Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “Hello,” said Montgomery Shoale hoarsely, a hand moving slowly over his lizardlike throat. Even in this bad light I could see that his face was an ashen gray strawberried with blood vessels, and that the downy wisps of hair around his ears were translucent. Either he’d deteriorated rapidly over the last few days or he benefited from a makeup artist—a makeup magician—before giving speeches. I released the gun in my pocket to shake his hand but he stepped close and hugged me with great frailty, his arms dried twigs and his body an antique wood box. “Please sit down.” He shuffled back to his seat, where two cups of green tea rested on a stand-up tray. Another rocker, with arms covered in blue corduroy, was stationed at a forty-five-degree angle to his own.

  He stirred his drink with a miniature spoon that might have come from a child’s tea party set and said, “I hope Mary is well.”

  “I do too.”

  “I would like to be able to say good-bye to her, but as you know she is not in sympathy with PASE, and so our meeting is impossible. I’m afraid that all her years of acting like a Paser exhausted her patience rather than whetted her spiritual appetite. Still, she humored me for a long time. That’s more than many daughters do for their old fathers.”

  “I’m here to tell you not to have your followers commit ur-Synergy.”

  His head swayed slightly, too much for the stem of his neck, an old sunflower that from the gust of a passing creature would fall off. “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  He sipped from his cup and then pushed his tongue through closed lips. “Drink your tea. It’s very healthy, you know, full of antioxidants. I maintain that a cup of green tea a day will do more to rid your system of toxins than any number of enemas and diuretics. There’s no reason to poison the bodies we have for so short a time.”

  He smiled and his face cracked into a thousand shards, like a broken mirror. I gagged on my tea, which tasted as though it had been skimmed from the surface of a pond.

  “I gather that your crash course in all things PASE and anti-PASE during the past two weeks has been educational. Maybe not what you signed up for, but then so much of what befalls us is out of our control.”

  I said, dropping my voice to a commanding baritone, with great sangfroid, “I will not let you kill anyone on the Last Day. Do you understand?”

  “If it’s out of our control, you might ask, in whose control is it?” His smile was gone and his face returned to its glassy smoothness, as though the mirror had reconstituted itself. “This question used to obsess me. Mary no doubt told you about my youthful wanderings in search of an answer. I was what they called a circulating saint, someone who turned from religion to religion trying on different faiths, always looking and always failing to find the perfect fit. Although you and I are similar in any number of ways, we differ in that important aspect. You seem not to have thought much about God. When I first learned of you this grieved and perplexed me. Why, I wondered, has he been so incurious? How is such indifference possible?” He picked a scrap of tea leaf from his tongue and wiped it on his chair as a child would something unmentionable. “But when I learned more about you, I realized that the need for an answer was always inside of you, however dormant, like a talent for a sport from which you had been kept your whole life. You were Sleeping Beauty waiting for a kiss. I knew that when exposed to Him you would have an awakening.”

  I was wrong to let him go on like this. I had told myself to shoot at the first opportunity, before he pacified or weakened my resolve. I had promised not to look at the Medusa’s head even through a reflection, or listen to the Sirens’ song even tied fast to a mizzen, but instead get in and out quickly and not tarry beyond a courtesy announcement that he was to die so that others would live. I hadn’t the time or luxury or stamina for questions.

  “Why did you care whether I thought about God?”

  He smiled again and was all shards. “Your generation is in such a rush to get to the end of everything. This impetuosity used to bother me too, until I learned that it is the result of an evolutionary process begun long ago. I no longer blame individuals for giving in to forces larger and more insistent than their own wills. Their exclusion from UR God will be punishment enough.”

  I felt an ache of curiosity in my gut, a harpoon wedged in deep, and really he was so small and vulnerable, so clearly limited by his physical condition that I began to consider the threat he posed more phantom than real. No one of his stature could do much harm. Natural laws acted as insurance against it. Shoale was a kind of Wizard of Oz, a faux bogeyman to be easily and peremptorily exposed somehow, not requiring the drastic measures Mary had rushed to deem necessary.

  “Maybe,” I said, “we can work something out. You could come with me now and be on house arrest for a few weeks; I’d make sure you were comfortable but unable to communicate with the outside world. Like what you did to me.”

  “You were asking why I care about your relationship with God. That is a very important question and bears considerable weight for this conversation. Did Mary mention that when I was your age exactly, thirty-four, I joined a group called the Perpetual Light Society?”

  Grudgingly I said, since he had either ignored or not registered what I’d said, strangling in its cradle my hope to save us both, “Yes.”

  Shoale coughed so delicately I barely heard him. “Six months after I moved to its ranch near Monterey, God spoke to me for the first time. He said that my life thus far, three decades during which I had vainly looked for Him, was no longer my own. He needed it for a special task, the nature of which would be revealed to me at the right time. Until then, I was not to tell anyone about His contacting me. As you can imagine, I was both ecstatic and frustrated, as though I’d been given a million dollars but told not to spend it.

