The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  I extended my hand, cupped his brow. His fever warmed my palm. “Where’s the nearest emergency room?” I asked Natalie.

  “Mass General.”

  “Listen, Mother,” John Snow 0001 said. “Hear me, Father. I can feel the whole world now. Not just a few things. Everything. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  “We’re taking you to the hospital,” I told him.

  “Right now,” Natalie added.

  The icy air made specters of our breath.

  “The twitchings in my stomach, I know that’s hunger,” the immaculoid said. “And the fire inside my body, it must be a fever.”

  Natalie asked, “Can you walk? Should we carry you?”

  John Snow 0001 seized my wrist. “Here’s something even stranger. All these words coming out of my mouth—they’re the ones I want to be speaking.” He relaxed his grip. “A week ago I would’ve said, ‘You’re taking me to the hospital? Sure you don’t want to get out your curette and slaughter me all over again?’”

  Acting in unspoken but complete accord, my wife and I crouched over our fetus and unpeeled the comforter. As Natalie slid her arms under his back, I took hold of his legs, and together we lifted him several inches off the mattress.

  “No!” he screamed. “It hurts too much!”

  We set him back down.

  “What hurts?” Natalie asked.

  “Everything.”

  “We would never hurt you on purpose,” Natalie said.

  “I know, Mother. Before, I would’ve said, ‘You certainly hurt me on purpose when you lanced me like a boil.’”

  Natalie shuddered.

  “The paramedics have painkillers,” I told our fetus, slipping the phone from my jacket pocket. “They’ll give you a shot of Demerol, then rush you to the hospital in their ambulance.”

  With the suddenness of a frog gigging a dragonfly, John Snow 0001 snatched the phone away and hugged it to his chest. “I can picture it all in my mind. Sharp and clear, like a leaf floating on still water.”

  “Picture what?”

  “My entire race. The mackies. Moving against the city.”

  “What city?” I asked. “Boston?”

  Before he could answer, a coughing fit seized him, the gouts of breath bursting from his windpipe along with a sprinkle of saliva. Natalie reached into the rubble and retrieved a half-liter 7-Up bottle. She gave our fetus a foamy gulp of warm soda. He coughed again, bathing us in carbonated spray, then took a second gulp. Sucking in a deep breath, he squeezed my hand and looked me in the eye.

  “Themisopolis,” he said. “The place where they perform the abortions.”

  “The immaculoids will attack Themisopolis?” I asked.

  “And you know something?” he said, nodding. “I’m not…what’s the word? I’m not jealous.” He coughed. “The other mackies will get to join the crusade, but I’ll be too sick to go”—cough—“and I don’t care. What they’re planning to do”—cough—“it’s wrong. Gasoline and firebrands, that’s simply wrong.”

  “Gasoline?” I said.

  “And firebrands.”

  “When does the crusade start?” Natalie asked.

  “Soon, they told us,” our fetus replied.

  “Who told you?” I asked. “Enoch Anthem? Felix Pielmeister?”

  “What I really want to know is how Amory and Claudius are doing.”

  “They’re doing fine,” Natalie said.

  “We love them very much,” I said.

  A tremor passed through his body, and then came a series of overlapping vibrations, a seismic dying for our netherson. Natalie and I threw ourselves atop the creature, massaging his muscles with taut, nervous fingers, as if we were making John Snow 0001 all over again, sculpting him from an immense lump of clay.

  “Can I”—cough—“ask you a question?”

  Natalie’s tears glistened in the lantern’s sallow glow. “Of course.”

  “What is it like”—cough—“to be alive?”

  I grimaced and winced. Tenured philosophers have a taste for grandiose questions, and failed philosophers relish them even more. What is it like to be a bat? What if our senses disclose only the shadows of reality? What if our language prevents us from thinking the most important thoughts of all? But my skull was empty just then, a grail devoid of wine, water, or any other useful fluid. I could not have said what it was like to boil an egg, much less to be alive.

  “City on fire!” our fetus cried. “Jehovah’s holy torch!”

