captivity at the PASE Wellness Center, where I was drifting away from the realm of normal experience toward one that claimed to be superior but was really group madness. That everyone saw UR God as real and hoped in the immediate future to starve to death as a way of joining him, proved that reason and sense, my primary survival tools in life until then, were as worthless there as foreign currency. I couldn’t hope to argue or cajole or reason my way out, nor could I appeal to anyone’s sense of fairness and compassion.

  Having seen the Center’s perimeter walls and entryways, I figured escape was impossible. Which meant I had to be rescued or let go naturally. Which meant, since rescue seemed unlikely, I had to act wisely. I thought about movies and books featuring people wrongly accused of being crazy, and how their insistence on being sane usually strengthened their captors’ decision to keep them locked up, following the Catch-22 idea that denial is the surest sign of a problem. It had always seemed obvious that they should have done whatever was expected of them, bidden their time until, satisfied with their progress, the people in power restored their freedom. That, clearly, was what I had to do. Like a possum playing dead in order to stay alive, I would drop my objections and questions and incredulity toward PASE, and adopt in their place a grudging respect that would then harden into an inviolable faith—stretching my conversion over a few days to make it believable—and thus appear to be a naturalized savant who had earned his release.

  With this resolution I felt better, with the right exit strategy from this surreal detour, but as sleep came on despite my not having taken any pills or drunk alcohol, I began thinking about the Synergy device and my relief and joy and absence of worry on it, and as my snore joined the others’ chorus I ransacked my unconscious for a way to feel those things again.

  CHAPTER 4

  Although I said before that nothing from my past could explain what brought me to this northern village and my part in the end of the world, the truth isn’t so simple. Or rather, it’s simple in a complicated way. My adoptive parents explain part of it, not because they played a direct role, but because if Heraclitus was right that character is destiny, then a look at the contributors to one will provide insight into the other.

  What’s odd is that I used to think destiny applied only to heroes of fairy tales and science fiction sagas, and that, unlike character, which was evident in everyone on Earth, it didn’t exist in the real world. As a child, therefore, I spent more time thinking about character than destiny, and I decided—before carrying the decision with me through the summer and fall of my adolescence and early adulthood—that my own owed little, perhaps nothing, to Rick and Ann. Consequently, I ascribed all of my strengths and weaknesses to my genes—the sources of which, my biological parents, I knew nothing about—like a rose giving full credit for its blossoms and thorns to the anonymous pollination that produced the seed from which it grew, as though sunlight, soil, and rain had been as incidental as a gardener’s conversation.

  I had good reasons for doing this. Rick and Ann and I were very different people. When at age twelve I compared their appearance, interests, moods, dispositions, mannerisms, and prejudices with mine, I discovered almost no areas of agreement. For example, they were tall, thin towheads with smooth, round faces and no body hair, whereas I was dark and pimpl
y and already previewed the overweight, furry little man I was to become.

  I accepted these differences as conditions that strained but didn’t break our relationship, while—even this shows our opposite temperaments—Rick and Ann wanted to get rid of them. They thought I could, by following a strict diet and exercising constantly, become as skinny as a natural child of theirs would have been. To this end they barred most sugars and fats from our kitchen, installed a treadmill in my bedroom, and volunteered me to do yardwork all over the neighborhood. They gave me tiny meals and bought me clothes a half-size too small, so that the suction fit of my pants and shirts would, like a cilice, remind me of a higher goal. In eighth grade they insisted that I sign up for two sports, tennis and water polo—I had the perfect build for football, but they dismissed the game as dangerous and primitive—at which I did badly until the summer after my sophomore year in high school, when I could no longer meet my coaches’ basic stamina requirements. Rick and Ann felt vindicated and defeated at once. They sat me down and said that in a couple of years they would not be able to moderate what I ate and did, and that I would then be faced with a choice. I could either succumb to or rise above my generation’s excesses. Life, they said, without irony or melodrama, was short and probably meaningless, and by continuing to get bigger I was ensuring that mine would be even shorter and probably more meaningless. Which would be sad for a dozen reasons, they said, not least of which was that if chiseled free from my extra weight I might become handsome and able to secure a partner with whom to enjoy my time here.

