The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Dear Abby,” I said, “my wife forgot our wedding anniversary. Should I feel hurt by this role reversal, or should I laugh it off?”

  Seeking to break the grip of the Spenserian monster Error, Natalie forced a smile, squeezed my hand, and invited me to dine with her at the Tasty Triffid, our favorite vegetarian restaurant. I accepted graciously. We made pagan love on the couch, then went out to eat. I spent the soup course joking about a hypothetical restaurant for total carnivores, the Bleeding Carrot, its menu featuring zucchini-flavored sausage, chicken wings prepared to taste like broccoli, and ersatz cauliflower made from pork. My wife pretended to be amused. She owed me that.

  Later, standing on the front stoop while Natalie rummaged through her handbag searching for her keys, I realized I might have forgotten to lock the store safe: hardly a crisis—the chances of a break-in were low. Still, I felt compelled to check. I told Natalie I’d be back in time for another roll in the bower, then dashed off.

  My habitual pedestrian commute took me along an asphalt path girding the south bank of the Charles, a pleasant twenty-minute stroll past willow trees and park benches. By day this promenade teemed with joggers, bicyclers, mothers pushing strollers, and those good-hearted folk whom the ducks had conditioned to toss bread into the water, but by night it was normally deserted, despite secondhand illumination from the Storrow Drive streetlamps. Alone, I moved through the soft summer air, listening to the river lap the shore with the soft, rhythmic gurgling of Error suckling her progeny.

  My solitude did not last. Within minutes I became aware, subliminally at first, then with a disquieting certainty, of a stooped and sinister presence dogging my steps, flitting in and out of the shadows like an immense luna moth paying court to the moon. An asthma victim, evidently, every breath an effort. Doubtless Boston had its share of compulsive stalkers and after-dark psychos, but why had this wheezing Jack the Ripper picked me?

  Keep moving, Mason. Left foot, right foot, left, right. I patted my jacket pockets, hoping I’d brought the cell phone. No such luck. The nearest police station occupied a location known to several thousand Bostonians, and God, but not to me. In my spinning brain, a tactic materialized. If I sprinted to the store, I could probably put a locked door between Jack and myself in a matter of minutes.

  The stalker drew nearer, hyperventilating like an expectant mother practicing her Lamaze exercises. I broke into a run. Parked cars flew past, lighted windows, dark trees, malevolent Dumpsters. At last the store loomed up. The key vibrated in my hand. Somehow I jiggered it into the lock. Securing the door behind me, I fingered every switch within reach. The secular radiance of sodium vapor flowed forth. I drew a thick breath, my heart thumping in my rib cage as I wondered what to do next: call the cops, call Natalie, or arm myself with the clawhammer from the toolbox Dexter kept under the counter.

  The hammer seemed the best option, and I was about to grab it when Jack hobbled into view, his silhouette filling the doorframe, his voice effortlessly penetrating the bulletproof pane. “Keep the door shut,” he insisted, four clipped and staccato syllables. “When you let me in, it must be a free choice, no coercion, no threats.”

  “What do you want?”

  He ignored my question. “I’m completely serious,” he said. “A free choice.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Like that other free choice you made about me.”

  “I’ve never met you.”

  “This is true, Father. Acknowledge me when you’re ready. I’m a patient fetus.”

  My intestines tightened. Father? Fetus? What?

  “Where are you from?” I asked the man who thought he was my son. “Which institution? I can’t help you. Really. Only the doctors can help you.”

  “Perhaps you and Mother would’ve named me Peter. Or Nigel. Biff. Oliver. Marcus. Kelton. Call me John Snow. Things would go better between us if you unlocked the door. John Snow and Mason Ambrose, talking face-to-face.”

  Without knowing why, I did as the intruder requested. As he struggled across the threshold, I thought of the second Kohlbergian dilemma with which I’d presented Londa: Helga Eschbach breaking into the pharmacy to steal the radium extract.

  Not until he’d reeled into the light did I realize that, far from being a conventional urban menace, this vagabond was fundamentally pathetic, not Jack the Ripper but John the Broken. He moved with the gait of an arthritic locust. His defective spine had imprisoned him in a permanent cringe. His right arm hung limp as a bell rope, while his left eye, unyoked from his nervous system, turned upward in perpetual contemplation of clouds and geese.

