Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “Then why did you turn your back on it?”

  “My girlfriend and my parents hired Religious Freedom Now to liberate me. Like you, I was resistant at first and wanted to get back to the cult, but they helped me to recognize the insular, suspicious underbelly of Sanharatha’s teachings. I had, like the Paser I told you about, been instructed to break off ties with my old friends and family. I’d been told that anyone who wasn’t for the Om Federation was against it, and that people hostile to Sanharatha were in fact hostile to everyone in the group, and that I had to keep myself pure by avoiding contact with any criticism or dissent from orthodox Om Federation beliefs. There was a lot of paranoia involved, a lot of mistrust and denial of the very things that had first attracted me to the group, namely love and human interconnectedness.”

  “You were following the wrong leader.”

  Tomas sipped his tea. “Do you see an element of paranoia in PASE?”

  “No.”

  “Dr. Cantor says you believe the world is going to end.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that with you.” It was cold in the room and I sat on my hands. This test of my faith was difficult but not impossible. My back pain and erections were perhaps even blessings insofar as they made me hate my body and drove me toward ur-savant status.

  Tomas said, seeming to grow larger in his seat as he bent toward me, “You know when it made sense to think that the world was ending? Ninety years ago. Before 1914 there was a consensus amongst most people that mankind was getting better, that we had moved past war and were on a teleological path forward, that we’d learned from our mistakes. Then World War I came along and shattered that idea. Millions died in combat and millions more died of influenza—Europe, not to mention parts of North Africa and Turkey around the Dardanelles, was laid to waste—and by 1919 every other person you met thought they were living at the end of times. But nearly a century later we’re still here; only now we have commercial airplane flights and space travel and the capacity to feed everyone alive. There hasn’t been a major conflict in Europe in sixty years.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “The Taborites believed the world would end in 1420, and for twenty years prior to it they waged a war in Bohemia that did nothing but establish a reactionary church in Prague. During the Interregnum in England, from 1649 to 1661, the Fifth Monarchy Men thought that 1666, with its numerical significance, would mark the end. In 1844, Adventist founder William Miller convinced fifty thousand people that the apocalypse would begin on October 22, which led to what’s called the Great Disappointment. Tens of millions of evangelical Christians today think the Rapture is coming and are buying Left Behind books by the truckload to prepare for it. The Mayan calendar says that time will end in the year 2012, when predictions have been made that the sun’s magnetic poles will shift, major astrological signs will collide, the Hopi Indians’ ‘Fifth World’ will commence, two worlds in Maori legend will mesh, and the Earth will be in perfect alignment with the center of the Milky Way.”

  I massaged my back and breathed in and out deeply. PASE would want me to keep my calm, to suffer fools gladly, to not get angry. I said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen on any particular day at any particular hour; I know that the sun will last for four billion more years, and that the Earth could last as long. I’m only saying what PASE says, which is that UR God will rescind His offer for us to fuse into Him.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because a major environmental crisis is going to strike soon, and He wants to save as many of us as possible beforehand. And because He’d like us to choose Him for His sake, while we still appear to have an alternative.”

  A trilling sound came from Tomas’s computer; he typed something and then turned the screen away from him; it had a race car screen saver. “You’re right to worry about the environment, because much of what’s going on in it is genuinely alarming. You’re right to resent your body’s imperfections, the backache and what have you, because getting older steals a lot of what we take for granted. But to think that the world should be perfect, or that because it’s sick it’s going to die, and to think that we should be perfect, is childish. Everything is not fair and everyone will not live happily ever after.”

  “I agree with you completely.”

  “We’ve got to keep carrying on, though; keep trying. That’s what’ll save us, if anything. Killing ourselves is not a solution to anything but our own private problems.”

  “I’ll say this one last time: Becoming an ur-savant is not dying. It is, in the only true sense of the word, living.”

  Tomas folded his hands and looked down at the hard plastic cover over his desktop calendar. “But what if you’re wrong? What if things are as they appear, and death really is death and life really is life? Doesn’t the emptiness of one and the plenitude of the other give you pause? Don’t you think, deep down, that this is all too important to be simply a game we’re playing?”

  Back in my room I read an encyclopedia entry about Wisconsin (Montgomery Shoale’s home state) and ignored a superfluous erection and did jumping jacks. I didn’t attempt and therefore didn’t fail to achieve Synergy. My outlook swung between confidence and despair, so that at one moment I thought this CON episode was just a blip on my journey to UR God, and at the next it was the journey’s cancellation. I didn’t know whom to believe, the optimistic or the pessimistic Jack, and whether my doubts signified that true faith was beyond my reach or deep within me.

  When a knock came at my door I hoped it might be Tomas coming to send me away, to admit that I couldn’t help him or the CON. Instead Elizabeth, dressed in the two-piece gray business suit I’d seen her wearing on the day everything began to go wrong, the one that went with her charcoal eyes, entered.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, wiping my nose and mouth and sitting up, uncramping my legs.

