Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “Alyosha!” came a voice from the other side. “It’s me, Cheryl! Sorry to bother you so early, but I need my crepe pan. I have guests in from out of town and I’ve been promising them my crepe Andalouse; it’s practically the only reason they’re visiting.”

  Mary turned around and signaled for me to get up quietly, put on my shoes, grab my things, and go to the fire escape. As I did this and she gathered her own belongings, spending a frenzied ten seconds scouring the living room floor for her car keys, the knocking continued interspersed with a woman’s voice: “Come on! If you’re naked I’ll keep my eyes shut while you hand me the pan. Please, this is important!”

  As Mary pulled her last foot through the window the front door splintered open and three men flowed in with a woman I recognized as the facilitator who’d asked me what I thought of chapter one of The Prescription, for whom I’d been unable to get an erection. They ran toward us and I bounded down the rusty ladder, banging my knees violently against the iron rungs and tearing my left hand on a protruding squiggle of metal, until I reached the bottom and geronimo’ed six feet to the ground below, leaving a palm print of blood on the alley sidewalk as I pushed myself up and staggered beneath the ladder, my arms outstretched to catch Mary.

  “The car!” she said, disentangling herself from my messy reception. We ran and my hand gushed blood with each footfall, each heartbeat, a pulsing stigmata, and I didn’t think but rather moved unconsciously beside her, on an autopilot mission to stay near. There was no indecision. No sawtoothed debate about the truth and its doppelgangers. With Mary at that moment I simply was.

  “Where are we going?” I asked after we got in her car and lit out onto the road, into a brakeless momentum. I imagined soon being faint with blood loss.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You said that place was safe.”

  “Apparently I was wrong.”

  From Post Street we turned on to California Avenue and climbed to the top of Russian Hill, the world aslant in our side mirrors, where we leveled off at the flag-waving Fairmont Hotel and the Gallic glory of Rose Cathedral. Fog covered pockets of the low-lying city below, like polyurethane foam insulating the ground against hoarfrost, and to the northwest, directly over the Golden Gate Bridge, which was hidden on the far side of the Presidio, a sharply defined cone of sunlight connected the land and sky. I finished bandaging my hand with a T-shirt from the back floor of the car, and when I elevated it, my elbow resting on my knee, Mary touched one finger tentatively and asked how I was doing. Before I could answer we reached the edge of the hill’s plateau and began our descent. “Okay,” I said, my body straining forward against the seat belt. Which was true. I felt, as on the night before and during our run, an element of Synergy—of love—that tempered but did not erase my physical pains and fatigue, a sustainable state. We turned on to Union Street and then passed the Palace of Fine Arts, followed by a drive along the Marina. A flash of déjà vu hit me.

  I said, “If your father is on the offensive like this, I don’t see how I’ll be able to get to him.”

  “He’s not on the offensive.”

  “What do you call that invasion back there?”

  “They weren’t acting on his orders.”

  “Of course they were.”

  “I recognized one of them, a guy named Abner, who’s Denver Stevens’s personal assistant.”

  “And Denver Stevens is your dad’s adviser.”

  “Mostly, yes.” She waved for a pedestrian to cross in front of us before carefully turning right. “But he’s also secretly working against him.”

  “He is? Then let’s go back and join forces with him.”

  “It’s not like that. Denver isn’t opposed to PASE or the Last Day, and at heart he really does revere my father; he just wants to thwart the plans concerning you. He sent that guy to your apartment on the night you were taken to the Wellness Center, for example.”

  “I was told that that guy acted alone as a renegade.”

  The route we were following through the city, without, as far as I could tell, anyone following us, was one I’d taken a hundred times, and looking at Mary I saw that it involved no forethought or deliberation.

  Mary said, “Denver also argued for you to be put through ur-Synergy after those two guys escaped from the Center. He was furious when you were sent to the CON instead.”

  “What’s the plan involving me?”

  “I told you I don’t know.”

  “You seem to know everything else.”

  “This is different. I only know that my dad is committed to it and Denver isn’t.”

