Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by The Friday Project 2015

First published in the USA by Scribner in 2008

Copyright © Josh Emmons 2008

Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Josh Emmons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007592883

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007592890

Version: 2015-03-14

Praise for Prescription for a Superior Existence:

‘Josh Emmons has created a wholly original, brave, and disturbingly plausible novel, an existential, theological, fin du monde thriller about star-crossed orphans, twenty-first-century cults, environmental angst, and the extremes and consequences of desire’

JAMES P. OTHMER, author of The Futurist

‘An acidly hilarious, tightly plotted adventure that folds big themes, romantic moments, and a little thing called the end of the world into its pages. Both a wicked skewering of religious cults and a finely wrought testament to their power, this novel reads like Raymond Chandler rollicking through the house of L. Ron Hubbard. It’s as probing and smart as it is moving, hopeful, and sweet’

ALIX OHLIN, author of Babylon and Other Stories

‘Josh Emmons successfully avoids the second-novel jinx, following up on his bravura debut, The Loss of Leon Meed, with a neat little metaphysical thriller that manages to combine satire and seriousness, social commentary and science fiction … by the end of this witty, wise novel, he has demonstrated how character and destiny are inextricably intertwined’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘Emmons rakes a herd of sacred cows over the coals in this unusual novel … Readers with a penchant for satire and the absurd will relish the novel’s outrageous premise and knowing jibes at popular culture’s sacred and secular excesses’

Library Journal

‘Resembles something Philip K. Dick might have written had he lived to experience the climate crisis and squash risotto’

New York Times

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Josh Emmons

About the Publisher

In this part of the world it is light for half the year and dark the other half. Sometimes at night I look at the halos around the window blinds and breathe in salty air redolent of afternoon trips to the beach I took as a boy, my hands enclosed in my parents’, my feet leaving collapsed imprints in the sand, my mind a whirl of whitewashed images. I remember how the shaded bodies lying under candy-cane umbrellas groped for one another, and how I pulled my mother and father toward the ice-cream vendors, and how I fell in love with the girls who slouched beside their crumbling sandcastles. The sun an unblinking eye on our actions. The waves forever trying to reach us. From the beginning there was so much longing, and from the beginning I could hardly bear it.

I used to think that with enough scrutiny I would discover a moment to explain what happened later. Not anymore. Now the idea that a Big Bang in my youth caused the events that have sent me here—or that with enough focus I could recall the incident, like an amnesiac witness during cross-examination recollecting how and where and by whom a murder was committed—seems absurd. Now I know that I was always on a collision course with Prescription for a Superior Existence, that it couldn’t have been otherwise.

To pass time I walk around this nightbright Scandinavian village, past seafood grottos and tackle and bait shops and thatched Viking ruins with pockmarked, briny walls blanched the color of dead fish. Bjorn Bjornson, a cod oil wholesaler who joins me sometimes in order to practice his English, though it is already better than most Americans’, says that the village has changed radically since he was young, noting that the citizens didn’t have cellular phones, personal audio devices, satellite receivers, or sustainable fishing laws, that as always in the past many indispensable things did not exist.

He imagines that growing up in California I witnessed even more incredible developments. “Your state is rushing ahead of everywhere else,” he says. “In Europe the conviction is that this is terrible, and we are expected to fear and disdain it. But I have met your countrymen and seen your films and read your literature, and I want to visit to make up my own mind. Consensus is sometimes no more than shared folly.”

Given more time in each other’s company, Bjorn and I might become friends. He is a patient, thoughtful man who considers every angle of a problem without being paralyzed by indecision. If it weren’t dangerous, if information didn’t travel so quickly and unpredictably, I would explain to him why I’m here and ask for his advice; instead I’ve told him I’m a tourist, come to take pictures of the glaciated fjords before they disappear.

And so I have to decide without his or anyone else’s counsel if the past month, and before that all of history, justifies my presence in a remote northern village where it has been decreed that at midnight on Sunday I will, after delivering a eulogy that is both inspirational and absolute, with a solemnity great enough for the occasion, conduct and preside over—I am choosing my words carefully and none other will do—the end of the world.

This is as strange for me to say as it must be to hear, and I should add that I’m not yet certain that the end is coming; it could be a grand deception, or sincerely but wrongly delineated, like the edges of the world on a fifteenth-century map. There are compelling arguments for and against each possibility, and I change my mind about them so often that on Sunday, instead of having discovered the truth, I may be as confused as a pilot with spatial disorientation, in danger of mistaking a graveyard spiral for a safe landing, when up is really down, sky is really earth, and life—suddenly and irreversibly—is really death.

CHAPTER 1

A month ago I thought we all had too much rather than too little time, and that like one of Zeno’s paradoxes its end couldn’t be reached. The future looked as though it would stretch out forever with no single moment more or less significant than any other—with a basic equilibrium underlying its progress—not because time was fair but because it was neutral, as disinterested and limitless a dimension as length and depth.

What I thought turned out to be meaningless, however, the sort of frangible wisdom that can’t survive large or even small cataclysms of the spirit, when during the course of two days in mid-February I lost my job and fell in love.

Neither event was extraordinary and together they might have struck the sort of balance I believed in, with the good and bad canceling each other out, except that the woman I fell in love with, Mary Shoale, was the only daughter of Montgomery Shoale, founder of the antisex religion Prescription for a Superior Existence. Looking back I see the unwisdom of getting involved with someone whose family ties were so forbidding, and even then I knew I should pursue a more available woman, but I was convinced that she and I were soul mates who belonged together at any cost, proof that love emboldens as much as misleads us.

The fallout came quickly. On the afternoon we first got together, an anonymous note was slipped under my front door warning me to stay away from Mary or face swift and severe retaliation. Not knowing if it was serious, I called her but couldn’t get through, and so spent the next few hours debating the question. Either she didn’t actually have to follow PASE precepts just because her father had invented them, or she was obliged to do so for that very reason; either I had nothing to worry about, or I had everything to worry about. The answer arrived later that evening when a Paser broke into my apartment to carry out the note’s threat. He was a large man, a giant, but with the help of my neighbor Conrad, who happened to be over, I prevailed in the resulting skirmish. Afterward, while waiting for the police to take him away, I understood that Mary and I would have to proceed on a cautious footing, that we couldn’t be careless about our affair with zealots like the giant running around. But in the calm of that moment, as I swelled with resolve and relief that the worst was over, shaken but guardedly hopeful, five more Pasers entered the room and took up positions around us, and when one of them pointed her gun at me I saw that the worst had yet to come.

Before she fired many things occurred to me, the most important of which was that I had never thought much about the afterlife. Conrad began to protest and was told to be quiet. I stared at the gun. My adoptive parents, Rick and Ann, who were artists, had reared me without religion and the incentives of heaven or hell or purgatory or nirvana, and I’d not gone out of my way to fill in the blanks. Which isn’t to say they opposed religion; rather they thought of it as an inheritance that other people made the best of or discarded. They didn’t dismiss it out of hand and they weren’t uninterested in the soul. Ann had once even described art as a pathway to joy more honest than religion—it admitted, after all, to being a human invention—but not better. In her view, art’s only advantage was that it didn’t tell a purportedly true story that science could disprove, which religion did only because it was so old, because in the past people had had to grope blindly for explanations of life and death and pain and love, which they called Judaism or Hinduism or animism. Happily, science had since come up with a version of how the cosmos worked that rendered the seven-day theories and turtles resting atop turtles all the way down quaint and irrelevant.

Bjorn Bjornson, who like most of the villagers here has a trace of the poet-philosopher in him—something about living so far from the planet’s nerve centers and being preoccupied with the great cycles of sky and ocean, where the human drama is contained in an unvarying population of 1,400 villagers among whom one is both participant and anthropologist, gives one access to more sweeping thoughts and ambitious language than the rest of us possess, which has led me to think that if we all lived as these people do, and as our ancestors did for millennia, rarely straying more than twelve miles from our birthplace, we might be better prepared for what is to come—phrased it as I would have liked to at the time, when I told him yesterday about Prescription for a Superior Existence. Shaking his great blond equine head Bjorn said, “In religion, in the end, the new is neither better nor worse than the old; beliefs and insights swirl and constellate over time without shedding any greater light than what has pulsed weakly throughout the ages. Reason and passion enact a tortoise and hare race in our hearts, and what seems true and beautiful today may seem false and hideous tomorrow.”

So I can’t adequately explain what happened in my living room, with Conrad and the giant and the five paratroopers standing around like Roman senators on the Ides of March, a moment heavy with anticipated violence. Whereas I might have thought, “Here it is at last, what we are all marked for from the beginning,” and seen it as a pointless conclusion to what had been a cosmically pointless existence—though able to obsess me for thirty-four years with the same resolute focus everyone pays to his or her own being—I felt that it shouldn’t end there, and that I would do anything to extend it long enough to determine its why and wherefore, which I knew then were not matters of insignificance or superstition but actually more important than work and friendship and the romantic impulse and whatever else I’d slotted into my viewfinder and looked at with such keen interest. I seemed to have gotten everything wrong, and I wished for a speech or action that would arrest the woman with the gun.

This is only worth mentioning because after being shot I did not die. Instead I opened my eyes in what appeared to be a hospital recovery ward on a hard bed beneath a thin sheet and thick downy comforter that smelled of unscented soap, as dawn glowed through three triangular skylights above me. Repudiating everything I’d thought about misunderstanding life, I sat up and looked around. The room and its contents were white: the sheet, ceiling, end table, linoleum floor, dust particles in the air. My head felt both weightless and heavy, like a stone held under water, and I craved coffee and food and any of the painkillers a hospital of this size would stock in unregulated doses. Nine beds were lined up on either side of mine and another ten along the opposite wall, in all of which men were sleeping, a mishmash of ethnicities and ages, though most looked younger than forty. I swung my feet onto the floor’s warm tiles and was about to stand up when an alarm clock rang and everyone opened their eyes at once, as if they’d been feigning sleep.

Next to me a tall stout Indian folded on a pair of thick plastic glasses, yawned widely, and said, “You must be Jack. I’m Mihir, and I will be your mentor here. Those are for you to wear.” He pointed to powder blue cotton pants and a collarless long-sleeved shirt stacked in a tidy pile at the foot of my bed. Everyone was dressing in the same outfit and folding their bed sheets so vigorously that they might not have been convalescents. Some hummed high-energy pop tunes. “I hope you slept comfortably and are fully rested. These mattresses are firm, yes, perhaps too much so for your taste, but the firmness is part of the treatment. Did your wife send you?”

“I’m not married.”

“Parents?”

“What kind of hospital is this?”

“Hospital? We are at the PASE Wellness Center. Please put on your exercise garments.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“Yes, naturally, after you have improved. In a moment we are due at Elysian Field, so we haven’t time for a full conversation.”

A man about my age entered the room dressed in a navy blue version of our outfit, wearing a whistle around his neck and holding a palm-sized stopwatch. The beds were all made up and crisply smoothed out; the men stood beside them proudly. “Good morning,” he said in an Alabaman drawl, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “You’ll be glad to know that Paul Davies and Thabo Ombassa were granted savant status yesterday and arrived home safely last night. They send their regards and expect all of you to be home soon. Also, as you can see, two new guests are joining us today, Shang-lee Ho and Jack Smith. Please make them feel welcome.”

“Excuse me!” I said, holding up my hand as he turned and walked out.

