Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “And now you know better.”

  “Now I know best.”

  “Could you tell me specifically what that best is?”

  Fixing my eyes on Dr. Cantor’s, I said, “I know how to break out of the cycle of desire that has fed me false hope ever since I was born and prevented my being satisfied with what I have. I know that an alternative exists, Prescription for a Superior Existence, and that I can follow it until I fuse into UR God.”

  “What would you say to the idea that you believe these things because of the major disruptions you’ve experienced lately, such as losing your job, breaking up with your girlfriend, and undergoing a transformative surgery?”

  “I’d say that you probably have a lot invested in finding any cause but the real one for my spiritual growth.”

  “Do you think your heavy reliance on alcohol and sleeping pills played a part in your conversion?”

  “No, but I think your heavy reliance on rationalistic thinking and traditional psychiatric treatment methods limits your ability to comprehend what has happened to me.”

  Dr. Cantor took a final drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and then stubbed it out slowly and ineffectually, so that it continued to burn, like a sloppily extinguished campfire from which scouts and posses would deduce that their quarry wasn’t far away. “Are you afraid of losing your faith?” he asked.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Yesterday you shouted for a long time, while doing considerable harm to your hands, that you had been well and that you would be well again. What did you mean by that?”

  “There’s no point in telling you.”

  “Can’t you explain it?”

  In my agitation—which I couldn’t for the moment master—I tore off the overhanging edge of the muffin and put it in my mouth. Dr. Cantor gave no indication that my eating pleased him, though I knew it did. He and Tomas and the others thought they could wear down my defenses, whereas really—I turned the muffin’s torn side away from me, and it was okay that I’d had that one bite because until I became an ur-savant I would have to eat a few calories here and there—they hadn’t the power. I told Dr. Cantor that my nausea, backache, extreme hunger, and wrist pain had gone away at the Wellness Center, along with my tormentuous erections.

  “Tormentuous?” he said. “Strong word, if it is one. What I wonder is why sex, which I assume you found pleasurable before your exposure to PASE, so disgusts you now?”

  “It doesn’t disgust me. I just want no more part of it. It’s a distraction.”

  “From what?”

  “UR God.”

  “Yes, Ultimate Reality God. I’ve studied the PASE cosmology—in fact I’ve read the entire Prescription and most of the supplementary tracts Montgomery Shoale has published, the pamphlets you asked for last night—and I’m curious about what you make of its being a hodgepodge of other religions, with a soupçon of science thrown in for good measure.”

  “It isn’t one, a hodgepodge.”

  “PASE features an entity similar to the Judeo-Christian God—an omnipotent creator—as well as separatist wands similar to Milton’s fallen angels but modeled physically on what string theory suggests are the smallest units of matter, and it is based on the Christian Scientist idea, which is actually borrowed from Gnostic and other traditions, that the corporeal body isn’t real and therefore can be controlled and transcended, itself a philosophical outgrowth of the Buddhist belief that attachment, or ‘desire’ if you’d prefer, is the ultimate evil. These to me seem like plagiarisms.”

  “This conversation is a waste of our time. Will you please just call my parents and I’ll talk to them and then we can go home?”

  “Why is it a waste of time?”

  “Because you don’t know anything.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “That before Montgomery Shoale was given The Prescription, some people who’d forgotten the truth about UR God had intimations of Him that they spun into religions because the compulsion toward Him was so strong. PASE isn’t copying them; it’s correcting them.”

  “Then we’re extremely lucky to be living at this time.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “People who came before us were at a disadvantage.”

  “If you read The Prescription you would know that wands have been reincarnated through all the evolutionary stages beginning when we were bacteria.”

  Dr. Cantor flipped through pages of his notebook until coming to one he studied. “Prior to your arrival here I talked to your parents about your childhood, which they said wasn’t easy. You often rebelled against them, flying into rages and screaming that you didn’t have to do what they said because they weren’t your real mother and father.”

  “That’s—All kids do that. Rebel, I mean.”

