“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 I said, a certain amount of cynicism is healthy, but there 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