The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  According to the Muller-Novak version of her tribulations, she had wanted to bring the baby to term, but she knew I would never forgive myself if anything bad happened to her during the pregnancy. In other words, her decision to abort was in essence a submission to my will. But for my paranoid attitude toward her blood clots, she would now be enjoying unequivocal motherhood, when instead she’d become the object of her unborn child’s infinite scorn.

  At some point during the siege of Themisopolis, this cute couple began enjoying illicit afternoons in Castorp’s apartment, a situation that Natalie successfully—and, I’m chagrined to report, effortlessly—kept under wraps for two whole months following my return from D.C. Ever on the lookout for a way to break the bad news, she finally got an opportunity courtesy of the same reading group that had blessed her with Castorp. Arriving home one evening after drumming Victorian poetry into several dozen pairs of indifferent undergraduate ears, she noticed that idle curiosity had prompted me to remove the seminar’s current selection, Harry Mulisch’s The Procedure, from the coffee table. Years ago at Villanova, I’d been assigned this neglected but beguiling moral fable, in which Mulisch takes a twelfth-century kabbalist’s ambition to create a clay golem and cleverly counterpoints it with a contemporary Dutch biologist’s success in wringing organic molecules from the same substance. Natalie immediately plucked the book from my hands and recited a passage concerning Rabbi Löw’s attempt to enlist his son-in-law, Isaac, in the momentous project.

  “‘Isaac’s hair and beard are red as a blazing fire,’” she read, “‘which seems to point to an ecstatic character, but the opposite is the case. Esther, Löw’s daughter, also found that out too late; but that’s nothing out of the ordinary, since virtually everyone marries the wrong person.’”

  She closed The Procedure and said, “Is Mulisch right? Does virtually everyone marry the wrong person?”

  “I recently saw a statistic suggesting that mutually satisfying marriages are not the norm,” I said.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I believe I married the wrong person.”

  I chuckled in amusement. She laughed in distress.

  “In fact, I know I married the wrong person,” Natalie continued, whereupon I began to feel sick, and then it all spilled out, the trysts with Castorp, the joys of having a friend who would rather talk to her than read Kierkegaard, my determination to maneuver her into the abortion clinic, my failure to comfort her adequately back when John Snow 0001 was calling her a murderer, my initial resistance to bringing the immaculoid’s ashes home.

  I freely admitted that these accusations were not without merit, which of course did me no good, since this wasn’t about my shortcomings—it was about Natalie being in love with Castorp. We wandered into the living room and took up positions on opposite sides of the couch, goalies in that most ancient of indoor sports, domestic discord. For the next four hours, we vilified one another as our marriage burned down all around us. At the dismal hour of 2:00 A.M., my desperation peaked, and I declared that I would seek out Dr. Charnock and convince him to fashion an infant from John Snow 0001’s bottled ashes, so that we would have our son again. Natalie reminded me that we’d never regarded the immaculoid as even the remotest simulacrum of a son, ours or anybody else’s, and this was not the time to start pretending otherwise.

  “You’re taking this much harder than I’d imagined,” she said. “Look at it this way. Now you’re free to go chasing after Londa. You’ve always been half in love with her.”

  “Londa is a deeply disturbed person. You’re the woman I love.”

  “Hey, Mason, I’m willing to sit here and talk till dawn, but we’ll just keep covering the same damn ground.”

  “You want to be with Castorp right now, don’t you?” I said.

  “More than you can imagine.”

  “I’m sure you’re being truthful. Philosophers appreciate the truth. Now please lie to me. Tell me I have a chance.”

  “It’s over, Mason. Sorry. I’m so crazy about Castorp, I can hardly stop singing.”

  At the methodical pace of a pallbearer, I rose from the couch, walked to the bookcase, and with both hands took hold of our fetus’s brittle sarcophagus.

  “Don’t do something you’ll regret later,” she said.

  “Fuck you.”

