by Josh Emmons
“When we’re done it’s going to be a distant, embarrassing memory, but right now we know it’s a cult. You know it, too, even if they’ve done their best to convince you otherwise over the past week. We wish we’d gotten to you sooner, but it took a while after your parents contacted us to verify that they were legitimate clients, and then requisitioning a PASE van and rigging a phone so that its ID showed up as a call from Montgomery Shoale slowed things down as well. Looks like we rescued you just in time.”
There were no windows in the room or even functional touches like a wall clock or calendar or thermostat. The air had a cryptlike quality, moribund and mortuary, and I felt fatigued and weak, as though my limbs were weighed down under an X-ray apron. My parents were involved in my being here. Ms. Anderson and the others were waiting for me at the Synergy Station. I’d been warned about people like this. Mr. Ortega may have had this very man in mind. “You want to take down PASE?” I asked tremulously.
“We have attorney friends outside the CON infrastructure who’ve agreed to file a pro bono class action lawsuit against it ostensibly on behalf of ex-Pasers, but who will really be acting as our legal agents. PASE has built up some goodwill in the community through its charity work, but we’ve compiled lots of anecdotal evidence against it, and with your help we’re optimistic. If the suit goes well we’ll be vindicated and strike a major blow against thought control.”
“Why do you say it’s thought control?” I had no idea where we were in relation to the city or the Wellness Center but I knew I had to do something, go somewhere. Thoughts danced and evaporated in my head like water droplets on a frying pan.
“Do you know the definition of a cult? It is—I’m quoting from a 1985 paper by West and Langone here—‘A group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group, fear of leaving it, etc.) designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.’ We got a call from a woman the other day whose son joined PASE and then left his pregnant wife, quit his job at a cable TV service because it ran ‘salacious’ programs, and now won’t talk to anyone he used to be close to who isn’t also a Paser. Another woman, a Paser of five years’ standing, told us that at PASE meetings if you make a sexual reference that isn’t negative—if you say, ‘I once had sex in a water closet,’ or if you make a Freudian slip like, ‘Put a cock in it’ instead of ‘Put a sock in it’—you’re sent to something called the Adjustment Facility to be deprived of food, kept awake all night, and forced to watch acts of rape until you’re sick. It’s right out of A Clockwork Orange. And consider how PASE makes money. To remain in good standing with the so-called church, every Paser has to subscribe to its weekly magazine, World PASE, which costs three hundred dollars a year; go on a weeklong three-thousand-dollar retreat every six months; tithe ten percent of his income; and make regular charitable contributions to the PASE Process and its International Educational Fund, which sends Paser missionaries to thirty-four countries on six continents. It’s an enormous conspiracy that we are going to stop.”
“You’re missing the point,” I said, completely unnerved and unable to have this conversation any longer. The room’s oxygen was as thin as turpentine vapor. I pulled at the neck of my shirt for air and felt more enclosed and needed first of all to breathe. “It’s about overcoming desire, the source of all human suffering.”
Tomas raised his eyebrows as he stared at me for a minute. Then he lifted his phone, pressed a button, said “Code one,” and hung up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were so far advanced. I’m usually more observant. We’ll talk again soon.” The door opened then and I turned around to see two men enter, one carrying a syringe that found its way into my neck while the other held me still; they didn’t know that I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to, not in that oxygen-depleted vault. Then the darkness.
CHAPTER 9
I woke up without any sense of how long I’d been out, on a padded examination table under the blue ceiling of a spacious honeysuckle room, in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt I’d bought just after my surgery. I sat up and a current of pain ran through my back. The room was decorated with daisy-link trim around its walls, eight-by-ten photographs of children playing on the beach, and a giant Monet print of a lily-strewn pond. A marble-framed vanity and two Viennese music boxes shaped like Gothic cathedrals sat on top of a butternut country dresser, and a pillow-backed wood rocking chair rested beside an overstuffed red couch with pink arm sleeves, in the purview of a small video camera nailed above the door. There was a television, a computer, a stack of books and magazines, two packing boxes, and my Couvade duffel bag zippered shut on a folding card table in a corner.
A man in his late fifties entered the room wearing a white coat and rimless spectacles, with a computer tablet tucked into the crook of his arm. His beard was trimmed so close to his face it might have been a few days’ oversight.
“Hello, Jack,” he said in a soothing bedside manner, standing a foot away from the exam table where I rubbed my back. “My name is Dr. Cantor. How are you feeling?”
“Not well.”
“I expected as much, considering that you’ve come directly from a PASE Wellness Center, which in its short history has contaminated scores of adults with deep-seated neurological disorders geared toward suicide. From what Tomas tells me, I gather that its operators had some degree of success with you, and that you consider the people there to be your friends. You may even have found value in some of their teachings. That would be understandable, since they’re not wrong about everything. As the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And yet the goal of all their actions and teachings was not to help you, but rather to exercise power over you.”
