The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “I asked him to imagine that Savage Rabbit had become an overnight sensation,” she told me. “Would he be willing to give his newfound fortune to the poor, after which we’d run off together and start an AIDS hospice in Nigeria? You’ll never guess what he said. He said that if he kept his money, we’d find it a lot easier to start an AIDS hospice in Nigeria.”

  “I can follow his logic.”

  “Then I told him to imagine he’d turned Savage Rabbit into a success only by making enemies. Might he see his way clear to loving those enemies instead of hating them?”

  “A provocative question,” I said, suppressing a smirk. “What did he say?”

  “He said I was getting on his nerves, and he didn’t know how he felt about me anymore, and then he confessed he was thinking of dating Brittany, which I said was fine by me, but I would appreciate it if he didn’t fuck her in the same places we’d used, and he said he would fuck her wherever he felt like, and then we got into a big fight, and then we broke up.”

  “I’m sorry, Londa.”

  “Don’t be. He’s really a very immature person.”

  At Londa’s request we spent the rest of the morning talking about Jesus’s cryptic concept of the Kingdom, and whether it was earthly or ethereal, but my thoughts kept drifting to the schism between Londa and Gavin. This was probably not the first time the Sermon on the Mount had wrecked an adolescent romance, but I was disturbed by the vehemence with which she’d forced the issue. Love me, love my Beatitudes. The Crimson Kantian had much to answer for, but this new version of Londa, this belle dame avec trop de merci, this Purple Pietist, was hardly an improvement. The sooner we left first-century Judea, fleeing across the Mediterranean like the Trois Maries of Provençal legend, the better.

  FOR THE REST OF THE SUMMER, Londa and Gavin engaged in an elaborate dance of mutual avoidance, until it came time for our youthful roustabouts to scramble aboard their vessels and go home. The kids had acquitted themselves well. A sturdy sandstone wall now encircled the patio, a magnificent new dock jutted into the Bahía de Flores, the Dewey decimal system had wrought its rationality upon our previously chaotic library, and the manor gardens boasted a vitality that would have sent Edwina’s beloved Swinburne retreating pell-mell into his gaunt and glamorous wasteland. Being a romantic at heart, I imagined a last-minute rapprochement between Londa and Gavin, but when I asked her about his departure, she reported, with magisterial indifference, that he’d sailed off without saying good-bye.

  As September came to Isla de Sangre, Londa and I took a much-needed imaginary cruise to the Galápagos Islands and thence into the luminous heart of Darwinism. Just as I’d hoped, the core chapters of my Ethics, with their argument that a universal and robust morality lay dormant within the theory of natural selection, seemed to bring Londa to her senses. Whenever we talked about our planet’s vast ecological tapestry with its innumerable species pursuing their interconnected existences, and how the Phyllistine megamachine with its insatiable appetite for forests and wetlands and other fragile habitats—Gittikac’s Getaway Apocalypse—was tearing that tapestry to pieces, she would occasionally spice the conversation with a Beatitude or two. But she had evidently abandoned, or at least postponed, her ambition to supervise the Second Coming of Christianity. Just as the Crimson Kantian had deferred to the Purple Pietist, so was the Purple Pietist now yielding to a thoughtful and humble Scarlet Darwinist.

  “I think I’m almost cured,” she told me. “I feel like a lizard who’s had his tail cut off, and now the thing’s growing back. I’m ashamed of the person I used to be. Setting fires. Killing fish. The old Londa makes me want to puke.”

  “We’re all ashamed of the person we used to be,” I said.

  As for Donya and Yolly, their tutors were convinced that both girls had finally conquered the void to which their ontogenerated flesh was heir. For a while Henry and Brock considered celebrating Donya’s breakthrough by giving her some objective correlative of a conscience, a statuette of a Kindness Crusader, perhaps, or a heart-shaped clock like the one Professor Marvel awarded the Tin Man. Jordan likewise imagined presenting her pupil with a trophy, and Brock, our resident artist, soon hit upon a concept we liked: a Lucite slab in which was suspended a shiny blue sphere representing the human soul. But in the end my colleagues decided that any such material prize would trivialize their students’ accomplishment.