Mihir tugged gently on my sleeve and said, “Our schedule, as I said, is very tight and allows no time at present for questions or comments. That man was Mr. Israel, by the way. He’s a facilitator and neither the smartest nor the most advanced, which is why he’s assigned to exercises. Most facilitators, however, are very kind, very wise persons, and even Mr. Israel has his good qualities.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Yes at first it is overwhelming, but that is why I have been assigned as your mentor. I will help you through this adjustment period and soon you will be as confident as I am, knowing just what to do and when. The learning curve is steep but short. Now, stand behind me.”

A perfectly straight line had formed at the door. I seemed to be in a dream that combined Prescription for a Superior Existence with boot camp, featuring people I’d never seen before and too-real set pieces. Through the skylights morning advanced timidly. Mihir went to the end of the line and signaled for me to follow him, which I did half-consciously, too bewildered to protest. From this room—this barracks or ward or whatever it was—we entered a classical Grecian hallway as ersatz and authentic as a Las Vegas hotel, with ceramic amphorae and bronze goblets lit up in display cases inlaid in its ocher walls, and walked to a lobby forested with Doric colonnades and painted marble vases and, in one corner, a large limestone replica of the Colossus of Rhodes. I seemed to be the only one paying attention to our fantastic surroundings, and then we were outside in a courtyard studded with young eucalyptus trees and straight-backed wooden benches painted volcanic red. To our left a round pond thirty feet in diameter steadily overflowed its edges, and a trio of stone seraphim at its center blew misty water into the air through copper trumpets. We kept walking and I kept gaping. Ivy-covered Corinthian and Tuscan buildings enclosed the courtyard; in the entablature above the doorway of each a name was carved: Shoale Hall, Celestial Commons, The Synergy Station. We followed a pathway out of the courtyard and passed between other buildings and a tennis court and a scale imitation of the Citadel and a menagerie of topiary animals, until finally we stopped at an acre of landscaped lawn bordered on its far side by a fifteen-foot, gleaming white wall. There we separated into two rows and spread out at arm’s length. When Mr. Israel instructed us to do fifty jumping jacks I came to attention.

“Why am I here?” I shouted, taking a step out of formation.

Mihir shook his head at me, and the others, already jumping in unison like young cadets, stopped and looked at Mr. Israel, who came toward me with a concerned expression, as if I were choking and needed his help. Up close his face was dotted with razor nicks that had stopped bleeding in the cold. He was younger than I’d originally thought, no more than twenty-five, and hid whatever Southern amiability was native to him beneath a mask of critical authority.

“Morning exercises,” he said, a vertical crease deepening between his eyebrows, “are how we begin the day.”

“I mean why am I at this PASE Wellness Center? I didn’t ask to come and I want to be returned home.” I looked around for sympathy, but with the exception of Mihir, who looked pained on my behalf, everyone shared Mr. Israel’s frown.

“You’re here like the other guests, to improve.”

“But I don’t want to improve.”

Someone yelled out “Ha!” and Mr. Israel’s body tensed and his right arm bowed like a gunslinger’s preparing to draw—he looked ready to hit me—but then he pulled a phone from his utility belt and asked for an escort team to come to Elysian Field. He signaled for everyone else to resume their jumping jacks, but their coordination was off now and they resembled windmills out of sync. Mr. Israel regarded me coolly until two men dressed in navy blue tunics approached and, with a nod from him, led me back to Shoale Hall. I asked them questions on the way, but they were as silent and formal as beefeaters, betraying no hint that they either heard or understood me. My back, which like most parts of my body ached, felt a little better for the brisk walking, and I would have liked to keep up the pace even after we entered the building. Instead they delivered me to the Red Room, which was painted beige and smelled of cinnamon and was furnished with a desk, silver suede sofa, and glass-topped coffee table, on which a pristine copy of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, the religion’s holy book, rested solemnly, thick enough on first glance to seem like a stack of individual books. I sat on the sofa for several minutes, my back and wrists and stomach and head all competing for my attention, like patients crowding a doctor late for his morning appointments, and I wanted a cigarette and drink and muscle relaxant, which is to say I wanted clarity, but a look around the room revealed nothing that could provide it.

“Not a reader?” The door shut behind a matronly woman in her midfifties wearing a feminine version of the navy blue tunic that seemed to be the uniform. Her hair was short and layered and gray, as thick as sheep’s wool, and she wore a pair of silver-colored feather earrings. Touching her nose with a tissue and then tucking it into her sleeve, she said, “My name is Ms. Anderson, and I’m director of this PASE Wellness Center. I’ve been watching you through the two-way mirror; you didn’t once flip open The Prescription.”

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Yes you are.” She crossed the room to a shelf laid out with a pitcher of orange juice and a bowl of green and red fruit, from which she took two pears and handed me one. “I signed your involuntary admission papers when you came in. You were unconscious.”

“Someone shot me.”

“It was only a tranquilizer gun. Physically you’re fine, if a little weak. One of our resident physicians monitored your reaction to the drug and found it satisfactory; in fact your system was so suffused already with similar substances that he thought it shouldn’t have affected you at all.”

“That’s—Why was I shot and brought here?”

Although I spoke with a demanding, inquisitive tone, like my earlier protest this question was disingenuous, for I thought I knew the answer.

She polished her pear on her sleeve. “Let me ask you a question: Did you consent to go to school when you were a boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“When your parents took you to kindergarten on the first day, did you run willingly into what must’ve seemed the confinement of the classroom, or did you beg to go back home to all that was familiar?”

“That’s not the point. I’m an American adult and my rights have been violated.”

She sat in a wingback chair that would have engulfed a smaller woman. “Mr. Smith, you are being given a great opportunity, a chance to escape from the prison you’re in. And I don’t mean this Center. I mean the larger prison of your desires, the one that makes you so unhappy so regularly.”

“I’m not unhappy.”

She folded her ring-laden hands together. “Forgive my bluntness, but you certainly are. You overeat and are obsessed with work and can’t maintain romantic relationships. You take pills to fall asleep and wake up and calm down and get energized. You drink too much alcohol and watch too much television and are terrified of being left alone with your thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time.”

The room’s lights didn’t change, but everything seemed to rise and then drop a shade in brightness, as though an electrical surge had passed through the wiring. “Who told you that?”

Ms. Anderson sneezed without breaking eye contact with me. “Like most people, you are unhappy because you aren’t fulfilled by what you have. You always want more, and that more is never enough. Throughout your life you’ve desired things, only to find after getting them that contentment lies in the next thing. And the next and the next and the next. Sadly but predictably, the result of all this deferred satisfaction for you and others has been the same: anxiety and depression. And if allowed to continue it will lead finally to the crowning tragedy, ambivalence.”

“This has nothing to do with me and I want to leave right now.”

“Some people say the cycle of desire is human nature. They point out that before we can speak we cry for milk and human contact and toys and dry diapers and relief from teething pain, that infancy is little more than I want!, that childhood is no better, that adolescence is worse, and that adulthood is a full-blown epidemic of insatiable neediness. But does it follow that we should forgive desire just because it’s human nature, in spite of its cost? Think of the old people you know, so beaten down by years of disappointment that they have no interests or passions or convictions left, who are content to let television mark time until they die. We at the PASE Wellness Center want to spare you that fate.”

I shook my head. “You’re trying to kill me.”

“No.” She smiled beatifically. “We are trying to save you.”

I opened my mouth to speak and at first nothing came out. “But I’ve become close with Mary Shoale. Aren’t I here because her father thinks I pose a threat to PASE?”

“It’s safe to say that Mr. Shoale considers you a friend. Besides, although Mary is at heart a good girl, she’s addicted to gratifying her own desires. PASE wouldn’t punish someone else for her folly. No, the man who broke into your apartment was a renegade Paser acting entirely on his own and without the administration’s knowledge. He has since been disciplined.”

“The giant?”

“We do not condone or practice violence. Our religion is neither a cult nor simply a nice philosophy to live by. It values all human life and does its best to protect rather than endanger people. You don’t need to look skeptical. Mary’s other playmates have sat where you are now and been just as suspicious and later emerged transformed, improved in every way. I don’t doubt that you will be equally successful. Now eat your pear.”

My wrists radiated pain and I hyperextended my back as recommended by physical therapists. When I turned around the two escorts leaned in toward each other at the door, blocking passage in or out. The room’s single window, although large enough to jump through, was one story above ground that, from the angle where I sat, appeared to be concrete.

“So you know about the men she’s been with? And you’ve abducted them all so they don’t embarrass your public relations department?”

She bit into her own pear and spoke while chewing. “Let’s concentrate on you so that we don’t waste your valuable time here. At this hour you should already be showering after exercises, though I understand that because this is your first morning at the Center, especially given the state in which you arrived, you have questions and concerns that might interfere with your improvement. The orientation session we’ve set up for you and the other new guests after breakfast will address those more fully, but we can touch on some of them now.”

I scratched off a section of wax from my pear and said, “This is illegal and you’ll go to jail for keeping me here against my will. I have an excellent lawyer who will destroy you in a civil suit once the state finishes with you.”

“Please don’t worry about us. We are well aware of the court’s attitude and behavior in California. You need to concentrate on learning about Prescription for a Superior Existence, for that, despite your disinclination, is why you’re here.”

“I’m here because I was kidnapped. I don’t want to know anything more about PASE.”

She took another bite of her pear and it was half gone. “What do you think about God?”

I glanced back again at the escorts, who hadn’t moved.

She said, “I presume that as an atheist you think of him as a fanciful idea man came up with to get through all the terrors of prehistory. ‘If God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him,’ and that sort of thing. This doesn’t necessarily make you a cynic, but on the measuring stick of faith your notch is nearer the closed than the open end. In a way, we don’t blame you. The god that most of the world recognizes is schizophrenic: either angry, wrathful, and genocidal, or subservient, meek, and fond of easy bromides. We Pasers see through that god, as well, and if we didn’t know about UR God, we might be atheists too.”

I thought about getting up to run and crash through the window with the hope of landing on the ground outside with a mere sprained ankle and skinned palms, but when I considered the lacerations this would also incur, provided the glass pane was thin enough to break through and the unlikelihood that I could then reach and scale the perimeter wall, I decided against it. “Ergod?”

“Ultimate Reality God. Media stories are always so concerned with our stance on sex or our charitable activities that they often neglect to mention Him. When they do, He is wrongly described as ‘a deity without any defining qualities,’ as though we were too lazy to give Him a deep voice or a long white beard. Journalists can be as inattentive as toddlers and as sex-crazed as teenagers. But you will shortly discover that UR God is our focus and that He is the supreme generative force who, cognizant of the Earth’s imminent collapse, gave us the book The Prescription for a Superior Existence so that we can improve enough to fuse into Him.”

“I thought Montgomery Shoale wrote it.”

“UR God used him to convey His message.”

“Did that happen on a mountain?”

“As I said, a certain amount of cynicism is healthy, but there comes a point where it causes more harm than good. All we ask is that you pay attention and keep an open mind during your stay with us, the length of which depends entirely on you. Put simply, by the time you leave here you will be free from anxiety and depression and anger and self-destructive tendencies, ready to know UR God. This freedom is in you now, buried like a precious metal; we will show you how to mine it.” Ms. Anderson looked at her watch and stood up. She’d eaten her entire pear, including its core. “Now you’d better go; it’s breakfast time.”

CHAPTER 2

Before the events leading up to my abduction and placement at the PASE Wellness Center, I had been a capital growth assessment manager at Couvade Incorporated, a midsized financing firm in San Francisco. After eight years with the company I was, as my performance reviews put it, “a self-starting team player who [thought] outside the box but within the realm of possibility.” The case for my promotion to senior manager was therefore strong, and I had, with others’ encouragement, begun to court and, in certain exuberant moments, expect the position. I ran a quick and efficient squad, never took sick days, and had the highest client satisfaction ratings of my peer group. I voluntarily fact-checked other squads’ work and was friendly yet professional with the interns. Following my surgery in December my boss, Mr. Raven, a reserved and laconic man to whom I’d worked hard to draw close during the previous year, and whose passion for presidential biographies and Latin jazz I had come to share, said that I appeared to be as healthy as my best reports and that he looked forward to working in closer tandem with me.