  But this is not the place to dwell on our struggle over my body, the tug-of-war I couldn’t help but win, because it was trivial beside the issue that most divided us: their devotion and my indifference to art. As with my weight, they thought I could and should become more like them—they were both painters—so from an early age I had to draw and paint for two hours every Sunday, as well as submit to lessons in mixing colors and dead-artist biographies. I had to read classic works of literature and go to the symphony and listen to opera and watch ballet. And sit through documentaries about the Renaissance and study the nuances of Doric versus Ionic architecture. I had to understand the mechanics of villanelles, sestinas, and roundels; the properties of mobiles and stabiles; and the tyrannical hold representational painting had on Western Europe before Cubism.

  Although I was uninterested in all of it, I especially disliked the summer arts camps they sent me to between the ages of five and eighteen. Run by stringy exiles from Bay Area repertory theaters and dance troupes and artist collectives, these places were devoted to singing, drawing, acting, writing, photography, and dancing, to jam sessions and improvisation nights and scaled-down productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Handel’s Messiah and The Nutcracker. Hundreds of dream-addled children from all over the state—who shone at the camps but must have been persecuted elsewhere for being so fantastically weird—came to have their abilities encouraged. They overperformed; they developed medieval grudges against one another; they salted their conversation with French and German and Italian expressions, using le mot juste to describe the Sturm und Drang of their cuore aperto. I barely survived those summers, when, on good terms only with the one or two other miserable children who looked forward to the day they could reject their parents’ interests in favor of their own, I was the outcast of outcasts.

  Every year Rick and Ann hoped that I would come home transformed, my inner artist found and nurtured. When I never did—when at last I went off to college and majored in business administration—their feeling was that I had willfully and stubbornly grown into an unimaginative adult, that I had squandered the advantages they’d given me as a child, and that I’d chosen to measure life in numbers rather than epiphanies. They ruefully concluded that nature played a greater role than nurture in human development, which, being the very conclusion I’d come to as a child, made me respect their judgment and even partly regret disappointing them.

  Deposited outside the Couvade building after being fired, I walked around a raised concrete flower bed empty of the nasturtiums and irises and roses that in gentler seasons colorized that stretch of monochrome sidewalk. To steady my heartbeat, which pounded at half-second intervals like something trying to escape, I stopped and looked up at the grid-plotted windows of 595 Market Street, a thousand apertures in a great amethyst chain mail protecting the building from—what? Me. I’d been let go. Made redundant. After seventeen tax-paying years, first as a sales assistant and then as a busboy, waiter, sales associate, bank greeter, bank teller, loan officer, research analyst, and finally capital growth assessment manager, I had no professional identity. I was utterly and fiscally alone.

  While the terror of this sank in I climbed aboard a crosstown bus and slumped into a cat-clawed vinyl seat beside a tiny old Chinese man wearing a tie-dyed poncho and teal lederhosen, who inched away from me. The Couvade building receded behind us and everything was a blur until we reached the Sutro Baths, which before the 1906 earthquake reduced them to ruins had resembled Rome’s baths of Caracalla, where I disembarked and walked to the jagged remains of its stone embankment, on a cliff overlooking the gunmetal blast of the Pacific Ocean. The sky was marbled with formless clouds grayed by time and indolence. On the sandy shore below, a family in matching yellow sweatshirts filed out of a wave-hollowed cave, dark water stains corrugated around the knees of the boy and girl, and made their way up the sandy path leading to the octagonal parking lot.

