The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Hello again.” A good opening gambit, I felt. Precise but non-threatening.

  “Have we met?”

  “I’m the guy who runs Pieces of Mind. I’ll be honest, Natalie. When you bought that pricey Faerie Queene, I was so dazzled I lost the power of speech, and before I’d untied my tongue, you were out the door. At long last, I told myself. At long last—a kindred spirit!”

  “We’re not communicating.”

  “‘Her birth was of the womb of morning dew.’ It doesn’t get any better than that.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “I’ll wager that of all the people down by the river today, only you and I fully appreciate that astonishing moment when Duessa stands exposed as a filthy, scabby hag, not to mention Error showering the Red Cross Knight with her vomitus of books.”

  “I really love your store.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for The Faerie Queene.”

  “Come again?”

  “To tell you the truth, I think Spenser is the most pompous twit ever to molest the English language. Sorry. Really. Art is so subjective.”

  All my muscles contracted, a whole-body wince. “I see,” I mumbled. “So that’s how it is.”

  “I know the man has his partisans. He also has his virulent anti-Catholicism, his bigotry toward Saracens, his contempt for democracy, and his treacly notions of piety. Pieces of Mind is a great gift to our community. May I buy you a beer?”

  “If you can’t stand Spenser, why did you spend two hundred and fifty dollars on that Erlanger House edition?”

  “A college graduation present for my brother. Verbal filigree and ersatz medievalism never had a bigger fan. You and Jerry should get together. I’m serious about the beer.”

  “What sorts of books do you like?”

  “Lately I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction, looking into the impact of science on philosophy. I just finished a thing called Virtue from the Dirt. No, that’s not it. Ethics from the Earth, by somebody named Ambrose. I think he lives around here. Breathtaking book. Do you know it?”

  TWO DAYS LATER NATALIE MOVED out of her cramped, cluttered, second-floor apartment on Cummington Street and into my cramped, cluttered, third-floor apartment on Sherborn Street, and we joyfully set about our objective of living happily ever after. For the better part of a year, our relationship flourished. Having previously transformed Londa into the restless and obsessive Dame Quixote, I had no ambition to make any woman, vatling or otherwise, into a putatively better version of herself, and I willingly endured Natalie’s habits of scrawling illegible messages on the kitchen calendar and stashing unpaid bills in her handbag. Natalie, for her part, announced that she would not battle my various defects—my illiterate understanding of laundry, my tendency to deface the bathroom sink with blobs of toothpaste—until I was her eager and unresentful ally. In short, we allowed one another to be terrible roommates, a forbearance that doubtless figured crucially in our becoming great friends.

  But there was a serpent in the garden, a worm in the apple of our idyll. Natalie’s symptoms were not particularly disturbing in and of themselves—intermittent pelvic pains, numbness in her legs and feet—yet in this case they pointed to a serious condition: blood clots. Once the diagnosis was confirmed, we listened in dismay as a team of specialists argued not only for putting her on a regimen of Coumadin injections but also for equipping her circulatory system with plastic screens designed to trap errant embolisms before they could lodge in her lungs. This plenary approach was no cure, as clots could easily form upstream from the Greenfield filters. It was better than doing nothing, however, and so despite her chariness toward orthodox medicine, Natalie submitted to the technique. There were no complications, and within a few weeks she was back at work, reciting Tennyson in full throat as the waters of the Charles lapped against the shore. Truth be told, she handled the situation much better than I, for whom this sword of Damocles seemed especially heavy, its thread singularly thin. Many were the nights I trolled cyberspace searching out the latest sonic, surgical, and pharmaceutical approaches to blood clots—once I even visited the Web site of Londa’s avant-garde Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations—but I failed to unearth any breakthroughs.

  Among the consequences of Natalie’s quasi-Luddite worldview was a commitment to what she called “pagan birth control,” which boiled down to a combination of fertility charts, herbal contraceptives, and wishful thinking. I was skeptical but willing to gamble, especially since for Natalie the natural correlate of pagan birth control was pagan lovemaking. Under cover of night, we shed our garments in woods and dells. We connected in sacred spaces, calling each a Bower of Bliss—for a couple of anti-Spenserians, we were peculiarly ready to appropriate his diction—most memorably the shallows of Walden Pond, the stacks of Widener Library, and those cryptic New Hampshire megaliths known as America’s Stonehenge.