I folded my arms and the room’s bed-and-breakfast décor was creepy in its strained effort to appear pleasant, in its Norman Rock-well adornments, as though put together by aliens hoping to calm skittish human abductees.
Dr. Cantor said, “You may not want to do this at first, but over time light will be shed on every inch of the crime committed against you and other captives at the Wellness Center, and you’ll thank us for this intervention.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’re not under arrest and you have nothing to fear from us. We aren’t going to hurt you; we’re going to save you.”
I didn’t guffaw because it was all too depressing and tiring. “Why did you take me? There are two guys there now who want to leave and they’d have been perfect for this place.”
“On the contrary, anyone wishing to leave the Wellness Center has no need of our services.”
“I don’t either.”
“Tomas may have mentioned that your parents hired us to get you out. They’ve been very worried since your disappearance last week.”
“Then this is a misunderstanding. I’ll talk to them and clear it up.”
“They plan to visit when the time is right. It can be dangerous to try to rush your recovery.”
My jeans and sweatshirt felt binding and constrictive and vainglorious, the symbolic and spiritual opposite of my powder blue tunic. “So what’s supposed to happen now? You’re going to try to deprogram me?”
“The process is not as mechanistic or clinical as its name suggests. We’re just going to discuss things in a warm, comfortable place, with music if you like and plenty of good food and whatever else will be conducive to an honest exchange of ideas. You have a bag here full of your clothes and two boxes of your personal effects. You are free to watch television, access the Internet, read—anything you want.”
“I want a copy
of The Prescription for a Superior Existence and the clothes I came here in.”
“Those particular items aren’t allowed.”
“Then I’ll take the PASE pamphlet series A to Z and you can remove the other stuff, unless there are any videos of Montgomery Shoale talks. And I’d like to speak to Ms. Anderson at the Wellness Center.”
“It’s seven o’clock at night, so I should make something clear, though I think you know it and are being facetious: You will not be exposed to anything related to PASE. You won’t read its literature or listen to its party line or talk to its adherents, nor will you visit its buildings or write to its leader or promote it to anyone else. PASE had its day in court with you and now it’s our turn.”
He left and might never have been there. I lay down and thought of UR God and meditated and after great effort felt a touch of Synergy. For three minutes or so I conjured that magnificent feeling until slowly, as though I’d held up a heavy object for too long, my strength gave out and I lost contact with it. I stood up and walked around the room and poked through the boxes full of miscellany from my apartment. I saw the edge of an adult-video case and then the front cover—two candy stripers pushing a football player down a hospital corridor—and my penis moved of its own accord. The feeling, so sudden and unwelcome, was as startling as if a snake had slithered nearby.
I sat on the couch, which, perhaps because it was too soft, turned up the heat of my back pain. And a distant throb in my wrist drew closer. Without warning, with awful predictability, my old symptoms were converging on me from everywhere at once, like some prearranged ambush. Pain, arousal, anxiety. I felt like an encephalitis lethargica patient who, after a miraculous L-dopa awakening, was beginning to relapse into catatonia. Or someone in the early stages of Alzheimer’s aware that soon he would forget a lifetime of memories, that one by one his mind would erase them like a computer infected by a rogue virus. So quickly, so finally.
“But I was well,” I said, the words evaporating on my lips like soap bubbles. Then louder, looking directly at the camera, “I was well!”
In an instant of overwhelming force, as when you return after a flood to the washed-out frame of what had been your house, and ruin blankets the world around you, a cleanup task so large you don’t know where to begin and so turn away to do nothing, defeated at the outset, I sensed the enormity of what had been taken from me when I was taken from the Wellness Center. The room’s lighting seemed to come in pulses with a strobe effect, and I tore off my sweatshirt and jeans and tried overturning the examination table that was bolted to the floor. The doorknob also wouldn’t budge and I couldn’t reach the camera or jump to knock it away. I beat on the thick Plexiglas window through which I could see only the beige of the hallway wall. I beat on the door with my fists and palms and screamed that I had been well and that I’d been promised eternal synergy with UR God. I was as naked as when I came into the world and I’d been promised and they couldn’t take it away from me for they had no right! I would return to the Wellness Center! CON was full of poison and they delighted in infecting others, but I would be well again! Like scorpions, I screamed, you are like scorpions! And all the while I threw myself against the door like a wave, and like a rocky promontory it would not be moved.
At the Wellness Center I’d heard stories about its Seclusion Ward, where people with physical dependencies—drug addicts and alcoholics, as well as those who elected, as Tyrone had considered doing, to stay there—went to get clean and dry out under locked, careful supervision. The accounts were of the guests’ desperate pleading and cold sweats and violent nausea, of love so tough it was indistinguishable from cruelty, of men and women miserable enough to consider dashing their brains out on their bed frame, anything to escape the misery of who they were and what they lacked. Several Seclusion Warders told me after their release that no experience was as unbearable. They’d rather have their eyes poked out than go through it again. Hobble or impale them, cut off their hands, set them afire.
