The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  Matthew logically locates the Sermon on the Mount on a hill, but Luke places the same speech on a plain. I have scheduled Operation PG for the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Future historians will probably stick it in the Gobi Desert.

  “What do you suppose the PG stands for?” Donya asked. “Parental guidance? Pride goeth? Phyllistine Götterdämmerung?”

  “Pineal gland,” I groaned. “Londa’s into Cartesian physiology.”

  “I’ve got her last message memorized. ‘Zero hour is barely a week away, so please make every effort to locate Mason. The plan requires his input.’”

  “Zero hour. Christ.”

  Donya pulled a phone from her jacket, plunking it down on the table with the weary air of a jaded Russian-roulette referee preparing to adjudicate a game. “Every time I call, she chatters merrily until the subject turns to Operation PG, and then she clams up. You’ll probably have better luck.”

  Londa answered with a chipper “All you need is love.” After insisting how wonderful it was to hear my voice, she turned suddenly somber and proceeded, characteristically, to take charge of my life. I was to catch the 6:45 A.M. Amtrak out of South Station and get off four hours later in Manhattan. She would meet me in Pennsylvania Station near the Seventh Avenue exit, right by Hudson News.

  “I hope your wife can spare you for a while,” Londa said. “I’m in dire need of an ethics tutorial.”

  “Three months ago Natalie ran off with a failed novelist who found fucking easier than plotting. I’m free as a bird.”

  “Oh, my poor Socrates, you didn’t deserve that. Was Joan of Arc part of the problem?”

  “Not as much as Katherine Anne Porter.”

  “Are you on the mend?”

  “Healthy as a horse. Speaking of health, Donya tells me you’ve found a way to rehabilitate the Phyllistines. Operation PG. Let me guess: pineal gland.”

  “Details at eleven.”

  Throughout the rest of our meal, Donya brought me up to date on the Hubris Academy faculty. Traumatized by the Themisopolis catastrophe and despondent over the loss of Yolly, Jordan had disavowed political activism and was now pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. Henry had begun portraying the host of Uncle Rumpus’s Magic Island on Nickelodeon, and the initial ratings suggested that America’s four-year-olds had found a new idol. The Rumpus franchise had also proved a boon to Brock, whose agent had arranged for him to receive a portion of the licensing fees generated by the characters he’d created for the show. Thanks to Plessey the Plesiosaur and friends, Brock was in danger of becoming embarrassingly rich.

  Later, as Donya and I strolled down Beacon Street, she rhapsodized about the Oceanographic Institute—by her account a truly utopian community, its scientists ever eager to pour their molten obsessions into the crucible of her curiosity. Her immediate guru was a cephalopod expert, whose explorations of the giant squid’s singularly accessible nervous system bade fair to revolutionize the field of neurophysiology. The resident arthropod aficionado had likewise taken an interest in Donya, initiating her into the cult of the preternaturally primitive horseshoe crab. Somehow we managed to get all the way to her car without mentioning Londa again, a fact on which Donya remarked as she slid behind the wheel.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “even while I was talking about squids, I was thinking about you-know-who.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Watch over her, will you, Mason?” Donya snapped her seat belt into place, then twisted the ignition key. The engine coughed to life. “Back on the island, she needed a morality teacher, and now she needs a guardian angel, and once again you’re the man for the job.”

  ALTHOUGH THE AMTRAK timetable had promised a noon arrival, my train didn’t pull into Pennsylvania Station until 12:13 P.M., which meant that by the corporation’s amoeboid clock, ever beholden to the whims of the freight lines, we’d actually hit New York ahead of schedule. We were nevertheless objectively late, and I was not surprised when, approaching the Seventh Avenue exit, suitcase in hand, I came upon Londa pacing in circles and checking her watch. Still very much a celebrity and hence vulnerable to unwanted attention, she had affected a disguise: dark sunglasses, scarf across her mouth, hair stuffed beneath a black beret. Only after we were secluded in a Yellow Cab, moving uptown in fits and starts, did I get a good look at her face. I hadn’t seen her since Yolly’s funeral, an afternoon on which grief had bloated her features. Today I was sharing a taxi with the most attractive woman in Manhattan, a svelte enchantress with high cheekbones and opalescent eyes.

