“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