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?”
Ms. Anderson sneezed without breaking eye contact with me. “Like most people, you are unhappy because you aren’t fulfilled by what you have. You always want more, and that more is never enough. Throughout your life you’ve desired things, only to find after getting them that contentment lies in the next thing. And the next and the next and the next. Sadly but predictably, the result of all this deferred satisfaction for you and others has been the same: anxiety and depression. And if allowed to continue it will lead finally to the crowning tragedy, ambivalence.”
“This has nothing to do with me and I want to leave right now.”
“Some people say the cycle of desire is human nature. They point out that before we can speak we cry for milk and human contact and toys and dry diapers and relief from teething pain, that infancy is little more than I want!, that childhood is no better, that adolescence is worse, and that adulthood is a full-blown epidemic of insatiable neediness. But does it follow that we should forgive desire just because it’s human nature, in spite of its cost? Think of the old people you know, so beaten down by years of disappointment that they have no interests or passions or convictions left, who are content to let television mark time until they die. We at the PASE Wellness Center want to spare you that fate.”
I shook my head. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“No.” She smiled beatifically. “We are trying to save you.”
I opened my mouth to speak and at first nothing came out. “But I’ve become close with Mary Shoale. Aren’t I here because her father thinks I pose a threat to PASE?”
“It’s safe to say that Mr. Shoale considers you a friend. Besides, although Mary is at heart a good girl, she’s addicted to gratifying her own desires. PASE wouldn’t punish someone else for her folly. No, the man who broke into your apartment was a renegade Paser acting entirely on his own and without the administration’s knowledge. He has since been disciplined.”
“The giant?”
“We do not condone or practice violence. Our religion is neither a cult nor simply a nice philosophy to live by. It values all human life and does its best to protect rather than endanger people. You don’t need to look skeptical. Mary’s other playmates have sat where you are now and been just as suspicious and later emerged transformed, improved in every way. I don’t doubt that you will be equally successful. Now eat your pear.”
My wrists radiated pain and I hyperextended my back as recommended by physical therapists. When I turned around the two escorts leaned in toward each other at the door, blocking passage in or out. The room’s single window, although large enough to jump through, was one story above ground that, from the angle where I sat, appeared to be concrete.
“So you know about the men she’s been with? And you’ve abducted them all so they don’t embarrass your public relations department?”
She bit into her own pear and spoke while chewing. “Let’s concentrate on you so that we don’t waste your valuable time here. At this hour you should already be showering after exercises, though I understand that because this is your first morning at the Center, especially given the state in which you arrived, you have questions and concerns that might interfere with your improvement. The orientation session we’ve set up for you and the other new guests after breakfast will address those more fully, but we can touch on some of them now.”
I scratched off a section of wax from my pear and said, “This is illegal and you’ll go to jail for keeping me here against my will. I have an excellent lawyer who will destroy you in a civil suit once the state finishes with you.”
“Please don’t worry about us. We are well aware of the court’s attitude and behavior in California. You need to concentrate on learning about Prescription for a Superior Existence, for that, despite your disinclination, is why you’re here.”
“I’m here because I was kidnapped. I don’t want to know anything more about PASE.”
She took another bite of her pear and it was half gone. “What do you think about God?”
I glanced back again at the escorts, who hadn’t moved.
She said, “I presume that as an atheist you think of him as a fanciful idea man came up with to get through all the terrors of prehistory. ‘If God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him,’ and that sort of thing. This doesn’t necessarily make you a cynic, but on the measuring stick of faith your notch is nearer the closed than the open end. In a way, we don’t blame you. The god that most of the world recognizes is schizophrenic: either angry, wrathful, and genocidal, or subservient, meek, and fond of easy bromides. We Pasers see through that god, as well, and if we didn’t know about UR God, we might be atheists too.”
I thought about getting up to run and crash through the window with the hope of landing on the ground outside with a mere sprained ankle and skinned palms, but when I considered the lacerations this would also incur, provided the glass pane was thin enough to break through and the unlikelihood that I could then reach and scale the perimeter wall, I decided against it. “Ergod?”
“Ultimate Reality God. Media stories are always so concerned with our stance on sex or our charitable activities that they often neglect to mention Him. When they do, He is wrongly described as ‘a deity without any defining qualities,’ as though we were too lazy to give Him a deep voice or a long white beard. Journalists can be as inattentive as toddlers and as sex-crazed as teenagers. But you will shortly discover that UR God is our focus and that He is the supreme generative force who, cognizant of the Earth’s imminent collapse, gave us the book The Prescription for a Superior Existence so that we can improve enough to fuse into Him.”
“I thought Montgomery Shoale wrote it.”
“UR God used him to convey His message.”
“Did that happen on a mountain?”
“As
