Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  The television ran commercials promising cures for male-pattern baldness, erectile dysfunction, heavy menstrual bleeding, and depression. The great maladies of our time. It seemed then, as it had in Mr. Raven’s office, although this was the first time I used the word, that something like a conspiracy was in place against me. Yes. I’d been singled out for punishment while others were given token warnings, and like an antenna searching for the strongest signal I gradually tuned in to the Californian question: Why not sue? Why not take Couvade to court and win a victory against religious persecution, provided enough could be made of Mr. Raven having told me to check into a PASE-run health clinic, and make a little money at the same time?

  Reasons not to quickly occurred to me—the time, the no-guarantees expense, the litigious reputation I would get among the city’s financing companies—but that I had to do something was not in question. I turned off the standing lamp behind me as a story began about Montgomery Shoale’s donation of fifty million dollars to state-funded cancer research. In a PASE Station conference room that afternoon, surrounded by a phalanx of suited officials and dignitaries that included the San Francisco mayor, two state senators, and the Department of Health Secretary, in front of a crowd of smiling onlookers, Shoale said that science could and would triumph over disease, for which he welcomed a new synergy between the business, political, and medical communities.

  I felt tired and was just entering the gauzy preamble to sleep, thinking that PASE’s sudden ubiquity in my life was like learning a new word and then hearing it everywhere, when a woman on the television screen behind and to the left of Shoale caught my attention. She was partially obstructed by the mayor’s Afro and a senator’s shoulder, but her short dirty-blond hair and profile were visible. I knew her from somewhere but couldn’t place it. At the PASE seminar, a party, graduate school, a neighborhood bar? My head felt massaged from the inside out by the sedatives, and the couch heated up seductively, but still I struggled to remain conscious and to remember. She took my bus, ate at my favorite taco stand, walked her dog in my neighborhood, dated one of my friends, worked for a Couvade client company, had a cameo in a movie? The memory was just ahead of me, just …

  I woke up at five A.M. in the same slack position, dehydrated and fully dressed. It was dark outside but for the misty glow around streetlamps and apartment windows behind which no one slept. I drank a cup of thick day-old coffee and dropped my damp clothes into the laundry hamper, feeling the defeat and bone-and-sinew fatigue of yesterday’s events, in addition to my standard lumbar pain, wrist trouble, and nausea. I scoured the kitchen for food, showered, and prepared for a day of action.

  At nine I got in my car and phoned Elizabeth, who cut me off by saying, “I have nothing against you personally, but you shouldn’t call here. Mr. Raven said you lost control in his office.”

  “I only yelled for a minute.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Could I ask you for a favor?”

  There was a muffled sound. “What did you say?”

  “Half the reason Mr. Raven is firing me is because he claims not to have gotten the Danforth file I sent him on Tuesday, so I wonder if you’d look in his deleted email folder to see if it’s there.”

  “Why would it be?”

  “I think he and the Employee Conduct Board are manipulating the case against me.”

  “Jack.”

  “If it’s not there, I won’t bother you again. Please.”

  “No one’s manipulating your case.”

  “Mr. Raven told me to check into the PASE Wellness Center, which was probably illegal in that he promoted a spiritual agenda in the workplace, and the Board gave me ten demerits for Chicago and none to the rest of my squad. How do you explain those things?”

  A pause punctuated her sigh before she said, “This must be a hard time for you and I’m sorry, but you’d do best to accept it and apologize to Mr. Raven so he doesn’t ruin your chances of getting another job.”

  “I’ve been fired because of false evidence and arbitrary, trumped-up penalties, and there could be wrongdoing going on.”

  “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Jack; bad things can happen without a villain or plot behind them. Move on and forgive everyone, including yourself. Now I’m getting another call. Take care, okay?”

