The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  When it came to the legal dimensions of her death, Edwina had obviously been willing to regard Yolonda as three distinct entities, for Fermoyle and Carrington began their presentation by noting that each girl had inherited her own billion-dollar trust fund. Moreover, by scrutinizing every twig and burl of the Sabacthani family tree, Edwina had located three blood relations willing to become the girls’ legal guardians, though in her prescience she’d also included a provision whereby we tutors might take custody of our charges. For Londa, Edwina had found a dullard first cousin whose life revolved around his marginally profitable Milwaukee hotel, for Yolly a dotty female second cousin who every Halloween turned her Baltimore mansion into a Poe-themed haunted house, for Donya a gifted great-aunt still employed as a cellist by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. I was not surprised when Henry and Brock announced their intention to adopt Donya, nor was I taken aback when Jordan said she would make Yolly her ward, for despite her protestations concerning motherhood and trapeze artists, it was obvious that Yolly’s advent had simultaneously diagnosed and treated a void in Jordan’s life. I myself did not address the guardianship issue that day, but the following morning I confided to Fermoyle that I’d be just as happy to let the Milwaukee hotel manager worry about Londa for a while, even as I admitted to myself that this decision was unlikely to free me of her sticky charisma.

  In the months following the funeral, the Sisters Sabacthani came remarkably close to fulfilling their mother’s dream of a unified Yolonda. They laughed together, cried together, ate, slept, gossiped, sang, danced, swam, sailed, windsurfed, flew kites, played croquet, built sand castles, and—once Jordan had imported a mare named Guinevere for Londa and a Welsh pony named Crackers for Donya—rode across the scrubland together. And of course they also drove one another batty, for only a sister has that special talent for breaking your last bottle of perfume, spilling grape juice on your best sweater, dropping your curling iron into a sink full of soapy water, losing your favorite Distressed Leather CD, borrowing your bicycle and then blowing out the tires, and cutting you to pieces by criticizing your taste in music or clothes or movies or anything.

  But such lapses were rare. On balance the children were companionable as littermates and compatible as Dumas’s musketeers, with Londa and Yolly entering into an amicable rivalry over who could be the better big sister. They nursed Donya through an episode of chicken pox and an encounter with a poison sumac plant, presented her with abridged versions of Londa’s colorful answers to Yolly’s incessant questions about sex, and despite their own sorrow ministered diligently to Donya’s grief, suggesting that she and Edwina might one day be reunited in some transcendent realm, though they declined to call it heaven, paradise, or any name implying geographic actuality.

  It was Jordan’s idea for the sisters to explore the upper reaches of Torre de la Carne, a domain that, prior to Edwina’s death, Yolly had been forbidden to visit as strictly as Bluebeard’s new bride had been barred from the room in which her pickled predecessors hung. Jordan invited the other tutors along, Charnock as well, and so we were a party of eight who ascended the tower that afternoon, following the spiral staircase ever upward.

  Stepping into the laboratory, I inhaled a gulp of mummified air and immediately began to cough. Dust covered everything—ontogenerator, control console, enzyme tanks, DUNCE cap—like a stratum of newly fallen snow. The spiders had been industrious in Edwina’s absence, so that the place suggested the atelier of an architect who was forever modeling avant-garde suspension bridges. Londa went instinctively to the great riveted sphere that had variously functioned as her placenta, bassinet, cradle, and playpen. She selected a porthole and peered inside, and soon Yolly and Donya did the same, so that the sisters formed a tableau evoking my favorite New England Aquarium poster: three children standing before a fish tank, faces aglow with curiosity, ichthyologists in the making.

