Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  Mr. Ramsted had to tell me twice when I entered the room—I was so distracted—that I had been transferred from sex to food counseling. Because of my speech the day before, he had suggested to Ms. Anderson and the food counselor, Mr. Martinez, that I was ready to move on from sensuality to my other problems. He shook my hand and congratulated me on improving.

  Up one flight of stairs, on the third floor of Celestial Commons, Mr. Martinez invited me to sit at a table with LaTeesha, Samantha, Dmitri, Brianne, Olive, and Tiberius. The room’s walls were decorated with posters of the food pyramid, nutrition charts, and exercising contests (one, of the 2003 San Francisco Marathon, I recognized from Mr. Raven’s office). In a corner sat three treadmills that we were allowed to use at any time.

  Mr. Martinez, whose thick neck and plump cheeks sat incongruously on a thin body, showed me a picture of himself from five years before, when he’d weighed 302 pounds, and, convening the session, asked me to tell my story.

  In a repetition of the day before, I meant to tell a few short anecdotes about my dependence on food but then spoke for an hour and a half. Beginning with a general description of the external and internal conditions that drove me to overeat as a child, I gave specifics about my lonely, disappointment-laden days at elementary school, where my grades and social conquests were mediocre, after which, to reach a baseline of contentment, I ate massive midafternoon bowls of cereal with vanilla ice cream, chunks of salami, and raw cookie dough. Following that I indulged in high school cafeteria binges and Friday night party snacks. I recalled with eidetic precision the all-you-can-eat buffets within a mile radius of my college dormitory. And the whole rotisserie chickens sold at the deli near my apartment in Hayes Valley. And the three-for-two candy bar deals, family-sized calzones, and prepackaged French dinners “specially made for epicures.” All this, I said, ending a narrative I’d told in a kind of trance, had continued for years despite my having a self-image comparable to the Elephant Man’s—I would hate myself and then feast and then hate myself much more—until finally, just recently, I had had liposuction surgery. My subsequent thinness would have been only temporary, though, if I hadn’t then come to the Wellness Center. It was no exaggeration to say that PASE had stopped an avalanche in progress.

  My entire speech was, I thought, upon finishing, even for someone who’d decided to be a Paser, too much. Way, way too much. Without any editing or careful elisions, it could have been the centerpiece of a PASE promotional video. There was a certain disturbing forfeiture of dignity in it, an unsavory exhibitionist element, and I was about to register self-disgust and rein things in, when I felt how powerful the Center’s gift to me was. Since arriving three days earlier I had not wanted the high-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-cholesterol, high-calorie foods that were permanent fixtures in my refrigerator at home. I had not loaded so much onto my trays at mealtimes that they sagged in the middle, nor had I cleaned up others’ plates or snuck into the bathroom with contraband snacks in between meals, or daydreamed painfully about food when it wasn’t in front of me. I had even felt some repulsion that morning when I saw a warming container of bacon beside the fruit bowl.

  Realizing this in the hushed counseling room where the other guests and Mr. Martinez had watched me tear off my cloak of respectability like some modern-day St. Francis of Assisi, and then proceed to rend it into a million useless scraps, I began to cry. Not so that my breathing was hindered or my face turned blotchy, but tears pooled together on my chin until I wiped them off with my shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what’s come over me.” Except that I did know. I was either a very emotional Paser or suffering from a delayed reaction to the events of the previous week or in awe of PASE’s ability to curb a hunger that had been with me for so many years. I felt completely and heroically transformed, the man I’d always wanted to be, triumphant over the cause of a problem that my surgery had merely covered up.

  “You may sit down now,” said Mr. Martinez. “Thank you for sharing.”

  I didn’t know I’d been standing.

  After lunch, which I willed myself to eat with the same force of mind that impels an exhausted man to keep walking when in sight of his home, I was told by Mr. Ortega that, as in counseling, I’d been moved up to class Introductory Level B with Ms. Webley in the room next door. The other students were Ang, Quenlon, Tyrone, Helmut, Paul, and Aranzanzu, whom I knew either through conversation or by sight. Taking a seat between Quenlon and Helmut, I noticed that the teacher was, as Mihir had said to me once, ethereally beautiful, which no more affected me than did the volume of her speaking voice or the shade of her tunic, as external, irrelevant facts.

  “Does anyone have a question about the reading for today?” Ms. Webley said.

  Ang, a woman with searching green eyes and long fingers woven together on the table in front of her, said, “I’m wondering how UR God can say the Last Day is coming up, when some of the prophecies in chapter nine haven’t happened yet.”

  “Which ones are you referring to?”

  “All of them.”

  “But they all in fact have occurred.”

  “When?”