  “Apparently you didn’t have many friends, you struggled in school, and you suffered from a weight problem that contributed to your social difficulties. Perhaps compounding these issues, your brother was something of a golden child, gifted in academics and popular with his classmates and a brilliant artist. For years you two fought over everything and you attacked him for being a suck-up and a Goody Two-Shoes.”

  “This is ancient history. Sid and I are best friends now and we have been for a long time.”

  “I’m not saying, and your parents didn’t say, that you were a lost cause or incorrigible. You went on to finish college and get a job and have a couple of girlfriends. The point I’m making is that while on the surface you turned out okay, underneath your wounds have been festering a long time. Most people’s view of themselves, their self-conception, is to a large degree established by the age of nine.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I leaned toward the partially burning cigarette as though a rope tied around my neck were being pulled. More than a third was left and I could reach out and grab it. To be able to freeze time for five short minutes! Dr. Cantor need not know, nor Ms. Anderson, nor UR God, nor even myself. The right hand keeps things from the left.

  “How fawningly did they behave toward you?” Dr. Cantor crossed his legs at the knee the way old men did when sharing expired wisdom. He was part Labrador, part basset hound, part pit bull: watchful, lugubrious, impassive.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A common practice among cults is to praise new members in everything they do and make them feel wanted and special, as though recognizing beauty and value in them that has gone unacknowledged by the outside world. It’s called ‘love bombing.’ People who feel neglected or down about themselves are prime targets for it.”

  “I assume you mean me.”

  “In your time at the PASE Wellness Center they must have treated you as if you were wonderful and unique and gifted. Perhaps they praised you excessively for something you did, or just for being who you are.”

  “And if they did that means I was love bombed.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I’m just saying that cults use an arsenal of tricks to lower people’s guard and win them over. Because of your history of self-esteem issues—which grew and hardened over time, turning into something of a petrified forest in your head—they might have employed certain methods that we can establish as insincere.”

  There was a maddening reasonableness to his tone, as though what he said was so incontrovertible that he needn’t add emotion or emphasis to carry his point, that anyone with a brain would upon using it concede victory to him.

  “Love bombing sounds more effective than what you’re doing now, hate bombing or whatever this is. I’d rather be praised than insulted.”

  “How did they do it? By calling you handsome or reassuring you of your physical attractiveness?”

  “You can’t really be a doctor.”

  “I imagine they laughed at your jokes and complimented you on your intelligence.”

  “Everything you’re saying is wrong. It’s incredible how wrong you are. Nobody said I was good-looking or funny or smart.”

  “Then they must hav
e called attention to something you did. Your performance in a sport, perhaps? Or on a musical instrument? Maybe you painted a picture they said they really liked?”

  I scooted my chair back and arched my back and straightened my shoulders. “You’re basically saying that I’m a witless, untalented moron whom nobody would acclaim without ulterior motives.”

  Dr. Cantor said, “What was the painting of?”

  “I’m not saying there was one.”

  “A landscape? A portrait?”

  “You’re a cynical, pathetic man.”

  “A portrait.”

  I tore off another piece of the muffin and swallowed it whole. “It was of UR God, and the facilitators and everyone said it was a revelation. They said I painted Him just as they’d always imagined but had never been able to express in words or images. They said it was a masterpiece.”

  “Your adoptive parents are artists.” Dr. Cantor relit his cigarette without turning on the purifier, set it back down in the ashtray, and stood up. I stood up also, ready to be anywhere but in that room.

  “I’ve got to go now,” he said, shuffling into his coat, “but I’ll see you again soon.”

  “I hope not.”

  He glanced at the plate of food and then left. I rested my hands on the tabletop, a foot away from the food and cigarette, and did not sit down for fear that my back, which had been heating up during that unhappy interview, would begin to burn. The muffin was really quite small and lean-tasting, probably less than three hundred calories altogether. I looked at it and a minute later it was gone and the fluffy pancakes and eggs seemed like smaller portions than they had appeared at first. I picked up the fork and with a groan dug its tines into the tabletop.

  When the door opened I threw down the fork and saw Tomas’s oppressive red quiff. “Here you are,” he said. Standing behind him, the driver from the day before smiled and his two front teeth were gold. “What do you say we get out of here for a bit? After being cooped up for so long, you could probably use some fresh air.”