  “You called me Father,” I said.

  “Would you prefer Papa? Mon vieux père?”

  A spasm of sorrow contorted John Snow’s face, which was pocked and stippled like a golf ball. He wore torn Levi’s, a soiled beige windbreaker, and a scuffed baseball cap sporting the Red Sox logo. Shuffling forward, he fixed me with an expression mingling disdain with curiosity, and I saw to my horror that his bushy eyebrows and Roman nose corresponded to my own, even as Natalie’s genes accounted for his ample lips and dimpled cheeks.

  “I am an immaculoid,” he continued. “Pure as milk, clean as soap, spotless as the lamb. Maturational age, thirty years. Chronological age, twenty days.”

  “Did Charnock send you after me? Dr. Vincent Charnock?”

  “Pure, clean, spotless, and yet you scraped me out of the world.”

  I staggered toward a newly arrived shipment of Harvard Classics and slumped onto the carton, all the bones and fibers and fancies of my Dasein trembling with perplexity. By what means had the degenerate behind this scheme obtained the residue of Natalie’s D and C? Did he pay for the material or simply steal it? No need for the whole fetus, of course. The tiniest scrap of tissue would have sufficed. A single healthy cell.

  “All satisfaction is denied my kind,” John Snow said. “We can smell the rose but never savor it. Taste the cherry but never relish it.”

  A single cell. Next stop, the petri dish, followed by the high-tech beaker, and then the ontogenerator.

  “Never to enjoy the sun’s warmth on my face—that’s what you did to me.”

  And finally the DUNCE cap. John Snow’s creator, I decided, was surely Charnock, using the RXL-313 to salve his guilt over sluicing away seven viable embryos.

  “Never the sweetness of an ice-cream cone.”

  Or, if not Charnock, then…Londa? Unthinkable, but not unimaginable.

  My visitor sprawled on a carton of high-school biology texts and stared in fascination at his good hand, as if just now realizing that his arm terminated in this marvelous device. He leaned toward me. Strangely enough, my anxiety faded, supplanted by an unexpected affection. When John Snow moved to kiss me, I did not recoil but submitted my cheek to the gesture.

  “Does the name Londa Sabacthani mean anything to you?” I asked.

  “Stainless as a saint.” He rose from the biology texts, fixing me with his mother’s blue eyes.

  “Was Londa your creator?”

  “Innocent as rain.” He approached the entryway and, in a surprisingly vigorous move for one so enfeebled, yanked open the door. “Natalie Novak made me. Mason Ambrose made me.”

  “Must you leave already?” I asked.

  “Never the fragrance of a pine forest.”

  “Are you going to visit Natalie?”

  “Every child deserves a maternal caress, whether it gives him pleasure or not.”

  “Will you see her tonight?”

  “Not tonight, but soon. I intend to call her Mother. She won’t like it. Never the song of a lark. Sleep well, Father. Happy wedding anniversary. You shouldn’t have murdered me.”

  John Snow slipped soundlessly into the night, closing the door behind him, and for a full ten minutes I simply sat on the Harvard Classics, my mind as blank as a newborn vatling’s soul.

  Chapter 9

  MOVED BY THE FRUSTRATION her lustful son endures when the chaste and lovely Florimell de
clines his offer of rape, a malevolent woodland witch hatches a plan. She will present her jilted offspring with a simulated maiden, easily overwhelmed and eminently ravishable. Thus does the byzantine plot of The Faerie Queene give birth to yet another strange creature, the False Florimell, an alchemical concoction on whom the witch has bestowed burning lamps for eyes, golden wire for hair, and an indwelling sprite “to rule the carcass dead,” the carcass in question being a fusion of painted wax and, of all things, snow, a material the witch presumably selected in sly mockery of the actual Florimell’s virginity.

  Sly mockery was probably the last thing on the mind of whatever unbalanced biologist had fashioned my nocturnal visitor and named him John Snow. Most probably he wanted to convey his belief that this fetus, like all fetuses, was innocence incarnate, snow become flesh, far closer to God’s original intentions for the human race than those depraved Homo sapiens sapiens who’d actually inherited the Earth. Smart money said the immaculoid’s creator had never read a single word of The Faerie Queene.