  Despite our apparent success in providing each Sister Sabacthani with a moral compass, Jordan argued that we still had work to do. In her view we were now obliged to give our charges what educators of her epistemological persuasion called “conceptual artifacts,” so that the ultimate fruit of the girls’ DUNCE cap programming and subsequent consumption of book after book after book would be “minds enlivened by knowledge, as opposed to brains anesthetized by data.” Her pitch made sense to the rest of us, and so we all set about enriching the Hubris Academy curriculum. Our lesson plans boasted a theatricality that I believe fell short of gimmickry. To give Donya an experience in cartography, Brock buried a box filled with costume jewelry behind Casa de los Huesos, drew a pirate map on a crumpled sheet of coffee-stained paper, and cheered his pupil on as she moved, chart in one hand, spade in the other, from the patio to an oleander bush to a garden gnome and finally to the rock beneath which the treasure lay. To introduce a unit on astronomy, Jordan had Yolly study the night sky, thread the stars into novel constellations, and then invent her own myths accounting for these sparkling beasts and glimmering gods. To help Londa grasp the poetry of mathematics, I invited her to recapitulate the steps, so elegant, so exquisite, by which Euclid had proved the Pythagorean theorem.

  “He didn’t need algebra at all,” I noted as we bent over my diagrams. “Look, he brings it off entirely with geometry. His stroke of genius was to frame the right triangle with three perfect squares, so that the proof becomes a matter of—”

  “A matter of showing that the big square is the same size as the two smaller squares combined!”

  “Shazam!”

  So Hubris Academy was a lively place, with nearly every lesson occasioning an intellectual epiphany, a eureka moment, a flash of rational revelation. We were all taken aback, therefore, when a strange malaise descended upon the Sisters Sabacthani, a condition that had them nodding off in class and moving about the island with the lethargic gait of deep-sea divers shuffling along the ocean floor. By monitoring the girls’ sleeping habits, we soon cleared up the mystery. In the middle of the night, Londa would rise from her bed, wander down to the Bahía de Flores, and spend hours staring at the rollers as they crashed against the rocks. Yolly’s nocturnal anxiety prompted her to saddle up Oyster and go galloping through the surf like a banshee making a house call. Even little Donya’s nights were plagued. At the godforsaken hour of 4:00 A.M., she would come suddenly awake, possessed by a phantasm, thrashing and writhing and tearing the sheets until she broke free of its clawed and scaly clutches.

  Upon learning of her daughters’ insomnia, Edwina decided to give Yolly and Londa sleeping remedies from her personal store, a therapy that proved generally effective, though Jordan complained that Edwina was treating the symptoms and not the cause. The Übermom’s approach to Donya’s disquiet was less mechanistic. She installed an extra bed in the child’s room, so that at the earliest sign of distress, whoever was on duty—Henry, Brock, Chen Lee, Edwina herself—could hug Donya reassuringly and tell her, over and over, that she wasn’t really sinking in quicksand or fleeing from hornets or climbing the branches of a burning tree.

  In theorizing about the children’s demons, Brock seized upon Henry’s remark of the previous summer—“And so they pass their days in solitude, waiting for each other”—and speculated that each girl had somehow intuited the existence of her doppelgängers. These nebulous presences, these intimations of a second self, and a third self after that, were haunting our charges night and day. My own theory was that Geworfenheit had started catching up with the girls. Their thrownness was sending them o
ver the edge. The least elaborate and, as it turned out, most accurate explanation came from Jordan, who noted that Edwina’s failing health was no longer something she could hide. Her death was now encoded all over her body, and the children had deciphered the woeful text.

  Oddly enough, it was little Donya who first put her fear into words, taking Henry and Brock aside and describing her mother’s skin, whose mottled brown surface she compared to the peel of an overripe banana. Her tutors told her the analogy was astute, but they said no more. Yolly spoke up next, mentioning with feigned casualness that Edwina seemed to have difficulty drawing her next breath. Jordan admitted that she’d observed the same phenomenon. Only Londa remained silent concerning her mother’s symptoms, exhibiting instead a preoccupation with death in the abstract. This development would not have surprised Heidegger. The more clearly the Dasein recognizes its thrownness, the more intense the encounter with nothingness.

