by James Morrow
The jungle paths leading away from Torre de la Carne were soaked in shadows, but the westering sun shone brightly, guiding me safely past the treacherous roots and perilous bogs, until I arrived, famished, at Faustino, eager to consume whatever Redux delicacies I could find. I sat at the kitchen table and worked my way through a wheel of Gouda, a quarter pound of caviar, and half a bottle of cabernet, until I felt both sated and insensate and thus prepared to deal with Londa’s letter. Abandoning the feast, I sought the library, my apprehension growing with each step.
Alonso occupied his usual post, discouraging visitors from choosing forbidden texts. Someone, Edwina 0004 presumably, had returned his sword to its scabbard. What thoughts had gone flitting through her head at the moment she’d sheathed that bloody implement? Did she see herself as a child-killer—Medea’s doppelgänger—or simply as a machine like the RXL-313 from which she’d come, beyond good and evil? I half expected to find her in the philosophy section, reviling the conquistador for supplying the murder weapon, but the only life-forms around just then were a hairy black spider, a scattering of ants, and a grieving Darwinist from Boston.
Handwritten but legible, the letter was in its promised place: an 8 ½-by-11-inch sheet marking the Caputo chapter called “Several Lyrical-Philosophical Discourses on Various Jewgreek Parables and Paradigms with Constant Reference to Obligation.”
My Dear Mason,
I must write quickly. Any minute now the Wild Woman will be here. Assuming you decline to suspend her destiny, I’ll be dead by the time you read this.
Here’s what I have to tell you. Two weeks ago my mother’s hunger came upon me. I speak now of the primal Edwina, and of her all-consuming desire to have a child. Fashioning Edwina 0004 did not satisfy my craving to procreate—how could it?—so I devised a different scheme.
The person you took to your bed last night was the Wild Woman. The whole arrangement appalled her, but she agreed to play her part out of love for me. There’s reason to believe a conception occurred. If our child is a boy, I hope you will name him Arthur, after the primal Edwina’s father. If a girl, let me suggest Sofia, wisdom.
I can hear my mother’s footsteps in the hall. She’ll lock me up in Charnock’s lab, long enough for you to make your decision, and then she’ll unsheath Alonso’s sword and bring me down to the beach. My plan is to hide this letter inside Caputo, hoping you’ll have cause to visit his pages again.
My sins are many. I failed to cure the Phyllistines. I murdered two men. I forced you to decide between two evils of which neither was the lesser: kill the gumbo girl, kill her not. Forgive me. She is coming. I love you, Mason. You’re not a very good philosopher, and you’re not really much of a conscience, but you’re some sort of great teacher.
Your difficult student,
Londa
Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you’d once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you’d felt compelled to erase?
The instant I finished Londa’s letter, I decided that if an amnesia machine existed, I would avail myself of it immediately. Lacking such a device, I compensated as best I could, returning to the kitchen, lighting a gas burner, and with steely determination edging the message toward the flame. The paper caught fire, transmuting into an airborne carbon curlicue.
My flesh throbbed with the exertion of destroying the ontogenerator. My head reeled from the effort of forgetting Londa’s confession. I trod the stairs to the primal Edwina’s bedchamber, that bower in which her fourth iteration and I had never made love, then lowered the curtains and surrendered to my dreams.
FOR THE NEXT SIX WEEKS I pursued an Uncle Rumpus sort of existence, combing the shores of my magic isle. I alternated my residency between Faustino and the primal Edwina’s cottage, all the while keeping an eye out for the Wild Woman—she with whom I had not slept, that person I did not impregnate—but I saw no trace of her, and eventually I decided she’d gone to the mainland. My scavenging skills were sufficient to keep me nourished, and the lack of distractions boded well for my new project, a sequel to Ethics from the Earth that I intended to call The Serpent Was More Subtle. The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.