I had tried to empathize by remembering my own feeling of withdrawal when I’d first been cut off from alcohol and painkillers and muscle relaxants and sleeping aids at the Center, but really I’d had no idea of what it was like until my first night in that honeysuckle room at the Cult Opposition Network. It was beyond awful. Although they didn’t have an active physical component, my claustrophobia and distress splintered into countless dimensions, so that when I concentrated and quelled one aspect of my misery, ten more rose to take its place, like brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’d been robbed of the ultimate treasure and if the world were to end in the night I would die a mere savant. Paradise now was to be paradise never. I curled into a ball on the table and shook.
According to legend, Fyodor Dostoevsky, after having been arrested in Russia for treason in 1849 and sentenced to die, stood before a firing squad listening to the countdown, and time slowed for him until he experienced an eternity in an instant, a mystical rapture and premonition of God that shocked and elated a man who had moved far away from the Russian Orthodox Church and from belief itself. But just before the attendant military man called out Fire!— in Russian—a word to be synchronous with his mortality, a messenger arrived on horseback from the governor’s office with a note commuting Dostoevsky’s sentence from death to four years in a hard-labor camp. A reprieve, a reversal’s reversal. Although devoutly Christian from then on, he never got over the disappointment of being pulled back to Earth just when he expected to transcend it forever.
When at some hour of the night the door opened and Tomas entered with a stranger and said something, I was too weak to expel the pill he pushed through my lips and between my teeth. In a hiccup of grief I swallowed and he said something else and then the two men left and I stared into the abyss of the here and now, which was soon replaced by another, fuzzier one.
Morning came and I woke up as body-slammed as I used to feel after a night of kamikaze raids on my liquor shelf and medicine cabinet and dessert pantry, as if instead of sleeping I had just won a pyrrhic victory for the rights to my head. It was seven-fifteen and I had a full-blown erection and my lower back crackled with pain. Again I was dressed in my old casual clothes, which chafed like wool trousers and a hair shirt, and again I thought of consciousness as a punishment too heinous to fit the crime.
In the past, before I became a Paser, my partial recovery from this condition would have involved ten minutes of dry-heaving over the toilet, three or four cups of coffee, and a scorching shower followed by five bicep repetitions with twenty-pound hand barbells. Now I would do none of those things. Just because I was physically removed from the Wellness Center didn’t mean I had to forfeit the gains I’d made there. I would follow my old regimen as best I could and, like Sir Thomas More studying the catechism in his Tower of London prison, retain what I’d learned of the truth and build on it inside me.
Yes, I decided, feeling better in anticipation of feeling better, it didn’t matter that I wouldn’t effortlessly fuse into UR God via a Synergy device. No one else had, and this was a chance for me to reach ur-savant status through diligence alone. I would cleave ever more to PASE. My erection and backache and other troubles were temporary insignificant setbacks that would, like tropical depressions in the ocean predicted to turn into hurricanes that then dissipate of their own accord, fall away while I prevailed.
An hour later I sat in a different room with Dr. Cantor at a table set with a cup of coffee, plate of pancakes, eggs, a sour cream muffin, and a portable air purifier. He lit a cigarette—he smoked the brand I once had—and turned on the purifier, so that only a hint of smoke reached me. I began to meditate and think about UR God and the unreality of this situation. I imagined a better place.
“Please go ahead and eat,” said Dr. Cantor. “We understand you love this particular breakfast.”
“Loved. In the past tense.”
“So you don’t want it?”
“I know what you’re trying to do and it won’t work.”<
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Dr. Cantor wrote that down on a pad of paper. “Your parents didn’t make you go to church or give you a religious upbringing, and before being taken hostage by Pasers you weren’t much interested in religions or cults or spirituality of any kind. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“But now you are committed to PASE.”
“Correct.”
“Would you say you’re a savant?”
“Yes.”
He scribbled something and underlined it twice. He didn’t touch the cigarette except to push its ashtray, in which it rested, out of the way to make room for his pad of paper; its smoke, freed from the purifier’s draft, wafted more fully in my direction. “What has changed about you in the last week? I ask because you’re thirty-four years old. Most people’s identities are fixed by that age.”
“What most people do is not my concern. I can’t save them. I can only attend to my own conduct and make sure it accords with UR God’s teachings in The Prescription.” My meditation technique, geared toward Him and our ultimate union, wasn’t working just then—I couldn’t get airborne in my thoughts or lose sight of the temptations in front of me—so I switched my focus to how I was separate from the cigarette and food. If I couldn’t get into Him I could at least stay away from them.
Dr. Cantor rested his left hand on his right, like paws, and there was something canine about him, an unsettling soulfulness in his expression, as though I might by being uncooperative break his heart. “My question is, why make such a radical break with your former life and join what you might have described as a crazy religion just one week ago?”
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”
“That’s from a different religion.”
“A week ago I didn’t know anything about PASE except some bogus reports in the media.” Sour cream muffins had always been irresistible to me. The eggs on the table were scrambled with cheese and liberally peppered, as I’d once liked them. The pancakes were a perfect golden brown.