  Even as Natalie and I tightened our grip on John Snow 0001, we felt his heat leak away in all its forms—first his acute fever, then his normal mammalian warmth, and finally the spark of life, leaving behind only his cold, confected flesh. Natalie pulled her Christmas gift out from beneath her sweatshirt, lifted the twine loop over her head, and placed the foil heart atop our fetus’s chest. Evidently she’d grabbed the thing as we were rushing out the door.

  “I meant for him to see I had it on,” she said.

  “He probably knew we were lying about Amory and Claudius,” I said.

  Natalie set her palm on the pendant. “I should’ve showed it to him and said, ‘I’ve never stopped wearing it.’”

  WE STAYED IN THE TOWER throughout the night, inhaling the fumes of the kerosene heater and talking about John Snow 0001’s short, unhappy incarnation. For Natalie his essential tragedy lay in his knowledge that “he was living an unlived life.” He could never escape his realization that his memories were contrived, his opinions programmed, his soul an epiphenomenon of his software. What truly impressed me, by contrast, was his brave and seemingly successful fight against his congenital disconnection from pleasure, so that his final days, miserable though they were by most indices, had included the savor of Ring Dings, the splendor of Twinkies, and the bliss of Triscuits.

  “If he’d lived, I wonder, would he have remained sentient?” I asked Natalie.

  “We’ll never know,” she said, combing her netherson’s hair.

  With the coming of dawn, we snuck across the freight yard and started down Atlantic Avenue, Natalie leading the way, John Snow 0001 wrapped in the comforter, his sorry husk slung across our shoulders. Our fellow Bostonians took little interest in this strange procession. We must have looked harmless, certainly not miscreants disposing of an inconvenient corpse: perhaps rug merchants delivering a Persian carpet to a Beacon Street penthouse, or archaeologists bearing an ancient scepter to the Boston Museum of Art. We reached the car, opened the trunk, transferred the clutter to the backseat—jumper cables, carton of cheap red wine, bag of potting soil, four empty motor-oil cans—and, after working John Snow 0001’s stiffening flesh into a fetal position, snugged him into the compartment.

  For the next half-hour, I fled the rising sun, driving aimlessly west, then eased the Subaru into the drive-through lane at a Brookline Burger King. I requested a couple of Egg Croissanwiches and some coffee, but when the order arrived, neither Natalie nor I could eat a bite. God knows we were hungry. The problem was that the Croissanwiches were so damn tasty, emanating delights that John Snow 0001 had largely been denied.

  We slurped down our coffee and resumed our wanderings. Buoyed by the caffeine, we talked about our netherson’s vision of a fetal army firebombing Londa’s city. An implausible narrative, we decided, but no more implausible than the immaculoids themselves.

  “Pielmeister is capable of anything,” I said.

  “You really think he would burn Themisopolis?” Natalie said.

  “If that’s what the paradigm shift requires.”

  We visited a Starbucks, consumed more coffee, and changed drivers. Logic said the mortuaries would be open now, and so while Natalie piloted us down Beacon Street, I pulled out the phone and called the West Newton Funeral Home. No sooner had I said the word “immaculoid” than the smarmy proprietor, an r-dropping Boston aborigine named Stephen Hammond, assured me that he understood our situation. We were the fourth couple this
month to approach him concerning the disposition of such a creature.

  “Your predecessors opted for cremation,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “Simply place the remains in your trunk.”

  “We did that already.”

  “There’s no shame in this, Mr. Ambrose,” Hammond said. “Nobody invited the mackies here.”

  The instant we pulled into the mortuary driveway, two pale but sprightly young men came bustling onto the veranda, wearing black serge suits and exuding soft gray sympathy. I hoisted myself out of the wagon and unlocked the trunk. The undertakers acted with exemplary speed. The last I saw of John Snow 0001 was a glimpse of his moldering sneakers as the somber men bore him across a vacant lot toward a squat brick building. A round, tapered chimney rose from the roof like a candle on a one-year-old’s birthday cake.