  Charnock now improvised a lecture concerning the rarefied procedure by which he’d taken five hundred anonymous donor eggs, stripped away their DNA, and injected each hollowed-out oocyte with cumulus cells harvested from Edwina’s ovaries. A subtle electric jolt was sufficient to transform the majority of these chimerical zygotes into blastocysts, scores of which survived to become full-blown embryos. With consummate care Edwina and Charnock had nurtured each nascent life. In three particular cases, the experiment yielded auspicious specimens—the budding Londa, the blossoming Donya, the burgeoning Yolly—all of whom were allowed to enter fetushood. The biologist exuded an understandable pride while describing the hormone shots he’d given each sister shortly before her transfer to the RXL-313, explaining how these injections had interacted with the vat’s unprecedented enzymes to radically accelerate first Londa’s maturation, then Donya’s, and finally Yolly’s.

  Throughout Charnock’s lecture I studied the sisters’ faces, soon concluding that nobody was remotely interested in what he had to say, and I realized that if they were to truly comprehend their situation—their passionless conceptions, ultramarine infancies, lateral kinship with Edwina—they must spend some time alone in this place. When I suggested in a cheery but emphatic tone that “our young charges would probably like a few moments of privacy,” the girls all released spontaneous sighs of relief.

  Ten years later, when Londa and I were no longer tutor and pupil but partners in a considerably more convoluted relationship, she told me what had happened that afternoon once the adults left the laboratory. By fiddling with the knobs on the control console, the girls managed to flip back the hatch on the ontogenerator. Without a single word passing among them, they removed their clothing, climbed the exterior rungs, and, heedless of the amniotic residue clinging to the inside surfaces, descended into the chamber. The cool, sharp scent of the titanium was oddly soothing. Its hardness made their whispers resonate. For well over an hour, the girls huddled in the dark, talking and then not talking, fused like Siamese triplets, arms linked, hip pressing hip, until it was apparent that they’d made peace with the late Edwina Sabacthani in her many guises—mother, sister, progenitor, confidante, nemesis—and so they returned to the outside world, laughing and joking and eager for a swim in the Bahía de Matecumba.

  DOZENS OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES would have been pleased to count Londa among their first-year students, but she would consider only her mother’s alma mater. She intended to follow in Edwina’s footsteps, pursuing her undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins, obtaining a Ph.D. in molecular biology from that same institution, and subsequently joining the cutting edge of medical research. My vatling was determined to master all existing techniques—bone-marrow infusions, liver resections, domesticated retroviruses, artificial chromosomes—for delivering healthy genes to patients who’d drawn losing tickets in the great DNA sweepstakes, and then invent a few such vehicles as well. But unlike her mother, Londa assured me, she would never succumb to the allure of self-replication.

  Initially the Hopkins admissions committee raised a collective eyebrow at Londa’s inability to produce anything resembling a high-school transcript. They weren’t sure whether to believe her claim that she’d read her way through the largest private library in the Florida Keys, likewise her curious assertion that she’d received “a rigorous education in ontology from an independent scholar whose unpublished thesis, Ethics from the Earth, will one day set philosophy on its ear.” But then they noted her stratospheric SAT scores, her sterling performance on the biology and mathematics achievement tests, and her cashier’s check for one year’s tuition in advance, whereupon their skepticism evaporated like alcohol in a petri dish.

  It turned out that Yolly, too, would be leaving on Labor Day. Jordan had accepted a job running the Department of Human Development at Merrimack Academy, a tony private school in Haver-hill, Massachusetts, and she’d lost no time arranging for her ward to join the freshman class. One campus visit was enough to persuade Yolly that Merrimack would make her happy. It had an equestrian program, after all, including a stable that Oyster would li
kely find congenial, not to mention an orchestra, a state-of-the-art computer lab, a theater modeled on the Globe, and a low teacher-student ratio. When I first heard of Yolly’s imminent departure, my instincts told me she was making a mistake, for the middle Sister Sabacthani had thus far failed to concoct a convincing personal history, a plausible Book of Yolly, and I worried that the other Merrimack students, realizing they had a naïf in their midst, would torment her mercilessly. I presented my troubling prediction to Jordan, and against my expectations she managed to allay my fears with a single cogent remark.

  “Yolly’s practically my daughter, for Christ’s sake,” she told me. “I’ll be looking out for her twenty-four hours a day, which is a better deal than most kids get from their parents, teachers, or guardian angels.”

