email in question. Also, the Danforth file I opened was not the one I’d worked on for eight hours. The date and time of its last modification was Monday afternoon, when Philippe had given it to me.
“We broke up again,” said Max, shutting off his phone.
“My Danforth file has been replaced with an older version,” I said.
“She thinks I hate her brother.”
“This is impossible.”
“Everybody hates him. She says other people just don’t understand him, and since I’ve spent so much time with her family I’m supposed to see past his unattractive qualities, but it’s precisely because I’ve been around him so much that I can’t stand him and don’t want him over for Seder.” He turned off his computer and desk lamp. “Come on, let’s go. We’re the last guys here.”
“I can’t redo Danforth today and go to a training seminar at the same time.”
“You have to go. You’re a man.”
“Mr. Raven wants the file by four.”
“Your absence would be noticed in a big way.”
Discreetly but unmistakably Max was referring to the conference in Chicago I had attended in January with my squadmates, one of whom, Juan, had used a company credit card for our six-thousand-dollar gentlemen’s club bill. Although he later called and finessed the charge down to a more realistic thirty-seven hundred dollars, and in spite of company policy not to reveal employee money matters, the story got out and the four of us were forced to give the Employee Conduct Board a lurid and damning account of our trip.
“Is Mr. Raven still here?”
“He left twenty minutes ago.”
“What about Mr. Grobalski?”
“Gone too.”
Max handed me my coat and I followed him out slowly.
It’s hard to say if I would have been more open to the seminar if Danforth hadn’t hung over me that morning. I knew I could be more sensitive—as much as the next man, certainly—but I was wary of the involvement of Prescription for a Superior Existence. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Beyond what was common knowledge, all I knew then about PASE was that its founder, Montgomery Shoale, a rich venture capitalist, had self-published The Prescription for a Superior Existence, a thousand-page book that introduced and explained the eponymous religion, nearly two decades ago, when it was widely considered a vanity project designed to lend depth and credibility to his company training seminars—he had built a reputation around the Bay Area for speaking about intra-office social cohesion and running more time-efficient meetings—until eventually PASE’s religious bona fides were established and the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a faith-based organization. When the Citadel, the flagship building of its Portrero Hill headquarters called the PASE Station, became the sixth-tallest structure in San Francisco, there was speculation that Shoale would go bankrupt, but instead he expanded the operation by building the Wellness Center, a four-acre campus in Daly City where people could study PASE intensively. Then he started the PASE Process, a charitable organization that infused money and crackerjack administrative staffs into underfunded soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and daycare centers in low-income areas of the city. It also gave grants to arts companies, medical research labs, and neighborhood development centers. At some point within the last couple of years a small but high-profile group of celebrities had begun talking in interviews about their conversion to PASE, and it had made international headlines the previous spring when the French government objected to its building a Wellness Center in Marseilles. That surprised me because I’d thought PASE was strictly a California phenomenon.
In general, though, I didn’t think about it. The West Coast gives birth to several religions annually, and although PASE had lasted longer and was better financed and more diversified than most, like them it seemed destined to struggle for a place on the country’s spiritual landscape before fading into the same horizon that had swallowed New Thought, the I AM movement, and hundreds of indigenous American faiths before it. If anything, it was at a disadvantage to the others because it condemned sex in every form; I couldn’t imagine it attracting more than a few thousand followers at any one time. Yes, PASE looked likely to burn through a dry distant swath of the population without threatening the green habitable land in which I lived.
Max and I pulled into a thirty-story parking garage at the Station and found a space sliced thin by two flanking armor-plated vans on the top floor. In the street-level lobby of the adjacent Citadel we joined our coworkers grazing on donuts and coffee, waiting for the seminar to begin. Max stopped to talk to someone and I went in search of the bathroom, along the way grabbing two maple bars and an apple strudel from the buffet table, which I ate crouched down in a stall. I returned to find Max with Dexter and Ravi at the orientation booth discussing the unemployment figures that had just been released and the crippling effect these would have on next quarter’s accounts retention.
“You guys seen Mr. Raven?” I asked.
Max pointed to a wall covered with pamphlets and book displays, beneath a giant video banner that said “Keep the PASE,” where Mr. Raven was talking to a member of the board of directors I’d only seen at weekend retreats and regional conferences. He was walking two fingers across his open palm as if to illustrate a story about someone running.
Deciding to wait for a more private moment to talk to him, I studied an orientation packet until the loudspeakers announced that the seminar was about to begin, whereupon we filed into a vast auditorium with sloped stadium seating that ringed an oval stage on which a thick wooden podium stood like a tree trunk. I sat between Max and Ravi and arranged my handheld devices on the pull-out desktop. Calibrated the personal light settings. Stretched and cracked my neck. Max ate a thick chocolate donut and held a cheese Danish in his lap.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You could have gotten your own.”
“I’ve quit eating sweets as part of my post-surgery diet.”
On the stage down below a man in a dark brown suit approached the podium and clipped a microphone to his tie just below the knot. Tapping it twice, he said, “Good morning. My name is Denver Stevens, and I’m the PASE corporate activities director. I’d like to begin today’s events by saying that although they are open to men of all faiths and creeds, our approach will use techniques and ideas developed in Prescription for a Superior Existence. This powerful spiritual system, parts of which will become familiar to you today, can help liberate you from the dangers of overintimacy at the workplace.”
There was so much work to do on Danforth in so little time. Either my computer and email programs had randomly and momentarily malfunctioned or someone had sabotaged them. If the latter, who would do it and why? No one personally benefited if the report was late. Our computer system’s firewall was the best in the industry. I had no enemies.
When Denver Stevens stopped talking and left the stage to respectful applause, the lights dimmed and people shifted around in their seats. I began to feel panicky, as though stuck in traffic going to the airport, and I might have snuck back to the office if at that moment a spotlight hadn’t interrupted the darkness to shine on a man climbing the steps to the stage. Like a wax figure, Montgomery Shoale too perfectly resembled images of him I’d seen in the media: short and barrel-chested, wearing a perfectly tailored suit, with a relaxed executive presence. Around the base of his bald skull a two-inch band of white hair angled down into a trim Viennese beard.
“Hello,” he said in a soft baritone that through the room’s space-age acoustics sounded everywhere at once. “We’re delighted to have you with us today. When your chief executive operator, Mr. Hofbrau, called me to arrange this seminar, I was saddened but not surprised to hear about recent events at Couvade, and I assured him that our primary concern here is with helping people—with helping you—more fully appreciate what it means to have a personal and a professional self, and how to improve in each until perfection is inevitable. As the great Russian doctor and