  I felt sandblasted with tiredness and asked, without energy or curiosity, “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.”

  We passed into the office, where I was given another bandanna for my eyes, and was guided outside and into the backseat of a car whose doors, like a police vehicle’s, didn’t open from the inside. Tomas sat beside me and the driver up front. After a thirty-minute drive, I took off the bandanna and saw that we were in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was a little after noon, and Tomas told me to look at all the hard work and initiative going on: the graffiti art and wild celebratory clothes and succulent Mexican food. This is the real world, he said, full of real people creating real, meaningful lives. And all of it is fueled by desire. Desire is what makes us who we are. It gives us direction and motivation; it causes us to act, to make a difference, to improve ourselves in tangible, real ways recognized by people other than billionaire crackpots and the dupes who follow them. The temptation is strong to look at the negative extreme of any action—of eating or doing drugs or sex—and condemn it, but that is no reason for us then to neglect its positives. Would it be right to outlaw bicycles because a few people crash on them, or aspirin because an overdose can kill? Tomas looked at me but I was concentrating on meditation, on conjuring the feeling of Synergy. It was close but not quite there.

  From the Mission we drove across town—there’s so much ingenuity and cause to be optimistic, Tomas said—to Fisherman’s Wharf, where tourists ate clam chowder out of sourdough bread bowls and street magicians bent bars of steel and the Bay drew gulls by the thousands. The sailboats formed an armada of white playthings shuttling across the water’s whitecap apostrophes. Of a teenage couple walking hand in hand, Tomas said, “Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? See how the girl adjusted her step to match his? And how he unscrewed the water cap so she could drink and then screwed it back on? That’s true selflessness, the kind born of genuine affection. There’s nothing sterilized or contrived about it.” I did not respond. “You have to ask yourself what PASE is doing when it says that charity and putting others first should be your top priorities, but it sequesters you away from people and has you think about yourself constantly.”

  Like suppressing a sneeze, I again didn’t speak, though a rejoinder burned my throat the way a sneeze does one’s nose. I was not able to enter Synergy. It lay behind a bricked-up entryway and I had nothing but my fingers to dig through to it. The sights and sounds of San Francisco were a vivid, convincing daydream. Tomas took two candy bars from his knapsack, ate one, and placed the other on the seat between us so that it pointed at me. In front of us were the Marin Headlands and Alcatraz and Vallejo and El Cerrito and Oakland and a hundred other communities I’d spent my life wandering through as comfortably as I had my own house.

  Then we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and the pearl of Sebastopol glinted down below as we headed up Highway 101 to the Richmond Bridge. Various landmasses and cities solemnized out of the water, their permanence like the solid and fixed and illusory images on celluloid. I twisted the bandanna around my thumb and wanted to put it back over my eyes. On the 580 North we turned off at University Avenue and entered Berkeley, an upward slant of Indian restaurants and hatha yoga centers and discount import shops. We drove along Telegraph Avenue while Tomas went over the macro- and microcosmic details of this living, breathing, mutable, growing, accommodating, studying, dirty, clean, searching, discovering modern city. Did I really want to opt out of all this vitality just because someone said desire was bad?

  Cutting over toward Oakland we passed an outdoor market full of Middle Eastern basketry and ceramics and burning spires of incense, a quasi-Bedouin operation that seemed to be run by a single man wearing a Nehru jacket and a fez. I said I was feeling carsick and asked the driver to roll down my window. He pressed a button and it lowered halfway as we stopped at a red light. Tomas told him in a clipped voice to raise it back up, that it was too low, but before the driver could comply I punched Tomas in the testicles, reached through the window, opened my door from the outside, and jumped out. We were at the corner of Telegraph and Fifty-second Street, and cars were lining up on either side of the stoplight. I ran toward the UC Berkeley campus, whose Campanile building resembled the Citadel, and so at that moment was a beacon.