  “Which alternative is worse, I wonder?” she said. “To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?”

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “It’s ambiguous.”

  “If I ever get to be God,” she said, unleashing the grin of the person who’d invented Largesse, “my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.”

  Much to the faculty’s dismay, Edwina declined to be honest with her daughters, answering with weasel words and outright lies their questions about her blotchy skin, sunken eyes, and chronic exhaustion. Usually she told the girls she looked haggard merely because she’d been working too hard. Sometimes she mentioned an experimental drug guaranteed to restore her vitality. I could not exactly accuse Edwina of being in denial: privately she still spoke freely of her disease, noble Nefer baring her breast to Sinuhe. But by leaving to us the task of preparing the children for her death, she confirmed my suspicion that this whole byzantine scenario, with its interlaced deceptions and impacted mendacity, was being performed solely to appease her voracious egotism, and the children’s ultimate welfare be damned.

  “My mother’s dying, isn’t she?” Londa said abruptly as we sat down to discuss social Darwinism, Mengelism, and other dark chapters in the Galápagos revolution. “Tell me the truth.”

  “She’s dying. Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “I knew it. Fuck. Will she die soon?”

  I squeezed her hand between my palms. “Sooner rather than later. I’m so sorry.”

  “When I was in love with Gavin, I used to have horrible dreams.” With her free hand Londa wiped away her tears. “Once we went swimming, and he drowned in the bay. Another time Alonso shot him with his musket, and the next thing I knew, Gavin was lying in a coffin.” Approaching the conquistador, she grasped the hilt of his sword. “I crouched over him, trying to push his eyes open with one of his drumsticks, but they were frozen shut.” Abruptly she pulled the sword from its scabbard, sending a harsh clang through the air like the resonance of a diabolical tuning fork. She held the weapon upright, its blade corroded with rust and tinged with dubious battle. “I would say that my life is underpopulated, wouldn’t you? Gavin’s gone. My father’s gone. Mother’s dying. I’m not a happy person, Mason. You’ll always be my friend, won’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll learn how to use a sword,” she said, sheathing the weapon. “A woman should be ready to take the offensive at a moment’s notice.”

  Chapter 7

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, Edwina staged a birthday party for Donya at Casa de los Huesos. The child was now ostensibly seven. I didn’t doubt she’d been winched from the vat on that date, and giving her advent the name “birthday” was by no means the most dishonest game Edwina had ever played with the English language, but the whole affair still struck me as pathetic and false.

  All the guests brought gifts. Chen Lee gave Donya a pair of cuckoo clocks, suggesting that she mount them on opposite sides of her room, so that once an hour the birds would enter into a spirited conversation concerning the time of day. Dr. Charnock presented her with one of his biological contrivances, a colony of twelve sea horses from whose customized bodies sprouted delicate membranous wings. My own contribution was a new addition to Donya’s stuffed-animal collection, Septimus Squid, whom I’d crafted from odds and ends found around Faustino—a silk pillow for the body, discarded vacuum-cleaner hoses for the tentacles, tennis balls for the eyes. But the most extravagant offering came from Henry and Brock, the Stargazer Deluxe, a portable planetarium they’d obtained two months earlier during a trip to Orlando. You inflated the plastic dome with a bicycle pump, thereby creating a cavity large enough for the projector and several amateur astronomers. After everyone squeezed inside, you threw the switch, then watched in awe as dozens of constellations materialized on the walls.

  It may have been Donya’s party, but it was Edwina’s celebration. The Übermom was everywhere at once that afternoon, distributing conical hats and plastic noisemakers, supervising rounds of Pin the Horn on the Unicorn, leading the guests in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You,” and serving the chocolate cake she’d meticulously baked and frosted. From start to finish the event delighted Donya, though occasionally I saw her cast a worried eye on her mother’s forearms, the blue veins rising from Edwina’s skin like earthworms dispossessed by a rainstorm.

  In the name of physical fitness and metaphysical prowess—I was still taking every opportunity to weed my brain of its Aristotelian dandelions—I had jogged to Casa de los Huesos. But being bloated now with chocolate cake and cherry-vanilla ice cream, I was disinclined to repeat the regimen, and so I gladly accepted Charnock’s offer of a lift home in his Land Rover.