  A few minutes later we parked at the top of Palatine Hill, from which the sheets of fog spread over sections of the city were again visible; the Golden Gate Bridge loomed directly ahead of us now, its massive suspension cables flaring in the sunlight.

  “Why are we stopped here?” I asked.

  “To figure out where to wait until you can get inside my dad’s house. During the day he’s surrounded by people, but in the middle of the night he’s alone except for two attendants. You won’t have any problem then.”

  “I didn’t say I’d do it.”

  After a pause, she said, “No?”

  I looked at her for what seemed like a long time, perhaps minutes, and she gave no sign of impatience or frustration. “Tell me if we’re at this exact spot by accident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we started driving did you have it in mind that we would take the route we did to come to Palatine Hill?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “I was thinking about coincidences. And sympathy.”

  The insignia on the steering wheel of the car was a series of dots that made a bear shape, like Orion. Steam bellowed out from the basement window of a building across the street. I lowered my hand and the blood rushed back like a river that has pierced its dam to again run along its immemorial channel. A vintage Cadillac with burnt-yellow fins nosed up to parallel park in front of us, and then a pair of children scrambled out of the back while its elderly driver heaved herself from the front, holding a clear plastic bag of multi-sized marbles, a thick gold chain necklace spelunking between her bosom.

  “Give me the gun,” I said.

  “But …” Mary said, her voice trailing off. I nodded. She withdrew a small object wrapped in a sequined handkerchief from her purse and gently laid it in my lap, as though it were a wounded bird or sacred talisman. “It’s loaded.”

  I pulled back the soft fleur-de-lis cloth and looked at a shiny black gun; it smelled like shoe polish and candle wax, a dark antique odor. I lifted it with my good hand and squinted to look at it through one eye, as though this were a barter. It felt solid and sure of its design; form followed function. I rewrapped it and wanted to hand the package back to Mary. I wanted to disclaim responsibility and repeat my arguments against killing Shoale while retreating from the car and her and this situation.

  I said, “Do you think you’re strange?”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “I mean, what do you think about never having been in love?”

  “Where did that come from?” she asked.

  “I’m wondering if you think it separates you fundamentally from other people.”

  “Not everyone has been in love.”

  “Most have.”

  “Have you?”

  I paused. “No.”

  “Then you’re a hypocrite,” she said, poking me hard on the chest and then brushing my shirt free of her finger’s indentation. “You told me I was depriving myself because of PASE, like you knew from personal experience what a great robbery that was, when you’ve never been in love yourself!”

  “But I’ve always wanted to be.”

  “That doesn’t make you any better.”

  “I agree.”

  She was silent for a second. “So why haven’t you been in love, if you’ve always wanted to?”

  A pickup truck pulled into th
e parking space behind us. My lowered fingers had regained their color and were a row of pink appendages jutting out from a strip of cotton dyed red over the inside of my hand. The bleeding had stopped. With my good hand I shoved the wrapped gun into my pants pocket. “It’s not easy for people like me,” I said.

  “And what are people like you like?”

  “Unattractive.”

  The word came out automatically, as though we were playing a word association game in which a quick and honest response was the only rule and the filter that prevents our being radically direct—ergo reviled—had been shut off. I didn’t say it in order for her to protest, though I realized that she had to. That everything depended on her denial. This conversation and our sitting there needed to be, in its roundabout way, an overture to her saying that I was no longer as I’d always seen myself, that I was remade and refashioned in love, which had eluded us both but would now, with loops crossed and bows tied, with million-to-one odds beaten, hold us tightly. I needed her in my arms agreeing that this was what we’d been waiting for our whole lives.

  “Get out!” she shouted, stretching across my lap to shove open the passenger door and push me roughly through it, so that I fell back on my elbows and smacked my head against a hard patch of dirt bordering the sidewalk.

  On the other side of her car a plain white van had pulled to a screeching halt and its door was sliding back. The vehicles in front and behind us were parked within a few inches of our bumpers, making escape impossible. I stood up to help Mary out, her legs swinging to the ground with a gymnast’s agility, and then backed away from the four men jumping from the van. Sucking in air and turning, she indicated that I go in the opposite direction. “I’ll find you later!”

