Prescription for a Superior Existence

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?”