  “I would like your perspective on a philosophical problem,” he said as the villa’s silhouette receded in the rearview mirror.

  “What sort of philosophical problem?” I asked, cringing. While I was always eager to dally with Lady Philosophy, Charnock was among the last people with whom I could imagine having a substantive discussion about Plato’s cave or Heidegger’s abyss.

  “Ethical.”

  My cringe entered the realm of contortion. “I see.”

  “I’m impressed by how much you’ve helped Londa,” Charnock said. “Being the oldest of the three, she was doubtless the hardest to civilize.”

  “Civilizing her was a walk in the park. The challenge will be to decivilize her, so she can function in the real world.”

  A soft rain descended on the Land Rover and the surrounding scrub. Charnock activated the wipers, thus compounding the visibility problem by smearing grime across the windshield.

  “Am I a murderer, Ambrose?” he asked abruptly. “Do I have blood on my hands?”

  “I’m not following you,” I said, though in fact I was, his conversation with Edwina in the gazebo having alerted me to his protective attitude toward microscopic beings.

  At the press of a button, Charnock caused dual jets of cleaning fluid to intersect the path of the windshield wipers. Three strokes, and the glass was clean again.

  Among the steps required to satisfy Edwina’s “unfathomable passion,” he explained, “her unhealthy need to create iterations of herself,” was a technique he found repulsive. Yolly’s advent had entailed the sacrifice of forty-three embryos. Donya had come into the world at the cost of sixty-eight. Behind Londa lay ninety-seven canceled lives. “Every one of those creatures, placed in the RXL-313, would’ve become a person. Naturally we always had a reason for throwing it away. Spina bifida, dysfunctional heart, malformed kidneys. But in seven cases—I remember them all—in seven cases Edwina asked me to discard the thing merely because she didn’t feel right about it. ‘This one isn’t my daughter. This one won’t do.’”

  Absently I fiddled with the favor I’d borne away from Donya’s party, a noisemaker capped by a coiled paper tube. “I can hear Edwina saying that.”

  “So why did I obey her? I’m not sure. When it came to our mutant mangrove, I wouldn’t do the dirty work
—I made Edwina extract the cerebrum on her own—but with those embryos I lost my bearings. I dumped them into the Bahía de Matecumba and let the salt water destroy them.”

  The road from Casa de los Huesos now brought us to the soaring façade of the southwest wall, its spiky iron gate padlocked shut so that Donya’s life would never accidentally spill into Yolly’s. Charnock had the key, and thus we passed without incident into the principality of Torre de la Carne.

  “I’m afraid Western philosophy can’t answer your question,” I said. “Aristotle never told us what basket to put our eggs in. Is a zygote a human being, an insensate speck, or something else? For once in his life, he neglected to categorize something.”

  “I can feel the blood,” Charnock said. “Coagulating on my fingertips, crusting under my nails.”

  A mile beyond the gate, the road split, one branch running southeast toward the Spanish fortress, the other becoming the east-west gravel strip that Henry and I had encountered during our explorations. Had Charnock and I followed the lower fork, we might have seen Yolly—Yolly and her Chincoteague pony and her forty-three phantom sisters—but we logically took the alternative, heading for the wall demarking Londa’s domain with its ninety-seven ghostly blastocysts.

  “Western philosophy can’t help you,” I told Charnock, “but maybe I can. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. It’s all very well to become an antiabortion activist and spend every waking hour fetishizing fetuses, but those seven discarded embryos belong to a different class altogether.”

  “Let’s not call them fetishists,” he admonished me. “Let’s not stoop to caricature.”

  I blushed profusely, a crimson chagrin made even redder by my anger at Charnock. Yes, I’d maligned the embryophiles, unfairly for all I knew, but I hated being scolded about it by this creepy curmudgeon. “My point is that when most people speak of the rights of the unborn, they’re simply expressing a hope that every existing pregnancy will come to term. They don’t mean that all conceivable souls must immediately achieve Dasein. Otherwise their motto would be ‘Fuck now.’”