Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “I didn’t know that would happen,” I said.

  “Yes you did,” said Mary, her temples smudged by black mascara and tears and sweat. A vein running beneath the bump on her forehead pulsed softly. She took my left hand between hers and traced my lifeline with a hooked forefinger.

  “How often do you have sex with strangers?” I asked.

  “Look at this pigmentation.” She pointed to a tiny brown spot on my palm just below my thumb. “Chiromancers—palmists—in the seventeenth century would have said it means you’ve made a deal with the devil.”

  The room brightened and then darkened as a cloud break opened and closed before the sun. “What does your mother think about you pretending to be a Paser?”

  She dropped my hand. “She died when I was a baby, before my father wrote The Prescription. He says she’d have been a Paser if she’d lived, though, because she believed he’d become the greatest prophet since Muhammad.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Let’s not talk about him anymore. I’m sick of the subject. Tell me about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “Anything.”

  “I’m thirty-four years old and between jobs at the moment because of your—just because. My brother, Sid, is a graduate student in theater arts studying to be a director. He’s African-American.”

  “Is he adopted or are you?”

  “We both are.”

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  “Yeah.” I rolled up a shirt lying on the ground behind me and put it under Mary’s head as a pillow. “They live in Fairfax.”

  “What about your real parents?”

  “They are my real parents.”

  “I mean the ones responsible for your birth.”

  “I’ve never met them.”

  She pushed away the shirt underneath her head and replaced it with my right arm, a pose we held for a time. Then she stood up and padded down the hallway collecting her panties, skirt, bra, blouse, socks, and shoes. I watched her dress and desired her all over again, wanted to remove her clothes as soon as she put them on. “I’ve got to go,” she said, standing in the doorway.

  “Can I see you again?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t see anyone twice.”

  “Never?”

  She shook her head.

  “So you haven’t ever had a long-term relationship?”

  “Not a romantic one.”

  “But don’t you want love and intimacy?”

  “I love a lot of people. And I have intimacy. I was just intimate with you.”

  “But you can’t commit to someone and build a life together. That’s—You’re a prisoner, like Rappaccini’s daughter.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A character in a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story whose evil scientist father fills her with poison.”

  “What happens to her?”

  “A young man falls in love with her.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She turned to go.

  “So you’re leaving now and we’ll never see each other again?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Again.

  And then again she was gone.

  With my vast experience of being denied and left by women, I shouldn’t have taken any more notice of her exit than does a scarecrow of a departing bird. I should have shaken off my budding attachment and told myself that there would be other fleeting encounters in the future, that I had many disappointments to go before I could rest, and that compared to Supritha and Camilla, Mary could not have meant anything to me by then. Instead I felt the loss sharply. It was as though I’d arrived at the place where I would have liked to live forever—after years of finding every settlement inhospitable—only to be told that its governor had ordered its evacuation, that he’d decreed it too beautiful for mortals to inhabit. I ached everywhere but in my jaw, which the memory of Mary’s kisses numbed into wellness. She had never seen me fat or known what a poor figure I cut in the world, didn’t know what an untouchable I was in the realm of love. In her mind I could be anyone. I could be the One. To her I didn’t have problems with drugs and alcohol and insomnia; I could have a glorious professional future; I could be my parents’ favorite child.

  But it wasn’t the opportunity to reinvent myself that excited and filled me with regret at its disappearance; it was the comfort I felt with her—quite opposite of my apprehension when she’d been Teresa—the way she and I simultaneously anticipated and were surprised by what the other had done during sex. The way every action complemented the ones before and after. I thought that in another situation this could have turned into love, that if not for a certain third party, we could have worked toward and fashioned the most meaningful bond imaginable. I decided while lying there on the ground at eye level with my shoes and socks and crumpled pants that the third party, Montgomery Shoale, had come to occupy too central a place in my life, and I wanted him gone. He didn’t belong in it. Nor, really, did he belong in Mary’s life if his influence was going to be so detrimental. Her behavior, except for during clandestine meetings like the one we’d just had, simulated a Paser’s, so it almost didn’t matter if in her heart she didn’t subscribe to its tenets. She was forced, on the surface at least, where it’s so easy to get stuck, to act as though she did. We had no chance to save each other.

  This was especially upsetting because it seemed that if allowed to be together, we might even go beyond saving to reach a level where our compulsions—mine toward food and alcohol, for example, and hers toward transgressive sex—would slow down or shut off, leaving us free to do as much good as our defects had formerly led us to do bad. It seemed that there was nothing wrong with us that love, meaning-maker and pain-absolver, couldn’t fix, just as there was no reason why with luck, with Mary, with some adjustment, I would remain broken.

  After showering and working through a half-tray of lasagna that Imelda-Maria had left in the fridge that morning, I sat down to watch television. One of the climatologists I’d heard on the radio was discussing the steps people could take to lessen pandemonium in the future; by totally changing their lives right now, by making personal sacrifices on a hitherto undreamed-of scale, the planet would be less devastated in a hundred years. She had a hard time maintaining professional composure, like a teacher lining up her students for a fire drill evacuation after learning that flames have engulfed the floor below them.

