Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  After talking in private for a few minutes they told me that my birth mother, Pamela, had been raped at age sixteen by an unknown assailant; when the adoption process was complete she had returned to her hometown in Massachusetts. They didn’t have her phone number or address, nor were they even sure if she was still alive. The whole transaction had been so emotionally difficult—she’d cried throughout their single meeting—that they’d never before considered contravening her request. They understood, however, that I was going through a difficult time, that nothing is a greater mystery to an eighteen-year-old than him- or herself, and they hoped that knowing was better than not knowing.

  I asked why she’d been in California. They said she’d come to attend a youth group or camp—they weren’t exactly sure what it was—near Monterey Bay. My dad went inside to root around his office, and upon returning he gave me a picture of her from the adoption packet; it showed a young girl sitting in what looked like a park, writing in a journal, a wreath of cornflowers crowning her head. She had a round face like mine, with the same spattering of pimples on her chin and forehead, the same narrow shoulders and thin mouth. My birth mother.

  Following that birthday I framed and hung the picture in my college dorm room, and later in my graduate school apartment. When I got my place in Hayes Valley, though, I put it in a desk drawer, thinking that at age twenty-five I could finally bury the feeling of not being wanted so deep that it wouldn’t escape without a massive excavation effort.

  Nine years later that excavation began on a cold November day when I received an email that said: “Dear Jack, I am going to be in San Francisco in December and wonder if you would like to meet your real mother, Pamela.” I stared at the computer screen for an hour before replying with a torrent of questions and exclamations and hopes. Her answer didn’t address my concerns or elaborate on her life or even say why she was coming to the Bay Area, but it did agree to meet me for dinner at Firestick, a pan-Asian restaurant on Guerrero Street. The next month at the appointed time I waited for three hours and drank so much sake that a team of Malaysian busboys had to carry me outside. Pamela, my mother, never showed. I emailed her the next day and the day after that, and every day of the following week. If it was possible to be heartbroken by someone who had once broken my heart for many consecutive years, I was. The great lengths to which I’d gone in preparation—from my liposuction and laser eye surgery to the professional manicure and electrolysis on my back—were for naught; she had not seen me at my reconfigured best. In early January I tracked her down on the Internet and discovered that she was employed by Boston’s First International Bank, that neither death nor a terrible accident had prevented her from meeting me or answering my emails. She’d simply stood me up. End of a story that had already ended.

  Except that nothing really ended, because I got it all wrong, because all was misrepresented to me at the time. I should be clearer so that you don’t think I can’t admit my mistakes. I can and I would admit them, if not happily then at least audibly, but to a degree unmatched by anyone of my personal acquaintance, and perhaps by anyone of theirs, I was willfully deceived again and again, and so should be forgiven my errors of understanding. Mountains were moved like chess pieces to keep me misinformed. Consider when Mary zipped up my bag and said that I was not, as I’d been led to believe, in a maximum security deprogramming center, but rather in the very place I’d longed to be, the PASE Wellness Center, Daly City.

  I told her to be serious and she said that I’d find out for myself in about two minutes. She slid on my shoes and tied their laces and said we had to get out right away, because the surveillance crew assigned to monitor my room had probably already seen her there and dispatched facilitators. I asked what was happening and was told to trust her. Once off the Center grounds we’d be partially safe, and then in her car with the engine running and with road disappearing under our tires we’d be mostly safe. She had someplace for us to go. But, I said, if we were truly at the Wellness Center then I didn’t want to leave, for that was precisely where I’d been angling to return for days. She answered that if after hearing her explanation—which would have to wait until we were out of there—I wanted to return, she would bring me back herself, that I had her word as Montgomery Shoale’s daughter.

  It was eleven-thirty at night. The hallway outside my room, which I hadn’t ever seen without a guard, was empty, and we ran down it with our heads ducked low, Mary just ahead of me, as though keeping our faces hidden was as good as wearing a cloak of invisibility. I tripped on a wave in the carpet and she put a steadying hand back for me to grab on to. We turned a corner and a ceiling light ahead of us died. Then another and another and within a second we came to a standstill in pitch darkness. Mary’s hand tightened around mine. “Shhh,” she said again. The darkness was immediate and impenetrable and seemed to billow out, like black smoke. I heard Mary digging through her handbag. “Shhh.”

