I swallowed thickly and felt the beginning of a sinus headache, of my tear ducts opening and throat constricting. Mr. Raven pushed a box of tissues toward me. I rose and then sat back down.
“The Board is giving us ten demerits?”
“You’ll get a copy of their written decision.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mr. Raven’s voice softened and his forehead relaxed, lowering his hair a quarter inch. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll undergo treatment and then, following a probationary period of not less than eighteen months, I’ll review your case and consider your coming back to work for Couvade.”
“No, this is wrong. Danforth was a mysterious accident, and I’d like to appeal to the Conduct Board for a reduced penalty.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“You’re telling me this for the first time right now!”
Mr. Raven, still holding the base of the tissue box, pulled it away from me and then picked up his phone. “Don’t make me call security.”
“But I’m being railroaded. You can’t—What if you call the system administration department and ask them to recover my Tuesday computer profile and they’ll tell you that I’m not lying about Danforth? In a situation this serious, you have to!”
I quit yelling and Mr. Raven set down his phone and we stared at a midway point between us for the seventy-three seconds it took two building security officers to arrive and lift me to my feet. I weighed a thousand pounds in their arms.
Following my meeting with Ms. Anderson at the Wellness Center, the escorts took me to the dining hall, a high-ceilinged oval room with rectangular metal tables, where, arriving as the others were finishing, I ate a four-egg omelet with sausage links and home fries. Nothing tasted as good as it looked, being made of the sort of low-fat, low-cholesterol ingredients that I’d bought after my surgery and then never again, but I took comfort in the act of eating and didn’t get up from the table until my escorts said that the orientation meeting was about to start in the Celestial Commons building. I would have argued that I didn’t care about missing the beginning—or the middle or the end—if I thought they’d care that I didn’t care; instead I followed them out.
Having felt like an animal caught in a steel trap during my conversation with Ms. Anderson—when I discovered that I lacked the strength to chew off my own foot—just then I felt calm and self-possessed. I walked steadily between my escorts. This was all temporary. Conrad must have understood PASE’s role in my being shot and taken away, meaning either the police or FBI would arrive at any minute to rescue me from this horrible compound. It was important that I not panic, that I keep my wits and be ready to level sane and convincing charges against my captors. A cigarette would have helped, or a stick of nicotine gum, or an assortment of pills with something liquid to chase them, but I made tight fists and clenched my jaw and knew that this was about to be over. Back in the courtyard I looked for signs of disturbance, not knowing if the authorities would drop from a helicopter in a SWAT team raid or storm the front gate, or if their warrant and tact would help them avoid an open and violent confrontation with the Center’s security guards. Everything was quiet. The escorts looked straight ahead, one in front and the other behind me. As a giant clock tower struck eight A.M., I tried not to think of what was delaying my rescuers.
The orientation meeting, in a room on the first floor of the Celestial Commons building, was led by Mr. and Mrs. Rubin—a small, round couple with nearly identical bodies, like two pieces in a Russian doll sequence, Mrs. Rubin could have nested snugly inside her husband—who handed me a notebook and a small bottled water and introduced me to the four other new arrivals at the Wellness Center: Rema, a tax assessor from Seattle; Shang-lee, a chemical engineering graduate student at Stanford; Alice, an obstetrician from Alameda; and Star, a retired “friend to gentlemen” from Key West. I sat in the chair closest to the door and waited for the door behind me to open and my release to be effected.
Mrs. Rubin rolled up her tunic sleeves and stepped forward. “Does anyone have a question before we begin?”
“No,” answered Mr. Rubin immediately. “Okay, first of all, congratulations on taking the first, most difficult step toward improving. The worst is already behind you. From now on, each successive step will be easier than the last until, near the end, your feet will hardly touch the ground as you bound toward the perfection of UR God. But I must warn you that this won’t come at the same time for everyone. Just because you’re here in orientation together does not mean you will progress with identical speed. Some Pasers advance quickly and others slowly, which is okay because we are not in a race. UR God will be as ready for you in fifty years as in fifty days.”
A short but purposeful knock came at the door. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin looked at each other quizzically and then moved in concert toward it. Trembling with relief, I envisioned the squad of armed men about to enter, call my name or even recognize my face, and lead me back to my apartment, where I could expect the law’s full protection until my safety was established. Which wouldn’t take long. Once PASE’s criminal intentions toward me were proven beyond question—a day? two days?—my only concern would be how much to ask for in damages. As far as I knew, Shoale’s private fortune had been blended into PASE’s coffers, meaning I might expect millions—perhaps tens of millions—of dollars, depending on how sympathetic a jury I got. Couvade would probably offer me a vice-presidency or some equally nice sinecure to restore its mainstream image and distance itself from the PASE fallout. Women from all over the Bay Area and beyond would read about me and, their interest piqued in someone who had almost been murdered before being forced into a celibacy camp and then awarded an enormous compensation settlement, seek me out. Yes, for several seconds in that orientation room, at the end of a row of desperately gullible people from whose rank I was about to escape, I foresaw a hasty and lucrative resolution to all of my problems. Part of me even dared to imagine Mary Shoale, whom I loved more with every passing second, seizing the moment to break from her father and make me the happiest of men. What had been my terrible luck was going to be flipped around and turned right side up.
Except that it wasn’t. Mr. and Mrs. Rubin cautiously opened the door, consulted in whispers with a young man and woman in regulation tunics, and then returned to the center of the room, smiling as though they had swallowed a bottle of Percodan.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Mr. Rubin said, “but we’ve just received wonderful news. Tonight, following Synergy, Montgomery Shoale will make a major announcement via a live video address that we’ll watch at the Prescription Palace. You are new here and so can’t appreciate how rare and magnificent an event this is, but to give you some perspective I’ll say that it’s been many months since Mr. Shoale last spoke to us.”
“Five months,” said Mrs. Rubin gently, though with a correcting tone.
“He is close to becoming an ur-savant, and this could be his last public appearance. You will witness history in the making.”
Shang-lee, whose unlined face and glinting gray hairs placed him between twenty and fifty, and who, besides me, was the only one not reflecting the Rubins’ smile, adjusted his small round spectacles, raised a bony hand, and said, “What’s an ur-savant?”
“You will learn about the savant stages later today in class,” said Mrs. Rubin. “Our purpose now is to provide you with background on the Wellness Center, its history and aims and rules of conduct, so that you’ll know what to expect and how to behave while here.”
During the ensuing account, told in alternating sections by the Rubins, I fought against the fear that every passing minute made my rescue less likely, that if the police weren’t there yet it was because Conrad hadn’t told them. Or they disbelieved him. Or they were in league with PASE and, even given proof that I was being held