Despite my tranquil surroundings and my enthusiasm for its theme, The Serpent Was More Subtle did not flow easily from my pen. Each sentence was a tribulation, every paragraph an ordeal. The problem, I decided, traced to a combination of writer’s block and procrastinator’s malaise. And the remedy? I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed likely that a return to Boston would do my book more good than harm.
True to his prediction, my landlord had failed to find a one-semester tenant for my Sherborn Street apartment. Instead he’d granted a full-year lease to, of all people, a Hawthorne philosophy Ph.D. candidate who’d loved, absolutely loved, Ethics from the Earth, her zeal for the thing eclipsing even Natalie’s enthusiasm of five years earlier. A spunky, thirtyish, divorced Spinoza enthusiast with an elfin face and a sensual overbite, Leslie Rosenzweig and I were not long into our first conversation before two noteworthy facts emerged: she found Boston as appealingly exotic as I’d found her native Los Angeles on those occasions when I’d visited my sister—Beantown’s buskers and scrod versus La-La Land’s surfers and palm trees—and she’d be delighted to let me crash on the living-room futon until I located more convivial digs. Leslie even offered me the master bedroom, citing the satisfaction she would feel in “doing a mitzvah for the inventor of Darwinian deontology.” Such a sacrifice, I insisted, was unnecessary: I had no wish to exercise some presumed elitist prerogative over her—as far as I was concerned, all middle-class urban intellectuals were created equal.
Not only did I now have a place to sleep, I soon acquired a social life as well. It turned out that my original vision for Pieces of Mind—here would flower the headiest philosophical discourse to be found west of ancient Athens—was not so silly after all. If an unrepentant neo-Darwinist and a vivacious Jewish Spinozist decided to institute such a dream, then by God it would happen.
Our core group met on Tuesday and Thursday nights, gathering in the science-fiction and fantasy section around a low, circular table barely large enough to accommodate our books, coffee mugs, tea presses, and occasional slammed fists. Leslie and I had peopled the seminar the way the young Orson Welles had mounted his idiosyncratic Shakespeare productions, with an affection for flamboyance. We drew our requisite eccentrics and scenery chewers from the Religious Studies Program, the William James Center, the Lewis Mumford Institute, and the congregation of bookstore barflies who passed their leisure hours at Pieces of Mind. I even allowed certain select members of the Hawthorne philosophy department to join our fellowship. We called ourselves the Whores of Reason, and our conversation was of sufficient general interest to eventually attract a regular audience, as if we were engaged in something rather more sensational than abstract discourse, like cockfighting or an American League pennant race. Week after week our fans would appear, cheering us on as we spelunked in Plato�
�s cave, settled Heidegger’s hash, confessed to our guilty admiration for Nietzsche, forged a compromise with pragmatism, relativized relativism, categorically rejected absolutism, and presumed to know Spinoza’s unknowable God.
Although I’d never regarded my recent sojourn on Blood Island as an attempt to elude the long arm of the law, the FBI didn’t quite see it that way. Pleased to realize that I now had a known and fixed address, a place that a person might approach without fear of quicksand, alligators, venomous snakes, or poisonous jellyfish, two agents from the Boston office began paying me regular visits. I told them more than they wanted to know but nothing they didn’t deserve to hear, with the upshot that I was not indicted. When one of my interrogators, a grim and intelligent Russian expatriate named Bolkonsky, said I should thank my “plucky stars” I hadn’t ended up in prison along with Fox, Powers, Kristowski, and the rest, I assured him that at dawn I would sing a hymn to the Aton.
Our philosophy group’s prestige quickly reached such proportions that the average Boston intellectual crackpot, of which there are many, took pride in being invited to favor us with an informal talk. Although it wasn’t my idea to have Vincent Charnock contribute to the Londa Sabacthani Memorial Lecture Series—the suggestion came from Dr. Cochran, the medieval-studies professor whose high-definition television had saved my life by displaying The Egyptian at a crucial moment—I did not protest, for the man had clearly turned over a new leaf, several new leaves, in fact. Truth to tell, Charnock had rewritten the entire Book of Vincent, not only climbing free of his self-constructed abyss (with a boost from Alcoholics Anonymous) but also funding and administering the Charnock Consortium, a Cambridge-based enterprise that in its devotion to avant-garde cancer research was generally perceived as the stepchild of the incinerated Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations. Having supplied Anthem and Pielmeister with the means for spawning the immaculoids, Charnock would always seem to me an accessory before the fact of Yolly’s murder, and yet he’d also evidently become a crusader on behalf of Yolly’s hope.
