by James Morrow
“I hate this fucking lesson!”
Edwina cringed. “Londa, darling, we do not say ‘fucking’ in school.”
Approaching my pupil, I took her right hand and massaged the palm as if to heal a Christly stigma. She heaved a sigh, then relaxed.
“Let’s call it quits for today, okay?” I said.
“Good idea.” Londa inhaled audibly, filtering the stuffy air through her clenched teeth. “Best fucking idea I’ve heard all morning.”
I retrieved my backpack from the reading table and pulled out Ethics from the Earth. “For your homework tonight, please read chapter four and write a thousand-word essay giving your personal reaction to the Stoics’ worldview.”
She assumed a facial expression combining forced exasperation with genuine annoyance. “Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“It’s not supposed to be fun.”
“Haven’t you read the goddamn U.S. Constitution, Mason? Cruel and unusual punishments are forbidden.”
Edwina said, “Londa, sweetheart, we do not stoop to sarcasm during our lessons.”
Snatching the book away, Londa announced that she intended to prepare herself “a morally degenerate lunch full of saturated fats and refined sugar,” then exited the room with the punctuated jumps of a nine-year-old playing hopscotch.
Edwina and I locked gazes, and I saw that Londa’s mismatched green irises were a legacy from her mother. She laid her delicate fingers against my cheek like a psychic healer performing a root canal.
“She’s doing awfully well, wouldn’t you say?” Edwina ventured.
“I see progress,” I replied, trying not to sound too satisfied with myself. How many real philosophers, the kind with Ph.D.s, could have brought Londa so far so fast?
“She knew why Madeleine felt compelled to fight the Nazis, but she understood the mother’s feelings, too. Before you came here, Londa couldn’t empathize with anybody except herself. ‘Progress’ is an understatement. I’d say she’s practically cured.”
THE LONGER I STAYED ON ISLA DE SANGRE, this tropical Eden with its squawking birds, squalling monkeys, and murmuring surf, the more certain I became that my years in academia had wrought a serious imbalance in my mental ecosystem. Thanks to Hawthorne University, a kind of Aristotelian kudzu had taken root in my skull, choking out the more dynamic blooms and covering the whole terrain with a creeping carpet of rationality. It was high time for me to reclaim my natural right to entertain whimsical notions and formulate indefensible ideas.
I resolved to spend Wednesday afternoon trekking around the island, admitting to my consciousness every species of thought, no matter how grandiose. If so moved by Lady Philosophy, I would prove once and for all that humans possess a priori knowledge, devise an airtight case against a priori knowledge, and pronounce so pompously on the mystery of Being that every Heideggerian within earshot would reach for his gun. This strange vision quest, with its aim not of spiritual enlightenment but of intellectual decadence, began immediately after lunch. I donned my hiking clothes—the crate containing my earthly possessions had arrived from Boston the previous evening—stuffed my backpack with three bottles of Evian and a half dozen PowerBars, and set off for the beach, humming my favorite melodic idea from “The Lark Ascending,” that passage through which Vaughan Williams arranges for the listener’s soul and the Hegelian World Spirit to fall madly and eternally in love.
According to Charnock, the island had the general shape of a human kidney, and my intention was to circumnavigate the cortex before the stars came out. At first my journey proved congenial, and I continued humming “The Lark Ascending” while negotiating the range of dunes that separated the verdant rain forest and the placid Bahía de Flores. The sky was the deep blue of unoxygenated blood. The air was redolent of orchids and heliotrope. Shells of every variety covered the sand—conch, clam, oyster, scallop, mussel, snail—Darwinian artifacts that my imagination transformed into cobblestones, and I soon fancied that I was strolling the streets of eighteenth-century Königsberg, following in Kant’s footsteps as he explained why the physico-theological argument for God’s existence did not yield a transcendent Creator but merely a cosmic Architect at the mercy of available materials.