  She hung up and I set my phone on the passenger seat. Without having planned to go there, I was driving slowly past the Couvade building on Market Street. I turned on to Post Street and then took a left at the steep ascent of California Avenue. Bad things could happen without plots, villains. Elizabeth was amazingly naïve. Cresting the top of Russian Hill, I looked at the Fairmont Hotel and Rose Cathedral and fog covering pockets of the low-lying city below, then descended the other side of the hill, where I turned on to Union Street, swung down to the Palace of Fine Arts, and then drove along the Marina. This was my favorite route through the city, a succession of epic peaks and valleys and Bay vistas and pastel Spanish villa-style homes that usually filled me with contentment, though I was too preoccupied then to appreciate natural beauty. I stopped on Palatine Hill, where I always did, to stare at the Golden Gate Bridge directly ahead, its massive suspension cables flaring in the sunlight.

  Perhaps Elizabeth was not amazingly naïve; perhaps she was right that I had blamed others for problems for which I alone bore responsibility. Sitting in my car at a time of day when I should have been working, when the weight of idleness felt especially heavy, I had to consider that there might have been no machination to discover other than my own bad behavior. That mine was a simple case of harsh yet warranted justice. Certain facts loomed: I’d had an erotically charged night in Chicago at the company’s expense, turned in an important project late (I ought to have asked Mr. Raven for receipt confirmation the moment I sent it on Tuesday), and not been fired outright but instead told to get help for what even I in dark moments admitted was a near-fixation on sex. My life had become a cautionary tale for future Shoale lectures.

  Maybe, I thought, being painfully open-minded, I do have an excessive sexual condition, and the wiring in my body, badly rigged from the beginning, has now shorted any chance I once had for normalcy and happiness. All this time I’ve preapproved my thoughts and actions without any sense of the moral dangers involved, like floating on a raft toward a waterfall and, when the sound of falling water grows to a distinct roar, singing so as not to hear it.

  An oil tanker glided into the Bay and I turned on the radio and summoned every bit of optimism available to me. Because my situation didn’t have to be hopeless. It wasn’t too late to change. I could, as Elizabeth suggested, put what had happened behind me, move on, and look for a new job; I could even take an antidepressant with libido-diminishing effects. And the sooner the better, for I had sizable debts and couldn’t afford not to earn a paycheck for long. Yes, it was just a matter of exchanging a broken outlook for a new one, I thought, deciding to go home and work on my résumé. People who tried radical cures for what ailed them might not be fools, but rather ordinary folks with troubles grown too large for regular treatment.

  Back on Market Street, waiting at a stoplight for the tide of crosswalk pedestrians to recede into four corners, listening to a radio talk show enumerate the near-future effects of global carbon dioxide emissions, when the Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves would melt and global sea levels would rise five feet—the millions of displaced people when New York, London, Tokyo, and Bangladesh flooded; the arable land lost to ocean or desert; the freshwater access disputes that alone would destroy the United Nations—I was staring ahead when the woman I’d recognized from Montgomery Shoale’s press conference walked in front of my car. Wearing trim pleated trousers, a black two-button coat with a Peter Pan collar, and a matching pillbox hat from which her blond hair skirted out, she glided past me and in an instant I knew she was who’d come to my apartment and kissed me: the femme fatale, Conrad’s student, Teresa.

  I hastily parked in a bus lane and ran after her. “H
ey!” I shouted, threading through oncomers and trying not to crash into the rolled luggage, baby prams, and unattended dollies spaced like track hurdles at regular intervals. “Teresa!” She kept walking. A few seconds later I matched her stride with mine.

  “Excuse me,” I panted, tapping on her left shoulder.

  “Yes?” She slowed her walk and tucked her purse tightly under her right arm.

  “It’s me, from the other night, your piano teacher’s neighbor.”

  She resumed her normal walking speed and looked straight ahead. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “You were the one wearing a wig.”

  “If you don’t get away from me I’m going to scream for the police.”

  “I want to know why you asked if I were a Paser and then came on to me. And what were you doing at Montgomery Shoale’s press conference yesterday?”