  “A week later God spoke to me again and commanded me to mate with a young woman new to the Perpetual Light Society. She was a lovely girl to whom I was already attracted, so the next time she and I were alone, looking for mushrooms on a hillside overlooking the ocean, as sublime a spot as any on Earth, I told her of my strong feelings for her. At first she laughed and kept her eyes on the ground, but after a minute she said she didn’t feel the same about me. Although she was kind about it, her manner left no room for me to mistake her seriousness. I said that it was too soon for her to decide how she felt about me, and that I was happy to wait until she consented to be mine. She repeated, less kindly this time and more firmly, that she didn’t love me and never could. I mentioned that God Himself intended us to be together. At this she got angry and abused me in very heated terms, very incensed language. People can be cruel when discouraging a love for which they have no use. They can exaggerate things and go on too forcefully about the other’s deficiencies. I tried not to take offense, and I patiently explained that it was not our decision to make, that we were destined to mate and the sooner she accepted this the better it would be for both of us. She yelled for me to stay away from her and then ran back to the ranch house.

  “Afterward she wouldn’t talk to me, and within a week she began sleeping with a young man I detested. This filled me with rage and jealousy and pain, as well as indignation that she would reject the will of God. One night, therefore, I went to her room asking to apologize, and when she let me in I overpowered her.”

  He crossed his scrawny legs and held his tiny tea cup in both hands, as though one would not have been sufficient support.

  “What are you saying?” I asked. The candle was no bigger than a thumb, with an hour left before it melted away.

  “Everyone at the Perpetual Light Society was upset, as you’d expect. More than upset. They were enraged. Horrified. Within fifteen minutes of the event three men locked me in a room and with a butcher’s knife made sure I could never do such a thing again. They might then have killed me if others hadn’t intervened and commenced a dialogue and finally decided that I should be banished instead of executed.”

  I set down the tea and stared transfixed at this shrivel
ed old man confessing what scarcely seemed possible. I wanted him to continue talking only slightly more than I wanted him to stop, for his story, the second to damn him (and more completely than the first) in twenty-four hours, had a rehearsed quality, an emotional divestment from its content—which required either unfathomable contrition and self-censure if he were good, or sadistic glee and self-glorification if he were evil—that, rather than cast doubt on its veracity, strengthened my need to know its conclusion.

  “After going home to recuperate in Oklahoma, I asked God why He had led me to commit a crime and then let me suffer for it, and He answered that by flouting His command to not reveal our pact to anyone, I had forfeited His protection and interest, and He had no more use for me. I begged Him for another chance, promising never to repeat my mistake and always to place obedience to His will above all else. He did not answer. I was distraught, and over the next few months I kept entreating Him to tell me how I could win back His favor; I prayed constantly for forgiveness; and all the while He maintained silence. Finally it occurred to me that if He wouldn’t give me instructions, I would have to figure them out on my own. After all, what God considered valuable work was no secret. One did not have to be an initiate or holy man to know that He encouraged care and consideration of others, respect for nature, thrift, temperance, and humility. All of these I could put into effect right away.

  “But before beginning a new life of piety and penitence, I changed my name and had facial reconstruction surgery to remove every trace of my former self, so that I appeared to be a new person when, a month later, I volunteered with an international charity organization that sent me to India, where I remained for several years working with the sick and elderly at a free clinic in Benares. During that time I grew less concerned with proving my worth to God than with helping people, and I gradually emerged from the torture of thinking constantly about what I’d done and lost. I made such progress, in fact, that I befriended and fell in love with a pregnant American woman. When she then died in childbirth, since the father was a stranger she’d met once and didn’t know how to contact, I adopted her daughter, Mary.

  “With a child to raise, I returned to America and told myself—without lying—that I was content with a regular life, and that I no longer needed or sought divine distinction. I could never fully atone for the violence I’d done the young woman at the Perpetual Light Society, and I should not expect to be treated as if it were possible. A certain calm settled on me then, the peace of no longer desiring what could not be had.

  “At that moment, like the return of a parent you’d thought gone forever, his or her affections transferred to new, worthier children, God spoke to me again. In a dream, with the same voice and demeanor I had last encountered ten years before, He explained that His real name was Ultimate Reality God, and that the time had come for me to announce the truth about Prescription for a Superior Existence to the world. I wept so copiously that when I awoke hours later to transcribe the opening of The Prescription, which He had recited to me, my pillow was soaked through. This process continued for the next six months, dreamtime recitations and morning transcriptions, until the book was finished. I then published and promoted it myself, and gave talks and handed out copies at ecumenical religious gatherings, self-help seminars, political rallies, business meetings, and entertainment functions. My contacts were extensive, and in a short time I got the book to thousands of people and invited them to the first PASE Station, where they took classes and had one-on-one tutorials. They also tried a prototype of the Synergy device I had commissioned a Stanford engineer to produce, which I had tested along its developmental path until it reproduced the feeling I’d had in UR God’s presence. Some argued at the time that the device was a cynical invention—if the experience of Him was real, why did it need to be manufactured with a machine?—though really its purpose was to give people an incentive to learn more about the religion, after which they could develop the techniques for unaided Synergy.