  A door at the end of the hallway creaked open and then an industrial-grade LED flashlight blinded us, accompanied by the tromping of several pairs of footsteps. Mary yanked me toward them in a charge, and a second later we collided with people we saw only in snippets of limb and torso. Strong arms clasped around me, pinning my hands to my side. There was a loud spray bottle whoosh, followed by yelling. I couldn’t see anything but the jerking light and struggled to get out of the bear hug. More spray, more yelling. The flashlight fell to the floor and I saw two kneeling bodies with their hands clutching their faces, grunting in pain. The hug tightened and I was losing my breath until a third spray sounded and the arms around me loosened and I slipped away as easily as if my assailant were a coat being removed by a butler. Then Mary’s hand took mine again and we sprinted down a chiaroscuro hallway framed by the beams of unattended lights.

  We burst through a heavy exit door using our shoulders and stood outside on the grated metal landing of a flight of stairs corkscrewing down to the ground. Seventy feet away the Wellness Center’s wall, in the daytime a batter white, was tinted green by a swollen moon. Mary ran down the stairs, pulling me toward it. The wall didn’t have any visible doors and I wondered if she hoped we could hoist each other over its fifteen-foot height. When we got nearer, though, I saw a small control panel, like a home security system, embedded into it at eye level. Mary punched a few numbers and a section of the wall swiveled open like a trick panel in horror story libraries.

  On the other side we forced passage through a thick shrubbery and came to the street, where Mary’s two-door hatchback was parked. My face and arms stung from the shrubbery’s branches and my chest felt constricted, but sitting in the passenger seat I felt better. A minute later we were on Nineteenth Street racing north, with the Pacific Ocean lapping at the shore to our left, low-resolution cars on their nocturnal rounds, and the sound of her engine revving up and down as we put a dozen stoplights between us and the Wellness Center. My heart beat at slower intervals and the air vents dried out my eyes.

  “Can we talk now?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We turned on to Lincoln Way, and the Sunset District was entombed in stillness, its extended families and narcoleptic medical students put down for the night. Gas stations glowed among the surrounding unlit buildings, turning the city blocks into jack-o’-lantern smiles. Mary smelled of aloe and pine, and she held her breath while shifting gears, breathing out when we were safely in second, third, fourth. As with Elizabeth, I tamped down an attraction to her that rose within me without permission or approval. She was a mistake and I had been a fool to think that I was elected to love her. The old Jack might have been so anointed, true, but not me. Not now. Whatever reason explained my sitting beside her after that mad scramble, it wasn’t love. She looked at her rearview mirror every two seconds, like a driving student trying to appear conscientious in front of her instructor.

  “Are we being followed?” I asked.

  “No. Those people back there were just extra night staff at the Center, the dumbest of the dumb
. They can barely operate a phone on their own. Plus I Maced the hell out of them.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “They seemed to be attacking us.”

  We drove past the entrance to Golden Gate Park and turned left at Stanyan before arcing on to Haight Street. As the adrenaline seeped out of my system, the aloe reminded me of a hiking trip to Lake Trinity my parents had taken me and Sid on when I was thirteen; I got a fourth-degree sunburn on the first day and when my arms and legs sprouted colonies of heat blisters, as though my skin were the surface of a boiling liquid, I applied an aloe cream and knew relief that was close to euphoria.

  “Why is the Cult Opposition Network at the Wellness Center?”

  Mary said, “It’s not. The CON doesn’t exist. PASE administrators wanted you to think you were in it.”

  I waited a second, to give the appearance of being unfazed. “Why?”

  “To test your belief.”

  “But Ms. Anderson said I would undergo ur-Synergy.”