There was one way in which Charnock had not changed. This moralist who’d so adamantly opposed Edwina’s removal of Proserpine’s brain, and who would doubtless have resisted our uprooting of the sentient mangrove had he been around at the time, remained a steadfast foe of physician-assisted suicide. In his talk that evening, “From Mercy to Mengele,” he made a coherent philosophical case against euthanasia. He began by recapitulating Kant’s claim that if the practice ever became commonplace, the effect would be to cheapen the intrinsic value of human life, then proceeded to demonstrate that John Stuart Mill’s defense of euthanasia suffered from the same fallacy as other Utilitarian positions—namely, an assumption that to mathematize a dilemma was to resolve it. For his coup de grâce, Charnock explained why in his view the institutionalized destruction of individuals facing a life without quality lay on the same continuum as the Third Reich’s eradication of those who supposedly had nothing to offer the Fatherland.
Although nobody agreed with Charnock’s conclusions—as Leslie later put it, “you could float the Titanic Redux through the holes in his argument”—it was an astute and heartfelt performance, drawing applause from the audience, myself included, and our guest was in good spirits when we adjourned to the Shepherd’s Pie. We were celebrating two events that evening: Charnock’s successful appearance before our group and my recent contract with Prima Facie Press for The Serpent Was More Subtle, based on two sample chapters and an outline. Most of us ordered beer. Our speaker opted for a Cherry Coke and nachos. As the conversation heated up, Charnock confessed that he’d begun investigating the problem of physician-assisted suicide because the abortion controversy had proved too much for him, requiring that he search his soul more deeply than was compatible with his sanity.
“I came to feel that if I really cared about those seven embryos I poured into the bay, I should adopt seven unwanted children in their place. Or six at least. Or five.”
“Or four unwanted children,” Leslie said.
“Or three or two,” I said.
“The truth is that I’ve never felt an urge to nurture,” Charnock said.
“Or one unwanted child,” Leslie said.
“Edwina certainly felt it,” Charnock continued. “She ached for motherhood. She needed it like oxygen.”
“So did Londa,” I said. “Not at first. But sometime during the hijacking, the impulse kicked in.”
“I didn’t know that,” Charnock said. “I’m not surprised. Like mother, like daughter. This drive to rear the next generation, it’s essentially a female instinct, wouldn’t you say?”
“Nonsense,” Leslie said.
“Nonsense,” I agreed, though I had nothing on which to base this assertion, my parenting experiences being limited to John Snow 0001, who hadn’t exactly brought out my inner Geppetto.
“To the next generation,” Leslie said, raising her pilsner high, and we all followed her lead, clinking our glasses together and giving posterity our permission to come forth.
ON A CHILL, RAINY EVENING in October, three days before Halloween, the Whores of Reason sat down to epistemology as usual. Our reading that autumn had been Hegel’s preternaturally dense Phenomenology of Spirit, with its audacious account of the individual soul’s journey from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason to spirit to religion to perfect knowledge. Although I’d always found this byzantine ascent annoying in its obscurity, I figured that the fault lay with me, and as the evening progressed, Leslie and I began playing good cop-bad cop with Hegel’s theology, your narrator defending the man’s attempt to privilege pure thought, Leslie arguing that we shouldn’t hesitate to label metaphysical drivel as such. To cinch her case, she related how Hegel had in 1800 written a dissertation proving that, while the definition of a “planet” had varied over the centuries, there could still be, philosophically, only seven planets. “And then, in January of 1801, an eighth planet—the asteroid Ceres—was discovered by a non-Hegelian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi,” Leslie said. “And so, once again, we see why the real world has always been such an embarrassment to German idealism.”