By the time I’d traveled perhaps three miles, I was no longer a happy hiker. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my scalp, making my brow itch and my eyes sting. Mosquitoes whined in my ears like defective hearing aids. Worst of all, an impediment now presented itself, a sheer sandstone bluff bulking out of the rain forest and jutting into the bay at the point where, if the island were indeed a kidney, the duct would emerge. For an instant I considered making an about-face and returning to my cottage with its mosquito netting and cold beer, but instead some dormant sense of adventure awoke within me, and I strode south into the jungle, the sound of the surf falling away by degrees, from boom to growl to grainy whisper.
Several miles inland, I was astonished to behold the bluff merge with a soaring concrete wall, not quite massive enough to confine a gigantic prehistoric gorilla, but of sufficient height to discourage human traffic, its moss-cloaked bulk continuing south into the jungle before dissolving in mist and shadow. Equally surprising was the taut string rising from behind the wall to join a silken kite—a golden phoenix with a flaming red tail—now lodged in a kapok tree. I stopped in my tracks. Sobs filled the air. A child was crying. Of all the explanations now flitting through my brain, I quickly discarded my initial, admittedly far-fetched hypothesis—the child was a prisoner and had launched the kite to signal for help—and settled on the obvious: distress over a lost toy.
Although athletically incompetent as a youngster, doltish at everything from softball to pitching pennies, a circumstance that provided my schoolmates with much unmerited amusement, I was always a serious tree climber. Confidently I shed my pack and, on the third attempt, leaped high enough to grab a limb. I hoisted myself into the kapok and mounted the branches until one golden wing was within my grasp. I unhooked the phoenix kite, untangled the string, and, descending several branches, inched forward until my feet dangled above the forbidden domain.
A slender little girl stared up at me, her heart-shaped face luminous with gratitude. She wore a pink pinafore fitted over a blue dress daubed with tomboy blotches of mud and moss, and she clutched a wooden spindle around which was coiled the surplus kite string.
“I believe you lost this,” I told my beaming admirer, lowering the toy into her outstretched arms.
“Thank you so much!”
She held the kite against her body like a shield, the vertical axis extending all the way to her forehead. I moved to the bottommost branch and, after hanging briefly like a sloth, uncurled my legs, relaxed my grip, and dropped to the ground. No sooner had I recovered my balance than a large and lithe Doberman pinscher appeared from out of nowhere, his amber eyes glowing through his black-on-brown bandit’s mask as he patiently awaited the child’s command to pounce on the intruder and extract his throat.
“My name’s Donya,” she said, stroking her guardian’s broad, rocky skull. “And this is Omar.” The dog had been spared the modifications to which breeders commonly subjected his kind—bobbed tail, ears forced erect by scar tissue—but he looked plenty scary without them. “What’s your name?”
“Mason,” I said, cautiously extending my hand, palm down, toward the Doberman. “Hi there, Omar.” The dog sniffed my fleshy offering, then issued a semantically complex snort. I was not to be entirely trusted, but at least I’d followed the proper protocol.
Surveying my surroundings, I saw that Donya’s intention to launch her kite that afternoon was not unreasonable, for we were standing on a windswept scrubland broken only by distant ranks of cypress trees and the occasional lone acacia. To have a successful kite-flying experience here, one need merely avoid the concrete wall and the forest beyond.
“I’m five years old, and I’m having a tea party with Rupert and Henry and Deedee,” Donya said, starting away. “W
ould you like to come, too?”
“Sure.”
Crossing the scrub, Donya at my side, I looked in all directions, hoping to spot an adult. Apparently the child was playing unsupervised. What sort of dumb-ass, irresponsible parents would abandon their preschooler to the perils of an island wilderness? Was Omar really equal to any threat that might arise?
My hostess guided me toward a banyan tree as vast and sprawling as its Indian cousins, the naked roots arcing from trunk to earth like ropes anchoring a circus tent. Cradled within its branches was a clapboard cottage, white with yellow shutters, scaled to Donya’s proportions. The child deposited her kite at the base of the trunk, told her dog she’d be back soon, and directed me up a zigzagging wooden staircase to the porch, where the other guests awaited. Donya made the introductions. Rupert was a velveteen giraffe boasting red fur covered with yellow polka dots, Henry a stuffed koala bear dressed in a Come to Queensland T-shirt, and Deedee a plush chimpanzee wearing a Florida Marlins baseball cap.
