Josh Emmons - Prescription for a Superior Existence

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?”