On that epigrammatic note, the clock struck nine, and the meeting broke up—or almost did. What kept everyone in place was the appearance of a stooped figure, wheezing and arthritic, her face obscured by the cowl of a rain-spattered poncho. She was toting, of all things, a wicker bassinet, and before she reached our inner circle, several bystanders remarked that the conveyance held a baby.
Shuffling into my vicinity, our visitor set the bassinet on the table. Thanks to the auxiliary plastic hood and an abundance of blankets, the infant had been spared the wretched weather. Indeed, it was sleeping peacefully, eyes closed, nostrils emitting a pianissimo snore, a tiny sphere of saliva poised atop its delicate lips.
“The hospital insisted that I put something on the birth certificate, so for now her name is Jane,” our visitor told me. “That won’t do, of course. I’ll leave the christening to you.”
I surveyed Edwina 0004. Evidently Londa and the Valkyries had assembled her so hastily that they’d introduced a flaw into her genotype. Her skin was as yellow as an ancient newspaper, her eyes had receded into her balding skull, and she had fewer teeth than fingers. The world at large would never recognize this broken crone as the late Dame Quixote’s doppelgänger.
“The delivery occurred two months ago at Mass General.” From the lining of her poncho Edwina 0004 retrieved a glass baby bottle, pressing it into my hands. “My milk has dried up. I use Similac instead. You make it from powder and water. Her pediatrician is Dr. Ankers in Brighton. The sooner you assume your proper role, the better. If she remains in my care any longer, she’ll languish.”
I thought of the newborn Sinuhe, cast adrift in a reed boat—“Thus the city of Thebes was accustomed to dispose of its unwanted children”—coursing down the Nile before being rescued by the good-hearted couple who then adopt him. And now this unexpected infant had likewise floated
into my life.
“Languish?” I tried returning the Similac to Edwina 0004, but she refused me with raised palms. “No, you’re doing a splendid job,” I told her. “It’s raining cats and dogs, but you kept her dry as a bone.”
“I’m a vatling,” she replied. “No conscience. Receive your daughter, Mr. Ambrose, before I harm her.”
“Harm her? She’s your child.”
“So was Londa. Name the baby as you will. Good-bye.”
With an agility that belied her decrepitude, Edwina 0004 spun on her heel and hurried out the door. My impulse was to chase her down and beg her to relieve me of this burden, but just then the baby woke up and started crying.
“Mason, I don’t understand,” Leslie said, bending over the bassinet. “Are you the father?”
“That appears to be the case.”
An astonishing circumstance, but not without its foreshadow. Here at Pieces of Mind, my netherson had first made himself known to me, and now on these same premises another such annunciation had occurred.
Gently Leslie unwrapped the woolen blanket and, inserting her hands under the baby’s armpits, lifted the squalling bundle free of the bassinet. The Wild Woman had dressed her in a fluffy pink jumper. Her eyes, like mine, were a dark shade of brown.
“Give me the bottle,” Leslie said, snugging the infant into the crook of her arm.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“I have a black belt in baby-sitting. Give me the goddamn bottle.”
I presented Leslie with the Similac. Edwina 0004’s return, her terminal condition, the abandoned infant, my newfound fatherhood: it was all so abrupt, so absurdly sudden, like Ceres appearing before Giuseppe Piazzi. But beyond my confusion, I felt exhilarated, and when my daughter stopped fussing and started feeding, thus prompting the crowd to break into spontaneous applause, my happiness grew greater still. My ignorance was endless—did they sell Similac at the Whole Foods Market? diapers, too? did a baby need shots, like a puppy?—and yet I felt equal to the challenge. She was a regular person after all, of conventional genesis. Ovulation, oocyte, orgasm, obstetrics. We humans had been tackling parenthood, often with impressive results, ever since Homo erectus had emerged from Homo habilis. When it came to the catastrophe in the bassinet, history was on my side.