  “That was a ruse. My father wanted you to go through deprogramming, so he had one of the Center buildings converted into a mock underground cult-fighting operation. You were meant to think it was in a South San Francisco or Emeryville warehouse, and that it was a serious resistance group. The guys you thought ran it are actors from Los Angeles training to become actuated savants.”

  “So there’s no such thing as the Cult Opposition Network.”

  “There are a few operating cult watchdog groups, but none with that name.”

  “I don’t see how deprogramming was a test of my belief; for the last two days I was given every reason not to be a Paser.”

  “And if tomorrow you still believed, my father would know it was real.”

  “Why does he care?”

  “I don’t know.” We parked outside 549 Birch Street. “Now go inside and get some clothes. You might not be back here for a while.”

  I found it difficult to move. “I need to know why my belief is so important to him.”

  “Hurry!”

  In my apartment everything looked unfamiliar, as though the past ten days had been as many years, and I stood for a moment on the edge of the living room in shell-shock. Because home is more than a collection of electronics, worn furniture, clothes, trip souvenirs, pornography, dirty dishes, and empty bottles of top-shelf whiskey, because it is a state of mind, I ought to have been as comforted by it as Ulysses was by Ithaca, a haven after my long strange sojourn. Instead it was chaotic and meaningless.

  I packed two bags and unplugged the appliances and turned off the heat and brushed crumbs off the counter. I grabbed my checkbook and extra credit cards and a fur-lined gabardine coat. After closing and locking the door I pressed the down button on the elevator, which began a slow and creaky ascent from the bowels of its shaft, and then I remembered my mother’s photograph. I went back inside to retrieve it, and once in the hallway again I saw Conrad standing in his doorway wearing his gray elephant-skin robe and rubbing his head.

  “Jack,” he said, frowning. “Where have you been? What happened?”

  “It’s a long story. The woman used a stun gun.”

  “That’s what it sounded like. The police came over and dusted inside but there weren’t any usable fingerprints, so they couldn’t get a warrant for you. I told them everything I knew.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Geraldine on the fourth floor has been particularly worried about you, but I told her you were probably all right.”

  I pressed the elevator button again.

  “I’ve got excellent news,” said Conrad, yawning. “Do you remember my student you asked about, Mary Shoale, the one who quit? She’s referred seven new students to me in the past week. In a year I’ll have enough money saved up for a surgery on my leg that the doctor says will fix my limp entirely, correct it so it’s gone.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Modern medical science is full of miracles. As you know from your own procedures.”

  “True.”

  “We’ll go running together when I’m better. Do you play basketball? I used to be everywhere on the court. We could put an intramural team together with some of the other guys from the building, have uniforms made. I’ll lose weight first. I started a vegetable and tofu diet a couple of days ago. Maybe in two years I’ll be able to get the stomach surgery you did.”

  “That’d be something.”

  “Why do you have those bags?”

  “I’m going away for a while.”

  He approached me and touched my elbow. “Fortune’s a funny thing. I was just thinking I’d never get another student again. Now I have more than I can handle. Maybe I’ll be entirely well by the next time we see each other.”

  Outside, Mary’s car was gone. I looked up and down the empty street and the poplars rustled in the Hayes Valley breeze, a soft tinkling sound that softened what was otherwise a hard urban scene of shuttered buildings and trash grilled into gutters and a middle-aged guy bicycling around the corner, waiting to give or receive or take. I was cold and pulled on a sweater. Then a pair of headlights bent on to Birch Street from Fulton and Mary pulled up.

  “I went to get a pack of cigarettes,” she said, lowering the passenger side window. “Want one?”

  “No.” I climbed in and the blast of warm air from the vent made me shiver.

  She lit two and handed me one and I held it over the floor between my legs.

  “There’s something we need to talk about, so I’m taking us to a friend’s place in North Beach.”

