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.
“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