  Against all odds, I remembered to check the safe—it was indeed locked—whereupon I left the store and sprinted pell-mell down Comm Ave. By jostling pedestrians and ignoring a half-dozen bright orange DON’T WALK signs, I reached our front stoop in under ten minutes. Natalie stood silhouetted in the parlor window: the Sisyphus of Sherborn Street, jogging on her treadmill. I lurched through the front door, rushed across the marble foyer, the cracks running every which way like John Snow’s disordered dendrites, and ascended the staircase two steps at a time. In my imagination a horrid tableau appeared, the immaculoid hovering over Natalie as she ran frantically in place, faster and faster. John Snow remained at her side, spewing out accusations.

  I burst into the parlor. Natalie threw the switch. The treadmill jerked to a halt.

  “Welcome back,” she said, panting.

  “Something happened tonight.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  There was ultimately no way to talk about John Snow without upsetting Natalie, but I still decided to broach the subject obliquely. “Do you remember the False Florimell? Sometimes called the Snowy Florimell?”

  “What about her?”

  “The first doppelgänger in literature, cooked up by an evil witch. Here’s the truth of it, darling. Somebody has made a living facsimile of our son.”

  “What son?”

  “You know what son. He calls himself John Snow.”

  “You’re not making much sense.”

  “Our fetus has come back.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “No. Technology.”

  We spent the rest of the night in our claustrophobic kitchen, talking and drinking coffee, and by dawn Natalie had become convinced that someone—Vincent Charnock or Londa Sabacthani or perhaps a third party—had used the ontogenerator and its collateral DUNCE cap for a stupefyingly sick purpose. Caffeinated but exhausted, we shuffled into the bedroom. A leprous, smirking moon glowed through the window. Heavy traffic growled and squealed its way along Comm Ave.

  “He intends to track you down,” I said. “Be prepared to have him call you Mother.”

  “Mother, and also murderer?”

  “Yes, but that’s just the DUNCE cap talking. Believe it or not, I felt a certain tenderness toward him. Especially when he kissed my cheek.”

  The last time Natalie and I had gone to bed sobbing in each other’s arms, John Snow had been the cause. Tonight, déjà vu—the same desperate embrace, the same passage into sleep on a stream of tears, only now the occasion was not our fetus’s death but his equally distressing resurrection. I vowed that if Londa was behind this business, I would accept that long-standing invitation to appear on Cordelia Drake Live, telling the viewing public that my former pupil, though ostensibly a humanitarian, was not above dabbling in biological diabolism. If you want my opinion, Cordelia, Dr. Sabacthani is out of her skull.

  I awoke at noon and composed an e-mail to Londa, a message that would come as either a bolt from the blue or proof that her plot against me was proceeding apace. In a few terse sentences, I told her about my bookstore, my marriage, my success in publishing Ethics from the Earth, and finally my fetus, calling his advent—for I wanted to think the best of her—“a bit of news that will shock you.” I stressed the ambiguity of the situation, the strange combination of pathos and banality that characterized John Snow’s speech, his unsettling aura of sadness leavened with menace. “Might we get together soon and discuss this misbegotten beaker freak?” I clicked on Send and hoped for the best.

  Later I went trolling for the Mad Doctor of Blood Island, feeding “Vincent Charnock” into my search engine and, when that failed, “ontogenerator.” Zero. Growing desperate, I hunted for Web pages containing “immaculoid” or “John Snow” or “Smell the rose but never savor it.” Zilch.

  On Saturday night Natalie suffered her first visitation. She and Helen Vanderbilt, the self-appointed poet, were leaving a revival of My Dinner with Andre at the Coolidge Corner Cinema when a gaunt man shuffled out of the darkness, laid a hand on her shoulder, and introduced himself. Their conversation was brief but pointed. The immaculoid called her “a ruthless exterminator of defenseless babies.” Natalie countered that carrying him to term might have killed her.

  “Then there would have been no net loss of life,” he replied.

  “Evidently there was an absolute gain,” Natalie said.

  “I am not alive,” John Snow asserted.

  As he slipped back into the shadows, Helen turned to Natalie and said, “What the fuck?”

  The creature kept his distance on Sunday, but then the haunting began in full, continuing unabated for the rest of the week. He attended our every waking minute, sometimes by his physical presence, more often through our troubled thoughts and acid spasms of dread. Each ticking instant lay heavy with this parody of our son—John Snow and his malign purity, his cosmic complaint, his unending devotion to our disquiet.