So when in early February, nearly one month ago from today, my squad was given the Danforth Ltd. project, a standard client profile that would take no more than a week, it seemed to be a victory lap at the finish line of which I would be promoted to senior manager. Passing from Juan to Dexter to Philippe, the file reached me on a Monday, two days before it was due. I opened it at six, after most people had gone home, and, chain-smoking into my air purifier and snacking from a box of shortbread, made great progress. An hour later I ordered Chinese takeout and a six-pack of beer. At eight, already a quarter done, I took a break and lost a game of speed chess to Alfredo, the janitor for my floor, and then spent ten minutes emptying the cubicle trash bins while he read online Mexican newspapers at my desk.

At 10:30 I made an error—I transposed a 6 into 9—so I packed up and went home. There I took four ibuprofens, three sleeping pills, a muscle relaxant, a shot of whiskey, and four green capsules a homeopath friend had given me for joint trouble in my wrists. My ex-girlfriend Camilla had stopped by to look for a sweater she thought might be there and to write a note on the dry-erase board saying she’d heard about my surgery and wanted to get together for a drink. I rubbed out the note and my surroundings began to spin as gently as a carnival ride beginning its cycle.

In the living room I landed on my red velvet couch, which just then felt like a flying carpet, but instead of falling asleep I heard broken snatches of piano music coming from the apartment next door. I struggled to sit up and listen. Scales. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti. Do-re-fa. Stop. Start over. This was interesting because Conrad, who was a piano teacher, had not had a student in the three years he’d lived there. He blamed this dry spell on the rising quality and falling prices of piano lesson software—people, he said, would rather learn from a computer program than from a live human being, resulting in the spread of rote, mechanical musicians who hadn’t had the individual instruction necessary to play Chopin or Satie with integrity and impact—but the more likely reason was that he charged two hundred dollars an hour. It was too much for someone as unknown as him. I’d recommended that he lower his rate to be competitive with other nonprofessional teachers’, but he thought that the more expensive a service was, the more people would value it; until this happened he was content to live on monthly disability checks from the military for an injury he’d sustained to his right leg in Iraq.

Hearing the scales, I was glad for Conrad and hoped this would begin a busy chapter in his career, but I also needed sleep and could easily be kept awake by the noise, so I went over to ask him to end the lesson. What remained of his dyed-blond hair was slicked back in a casino operator clamp, and he leaned against his doorway with a new ivory-handled cane in his right hand. Just thirty more minutes, he said, looking over his shoulder and thanking me for my patience. He would have closed the door then had not a young woman, the student, appeared behind him and said she was ready to quit. Conrad gripped the handle of his cane tightly. I mumbled thanks and retreated to my apartment and in a wobbly swoon lost consciousness at the foot of my bed.

I could do this—black out in the middle of a room at midnight—because I lived alone, as I had ever since taking my first one-bedroom apartment, in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, because neither of the two women I’d dated seriously in that period had wanted to move in with me. Supritha, the first, had ended our seven-month relationship over a fiery south Indian breakfast when I mentioned the time and money we would save—not to mention the love we would generate—by living together. “I don’t know why,” she’d explained, ladling dal over a pancake and frowning as though her fickleness were as mysterious to her as to me. I died a little. The second, Camilla, had in the six months we dated cheated on me “with tons of guys,” which was, she decided, given that I hadn’t been enough for her sexually, partly or perhaps largely my fault. I died a little again.

What brought me back to life on both occasions was the thought that someday I would meet the woman of my dreams and we would fall in love and these early false starts would provide all the contrast I needed to appreciate what at last I had found.

In the meantime I tried to make the best of being a bachelor. My married or otherwise engaged friends put a positive spin on it by pointing out that I never had to eat with boring couples, bicker, clean up after myself, shop, talk about my feelings, talk about her feelings, or be anywhere besides work and home. I didn’t have to remember birthdays or anniversaries or Valentine’s Day, nor did I have to think about the toilet bowl lid or hide my pornography or apologize. This last point was especially important to them. Being alone, they said, meant never having to say you were sorry.

But I would gladly have paid for the upsides of romance with its downsides, because to me, in addition to being a source of human connection and joy and security, relationships were a health matter—almost a survival issue—and I looked and hoped for one constantly. That is, on my own, undisturbed and unapologetic, I had a dangerous amount of freedom that allowed for all kinds of abuses that, even while committing them, I regretted but could not stop. There were points on which Ms. Anderson would later be correct. Alone and without the regulatory oversight of a companion, I had license to eat, drink, and watch anything at any time. I could treat my body as a chemical processing plant or a temple, filling it with whatever brought relief from or an end to my daily stresses, which led to grand solitary debauches, nights when I would stare at an empty pizza box or Playboy care package ordered by and for myself, in a drug- and alcohol-induced fugue, forced to consider that overeating and binge drinking and perpetual masturbation were signs of deep and abiding unhappiness, and that I ought to do something about them right away. At those times I would say aloud, “If I keep doing this I won’t last much longer,” without daring to answer the follow-up question: “Would that be any great loss?” A little while later, calmed by the exhaustion that follows worry, I would find myself seminaked on the couch with five barbiturates and a half-bottle of scotch sluicing through my bloodstream, watching East European adult television at four A.M., and I would tell myself that there were many versions of a full life and this was mine. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, said Shakespeare.

In several respects, though, I was doing poorly and getting worse. My insomnia, for example, was out of control. I’d always had trouble sleeping, but since receiving an email in November from my biological mother, I’d found it nearly impossible. Then came an unfortunate work-related incident in Chicago. Then my break-up with Camilla. Then my surgery, which I feared meant that at heart I was vain and shallow, a slave to the body image stereotypes I’d rejected for so long as demeaning and oppressive. Then my back and wrist pain increased. Then I realized that, unable to change my diet following the surgery, I was on course to quickly regain every one of the eighty pounds I’d lost, that the case for my guilt was about to get stronger.

And my real troubles had not even begun.

On Tuesday, after finishing and sending the Danforth file to Mr. Raven, I asked my coworkers if they wanted to go to a bar after work to unwind, but everyone either had plans or was too tired or had stopped drinking. At eight o’clock, with nothing left to do at the office, which was empty—Alfredo had come and gone early—I went home and downed three tall whiskeys and put a corned beef in the oven, along with rice on the stove. A radio show broadcasted news that Greenland was splitting apart due to softened permafrost from rising annual temperatures; the war had claimed another 107 lives; an earthquake near Seattle was reported, the size and effects of which weren’t known; and there was now consensus among economists that we were in the middle of a recession, housing market slump, and dollar devaluation that hadn’t spurred a consequent rise in demand for U.S. exports. A terrible trifecta. The alcohol relaxed me, and the hours until I could return to work in the morning—when I would again be around people, with a purpose, liberated from my own thoughts—seemed endurable.

As I refilled my glass with ice, the doorbell rang. I thought it might be my brother, Sid, stopping by to borrow money or set me up with another of his girlfriend’s friends (as payback or pay forward), but it was Conrad’s student from the night before. She wore tight brown slacks and a short white blouse with stressed buttons, and her shiny straight black hair brushed the top of her shoulders and cut across her forehead with Cleopatra precision. Her name was Teresa, and she had come to apologize for keeping me awake during her lesson. She knew what I’d suffered because a neighbor of hers who built birdhouses was always hammering something at odd hours. She shouldn’t have agreed to a lesson so late at night.

“It’s not your fault for agreeing,” I said. “It’s Conrad’s for suggesting.”

She tugged on the bottom of her blouse, bringing her nipples into bas relief, and wedged a thumb into her front pants pocket. “Thanks for understanding.”

“Sure.”

“I was afraid I’d have to beg.”

“No.”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Right now?”

“I just drank a big bottle of water.”

Although I usually welcomed the chance to let beautiful young women into my apartment—despite its rarely, actually never, happening—I hesitated. She was lying. I couldn’t say how or why I knew this, only that it was so. Heat gathered around my neck and crept slowly up my face like an allergic reaction.

“I’m in the middle of making dinner,” I said, not widening the door.

“I’ll be half a minute.”

“My toilet isn’t completely reliable.”

“Please.” She smiled and revealed two rows of evenly set, glistening white teeth, evidence of great luck or money or discipline as a child. The radio was an indistinct babble in the background. Maybe, I thought, I was being irrational and drunk, and there was nothing suspicious about this woman or her request. She bit her lower lip and I stepped aside to make way for her.

Back in the kitchen I found milky water bubbling from the rice pot into a moat around the burner’s flame. This was typical of how ineptly I cooked, because of which I had recently contracted with the woman who cleaned my apartment every other week to make and deliver frozen batches of food—enchiladas, chicken mole, lasagnas—on her workdays. The last of her latest delivery was gone, though, and I didn’t remember when she was scheduled to return.

A minute later Teresa stood framed in the kitchen’s entrance, wiping wet hands on her hips, imprinting black finger marks on her slacks like daguerreotype shadows. “I hate leaving someplace and then realizing I should have used the bathroom. My family never went on vacations, so as a kid I wasn’t trained to always go before getting in the car. A lot of what we do instinctively comes from our nine-year-old self.”

Again I felt a slurred apprehension and concentrated on cleaning the stovetop. The water had evaporated to leave a layer of dried white froth like old sea foam cobwebbed on the beach. From the beginning there had been so much longing that I could hardly bear it. “You remembered to use my bathroom.”

“That’s because of the water. It’s like an alarm clock for me. Did you know that on nights before they were going to wage battle, Native American warriors drank gallons of water so they’d wake up early and get the jump on their enemies?”

I grunted no and pulled from the oven the corned beef, a loaf of grayish meat with a scrim of yellow fat around its sides, as the radio announced that an Amazon-born virus with a thirty-six-hour incubation period had killed twelve people in the last week. Epidemiologists expected it to travel far and wide over the coming months. I flipped on the stove fan and trimmed off the fat and sipped at my whiskey while Teresa picked up a piece of junk mail lying on the counter.

Burning my thumb on the oven pan, I turned to her and shouted, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s my mail.”

“It’s just a PASE brochure.”

“Please leave it alone.”

“Are you a Paser?”

“That’s—Why are you still here?”

“I want to help you clean up.” She indicated the dishes in the sink, torn seasoning packets by the cutting board, blackened hand towels, and a grease-spattered calendar tacked above a sink full of brackish water.

“Why would you do that?”

“To make up for last night. Because I’m nice.”

“I don’t think so.”

She let go of the brochure and lost her veneer of friendliness and the pain in my thumb seemed unimportant. Conrad, when talking on the phone to his first-ever student, would not have vetted her closely, and in the final analysis nobody could safely say what another person wasn’t capable of. She stepped forward and I braced myself, my right hand a foot from the knife block, ready for what might follow, be it loud or quiet, and the moment was starting to feel very drawn out when she leaned in and kissed me. A button of her blouse came undone at the sternum, pressed against my chest.

“There’s no need to be hostile,” she said, pulling back as a thread of saliva bridged our lips, her green eyes as limpid as a secluded pool. She held the intimacy for twenty seconds and I grew painfully erect. “That’s why I came over, so we could be friends.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, wiping my mouth.

“Yes, you do.”