  The CON car made a screeching 180-degree turn. Being used to running at the Wellness Center, I flew along the sidewalk past the Bedouin market, where the man in the fez arranging goods on a table shouted huzzas at me and clapped, though right away I felt winded. When I heard Tomas, abreast of me in the car on the other side of a traffic lane, call out to passersby that I was an escaped patient and should be apprehended, so that a couple of pedestrians looked at me hesitantly, I answered that I was being held prisoner and needed protection. This made up the pedestrians’ mind to do nothing. I abruptly turned off the sidewalk and ran along a gravel driveway separating two creamy houses, hoping for a clear passage to Stuart Street, from which I could get to Shattuck Street and jump into a taxi or BART station, but instead I came to a tall chain-link fence connecting the two buildings. I had half scaled it when the flat side of a metal rake slapped me on the back, stunning me to the ground like a flyswatter. I got up and confronted the woman holding it; she was yelling that she lived in one of the houses and wouldn’t let me cause mischief in her backyard. I stuttered an explanation and dodged another swipe, getting around her and back to the sidewalk, where the CON car had pulled up at a forty-five-degree angle. Tomas and the driver jumped out and stood on either side of me, their bodies hunched like dogcatchers. They thanked the woman and I begged her to call the police and not let these people take me, for they wanted to kill me, but she didn’t seem to believe or care what I said, and ten seconds later I was alone in the backseat of the car. Tomas and the driver sat in front.

  For several minutes the three of us didn’t move. I panted and rubbed my face and felt for the most tender spots on my back. Had I been taller I might h
ave made it. Had I had taller birth parents. Had I not started smoking when I was thirteen. Had I practiced jumping like those small men who could slam-dunk basketballs, their size no match for their ambition. But no, it was to end in defeat, in my inability to get over what would keep me down.

  That evening, in my room, I was given a steak dinner, a glass of water, and a mixed bottle of sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. I went through my Couvade duffel bag, which contained most of my smaller-sized clothes and a few bigger sweatshirts, and then through the boxes of things from my apartment: photo albums, books, music compilations, old concert ticket stubs, my MBA diploma, and porn videos. Tomas and the other CON employees didn’t bother to disguise the intended effect of these mementos; I was to see them and incrementally or, better yet, immediately feel nostalgia for my old life. The cumulative weight of those thirty-four years was supposed to snap my hastily erected Paser identity and restore the Jack of all craves.

  To show my captors that I was immune to these things, that I regarded them as Constantine and his apostatical empire did the pagan deities that had long ruled Pax Romana, I spent the next several hours staring at the photographs and watching the pornography and listening to the music that had once driven and provided substance to my life. I lazily flipped through snapshots of proms and graduations and parties and girlfriends and vacations and barbecues and restaurants, each shot a colorful, spiraling association of memories, a mnemonic fractal by which formerly I’d been as comforted as a mathematician by a familiar algorithm. The first and only weekend Supritha and I spent in Mendocino, partially smitten as we sat on benches between short walks to and from the Sea Castle Bed and Breakfast Inn. My parents cutting me a small piece of cake when I finished junior high school, a shiny new digital watch programmed with two basic games adorning my chubby wrist. Closing the photo albums, I put on a few videos and yawned at the uncut footage of unlikely encounters between historical and futuristic personages who, no matter how exalted or lowly their station, no matter how pressing their need to prosecute or escape justice, no matter how flimsy or outrageous the premise of their world and character, found the time and opportunity and equipment to have sex in every conceivable location. Duchesses scolding their priapic gardeners on lush botanical grounds. Solar-powered cyborgs and the Earth girls who’d tried everything else. I responded as a child does to an ant colony, mildly amused by the hard work on display but ready on a whim to ignore or knock it down. When the movies ended I played music and feigned a nap during the second song of my favorite CD, a sublime four-minute ditty that had, throughout my ungainly adulthood, inspired me to move, if not dance, with comparative grace and coordination. The most successful of my one-night stands—that is, the one that was consummated—had followed my spinning a young businesswoman from Dubuque across the slippery dance floor of the Up and Down Club to its whirling melody. What had been a burst of sonic serotonin was now, to judge by the face I displayed, no better than an elevator banality.