  With a mournful tread Natalie and I mounted the veranda steps and entered the parlor. The place was a reified lie, its fraudulence so stark as to render any postmodern deconstruction superfluous, all ferns and perfumes and uplifting synthesized harp music, when in fact its business was carrion and lamentation. The funeral director materialized from behind a red velvet curtain, introducing himself in the unctuous tones his profession had perfected down through the generations. He conformed surprisingly well to the mental image I’d assembled over the phone: a balding, roly-poly man with a small white mustache like the bristles on a toothbrush.

  “Most of our immaculoid families prefer to leave the ashes here,” Stephen Hammond said.

  Without consulting me, Natalie said, “We’ll take them home.”

  “No we won’t,” I said.

  For a full minute, my wife and I exchanged annoyed glances and indignant throat clearings. Hammond looked away and took a discreet step backward: apparently a customary move for him—doubtless he’d witnessed many such communication breakdowns between quasiparents. It was Natalie who ended the stalemate, taking my hand, drawing it toward her, and pressing my fingers against her sternum.

  “I don’t ask for many favors, Archimago.”

  Fixing my gaze on Hammond, I said, “The ashes will come with us.”

  The funeral director returned to our sphere, flashing a major smile. His teeth were enormous. I thought of an egg carton with its lid flipped back. Humming in counterpoint to the ecclesiastical Muzak, he guided us to a display case featuring ceramic urns. Natalie selected one bearing an enameled image of wildflowers, explaining that they reminded her of the habitat our netherson had created for Amory and Claudius.

  “The procedure takes ninety minutes,” Hammond said.

  About as long as a D and C, I mused. Later I learned that the same thought had occurred to Natalie.

  Under Hammond’s guidance we staggered into a small room lined with leather-bound books, reminiscent of the children’s alcove back in Pieces of Mind. Rummaging among the news magazines on the coffee table, Natalie extracted a recent issue of Time featuring the annual circulation-boosting “So What’s the Big Deal About This Jesus Person?” cover story. I selected the complete works of W. H. Auden, then joined my wife on the Naugahyde sofa. I attempted to read, but the poems kept dissolving into typographic jetsam adrift on a white sea. Eventually we put our printed matter aside and held hands. It was like waiting for a muffler installation, only with harps instead of Johnny Cash.

  Hammond appeared right on time, bearing the wildflower urn. While Natalie cradled our fetus’s remains, I took care of the bill, $530.75 including tax, charging it on our Visa card.

  We immediately agreed that John Snow 0001 must not be consigned to the trunk again. This time he would ride up front on Natalie’s lap. By noon we were back in our apartment, setting the ceramic vessel atop the same bookcase where our grasshoppers had resided.

  “You were right all along,” I told Natalie. “I’m glad we brought him home.”

  “It’s the least we owe him.”

  I stroked the vessel. “I wonder if he’s the only child we’ll ever have.”

  “He was not our child.”

  “He was not our child,” I agreed.

  GASOLINE AND FIREBRANDS, John Snow 0001 had said. City on fire. Jehovah’s holy torch. As I entered the kitchen to call Londa’s office, my imagination showed me Cinemascope images of siege towers grinding toward Themisopolis, their turrets crammed with vengeful immaculoids wielding implements of sanctified arson. Gertrude Lingard answered. Her boss, she said, was in Miami evaluating the effectiveness of the Wollstonecraft Fund in helping Cuban and Haitian immigrants find jobs. I tried Londa’s cell phone, getting her on the first ring.

  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you may be sure I was profoundly reluctant to tell my vatling that John Snow 0001 had died. Her annoyance with her ponderous conscience, that philosopher who’d inflicted so many facets on her face and hung the uncast stone around her neck, would surely preclude any genuine expression of sympathy. Imagine my surprise when, learning that the creature was no more, Londa choked up—I don’t think she was faking it—then went on to assure me that Natalie and I had lost not a son but a cruelly exploited antiabortion icon who was probably better off dead.

  It was only after I changed the subject, describing John Snow 0001’s forecast of an imminent attack on the city, that the conversation began to unnerve me, Londa’s voice becoming incongruously calm, as if I’d said the immaculoids would be spray-painting the walls with graffiti, not burning them down. Dispassionately she proposed that on Monday we make our separate ways to Harford County Airport and thence to Themisopolis, there to share a leisurely dinner while analyzing my netherson’s last words.