Stooping, I entered Donya’s diminutive domain. The raw materials of a tea party—four white china cups and saucers, a small silver pot, a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches, a plate holding chocolate-chip cookies and vanilla wafers—covered a table adorned with Ernest Shepard’s classic drawing of Christopher Robin descending the stairs dragging Edward Bear behind him, bump, bump, bump. Donya brought Rupert, Henry, and Deedee in from the porch, propping them up in their little cane chairs, then installed herself at the head of the table. Given the frailty of the chairs, sitting was not an option for me. I crouched in the corner.
“Might I infer you’re here on vacation—or are you a local resident?” In my efforts to avoid condescending to children, I commonly burden them with my most tortured diction, but Donya nevertheless understood me.
“I live here,” she said, offering me a cherubic smile. Freckles decorated her cheeks like sprinkles of cinnamon.
“With your mother and father?”
“Just my mother. I don’t have a father. Henry and Brock visit every day.” Donya upended the silver pot, poured out a measure of red liquid, and set the teacup before her stuffed chimp. “The other Henry, I mean. Henry Cushing, not Henry Koala.”
“Is Henry Cushing a person?”
“Of course he’s a person. He gives me my lessons. Brock does, too.”
How strange to think I wasn’t the only tutor on Isla de Sangre. I wondered how many of us there were, and whether we all worked for Edwina.
While my hostess filled two more teacups, passing one to Henry Koala, keeping the other for herself, I increased my crouch ten degrees and peered out the window. A grand and garish edifice met my gaze, a kind of ancient Spanish villa secluded by cypresses, each tower capped by a conical roof covered in tiles suggesting fish scales. Thick, swarthy vines crisscrossed the dark stone walls like twine securing a brown paper package.
“Tell me your full name,” I said. “Is it Donya Jones maybe? Donya Smith?”
“Donya Sabacthani.” Puckering her lips, my hostess whistled “Pop Goes the Weasel” as she filled the remaining teacup and held it out to me.
“Shouldn’t this be for Rupert?” I asked, staring into Donya’s eyes. Her irises, like Edwina’s and Londa’s, were two different shades of green.
“Giraffes don’t like Hawaiian Punch.”
“Donya, do you know your mother’s first name? Does she call herself something like Judy or Carol or Edwina?”
“I call her Mommy. She’s the best mommy in the whole world. She built the wall just for me.”
“Could her name be Edwina?”
“I don’t know, but I can show you her picture!”
Donya reached under the table and obtained a blue lacquered music box. She lifted the lid, unleashing a tinny rendition of “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. The green velvet interior held several pieces of costume jewelry, a compact mirror, and a snapshot of Edwina wearing a grin as artificial as a paper carnation.
“My mother’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Donya said.
“Very pretty,” I echoed. In a rainy-day, Blanche DuBois sort of way. “I’m a friend of hers.”
“Are you a molecular geneticist, too?”
“No, I’m a teacher, like Henry and Brock. My student is your sister Londa. She’s seventeen years old.”
“I don’t have a sister Londa. Mommy says I’m a lonely child.”
“An only child?”
“That’s what I meant. Only children are lucky. They get their mommies all to themselves. What makes you think I have a sister Londa?”
I took my first swallow of Hawaiian Punch. It tasted vaguely like watered-down mumquat nectar. Something extremely odd was happening on this end of the archipelago. If the March Hare suddenly appeared at the present festivity, I would not be entirely surprised.
“My student’s name is Londa Sabacthani,” I said.
“Well, she can call herself that if she wants to,” Donya said, “but that doesn’t mean she’s allowed to be my sister.” She picked up the snack plate and addressed the chimp. “Would you like a cookie, Deedee?”
I affected a falsetto and dubbed in Deedee’s voice. “I would love a cookie.”
“What kind?”
“Vanilla wafer.”
