Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  All of this required huge effort on my behalf, a watchfulness against pleasure and sympathy with my old self in constant danger of slackening. I was like a policeman in his childhood neighborhood listening to the clemency appeals of his onetime best friends caught for drunk driving or minor drug possession. It demanded a hardening of the heart. I couldn’t tell if my performance impressed the CON, because no one came to take away my undisturbed dinner plate or check on me. I was alone with the pain and frustration and fear that my PASE improvements were eroding in a feedback loop and would soon disappear altogether. I still couldn’t reenter Synergy; like an oar that has slipped overboard and into the water, it drifted farther away the more I splashed to retrieve it. My vertebrae were hot iron spikes that pinched and scalded the attached nerve clusters. I flexed my groin muscles to keep an erection from forming with the desperation of a child holding his breath underwater, frantically hoping for help that couldn’t come from without. Things might get worse rather than better, despite my intentions and exertions and protestations.

  At ten P.M. I shut off the light and got into bed and lay on my side and sleep was light-years away. I inhaled and exhaled adrenaline. The room’s silence was too loud. The bed was too soft. I was too alone. What if, after my time at the CON, PASE would no more take me back than a mother bear would accept a cub that had been touched and therefore contaminated by human hands? What if I had become damaged goods, spoiled, an unreclaimable outcast? Some questions, framed negatively enough—as mine were then—produce only one answer. At one A.M. I turned on the light and tried the locked door and examined the sleeping pills. They were brand name, high quality, the sort I kept at home in regular quantities. Small enough to fit in a dollhouse bathroom. Like the eggs of some mythically tiny bird. Lightweight and perfectly rounded and buffed. I peered at them and they arranged themselves along my hand’s lifeline like the tail end of a fantastic constellation.

  With my hand lightly shaking I flipped a coin to determine if I would take one: tails no, heads yes. It was tails. No. I flipped again, going for two out of three. Tails again. I turned the quarter over and rubbed George Washington’s shy regal head. He was telling me not to take the easy road to sleep and to the breakdown of my resolve. He was saying, Don’t give in. Don’t remove your finger from the dam; don’t scream near fragile glass. If drugs put you under now, you will be less able to do it on your own later. There are processes that once set in motion are difficult to stop. Just because you did so once doesn’t mean you can do it again. Like any good father—of a family or nation—Washington cautioned against a gamble that he wouldn’t have hesitated to take when younger.

  And yet without the pills, I thought, answering him apologetically and with what might have been cheap casuistry, though it seemed like calculated wisdom, I won’t sleep at all, and my defenses will be weak against the CONslaught awaiting me in the morning. Shouldn’t I preserve my energy by getting some restorative rest, allow a minor front to fall so that I can send reinforcements to the other, more important battle site? A sacrifice must be made somewhere. This is about damage control, not damage prevention.

  I flipped the coin again and it was heads and, lifting two blue tablets to my mouth, I avoided the dead man’s steely gaze.

  In the morning, following seven hours of unconsciousness, I was not restored or in control or noticeably stronger. If anything, I felt worse and thicker-headed than on the day before, like a boxer regaining consciousness after being knocked out for the second fight in a row. A full cup of fragrant black coffee rested on a warming pad beside my bed. My back and stomach were the physical equivalent of pounding on the deep end of a piano.

  When I entered the interrogation room to talk again to Dr. Cantor, he pulled out my chair in front of a steaming plate of eggs Benedict with a tall orange juice and another cup of coffee. A fresh pack of cigarettes lay in front of him. No air purifier. Cool jazz played, a saxophone and clarinet duet in which neither instrument had the upper hand. I sat down and looked at him coolly. He was powerless and I knew the truth. For thinking makes it so.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked, removing the protective wrapping around the cigarettes and tapping one out. An extra landed on the table and rolled toward me; a third jutted halfway from the pack like a cannon barrel.

  “Fine.”

  “You look like you could have used a few more hours.”

  “Couldn’t everyone?”

  “I suppose we should get started, in that case.” He lit his cigarette and the smoke dance started up again. It was all sickeningly familiar, with the second cigarette calling for me to help it up as though I were a passing good Samaritan. “Do you know anything about Eros and Thanatos?”

  When looking out from inside a heavy fog, mental or meteorological, you notice that objects and events lack precision. Dr. Cantor and this room, for example, had for me soft rather than sharp edges, as though someone had drawn them in charcoal and then with a thumb smudged their outlines. I wanted a pair of glasses for my mind.

  “They are the Greek gods of sexual love and death, respectively. In Freudian terms, Eros represents the life instinct and Thanatos the death instinct. Some people believe that the two vie for primacy in every individual and in society as a whole, that our urge for life, as enacted in sex and desire, moves in lockstep with our attraction to death, which is manifested in war and self-destruction. To be healthy therefore is to maintain an equilibrium between the two. Devoting yourself to either god, or instinct, is like living with only the right or left half of your body, like flying with one wing. It is, in short, an impossibility, because too much Eros or too much Thanatos overloads the body and mind and creates a kind of ontological black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light, and ends in either overintoxication or asceticism.” He transferred the cigarette from his right to left hand. “I won’t spell out the obvious application of this theory to what happens to a Paser, but I will ask you to ponder it later on your own.”

