Prescription for a Superior Existence

by Josh Emmons

  “Years passed and I accepted the idea that PASE was a benign self-help program whose supernatural shape did not reflect a spiritual reality. I appreciated whatever good had come from my delusion and considered the bad its regrettable but necessary waste product.

  “Then, with the same triumphal surprise as when He’d first told me about PASE, UR God appeared to me one afternoon while I was awake. It was in this very room where we’re sitting now. I was hungry, as one gets as an actuated savant—I advanced through the savant stages to provide an example for others—when the giant spectral circle of UR God materialized in the air. A miraculous vision. When I conquered my surprise and awe—when I rose from the ground—He told me that the young woman I’d violated in the Perpetual Light Society had had a child nine months later, and that this child, my son, had grown into the man who would execute the final stage of PASE. I was astonished by both the fact and the content of this communication. PASE was in fact true! And I had a son! What’s more, a son who had been chosen for the most important task of all time! After UR God left I discovered my son’s identity and whereabouts, which turned out to be here in San Francisco, where he worked at a company whose board of directors included some of the first converts to PASE.”

  I wished to trade in my tea for a shot of whiskey. The candle flame flickered and a moment later the window rattled and I wondered if the two were correlated like thunder and lightning, and if measuring the time lapse between them might determine the remaining lifespan of the building’s weatherproofing or the difference in indoor and outdoor air pressure. A heaviness settled over my chest then and my intakes of breath were confined to short puffs. I squeezed my kneecaps and thought of the description Mr. Raven had once given me of his heart attack, in a conversation whose intimacy had filled me with hope at the time, but I couldn’t recall if he’d said the pain came at sharp intervals or was dull and persistent.

  I said, releasing my knees, “You sent me that email from my mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re my father.”

  “Yes.”

  The miniature grandfather clock tolled the three o’clock hour. “Because you raped her.”

  “I haven’t eaten in twenty-three days, and besides tea I have ingested no liquids. My doctor tells me that at most I can live another few days, which is not long enough to conduct the world’s Pasers in the ritual of ur-Synergy and so into the splendor of UR God. But this is as it should be, because He has selected you to preside over the great migration of those who know best from this world to the next. On Sunday at eleven forty-five P.M., you will stand before a hologram transmitter and deliver a final benediction to every Paser around the world who will be connected to a Synergy device. Then following your signal you all will simultaneously and instantaneously become ur-savants.”

  I didn’t realize I was sweating until a bead slipped from my forehead into my eye and I had to blink away the muddle of half my visual field. The pain around my heart alternated between sharp, dull, and imperceptible. “I will not allow you to kill innocent people.”

  He straightened up in his chair. “You must listen now very carefully. After UR God’s appearance, I told my advisers about you. Most were excited by the news and agreed to treat you with as much deference as myself, but some, including my closest adviser—Denver Stevens—reacted badly. They did not want you to be allowed to do what I know you must do. Thinking that I was as mistaken as when I’d doubted PASE’s truth, they argued that you were not my real son and explained away my encounter with UR God as the effect of a hunger pain. When I persisted, they finally pretended, as they had with my Faces of PASE directive, to accept it; in private, however, reflecting an independence and partial distrust of my leadership that might someday have led to a schism in PASE, they made contrary plans to eliminate you. Although you are divinely appointed and so have not been in any real danger, this afternoon I had them rounded up and put through ur-Synergy early so that you could have free rein to prepare for Sunday without any petty intrigue and futile power politics. Unfortunately, this has upset some people in the PASE organization. They will be even more upset when they learn about this evening, and they will try to prevent you from assuming your rightful place on the Last Day.”

  I stood up and took the gun from my pocket and pointed it at Montgomery Shoale. “My only place in connection to the Last Day is to stop it from happening. That is why I’m here.”

  He smiled at the gun as though I’d produced it at his request. “I know exactly why you are here, and so do you even if you’re still clinging to the illusion that it’s to prevent a crime from taking place. That will fade shortly and be replaced by the awesome sensation, not altogether unfamiliar to you, that you are the medium by which many people will be saved, that you will deliver unto them a priceless gift.”

  I said with much less outward conviction than I intended, “Mary told me about the threats to PASE and how it’s about to fall apart. That’s why you want to go through with this now.”

  “You must forget these small machinations and concentrate on what matters.”

  “PASE is about to end and you’re desperate to take as many people with you as possible.” I sounded like a child repeating the Pledge of Allegiance, memorized words the meaning of which had been forgotten even though their necessity had not. “Mary told me it’s all over.”

  “With great but misguided powers of deduction, Mary has let her skepticism color the mixture of fact and fiction she’s uncovered over the last year, but I assure you that although Monsieur Pissoud and other victims of the Faces of PASE campaign are justified in walking away, they no more represent the end of the religion than a stray drip does the end of a faucet.”

  I felt curiously disembodied, as though the gun were the only thing anchoring me to the floor. I struggled to stay centered, focused, strong. “But PASE isn’t real. You were right when you thought you’d made it up.”