  Some time later I woke up from a partial nap to answer my doorbell. Conrad, angrily tapping his cane on the carpet, said that he could hear every word of the game show blaring out of my television. While agreeing to turn it down I spied a piece of paper on the ground that had been slipped under my door. I picked it up. A photocopied, typed note, it read: Your recent association with “Teresa” must end now and should not have begun in the first place. Maybe you acted out of ignorance? Have no further contact with her and tell no one what happened between you. If you disregard this warning retaliation will be swift and severe.

  Conrad, annoyed that I was ignoring him, said he wouldn’t hesitate to complain to the Tenant Committee if I didn’t do what I’d promised. I shut the door and went to the kitchen and worked through a quart of ice cream. The note had a terrible vagueness and familiarity. I cut a block of salami into six thick wedges and chased them down with a glass of milk. Was it serious or just the bluster of a man whose messianic complex, informed by a deep and irrational hatred of sex, led him to bully and intimidate people who’d accidentally, although, in retrospect, gratefully, been intimate with his daughter, like me? The darkness outside was total and my afternoon had evaporated without my doing anything more to find a job. How had Montgomery Shoale found out about us? Perhaps Mary lied that he knew nothing. Or perhaps she was unaware of what he knew. Whatever the explanation, it was an ugly, disturbing message.

  I searched online for her phone number, hoping to learn th
at she’d written the note herself as a prank so that I would call and she could laugh at how easily I spooked. However juvenile and sadistic and unlikely, it was preferable to any other explanation. But there was no Mary Shoale listed. Or Teresa Shoale. I called the PASE Station and in an unnaturally low voice asked for her number and was told it was private.

  On television the news ran a story about the still immeasurable destruction in Seattle as rescue workers hunted for bodies and neutralized downed power lines. The president pledged his support for the Pacific Northwest and called for more religious tolerance among the American people, touting bipartisan support in Congress for a planned Have Faith in Faith Day the following month. Another story came on about the sickly oceans, with an inevitable wipeout of the world’s seafood supply, dangerous tidal irregularities, catalyzed water warming, polar glacier liquefaction, and rock destabilization in newly submerged islands. My problems seemed trifling in comparison to the planet’s impending death from a dozen causes at once, as though it were a victim on the Orient Express, and for a moment I felt nothing.

  But then, upon changing the channel to a soft-core Western, I felt something. I felt arousal. It was all-at-once and all-consuming, so I grabbed some lotion and a hand towel, adjusted the room’s lighting, massaged my wrist, and reclined on the couch for a private moment. A car commercial without sexual undertones interrupted the movie. While waiting for it to end a knock came at my door that I ignored because the television had returned to a pert young squaw slapping the cowboy who was creeping into her teepee. She fought off his advances—protesting too much, the movie implied—before giving in enthusiastically. Forty-five seconds later, frozen in ecstasy, I heard the knocking grow louder and more insistent. Toweling myself off and muting the television, I tiptoed to the door and looked through the peephole. It was Conrad.

  “I know you’re in there,” he said.

  “Yes?” I answered, opening the door a crack.

  “I told you that I’d complain to the Tenant Committee the next time you played your television too loud. Is it cable or something from your own private collection?”

  Just then a sound, soft but distinctive, came from my kitchen window, which opened onto the fire escape. “Wait,” I said, putting a finger to my mouth and molding my body to its most receptive, radarlike shape, trying to catch every datum of information the next sound would convey. The kitchen window in question was locked, but I knew that with skill and dedication, with the requisite tools and patience, it could be opened. A creak. “Did you hear something?” I asked and then ran to the hallway utility closet to root through the clutter of a vacuum cleaner, dust mop, and window squeegee. Conrad hobbled along behind me.

  “What’s the broom for?” he asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “Someone’s breaking into my kitchen from the fire escape.” I pulled out my phone and called the police and was put on hold.

  “Go in there and they’ll get scared and leave.”

  “They’re not thieves; they’ve come to kill me.”

  “Do you owe them money? Is it the Mafia?”

  “No.”

  “Because the Mafia have guns and a broom will be useless against them.”

  “It could get dangerous here; you should go back to your apartment.”

  “Why would they break in through a window instead of busting down the door?”

  I didn’t answer and he left. Then, tucking my phone between my shoulder and ear, I held the broom in a defensive horizontal posture and went to peek into the kitchen, where a man in a purple ski mask was hoisting himself through the window. He was a giant, perhaps six foot ten and built like a longshoreman. The Goliath of Pasers. I retreated to the bedroom and locked the door behind me and prayed for the police to pick up my call. This was my chance for them to catch PASE in the act and then protect me as I clearly needed to be protected. Otherwise, alone and defenseless, I didn’t have much hope. PASE had apparently decided to snuff me out in a brutal and violent way, despite my being no more guilty than a cockroach for the revulsion it inspired in people to whom it had done nothing. I deserved to live on in darkness.