  “I won’t,” I said, struggling not to ponder it already.

  “Well, I can’t make you think of pink elephants.” He laughed. “That’s a joke.”

  I sighed and watched the smoke.

  “How about we go back to what we talked about yesterday, about why you decided to join PASE?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it and have a theory. Mind if I share it with you? It has to do with the ‘bowling alone’ thesis concerning contemporary America, which you might already know of. The gist of it is that we in this country feel less connected to one another than past generations did, which has created a kind of vacuum in our lives. Sociologists call it a decline in social capital. In the 1960s, for example, eight percent of Americans belonged to a bowling league—they would get together once or twice a week in a friendly, social environment to bowl and interact with one another—whereas now fewer than one percent do. Add to that the fact that in the 1950s people got married on average six years younger than we do now, so that the mean age of a man and woman marrying were twenty-two and twenty, compared to twenty-eight and twenty-six now, meaning they had children at an earlier age and developed closer coupled friends, and of course the divorce rate was lower then, too. All this is to say that whereas in the past we were part of various groups that met regularly to socialize and act as extensions of the families we already had at home, giving us a rich and vibrant sense of community, an emotional network that we’d cultivated in different forms since our time as hunters and gatherers, these days we have nothing—”

  “How sad for us.”

  He paused to show that he didn’t mind my interruption and would welcome more of my thoughts, then said, “These days we have nothing to meet those needs but work and religion. Man is a social animal by nature. Living as isolated as we do now is affecting us in ways we can’t yet understand fully, but that are almost certainly unhealthy. It breeds extremism and desperation. Look at you, for instance. You live alone and apparently have
no hobbies or activities outside of your job, which, when you lost it, turned out to have been the only bulwark between you and the first community and belief system that came along.” Although animated while speaking, he went back to his expectant dogface when he fell silent, like a mime after performing his dollar routine.

  “Maybe your other patients like being reduced to a statistic and belittled,” I said, “but I don’t. In fact I find it annoying.”

  “I don’t mean to annoy you.”

  “Too late.”

  “Okay, then let’s talk about something else.”

  The pack of cigarettes between us on the table was a perfect rectangular object, without nicks or scratches, fresh and clean and promising, the ratio of its size to its effects like a stick of dynamite to its explosion.

  “Have you had a nocturnal emission since you became a savant?” asked Dr. Cantor, sticking his pen behind his ear.

  “Excuse me?”

  “While sleeping, have you had an orgasm? And if so, were you upset by it?”

  “That is a stupid question.”

  “Men who don’t have sex or masturbate, a category I presume includes you, often have nocturnal emissions.”

  “Savants don’t. We control our bodies at all times, even when we’re asleep.”

  “Very interesting. How do you manage it?”

  “As The Prescription says: ‘Desire is a by-product of ignorance, of the idea that human beings are limited by their bodies and in need of a corrective in order to survive and be well. Once ignorance and superstition are vanquished by wisdom, by the full personal revelation that we are part of a greater truth, of ultimate reality, desire will lose its strength and have no more influence over us than a witch doctor’s spell. The truth is the antidote to desire. The truth is all-powerful. The truth works during the day and night, before and after, always and always.’”

  “An impressive recital.”

  “How much longer do we have to talk to each other?”

  “About an hour.”

  “No, I mean in general when do you plan to admit to my parents that deprogramming won’t work with me? Because they’re not rich. While we’re here chatting so amiably, you’re bankrupting a retired couple on a fixed income. Not that I think your conscience could be tweaked by anything short of murder.”

  “We’re not charging them a fee.”

  “But they hired you.”

  “Our hope is that when you understand the secret nature of PASE, your testimony against it will help us bring it down. That will more than offset the cost of your stay here.”

  “So you’re doing this for free?”

  “Yes.”

  I grew sullen and didn’t answer Dr. Cantor’s next few questions. Soon he stopped asking them and circled back to the ground he had covered earlier about how troubled I was. He was sorry if it annoyed me but I needed to hear it. I had a death fixation. I was lonely. Did I know about the followers of another Bay Area guru, Jim Jones, who in the 1970s mixed together a potent blend of apostolic socialism and liberation theology in a cult called the Peoples Temple, which to escape scrutiny fled to Guyana, where, in 1978, increasingly despotic and given to sexually and psychologically abusing his acolytes, Jones forced all of its members to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch after a California congressman came to see how they were doing? More than nine hundred people died, including women and children, and the congressman was murdered along with his traveling companions. I had a death fixation and was lonely. And surely I remembered David Koresh, who converted his Branch Davidian ministry into a heavily armed compound in Texas and burned it down, killing eighty people? I was a lonely, death-fixated man who’d accidentally entered the orbit of a ruthless cult whose destructive powers were as yet unknown, but which umpteen historical examples suggested would be horrible. In the battle between Eros and Thanatos for dominion over me I’d given everything to Thanatos and become a bitter foe of Eros and why was this? Many people were lonely but they didn’t have to be death-fixated. If I felt the absence of community I could seek it out. I could join an intramural basketball team or take an adult education class or start a book club. There were a million things I could do to reconnect with people around me, to feel a part of something.