  Montgomery Shoale was perfectly still. “You are living proof of PASE. I never had a tenth of your native ability or wisdom. Even before my doubts I was unable to reduce my appetite and so had to take diet pills. I couldn’t get to sleep naturally and relied on sedatives for my every moment of rest. I haven’t known respite from my back pain or nausea or wrist pain in forty years. I required months to improve my oratory and counseling skills, whereas yours developed within two days of entering the Wellness Center. And just think of how happy you were when you were there, how powerful your belief was! I needed miracles to see the truth and you saw it through faith alone.”

  “That’s—” I said.

  “You are the spitting image of me at your age, when UR God first told me to do His bidding, and now it is your turn.”

  I lowered the gun halfway and felt anger and resonance and a terrible conviction that I was on ice and one step in any direction would cause me to slip and fall. “Because of you I was rejected by my birth mother and grew up in a family that disapproved of me. My whole life has been a mistake.”

  Shoale held out his free hand palm up and said, “Because of me you are here today. I am only a man, like you—more like you, in fact, than anyone else who has ever lived—and I have erred and asked for forgiveness, and now you must grant it, as every son must, because bitterness and delusion are the only alternatives, and those are unendurable. Because everyone’s life feels like a mistake. I understand your conflicted feelings, but UR God told me you would come tonight and you drank the tea I poured for you in anticipation. Everything has been preordained.”

  I pulled the trigger halfway and reached a pressure beyond which I knew there would be explosive sound and discharge. Montgomery Shoale smiled and closed his eyes and his face was a smooth pure adamantine glass in which I saw, with a violent telescoping depth, my own expression relaxed into a profound readiness.

  “I can’t let you do it,” I said, though my voice was so small I couldn’t hear it. Louder, I said, “It doesn’t matter if we’re related and you have this vivid continu
ous dream. I have an obligation to help others even if they can’t help themselves. Everyone has to do all in their power to rescue everyone else. That’s why we evolved as social animals. Do you see? I can’t let you do it. I have an obligation.”

  “Yes,” he said with a look of equanimity that so terrorized me as I pulled the trigger and the gun fired that I fell to the ground—I slipped and was caught—while Shoale’s body slammed against his seat, his head whipping back and forth with a loud snap. His teacup tumbled forward to dribble between his legs, forming a puddle two feet away. I turned around after a few seconds to see the two blue-tunic women standing there. One came forward to help me to my feet while the other picked up the teacup, dabbed at the spilled liquid with a washcloth, and laid a dark blanket over Shoale’s face and torso. My helper took the gun from my hand and wiped its handle and barrel with her sleeve before depositing it in a plastic bag that she held open for the other’s tea-stained rag.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, now holding a plane ticket and passport.

  “You have travel reservations to Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, where you’ll be safe. Nobody besides us and the advisers Mr. Shoale handpicked to accompany you there will know where you are when on the Last Day you deliver us to UR God.” She covered my hands with hers and smiled worshipfully; the other stood by the cloaked body watching me with similar adoration.

  “I just killed him.”

  “A cab is waiting out front and there’s no more time to spare. Please, you must hurry.”

  I needn’t mention who drove me to the airport, where I boarded a plane to London and then Oslo before a boat ferried me to the farthest north settlement in the world. The three men and one woman assigned to come with me slept the whole way. I stayed awake and stared out plane windows at the darkness and light that alternated across continents and oceans, divisions that have been useful for too long.

  CHAPTER 12

  Religious texts are full of stories about people trying to evade what they have been told is their duty: Jonah setting sail for Tarshish because God commanded him to preach in Nineveh, the Prodigal Son running away from his father’s house to drink and whore his way across the land, Atlas attempting to trick Heracles into taking his place as the heavens’ eternal support. They also include stories of those eager to comply: Siddh?rtha leaving his palace to sit beneath a ficus tree and become enlightened, Moses guiding his people to the Promised Land, Krishna infringing his ethic of nonviolence by killing Jarasandha to save the world. Coming from different traditions, these stories might be expected to provide different lessons, but really they offer only one: Disobedience is futile (Jonah was cast into a leviathan’s belly and Atlas outwitted) and acceptance rewarded (Siddh?rtha became the Buddha and Moses delivered his tribe to Canaan). They teach that destiny is real and ineluctable, that saddled with one you must ride until you and it merge into the same substance.

  I spent my life repudiating my parents’ artistic plans for me, a course I defended with amateur theories about character and temperament. This required so much effort, such a windstorm of rationalization and counterfeit self-confidence, that I came to believe that my life, like everyone’s, was just a single act of carelessness away from slipping into the void, and that survival meant pitting my will against all challengers. I know now that I was no more called to be a senior capital growth assessment manager than I was a painter, and that I might with more purpose, not to mention filial integrity, have gone to art school and repaid my parents for their trouble and heartache. I might not have been seduced by the idea that I could live according to whatever gratified my ego—that hothouse flower I tended so heedfully, so disastrously—and that by doing so I could be delivered from the thousand protracted pains that accompany a dance across this planet. I might not have thought I knew best when it was plain to everyone, not least to me, that I knew nothing. Because everything that can form the daily foundation of a life, whether curing cancer or teaching children or polishing brass or digging ice cores, is fraught with repetition and stress and setbacks and progress and boredom and spells of satisfaction, and in the end I was a fool to think that choosing this over that in order to be true to myself meant anything. I repeat it now with the pride of humility (of which I am not yet ashamed enough): I was a fool.