  “The assassination of Nigerian president Ben Membawa two weeks ago, for one. In the ‘Following the Leaders’ section it says, on page 376, ‘Those who are raised up with one hand will be torn down with the other, for hearts of darkness will admit no light. Where order is destroyed, chaos will reign, and a million widows and orphans will go unheeded by those beyond the valley of their tears.’ The Midwestern water shortage is mentioned in the ‘Nothing to Spill’ section, page 402: ‘The land like old skin will crack and no moisture will provide relief.’ The earthquake in Seattle and the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico were written about in the ‘Final Rumblings’ section, page 414: ‘When earth turns fluid and mountains exhale and clouds touch ground, the clock will tick faster.’ The slackening of America’s economy, which has led to a recession that will become a depression, is written about at length in the ‘Wanting More When There Is Less’ section, page 433: ‘The big, heavy engines will run out of fuel and those on the bus will be forced to get out and walk to nowhere.’”

  While Ms. Webley spoke I flipped to the passages she mentioned. She was right. They predicted disasters going on at that very moment. A fool might say they were too cryptic or figurative to refer to any specific political turmoil or weather event, but the truth was there for everyone else to see.

  “Is there any chance,” I asked, using my thumb as a bookmark and closing The Prescription, “of the world ending before the Last Day? Say some catastrophic thing happens tomorrow. We’re not ursavants yet. Most of us guests aren’t even savants and we need time to climb through the ranks.”

  “There is a way to expedite Paser growth in case of an emergency,” she said. “But we don’t think it will come to that for people here.”

  “What is the emergency growth way?”

  “Let’s not worry about that now.”

  “I’ve never understood why the planet has to be destroyed in the first place,” said Helmut.

  “It won’t be destroyed, but it will die like everything outside of UR God. There’s no why for this; it simply is.”

  “Can’t He let the Earth keep going, as a favor to people who don’t become ur-savants in time?” I asked.

  Ms. Webley said, “With the way we human beings are acting, that would not be kind to those who remain.”

  During research—Paul’s discussion group had decided to meet every other day—I watched a video on meditation that demonstrated the proper sitting position, breathing technique, and panegyric to achieve Synergy without a Synergy device. It was important not to meditate on a full stomach or in anger or without a goal, such as sublimating a desire. When I put down the video screen, a guest who’d arrived the day before, whom I hadn’t yet spoken to, came over and stood beside me.

  “I know about you,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You
’re an involuntary admission, just like me.”

  “I was, yes.”

  “My name is Chaim.”

  “Jack.”

  Chaim had a blow-dried pompadour and wore the sleeves of his Center outfit rolled up to his elbows. “I heard that a couple days ago you said you didn’t want to improve.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re acting like the facilitators want so you can get out early.”

  “Actually—”

  He squatted and rested his elbows on his knees. In a soft voice he said, “You know that the inmates are in charge of the asylum, and this joke about quitting desire has got about ten more minutes before it quits being funny. Warren sent me to talk to you about his plan—the Indian guy won’t let him do it himself—to get out tonight. We want you to come with us. For a very fair price, one of the night watchmen has agreed to leave a door unlocked and look the other way. You pay a third of his fee, about three hundred bucks, and by tomorrow we’ll all be on the outside, able to go back to our regularly scheduled lives.”

  A facilitator walked by holding a phone, with her head tucked into her shoulder like a sleeping bird’s into its wing. When she was out of hearing range, I said, “That’s not a good idea.”

  “We won’t get caught, and even if we did, life can’t get worse for us than it already is.”

  “I feel differently than I did a couple of days ago.”

  “They kidnapped you, like me.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You think they’re going to let you go just because you run around during exercise like a spastic? They’ll keep you here for a month at least and then make you sign away your rights to ever say anything bad about PASE. I think they’re practicing brainwashing techniques we’re not even aware of.”

  I put on my video headphones and cranked up the volume as loud as it would go. The proper response to stress was to press your hands together with equal pressure over the surface of your palms and fingers, while thinking of UR God. Conflict was a trick of unreality, a legacy of the billions of years during which we’d forgotten Him, and it wilted next to the truth like a flower brought close to fire. I felt Chaim’s eyes on me for a moment before he stood up. He and Warren had no idea what they were doing, rejecting discipline for the illusory charms of the outside, like children desperate to avoid vegetables in favor of desserts. Wait for the rotted mouth. Wait to go blind from staring too long at the sun of their own pleasure. The meditation video ended. Perhaps I had an obligation to inform Ms. Anderson of their plan. Perhaps it would spare them ulcerated gums and sightless eyes. What would hurt them in the short term would save them in the long.

  These thoughts did not go away during recreation—I wrote a song on composition software, “Give PASE a Chance,” that Ms. Bentham passed around to the other facilitators, one of whom thought it should become the religion’s anthem—and grew more persistent during dinner. Chaim and Warren sat together at a table by themselves, talking privately. I got up to refill my water glass and then stopped at their table.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “On your way back from Damascus?” asked Chaim.

  “I think you should reconsider about tonight. There’s no need to get hurt by making a hasty decision. The Center has your best interests at heart and you don’t want to treat it this way. It’s legally responsible for you; your sneaking out could be a big liability for it.”

  “What do you mean we’ll get hurt by a hasty decision?” asked Warren, his eyes dulled to an overcast gray.

  “Your chances of improvement would go down,” I said.