  That summer, owing to the Caligulan protocols by which the Hawthorne English department operated, Natalie was obliged to shoulder a four-course load: Freshman Composition, British Renaissance Poetry, Greek Drama, and Arthurian Romance. Almost every time she entered the classroom, John Snow would be waiting in the far corner, slumped in a chair, clicking his fingernails on the retractable Formica writing board. He never participated in the discussions, though sometimes a non sequitur would escape his lips like a shout from a Tourette’s victim. “Booted into the abyss!” “She praises humanists and murders humans!” “Never to feel my heart soar when Perry Como sings ‘I Believe’!” Natalie told her undergraduates that John Snow was her highly medicated brother, recently delivered into her charge by a state mental institution. Her explanation went unquestioned. Anyone who’d taken a course in the College of Continuing Education had encountered adult students far weirder than this demented auditor.

  When not harassing Natalie, the immaculoid would appear at the bookstore, gimping past the shelves, then flopping into an empty chair in the coffee bar. I allowed him to run up a tab. Most of the time he simply sat there, bathing his insensate tongue in a latte and reading a random selection from our science-fiction and fantasy shelves, though occasionally I had to endure his outbursts. “Tossed away like an orange peel!” “Deny the devil his curette!” “Impaled alive by my own parents!” Despite the discomfort he caused our customers, no one asked me to eject him. In those days many a homeless schizophrenic roamed the Boston streets, and by an unspoken ethic we shopkeepers were expected to supply these wretches with free coffee, shelter from the rain, and as much patience as we could muster.

  On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, relatively tranquil periods at the store, I usually found time to speak with John Snow. Our encounters were unenlightening. He refused to tell me who had supervised his birth, how he supported himself, or where he spent his time when not hectoring his supposed parents. Only once did a question of mine catch him off guard, and he answered it with a
frankness that I suspected would have displeased his maker.

  “I can’t help noticing you aren’t a well man,” I told him. “Does an immaculoid have a normal life span?”

  He shook his misshapen head and coughed. “My days are numbered.”

  “Do you anticipate living for five more years? One more year?”

  “Soon my purpose will be complete.”

  “What purpose? To drive me crazy? To make Natalie miserable?”

  But the fetus had exhausted his reserves of candor. With the apparent aim of ending our conversation, he leaped from his chair and screamed, “Masturbate I must, but each orgasm is duller than the last!”

  The customers variously gasped, moaned, giggled, and pretended to be somewhere else.

  “Ejaculation without elation! Can you imagine?”

  On Sunday morning Londa finally answered my e-mail. No greeting, no “Dear Mason,” just a single sarcastic sentence. “When the gumbo girl was anxious to communicate with her old morality teacher, he hit Delete, and now she’s supposed to roll out the fucking red carpet?”

  My answer was simple. “You owe me a civil reply, and you know it.”

  She was back at her keyboard within the hour. “I have many enemies, but Mason Ambrose isn’t one of them.” She went on to say that my success as a bookseller delighted her, that she’d made Ethics from the Earth required reading among her staff, and that Natalie must be “a very smart lady if she decided to marry you.” Concerning the John Snow crisis, Londa claimed to be as much in the dark as I. “How strange to think there’s a fourth beaker freak in the world. Find your way to my door, Socrates, sooner rather than later, and we’ll talk of life and its mysteries. Yolly will be thrilled to see you—Quetzie, too—and once you’re actually standing in my presence, I might deign to give you a hug.”

  I JOURNEYED TO THEMISOPOLIS at a leisurely pace, sleeping in funky motels and prospecting for bibliographic gold in every thrift store and antique shop between Boston and Philadelphia. By the time I’d crossed the Maryland border, the trunk of my Subaru wagon held some rare Willa Cathers, a couple of Theodore Dreiser first editions, and the obscure Thomas Bergin translation of The Divine Comedy. I checked into a Chadds Ford bed-and-breakfast called Harriet’s Hideaway, then switched on my cell phone and contacted Londa’s reedy-voiced appointments secretary, who told me that tomorrow’s password would be “Godzilla.” I slept in Harriet’s guest room, snatched a couple of warm bagels from the breakfast spread, and continued down Route 1.