  Today is the Last Day and tonight I will stand before the hologram transmitter installed in my bungalow and address all the world’s Pasers for the first and last time. I will tell them what is common knowledge, that the world is going to end, and what isn’t, that at midnight UR God will lift up the drawbridge of PASE, thus stranding everyone who doesn’t perform ur-Synergy on the other side of a rising, deadly moat that will someday flood our poor beleaguered planet.

  I haven’t eaten or drunk much since I got to this village. I have given away my money and discounted my vanity and resisted desire. I have recited long passages of The Prescription and meditated and prepared to fuse forever into UR God. But not because I have regained the conviction I had before Mary revealed the Wellness Center’s con. My preparations have nothing to do with that. I don’t know if I was once a dissolute wand who demanded a space outside of UR God and now needs to become worthy of rejoining Him. The Reality Facts may be as arbitrary as the rules of a board game. Montgomery Shoale, my father, may have been driven by his desire for divine election from the crime of sexual assault to the larger, exponentially worse decision to kill thousands of people who trusted him with their souls and would ultimately have done so with their bodies. PASE could be nothing but a salmagundi of other beliefs, a patchwork as carefully worked out and sown with symbolic truth as a piece of fiction, and as a result admirable and edifying only if not taken too seriously. It is possible that Pasers are, as I once thought them with implicit condescension—me, who stood for nothing and so could fall for anything!—a collection of the lost who found, rather than what they were looking for, only one another.

  Tonight I will corral them through the electroshock gates of a Synergy device because outside it is so bright that if I didn’t know better I’d think it always was and always will be so, that this is the constant state of the universe. Though I do know better. I had nothing and then everything and then nothing again, and to be aware of what I’m missing is too awful. Or I had everything and then nothing and finally everything again, and I cannot live with that kind of instability. This is my last day.

  I am standing at the corner of Christiansand and Erikson roads. The Pasers assigned to protect me—my advisers—are at the bungalow. Thirty minutes ago I met Bjorn Bjornson in front of the bait and tackle shop. He had just made arrangements for his trip to the United States in November. He will begin in New York, drive down to Florida, and conclude his vacation in San Francisco. Perhaps, he said, we might walk together across the Golden Gate Bridge. When I told him I wouldn’t be around this fall in a way that implied an absence on Earth as much as in San Francisco, he said, “I see. Well. It is always foolish to depend on the future being what we predict. But it is good to be foolish about some things, yes?”

  The news, when I read it, is alarming. Global warming is set to a boil. Species are dying out at the rate of seventy-four per day. Sectarian violence continues in Northern Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Indonesia. Deadly viruses are pouring out of the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Small nations run by fanatics continue to rattle the saber of their nuclear warheads at trembling giants who soon will stomp on them, and poison will seep out everywhere. These are the facts, and even though I will be gone when they reach their unimaginably horrible conclusions—their disaster movie premises—I feel sad about them. I wish they did not have to happen. My father was right that we are hardwired to believe in happy endings. I and all the Pasers will go to ours while the world slouches toward their opposite.

  You might wonder, given the attention I’ve paid to it, how my body is doing. I can’t honestly say. I use the Synergy device in my bungalow so regularly that I haven’t felt any
discomfort since I got here. This is an abuse and only excusable to me because I am poised to escape the dilemma of pain management forever, when the very concepts of agony and loneliness and ignorance and sadness will become meaningless.

  The village I’m in is built low to the ground; no structure is higher than two stories. The waves that wash up to it are so cold I can’t walk barefoot along its beach, where there are never any girls making sandcastles. Desire may have marked the beginning of my life, but it has no place at its end.

  All around me is a barren, white-chapped land with hills of gray earth capped by dirtying snow, as though at this latitude color can’t take root. Sites that look dull from a distance are even more so up close. When the ocean levels rise, this village will be among the first to drown, but for now it seems a preview of what the rest of the world will be like when its death moves into the next phase.

  I can see the small outline of my unremarkable bungalow against the cobalt sky striated with cloud remnants. It occurs to me that—

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  There’s a stinging in my nose and the back of my head feels like an excavation site and I reach up to feel for the damp of blood.

  “I figured you’d have your muscle relaxants and painkillers, like you did the time we bumped into each other, but I’ve looked everywhere and unless they’re hidden somewhere clever, they’re not here.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I made an ice pack. Lift your head up.”

  “Mary.”

  “I’m not mad that you ran away. I knew something like that might happen. You change your mind a lot. I did not expect this town, though. Not at all. When my source at PASE told me about it I thought she was lying, but I had nothing else to go on.”