  Despite our prophylactic intentions, we soon learned that one likely outcome of conjoining pagan birth control to pagan lovemaking is a pagan pregnancy.

  “I knew this was going to happen!” I wailed when Natalie told me the news. “I goddamn fucking knew it!”

  “No birth control method is foolproof,” she said.

  “We didn’t practice birth control. We practiced druid superstition.”

  “This is not your finest hour, Mason. You’re behaving abominably.”

  “I’m behaving abominably,” I agreed, and then I continued behaving abominably for the rest of the afternoon, accusing Natalie of “self-delusion masquerading as shamanism” and “flakiness posturing as subversion.” Natalie, to her credit, accepted delivery on none of these indictments. By sundown we were calm again, assuming demeanors more appropriate to our circumstances: two civilized adults facing questions for which neither civilization nor adulthood furnished palatable answers.

  As any good Darwinist will tell you, ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny. In noting the transient gill slits of a developing human fetus, one must avoid the temptation to regard the creature as an adult fish. And yet, as that same good Darwinist will tell you, there is something astonishing about a fetus’s gills, an intimation of the epic through which algae became Aristotle and the cucumber turned into you, for these wispy slits resoundingly echo the corresponding features in an embryonic fish. And so it happened that as Natalie’s pregnancy progressed, I found myself wondering whether the mite in her womb had yet embraced its piscean ancestry, and when it might take title to its reptilian estate. As long as the thing had not claimed its mammalian heritage, I would endorse whatever decision Natalie made.

  Over the next three weeks, we consulted a quartet of health professionals, and they were unanimous in their view that Natalie’s pregnancy would aggravate the propensity of her blood to form rogue clots. “The danger is serious but not grave,” said Dr. Millard, her primary-care physician, a remark that struck us as a distinction without a difference. The gynecologist was equally unhelpful. “If you elect to bring the fetus to term,” Dr. Harris told Natalie, “I’ll do everything possible to keep you out of the danger zone.” Hematologist number one, Dr. Protter, offered a more upbeat verdict—“Although I can’t make any promises, this impresses me as a low-level risk”—but her optimism was canceled by the unequivocal gloom of hematologist number two. “In your shoes,” Dr. Shumkas informed us, “I would terminate the pregnancy.”

  The human mind, I learned that month, had not yet evolved sufficiently to wrap itself around this sort of issue. My thoughts were a stroboscopic muddle of flashes and voids, every second burst showing me a vignette from the life of my provisional son, my hypothetical daughter, a Donya Sabacthani sort of childhood, abrim with tree houses and toy planetariums, but it was the interlaced images, the glimpses of mourners and pallbearers, that stayed with me. Two days after our consultation with Dr. Shumkas, I told Natalie I thought she should get an abortion.

  “I don’t want an abortion.”

 
“You want a baby, then?”

  “Not that either.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want the pregnancy to go away.”

  At the end of the week, we drove to Mass General and withdrew our contribution to posterity. It was the simplest of procedures, a routine outpatient dilation and curettage. My root canal had been more complicated. We decided not to ask about the gender of the extinguished fetus. On the way out of the hospital, we stopped by the pharmacy and obtained the prescribed antibiotics. We went home, split a bottle of Chianti, and crawled beneath the blankets, sobbing in each other’s arms.

  I awoke near dawn with a foul, metallic taste in my mouth, as if I’d been licking a spigot. Leaning toward my drowsy friend, I kissed the nape of her neck. I shuffled to the bathroom, appeased my bladder, and, upon returning to bed, endured a long and distressing Isla de Sangre dream. I was snorkeling in the Bahía de Flores, gliding above a clamshell the size of a hatbox, which suddenly opened to reveal, besides the expected clam, a sodden copy of The Book of Londa. Applying some amorphous appendage, the clam turned back the cover, whereupon I read, “My mother conceived me, my godfather gestated me, my sisters nourished me, but it was Mason who made me the monster I am.”

  IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING her D and C, Natalie grew increasingly sad, until it seemed she was in thrall to that wan and manipulative troglodyte from Book One, Canto IX, whom Spenser had with characteristic subtlety named Despair. Nothing helped. When I recommended that we get a cat, she reminded me about her allergies. When I proposed that we fly to the Bahamas for the weekend, she pointed to a stack of ungraded papers. When I suggested she might be a candidate for Prozac, she accused me of wanting her to be “somebody else, anybody else, so long as she isn’t Natalie Novak.” We had sex infrequently and indifferently, keeping further embryos at bay with condoms. Neither of us was surprised when I reverted to my old habit of staying in the store after hours, Mason the Gutenberg ascetic, the hermeneutical hermit, immured by other people’s wisdom.

  With our romance withering, our affection wilting, and our rapport a thing of the past, we did what any rational couple would do under the circumstances. We got married. The ceremony occurred at the home of Natalie’s geeky medievalist brother, Jerry. We decided that no depressing people could attend, which ruled out our parents and most of our relatives. Besides Jerry, our audience was limited to Dexter Padula, my sister Delia—then in the process of transplanting her nonexistent acting career from New York to L.A.—and three of Natalie’s friends: willowy Helen Vanderbilt, who’d recently published three chapbooks of unpublishable poetry, zaftig Margery Kaplan, who’d gone to high school with Natalie and now raised basset hounds, and a lantern-jawed Henry James scholar named Abner Cassidy, Natalie’s former lover and present adviser, to whom I took an instant liking despite his carnal knowledge of my bride.

  “I am grateful to thee, Archimago,” she told me on our wedding night, Archimago being our favorite Faerie Queene character, a protean magician deployed by Spenser to symbolize, variously, hypocrisy, Satan, and the pope. “Not every man would put up with a melancholic Emily Brontë freak who can’t finish her dissertation.”

  “If ’twould please thee, Malecasta, I would fly to the moon and paint it the color of thine eyes,” I replied, Malecasta being the mistress of Castle Joyous, the sensualist’s paradise, a magnet for every letch and satyr in Faerie Land.

  To consolidate her rising spirits, Natalie began following a regimen that, while it sounded like something out of a particularly vapid self-help book, actually seemed to work. I couldn’t say whether her deliverance from Despair—“his raw-bone cheeks, through penury and pine, were shrunk into his jaws, as he did never dine”—traced to her nightly doses of St. John’s wort, her twenty daily laps in the YMCA pool, the Tuesday-night fiction-reading group she’d organized at the Caffeine Fiend, my jovial willingness to be the butt of her jokes, or a combination of all four remedies. In any event the ogre loosened his grip and slunk back to his lair, a place “dark, doleful, dreary like a greedy grave that still for carrion carcasses doth crave.”

  It was not long after Natalie’s recovery that, courtesy of our subscription to the Boston Globe, Londa’s name and photograph began appearing routinely in our lives. During that era, of course, hardly a week went by without a Dame Quixote story seeing print, but this was front-page stuff—the revelation by the Reverend Enoch Anthem, founder and chairman of a postrationalist think tank called the Center for Stable Families, of an outrageous scheme hatching in that bastion of degenerate feminism, Themisopolis. Somehow Anthem had obtained an audio recording of a meeting between Londa’s staff and the vice president of the Baudrillard Simulacrum Corporation, a Toulouse-based manufacturer of Disneyesque audio-animatronic robots. When the FBI decided that Reverend Anthem’s case against Londa was fundamentally preposterous, he took his complaint to the Washington Post, whereupon the tale proliferated like a bacterial culture, flourishing coast-to-coast in a thousand cybernetic petri dishes.