  She smiled and looked about nervously, as though she’d been waiting in the wings of a talk show and was scared to be in front of an audience. “Hi, Jack. It’s good to see you again.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She sat in the rocker and set down her purse. “I want to apologize for the last time we talked on the phone, when I didn’t believe you about the conspiracy at Couvade. I’ll never forgive myself for being so dense. Last week I asked someone in accounts how much we’d billed for Danforth, and she said that Danforth had withdrawn its contract with us three weeks earlier. Before the PASE seminar.”

  “I see.”

  “That means you weren’t late getting Danforth in because they weren’t our client anymore, which means that Mr. Raven dismissed you illegally. It’s just like you suspected. I’m so sorry I didn’t look into it right away. I blame myself for what’s happened to you since then and I hope you can forgive me.”

  “Done.”

  She waited, as though being a good host I should ask her a question or say something to fill the dead air. After a few seconds she said, “I heard from your parents that you were sent to the PASE Wellness Center.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I couldn’t get ahold of you, I tracked them down. That’s how I found out you were here.”

  “You put yourself to all kinds of trouble.”

  She folded her hands loosely and I remembered too clearly why I’d asked her out, the direct and slightly worried way she looked at you before something caught her attention off to the right or left. She wasn’t wearing earrings and had a slender, graceful neck, and I fought down my attraction to her. “I talked to Mr. Raven on Thursday night after work—I confronted him, basically—and he admitted to setting you up. He said that the CEO and some other higher-ups had converted to PASE and insisted that someone with a record of sexual misconduct be made an example of, and you were chosen randomly. He started crying while telling me this, begging me not to tell anyone. But it’s a major scandal; it’s illegal what they did to you and possibly to others. The world needs to know about it so workplace per
secution stops before it spreads.”

  “You don’t have to say all this.”

  “I want to help and support you. When you get out of here we’ll collate the evidence of corporate malfeasance at Couvade and prosecute the company. I’m not sure you’ll get your job back—not that you’d want it after all this—but there should be a big settlement package, a kind of reparations. I’ve talked with Mr. Kowinski and Dr. Cantor here, who say we could link the suit with their case against PASE. Or we could file it on its own. Either way, I want to reassure you that you’re not alone in this.”

  Elizabeth seemed almost to believe what she was saying, an actress who, once warmed up to the studio audience, could rely on whatever skill had brought her to this point in her career.

  “I’m not taking Couvade to court, so tell them that you tried but it’s a no-go. I don’t imagine they’re paying you.”

  “Who?”

  “The Cult Opposition Network.”

  “Paying me for what?”

  “For coming here. You wouldn’t give this performance for free.”

  “No one’s putting me up to this. I want to help you expose what’s going on at Couvade. Everything you told me last week was true: PASE was responsible for you receiving ten demerits while Juan and Dexter and Philippe got none, and for you being let go unfairly. It all really happened.”

  “PASE did what it had to do, as did Mr. Raven. I’m much better off for their actions.”

  “But they’re working against you. You can’t not see that. And if you don’t do something to stop them, more people will suffer.”

  “I have nothing against you personally, but I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

  Getting up and pulling her chair around the table in front of mine so that our knees touched, Elizabeth said, “When you asked me out on a date I said no because of an office romance I had at my last job that didn’t go well. It ruined a year of my life and I swore I would never go out with anyone I worked with again. In other circumstances I would have said yes.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You ran off too quickly at the time for me to tell you that. Then you acted like it was no big deal and I thought maybe you asked out everyone and didn’t care why I’d turned you down or what my real feelings might have been. I’m not trying to trick you and I’m not lying and you should think about what PASE has done to you.”

  “I don’t think about anything else.”

  Elizabeth looked at me for a long time and then closed her eyes and tilted her head to the left at a pre-kiss angle. Her knees parted by two inches. She reached out to touch my hand as one would a cat stuck in a tree, a tentative move that reflected the idea of the action as much as any desire to rescue. Just before she made contact I stood up and went to the door and said, “It’s time for me to rest now.”

  Night fell and I went with it into a deep hole where everything was shrouded and darkly ominous, where a step in any direction would send me plummeting farther down. I’d had to work hard to maintain a hard-boiled response to Elizabeth’s tacit sexual invitation. My mind was determined to keep me in one state—though already fissures veined its surface—and my body the other. As a savant I was supposed to be beyond this disintegration, this disagreement; I’d made a stand on it with Dr. Cantor. I sat with my hands folded, perfectly still, thinking of a temptation so great it assumed a shape and solidity and color, as when a cirrus cloud turns into a nacreous cumulus, and I didn’t try to prove anything to the CON by examining my belongings. That strategy hadn’t worked the first time and might actually have harmed more than helped my cause. Minutes passed like hours, devoid of interest or meaning, and I began to think that like a fish kept too long out of water I would not survive.