  I hesitated for a second and then ran to Lombard Street and cut down its serpentine block through flower beds and half driveways, never looking back to see if the men from the van were there. When I got to Juniper Street and bolted right and flung myself in front of a passing cab, which braked with a banshee screech a foot away and let me in, no one was behind me. I told the driver, a small Bulgarian man with a black quarter-sized scab on his bald crown like a shrunken yarmulke, blaring a Spanish radio station and eating a ham sandwich the size of his face, to drive and drive fast. He looked at me skeptically in his mirror, on which was pasted a sequence of Looney Toons stickers, but then, perhaps noticing the expensive make of my coat—the fur-lined gabardine—he obliged, and three minutes later we were on Columbus Avenue in the stacked traffic headed toward downtown. If not far away already from Palatine Hill, we were at least a single anonymous vehicle among thousands in the city’s midmorning gridlock. I slouched down and lowered my head.

  “You have street address?” he asked, bringing a soda cup up to his mouth and rattling its ice.

  “No.”

  “Name of business or hotel?”

  “Just keep driving.”

  The fare meter ticked upward as we crawled past the Trans-America Pyramid and the Embarcadero complex, along avenues shaded by skyscrapers with scale and sea vessel and globe statues adorning their entrances, monuments to the banking and shipping and Internet commerce inside. I didn’t have a phone or Mary’s number or any hope of arranging an appointment with her before nightfall. The gun anchored me to my seat and a mariachi band crooned from speakers at my shoulders. Your true love was out there, waiting in a room where the teakettle never blew, ready to take you back without question, without demand. I had heard the song performed live at a mambo festival in Marysville I’d attended in January, hoping but failing to run into Mr. Raven, when like all the other empty meaningless promises art made to people who didn’t know better, it hadn’t meant anything. My cab turned right on to Market Street and the Couvade building was a few hundred feet ahead. Several pedestrians on the street resembled my old coworkers—Max coming out of a deli, Juan running to catch a bus, Mr. Raven making a phone call—though on closer inspection they became strangers.

  “You want for me still to just keep driving?” the Bulgarian asked.

  “Yes.”

  We sat at a traffic light next to 595 Market Street for ten seconds and the song ended. I felt neither the rage of being fired nor the thrill of being promoted nor the solidarity/disillusionment of knowing it was run by Pasers. The building was just a place I’d gone for so many years. Like a comet returning to its perihelion after the sun has died, I was no longer affected by the proximity.

  Then we passed midtown’s tourist knots waiting to get on or off a trolley, and the U.S. Mint and Van Ness bottleneck, and the adult shops selling live views of paradise for a dollar a minute. A billboard on our right advertised a floral exhibition at the Golden Gate Park greenhouse, which I read uncomprehendingly before understanding that it promised a series of gardens duplicated from famous literary works. I thought of the conversation I’d had with Mary about a story by Hawthorne, and how there were no coincidences. As we crossed Haight Street, I told the driver to get over to Fell Street and drive by the Panhandle’s eucalyptus processional and stop at the park entrance, where a sign pointed to the box office that sold tickets to the floral exhibition. I paid the cabbie and got out.

  Inside the giant greenhouse I came to the first display of Les Fleurs de la Littérature, a replica of Don Pedro’s garden in Much Ado About Nothing. Behind it was the Garden of Eden from Paradise Lost. I couldn’t see a directory of the individual exhibits and the ticket lady hadn’t given me a map or guide, so I went down the nearest path, which led to the staging ground for the tropical plants in Suddenly, Last Summer and the carnivorous Venus flytraps of Little Shop of Horrors and the perfect rosebushes of Beauty and the Beast. I seemed to be the only person there until from across a bed of The Sound and the Fury honeysuckle the back of someone’s head moved toward the mushroom garden in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I kept walking and on one side was the Pride and Prejudice garden where Lady Catherine de Burgh rebukes Elizabeth’s impudence, on the other a rendering of Charles Kinbote’s sidehouse plot in Pale Fire. I began to think that the display I hoped to find had, due to space or the curators’ literary limitations, been omitted, that my hopes of meeting Mary would be dashed. I turned completely around, like someone who has lost his child in the middle of a crowded beach, trying not to panic.

