The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  THUS DID I FIND MYSELF living under house arrest aboard the Titanic Redux. In retrospect I realize I was enduring the sort of cushy incarceration our Phyllistine captives would have enjoyed had they been convicted of their various crimes against the planet and its life-forms. But at the time I found no irony in my imprisonment, only infinite frustration, for I was evidently missing the most significant events of the voyage.

  The first thunderbolt struck during Londa’s regular nine o’clock broadcast. “Good news, masters of the universe! My staff reports a virtual orgy of self-reflection on G deck, and Colonel Fox believes that many of you are now on the road to recovery—and so we’ve decided to put your rehabilitation on hold. Even as I speak, we’re shutting down the venting initiative, and in a matter of hours the ship’s regular staff and stokers will come out of retirement to take over those character-building jobs that have absorbed you of late.”

  She spent the rest of the program telling her captives what to expect in the days to come. One by one they would be brought up to OPG headquarters for an interview “not unlike those that routinely occur between felons and parole officers.” As the evaluation progressed, Londa would assay the hostage’s soul, and if she deemed him cured, he would be put ashore when the Redux reached the Florida Keys on September 17. Anyone who failed the examination would remain on the ship “under the regrettable but necessary plastique regime,” until he, too, became fluent in the Beatitudes.

  “How many G-deck residents have thus far acquired a moral compass?” Londa wondered aloud. “Some? Most? All? None? Be sure to tune in our next exciting episode!”

  Prompted by a combination of inquisitiveness and fear, I indeed tuned in the next exciting episode—that is, I decided not to censor it with my pillow—and a half-dozen subsequent episodes. What I heard astonished me even more than Edwina’s long-ago disclosure that she’d quadruplicated herself. For if Londa could be believed, Operation PG was a resounding success, with nearly every Phyllistine lamenting his former indifference to the downtrodden and his past offenses against Lady Justice.

  “Tomorrow we drop anchor off Key Largo,” she said over the swelling Rocky theme, “whereupon two hundred and eighty-eight of you will be ferried to Miami. Those dozen voyagers who still require treatment will remain on board until they are likewise ready to join the fellowship of the gentle.”

  As the music reached its crescendo, I muttered an acid paraphrase of Londa’s final sentence—“Those dozen voyagers who refused to tell me what I wanted to hear will remain on board until I broker a deal with the FBI”—for such was the depth of my hostility toward Operation PG, my skepticism regarding the Phyllistines’ redemption, and my disgust with Dame Quixote and all her poisonous dreams.

  Hostility, skepticism, disgust: and yet—wonder of wonders, joy of joys—these sentiments were evidently misplaced. Although Londa did not permit me a shortwave radio or an Internet connection, she did allow Lieutenant Kristowski to drop by D deck once a day and shout the latest news through my barricaded door, and each such bulletin proved more heartening than the last. Against all odds, defying every rational expectation, our recently released Phyllistine legislators were sponsoring Beatitudinous measures around the clock, aimed variously at sparing the planet the ravages of industrialization, curbing the theocratic agenda of the Center for Stable Families, undermining Corporate Christi, and raising the republic’s foreign-aid budget to levels commensurate with Jesus of Nazareth’s reported enthusiasm for generosity. Our liberated CEOs, meanwhile, ashamed of their former complicity in sweatshops and global poverty, were arranging for the planet’s toys, running shoes, designer clothing, household appliances, and cybernetic consumer goods to be assembled in convivial environments by reasonably contented workers who received fair wages. As for our rehabilitated lobbyists, they were switching allegiances with an alacrity to tax the vocabulary of even the most articulate neo-Nazi radio host—for after you’ve labeled them traitors, quislings, and agents of Lucifer, what else can you call them?—and in nearly every case the reformed influence peddler announced that his new cause, whether it was educating preschoolers, protecting rain forests, or securing affordable day care for single mothers, had blessed him with an unaccustomed quantity of self-respect.

