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“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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