  As for Donya, both Henry and Brock wanted to continue educating her on the island, though they admitted to enjoying little objectivity in the matter, as neither could imagine a better place for pursuing his pet passion—in Henry’s case, a cycle of speculative scripts for Uncle Rumpus’s Magic Island, in Brock’s, a magnum opus: ten huge canvases that would ultimately form a 360-degree cyclorama of Isla de Sangre as refracted through his surrealist’s sensibility. It was Jordan who settled the question, arguing that several additional years of idyllic isolation would do Donya more good than harm. Sometime around her sixteenth birthday, she should be given the same choice as Yolly—another season in Eden, pumpkin, or a leap into the larger world?—but for now it made sense to cultivate her innocence.

  On the same day that Yolly received her acceptance letter from Merrimack, Javier informed me that Vincent Charnock, having completed his last experiment and removed his equipment from the Quonset-hut complex, was no longer in residence. Shortly after sunrise the father of ontogeneration had strolled down to the Bahía de Flores, boarded Captain López’s cabin cruiser, and left for Key West without telling a soul. I was hardly surprised. Charnock had gotten what he wanted from me—corroboration of his suspicion that philosophers couldn’t think straight about embryos—and he obviously had nothing more to say to the Sisters Sabacthani, no bits of avuncular wisdom, no nuggets of godfatherly advice.

  “Now that Edwina and Dr. Charnock are gone, I can do a forbidden thing,” Javier told me one night as we savored Cuba libres on my deck. “I speak now of our poor, miserable Proserpine.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re going to gobble down a dozen rococonuts and mud-wrestle an alligator.”

  Smiling, he sipped rum and shook his head. “I want to end her suffering. Edwina wouldn’t allow it—she always said Proserpine doesn’t feel anything—and Dr. Charnock, he was just as stubborn, but for different reasons. Whatever Proserpine’s quality of life, he said, we’ve got no right to commit euthanasia.”

  “So you’re going to uproot her?”

  “The tree will bless us for it.”

  Two days later, Javier gathered together Henry, Brock, Londa, and myself, fed us a hearty lunch of calamari stew in the Faustino dining hall, and guided us into the conservatory. We stripped Proserpine of her fruits. The harvest fit into two hundred king-size Ziploc bags, which we stored in the manor’s largest freezer. Having never experienced the unique inebriation afforded by mumquat nectar, Henry and Brock briefly considered sharing a rococonut, but they decided to abstain, knowing that the day’s task would require a clear head and steady hands.

  We returned to the conservatory and, after three hours of hard labor with picks and shovels, extracted Proserpine from her brackish habitat. As we carried the mangrove to the Quonset huts, her breathing became softer, her heartbeats slower, her trembling imperceptible. Charnock’s Faustino laboratory was even larger than his workshop atop Torre de la Carne, but Proserpine’s roots and branches still jammed the place to its corrugated walls. Under Londa’s direction we inserted the tubers in buckets of morphine and, once convinced that the tree was insensate, incised her trunk with a chain saw and got to work. Our efforts continued from midafternoon to dusk, until at last all traces of the biologists’ interventions were gone, every chunk of lung, scrap of heart, and curd of neural tissue.

  Shortly after dark we hauled the vegetable cadaver down to the beach, stopping near the site of Ralph Gittikac’s prodigal picnic. A full moon rose over the Bahía de Flores, painting the waters with streaks of such silvery beauty that they suggested some benevolent inverse of an oil spill—a slick of angel’s tears or dolphin’s milk. We filled the mangrove’s dredged trunk with kerosene, then set it on fire. For nearly an hour, the five of us stood on the shore, chatting idly as sparks swarmed around the flaming tree. Javier was the first to leave, saying he needed to work on his résumé. Henry and Brock departed next, explaining that Chen had done more than his share of baby-sitting that day.