  Concerning our immediate circumstances, Lieutenant Kristowski reported that after leaving Key Largo the Redux had steamed to Isla de Sangre, and she presently lay at anchor in the Bahía de Colón. Captain Pittinger and his officers, as well as the deckhands, stokers, stewards, galley staff, and medical personnel, had all been sent home, and in a goodwill gesture Londa had transferred the twelve unrepentant Phyllistines—a group that, predictably enough, included Enoch Anthem, Felix Pielmeister, and Ralph Gittikac—to second-class cabins on E deck. Throughout the luxury liner, the lieutenant told me, an eerie quietude reigned: not surprising, really, since the guards now outnumbered the prisoners. Plenty of food remained in the pantries, and the Valkyries were amusing themselves by preparing gourmet meals for one another. Owing to our explosive cargo, the outside world was still disinclined to harass us, though it wasn’t clear how much longer the standoff would prevail before somebody blinked, balked, or blew up the ship.

  Hour by hour the glad tidings poured in. The civilized world watched in awe as drug companies voluntarily lowered their prices, cigarette manufacturers launched class-action lawsuits against themselves, and automakers burned the midnight oil seeking ways for future generations to burn innocuous fuels instead. But you know more about these halcyon days than I, ladies and gentlemen. After all, you were sitting in front of your television screens every night, watching heaven come to earth, while I languished in my boring windowless cabin, watching grade-Z Frankenstein movies.

  When not contemplating Mary Shelley’s cinematic descendants, clearing away the resultant cranial cobwebs with the aid of J. R. R. Tolkien and Guinness stout, or sending impotent messages to Londa imploring her to let me out of the clink, I talked through the door with Lieutenant Kristowski. Despite her inveterate faith in Dame Quixote, my aide-de-camp was having as much trouble as I believing that the miracle had occurred. “To be truthful, I wasn’t always sure she’d bring it off,” the lieutenant said. “There’s a moment in The League of Londa number twenty-four when her followers lose faith. Dame Quixote has resolved to talk the world’s leaders into destroying their nuclear weapons, and of course her disciples think she’s gone off the deep end, but she actually makes it happen, universal disarmament. You must be pretty proud of yourself, giving her such an ironclad conscience.”

  “Proud? Right, Lieutenant. You bet. I taught her everything she knows. Love your enemies, and if that doesn’t work, grind them into the dirt. Turn the other cheek, and if the bastard slaps you again, imprison him on a polluted luxury liner. Next time you meet a rich man, try dragging him through the eye of a needle, and if the experience leaves him a bloody pulp…well, you certainly shattered his complacency, didn’t you?”

  “Really, sir, I don’t think this is a time for negativism,” Lieutenant Kristowski said.

  “Londa would agree with you. That’s why she keeps me in jail.”

  “You never told her to grind her enemies into the dirt.”

  “Back when we were mentor and mentee, I told her that at least once a day. Obviously she learned her lesson. I’m a better teacher than I know.”

  IN THESE SNEERING, jeering, jaded times, we tend to forget how close my vatling came to redeeming Western civilization through Operation Pineal Gland. For a full seven weeks following the release of the cured plutocrats, an epidemic of decency raged through the corridors of power and the citadels of privilege. Sometimes the blessing in question traced directly to the activism of a former Redux hostage, sometimes to a mover and shaker who’d been moved and shaken by a rehabilitated Phyllistine’s example. It seemed not only that the meek stood a plausible chance of inheriting the earth, but that the concomitant taxes would be paid by, of all people, the rich. Within the walls of corporations on
ce shamelessly engaged in gangbanging the biosphere, moderation was now the watchword, even as a previously unthinkable distinction—that between an honest profit and a profit beyond cupidity’s wettest dream—was openly discussed in boardrooms everywhere, with the latter judged inimical to the common good. Behind the ramparts of America’s gated communities, a discourse had arisen whereby the promiscuous accumulation of wealth was regarded less as a mark of genius than an index of sin.

  The bubble, I am told, did not so much burst as implode. Apparently one could practically hear the sluggish suck of unearned income returning to plutocrat pockets, the plaintive peal of progressive legislation falling into procedural purgatory, and the agonized cries of Lady Justice squirming and writhing in the jaws of alleged necessity. It was as if the rehabilitated Phyllistines and their acolytes had awoken one morning and said to themselves, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? This is the United States of America, not fucking Camelot. What were we thinking?”

  Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, I understand why many of you recall the golden age of Operation PG with fondness. If the Beatitudes broke the bank once, the argument goes, the same thing could happen again, so let us celebrate the dream, short-lived though it was. For what it’s worth, however, I have come to regard Londa’s transient success as an unequivocal tragedy. Far better for the merciful, the gentle, and the spit-upon if they’d remained permanently in the shadows and never endured the fate that actually befell them, a day in the sun followed by the cruelest imaginable eclipse.

  Though filtered through several layers of pine and oak, Lieutenant Kristowski’s sobs clawed at my soul, the most wrenching such sounds I’d heard since the choral grieving at Yolly’s funeral. Numb with sorrow, paralyzed with despair, my aide-de-camp could barely bring herself to relate the dispatches now arriving from all directions. Sweatshops once again running at a pace to wreck their employees’ health and rack their spirits. Developers devouring ecosystems as if—the very outcome this violence seemed intended to secure—there was no tomorrow. Legislators cutting nutritional programs for the urban poor even as these same elected representatives rigged the tax code to guarantee that no CEO need ever suffer empty-yacht-berth syndrome again.

  “Back to square one,” I moaned.

  “Dr. Sabacthani will think of something,” my aide-de-camp asserted in the bravest voice she could muster. “She always does.”

  Lieutenant Kristowski’s instinct was doubtless correct. Dr. Sabacthani would think of something. And at that particular moment, sitting in my prison as Lady Frankenstein played across my plasma television monitor, I could not imagine a more disturbing prediction.

  WHILE THE UNRAVELING of Operation Pineal Gland broke my heart, it also hardened my resolve, convincing me to do all within my power to prevent the circumstances through which Londa Sabacthani had come into the world—her vatling birth, DUNCE cap infancy, scattershot moral education at the hands of a dubious philosopher—from ever converging again. How I longed to break free of my prison and appear on Londa’s doorstep: not in my persona as her ethical adviser, of course, a sympathetic Jiminy Cricket nudging her back onto the straight and narrow. Her caller, rather, would be an insect of Gregor Samsa pedigree, bent and grotesque, graphically mirroring her own misshapen soul. Or perhaps I would become an arthropod more monstrous yet, a chittering, chitinous mutation out of some 1950s science-fiction movie, It Came From Beneath the Family Hearth. You may fancy yourself a semidivine genius, I would tell her, but in truth you’re just another autocratic narcissist whose followers have guns. You’re not a demigod, Londa Sabacthani, merely a demagogue.

  As the days slogged by, I came to wish that my DVD library actually included some of those 1950s giant-insect thrillers. In my experience such spectacles were marginally diverting, which is more than I could say for my digitalized Frankenstein omnibus. Despite their promising titles, none of these films could be rehabilitated through hermeneutics. There was no compelling discourse on gender occurring between the frames of Lady Frankenstein, no postmodern insouciance afoot in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, no tacit political subtext crying out for deconstruction in Frankenstein Conquers the World, no allegory on adolescence to be gleaned from I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. There was only tedium, and turgidity, and my gradual realization that Londa was severely mistaken to imagine that these cinematic catastrophes could provide any insight into her mother’s mind.

  Month three of my imprisonment was not long under way when, early one morning, Major Powers popped the padlock, marched into my cabin, and, after hauling my semiconscious self out of bed, explained that Londa wanted to see me. I dressed frantically—linen slacks and a silk shirt that in fact belonged to one of our twelve on-board Phyllistines, Clarence Garmond of the White House Council on Air and Water Quality—and soon we were on B deck, marching toward Londa’s headquarters. Although I’d never doubted Lieutenant Kristowski’s report that the Redux lay moored in the Bahía de Colón, I was startled to look beyond the glassed-in promenade and see not the usual expanse of ocean but a range of forested hills wreathed in clouds. It was a typical Isla de Sangre dawn, pure travel brochure, the rising sun fruiting the trees with emeralds and filling the bay with a million buoyant diamonds.