  She stopped and pivoted away to yell, “Help! Police! Police! Help!” This happened suddenly and loudly, and a small crowd gathered around us, through which two policewomen with raised guns squeezed their way. Instinctively I held up my hands and folded them behind my head.

  Five minutes later the crowd had dispersed and I leaned against a thin poplar tree with the taller policewoman guarding me, as Teresa explained that I had accosted her. At first, she said, she’d thought I mistook her for someone else, but when I mentioned having seen her at a PASE Station press conference she knew that I knew who she was.

  The shorter policewoman, cupping a small digital recording device in her hand, said, “What is your name, miss?”

  “Mary Shoale. My father is Montgomery Shoale.”

  “Would you like to press charges?”

  “What kind of charges?”

  “You say he assaulted you?”

  “More like he tapped my shoulder. To get my attention.”

  “You’re welcome to go to the station and fill out a formal complaint and apply for a restraining order against him, if you think he’s stalking you.”

  She bit her lower lip in the same manner she had as Teresa and said, “That’s probably not necessary. Pasers like him think they know me or have this intimacy with me because of my father. I try not to acknowledge them, but sometimes I can’t help it, like just now.”

  “So you don’t want to press charges?”

  “I guess not.”

  The shorter policewoman signaled for her partner to accompany Ms. Shoale to wherever she was going and when they were out of sight said to me, “You need to leave her alone. Do you hear? You’re not to go near her in public or in private, beginning now.”

  “This was a big misunderstanding,” I said.

  “You got that right.”

  I walked back to my car, where an orange parking ticket fluttered under the windshield wipers like a fish trying to flap its way back into the water.

  CHAPTER 5

  On my second morning at the Wellness Center I woke up without an erection for the first time in recent memory, and my back, instead of aching, was limber and loose. It could have belonged to someone else. My nausea was gone, too, as was the warning of carpal tunnel syndrome. I ran my hands over my arms and torso to see if I’d been given medical treatment during the night, but felt no bandages or tenderness or signs that I’d been tampered with. Except for the asexuality, this was how most adults remembered their teenage bodies, as airbrushed and unblemished, as yardsticks against which to measure the minor and major pains that crept in later and, unless we’d been paying attention all along, were as amazing in their quantity as the number of musicians who contribute to symphonies that begin with a single instrument.

  I was so pleased that I willingly, even gladly, took part in morning exercises. With Mr. Israel calling out instructions, I ran laps around Elysian Field, did push-ups and jumping jacks, participated in relay races through obstacle courses of car tires and two-foot hurdles, and played catch football. Not a twinge of discomfort. It was as though instead of spending the last ten years slouched over a desk with my fingers glued to a keyboard, stuffing myself compulsively, I had sat upright with my hands in a relaxed position and eaten like a monk. It recalled the moment following my surgery when I saw in the mirror a slender frame instead of my lifelong large one, as though I’d had a piece of Alice’s cake in Wonderland, and I realized that from then on I wouldn’t need oversized clothes or specialty chairs. I wouldn’t arouse others’ disgust or pity or tempered discomfort. I might, at last, not think about my body for whole days at a time, nor feel conspicuous in elevators or on airplanes or in line at grocery stores, nor know exactly what someone was thinking when they said hello to me and forced their eyes not to drop below mine. Coming off the field and heading toward the showers, I started to laugh for no reason.

  I stopped laughing, though, when I thought about the change in my sex drive. This concerned me because although thirty-four years old is not seventeen, it isn’t yet sixty-eight, so in the bathroom I sat on a toilet with my member tucked between my legs—from Tyrone’s experience I gathered that the surveillance was total—and teased myself into a state of excitement. As my erection pressed up against the underside of my thigh, with its blind insistence on climbing higher than it could go, I was reassured that that morning’s flaccidity had been an accident. But then, almost immediately, it began to fall, and thirty seconds later it had shrunk to less than its two-inch default setting. I wiggled it some more to no effect. In the next stall over someone asked if I was okay. “Maybe,” I thought, “I’m adjusting to this new reduced-calorie diet, and my energy is being temporarily redirected from its normal avenues.”