“Women don’t just walk into strangers’ apartments and kiss them.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are.” She turned around. “At this rate, you have a minute to stop me from reaching the front door.”

She walked carefully, one foot precisely in front of the other, as though on a gymnast’s beam, out of the kitchen. A voice told me to let her go and lock the door behind her and return to my dinner and later fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I would go to work and, except for five or ten solitary adventures, forget Teresa as easily as I’d forgotten all the other women who’d taken friendliness with me only so far. You learn to release because otherwise you’re pulled in directions you can’t go. But even as I registered this warning, wondered if being thin could make so much difference in my attractiveness to women, and thought about newspaper accounts of femmes fatales who seduced men in order to rob them or turn their bodies over to the internal organ black market, as well as about the venereal risks involved in sleeping with someone so brazenly pursuing anonymous sex, I ran to the living room and then the front door and then the common space from which both the stairwell entry and the elevator were visible. I was too late. She’d gone.

When I got to work late the next morning at 9:45, having dozed off just before my alarm sounded and then slept for an hour, most of my coworkers were putting on their coats and crowding around the elevator, making quiet conversation and picking hairs from their clothing. One stood motionless off to the side with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall as if asleep or recovering from a dizzy spell. They were all men.

The office, despite its vaulted ceilings with propeller fans, felt particularly warm and close that day, like a ship hold. My cubicle mate, Max, talked on the phone and stared at the kidney-shaped glass bowl between his desk and mine, in which a Japanese fighting fish swam through Neptune reefs and arched castle gates, trailing a gossamer of skin. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top of my starched yellow shirt and, feeling the nausea pangs that stabbed me every morning, held my stomach as if to keep it from swelling back to its former size.

“Max,” I said. He shook his head, switched the phone to his left hand, and wrote “angry girlfriend” on a piece of paper.

Across the room Elizabeth, Mr. Raven’s secretary, waved me over to her desk. I had invited her out to dinner the week before, and although she’d begun refusing before I’d finished asking, it seemed possible as I walked across the houndstooth carpet that she was one of those women with a default no response that, although it cost her a few good dates, saved her from the many undesirable men who saw deliberation as foreplay, and that, breaking character, she had reconsidered me. In a flattering blue pantsuit, she smiled and poured steaming water from a tulip-decorated teakettle into a matching cup.

“Are those new earrings?” I asked.

“You’re late and—”

“They bring out the auburn in your hair. Where’s everyone going?”

“The sexual harassment sensitivity course at the Prescription for a Superior Existence Station,” she said.

“I forgot that was today. Only men seem to be leaving.”

“That’s the directive.” She squeezed a lemon wedge into her teacup, beside which a pewter condiment caddy held honey, sugar, cream, and echinacea powder. “Mr. Raven asked me to remind you that he needs the Danforth file by four o’clock.” Her eyebrows, sharpened and defined and darkened since I’d last seen them, came together as she looked up and curled a ginger lock of hair behind her ear. She had not reconsidered me.

“I emailed it to him yesterday,” I said.

“He must not have gotten it.”

“I’ll send it again.”

She nodded and I returned to my computer, where I found no record of the email in question. Also, the Danforth file I opened was not the one I’d worked on for eight hours. The date and time of its last modification was Monday afternoon, when Philippe had given it to me.

“We broke up again,” said Max, shutting off his phone.

“My Danforth file has been replaced with an older version,” I said.

“She thinks I hate her brother.”

“This is impossible.”

“Everybody hates him. She says other people just don’t understand him, and since I’ve spent so much time with her family I’m supposed to see past his unattractive qualities, but it’s precisely because I’ve been around him so much that I can’t stand him and don’t want him over for Seder.” He turned off his computer and desk lamp. “Come on, let’s go. We’re the last guys here.”

“I can’t redo Danforth today and go to a training seminar at the same time.”

“You have to go. You’re a man.”

“Mr. Raven wants the file by four.”

“Your absence would be noticed in a big way.”

Discreetly but unmistakably Max was referring to the conference in Chicago I had attended in January with my squadmates, one of whom, Juan, had used a company credit card for our six-thousand-dollar gentlemen’s club bill. Although he later called and finessed the charge down to a more realistic thirty-seven hundred dollars, and in spite of company policy not to reveal employee money matters, the story got out and the four of us were forced to give the Employee Conduct Board a lurid and damning account of our trip.

“Is Mr. Raven still here?”

“He left twenty minutes ago.”

“What about Mr. Grobalski?”

“Gone too.”

Max handed me my coat and I followed him out slowly.

It’s hard to say if I would have been more open to the seminar if Danforth hadn’t hung over me that morning. I knew I could be more sensitive—as much as the next man, certainly—but I was wary of the involvement of Prescription for a Superior Existence. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Beyond what was common knowledge, all I knew then about PASE was that its founder, Montgomery Shoale, a rich venture capitalist, had self-published The Prescription for a Superior Existence, a thousand-page book that introduced and explained the eponymous religion, nearly two decades ago, when it was widely considered a vanity project designed to lend depth and credibility to his company training seminars—he had built a reputation around the Bay Area for speaking about intra-office social cohesion and running more time-efficient meetings—until eventually PASE’s religious bona fides were established and the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a faith-based organization. When the Citadel, the flagship building of its Portrero Hill headquarters called the PASE Station, became the sixth-tallest structure in San Francisco, there was speculation that Shoale would go bankrupt, but instead he expanded the operation by building the Wellness Center, a four-acre campus in Daly City where people could study PASE intensively. Then he started the PASE Process, a charitable organization that infused money and crackerjack administrative staffs into underfunded soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and daycare centers in low-income areas of the city. It also gave grants to arts companies, medical research labs, and neighborhood development centers. At some point within the last couple of years a small but high-profile group of celebrities had begun talking in interviews about their conversion to PASE, and it had made international headlines the previous spring when the French government objected to its building a Wellness Center in Marseilles. That surprised me because I’d thought PASE was strictly a California phenomenon.

In general, though, I didn’t think about it. The West Coast gives birth to several religions annually, and although PASE had lasted longer and was better financed and more diversified than most, like them it seemed destined to struggle for a place on the country’s spiritual landscape before fading into the same horizon that had swallowed New Thought, the I AM movement, and hundreds of indigenous American faiths before it. If anything, it was at a disadvantage to the others because it condemned sex in every form; I couldn’t imagine it attracting more than a few thousand followers at any one time. Yes, PASE looked likely to burn through a dry distant swath of the population without threatening the green habitable land in which I lived.

Max and I pulled into a thirty-story parking garage at the Station and found a space sliced thin by two flanking armor-plated vans on the top floor. In the street-level lobby of the adjacent Citadel we joined our coworkers grazing on donuts and coffee, waiting for the seminar to begin. Max stopped to talk to someone and I went in search of the bathroom, along the way grabbing two maple bars and an apple strudel from the buffet table, which I ate crouched down in a stall. I returned to find Max with Dexter and Ravi at the orientation booth discussing the unemployment figures that had just been released and the crippling effect these would have on next quarter’s accounts retention.

“You guys seen Mr. Raven?” I asked.

Max pointed to a wall covered with pamphlets and book displays, beneath a giant video banner that said “Keep the PASE,” where Mr. Raven was talking to a member of the board of directors I’d only seen at weekend retreats and regional conferences. He was walking two fingers across his open palm as if to illustrate a story about someone running.

Deciding to wait for a more private moment to talk to him, I studied an orientation packet until the loudspeakers announced that the seminar was about to begin, whereupon we filed into a vast auditorium with sloped stadium seating that ringed an oval stage on which a thick wooden podium stood like a tree trunk. I sat between Max and Ravi and arranged my handheld devices on the pull-out desktop. Calibrated the personal light settings. Stretched and cracked my neck. Max ate a thick chocolate donut and held a cheese Danish in his lap.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You could have gotten your own.”

“I’ve quit eating sweets as part of my post-surgery diet.”

On the stage down below a man in a dark brown suit approached the podium and clipped a microphone to his tie just below the knot. Tapping it twice, he said, “Good morning. My name is Denver Stevens, and I’m the PASE corporate activities director. I’d like to begin today’s events by saying that although they are open to men of all faiths and creeds, our approach will use techniques and ideas developed in Prescription for a Superior Existence. This powerful spiritual system, parts of which will become familiar to you today, can help liberate you from the dangers of overintimacy at the workplace.”

There was so much work to do on Danforth in so little time. Either my computer and email programs had randomly and momentarily malfunctioned or someone had sabotaged them. If the latter, who would do it and why? No one personally benefited if the report was late. Our computer system’s firewall was the best in the industry. I had no enemies.

When Denver Stevens stopped talking and left the stage to respectful applause, the lights dimmed and people shifted around in their seats. I began to feel panicky, as though stuck in traffic going to the airport, and I might have snuck back to the office if at that moment a spotlight hadn’t interrupted the darkness to shine on a man climbing the steps to the stage. Like a wax figure, Montgomery Shoale too perfectly resembled images of him I’d seen in the media: short and barrel-chested, wearing a perfectly tailored suit, with a relaxed executive presence. Around the base of his bald skull a two-inch band of white hair angled down into a trim Viennese beard.

“Hello,” he said in a soft baritone that through the room’s space-age acoustics sounded everywhere at once. “We’re delighted to have you with us today. When your chief executive operator, Mr. Hofbrau, called me to arrange this seminar, I was saddened but not surprised to hear about recent events at Couvade, and I assured him that our primary concern here is with helping people—with helping you—more fully appreciate what it means to have a personal and a professional self, and how to improve in each until perfection is inevitable. As the great Russian doctor and writer Anton Chekhov once observed, ‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’ We hope that after today’s activities you will know yourselves better and so be better.”

One of the other candidates for the senior manager promotion might have wanted to hurt my prospects in order to bolster his or her own, but I couldn’t think of any who had both the refined Machiavellian instincts and the technological skill to intercept my email and override my password file protection.

“I don’t know you all as individuals. Sitting beside a vegetarian might be a carnivore. Next to a pacifist, a war-supporter. There may be two men among you who claim nothing in common but an employer, and even that may be a bone of contention. As human beings, however—and more specifically as men—you are in many crucial ways the same. You eat and sleep and wear clothes. You use language to communicate. You feel joy and anger and love. You were born and you are going to die.” He took a sip of water. “From these common traits we can draw certain conclusions: eating reflects a common desire for food, sleep meets a desire for rest, and clothes answer a desire for warmth and propriety.” He paused and I looked for Mr. Raven in the audience. “We could spend a whole day—a whole lifetime, perhaps—talking about your desires and what is done to gratify them, but today we’re interested in one in particular: your desire for sex.”

I asked Max in a low voice if he would give me the Danish, and he said no.

“You might ask what is wrong with sex and point out that no one, with the exception of a few test-tube babies, would be here without it. You might say that it is a fundamental part of us. That would be understandable. At one time I myself would have said the same things, for I too once knew the full force and function of sexual desire, the urge that begins with the sight of a pair of legs or a bawdy joke or a warm object held in one’s lap, and grows until nothing matters but the satisfaction of that urge. And like many of you here today, I believed that I was fine.” Shoale took another sip of water. “But was that true? Are you fine? Your eyes, like mine were, are forever restless in their sockets; you covet your neighbors’ wives and sisters and daughters and mothers; you fidget from the time you wake up until you go to sleep, and even then the fidgeting doesn’t stop. You’re like live wires that can’t be grounded for more than a few hours at a time.” He let this sink in for a moment. “The majority of sexual attraction takes place in the mind, where you are, in a word, distracted. Deeply so. And what are the consequences of this distraction?” A few hands rose timidly in the air. “You contract costly, disfiguring, sometimes even deadly diseases; your marriages break up; your job performance suffers; you hurt others and subsidize prostitution and make false promises. You become dissatisfied with life and lose the respect of your friends, families, and coworkers. You don’t say hello to someone without figuring the odds of getting them into your useworn bed. You spend idle, obsessive hours poring over Internet pornography like prospectors burning with gold fever, and in the end a sad onanist looks out at you from the mirror.” Next to me, Max was breathing heavily. “This is a sickness as debilitating as tuberculosis or emphysema. You are aware of its symptoms, yet you don’t try to get well.”