  I raised the urn high above my head and sent it on a collision course with the hardwood floor. The moment of impact was gratifyingly spectacular, ten thousand glittery splinters radiating outward from the impact point. I thought of bombs exploding, universes expanding, paradigms shifting. With a demented cackle I dropped to my knees and, reaching into the rubble, closed my fist around a scraggly carbon glob.

  “I hope you and Castorp have lots of children.” Rising, I assumed the posture of a catapult. “I hope you have so goddamn many children the Catholic Worker names you Baby Factory of the Year.”

  “Mason, don’t,” she said between gritted teeth.

  “Heads up, Natalie! John is coming to get you! This snowball has your name on it!”

  I laughed and launched the projectile. The lumpish remains found their target, splattering across Natalie’s chest. She screamed and called me a piece of shit, a not inaccurate evaluation under the circumstances, then stormed out of the apartment. There could be no doubt concerning her destination.

  My heated brain became home to a lurid psychodrama. In this dark reverie, I removed my clothes and rolled around naked on the floor, grinding the urn fragments into my back, after which I sought out Natalie and showed her my mortified flesh. But martyrdom has never been my métier, and in this case it wouldn’t have accomplished anything, so I simply located the dustpan and returned to my knees and got to work.

  IT TOOK US a mere five weeks to legalize our enmity. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had long ago recognized the pragmatic concept of no-fault divorce, which during the course of our negotiations I started calling recursive-blame divorce, and because our mutual assets were few and our children nonexistent, the whole process set us each back only three hundred dollars. When it was over, we shook hands on the steps of the Massachusetts State House, wished one another well, returned to our separate domiciles—Natalie and Castorp had just bought a condo on Beacon Hill—and set about the business of never seeing each other again.

  The rest of my winter passed in three unrelated activities: feeling sorry for myself, presiding perfunctorily over Pieces of Mind, and appearing before Virgil Harkness’s Congressional Commission on Fetal Activism. Although his heart wasn’t in it, Senator Harkness had hastily convened his panel upon realizing that for most Americans the immaculoid phenomenon had proved impossibly distressing, and these shaken citizens wanted the government to protect them from any future such invasions. The initial sessions were televised, but C-Span viewers soon found them unpalatable (too much talk about mackies driving their quasiparents to suicide), and so the network began broadcasting the far livelier Chaffey Hearings into allegations that certain gratuitously compassionate physicians in Pennsylvania were systematically violating the Mother Teresa Anti-Euthanasia Laws. Somewhere in my disorganized cache of DVDs is the C-Span coverage of a bitter Londa, a shattered Jordan, and a depressed Mason presenting their testimony to Harkness and his colleagues. Among the highlights of this digital vérité collector’s item is a sound bite of Londa admitting that her now-defunct Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations had “acquired an RXL-313 ontogenerator with an eye to conducting human duplication experiments” and forthwith urging the committee to “excavate this treacherous device from the ashes of Themisopolis and oversee its destruction.” The C-Span video also includes a brief segment of Jordan imploring Harkness to hunt down the “self-righteous criminals” who, through their fetal proxy General John Snow 4099, had “murdered Yolly Sabacthani in cold blood.” But my favorite clip shows me assuming a gesture of more j’accuse while explaining that, if I knew their exact location just then, I would point my indignant digit directly
at Enoch Anthem and Felix Pielmeister, “who almost certainly convinced General John Snow 4099 that it was open season on the Sisters Sabacthani.”

  As unimaginative sycophants go, Harkness was a fairly decent chap, and he took my indictment of Anthem and Pielmeister seriously enough to dispatch a team of FBI agents to the Center for Stable Families. In giving their depositions to the G-men, Anthem and Pielmeister vociferously denied any connection to the mackies beyond, as Pielmeister put it, “an unashamed sympathy for their pro-life agenda,” but eventually it became obvious that the two suspects and the Harkness Commission had struck a deal, for a week later the FBI invaded an abandoned limestone processing plant near Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, and found therein a clandestine bioengineering laboratory. The prize of the haul was three ontogenerators, and the following day Harkness, in keeping with Londa’s recommendation, convinced Governor Winthrop to send a Maryland National Guard unit to Themisopolis and recover the device through which she’d populated the Circus. Before the month was out, the Harkness Commission had arranged for the effective extinction of this technology, contracting with the U.S. Coast Guard to load all four ontogenerators onto a container ship, bear them twenty leagues due east of Cape Hatteras, and there consign the machines to a watery grave.