  There were footsteps in the hall. I grabbed a pair of pajama bottoms bunched nearby on the floor and draped them over me as camouflage. They didn’t cover much, so I added a jacket and two T-shirts to complete the cocoon, then like a moth I lay immobile, my call still on hold.

  The door rattled and I whispered into the phone for an officer to pick it up. The door rattled some more and then popped open. Light flooded in and a pair of cut-out eyes rested on me. Dropping my phone just as a voice asked what the emergency was, I jumped up and waved the broom in front of me.

  “Put that down,” said the giant in a low, serrated voice.

  “I’m at 549 Birch Street, apartment 8-A!” I shouted. “Send help it’s murder!” A fuzzy response crackled out of the phone, which the giant smashed with an enormous steel-toed boot. Like a cockroach, I thought.

  When I windmilled the broom around, as I had seen done in kung fu films, he charged at me, seized and disposed of the broom, and slammed me against the wall, knocking the wind out of me and renewing the pain in my jaw tenfold. I lifted my arms but he clamped them together with one viselike hand and then stepped back to deliver what would have been a first and final blow to my head had not Conrad entered the room with a gun and said, “Stop it! Let go of him. That’s right. Step away and take off the head mitten.”

  The giant was at once calm and collected, at complete variance with the whimpering, shivering wreck I’d become, as he peeled off the mask to reveal the mongoloid arrangement of his oversized nose, mouth, forehead, and ears. He rubbed his scalp and ran his hands over his face to wipe away sweat.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Conrad, holding the gun in his right hand and leaning on his cane at a Little Tramp angle.

  “I came to rob the place.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, slipping past him, rubbing my wrists.

  “Why did you attack Jack?”

  “I heard the guy who lived here was on vacation. I wasn’t going to hurt him, just tie him up so I could do the job.”

  “Who told you I was away?” I asked.

  “Some guy I met.”

  “You’re not with the Mafia?” Conrad asked.

  “He’s with Prescription for a Superior Existence,” I said.

  “I’m not with anybody,” said the giant. “Why don’t I leave and I’ll never bother you again? I’ve got fifty bucks and you could have it.”

  “Why would PASE send this man to harm you?” Conrad asked.

  “There are reasons.”

  “So it’s not the Mafia you’re afraid of?”

  “No. I need to tie him up till the police can get here. Let me use your phone.”

  I called the police again, fixed a triple whiskey, and then with extension cords bound the giant’s hands and feet together, so that he sat in a Lotus position.

  While I lit and concentrated on a cigarette, he said, “These are tight.”

  “Shut up,” said Conrad, who landed a solid blow on the middle of his back with the tip of his cane. The giant winced but said nothing; a bead of sweat rolled down the side of his wide glossy face.

  “Don’t use excessive force,” I said.

  “He came to kill you.”

  “I didn’t!” cried the giant with a trace of panic that pushed his voice up past the adult register to land in a child’s. Before he could say anything more Conrad rapped him on the head and he slumped over, his mouth drooling, his drawn eyelids a dark crimson.

  “I need to talk to him,” I said, taking the cane from Conrad’s hands. “You can’t knock him out like that, or kill him, or whatever you did.”

  “He’s not dead.” Conrad gently took back his cane.

  I kneeled down and placed a hand on the giant’s neck to determine that he was still alive. “You’re lucky.”

  “He’s an intruder. If I killed him it’d be self-defense; every
court in the country would rule in my favor.”

  “This is my apartment, and I don’t want him dead. Please just stand here and be supportive.”

  When the giant stirred, Conrad, looking very excited, prodded him with his cane.

  I said, “What are your orders?”

  “I told you I was trying to score. Maybe someone else is coming here too, but I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You’re a Paser and you’re going to tell the police that. You came because you’re a sexophobe with a mindless vendetta against me. I want to know exactly what your plan was from the beginning up until my death.”

  “I never wanted to hurt you!”

  Conrad raised his cane in the air but I put up a hand to stop him from lowering it. Then I went to the kitchen and pulled the fire extinguisher from its wall hook beneath the sink. It was cherry red and compactly heavy, like a bundle of dynamite.

  “It’s up to you whether I use this,” I said, bringing its nozzle close to the giant’s face.

  A pitiable sound escaped his throat. “I’d tell you if I knew!”

  I unlatched the extinguisher’s safety valve and he tried to move away and I pulled the trigger. The sodium bicarbonate exploded onto his face, its hiss creating a demented harmony with his cries while I held the canister steady. Conrad sat on the couch and smiled with a combination of bloodlust and awe, his good leg bouncing up and down.

  When I released the trigger the giant, who’d twisted his head around in a futile effort to escape the blast, shut his mouth and moaned through his nose. Where his skin was visible a great red rash puffed up and in places showed that epidermal layers were sheared off. I could see glazed patches of pus and exposed capillaries. The rest of his head dripped white goo.

  “Jesus,” said Conrad. “You got him.”