My thoughts swung between Danforth and Shoale’s speech and my fatigue from not having had any replenishing sleep in three months. With a small cough Max stood up and stalked out to the aisle, ignoring the grunts of men whose knees he banged.

“Is he okay?” I whispered to Dexter, who’d sat on the other side of him.

Dexter shrugged.

Max ran up the aisle and out the door. I thought about going after him but spotted Mr. Raven seven rows down and twelve columns over, staring at me with eyes as dark and cold as two black moons, so I returned my focus to the stage and tried to concentrate on what was being said.

This opening speech made me wonder why our CEO thought the seminar would be helpful. Some of the incidents Shoale had alluded to at Couvade were serious—a vice-president was being sued by his secretary for telling her inappropriate jokes, an accounts manager had downloaded a virus-infected pornography file onto his work computer that immobilized our entire system for two days, a field representative had been arrested for buying a child bride in Indonesia, and of course there was my squad’s own ill-executed trip to Chicago—but such a stridently antisex message seemed farcical and doomed to fail with the men of Couvade, whom I’d seen at bachelor parties and after-work clubs and company retreats to Florida.

The rest of the day’s content, however, was more effective. After Shoale’s talk we watched a documentary about sex crimes and one about the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases that featured disturbing footage of a syphilitic man having his nose surgically removed. Then we had lunch and came back to form small discussion groups and role-play exercises—when alone with someone we found attractive, we were to talk only about work-related subjects, even if that person tried to make things personal—before concluding the day with a lecture from Shoale that took a more positive, empowering tone than his first: “You have the ability to be as great as anyone who ever walked the Earth,” he said. “Gandhi, Buddha, and even Jesus suffered the same temptations and trembled from the same desires that you do. What made them different—what can make you different—is that they heeded the call of their best selves. They made the choice, as you can, to rise above the squalor of desire.”

Several men around me nodded thoughtfully while gathering together their things.

From there I raced back to the office and finished Danforth at four A.M. Then I went home, slept for three hours, and by nine the next morning was seated at my cubicle, where I opened an email from Mr. Raven. I felt a burning sensation in my right wrist and popped two homeopathic pills that went on to have no effect.

“Mr. Raven?” I knocked lightly on his door.

“Come in,” he said, pushing aside his keyboard. Commemorative posters of marathons and charity races covered the wall space not taken up with shelves of corporate histories, mambo primers, and presidential biographies. Through the window I could see latticed scaffolding in front of a former hotel being converted to office space. Mr. Raven patted his gelled gray hair, which lay frozen across his scalp like a winter stream.

“Sit down,” he said, moving things around on his desk—a box of chocolate mints, a pair of Mongolian relaxation balls, a penknife—and fingering a reddish birthmark on his chin. “I assume you know why I want to see you.”

“Is it about Danforth Ltd.?”

Mr. Raven appreciated candor about painful or difficult subjects, as well as when bold action was required. We’d discussed Harry Truman once and, while acknowledging and finding fault with his faults, we’d approvingly measured the strength of his character—its unflinching directness—because of which he could say without hypocrisy that the buck stopped with him. A true leader saw, identified, and accepted mistakes while learning how not to repeat them.

“Please tell me why it was late.”

“I first sent it to you on Tuesday and didn’t know that you hadn’t received it until yesterday morning. I would have done it again right away except that the sensitivity training seminar was about to start.”

“Which your actions largely occasioned.”

“That’s—”

A questioning look settled on Mr. Raven’s face.

I drew my left ankle up onto my right knee and pulled at the pant leg material. “As you know, there were four of us in Chicago. I didn’t see the credit card Juan used and figured it was his personal one, and we’d pay him back later. This isn’t to say I’m blameless—the whole thing reflected bad judgment, including my own—but I’ve already had my wages garnished to make up my quarter of the expense account item, and I formally addressed the Employee Conduct Board last week and volunteered to do community service as well as—”

Mr. Raven leaned forward with a hard, penetrating look and said, “Let’s cut the folderol.”

“Excuse me?”

“We both know you’re a sick man.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your performance at Couvade has been greatly compromised lately, and you now have a choice. You can take a leave of absence and get healthy. Check into a sex addiction clinic like the PASE Wellness Center in Daly City. Work on this problem and beat it. Or you can accept the ten demerit points I’ll have to issue you for Danforth Ltd., which combined with your ten demerits from the Employee Conduct Board would total the twenty required for me to fire you.”

I swallowed thickly and felt the beginning of a sinus headache, of my tear ducts opening and throat constricting. Mr. Raven pushed a box of tissues toward me. I rose and then sat back down.

“The Board is giving us ten demerits?”

“You’ll get a copy of their written decision.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mr. Raven’s voice softened and his forehead relaxed, lowering his hair a quarter inch. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll undergo treatment and then, following a probationary period of not less than eighteen months, I’ll review your case and consider your coming back to work for Couvade.”

“No, this is wrong. Danforth was a mysterious accident, and I’d like to appeal to the Conduct Board for a reduced penalty.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“You’re telling me this for the first time right now!”

Mr. Raven, still holding the base of the tissue box, pulled it away from me and then picked up his phone. “Don’t make me call security.”

“But I’m being railroaded. You can’t—What if you call the system administration department and ask them to recover my Tuesday computer profile and they’ll tell you that I’m not lying about Danforth? In a situation this serious, you have to!”

I quit yelling and Mr. Raven set down his phone and we stared at a midway point between us for the seventy-three seconds it took two building security officers to arrive and lift me to my feet. I weighed a thousand pounds in their arms.

CHAPTER 3

Following my meeting with Ms. Anderson at the Wellness Center, the escorts took me to the dining hall, a high-ceilinged oval room with rectangular metal tables, where, arriving as the others were finishing, I ate a four-egg omelet with sausage links and home fries. Nothing tasted as good as it looked, being made of the sort of low-fat, low-cholesterol ingredients that I’d bought after my surgery and then never again, but I took comfort in the act of eating and didn’t get up from the table until my escorts said that the orientation meeting was about to start in the Celestial Commons building. I would have argued that I didn’t care about missing the beginning—or the middle or the end—if I thought they’d care that I didn’t care; instead I followed them out.

Having felt like an animal caught in a steel trap during my conversation with Ms. Anderson—when I discovered that I lacked the strength to chew off my own foot—just then I felt calm and self-possessed. I walked steadily between my escorts. This was all temporary. Conrad must have understood PASE’s role in my being shot and taken away, meaning either the police or FBI would arrive at any minute to rescue me from this horrible compound. It was important that I not panic, that I keep my wits and be ready to level sane and convincing charges against my captors. A cigarette would have helped, or a stick of nicotine gum, or an assortment of pills with something liquid to chase them, but I made tight fists and clenched my jaw and knew that this was about to be over. Back in the courtyard I looked for signs of disturbance, not knowing if the authorities would drop from a helicopter in a SWAT team raid or storm the front gate, or if their warrant and tact would help them avoid an open and violent confrontation with the Center’s security guards. Everything was quiet. The escorts looked straight ahead, one in front and the other behind me. As a giant clock tower struck eight A.M., I tried not to think of what was delaying my rescuers.

The orientation meeting, in a room on the first floor of the Celestial Commons building, was led by Mr. and Mrs. Rubin—a small, round couple with nearly identical bodies, like two pieces in a Russian doll sequence, Mrs. Rubin could have nested snugly inside her husband—who handed me a notebook and a small bottled water and introduced me to the four other new arrivals at the Wellness Center: Rema, a tax assessor from Seattle; Shang-lee, a chemical engineering graduate student at Stanford; Alice, an obstetrician from Alameda; and Star, a retired “friend to gentlemen” from Key West. I sat in the chair closest to the door and waited for the door behind me to open and my release to be effected.

Mrs. Rubin rolled up her tunic sleeves and stepped forward. “Does anyone have a question before we begin?”

“No,” answered Mr. Rubin immediately. “Okay, first of all, congratulations on taking the first, most difficult step toward improving. The worst is already behind you. From now on, each successive step will be easier than the last until, near the end, your feet will hardly touch the ground as you bound toward the perfection of UR God. But I must warn you that this won’t come at the same time for everyone. Just because you’re here in orientation together does not mean you will progress with identical speed. Some Pasers advance quickly and others slowly, which is okay because we are not in a race. UR God will be as ready for you in fifty years as in fifty days.”

A short but purposeful knock came at the door. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin looked at each other quizzically and then moved in concert toward it. Trembling with relief, I envisioned the squad of armed men about to enter, call my name or even recognize my face, and lead me back to my apartment, where I could expect the law’s full protection until my safety was established. Which wouldn’t take long. Once PASE’s criminal intentions toward me were proven beyond question—a day? two days?—my only concern would be how much to ask for in damages. As far as I knew, Shoale’s private fortune had been blended into PASE’s coffers, meaning I might expect millions—perhaps tens of millions—of dollars, depending on how sympathetic a jury I got. Couvade would probably offer me a vice-presidency or some equally nice sinecure to restore its mainstream image and distance itself from the PASE fallout. Women from all over the Bay Area and beyond would read about me and, their interest piqued in someone who had almost been murdered before being forced into a celibacy camp and then awarded an enormous compensation settlement, seek me out. Yes, for several seconds in that orientation room, at the end of a row of desperately gullible people from whose rank I was about to escape, I foresaw a hasty and lucrative resolution to all of my problems. Part of me even dared to imagine Mary Shoale, whom I loved more with every passing second, seizing the moment to break from her father and make me the happiest of men. What had been my terrible luck was going to be flipped around and turned right side up.

Except that it wasn’t. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin cautiously opened the door, consulted in whispers with a young man and woman in regulation tunics, and then returned to the center of the room, smiling as though they had swallowed a bottle of Percodan.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Mr. Rubin said, “but we’ve just received wonderful news. Tonight, following Synergy, Montgomery Shoale will make a major announcement via a live video address that we’ll watch at the Prescription Palace. You are new here and so can’t appreciate how rare and magnificent an event this is, but to give you some perspective I’ll say that it’s been many months since Mr. Shoale last spoke to us.”

“Five months,” said Mrs. Rubin gently, though with a correcting tone.

“He is close to becoming an ur-savant, and this could be his last public appearance. You will witness history in the making.”

Shang-lee, whose unlined face and glinting gray hairs placed him between twenty and fifty, and who, besides me, was the only one not reflecting the Rubins’ smile, adjusted his small round spectacles, raised a bony hand, and said, “What’s an ur-savant?”

“You will learn about the savant stages later today in class,” said Mrs. Rubin. “Our purpose now is to provide you with background on the Wellness Center, its history and aims and rules of conduct, so that you’ll know what to expect and how to behave while here.”

During the ensuing account, told in alternating sections by the Rubins, I fought against the fear that every passing minute made my rescue less likely, that if the police weren’t there yet it was because Conrad hadn’t told them. Or they disbelieved him. Or they were in league with PASE and, even given proof that I was being held against my will, not going to help me. I closed my eyes and willed the door to open, an amateur’s telekinesis. At nine A.M.—twelve hours since I’d been shot and kidnapped—full of disappointment and desire for pills and alcohol and tobacco, I wiped away two tears caught in my eyelashes and fought down a rumbling nausea.