  Dr. Cantor used preacherly cadences that in a church context might have zigzagged between the River Jordan and Mount Sinai until, too weary to make another pass, they would have finally bid a congregation to go forth and sin no more. You got the sense that he hated charismatic leaders because they reminded him too much of himself. While listening to him it occurred to me that all we really had was our decision to go one way or another, and where we went helped settle the dust of this or that path, and the people further along for whom the decision was already irreversible would do anything to make the rest of us settle the same dust they had, because otherwise the dust might rise and blind and choke them. It was all a wild gambit to keep the ground from swallowing us up.

  Eventually he asked what I thought.

  “About what?” I said.

  “About anything I’ve been saying. For example, what do you think of not having any nonwork interests?”

  “I think it’s beside the point.”

  “What point?”

  “The Earth is in such critical condition that it doesn’t matter whether I join a bowling league or start a book club.”

  “How is that?”

  “We’ve done so much damage to the planet that talking about our future here is like fantasizing about what to do with a lottery jackpot. Look at the political problems in the Middle East and Africa. Look at the extreme weather and the natural disasters, the earthquakes and hurricanes and volcanic activity, plaguing our cities and countryside. Look at violent crime. Look at the outbreaks of war. Look at the spread and increasing virulence of animal and vegetable diseases. Look at drug addiction and the collapsing global economy. And if that doesn’t finish us all off, some bellicose country will start a worldwide nuclear war sooner than later. We can no longer fix what’s gone wrong here. It’s over.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  He wrote in his notebook for five minutes, occasionally stopping to look up and stare into space. I regarded the eggs Benedict, the hollandaise sauce of which had congealed and glistened as though wrapped in cellophane, and my stomach felt as empty as a well when there’s nothing left to wish for.

  That afternoon I went online and found all the PASE and PASE-affiliated websites blocked, along with email capabilities. I hadn’t seen or heard any news in ten days and was surprised to find so little about Ben Membawa or the war or the country’s rising unemployment rate. Those things were either resolved or in a holding pattern. Now it was a dockworkers’ strike, illegal gerrymandering, underperforming public schools, and academic disparities between boys and girls in middle school. I decided to meditate again and tried not to think about my previous failures—one had to do, not reflect—but for the third time in a row Synergy eluded me, like fire to someone striking a used match. I wondered, like Warren and Chaim, whom I could bribe at the CON to alert the police of my whereabouts, because if my captivity didn’t depend on my parents’ money, a finite resource, it might go on indefinitely.

  I lay down and my back pain cooled off. I told myself again, though with less conviction than before, that I would not be broken by the CON. It was bound to find better witnesses out there to help prosecute its hopeless case against PASE, and then it would let me go. If this was a war, as Tomas claimed, it would discharge anyone unwilling to fight on its side, for, although not wise, it was not dumb. I lay there and my regression was only temporary and I had to keep this in mind. It was a test. A proving ground. My belief in PASE would not waver.

  Then I was being shaken awake and taken to Tomas’s office by the two escorts who’d tricked me away from the Wellness Center; each kept a step ahead of me. My life had become an unending series of office visits. I sat across from Tomas, who smiled warmly and dipped a
tea bag in and out of a football-shaped 49ers mug.

  “First of all,” he said, picking a wiry red hair from his mouth, “I’m sorry that you’re not enjoying your time with Dr. Cantor, that he’s exasperated more than helped you. I know what it’s like at the beginning; I went through a whole deprogramming treatment with him myself. He means well, of course, and would prefer it to go happily and smoothly, but the nature of his job is to find our most sensitive spots and press on them to drive out the pain, like rubbing a knotted muscle until it’s healed. Hurts like hell. I was in deprogramming for a full week before I was fixed.”

  “So you weren’t always a criminal?”

  He laughed. “I used to be like you, in that I too was seduced into a fringe religious organization. In the mid-1980s I joined the Om Federation, a kind of Hindu sect, when swami Sanharatha gave a talk on the Berkeley campus. I was studying Indian history at the time, and I went to hear him more for academic than personal reasons, but while leaving his talk I met some people who invited me to a weekend of learning in Napa. A month later I dropped out of school and joined the Om Federation’s living quarters in Elmwood, and then I took vows to uphold the Way. Sanharatha seemed like a wonderful teacher, the other members were supportive and loving, and we did what I considered to be important work promoting Sanharatha’s message and collecting donations.”