  “Because if you’re planning to tell on us,” said Chaim, “that wouldn’t be friendly.”

  “I’m not threatening you. I’m saying that running away from here would be a mistake.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” said Warren.

  “Appreciate it,” said Chaim.

  “I want to help you,” I said.

  “Didn’t we just say thanks?”

  I turned and looked at my table, then at Ms. Anderson seated at a table of guests not far away. Warren and Chaim went back to eating. I sat down.

  “Your buddies are waiting for you over there,” said Chaim.

  “I need to say a few things to you first.”

  They didn’t answer, so I explained in great detail the reasons why they should stay, the rewards both immediate and eventual. I knew their mindset, having had it just days before, and anticipated and described and undermined it. They went on eating with their eyes fixed on their plates, as though nothing mattered but the next bite. I didn’t care if they wanted me to leave. I would win them over. If I could paint UR God and make a clay replica of Shoale’s Wisconsin home, if I could write a PASE anthem and be an elder statesman to Pasers who knew the religion better than I did, I could with all my rhetorical power, which seemed to have entered its zenith, prevent these men from leaving. Mihir came over when dinner ended and I sent him away. Walking to the Prescription Palace with Warren and Chaim for the group activity I continued my argument even while accepting the juice, fig bar, and chair. Onstage a panel of PASE officials talked about how membership was up by a thousand percent over the year before. Land had just been purchased in Los Angeles for a celebrity PASE Station to accommodate new interest from movie and music industry people. An interfaith program with the Roman Catholic church had inoculated a million South Americans against AIDS during the past year. The birth rate among Pasers was one per five hundred, and in every case pregnancy predated the female Paser’s induction into PASE.

  “If you had a terminal illness,” I whispered to them, “and a doctor said there was a new procedure to cure it that involved, say, giving up red meat, would you refuse it just to keep eating steaks?”

  Chaim said, “Yes, if no one thought I was sick but that one doctor.”

  “A doctor whose credentials were better than everyone else’s combined.”

  I kept it up on the way back to the dormitory, and then in the bathroom while we brushed our teeth. Finally, just before going to sleep, they said they’d give the Wellness Center another week.

  “You’ve convinced us,” Warren said.

  “Really?”

  “You’re very persuasive,” said Chaim.

  Part of me knew that they were lying, but another part of me knew otherwise. I had made powerful ethical, logical, and emotional appeals, spelling out in detail the advantages to staying and the disadvantages to leaving. I had begun, sustained, and concluded the argument. As the wall lamps beside everyone’s beds shut off one by one, it seemed possible, however unlikely, that I had succeeded.

  When I woke up at six A.M. the next morning and their beds were empty, I was disappointed but not entirely surprised, as though a pair of feral cats I’d hoped to entice through care and affection to stay indoors had stolen back to the city streets, where their prized freedom was in fact a license for savagery and a shortcut to death. Dressing quickly, I decided to tell Ms. Anderson and on the way met two escorts who had been sent by her to fetch me. In the Red Room, she was rooting through her desk, and all of my teachers, counselors, and facilitators stood in a row behind her like witnesses to some grand Oval Office legislation-signing—Mr. Ramsted, Mr. Ortega, Mr. Martinez, Ms. Bentham, Ms. Webley, Mr. Israel—beaming as though UR God Himself had called them there.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  If they knew about Chaim and Warren, which I assumed was the reason I’d been summoned there, they didn’t display any anxiety or worry. Just the opposite. “Good morning!” they said.

  Ms. Anderson said, “You got here fast.”

  “I was on my way already to talk to you about something.”

  “What a nice coincidence. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I sent for you in order to say that the affinity you’ve shown for PASE customs over the last few days has been remarkable and extremely gratifying, further proof that PASE can turn resistance into inspiration. Yo
ur recreation work—for example, your painting of UR God and clay representation of Montgomery Shoale’s childhood home and your original song—have given hope and clarity to facilitators and guests alike, as have your sophisticated engagement with PASE ideas in class and your recognition in counseling of the dangers of sexuality and food. These wonderful developments have made us all very proud.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She waved her hand and the lineup behind her copied the move so that it rippled across them from Mr. Ramsted to Mr. Israel. “Your eating habits haven’t escaped notice, either. We’re aware that before your liposuction surgery in November you were obese, and that just before coming here you were on track to gain back everything you’d lost, but that in the past week you’ve taken on your own to salads and low-fat vegetable dishes.”

  “I feel much better.”

  “Tell us something. Do you consider yourself a Paser?”

  “Yes.” I said this with as much confidence as I would have admitted to being a man.

  “You see the truth of The Prescription and believe in the revelation of Montgomery Shoale?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you will understand how unfortunate it is that last night two of our guests, Warren Axelrod and Chaim Singer, attempted to leave the Wellness Center without authorization. Perhaps you saw that their beds were empty when you woke up this morning?”

  I swallowed and felt cold all over, as though a snowflake had fallen on the back of my neck. “Yes.”

  “They made arrangements to escape two days ago with one of the night watchmen, who told us about it beforehand so we could take preventive measures.”