Mr. and Mrs. Rubin explained that this Wellness Center, a mere three miles from the San Francisco PASE Station, had been built eight years earlier based on a blueprint drawn up by Montgomery Shoale and provided through revelation by UR God. The first of its kind, it provided the model for the other Wellness Centers subsequently established in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York, as well as for those planned in or near Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Tangiers, Marseilles, Utrecht, Riga, Seoul, and Sidney. Mrs. Rubin punched something into a laptop computer and a montage of photos blanketed the wall behind her showing the various stages of each new Center’s completion. Like the Daly City original, they were all set on four acres and would, when completed, have an outdoor park with a botanical garden, a meditation post, two residential dormitories (one for men and one for women), an education building (Celestial Commons), a screening facility (Prescription Palace), a hospital (Freedom Place), a library and administration building (Shoale Hall), a recreation building, a dining hall, and a church (Synergy Station). They would all house forty guests at a time, an even number of men and women, whose activities would be fully integrated.

Although the architecture varied slightly from one Center to another, as did the flowers in the botanical garden and the food served in the dining halls to reflect local produce and culinary traditions, life would follow a set schedule at all of them: 6 A.M. wake up. 6:30 A.M. exercises. 7:15 A.M. breakfast. 8 A.M. reading/studying. 10 A.M. counseling. 12 P.M. lunch. 1 P.M. class. 3:30 P.M. individual research. 4:30 P.M. recreation. 6 P.M. dinner. 7:30 P.M. all-guest activity. 10 P.M. lights-out. On Sundays there was a thirty-minute Synergy session at 7 P.M.

And what exactly was the purpose of a Wellness Center? What did Montgomery Shoale hope it would accomplish? Although in practice its functions and benefits were too many to count, it was designed to speed along neophytes’ and longtime Pasers’ journey toward permanent synergy with UR God, the fusion of everyone into His vast being and thus the end of human strife on Earth. Shoale’s goal was our own. He personally interviewed all the doctors and staff, who then underwent a rigorous training program and six-month probation period before being brought to work at a Center full-time. He kept in close contact with all the individual directors and monitored the progress of their operations worldwide.

In addition to treating the normal range of behaviors that had to be modified and/or eliminated—sexuality, rage, material greed, television, Internet abuse, etc.—the Center was equipped to help people with problems involving addiction, extreme emotional imbalance, and psychiatric disorders. According to its strictly refined physical and spiritual practices, it helped these unfortunate guests using a holistic approach to mind and body and soul wellness taken from The Prescription, which, in its wisdom, recognized that while everyone needed to improve, some were, at the time they reached adolescence or adulthood, at such a deficit that they required extreme and immediate preimprovement treatment. For example, the Center’s hospital included a Seclusion Ward that provided twenty-four-hour care for sufferers from drug withdrawal, during which the guests’ isolation was leavened by audio recordings of Montgomery Shoale lectures, as well as by frequent use of a Synergy device and special stretching techniques favored by UR God and interpreted by Mr. Shoale. PASE enjoyed a hundred percent success rate in curing heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine addiction, as it did with freeing guests of anger, violent tendencies, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, generalized anxiety, misanthropy, boredom, acute narcissism, and—

“What are you doing, Mr. Smith?” Mr. Rubin asked, cutting off his wife’s speech.

I’d gotten up from my seat and walked to a window overlooking the courtyard. “Just checking something.” As when I’d crossed it earlier, there were no policemen or FBI agents visible, though I told myself that they could be talking to Ms. Anderson or some other administration figure, trying to ascertain where I was being kept, on the verge of taking the noncooperative Pasers into custody and beginning an exhaustive hunt around the premises for me. I looked for a latch or lever with which to open the window—thinking I would scream out for help and catch the attention of either the law or someone passing by on the other side of the Center wall—but it was sealed shut.

I heard Mr. Rubin take a few steps toward me and then stop. “During instructional sessions like this one, there is a basic protocol for being excused from your seat to go to the bathroom or attend to another Center-approved activity. Please sit back down and I’ll explain it to you.”

“I’d rather stand here, if you don’t mind.”

Mrs. Rubin said, “We do. We mind very much.”

A door opened in the building across the courtyard and two men emerged, one of whom wasn’t wearing a blue tunic. I tried to make out whether he had a metallic badge on his breast or walked as officiously as someone in the intelligence community, but at that distance I couldn’t tell.

“We really must insist,” said Mr. Rubin. “Please don’t make this difficult for us and yourself.”

The two men walked in my direction and disappeared under the foliage of a pair of eucalyptus trees shooting up like twin geysers in the middle of the courtyard.

“Go on with what you were saying,” I said, waiting for the non-tunic man to come back into view, when he would be close enough for me to make out his clothing and features. But then four meaty hands gripped my arms, turned me around, and roughly pulled me back to my seat. My escorts withdrew from the room after nodding tersely to Mrs. Rubin, who bit her lower lip and looked at me pityingly.

I stared with dull hatred at the Rubins, who said that they would now go over the basic rules of conduct so that such disciplinary measures wouldn’t be necessary again. Anarchy did not reign at the PASE Wellness Center. Some actions were forbidden and others encouraged. In the first category, we were not allowed to leave the Center or receive visitors without permission. Television, books, and the Internet were okay with some built-in restrictions, for which reason certain programs and periodicals and websites were blocked or made inaccessible. We could not drink alcohol, take non-prescribed drugs, or engage in any sexual activity, including with ourselves. Profanity was prohibited, as was licentious talk and any attempt to leave the Center grounds before the facilitators deemed it appropriate. Disputes between guests were to be taken to a facilitator and should not involve violence or violent intent.

I thought I heard footsteps in the hall outside but it was just my teeth grinding.

Mr. and Mrs. Rubin knew that these restrictions sounded harsh. No one liked to be told they couldn’t do something. But Montgomery Shoale had devised them for our health and safety; otherwise our improvement would be no more possible than rain without clouds. Much was asked of guests at the Center, and in return much was given. We were worthy, infinitely capable people, for we came from UR God and would be with Him again someday. We had to bear in mind that reaching this destination was the most difficult, rewarding journey we would ever undertake.

“Did you say there’s going to be Synergy tonight?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Rubin.

“What is Synergy?” asked Shang-lee.

“So today is Sunday?”

“Synergy,” said Mrs. Rubin, while smoothing out a kerchief she’d held bunched in her left hand, “is the feeling of being fused into UR God.”

Mr. Rubin added, “It can be had on this planet in one of two ways. The first is with a Synergy device, which is like a big gyroscope that you stand in with electrodes connected to your temples. Synergy is, you’ll find, the most wonderful feeling imaginable, and when you become an ur-savant it is the only one you will ever experience again.”

“Sunday the nineteenth?” I said.

Mr. Rubin nodded and I leaned over and tried to throw up. I had been shot on Friday the seventeenth, meaning I had been unconscious for an entire day, meaning any immediate attempt to rescue me from the Wellness Center would already have ended. There was no cavalry on the way, no quick response to my dilemma. And this whole situation was neither a joke nor a social experiment. A camera crew was not filming behind a fake wall, ready to ask me how it felt to believe that I’d been forced into a PASE indoctrination camp. There was no winking host or thoughtful documentarian orchestrating my deception in a cruel and elaborate prank, and I would not have the chance to talk about how similar it was to my childhood fear of being sent to an orphanage full of seemingly well-intentioned people who were in fact bent on destroying my will. This was real.

Unable to vomit, I sat back and the orientation session ended. The Rubins thanked us for being good listeners and handed out information packets with a map of the Center grounds, a personalized schedule listing our counseling session and class locations, a rulebook, a pocket-sized edition of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, and a personal digital assistant with electronic copies of everything. The other guests, eyes on their packets, rose and filed out of the room, and Mrs. Rubin asked me civilly if I needed assistance in getting to my next event.

My itinerary said I was supposed to be in Room 227 of the Celestial Commons building, one floor above, so I left the room and paused to look up and down the hallway, where Shang-lee’s back was receding toward an Exit sign that marked the stairwell and elevator. Single escorts were placed at fifty-foot intervals between us, as motionless and erect as suits of armor. I passed these hollow men in their blue tunics, reached the stairs, and climbed them deliberately, going over problems that configured themselves in my head as a tetrahedron, with my separation from Mary on one side, my present incarceration on a second, my forced sobriety on a third, and my unemployment—with its implications for my debts—on a fourth. The first and fourth sides existed in the outside world, to which I didn’t have access presently, while the second and third affected me then and there, and had to be overcome. Which I didn’t know how to do. Shang-lee, Rema, Alice, and Star were out of sight when I got to the second-floor landing, apparently already in their counseling rooms.

A short man in his midforties with a flat nose, sparse hair, and ruddy complexion met me at the door of Room 227. His name was Mr. Ramsted, and he invited me to sit at an oblong mahogany table with attached seats that slid back and forth on floor tracks, where the other guests—Ang, Brian, Eli, Rema, Quenlon, Amanda, Tyrone, Helmut, Sarah, Summer, and Mihir—introduced themselves. For the benefit of Rema and me, the only newcomers to counseling, Mr. Ramsted explained the sessions’ format: on days not designated for group discussion, a guest told the story of how his or her problem developed up until the time they chose to enter the Wellness Center. Then the other guests would make observations and suggestions and corroborations, and Mr. Ramsted—who throughout his twenties had been a sex addict, practically living in the Castro’s bathhouses, and who therefore possessed authority beyond that of just being an actuated savant—would provide his own insights into what was wrong with us and how we could improve.

“Jack,” he said, “since this is your first day, why don’t you start our session by telling us the history of your problem?”

“What problem?”

“With sex.”

“I don’t have one.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“Let’s not waste everyone’s time, please.”

This echo of my exchange with Ms. Anderson was an effective piece of psychological torture. I slid my chair back to the end of its groove. The faces around the table looked at me impatiently, as though I were an actor who’d come onstage in costume and makeup to say that the evening’s performance would not go on because I didn’t look the part.

“I don’t belong here,” I said.

Addressing the rest of the table as a prosecutor would a jury, Mr. Ramsted said, “Are you saying you’re completely satisfied with your sexual history?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“All of it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s amazing. I’ve met confirmed libertines, people who would rather have sex than bring about world peace, who can’t say as much.”

The walls were a creamy orange and air ducts in the ceiling circulated a cool breeze. The windows’ shades were drawn and I pictured what was happening on the other side of them—nothing. I felt as though I were tumbling down a mountain while the static world spun around me. My lower back was alight with discomfort and I placed my wrists gingerly on the tabletop, where they glowed yellow in the reflected varnish, thinking that if I remained completely still the pain in them would settle down to an acceptable throb.

“What do you want to hear?”

Mr. Ramsted pursed his lips and rubbed his nose, the divot in the bridge of which suggested an old fracture. “I want an explanation of the incredible statement you just made. I want you to confirm that you’ve never made an unwanted pass or offended a partner in bed. That you’ve never had an inappropriate dream about a family member or friend. That you’ve never lusted after someone too young or too old. That you’ve never had erectile dysfunction or gotten an erection when you shouldn’t have. That you don’t fantasize too much or too intensely. And that you think back on all your sexual encounters with approval and sanguinity.”

“I do.”

After a pause Mr. Ramsted said, “Rema, let’s hear about your experiences.”

“From the time I was a kid?” she said.