  “Donya told me about Quetzie,” I said. “Please accept my condolences.”

  “It’s all right,” she said wistfully. “He didn’t know he was supposed to live any longer. Maybe he wasn’t.”

  “That lizard had a more complicated relationship with language than Wittgenstein. Hey, Londa, I’ve never seen you looking better.”

  “That’s hard to believe. I’ve been working around the clock.”

  “On curing the Phyllistines?”

  “I even worked on my birthday. We beaker freaks have birthdays—you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Naked came I from my mother’s vat.”

  Later that afternoon, surveying Londa’s claustrophobic living room on the second floor of 56 West Eighty-second Street, I tried to decide whether she was a tidy housekeeper. The place was awash in clutter, but on closer inspection I realized that most of the detritus traced to a single source, her preoccupation with both the maiden voyage of the original Titanic and the imminent cruise of Ralph Gittikac’s Titanic Redux. Her apartment would probably seem quite neat were she to jettison the myriad books, DVDs, news clippings, brochures, handbills, and blueprints concerning the primal Ship of Dreams and its equally decadent descendant.

  “Want my advice?” I wedged my denim jacket into a hall closet crammed with jeans, blouses, skirts, and sweatshirts. “Stop brooding about the Redux. Rich people get to go on luxury cruises, poor people don’t, and there’s nothing you or I or Thoth on his throne can do about it.”

  “I always want your advice, Socrates,” Londa replied, “and in the case of Operation PG, I lust for your advice. I’ll happily put you up at the Essex House, but I’m hoping you’ll reconcile yourself to my futon. My next deontological crisis could strike at any time, day or night.”

  “The futon’s fine. Shall we begin the tutorial now?”

  “First food, then philosophy.”

  Not only were Londa’s housekeeping skills beyond evaluation, I learned nothing that day about her cooking abilities, for the lunch she now fed me consisted of reheated fried rice and sesame scallops from the previous evening’s Chinese dinner. Throughout the meal we chatted superficially, Londa systematically deflecting my questions about Operation PG, but then events took a surprise turn when she dropped a manila envelope into my lap and announced that it contained “the single most libidinous object in New York.” Instead of explaining herself, she suggested that I investigate her claim while she took a shower.

  Londa trotted off to the bathroom, and an instant later came the rubbery percussion of the spray hitting the plastic curtain. I shoveled some Titanic memorabilia off the futon, sat down, and separated the envelope from its contents: a charged artifact indeed, the twelve-page manuscript of her old one-act play, Coral Idolatry.

  “‘A sea nymph lives with one purpose in her heart!’” she called from the bathroom, projecting her first line over the water’s drumming. And suddenly I was back on Isla de Sangre, watching her portray the undine Sythia climbing onto the shore. “‘She seeks a mortal who will love her, betroth her, and lavish his body upon her, for in this manner alone might she acquire a soul!’”

  Londa glided into the room wearing nothing but her facial expression. A smile. The residue of her shower spilled from her drenched auburn hair and sluiced along her limbs.

  My throat constricted. My blood rolled in all directions. Nothing about the moment fail
ed to astonish me. There she stood, the unhorsed Dame Quixote, the deposed empress of Themisopolis, dripping and glistening as if newly emerged from Charnock’s broth—“Her birth was of the womb of morning dew”—and I knew that despite everything, despite her plots and zombies and titanic machinations, I was in love with this person and always would be.

  “‘Two hundred days have I followed the submarine currents, seeking the legendary Isle of Sérifos, whose pleasure-loving Hedonists never hesitate to avail themselves of succulent sprites and willing sylphs,’” she continued. Her aureoles were the size and hue of gingersnaps. “‘Could it be that my search is finally ended? Will the man I see before me grant my wish?’”

  I peeled off my turtleneck. The undershirt came with it, accompanied by the crackle of static electricity. “No problem with lavishing my body, Miss Nymph, but the betrothal will have to wait.”