  Like many an obsessive activist, Londa never stopped working, and neither did Dame Quixote or Weltanschauung Woman, and so predictably enough our meal occurred in her executive suite atop Caedmon Hall. We ate at the conference table, adjacent to the model City of Justice, Quetzie roosting on the Vision Institute. When not discussing the possibility of fetal violence, Londa and I shared vegetarian delicacies—“my homage to little Donya,” she explained, “everybody’s favorite animal-rights advocate”—prepared by the Artemis Clinic’s live-in cooking staff, each tureen covered by a silver dome suggesting a DUNCE cap. Since our phone conversation, she had if anything become more cavalier toward the presumed menace. With each new course, I grew increasingly emphatic, averring that a dying immaculoid would not cry “City on fire!” or “Jehovah’s holy torch!” without good reason, but only after we’d broached the desserts did Londa deign to explain her nonchalance. She crowned her pecan pie with a globe of vanilla ice cream, ambled toward a filing cabinet, and slid out the upper drawer like a morgue attendant displaying a corpse to a coroner.

  “The cornerstone of Themisopolis was barely laid when the threats began,” she said. “Each morning’s e-mail includes a dozen hate letters, most of them promising to gun down Yolly and me on sight. When it comes to sending us anthrax and explosives, of course, the Internet doesn’t work very well, so the Phyllistines have to use FedEx and UPS. At first I was freaked, but then I became—you’d be proud of me, Socrates—I became philosophical about it. We’ve got a damn smart bomb squad in the mail room, and their dog is even smarter.” She brushed her fingers across the files, grabbed a random document, and yanked it before her eyes. “‘Your days are numbered, you sick, twisted weirdos,’” she read. She made a second arbitrary choice. “‘You know you’re the Antichrist, and I know it, and soon the whole world will know it.’” She slid the drawer home. “Junk mail from Jeremiah. Cassandra learns to spam. Forgive me if I don’t take your immaculoid’s warning more seriously than the ten thousand that came before it.”

  “Pielmeister,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Felix Pielmeister.”

  She asked me to elaborate, and I attempted to paraphrase the Augustinian’s rant in the Hawthorne parking lot. I told how he’d screamed about geysers of blood, and how before long Corporate Christi would engulf the globe with godly profiteering and eschatological
lava.

  “He absolutely fucking terrified me,” I said.

  “Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said.

  “And how do you suggest we react to this crisis?” Londa asked dryly.

  I couldn’t tell whether she wanted my opinion or merely sought to befuddle me into silence. “You’re the only superheroine in the room. I’m just another bookseller who never got his Ph.D. I suppose you should post some Valkyries along Avalon Lane and double the watch on the ramparts.”

  “Here’s my idea,” Londa said brightly. “Let’s spend the rest of the week making merry in the Circus of Atonement. That way we’ll be in a good mood when the mackies come and put us out of business.”

  “Blessed are the facetious.”

  “But before we hit the Circus, we have to drop by the cemetery.”

  “Cemetery?”

  “White Marsh Cemetery.”

  “I spent Wednesday morning in a funeral parlor. I have no wish to visit a cemetery.”

  “When a gumbo girl goes bad, sweetie, she goes very, very bad. It’s possible my case is hopeless. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

  LONDA WAS THE MOST RECKLESS person into whose hands I had ever commended my flesh, a driver for whom the Baltimore Beltway was a latter-day Hippodrome where any sufficiently foolhardy charioteer might garner some laurels and a sack of sesterces. While her palpitating passenger scrunched down in the adjacent seat, staring at the recessed letters spelling out AIR BAG, she intimidated sedans, bullied SUVs, and antagonized tractor-trailers, all the while treating the 65 mph speed limit merely as a baseline against which to measure the caliber of her nerve. By the time we reached the cemetery, the sun had set, the moon had risen, my heart had entered my mouth, and my stomach had migrated into the new-made cavity.