He rose and began slowly circling the table. “Just be honest. Without honesty no one can hope to grow or improve or come to know the truth.” He looked at me and continued his orbit. “You know what Alexander Pope said: ‘An honest Man’s the noblest work of God.’ And Emily Dickinson wisely wrote: ‘Truth is as old as God, / His twin identity—and will endure as long as He, / A co-eternity …’ And Jesus said, ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ Honesty is the bedrock of Prescription for a Superior Existence, as it is the policy of every right-thinking adult who aspires to succeed in this life and the next.”

Rema then gave a nearly two-hour account of her sexual biography, starting full throttle at age thirteen and accelerating through twenty years of rogue-gallery men and dithyrambic women, in bedrooms and public parks and water closets and interstate train bathrooms, in and out of schools, in and out of jobs, in and out of in and out. It was a smoldering, exhaustive, unpredictable, and inventive monologue that, had it been told breathily instead of with evident pain and shame and self-censure, could have been turned into a podcast sensation. I was enthralled and uncomfortably aroused throughout most of it, and my problems seemed as small as dust mites.

“I have to cut this short,” Mr. Ramsted finally said, giving me another reason to resent him, “and forgo our chance to comment, which is unfortunate because this tragic story puts into stark relief the misery caused by our libidos, in exemplary fashion, but it’s time for lunch. I’d like to thank Rema for her brave, unstinting account of two decades’ worth of mistakes. I asked for honesty and she provided it generously.”

Mihir fell in line beside me on the way to the dining hall and said that despite my obstinate behavior during exercises and counseling, I hadn’t ruined my chances at the Wellness Center. I could yet make up for it. At the serving line as I selected six pieces of pepperoni pizza and a tall fruit juice, he said he understood my attitude, which, although counterproductive and immature, was to be expected at first. Men were brought up to brag about their exploits, not confess them, so we felt cognitive dissonance when learning that our every sexual thought from the moment puberty stretched and dropped our genitals was a debasement of our truest self. It had taken him five days to work up the courage and to develop the perspective to tell his story.

“Is that right?” I said, disappointed by the pizza before even tasting it.

He ladled salad dressing over a plate of tomatoes. “Now I love to tell my story. Every time I do I feel such relief and gratitude that I changed before it was too late. As recently as one month ago I was like a person eating red meat three meals a day without any thought for his cholesterol level, as though I had a good reason to be cavalier about my diet, as though heart attacks were as uncommon as Huntington’s disease! One month. Perhaps you would like to hear my story now.”

We stopped, holding our trays of food, to look around the room for a place to sit.

“I just want to eat.”

“That is not a problem. I will give you the abridged version, not go into the painstaking exact details. You will get more from it than you did from Rema’s, because as a woman her methods and goals of seduction were necessarily different from yours, her experience more complicated and harder to relate to. My story, on the other hand, coming from a man’s perspective, will show that you aren’t alone in your depravity, that sex does not actually prove your power and virility, and that you must step out of the orgasm rut.”

We found an empty table beside a bay window facing the Center entrance, and Mihir shook the salt and pepper dispensers over his plate. “I am married,” he said, “and have cheated on my wife, according to a conservative estimate I made just last Tuesday, more than eight hundred times in the twelve years of our marriage, beginning within twenty-four hours of our wedding vows, when my driver’s daughter took me to the office while her father saw a dentist, and ending the day before I came here. I intimately knew a dozen prostitutes in my neighborhood and fathered seven children out of wedlock, one of whom is the finest junior cricketer in southeast New Delhi. All seemed to be going well, with of course some minor problems, until three weeks ago, when after an afternoon dalliance with two British backpackers I came home from work and found my wife threatening to castrate my eldest son, who shares my name, unless I agreed never to have sex with anyone but her again. You should have seen the cold resolve of this woman, such as she had never shown before, ready to mutilate her own child to restore a fidelity that I considered to be an impossible dream. Well, here, look, this is a picture of her taken at the airport the next day. She made calm accusations that were all true and I denied them fiercely—I tell you I felt no guilt about my past behavior or my present lies and thought that the only injustice would be if I were forced to admit wrongdoing and then forswear doing it again, for yes I was a sociopath!—but she had hired a private detective, and she produced video footage and compiled written testimony from my disgruntled former mistresses. I was caught and would you believe that even then I feebly tried to explain away the evidence as either having happened before our marriage or been part of my job? According to my pathetic story many women clients of my company would have gone with a rival had I refused to sleep with them. My wife grabbed the knife sharpener in the middle of these excuses and my son cried and swayed in place like a hungry beggar. Ten minutes later, with my son’s pants around his ankles and his penis pulled taut in her hand, seeing that she was not bluffing, I acknowledged everything. I told her about all the women and all the occasions and do you know what, instantly this had a remarkable effect on both of us. She went from composed resolution to tears, and I went from being an indignant child weighed down by complicated lies and self-justifications to being for the first time in my life an adult able to look at myself, if not dispassionately, at least from another’s point of view. I felt a type of levity then, almost an ecstasy, and as my wife’s tears fell I apologized and comforted her and explained truthfully that my former life was over, that I would not go back to covering up and misleading and hurting those who meant most to me. By decree I ended the lies and recriminations and performance enhancement supplements that had compromised me for years, during which time sex had so darkened my perspective that I felt just then as if I were stepping out of a cave and into the light of day. By evening time we were discussing our future together, and my son was happily doing his homework. It was the rebirth of our love. Yet I knew even as we made new pledges that my body could betray me and my resolve could falter and that I needed more than self-help, so I looked into programs that fostered celibacy and found information about the PASE Wellness Center.”

The pizza tasted like air. “Your wife must be happy.”

“At first, yes, she was overjoyed, but now that I have learned the truth of PASE and know that all sex is unnecessary, including with her, she is less supportive. In fact we have had some trying conversations on the phone and it’s clear to me that she must come here herself, for I am worried about her own salvation. At present, however, she refuses to even consider it. This causes me great disquietude.”

By then five other people had joined our table. One of them, seventeen-year-old Tyrone, who was in our counseling group, said that he wished to have a tenth of Mihir’s resolve. A pimply boy with crowded teeth and a slightly hunched back, he confessed that he was a chronic masturbator who had backslid the day before and been forced, as part of the treatment, to send a picture of himself in midact—taken by one of the microscopic cameras planted all over the Wellness Center—to everyone in his email address book, with exaggerated close-ups of his face and hands reserved for his teachers, grandparents, and parents’ friends. If he slipped again the picture would be delivered to any schools and employers he approached in the future.

“Why don’t you take an inhibitor?” asked Warren, a dark-haired Bostonian with a sharp widow’s peak who, Mihir whispered to me, due to his rage issues had beaten up a small Filipino woman for not crediting his expired coupon at a supermarket, and was at the Wellness Center in lieu of serving half his prison sentence.

“As if they’re around,” said Tyrone, forking a cherry tomato that squirted onto his hand.

“What’s an inhibitor?” I asked.

“A chemical injection that lowers your sperm count and prevents you from achieving and sustaining an erection,” said Mihir, with a forbidding shake of his head. “It’s a type of antiaphrodisiac and PASE does not allow it.”

“Out of fear,” said Warren.

Mihir said, looking at Warren as he would a stranger cutting ahead in line, “One doesn’t conquer desire and become compatible with UR God by taking inhibitors.”

“UR God cares about ends, not means.”

Mihir raised his voice. “You can’t achieve lasting synergy with Him if you’ve merely put desire into a closet instead of throwing it out for good. Any declared Paser can tell you that; it is basic teaching.”

Warren cut the remainder of his steak into diamond-shaped bites, the muscles of his forearms moving independently like machine parts. “If you don’t get in fights or have sex or whatever, you’re going to mainline UR God without any problem. It’s all about results and there’s no point in having this debate like we’re too stupid to know as much.”

Mihir set down his clean silverware, folded his napkin, and said, dropping his voice to a chilly undertone, “You are prattling on stupidly in front of a new guest who is my mentee. I’d rather you not confuse or dishearten him, so if you must speak rubbish perhaps you could do it at another table.”

“Are you going to say that when someone on the outside challenges you? Are you going to ask them to go away? That won’t bring one more person to UR God.”

“As if you care about Him or yourself or the goal of improving! You care only for appearances, not substance. Reality Fact Number Thirty-two in The Prescription states clearly: ‘Not everyone will embrace the truth.’ On the outside I will not bother trying to convince such persons as yourself, who are incapable of the necessary sacrifices.”

Warren smiled. “I think you’re forgetting Reality Fact Number Twelve: ‘He who thinks he knows the nature of UR God is like a child convinced he can speak a foreign language after hearing it once.’”

“Reality Fact Number Eight: ‘The way to UR God can no more be shortened than can a ladder stretching from the ground to the moon.’”

“Reality Fact Number Five: ‘There is room for every aspirant in the body of UR God, as there is for every note in the body of music.’”

“Reality Fact Number Three: ‘Desire has a thousand faces; take care to destroy the one that most resembles yours.’”

“All right,” said Eli, a leathery old man from our counseling group, a retired fisherman from the Puget Sound area who’d built a crystal meth lab in his basement and blown off all his left-hand fingers in an explosion the year before, and who’d managed to keep using the drug for a week before someone found him sleeping in their driveway and sent him to the first of four rehabilitation centers he would attend in advance of this Wellness Center. “Let’s just enjoy our food. We can settle this in class.”

Mihir leaned over and told me that nearly everyone—99 percent of the guests—would and could improve, but that sometimes a wastrel such as Warren came through who was doomed to failure and I was to ignore him and his crude, perhaps intentional misunderstandings. Those full of poison delight in infecting others. Just ask the scorpion.

Mihir seemed in earnest and no more open to talk of escape or insurrection than a freshman at Harvard. I tried catching Warren’s eye to see if by a wink or glance he might acknowledge that we were on the other side of the looking glass, but, however heretical Mihir considered him, he had a serene expression, as though internecine squabbles at the Center—and PASE itself—were great fun and in no way a sign of the religion’s inanity.

When a Brazilian man named Caetano, sitting to Tyrone’s left, launched into a description of how his former girlfriend had wanted him to do “unspeakable” things to her, which at first he had done willingly, thereby eclipsing his best self behind a “grunting, squealing” animal self, and which set in motion a sense of defilement that “spread like a cancer” and made part of him feel relieved when her death the previous December in a car crash released both of them from their sick physical entente—although she, dying without any contact with PASE, was suffering the agonies of nonbeing—a bizarre declaration that ought to have repelled everyone at the table but instead brought out their warmest sympathy, I concentrated on my pizza.

After lunch came the class period. While walking together to Celestial Commons, where all classes were held on the third floor, Mihir told me that I was in Introductory Level A with Mr. Ortega, who focused on the mechanics of the PASE hierarchy and simple exegeses of The Prescription, things that were self-evident and not challenging to intelligent persons such as ourselves. Luckily, it lasted for only five days and then I would move on to Introductory Level B, helmed by the inspiring, ethereally beautiful Ms. Webley, to whom I, like all guests, would form an intense nonsexual attachment that might show up in my dreams.

When I got to class, Mr. Ortega, a potbellied man with oversized hands and head, rolled up his sleeves and crossed his bandy legs and took no notice of me. Instead of sitting around an oblong table, we—all four guests from my orientation, a freckled and too-muscular Englishman named Alastair, a slender black woman with tight cornrows named Tonya, a skinny Italian woman named Suzanne, and a zaftig blonde named Emma—sat in fold-out chairs arranged in a semicircle, with Mr. Ortega at the opening. If the seating arrangement was meant to satisfy our need for variety, it failed, but I was determined to treat this class like a work seminar, an occupational hazard to be endured quiescently, signifying nothing in itself. I may have been tumbling down a mountain but I would not worry anymore about the ground below. I was collecting my bearings.