  Major Powers and I arrived in time to observe the changing of the guard, two steely-eyed Valkyries stepping away as their dayshift counterparts—the avatar of Themis and the transsexual conquistador—came on deck. A shroud of melancholy enswathed all four sentries. Dagmar Röhrig sat slumped behind her desk, staring despondently into space as if practicing to play herself in a Hollywood adaptation of a forthcoming League of Londa comic in which Dame Quixote’s staff lapses into suicidal depression following the demise of Operation PG. Saying nothing, she waved us into the parlor suite.

  Londa lay sprawled across a green velvet divan, wrapped in shadows, a raven cloaked by its own wings. Major Powers made a discreet exit. A calculated cough escaped my throat. My vatling struggled to her feet and stepped into a shaft of sunlight streaming through the porthole. Her auburn hair was a snarled skein. Her eyes suggested corroded pinballs. Her flesh looked battered and swollen, as if she’d been swallowed by Spenser’s allegorical Error, judged indigestible, and vomited out.

  “Guess what, Socrates?” she muttered. “You’ve been replaced. Like a worn-out fan belt, or a TV show with low ratings. I’ve got a new conscience now.”

  Although rococonut milk was Londa’s anesthetic of choice, today she’d opted for rum. She approached her antique desk and, taking hold of a half-empty Captain Morgan bottle, slopped a measure into a cracked white coffee mug.

  “Is this development supposed to make me jealous?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t.” Actually it did.

  She swallowed some rum, then moved her hands with the staccato awkwardness of a stymied charades player, eventually directing my gaze toward the porthole and the island it disclosed. “The Wild Woman of the Jungle.”

  “What?”

  “My new ethical adviser. The Wild Woman of the Jungle. The feisty lady has blessed every aspect of Operation PG—past, present, and future. She even signed The Book of Londa. Our relationship is not ideal, but she understands me better than you do.”

  “That rum bottle understands you better than I do.”

  She took another gulp of Captain Morgan. “Be honest, Mason. You think I’ve lost. Lousy position, down a rook, and my opponent’s about to queen a pawn. But as we all know, sweetie, the winner’s not the player with great position, an extra rook, and a pawn storming the back row—it’s the player who can flash her opponent a smirk and say, ‘Checkmate.’ The whole world will be listening to tomorrow’s broadcast, but my message will hold particular interest for our recently released Phyllistines. They have one last chance to get it right.”

  “And what if they don’t get it right?”

  “You always ask such penetrating questions, Mason. I swear, the day you die, Aristotle and Plato
will petition God to have you transferred south. If you can’t liven up limbo, nobody can.”

  “Limbo doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Neither does God. Been enjoying your Frankenstein films?”

  “They’re garbage. What if the released Phyllistines ignore you?”

  Londa sipped rum and removed a Jerusalem Bible from her desk drawer. “Major Powers tells me there’s a great speech in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. ‘Come, come, my boy, say good morning to your creator. Speak! You’ve got a civil tongue in your head—I know you have, because I sewed it back myself.’” She flipped open the book and made a beeline for the Gospels. “This Jew you think is such a splendid moral philosopher—you know what he really is? He’s Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Go digging through the New Testament, and eventually you’ll unearth enough material to stitch together any sort of Jesus you want. When you neo-Darwinist sentimentalists go about it, you naturally assemble the brother-loving, mother-loving, other-loving, love-loving rabbi of your cuddliest fantasies. But suppose we want to build ourselves a different kind of Christ—say, the lock-and-load Messiah of the Rapture-mongers? No problem. Take the Gospel According to Matthew. Chapter eleven, verse twenty-three, Jesus blithely condemning an entire city to hell—men, women, children, and fetuses. Chapter thirteen, verse forty-two, the Messiah merrily throwing sinners into a blazing furnace. Chapter eighteen, verse thirty-five, the Prince of Peace threatening his followers with torture if they fail to accord their estranged relatives sufficient forgiveness.” She snapped the book closed. “What if the Phyllistines ignore me? Simple, Socrates. Colonel Fox brings Enoch Anthem onto the weather deck, and the first thing he notices is the dozen nooses dangling from the foremast shrouds.”

  “Nooses?”

  “The apocalypse, Anthem now realizes, is about to become complete. War, Famine, and Pestilence have already visited the ship, which leaves only the pale rider on his pale horse.”