Prescription for a Superior Existence
Page 27
Whatever she hit me with has affected my vision and I can’t see her distinctly, though I can make out that she’s sitting on a chair a few feet away in my bungalow’s living room. The blinds are drawn, but planes of sunlight come through the slats. “Is it nighttime?”
“It’s a little after eleven.”
“What are you doing here?”
She scooted her chair closer. “I need to tell you something.” Her face is easier to comprehend up close.
“Where are my advisers?”
“Locked in the laundry room. Whatever my father said, I’m sure he was sincere, but it’s not a reason to go through with this. I was at the Golden Gate Park floral exhibition, and I saw you talking to yourself on that bench. You made little hand gestures on your lap and it looked as if you were waiting for me. A couple of times you got up and counted individual flowers’ petals, like you were playing she-loves-me she-loves-me-not.”
“That’s—” I say. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I wanted you to think something bad had happened, so that whatever hesitation you felt would disappear.”
My visual field corrects itself and her face seems to expand. I could jump up and away and she would be no match for me.
“Did you know,” she says, “that after you asked me if I regretted not being in a loving intimate relationship—the day we talked about it in your apartment—I cried all the way home? It’s funny, because the first time I saw you, when you asked your neighbor to end the piano lesson and he snowed you, I was put off. I’d always thought that forceful guys were the only ones worth pursuing. I felt safe seeing and knowing that their self-prepossession was possible. But I’d picked you out for a conquest, so I went back the next night and you didn’t drop everything to fall into bed with me, which made you an army of one in my experience. I was annoyed then, which is probably an emotional synonym for feeling hurt, until I decided that you had refused me out of strength, and for a tenth of a second I respected the part of PASE that finds nobility in saying no. The ‘negative is really positive’ line. When that went away, though, I wrote you off again and hoped we’d never run into each other, so when you recognized me on the street I was flustered and angry. And then suddenly I didn’t know how I felt anymore. The cop asked if I wanted to press charges—I should’ve said yes to keep up appearances, but I couldn’t because I wanted to see you later. Maybe I was just amazed to be recognized as myself. But maybe it was more than that. More than surprise. More than gratitude. What I want to say is that Prescription for a Superior Existence removes love from the human sphere, the one we’re all part of and can contribute to, and directs a simulation of it outward to a cold distant god. PASE demands respect and awe but can’t value us as we are or provide real empathy for anyone. UR God and ur-savants are perfect and so know only perfection. If there is any validity to the story of those mutinous wands who opted out of UR God, it is that they needed to see and know and love one another in their own right, with all the force and compulsion of desire. Like staring at the sun, being part of Him would make you blind. Really blind. Not the abstract warning The Prescription gives about how our bodies are an eyecover preventing us from seeing ultimate reality. Everything Pasers do that is positive—and it’s a lot, an incalculable amount of good—falls short of love between men and women and parents and children and strangers who outgrow that categorization. That’s what PASE can’t provide through its anesthetics and regimented march toward a state of disconnection.”
“You could just kill me if you want to stop ur-Synergy.”
She looks at me with dark worry, though the sunlight behind her produces a corona around her face.
“Or is someone else lined up to officiate in my place if I don’t show up? Maybe you’re here to get me to tell everyone that this isn’t the Last Day and there never will be one.”
“I’m here because I love you.”
There is a long silence. Unlike the other times we’ve been together, I cannot tell if she is lying. It’s possible that part of what she said is true and part false, or that all of it is one or the other. I have no idea. I get up and grab the corner of a table to steady myself. The hologram transmitter is a few feet away, and as I walk toward it I see Mary standing at the counter beside a block of knives. The femmes fatales I picture in my head are cartoons, drawn from the imaginations of small men trying to scare other small men. The transmitter is very simple. Via an instant satellite upload it is set to broadcast my image to the PASE Station and Wellness Centers and makeshift locations set up all over the world to house Synergy devices, where people, full of faith and commitment and trust, are gathering so that they might be released, and in this strangely lit room with Mary and me and a choice to be made I ask myself: From what? And think: From themselves. And think: From characters and destinies that, like stones skipping across water, must not be scooped up by any human hand.
So much comes down to choosing this path or that, and the selection we make disturbs or gratifies people whose decisions are already made because they would have us tamp down the dirt behind them, because they don’t want to be swallowed up. Montgomery Shoale, father, Father. Absolute laws to be followed or broken absolutely. After I shut off the hologram transmitter at five minutes past midnight, having just announced my father’s final communication from UR God before dying—that the Last Day had, through His infinite mercy, been postponed forever, and that becoming a master actuated savant was now the highest achievable status—I went with Mary to ask Bjorn Bjornson to open the laundry room door of my bungalow in the morning. Before leaving I gave him my phone number and said I’d gladly meet him on the pedestrian walkway of the Golden Gate Bridge in December.
Mary has said very little since we arrived at the ferry station that will take us to the mainland, from which we can get a flight home. I still cannot tell if her love is real or not. Maybe she’s planning to stay with me just long enough to establish my defense in the Montgomery Shoale murder trial, some noblesse oblige that stems from her good heart. Maybe she’ll slip away when we reach Oslo. Maybe, though, just possibly, she and I are the point of what’s led up to this moment. Is it so incredible to imagine that every coincidence and existential echo has served not to advance the cause of another supreme deity, but rather to bring two people together for the purpose that unites all of mankind, from prophets to troubadours? I remembered the complete plot of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” an hour ago. The hero, a romantic youth named Giovanni, falls in love with his beautiful neighbor, Beatrice, and then discovers that her father, Rappaccini, has reared her as a scientific experiment to be full of poison, with the result that every living thing she touches or breathes on dies. As the two lovers lament the barrier between them, Rappaccini takes pity on his daughter’s solitude and so works the same dark magic on Giovanni, rendering them biological equals who can be together safely. At this moment, however, Giovanni’s friend gives him an antidote, which Beatrice drinks first. She dies then, so integral has the poison become to her being, and the story ends with Giovanni and Rappaccini bereft of the thing both loved more than any other. In our story, the father has died first, and we must wait to see what will happen to us.
The restaurant here serves excellent coffee. Mary and I each add a dash of milk and a half packet of sugar to our cups, and this is synergy, sympathy, solidarity, sodality. Or it is none of those things. It has been a long day and I’m pleasantly tired, as after a vigorous swim when your limbs are heavy and you lie on a blanket to be dried by the breeze and sun, the sound of others’ laughter like great outdoor wind chimes, at peace. I take her hand or she takes mine and the sun, after a seeming age, is beginning to set, as we’ve long known it would, and in this climactic twilight I consider that we may regret for the rest of our lives and beyond the possibility that we are acting not for us or them or me or her, but instead, despite our proud declensions and piteous exaltations, despite the caveats of a hundred false positives, for the love of God.
There’
s a chance, however, if we’re lucky, if accidents and coincidences happen for no greater or lesser reason than life itself, that we will be wise enough to take solace in the hope—in the infinite complexity of our glorious averring desire—that this is all there was, is, and ever will be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to everyone whose support and guidance made this book possible: Katie Ford, Susan Golomb, Reza Aslan, Bret Anthony Johnston, Fred Tangeman, Rich Green, Samantha Martin, and Nan Graham.
About the Author
Born in 1973, Josh Emmons was raised in Northern California and received an MFA and teaching fellowship from the University of Iowa. His debut novel The Loss of Leon Meed won the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award in 2005. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Also by Josh Emmons:
The Loss of Leon Meed
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