“Today,” Mr. Ortega said, tugging on his thick forearm hair—for this and his sloping forehead, rounded shoulders, and other simian qualities I felt a kinship with him—“we’re going to talk about the six Paser stages. Can anyone begin by describing the difference between a declared Paser and a savant?”

Everyone looked at their hands or laps uncomfortably until Alastair, in the posh accent that Americans affect to tell British jokes, said, “Isn’t a savant basically like a more advanced declared Paser, in that he professes faith in UR God but takes it a step further by giving up sex? He walks the walk, in other words.”

“Correct,” said Mr. Ortega, “if sex is his or her favorite activity. It’s important to note that you become a savant by giving up whatever you most love to do, which isn’t always sex. Many people live happily without that and therefore renounce nothing by renouncing sex. They need to look elsewhere in order to achieve savant status, such as to chocolate or gambling or cocaine or shoe shopping. The essence of being a savant is self-control; it demonstrates the beginning of your independence from the false joys of this world and shows your affinity with UR God.”

This was all very boring and I remembered counseling wistfully and with a new fondness. I thought about Rema’s various exploits, their audacity and imaginativeness, which, now that she’d joined PASE, would cease, and I grieved for their passing. Then, despite my earlier conclusion that half of what had gone wrong in my life was externally unchangeable and the other half internally so, and that I should not worry about where I was going—the bottom of the mountain toward which I was barreling—the tetrahedron of my problems rose up in my mind’s landscape like a terrible portentous obelisk. It eclipsed everything else in my line of sight, so that I barely saw Shang-lee sitting next to me, his hands folded in his lap in bodhisattva fashion, and feared that I might pass out from terror at any minute. I badly wanted—I needed—a sedative and drink and cigarette and pornography and coffee and chocolate and lasagna and assurance that I would not languish here forever, that my absence meant something in the world at large.

Shang-lee asked me if I was all right and I nodded.

Mr. Ortega opened his hands questioningly at us, cocked an eyebrow, and then continued, “After you’re a savant you become a functioning savant. In this stage you branch out beyond desire in its most active sense to work on curtailing your vanity and self-focus, the two biggest impediments to improvement. As a functioning savant you will think less about yourself and how others perceive you. To do this requires reducing the time and money you spend on clothes, cosmetics, hair care, entertainment, etc., and at the same time increasing your charitable contributions and your study of The Prescription. Both your reductions and your increases need to be substantial. For example, you can’t buy four lipsticks instead of five and call that cutting back, nor can you spend eight hundred instead of nine hundred dollars on a new season’s wardrobe. You must feel the deprivation of having less than you used to.”

“How long does it take to go from being a savant to a functioning savant?” asked Tonya. Midway through Mr. Ortega’s speech she had put down the emery board with which she’d been filing her nails, as though even this act of grooming might be unPASElike.

“The Rubins must have told you in orientation,” said Mr. Ortega, “that everyone advances at their own speed, but I’ll warn you that it’s possible to go too slowly or too quickly. You can’t become a functioning savant overnight, nor can you drag it out over ten years. The good news is that when you reenter the outside world you’ll be able to consult with advanced Pasers at any PASE Station to come up with an appropriate timeline. Just remember that your improvement has to be real and consistent. You can’t take breaks to do things you’re not supposed to.”

“Do you get a badge or a certificate when you move up a level?” Tonya asked.

“No.”

“Then how’s anyone supposed to know you’re a functioning savant and not some starting-out type?”

“UR God will know and you will know. Nothing else matters.”

“But it wouldn’t be bad—you wouldn’t get in trouble, right—if you wore a shirt that said ‘functioning savant’ on it or a button or a belt buckle.”

“That would be fine. Now, after the functioning savant stage you will graduate to the master savant stage, which is defined by fewer desires, smaller meal portions, a commitment to buying only used clothes and no-brand hygienic items, further engagement with The Prescription, taking a leadership role in a local Paser study group, and active volunteering with the PASE Process, such as at one of its soup kitchens or homeless shelters or hospital terminal wards.”

“I’d like to do something with the blind,” said Alastair. “I’d like to read to them or take them to a museum.”

Mr. Ortega made a displeased face and said, “Next you’ll become an actuated savant. I, for example, got to this stage a year ago by memorizing large sections of The Prescription, whittling down my desire, eating modest meals without appetizers or desserts or alcohol, dressing mainly in my tunic, and making large contributions to the PASE Process.”

“Does everyone have to be an actuated type to get a job here?” asked Tonya.

“It’s a necessary prerequisite, yes, for becoming a facilitator, along with taking a test and undergoing an apprenticeship training program. The whole process takes about two months, and only a third of the applicants are then hired to be on staff.”

“Are the tests hard?”

“They’re challenging, yes.”

“Did you have to know lots of names and dates? Because my intelligence isn’t geared toward those per se. I’m more of a conceptual thinker, and I’m wondering if there’s a type of test that would capitalize on that aspect of the mind as opposed to the dates.”

“The tests are very concept-oriented, yes.”

Mr. Ortega and Tonya went on for a while and to distract myself I drew up a mental list of people from whom I might ask to borrow money to pay my creditors until I found a job: my parents, though they’d retired the year before and were cash poor; my brother, Sid, who owed me three thousand dollars but wouldn’t have it; Max, who carried almost as much credit card debt as I did; Supritha, whose family was wealthy but not fond of me; and Juan, who, having sold me out at Couvade, would probably avoid me forever. Mr. Ortega was nodding at Tonya and Alastair was scrawling notes and I was having revelations I’d had many times before. At age thirty-four you don’t have the thousand options you had at twenty-four. If barred from the world of capital growth assessment, I effectively had none. Anxiety fell on me in droplets as corrosive as acid rain, and Mr. Ortega told a joke that made everyone laugh, and I saw no shelter big enough to cover me.

“Next,” Mr. Ortega said, “comes the master actuated savant stage. This is the penultimate step you take before becoming an ursavant. In it you renounce all desires beyond those necessary for maintaining a physical body, such as for food, water, heat, sleep, and oxygen. You have to know The Prescription backward and forward, give away whatever money and objects you don’t immediately need, work with the sickest and most hobbled people in the vicinity, advocate nonviolence and universal tolerance, and take care of any unfinished business you may have in anticipation of becoming an ur-savant.” He paused and cracked his knuckles. “I’m not going to lie or sugarcoat it: this is a difficult level. It requires a great deal of commitment—a superhuman control over your corporeal reality—so don’t worry if it sounds impossible to you right now. No one when they first start jogging attempts an ultra marathon.”

Normally when a person in a meeting lays out a preposterously hopeful forecast, when they talk about doubling a company’s clients or tripling its revenue in a year, the realists in the room hasten to point out the obstacles to such a development, from the scarcity of potential new clients to increased competition to insufficient staffing, and quash the fantasy before anyone besides the initial speaker decides to believe in such nonsense. I listened to this description of a master actuated savant and expected someone to point out the patent absurdity of anyone—much less hundreds or thousands of Pasers—fulfilling its ascetic criteria, and when Alastair raised his hand, I looked to him as a mute would his advocate.

“That does sound like a difficult level,” he said, tightening his mouth and closing his eyes halfway to suggest deep concentration. “One really has to change one’s life around, it seems. More so than on the previous levels.”

“That’s what PASE is about,” said Suzanne, tapping her foot against the leg of her chair. “If you’re too weak or noncommittal to make it, you drop out and that’s that. No one’s forcing you to fuse into UR God.”

“I’m not weak or noncommittal,” said Alastair. “I’ll make the changes necessary to improve; I’m just pointing out that there’s a wider chasm between the actuated and the master actuated stages than what’s come before.”

“That’s a defeatist’s point.”

Mr. Ortega cut in by saying, “Then, lastly, most wonderfully, you will attain ur-savant status and be ready for eternal synergy with UR God. At this stage you will be totally self-contained and perfect in every way. You will have no more need of this planet or your body. You will be what you were in the beginning and will be forever after, a wand waving about inside of UR God as an ecstatic part of the truth, a sliver of true harmolodic vibration.”

Silence followed. I pulled at a thread coming from my chair’s seat cushion and the clock ticked as loudly as a metronome. It became clear after a minute that no one would respond, that Alastair had been at best a semirealist and was now, following Suzanne’s comment, even less of one. My standard aches and pains performed their dirge and my need for alcohol and a sealed bottle of anything swelled in my head and I knew not to speak—it didn’t matter what these people told themselves, and I didn’t want a repeat of my confrontation with Mr. Ramsted—but as the silence continued I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Are you saying,” I asked, “that ur-savants don’t eat or drink or breathe?”

“That’s correct.”

I yanked the thread free and wrapped it around my left pinkie, turning its tip pink. A fly landed on Alastair’s knee, and he slapped his hand down and missed and it buzzed away at an angry pitch. “Then they must be dead.”

“On the contrary, it is they who are truly alive, as part of UR God, fused synergistically into His being.”

“But to everyone on planet Earth they must appear to be corpses.”

The fly landed on Mr. Ortega’s knee and was not lucky a second time. “You must understand that our bodies are holding vessels that no more own our spirit forever than a balloon does the air it contains. For example, you, Jack Smith, consider sex to be an integral part of yourself, whereas really it’s a pointless pressure that, once released, will leave you free in its absence.”

“I don’t see how you can say that, or how you can say that an ursavant isn’t just a dead person. If sex isn’t an integral part of me, nothing is.” I was beginning to feel engaged and defensive against my will, for it seemed that this was more than a bidding war between common sense and uncommon belief; I wished someone else would play my part.

“You only think so because you’ve been brought up to expect to feel that way. Surely you know by now that much of what we’re taught is wrong or misleading, that there are specious biological justifications floating around for our worst behavior.”

“That’s—I don’t know what exactly you’re talking about.”

“Take meat eating, for example. People say our incisors are designed for cutting and our molars for crushing and tearing meat, which supposedly gives us the right to inhumanely raise and then slaughter millions of animals a year.”

“What does that have to do with people deciding not to breathe or drink anymore?”

“I presume you haven’t read The Prescription.”

“No.”

“It explains exactly what happens when we break free of our bodies and, if we’ve proven ourselves worthy of UR God, rise into Him. Its eloquence and truth are irrefutable.”

“I refute them.”

“You haven’t read them yet.”

“I refute Mein Kampf and a hundred other stupid manifestos I’ve never read.”

“Those were all written by mortals. The Prescription was written by UR God.”

“The Bible was written by the regular God, and I imagine it contradicts The Prescription all over the place.”

“The temptation to endow a man-made book with legitimacy by saying that a higher power wrote it—whether it’s the Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, or what have you—has often tempted its authors.”

“Like it did Montgomery Shoale.”

“I recommend that you read The Prescription and then tell us what you think. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

When class ended Mr. Ortega took me aside and said he appreciated my dynamism in class, the way I fought to understand what PASE was really about and challenged hearsay. Most guests quibbled over trivia or blindly accepted whatever he said, which was fine at the Center, but later, when back among the general population, they would be vulnerable to others’ lies and misinformation. Because I poked and prodded PASE, my belief would be deeper, more substantial and harder won. I would be immune to the hucksters and charlatans who preyed on the spiritually defenseless and only cared about power and money and their own aggrandizement. I would earn my place in PASE hierarchy and would see clearly how false prophets and gurus and religious leaders in the so-called real world plied their sham religions and took advantage of everyone they could. He said that I would be a savant before I knew it.

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