  This reverie of self-pity ended abruptly with the sound of a door closing and a woman walking over to my bag and boxes. I rubbed my eyes and cleared my throat and looked at this stranger bending down in low-riding tan jeans that hugged her hips and flared out at the ankles. Her T-shirt rode up to reveal an Ouroboros tattoo on her lower back while she zipped the bag closed.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding off the table, my back as silent as a prisoner who stops shouting when an officer arrives with a crowded set of keys, “what are you doing here?”

  Mary Shoale stood up and turned around with my bag slung over her shoulder, her dirty-blond hair in a bedhead tussle. With a finger to her lips she said, “Shhh.”

  In a lowered voice I asked, “Are you taking me back to the Wellness Center?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “Figured what out?”

  Her shoulders relaxed and my bag almost slipped to the ground. “You never left.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Most of us try and manage for long stretches to bury the doubts we harbor about ourselves, the flock of neuroses that would otherwise feed on our self-confidence like eagles at Prometheus’s liver. Because if we think we are at core unlikable, it is best, so that we may get ahead, win friends, and influence people, to inter that thought in an airless tomb to which we don’t have ready access, to stow it away in the catacombs of our unconscious. The same is true of any suspicion that we are unintelligent, slow-witted, ugly, socially inept, overbearing, useless, scary, or in any other way repellent. Deny, repress, conceal. Submerge. People who’ve felt the incisive tear of self-doubt’s beak know that it ought to rest far belowground, with flowers growing over its burial site and worms decomposing it.

  Some of us, however, have a hard time with this. We can’t dig a deep enough hole using only our willpower for a spade, and from its shallow grave self-doubt rises to haunt us for hours or days or years. And while there are self-credentialed ghostbusters and demonslayers out there, therapists and other soldiers armed with silver bullets and wooden stakes, they’re often too late or ineffectual or wounded by their own problems to take care of ours.

  As a child, as I’ve suggested, I had many worries. They centered on my weight, height, physical coordination, attractiveness, future earning potential, and lovability, all of which lay beneath a thin layer of topsoil made light and porous by the reagent of my adoption. Had Dr. Cantor approached the subject with greater finesse, he might have learned that the phrase “I was unwanted” used to enter my head unbidden fifty times a day: waking up, walking to the school bus, in recess, taking tests, playing with a friend, getting taunted by bullies, fighting with Sid, watching my parents get drunk, doing my homework, and lying in bed. These three words evoked, in graphic detail, the sequence in which my biological mother had given birth to me and seen me with her own eyes and then overcome what by all accounts is the greatest bond a woman can form, with her child, in order to hand me over to strangers to rear and mold. I was unwanted after having done nothing but come into existence. Like being born with original sin. Like being guilty of being guilty.

  I think that my obsession with what I considered to be an almost primal injury derived not from inevitability but from a haywire self-pity that others in the same situation didn’t share. Sid, for example, who had been equally unwanted by his birth parents, and was in addition African-American, wasn’t bothered by the fact of his adoption, which may have had something to do with his being our parents’ favorite, in the same way that my not being their favorite may have compounded my sense of rejection—even my adoptive parents, whose early care for me was meant to compensate for my biological parents’ absence, didn’t seem to love me enough—though my feelings were too severe for that explanation. In either case, I knew I needed to get over it. I couldn’t change the circumstances of my birth, and every minute I spent wishing otherwise was a minute subtracted from my store of potential happiness. Life is very short, however much it may seem otherwise to the young.

  Therefore at age eleven I decided to confront my biological parents about why they’d gotten rid of me—in my preadolescent way I thought that the answer would provide closure and carry me cathartically into puberty—so I asked Rick and Ann for their names an
d phone numbers. This neither surprised nor upset my adoptive parents, who said that the child placement agency had kept identity matters private and that there was no way to find out now. They were sorry. Three years later I asked again and got the same story. Which is perhaps where I should have left it. History and mythology abound with warnings against knowing too much about one’s parentage. It’s impossible to forget Oedipus poking out his eyes and wandering away from Thebes. But on my eighteenth birthday, at a party in our backyard full of Sid’s drama student friends and two of my regular ones, as an a cappella group performed Sid’s avant-garde reworking of “Happy Birthday” and I reduced a dollar sign cake to its vertical bar, I told my parents, in recognition of my legally becoming a man, to tell me. I had a right to know. Instead of denying everything, this time they said that I wouldn’t like what I heard and that my birth mother had asked never to be contacted by me or hear anything about my whereabouts and goings-on. Please, I said, assuring them that I wouldn’t call or write if those were her wishes, but that just knowing her name would help me in indescribable ways. The more I could invent details, the more I suffered psychologically and found myself unable to be fully comfortable in life. Her name, however unrevealing in itself, would improve my understanding of and facility with others and myself. They looked at me curiously, as though I might have dimensions they hadn’t suspected, as though by admitting to a lack of self-knowledge I was already on my way to restoring it and deserving of assistance.