  “Stick to the script, Mason. Your line is ‘Forgive me for gaping, but I’m astonished to find myself a mere stone’s throw from a creature of your kind.’”

  “‘Forgive me for gaping, but I’m astonished to find myself a mere stone’s throw from a creature of your kind.’” I subtracted my jeans, jockey shorts, and socks from the situation, then scrambled to my feet, clutching my script in one hand and brushing Londa’s cheek with the other. “‘Until now I’ve observed undines only from afar. Whenever I take ship, I stand on the deck and stare out to sea, hoping to glimpse a nymph sporting with the dolphins.’”

  “‘My name is Sythia. Are you a Hedonist?’”

  “‘Call me Thales, disciple of Epicurus.’”

  She wrapped a damp hand around my wrist and led me down the hall to her boudoir. There was no bed in sight, simply a queen-size mattress strewn with quilts—not a large beach, but sufficient for this performance. “‘Epicurus? Then I must surmise that for you the essence of pleasure is the removal of pain.’”

  “‘True, fair Sythia. Once pain is gone, pleasure admits of variation but not of increase—’”

  “If we made love until the sun comes up, you might decide that ecstasy comes in gradations,” she said.

  “I thought we were sticking to the script.”

  “Poetic improvisation is encouraged.”

  “Then I suggest we improvise an elision and jump to page four. Stage direction: ‘Sythia kisses Thales squarely on the lips. Thales reciprocates.’”

  Sythia did as the text required, according Thales a protracted kiss. Fingers scurried across bodies not their own. Blood vessels swelled. Words were exchanged concerning the sea nymph’s fertility, as neither party desired a fetal outcome to their frolic, and they agreed to meet this contingency with a selection from Sythia’s collection of exotic condoms from the four corners of the world.

  She liquefied, my passionate vatling, and inevitably I thought of those colorful enzymes—crimson, purple, gold, turquoise—in which Charnock had braised her nascent frame. We sat on a floral quilt and connected face-to-face. She told me I made a fine supplementary superego but an even better subsidiary id. I replied that I’d nearly forgotten what a splendid thing was the mammalian mode of descent.

  “A miracle, really,” I said. “No dreary anthropomorphic deity could have thought it up in a million years.”

  “True enough,” Londa said. “And yet the most erotic sentence I ever heard doesn’t come from Fanny Hill or Justine or Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It comes from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.”

  “The most erotic sentence?”

  “With my body I thee worship.”

  NO PILLOW TALK for my undine, no basking in the afterglow, no lolling about on the shores of Sérifos. This was Londa, after all, the driven Crimson Kantian, the edgy Purple Pietist. She slid free of my embrace, grabbed her cell phone, and slipped away, leaving me to contemplate in private the afternoon’s remarkable events. A few minutes later, her urgent mutterings wafted into the room. I heard an occasional “Dagmar.” She was talking to her manager, doubtless about their plan to fix the Phyllistines.

  My mind raced like a machine shorn of its flywheel. Was it possible that Londa’s reasons for staging this off-off-Broadway performance of Coral Idolatry were less romantic than I’d imagined? Had she merely sought to win my approval of Operation PG? I placed my palm in the quilted cavity from which she’d emerged. The fabric was still warm. No profit in pessimism, I decided. For the immediate future, I would refrain from thinking the worst of my undine. Gradually my anxiety faded, and I drifted off to sleep, lulled by the comforting rumble of the rush-hour traffic rolling up Amsterdam Avenue.

  It was dark when I awoke—8:17 P.M. by the gimlet gaze of the digital alarm. Slowly I slid free of my dream, an expressionist extravaganza that found Charnock and me sailing his houseboat across a nameless sea, pursued by pirates, menaced by sharks, and engulfed by a maelstrom. Londa brought me her restive flesh and a crystalline goblet of mumquat nectar. For the next two hours, we lay together, entwined like strands of DNA, my vatling demonstrating an uncanny talent for combining recitative and fellatio, her morality teacher reciprocating with a cappella cunnilingus, neither of us pausing except to use the bathroom or sip more serenity. At length Londa asserted that I would do well to get a good night’s sleep, as tomorrow we were leaving on a long journey.