  Even though the chances of another grand-scale immaculoid protest were essentially zero, there being no more RXL-313s in the world save the moldering remains of the prototype back on Isla de Sangre, I suspect that for the likes of Felix Pielmeister, Enoch Anthem, and Tucker Winthrop this was a golden age. Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands. As for the dubious projects nurtured by the so-called City of Justice, it would be years, perhaps a decade, before the data pulverized in Alethia Square could be replicated by the scattered staff of the Susan B. Anthony Trust and the tattered remains of the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations.

  One particularly telling sign of the times was the consummation of Ralph Gittikac’s campaign to rebuild the RMS Titanic. Much to my amazement, our primal Phyllistine had gotten the luxury liner’s doppelgänger off the drawing board and into the water. Gittikac’s Getaway Adventures was now taking reservations for the “Great Cathartic Voyage of the Titanic Redux,” scheduled to sail from Southampton, England, on the first of July and arrive in New York City on Independence Day.

  From the Phyllistine perspective, of course, one felicitous development eclipsed all the others. According to a confluence of rumor, gossip, and paparazzi espionage, Londa Sabacthani was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Evidently she’d been checking herself into one Manhattan mental institution after another, even as her press secretary, the faithful Pauline Chilton, proceeded to frost her client’s fruitcake condition with obfuscation and euphemism.

  With my marriage a void, my vatling an inmate, and Corporate Christi poised to conquer the world, I found it increasingly difficult to get up in the morning. Day by day I retreated ever farther into the deepest reaches of myself: Mason Ambrose, shipwreck victim, washed up on the deserted shores of his own Dasein, a condition that he perversely compounded by disconnecting his phone, selling his computer, and instructing the post office to hold his mail. No man is an island, John Donne had famously insisted—very well, true enough, but I had certainly become whatever landmass entailed an equal measure of estrangement: a tidal peninsula, perhaps, joined to my fellow beings by the narrowest of shoals. Wandering my barren beaches, I encountered no auspicious footprints in the sand, and the corked bottles I retrieved from the surf contained only blank scraps of parchment, their messages long since bleached away by the sun.

  My condition worsened, from isolation to desolation. Acting on impulse—if a man gripped by stupefying malaise may be said to act on impulse—I appointed Dexter Padula the sole manager of Pieces of Mind and sold him the bulk of my shares, using the ready cash to pay the rent three months in advance, send anticipatory checks to the gas company, and provision my rooms with certain essentials: a case of canned salmon, the Erlanger House Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, twenty bottles of red wine, a stack of Vaughan Williams CDs. I closed the door, turned off the lights, and waited for Godot. The days elapsed at the velocity of molasses. Camus, I decided, had gotten it right—there is only one important philosophical question: why not suicide? My apartment was an embarrassment of possibilities. A set of stainless-steel steak knifes. A heavy-duty extension cord, easily fashioned into a noose. A fire-escape platform offering a thirty-foot fall to a concrete alley.

