Josh Emmons - Prescription for a Superior Existence

The Friday Project

An imprint of Harper CollinsPublishers

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

‘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.