  “I just got here,” I protested.

  “First thing in the morning, we’re hitting the road, Thales and Sythia, off on another adventure. We’ll be away three months at least, maybe four.”

  “Four months? You’re not making much sense, darling.”

  “Don’t worry if you don’t have enough underwear with you. Where we’re going, consumer goods grow on trees.” She presented me with her cell phone. “Call your landlord. Tell him to sublet your apartment from now till New Year’s.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “No, it’s your gumbo girl. Trust her.”

  A wave of fatalism washed through me, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. Trust her? Why not? What did I have to lose?

  I pestered Verizon for Fred Packer’s number, punched in the digits, and caught him in a good mood, the Sox having just vanquished the Yankees on a ninth-inning grand slam. He said he’d try to find a substitute tenant for one semester, though naturally it would be easier to lease the apartment for the whole school year. Either way works, I told him, figuring that once Operation PG had run its course, Londa and I would start playing house here in Manhattan.

  Next I called Dexter Padula, telling him he could have my remaining shares in Pieces of Mind if he would hire a van, drop by my apartment, remove all possessions of value, and stick them in a storage shed. He agreed without batting an eye, no doubt delighted that his increasingly unreliable business partner was getting out of the game entirely.

  “So what happens after we cure the Phyllistines?” I asked Londa. “Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.”

  She snickered and said, “I’m not ruling out that possibility.”

  “What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato’s demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?”

  “That job’s already taken,” she said.

  “But you could do it better,” I said.

  “When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.”

  Londa’s voice fell, her eyelids drooped, and her mouth opened in a cavernous yawn revealing all thirty-two of her mother’s straight, white teeth.

  THE DIGITAL ALARM roused us at eight o’clock. Londa served me coffee and a toasted poppy-seed bagel. Naturally I’d imagined that our departure from Manhattan would occur by car, taxi, bus, train, or some other horizontal means, so I was taken aback when she announced that we’d be traveling by helicopter.

  “Traveling where?” I asked, harboring not the remotest expectation of a straight answer.

  “To the radiant crux of justice.”

  As a mellifluous July morning flowed over the city, Londa and I stepped into the hallway g
ripping our respective suitcases. We lowered the fire ladder from the ceiling and climbed to the roof, where a helicopter stood ready to receive us, rotor blades churning, cockpit enclosed by a dirty Plexiglas blister—a hydrocephalic dragonfly. Dagmar Röhrig sat behind the controls. We fought our way through the prop wash, climbed into the cab, and secured our luggage. Londa seated herself in the copilot’s chair, and so I joined my suitcase in the storage compartment, involuntarily assuming a painful and unnatural posture. I wondered if all trips to the radiant crux of justice required such contortions of their pilgrims.

  “Did we make the Times?” Londa asked.

  “The front page,” Dagmar replied. “Also the last three minutes of Coffee Klatch and the news banner on the Flatiron Building.”

  We flew south along the Hudson River docks, soared across Upper New York Bay, and swung so close to the Statue of Liberty I could see the startled faces of the tourists clustered in her crown. After skirting the western lobe of Brooklyn, we veered away from the rising sun and entered upon the vast foaming tracts of the North Atlantic. Each time I posed a question to Londa or Dagmar, she declined to answer, insisting that the present mission was too complicated to be summarized in a few sentences shouted over the roar of our engine—a feeble excuse, since the women were perfectly happy to compete with that same racket when speaking to one another. From the snatches I caught of their conversation, I gathered that our destination was the Titanic Redux, currently somewhere on the high seas, steaming toward New York.

  As we zoomed across the whitecapped ocean, mile after nautical mile, I resolved to inhabit the moment as fully as I could. Here I was rambling around with a goddess whose soul I’d once assembled and whose body I’d recently worshipped in the best High Church style, beginning an exploit that, whatever its hazards, would most likely include intervals of bliss aboard a luxury liner. Apart from certain disconcerting mysteries, my situation had much to recommend it.

  After a flight of perhaps an hour, I once again attempted to make Londa stop ignoring me.