  Dressed in ragged chinos and a white T-shirt, Londa looked exquisite by firelight. The flames bronzed her cheeks and burnished her brow. She told me that earlier in the week she and Yolly had brought Donya to this very spot. The three girls had baked clams and played Frisbee, and when the stars came out, they’d sprawled on the beach and wriggled their toes in the sand, “playing footsie with the planet,” while scanning the dome of heaven. Thanks to her Stargazer Deluxe, Donya had quickly identified Orion, the Pleiades, the Big Dipper, and a half dozen other constellations. Seeking to stimulate her youngest sister’s sense of wonder while expanding her other sister’s intellect, Londa had speculated aloud that the night sky was an illusion—a projected vista of bright bodies and black voids generated by an immense planetarium located on Platonia, an invisible world in orbit between Earth and Venus.

  “I trust your siblings were amused,” I said.

  She answered with characteristic Sabacthani solemnity. “They giggled idiotically. Humor was not my intention. I wanted them to imagine that Platonia and the Platonians really exist.”

  “Sisters can be so annoying.”

  “You call us sisters, which is more or less correct—but I’ll bet our teachers call us other things behind our backs. Be honest, Socrates. Are we kettle kittens? Chowder chicks? Bisque bitches?”

  “Vatlings, actually.”

  “Vatlings?” Londa laughed, pleased with herself. She’d smoked us out. “Very funny. What else?”

  “Beaker freaks, gumbo girls, and tureen queens.”

  “Any more?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “What?”

  “Bouillababies.”

  “And?”

  “And petri dolls and chamber maids. That’s all.”

  “I like gumbo girls best.”

  “Me, too.”

  She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her chinos. “Mr. Fermoyle tells me you don’t want to be my guardian.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “You stuck me with some chucklehead cousin. I don’t mind, really—not as long as you’ll keep on being my auxiliary conscience.” She gestured toward Sagittarius, as if signaling the centaur to release his arrow. “Hey, Mason, you want to hear something interesting about the Platonians’ projection? It isn’t just a sky map. It’s also a blueprint.”

  “A blueprint,” I echoed evenly.

  “A blueprint for a city.”

  “A city. Right.”

  “See how it shines? Streetlamps, lighted windows, mooring beacons for zeppelins—all glittering like Donya’s sea horses.”

  “I love those sea horses. They’re all I know of God.”

  “The Platonians fully intend to build it one day, a perfect city, a haven for the misbegotten.”

  “The misbegotten deserve no less,” I said dryly.

  “Once the Platonians get an idea in their heads, there’s no stopping them.”

  “Be careful, Londa. Even Jesus failed to bring heaven to earth.”

  “Jesus didn’t have a trust fund.” She lifted a stone from the beach and tossed it into the fire, breeding a new generation of sparks. “For a while I was committed to the name ‘Zeus City,’ in honor of the Stoic
s’ utopia, but then I decided ‘Themisopolis’ was a better choice, you know, after the goddess with the sword and the blindfold and the balance scales.”

  “I applaud your ambition.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “The last thing on my mind.”

  “Themisopolis, the City of Justice. And with the help of my auxiliary conscience, I’m going to make it happen.”

  “Your auxiliary conscience has other plans,” I said. True enough: I was planning to have nothing to do with Themisopolis.

  “You’ll miss all the fun,” she said.

  “Fun on a bun,” I said.

  A vibration passed through my bones, as if I were the late Proserpine enduring a vestigial fit. When Londa installed herself as monarch over her trust-fund utopia, which of her personae would be ascendant? Even if the benign Scarlet Darwinist proved dominant at first, the Crimson Kantian and the Purple Pietist would be lurking in the shadows, waiting to seize power.

  “Question, my dear,” I said. “What will happen when the Platonians switch off their planetarium?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The heavens will vanish, every last star, and then we’ll finally see what lies beyond. It promises to be impossibly magnificent and utterly incomprehensible.”

  “That’s the difference between you and me, dear. I don’t want to be there when the stars blink out.”

  “Whereas I would try to get a front-row seat.”