  The mother alone didn’t stop to turn and admire the view, but headed toward the car. From her unsentimental, determined gait I saw that she knew how quickly the world could turn on you, how little provocation it needed to change its mind and leave you to your own devices. She seemed to understand that although the world preferred to do this to the beautiful and talented—to the professional musicians, actors, and athletes who rode high for years, hit one updraft after another and believed in the fiction of perpetual flight, until karma, disguised as chance, melted the wax in their wings—it could do it to regular people, too. It had done it to me.

  What made it all so senseless was that my performance at work, as I have said, contrary to Mr. Raven’s charge, had not been compromised over the past few months. Danforth was an anomaly and not my fault. And although Chicago had been embarrassing, it was not without precedent in corporate America—or anywhere else, really—and I deserved a stern warning rather than a trip to the gallows. True, I’d also asked out Elizabeth and a few other women in the office over the years, but dating between employees wasn’t forbidden so long as one didn’t have power over the other, and Elizabeth, working exclusively for Mr. Raven, was leagues outside of my narrow sphere of influence.

  There comes a point in most San Francisco days when being outside is like standing in a shower that has run out of hot water, when the cold becomes shockingly immediate. Having reached it, I went home and took a few pills and Teresa’s face was inches from mine, imploring, using the bathroom, maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are. Either check into a sex addiction clinic such as the PASE Wellness Center or be fired. The television news ran a story about a mutant strain of kudzu, a weed that had been strangling trees in the South for twenty years, spreading north and threatening to wipe out half the nation’s forests. A serial killer at large in the Bay Area had attracted two copycats. Bus drivers were going on strike. Seattle was blitzkrieged.

  I switched channels and while listening to a jingly game show I opened one of my financial magazines to an article about PASE. The author called it an example of America’s vulnerability to extremes. In the most vital country on Earth, she wrote, we were inclined to pay for our great freedoms with perverse, self-imposed restrictions. For some of us it was always feast or famine, because a quirk in our collective DNA compelled us to take up and then abandon life’s rich rewards—wheat and eggs and cigarettes and alcohol and sugar and civil liberties and lawn irrigation and gambling and love—all in order to feel better. Because generally we didn’t fee
l good. In fact, generally we felt miserable. The author offered a few theories about why this was while suggesting that the real reason was buried in the enigmas of evolution or language or God. If some people were unhappy enough to try celibacy, the rest of us should pity rather than condemn them. Someday they would snap out of it and find themselves on the other side of desirability, where abstinence is a by-product of age rather than a sign of piety, and they would yearn for the opportunities they’d missed.

  This further depressed me and I was tempted to pick up one of the Russian novels my parents had made me read as a teenager, the only part of my arts education I had instantly and unequivocally valued, because for insight into the human condition, with its relentless struggle for and against itself in an impassive world, so that every single life, no matter how superficially ordinary, can reveal its most dramatic rise and fall, no one provided more return on my reading investment than the old Russian masters. In less serious times I had tried to carve out a sober hour or two every week for The Idiot or Hadji Murat or Fathers and Sons, and just then the wisdom of those books seemed like the right balm to soothe what I feared was about to explode into a four-dimensional anxiety attack. From my roost on the couch I spied a rare edition of Tolstoy’s Confession on the brick-and-plywood bookshelf next to the TV, and I thought about retrieving it. In ten seconds it could have been in my hands.

  Instead I called Juan to see if he wanted to get drunk. He answered on the first ring and I suggested we meet in a half hour at Rudolfo’s Tavern to process, or obliterate, our pain from the Employee Conduct Board’s decision against us. Juan, after a pause, said that he and Dexter and Philippe hadn’t been given any demerits, that the Board had issued them warnings with travel probationary status. I was stunned. How could they have gotten such a light tap on the wrist when I’d been bludgeoned over the head? Juan didn’t know. I asked him to plead my case to the Board and explain that I wasn’t any guiltier than him, that in fact I was less guilty because in Chicago I’d suggested we catch “Blind” Willie Johnson perform at the Delta Pyre instead of lose all discretion at the Crazy Horse, but he said he had no influence with the Board—nor could he jeopardize his own and the others’ position—and hung up.