  “Slowly at first but then more quickly, word spread and PASE found a growing corps of dedicated followers. As its success mounted, I came to believe that my past mistakes had been forgiven, and that the rest of my life would be spent in advocacy of the truth with which He had charged me. I believed I would never again know worry or loneliness or disappointment, which even caused me in a way to bemoan the loss of my old afflictions, as one does the passing of an ailment the longevity of which links your current and past selves.

  “But generally I was happy and content until, for no discernible reason, my happiness and contentment were replaced by doubts. About everything. Overnight I began to suspect that The Prescription was not actually the word of UR God, and that what I’d heard in my sleep was simply my own projection of His voice. It occurred to me that my belief in His authorship of PASE was just wishful thinking or megalomania, and that I was a false prophet, perhaps the worst who had ever lived because rather than admit my uncertainty about PASE, I continued to act as though the religion were true. These thoughts came to a head one morning and I fell into a totalizing and debilitating despair.

  “I then stayed in bed for nearly a year, morbidly thinking it would be better to kill myself than go on living a lie. At a particularly self-critical moment, unable to stand the dissemblance anymore, I called a conference of my closest PASE advisers and gave them the full and truthful account of my life, hoping they would take it upon themselves to put an end to the religion. Instead they assured me that my revelation was genuine and swore not to reveal my doubts or secrets. They pointed out that all great men suffer from like apprehensions, that Tolstoy himself, after writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, felt like an abject failure as a human being and artist. He carried rope with him in case the urge to commit suicide became too great to withstand, and he subjected every minute of his past to severe self-castigating scrutiny. Like his doubts, my advisers claimed, mine were evidence of my essential goodness. Would a madman or charlatan admit to such thoughts? No, therefore they were groundless.

  “The logic of my advisers was deeply flawed, of course; to suspect that something isn’t true is not proof of its truth, and I was more convinced than ever that PASE was an elaborate lie I’d told myself and others. UR God never spoke to me when I was awake, for example, and I reread The Prescription with an icy certainty that I had made up every word. I slept little at night—my insomnia was stronger than it had ever been—thinking that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote ‘Kubla Khan’ in an opium slumber he at least had had the sense to credit his own powers of creativity rather than a higher power’s. Sometimes I squeezed an ounce of calm out of the idea that all invention is traceable to UR God, being the source of all creation in the universe, but then my misery would return with redoubled ferocity. Making matters worse, my back pain, which I have known all my adult life, grew appreciably worse, as did my chronic nausea and myopia.”

  I took another sip of my tea and found it palatable this time, even nice in its aftertaste, as though my initial dislike stemmed from prejudice rather than honest assessment. Shoale had not taken his eyes off me the entire time he’d spoken. The candle rolled a drop of clear wax down its side, the windowpane groaned in the wind, and the odor of potting soil, though it must have been there the entire time, seemed suddenly powerful. I was tempted to reach over and hold Shoale’s hand. It is rare to hear people discuss their fears and self-disgust and pains with such candidness, such fearlessness. It changed nothing—I had to kill him—but I knew at least a mitigating kind of love just then, as I would for a dog I needed to shoot because it had, innocently in its fashion, contracted rabies and so become a threat to others. Killing with compassion, I thought, might answer the objections that had plagued me the night before. It might elevate this encounter to the realm of unquestionable good—or at least necessity—at the micro as well as the macro level, strip the act of its savagery.

  Shoale held his teacup in his left hand like an offering. “While this was going on, though, a st
range thing happened. I began to receive a number of reports charting the improvement being made by Pasers all over the state: of their saved marriages and conquered addictions and anger control. Testimonials piled up on my desk from people amazed by the positive changes in their lives PASE had inspired them to make. They told in minute detail stories of how they’d nearly given up on life when PASE found and nurtured and saved them. They described being empowered for the first time to look beyond themselves to help others in need. After reading enough of these, I concluded that whatever its source—my dreams or UR God—PASE had a beneficent effect on its followers. Practically, it worked.

  “My despair soon abated and I felt an inkling of hope. Not that PASE was true, but that a lie with such results might be worth promoting. Ten years ago, then, I returned to helm PASE and embarked on an extensive international speaking tour. The public restoration of my faith was greeted joyfully and enthusiastically by my advisers, particularly Denver Stevens and Gloria Anderson, who launched a recruitment effort at the same time that boosted the membership rolls impressively and garnered a great deal of media attention for PASE. I am sorry to say that they kept some of their effort’s unsavory aspects from me, such as the Faces of PASE campaign, which I forbade once I found out about it, and I am even sorrier to say that they then publicly obeyed while privately defying my order. Zeal led them to mistake the wrong course of action for the right one, a too-common phenomenon in the history of religion.