  I stopped. There, on a rectangular patch of ground twenty feet away, I saw it: the vibrant Mediterranean flora of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” I sat on a bench beside it and waited for Mary to arrive, for she and I were in sync and harmony and jeopardy, and the force majeure sweeping us along would not lose its momentum. There was no such thing as coincidence, only sympathy.

  The hours passed with prehistoric slowness, every minute a Pleistocene, and when late that afternoon a loudspeaker announced that the exhibition was closing, I stood up as though just thawed from a cryogenic freeze, and fleetingly saw the back of someone’s head, the only person I’d seen since morning. I walked creakily past the flower collections famous to so few people as hardly to deserve the name, and outside, parked in front of the greenhouse like Hades’ charioteer, I got in a checkered cab driven by the same Bulgarian from earlier. He acted surprised to see me and said, with wonder spiking his phlegmy accent, that only in a city as small as San Francisco would it be possible for someone to get in his cab twice in one day; I told him to take me to a bar on Lower Haight Street, where I drank two beers in seven hours.

  After midnight I got into a cab that was again driven by the Bulgarian, and he joked that he should work on a monopoly of the city’s customers, that at this rate he might become the only cabdriver in all of San Francisco, able to give rides to everyone all day and night with the same miraculous efficiency as Santa Claus. He laughed jollily. I got out on Pacific Heights, a block away from the mansion Montgomery Shoale had vacated for what had formerly been the groundskeeper’s residence on the same property. Walking uphill I grew warm and the grass and the stone parapet beside me glistened with evening dew and the only lights burning in the appari
tion-like mansions were over front doors and walkways and planted security signs, lollipops of caution. In the distance a dog barked and was abruptly quieted. I did not think about Mary. Between some of the buildings I caught glimpses of the moonlight glittering off the Bay, which borrowed traffic sounds to produce a gentle oceanic murmur, as though despite the mechanisms of civilization girding the world at that moment those of nature were stronger. The gun in my coat pocket produced serenity. PASE would dissolve and I, who the day before had believed in it entirely, was to be the agent of that dissolution. And I was lonely and death-fixated and ugly and unlovable and secretly fat and dependent on drugs and unemployed and doomed to a spot on the Earth big enough for all this self-awareness. Not such an untenable or even unusual fate, really. I stopped walking when Shoale’s house came into view. Palming a concealed weapon outside one of the largest private residences in San Francisco, as blind as Samson preparing to knock down the columns that supported the roof over his head—that is, possessed of improbable sight—I saw a shooting star and envisioned Mary’s face and if you didn’t know the constellations then any picture could be drawn in the night sky.

  At the gate in front of Shoale’s house, as craggy and blackened as an abandoned castle, I found a video call center and followed its instructions—announcing my name and intent—and a second later the gate swung open soundlessly. Motion detector lights flooded the area with brightness. Although now overrun and neglected, the front lawn had evidently once been extravagant, with echoes of Xanadu in the topiary sculpture and mermaid pool and Japanese rock garden, replete with torii and quartzite boulder radiating half-inch ripples.

  A moment after I stepped on to the stone path leading to the front door of the house, two women wearing blue tunics approached and greeted me. Their hair was cropped into matching Joan of Arc cuts and they stood in an identical posture, hands cupped together beneath their diaphragms, shoulders pressed back, faces washed clean of expression. Without any interview or exchange, they took me behind the house through knee-high grass to a small building with one glowing window. There they stopped and told me to go in alone. The lateness of the hour, my being unannounced, the fact that I’d lately broken out of PASE custody: none of that mattered. I hesitated but they nodded encouragement, so I opened the door and entered a room colder than outside; a candle flickered on an end table, beside which a small figure rose from a rocking chair and came toward me tentatively, as though the earth were moving unpredictably beneath his feet.