holding a palm-sized stopwatch. The beds were all made up and crisply smoothed out; the men stood beside them proudly. “Good morning,” he said in an Alabaman drawl, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “You’ll be glad to know that Paul Davies and Thabo Ombassa were granted savant status yesterday and arrived home safely last night. They send their regards and expect all of you to be home soon. Also, as you can see, two new guests are joining us today, Shang-lee Ho and Jack Smith. Please make them feel welcome.”
“Excuse me!” I said, holding up my hand as he turned and walked out.
Mihir tugged gently on my sleeve and said, “Our schedule, as I said, is very tight and allows no time at present for questions or comments. That man was Mr. Israel, by the way. He’s a facilitator and neither the smartest nor the most advanced, which is why he’s assigned to exercises. Most facilitators, however, are very kind, very wise persons, and even Mr. Israel has his good qualities.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Yes at first it is overwhelming, but that is why I have been assigned as your mentor. I will help you through this adjustment period and soon you will be as confident as I am, knowing just what to do and when. The learning curve is steep but short. Now, stand behind me.”
A perfectly straight line had formed at the door. I seemed to be in a dream that combined Prescription for a Superior Existence with boot camp, featuring people I’d never seen before and too-real set pieces. Through the skylights morning advanced timidly. Mihir went to the end of the line and signaled for me to follow him, which I did half-consciously, too bewildered to protest. From this room—this barracks or ward or whatever it was—we entered a classical Grecian hallway as ersatz and authentic as a Las Vegas hotel, with ceramic amphorae and bronze goblets lit up in display cases inlaid in its ocher walls, and walked to a lobby forested with Doric colonnades and painted marble vases and, in one corner, a large limestone replica of the Colossus of Rhodes. I seemed to be the only one paying attention to our fantastic surroundings, and then we were outside in a courtyard studded with young eucalyptus trees and straight-backed wooden benches painted volcanic red. To our left a round pond thirty feet in diameter steadily overflowed its edges, and a trio of stone seraphim at its center blew misty water into the air through copper trumpets. We kept walking and I kept gaping. Ivy-covered Corinthian and Tuscan buildings enclosed the courtyard; in the entablature above the doorway of each a name was carved: Shoale Hall, Celestial Commons, The Synergy Station. We followed a pathway out of the courtyard and passed between other buildings and a tennis court and a scale imitation of the Citadel and a menagerie of topiary animals, until finally we stopped at an acre of landscaped lawn bordered on its far side by a fifteen-foot, gleaming white wall. There we separated into two rows and spread out at arm’s length. When Mr. Israel instructed us to do fifty jumping jacks I came to attention.
“Why am I here?” I shouted, taking a step out of formation.
Mihir shook his head at me, and the others, already jumping in unison like young cadets, stopped and looked at Mr. Israel, who came toward me with a concerned expression, as if I were choking and needed his help. Up close his face was dotted with razor nicks that had stopped bleeding in the cold. He was younger than I’d originally thought, no more than twenty-five, and hid whatever Southern amiability was native to him beneath a mask of critical authority.
“Morning exercises,” he said, a vertical crease deepening between his eyebrows, “are how we begin the day.”
“I mean why am I at this PASE Wellness Center? I didn’t ask to come and I want to be returned home.” I looked around for sympathy, but with the exception of Mihir, who looked pained on my behalf, everyone shared Mr. Israel’s frown.
“You’re here like the other guests, to improve.”
“But I don’t want to improve.”
Someone yelled out “Ha!” and Mr. Israel’s body tensed and his right arm bowed like a gunslinger’s preparing to draw—he looked ready to hit me—but then he pulled a phone from his utility belt and asked for an escort team to come to Elysian Field. He signaled for everyone else to resume their jumping jacks, but their coordination was off now and they resembled windmills out of sync. Mr. Israel regarded me coolly until two men dressed in navy blue tunics approached and, with a nod from him, led me back to Shoale Hall. I asked them questions on the way, but they were as silent and formal as beefeaters, betraying no hint that they either heard or understood me. My back, which like most parts of my body ached, felt a little better for the brisk walking, and I would have liked to keep up the pace even after we entered the building. Instead they delivered me to the Red Room, which was painted beige and smelled of cinnamon and was furnished with a desk, silver suede sofa, and glass-topped coffee table, on which a pristine copy of The Prescription for a Superior Existence, the religion’s holy book, rested solemnly, thick enough on first glance to seem like a stack of individual books. I sat on the sofa for several minutes, my back and wrists and stomach and head all competing for my attention, like patients crowding a doctor late for his morning appointments, and I wanted a cigarette and drink and muscle relaxant, which is to say I wanted clarity, but a look around the room revealed nothing that could provide it.
“Not a reader?” The door shut behind a matronly woman in her midfifties wearing a feminine version of the navy blue tunic that seemed to be the uniform. Her hair was short and layered and gray, as thick as sheep’s wool, and she wore a pair of silver-colored feather earrings. Touching her nose with a tissue and then tucking it into her sleeve, she said, “My name is Ms. Anderson, and I’m director of this PASE Wellness Center. I’ve been watching you through the two-way mirror; you didn’t once flip open The Prescription.”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Yes you are.” She crossed the room to a shelf laid out with a pitcher of orange juice and a bowl of green and red fruit, from which she took two pears and handed me one. “I signed your involuntary admission papers when you came in. You were unconscious.”
“Someone shot me.”
“It was only a tranquilizer gun. Physically you’re fine, if a little weak. One of our resident physicians monitored your reaction to the drug and found it satisfactory; in fact your system was so suffused already with similar substances that he thought it shouldn’t have affected you at all.”
“That’s—Why was I shot and brought here?”
Although I spoke with a demanding, inquisitive tone, 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