  At breakfast I tried to eat more but could barely finish a bowl of unbuttered oatmeal. While Mihir and I were alone he showed me pictures of his wife and daughters, “once and future virgins,” but when Eli and Tyrone sat down the conversation turned to and stayed on the Last Day. Then Alastair joined us. Then Rema. When Warren came near Mihir draped a leg over the remaining empty chair’s seat. There were questions, unsettling unknowns: When exactly would the day come? Was the environment UR God’s only reason for instituting it? What if none of them could become ursavants in time? What would happen to their non-Paser friends and family? Eventually Mihir tried to muzzle their panic by saying that they would know the date when the time was right, and UR God had reasons they couldn’t begin to fathom, and Shoale would find a way to deliver them, and their loved ones would be taken care of somehow.

  “We should be focusing on improving,” Mihir concluded. “Worry and second-guessing are no better than procrastination, and really we have known from the beginning that we couldn’t dawdle forever. UR God is just bringing us to Him faster. If anything, we have cause for celebration!”

  Then we got up, bussed our trays, and walked to the ivy-covered library, where all the guests swarmed around three tables stacked high with beautifully bound copies of The Prescription. I grabbed one and found an open study carrel with a bright desk lamp, prepared for act one of my Paser transformation. I set the book down and gazed intently at it. Anyone watching was about to see me deliberate over each page, mouthing the words like an adult learning to read, visibly affected by its message. Anyone watching was about to see someone seeing the light.

  The cover of The Prescription depicted thousands of glowing lines the size of hyphens that seemed, via a design trick, to vibrate when looked at from different angles. The title page read “The Prescription for a Superior Existence, by UR God,” and below that was a small Citadel icon and the words “PASE Publishing, Inc.” Opening my eyes wide and throwing back my shoulders—this bordered on caricature, but I thought it better to over-rather than underplay it—I turned to the first chapter, which was surprisingly unsurprising. Whereas Montgomery Shoale might have thrown a curve ball to distinguish his religion from the Bible’s in both form and substance, he instead began, like the other book, with a description of the universe’s origins. The writing, plain and unadorned, had its rival’s confidence, as well, though it used pseudojargon th
at made my mind wander.

  For trillions and trillions of years—for nearly an eternity—Ultimate Reality God had composed everything in existence, matter and antimatter and un-matter. This was expressed as a near palindrome: He was all and all was Him. Within that all—that is, within the protoplasm of His being—a soup of living essence called “sourcespirit” floated around made up of individual impulses known as “wands”—the sticklike entities I’d mistaken as hyphens on The Prescription’s cover—that collectively supported UR God’s will and in return were rewarded with the truth, the awareness that they, as part of Him, lacked for nothing. Fifteen billion years ago, however, a group of these wands decided that there was more to the truth than UR God was telling them, and they decided to break away and exercise their own wills to discover the truth for themselves. UR God asked them not to leave, and He warned them of what would follow, namely estrangement from Him and one another, and then an end to being, called death, but they insisted, so He caused the Big Bang explosion and created a place outside of Him, planet Earth, for them to go.

  At first the wands loved their new environment and reveled in being simple life microorganisms—bacteria—but over time they learned nothing and got bored. To challenge themselves many evolved into more complicated animals, and then evolved again when that became dull, and again, and so on. With each new ontological advance their satisfaction period shortened—they weren’t getting any closer to the truth—so that although they were content as bacteria and blue-green algae for two and a half billion years, they grew tired of being aquatic worms after two hundred million years and couldn’t stand being fish for more than a hundred and eighty million years. From the oceans they made their way onto land and after a humdrum hundred and fifty million years as amphibians they took a monotonous hundred-million-year turn as primitive mammals before growing into sophisticated primates. Then the novelty of this too wore off, and they swung through seventy million years as apes before becoming hominids.