hours since I’d been shot and kidnapped—full of disappointment and desire for pills and alcohol and tobacco, I wiped away two tears caught in my eyelashes and fought down a rumbling nausea.
Mr. and Mrs. Rubin explained that this Wellness Center, a mere three miles from the San Francisco PASE Station, had been built eight years earlier based on a blueprint drawn up by Montgomery Shoale and provided through revelation by UR God. The first of its kind, it provided the model for the other Wellness Centers subsequently established in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York, as well as for those planned in or near Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Tangiers, Marseilles, Utrecht, Riga, Seoul, and Sidney. Mrs. Rubin punched something into a laptop computer and a montage of photos blanketed the wall behind her showing the various stages of each new Center’s completion. Like the Daly City original, they were all set on four acres and would, when completed, have an outdoor park with a botanical garden, a meditation post, two residential dormitories (one for men and one for women), an education building (Celestial Commons), a screening facility (Prescription Palace), a hospital (Freedom Place), a library and administration building (Shoale Hall), a recreation building, a dining hall, and a church (Synergy Station). They would all house forty guests at a time, an even number of men and women, whose activities would be fully integrated.
Although the architecture varied slightly from one Center to another, as did the flowers in the botanical garden and the food served in the dining halls to reflect local produce and culinary traditions, life would follow a set schedule at all of them: 6 A.M. wake up. 6:30 A.M. exercises. 7:15 A.M. breakfast. 8 A.M. reading/studying. 10 A.M. counseling. 12 P.M. lunch. 1 P.M. class. 3:30 P.M. individual research. 4:30 P.M. recreation. 6 P.M. dinner. 7:30 P.M. all-guest activity. 10 P.M. lights-out. On Sundays there was a thirty-minute Synergy session at 7 P.M.
And what exactly was the purpose of a Wellness Center? What did Montgomery Shoale hope it would accomplish? Although in practice its functions and benefits were too many to count, it was designed to speed along neophytes’ and longtime Pasers’ journey toward permanent synergy with UR God, the fusion of everyone into His vast being and thus the end of human strife on Earth. Shoale’s goal was our own. He personally interviewed all the doctors and staff, who then underwent a rigorous training program and six-month probation period before being brought to work at a Center full-time. He kept in close contact with all the individual directors and monitored the progress of their operations worldwide.
In addition to treating the normal range of behaviors that had to be modified and/or eliminated—sexuality, rage, material greed, television, Internet abuse, etc.—the Center was equipped to help people with problems involving addiction, extreme emotional imbalance, and psychiatric disorders. According to its strictly refined physical and spiritual practices, it helped these unfortunate guests using a holistic approach to mind and body and soul wellness taken from The Prescription, which, in its wisdom, recognized that while everyone needed to improve, some were, at the time they reached adolescence or adulthood, at such a deficit that they required extreme and immediate preimprovement treatment. For example, the Center’s hospital included a Seclusion Ward that provided twenty-four-hour care for sufferers from drug withdrawal, during which the guests’ isolation was leavened by audio recordings of Montgomery Shoale lectures, as well as by frequent use of a Synergy device and special stretching techniques favored by UR God and interpreted by Mr. Shoale. PASE enjoyed a hundred percent success rate in curing heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine addiction, as it did with freeing guests of anger, violent tendencies, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, generalized anxiety, misanthropy, boredom, acute narcissism, and—
“What are you doing, Mr. Smith?” Mr. Rubin asked, cutting off his wife’s speech.
I’d gotten up from my seat and walked to a window overlooking the courtyard. “Just checking something.” As when I’d crossed it earlier, there were no policemen or FBI agents visible, though I told myself that they could be talking to Ms. Anderson or some other administration figure, trying to ascertain where I was being kept, on the verge of taking the noncooperative Pasers into custody and beginning an exhaustive hunt around the premises for me. I looked for a latch or lever with which to open the window—thinking I would scream out for help and catch the attention of either the law or someone passing by on the other side of the Center wall—but it was sealed shut.
I heard Mr. Rubin take a few steps toward me and then stop. “During instructional sessions like this one, there is a basic protocol for being excused from your seat to go to the bathroom or attend to another Center-approved activity. Please sit back down and I’ll explain it to you.”
“I’d rather stand here, if you don’t mind.”
Mrs. Rubin said, “We do. We mind very much.”
A door opened in the building across the courtyard and two men emerged, one of whom wasn’t wearing a blue tunic. I tried to make out whether he had a metallic badge on his breast or walked as officiously as someone in the intelligence community, but at that distance I couldn’t tell.
“We really must insist,” said Mr. Rubin. “Please don’t make this difficult for us and yourself.”
The two men walked in my direction and disappeared under the foliage of a pair of eucalyptus trees shooting up like twin geysers in the middle of the courtyard.
“Go on with what you were saying,” I said, waiting for the non-tunic man to come back into view, when he would be close enough for me to make out his clothing and features. But then four meaty hands gripped my arms, turned me around, and roughly pulled me back to my seat. My escorts withdrew from the room after nodding tersely to Mrs. Rubin, who bit her lower lip and looked at me pityingly.
I stared with dull hatred at the Rubins, who said that they would now go over the basic rules of conduct so that such disciplinary measures wouldn’t be necessary again. Anarchy did not reign at the PASE Wellness Center. Some actions were forbidden and others encouraged. In the first category, we were not allowed to leave the Center or receive visitors without permission. Television, books, and the Internet were okay with some built-in restrictions, for which reason certain programs and periodicals and websites were blocked or made inaccessible. We could not drink alcohol, take non-prescribed drugs, or engage in any sexual activity, including with ourselves. Profanity was prohibited, as was licentious talk and any attempt to leave the Center grounds before the facilitators deemed it appropriate. Disputes between guests were to be taken to a facilitator and should not involve violence or violent intent.
I thought I heard footsteps in the hall outside but it was just my teeth grinding.
Mr. and Mrs. Rubin knew that these restrictions sounded harsh. No one liked to be told they couldn’t do something. But Montgomery Shoale had devised them for our health and safety; otherwise our improvement would be no more possible than rain without clouds. Much was asked of guests at the Center, and in return much was given. We were worthy, infinitely capable people, for we came from UR God and would be with Him again someday. We had to bear in mind that reaching this destination was the most difficult, rewarding journey we would ever undertake.
“Did you say there’s going to be Synergy tonight?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Rubin.
“What is Synergy?” asked Shang-lee.
“So today is Sunday?”
“Synergy,” said Mrs. Rubin, while smoothing out a kerchief she’d held bunched in her left hand, “is the feeling of being fused into UR God.”
Mr. Rubin added, “It can be had on this planet in one of two ways. The first is with a Synergy device, which is like a big gyroscope that you stand in with electrodes connected to your temples. Synergy is, you’ll find, the most wonderful feeling imaginable, and when you become an ur-savant it is the only one you will ever experience again.”
“Sunday the nineteenth?” I said.
Mr. Rubin nodded and I leaned over and tried to throw up. I had been shot on Friday the seventeenth, meaning I had been unconscious for an entire day, meaning any immediate attempt to rescue me from the Wellness Center would already have ended. There was no cavalry on the