My hostess served her chimp a vanilla wafer and said, “I invited Mommy to the party, but she’s in Chicago this week.”
“I know,” I said. “An artificial-intelligence conference.”
“That’s right. She’s teaching people to be nice to their computers.”
I sipped more punch. Sinuhe’s favorite question rattled around in my skull. Why hadn’t Edwina told me about this second child? Why had she bisected the island with a wall? Why did her daughters need separate estates? I wondered whether the woman in the photograph might actually be Edwina’s twin sister, likewise a molecular geneticist and likewise attending a neural-network conference in Chicago—a fanciful theory, but not unimaginable.
I drained my Hawaiian Punch. “Donya, I have to say something. This is important. If you ask me, a five-year-old girl should not be out flying a kite by herself.”
“Mommy says that as long as I stay inside the wall, nothing bad will ever happen to me.”
“I believe that an adult should be watching over you at all times.”
Donya gestured toward the rear window. “Henry’s looking at me right now.”
My opinion of parenting standards at Donya’s villa improved considerably as my gaze alighted on the highest tower. A bulky human figure, backlit by the descending sun, scrutinized the scrub through a brass telescope. The instrument seemed focused directly on me. I wondered if it was powerful enough to show Henry my perplexed expression.
“Would you like to know the name of my house?” Donya asked. “My real house, I mean, not my tree house. It’s Casa de los Huesos. That means the House of Bones.”
“What sorts of things do Henry and Brock teach you?”
She bit into Deedee’s vanilla wafer. “You ask a lot of questions, Mason. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Donya.”
Instantly her brow and cheeks turned red, and I braced myself for a squall of tears, but instead she took a deep breath. “I’m…I’m sorry.”
“I accept your apology.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I say bad things like that because I don’t have my rectitude yet.”
“‘Rectitude.’ That’s an awfully big word.”
“Like the time I smashed Mommy’s cell phone and said I didn’t, and that other time when I threw Chen Lee’s watch in the bay, and once I dug up all of Mommy’s hyacinths. Henry and Brock are teaching me the three R’s. Reading, writing, and rectitude.”
“I see.”
“After I get my rectitude, I won’t dig up any more hyacinths. Are you teaching Londa her rectitude, too?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
&nbs
p; Over the next half-hour, I consumed three additional cups of punch, two peanut-butter sandwiches, and four cookies like nobody’s grandmother used to make: disks of impossibly moist cake studded with scrumptious chunks of chocolate. When not eating, Donya and I played Candy Land, sang nursery rhymes, and discussed whether Christopher Robin might have found a more considerate way to transport Winnie-the-Pooh downstairs. It would be a better world, I decided, if tree-house tea parties occurred with greater frequency.
At four o’clock Donya announced that Henry and Brock expected her to be home soon, so we descended to the scrub. Omar sniffed my knees, thighs, and ankles, quickly deciding I’d acquired no unacceptable aromas since his previous inspection. Donya made me promise to visit her again. I scrambled back into the kapok tree. As I returned to the jungle and retrieved my pack, I wondered whether Edwina, by applying her considerable monetary and material resources to Donya’s domain, had indeed made it a completely safe haven. Quite possibly I was living on the wrong side of the concrete wall, and if I moved into Casa de los Huesos, nothing bad would ever happen to me.
Chapter 4
A PARTICULARLY BAROQUE PRODUCT of Charnock’s genetic engineering skills greeted me when I entered the library the next morning, a winged and feathered iguana boasting the same talent for uncomprehending repetition found also in parrots and poststructuralists. The creature was perched on Londa’s shoulder, swathed in her luxurious hair, his forked tongue flicking wildly as he peeked out from behind her tresses like a theater manager counting the house.
“Does he have a name?” I asked.
“Quetzie,” Londa replied, feeding the iguana a handful of dried ants. Her bright yellow sundress gave her the appearance of a gendered banana. “After Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered-serpent god.”
“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said. His plumage was indeed astonishing, a red-and-gold raiment flowing behind him like an emperor’s robe.
“Quite so,” I told him.
“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” he said again.
“Indeed.”
