Prescription for a Superior Existence

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.