  We passed bars and nightclubs closing for the evening; streams of people poured out to whirlpool on the sidewalk before cabs and friends’ cars siphoned them away. I tried not to look at Mary, because when I did I couldn’t breathe well and my confusion about PASE was eclipsed by a warm unthinking orb that was many colors and resembled UR God but was not Him. We got to North Beach and parked four blocks away from a small one-bedroom apartment that belonged to Alyosha, a friend of Mary’s from high school who was away for a month doing an internship in St. Petersburg.

  Mary unlocked the door to let us in. “Want a drink?”

  “Water, please.”

  “There’s scotch, gin, rum, whiskey, and beer. I’m making a margarita if you’d like one.”

  “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “You’re keeping that up?”

  “Yes.”

  She dumped tequila, lime juice, and triple sec into a blender and sloughed off her shoes in the kitchen that doubled as a wall of the apartment, moving sideways to and from the wet bar. “The thermostat’s on the wall if you’re cold. And you can sit anywhere; the futon’s comfortable.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “you’re really working for the Cult Opposition Network.”

  “Hold that shrewd and ingenious thought.” She ran the blender and during its grinding I looked at the Nijinsky posters on the wall and the books stacked in a corner, in the middle of which was the new Roosevelt biography’s blue spine. The room filled with the sweet aroma of tequila. A stack of music next to the stereo was topped with Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite. When the noise died down she turned on the radio, lit a cigarette, emptied the blender into a tall glass, filled a cup with water, walked over to kneel on the floor in front of the couch where I sat, and placed an ashtray from her pocket by her knee. A radio DJ said it was 2:22 in the morning, the witching hour.

  “Your father doesn’t need to doubt my loyalty,” I said. “I am a Paser.”

  “Then you have to stop being one right now.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  She squinted and I squinted back at her, and when she scratched her ankle I did the same, and only when we both returned our hands to our laps did I catch myself. As she exhaled smoke I coughed and leaned back into the futon. We were not in harmony or sympathy or empathy. I had less in common with her than with thousands of Pasers I’d never met, because she was, despite her lineage and firsthand knowledge of the subject, a
n enemy of PASE. I should not have come with her to a place where I felt so simultaneously weak and energized, so tired and alert, so susceptible to changes in the magnetic pole.

  “I’m going to tell you about my father,” she said, taking a sip and crunching the ice of her margarita, “and you’re not going to like it, so reserve judgment until you’ve heard the whole thing.”

  “I already know everything about him.”

  “You know an official, bowdlerized version of his life story that will soon—but not soon enough—be totally discredited.” She put out her cigarette. Her margarita glass frosted over and the salt crystals along its lip resembled an ice crown. She rubbed her nose vigorously. “First of all, his real name—the one his parents gave him—is not Montgomery Shoale. It’s Dale Wilkins, and he was born to an oil-rich family in Oklahoma in 1942. He went to college and business school in Tulsa, and his first job was for a venture capitalist in New York in the late sixties. After two years he quit and moved to a Buddhist priory in northern California. Six months later he joined the Children of God, which was a nomadic Christian sect; then the Om Federation, a kind of Hindu group; then the Staff & Wheat Tribe, who were Druids; and then the Perpetual Light Society, which was a mystical Christian Islamic Jewish hybrid. When he left them in 1976 he changed his name to Montgomery Shoale and got plastic surgery on his nose, chin, forehead, cheekbones, and jaw. These are before and after pictures from the hospital where he had the procedures done.” She handed me two glossy photographs and turned on the lamp on the table beside me. One showed a buttery young man with thin sideburns and a mane of wiry brown hair, and the other was of Montgomery Shoale from the same time period, against the same gray background. “Look specifically at the eyes and ears and you’ll start to recognize one in the other.”

  The two men were completely dissimilar. Where the pudgy Dale Wilkins had heavy jowls that thickened the sides of his mouth, which was just a slit above his pointy chin, Montgomery Shoale’s face was gaunt except for his mouth, a warm and welcoming orifice from which wisdom was as inevitable as breath. Wilkins had a low hairline and bulbous nose; Shoale was balding with a thin aquiline nose. Cosmetic surgery might have produced these discrepancies, but I no more accepted that than I did the possibility that man invented UR God.