comes a point where it causes more harm than good. All we ask is that you pay attention and keep an open mind during your stay with us, the length of which depends entirely on you. Put simply, by the time you leave here you will be free from anxiety and depression and anger and self-destructive tendencies, ready to know UR God. This freedom is in you now, buried like a precious metal; we will show you how to mine it.” Ms. Anderson looked at her watch and stood up. She’d eaten her entire pear, including its core. “Now you’d better go; it’s breakfast time.”
Before the events leading up to my abduction and placement at the PASE Wellness Center, I had been a capital growth assessment manager at Couvade Incorporated, a midsized financing firm in San Francisco. After eight years with the company I was, as my performance reviews put it, “a self-starting team player who [thought] outside the box but within the realm of possibility.” The case for my promotion to senior manager was therefore strong, and I had, with others’ encouragement, begun to court and, in certain exuberant moments, expect the position. I ran a quick and efficient squad, never took sick days, and had the highest client satisfaction ratings of my peer group. I voluntarily fact-checked other squads’ work and was friendly yet professional with the interns. Following my surgery in December my boss, Mr. Raven, a reserved and laconic man to whom I’d worked hard to draw close during the previous year, and whose passion for presidential biographies and Latin jazz I had come to share, said that I appeared to be as healthy as my best reports and that he looked forward to working in closer tandem with me.
So when in early February, nearly one month ago from today, my squad was given the Danforth Ltd. project, a standard client profile that would take no more than a week, it seemed to be a victory lap at the finish line of which I would be promoted to senior manager. Passing from Juan to Dexter to Philippe, the file reached me on a Monday, two days before it was due. I opened it at six, after most people had gone home, and, chain-smoking into my air purifier and snacking from a box of shortbread, made great progress. An hour later I ordered Chinese takeout and a six-pack of beer. At eight, already a quarter done, I took a break and lost a game of speed chess to Alfredo, the janitor for my floor, and then spent ten minutes emptying the cubicle trash bins while he read online Mexican newspapers at my desk.
At 10:30 I made an error—I transposed a 6 into 9—so I packed up and went home. There I took four ibuprofens, three sleeping pills, a muscle relaxant, a shot of whiskey, and four green capsules a homeopath friend had given me for joint trouble in my wrists. My ex-girlfriend Camilla had stopped by to look for a sweater she thought might be there and to write a note on the dry-erase board saying she’d heard about my surgery and wanted to get together for a drink. I rubbed out the note and my surroundings began to spin as gently as a carnival ride beginning its cycle.
In the living room I landed on my red velvet couch, which just then felt like a flying carpet, but instead of falling asleep I heard broken snatches of piano music coming from the apartment next door. I struggled to sit up and listen. Scales. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti. Do-re-fa. Stop. Start over. This was interesting because Conrad, who was a piano teacher, had not had a student in the three years he’d lived there. He blamed this dry spell on the rising quality and falling prices of piano lesson software—people, he said, would rather learn from a computer program than from a live human being, resulting in the spread of rote, mechanical musicians who hadn’t had the individual instruction necessary to play Chopin or Satie with integrity and impact—but the more likely reason was that he charged two hundred dollars an hour. It was too much for someone as unknown as him. I’d recommended that he lower his rate to be competitive with other nonprofessional teachers’, but he thought that the more expensive a service was, the more people would value it; until this happened he was content to live on monthly disability checks from the military for an injury he’d sustained to his right leg in Iraq.
Hearing the scales, I was glad for Conrad and hoped this would begin a busy chapter in his career, but I also needed sleep and could easily be kept awake by the noise, so I went over to ask him to end the lesson. What remained of his dyed-blond hair was slicked back in a casino operator clamp, and he leaned against his doorway with a new ivory-handled cane in his right hand. Just thirty more minutes, he said, looking over his shoulder and thanking me for my patience. He would have closed the door then had not a young woman, the student, appeared behind him and said she was ready to quit. Conrad gripped the handle of his cane tightly. I mumbled thanks and retreated to my apartment and in a wobbly swoon lost consciousness at the foot of my bed.
I could do this—black out in the middle of a room at midnight—because I lived alone, as I had ever since taking my first one-bedroom apartment, in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, because neither of the two women I’d dated seriously in that period had wanted to move in with me. Supritha, the first, had ended our seven-month relationship over a fiery south Indian breakfast when I mentioned the time and money we would save—not to mention the love we would generate—by living together. “I don’t know why,” she’d explained, ladling dal over a pancake and frowning as though her fickleness were as mysterious to her as to me. I died a little. The second, Camilla, had in the six months we dated cheated on me “with tons of guys,” which was, she decided, given that I hadn’t been enough for her sexually, partly or perhaps largely my fault. I died a little again.
What brought me back to life on both occasions was the thought that someday I would meet the woman of my dreams and we would fall in love and these early false starts would provide all the contrast I needed to appreciate what at last I had found.
In the meantime I tried to make the best of being a bachelor. My married or otherwise engaged friends put a positive spin on it by pointing out that I never had to eat with boring couples, bicker, clean up after myself, shop, talk about my feelings, talk about her feelings, or be anywhere besides work and home. I didn’t have to remember birthdays or anniversaries or Valentine’s Day, nor did I have to think about the toilet bowl lid or hide my pornography or apologize. This last point was especially important to them. Being alone, they said, meant never having to say you were sorry.
But I would gladly have paid for the upsides of romance with its downsides, because to me, in addition to being a source of human connection and joy and security, relationships were a health matter—almost a survival issue—and I looked and hoped for one constantly. That is, on my own, undisturbed and unapologetic, I had a dangerous amount of freedom that allowed for all kinds of abuses that, even while committing them, I regretted but could not stop. There were points on which Ms. Anderson would later be correct. Alone and without the regulatory oversight of a companion, I had license to eat, drink, and watch anything at any time. I could treat my body as a chemical processing plant or a temple, filling it with whatever brought relief from or an end to my daily stresses, which led to grand solitary debauches, nights when I would stare at an empty pizza box or Playboy care package ordered by and for myself, in a drug- and alcohol-induced fugue, forced to consider that overeating and binge drinking and perpetual masturbation were signs of deep and abiding unhappiness, and that I ought to do something about them right away. At those times I would say aloud, “If I keep doing this I won’t last much longer,” without daring to answer the follow-up question: “Would that be any great loss?” A little while later, calmed by the exhaustion that follows worry, I would find myself seminaked on the couch with five barbiturates and a half-bottle of scotch sluicing through my bloodstream, watching East European adult television at four A.M., and I would tell myself that there were many versions of a full life and this was mine. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, said Shakespeare.
In several respects, though, I was doing poorly and getting worse. My insomnia, for example, was out of control. I’d always had trouble sleeping, but since receiving an email in November from my biological mother, I’d found it nearly impossible. Then came an unfortunate work-related incident in Chicago. Then my break-up with Camilla. Then my surgery, which I feared meant that at heart I was vain and shallow, a slave to the