  To this day I’m not certain how I survived my long, dark fortnights of the soul. Through some felicitous synergy of Nietzschean fortitude, cabernet sauvignon, and “The Lark Ascending,” I continued to elude the abyss. And then came my deliverance. I was sitting beside my bedroom window, staring across the alley into the parlor of my closest neighbor, Thomas Cochran, a Medieval Studies professor so ancient of days that his colleagues joked how he’d joined the department back when it was called Contemporary Theology. At some point during my twelve-week immurement, Dr. Cochran had acquired an enormous plasma television set, and to my astonishment the screen now shimmered with a familiar Cinemascope long-shot. There he was, my old mentor Sinuhe, walking the banks of the Nile. Half in jest and half in desperation, I told myself that this sign had arrived from a supernatural realm, and the meaning was unequivocal: my philosophy career had not yet run its course. Rather than become a corpse, I must follow up Ethics from the Earth with additional impertinent Darwinist tomes that nobody wanted to read. Isis expected it, Horus would settle for nothing less, and who was I to defy the gods?

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER the Egyptian deities made their wishes known, I received an equally welcome visitation when young Donya came knocking at my door. I was ill-prepared to receive her. Unsightly stubble covered my chin, uncivilized aromas wafted off my skin, and my apartment looked like a rutting ground favored by caribou. She didn’t seem to notice—a spontaneous Platonist, that girl, ever on the scent of the eternal, unconcerned with the immediate world’s superficial splotches and transient smudges.

  After revealing that she now lived a mere two hours from Boston, her e-mail correspondence with several renowned marine biologists having netted her a summer internship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Donya explained herself. Everybody was concerned about dear old Mason—Donya, Henry, Brock, Jordan, especially Londa—so Henry had persuaded the younger Sister Sabacthani, the only Massachusetts member of our fellowship, to track me down. I related how the collapse of my marriage had landed me in Spenser’s Cave of Despair, but I had more or less recovered, having found a provisional answer to Camus’s notorious question. Any day now, I told Donya, I would start writing a new treatise on evolutionary ethics.

  “To be honest, I wasn’t terribly anxious about you,” she said. “Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy. It’s weird big sister who’s got me worried. Did you know her iguana died?”

  I shook my head. “You’re worried about Londa because her iguana died?”

  “I’m worried about Londa because she’s Londa.”

  “Poor old Quetzie. What happened?”

  “Nothing. A bad case of mortality. At least she has a clear conscience on that score.”

  Forty minutes later, having disinfected myself, put on a clean shirt, and located a viable credit card, I accompanied Donya to the Tao of Sprouts in Copley Square. The best local vegetarian restaurant was still the Tasty Triffid, but returning there without Natalie on my arm would have been excruciating.
While the chef heated our ratatouille, Donya reminisced about her childhood, breezily recounting a Yolly story I’d never heard before—how she’d once made a hilarious home video by taking her documentary footage of Blood Island fiddler crabs and altering the soundtrack, so that the creatures appeared to be playing a Beethoven string quartet. Throughout Donya’s anecdote my eyes rarely left her face. How strange to be sitting across from this willowy adult version of the diminutive six-year-old who’d once served me peanut-butter sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies in a tree house. Strange, and also a little sad, because the preschool Donya was gone forever now—wasn’t she?—as irretrievable as Edwina or Yolly or John Snow 0001.

  Our ratatouille arrived. We consumed several ambrosial morsels, then broached the evening’s unhappy topic.

  “Apparently she’s plotting something—a weird big sister sort of something, ingenious and dangerous and very likely to end badly,” Donya said.

  “The last I heard, she was on a grand tour of New York’s loony bins.”

  “A subterfuge.”

  From her shoulder bag Donya produced a sheaf of computer printouts, crumpled like the treasure maps Brock used to create for her cartography lessons. E-mails from Londa, she explained, then read me a series of snippets, and I soon concluded that Donya was correct concerning her sister’s sanity. These weren’t the ravings of a madwoman but something even more disturbing: the effusions of a frighteningly rational person systematically setting a trap for her enemies.

  Call me an egotist, dear Donya, but I believe I·ve devised a way to cure the Phyllistines.

  I won’t deny it: certain aspects of Operation PG are morally ambiguous. I’d better secure Mason’s services the instant he resurfaces.

  The pieces are falling into place. At first the Phyllistines will denounce me, but in time they’ll realize I’ve delivered them from their own evil.