  If Anthem’s account of Baudrillard recording could be believed, many ideas were entertained on that sweltering August afternoon, from the clever to the harebrained. In one particularly wild scenario, an enormous robotic replica of Abraham Lincoln, scaled to the ponderous proportions of the famous D.C. sculpture, would appear on the Capitol steps, screaming a challenge to the assembled representatives. “Does any man amongst you cleave to an ideal higher than his own reelection? Who will tell me of the time he favored the demands of his conscience whilst resisting the tyranny of his constituents?” An equally outlandish project had the Sisters Sabacthani smuggling some simian androids into the Primate House of the Washington Zoological Gardens. The next day’s visitors would witness the New World monkeys lamenting the destruction of their relatives’ jungle habitats, a crime readily traceable to American fast-food corporations bent on creating new grazing lands for beef cattle. But it was Operation Redneck, the most demented of the afternoon’s brainstorms, that caught Enoch Anthem’s attention. The plan called for the Baudrillard people to construct a score of android joggers indistinguishable from their flesh-and-blood prototypes, each decked out in a T-shirt endorsing reproductive rights, gay marriage, evolutionary biology, or some other institution of which Jesus Christ disapproved. Sooner or later a reactionary motorist, intoxicated by beer or piety or both, would run down one of these benighted athletes, a gesture that the motorist would not live to regret, for the robots were in fact ambulatory bombs, wired to explode on impact.

  A lardish man whose small head, bulbous frame, and anxious demeanor put me in mind of a bowling pin about to topple, Enoch Anthem spent the next three weeks attacking Operation Redneck through mass mailings, saturation blogging, and dozens of appearances on what Natalie called the “revengelical” networks. He accused Londa of concocting “a terrorist plot worthy of those who crucified our Lord,” and, by the pollsters’ reckoning, a majority of Americans agreed. The image of even the sleaziest yahoo being blown sky-high by a leftist French C-3PO did not sit well with Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public.

  Ever since Natalie had gotten me to admit that appreciable levels of sexual tension had characterized the classroom climate back on Isla de Sangre, she’d been vaguely jealous of Londa. But, like almost every feminist in the Western world, Natalie also admired Dame Quixote, and she urged me to proclaim publicly that my former pupil would never implement anything so rash as Operation Redneck. I was within hours of phoning the New York Times when Pauline Chilton, that canny spinmistress, announced that Dr. Sabacthani would be holding a press conference “for the purpose of answering Reverend Anthem’s absurd accusations.” Once again, it seemed, Isis and Horus and Thoth had come to my rescue. For the immediate future, at least, I would be permitted to remain outside Londa’s sphere.

  Over a hundred journalists attended the event, which Natalie and I watched on television while consuming gourmet microwave pizza. Londa acquitted herself brilliantly, using the occasion not only to assail Enoch A
nthem as “a man who wouldn’t recognize a joke if it walked into his house with a duck on its head” but also to remind her fellow Americans that “the Themisopolis community has an impeccable record of eschewing violence in all its forms, which puts us one up on the Center for Stable Families.” Before the week was out, the polls disclosed that Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public had forgiven Dame Quixote her offensive fantasies.

  “Londa was wrong about one thing,” I told Natalie. “Operation Redneck was pure whimsy, but there really is an ambulatory bomb inside the walls of Themisopolis.”

  Natalie had heard me question Londa’s sanity before, but she’d never found my arguments persuasive. “How long till she detonates?”

  “I’ll give her three years at the most.”

  “Hey, Archimago, want to hear something you don’t want to hear? Okay, sure, you’re the Dame Quixote expert around here, and I’ll admit it’s possible she’s riding for a fall. But I can’t help wondering whether, deep down, you believe that fighting the good fight against clowns like Anthem is a man’s job.”

  “She snuffed a candle with her palm. She stuck a thorn under her thumbnail.”

  “An interesting person, no doubt about it. If you ever see her again, I want her autograph.”

  ON THE EVENING OF OUR FIRST wedding anniversary, I came home bearing a dozen roses, presenting them to a startled Natalie with a theatrical flourish and a facetious remark about the care and feeding of the Japanese beetles inhabiting the bouquet. Our eyes met. Natalie was ravishing even when pained and embarrassed.