by James Morrow
DURING THE INTERVAL since my last encounter with the mutant iguana, a new sentence had coalesced in his cold-blooded brain. When I walked into the library on Friday morning, Quetzie stared at me from his perch atop the conquistador’s helmet and proclaimed, “All you need is love.”
“That’s a matter of some controversy,” I said.
“All you need is love,” Quetzie insisted.
Just then Londa stepped into the room, dressed distractingly in blue denim cutoffs and an orange halter top, clutching her copy of Ethics from the Earth. As she approached Quetzie, he hopped from the conquistador to her head, so that she now wore an Aztec princess’s feathered crown.
“Stick out your tongue,” I instructed her.
“I didn’t mutilate it.”
“All you need is love,” the iguana said.
“Stick out your tongue,” I repeated.
Londa stuck out her tongue. It looked entirely healthy.
“Show me your hands.”
She did as instructed. The inflamed skin beneath her thumbnail seemed to be healing, likewise the blister on her palm, and I saw no evidence that she’d manually snuffed another candle. I inspected her shoulders. No aberrations. I glanced at her knees and calves. The skin seemed intact.
“I’m still a Stoic,” she explained, “but from now on I won’t behave like one, since it makes you so fucking unhappy, though your fellow educator Jean Piaget believes that a developing child constructs her world through action.”
“Your teacher this morning is Mason Ambrose, not Jean Piaget. Did you reread chapter four?”
“Twice.”
“Mason is a genius,” Quetzie said.
“Here’s the setup,” I said. “Imagine you’re an artist living in a contemporary version of the Stoics’ fabled City of Zeus. Your name is Sybil Bright, and you believe that personal integrity is the highest virtue.”
“Let me get this straight,” Londa said. “I’m allowed to play at Stoicism, but I’m not allowed to practice it.”
“What you’re not allowed to do is burn your palm or puncture your thumb or any such crap,” I said curtly. “A man named Alvarez has come to your studio. He works for a bank. Ready?”
“Whatever you say.”
I rapped my knuckles on the reading table to simulate Mr. Alvarez knocking on Sybil Bright’s door.
“Could I have a minute of your time, young woman?”
Londa pulled a colorfully packaged piece of bubble gum from her hip pocket. “My newest vice,” she said, unwrapping the pink lozenge. “It helps me overcome the urge for a cig.”
I cleared my throat. “Could I have a minute of your time?” I said again.
She shrugged and popped the gum into her mouth. “Would you like to buy a painting?”
I pantomimed a banker entering Sybil’s studio. “Casper Alvarez of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company. I’m here to offer you a credit card. No annual fee, a stunning five-point-eight percent APR, and you get to accumulate a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt before we bat an eye, assuming you keep up the minimum monthly payments.”
“I don’t need a credit card.”
“Sure you do.”
“Why?”
“To buy things.”
“What things?”
“A recreational vehicle, a snowmobile, a sailboat, a home theater.”
“Will they make me a better person?” she asked.
“They won’t make you better,” I said, “but they’ll afford you countless hours of enjoyment.”
“We Stoics distrust enjoyment. My life is a quest for divine wisdom.”
“Don’t be self-righteous, Sybil. When you experience intimations of the numinous, this gives you a rush of satisfaction.”
“True enough, but it’s the wisdom I value, not the rush.”
A crackerjack retort, I thought. Perhaps I was a better teacher than I knew.
Our conversation went on for another twenty minutes, an interval during which Mr. Alvarez failed to make Sybil stray even one centimeter from her personal code with its imperatives of integrity, forbearance, and openness to epiphany.
“Curtain,” I said, resting an affirming hand on Londa’s bare shoulder. “You were terrific.”
“Was I?”
“Absolutely sensational. For Monday’s class, I want you to study the next chapter, all about Epicurus, then write out a two-page conversation between an Epicurean and an anti-Epicurean.”
She set her hand atop mine, pressing down until I felt the bone beneath her flesh. “The Epicureans believed pleasure was a virtue, didn’t they?”
“True enough,” I said, retrieving my hand.
“You won’t allow me to experiment with pain. Am I supposed to run screaming from pleasure, too?”
“Depends on what you mean by pleasure. An Epicurean would be the first to argue that hedonism is both degrading and dangerous.”
Londa blew a bubble that looked like a pink cantaloupe. She let it pop, returned the strands to her mouth, and smiled. “I’ve got the whole fucking weekend ahead of me. There’s no telling what I might do.”
ON SATURDAY MORNING I filled my backpack with trail mix and juice boxes, then hiked to Casa de los Huesos, where I found everyone assembled on the lawn for croquet—Donya, her tutors, plus a rangy Asian man and a ruddy, zaftig woman, whom Henry introduced as, respectively, Chen Lee, “a cook with Szechuan credentials,” and Rosita Corona, “a gardener with a green thumb on each hand.” Omar sat on his haunches just beyond the midfield stake, ready to referee. Donya offered me the blue-striped mallet—me, the washout at soccer, badminton, volleyball, kick the can, and every other athletic activity save tree climbing. I told her I’d rather watch.
The game was barely ten minutes under way when I realized that the four adults were arranging for Donya to win. They deliberately missed wickets, allowed her to retake bobbled shots, and declined to roquet her ball even when that was the only rational tactic. I wondered how this pathetic charade was supposed to further her moral education. Did Henry and Brock really believe that a sham victory would help give Donya a superego?
When at last the contest reached its predictable conclusion, Donya the winner and still champion, Henry shouldered his own backpack, bulging with luncheon delicacies secured in Tupperware containers, then announced that he and I were about to go rambling around the island in imitation of Robinson Crusoe.
“I want to come, too!” Donya shouted.
“Sorry, cupcake,” Henry said.
Storm clouds gathered above the child’s head. She screwed her features into a cameo of disgust and hurled her croquet mallet onto the grass. “You never let me do anything!”
“Guess what, pumpkin?” Brock said, strolling nonchalantly up to Donya. “A special package came yesterday.”
“What special package?” she demanded shrilly. “What was in it?”
“Indoor voice, Donya,” Brock admonished her, “indoor voice.”
“But we’re outdoors.”
“Let’s say we go open that special package,” Brock suggested, stooping into a leapfrog position. Donya jumped onto his shoulders, swinging her legs around his neck. He rose, grasped her ankles, and started toward the villa. “I think it might be the bumper cars for our amusement park.”
“Giddyap!” Donya cried. “Giddyap! Giddyap!”
As I followed Henry across the croquet field, barely resisting the temptation to hook my instep under the wickets and loft them into the air, he informed me that in fact the narrative of Robinson Crusoe was much on his mind these days. He’d recently hit on a concept for a children’s show, Uncle Rumpus’s Magic Island, centered on a castaway who spends his days combing the beach for whatever flotsam and jetsam might help him to survive. Being part of a larger artifact, each piece of junk he finds proves perplexing—table leg, bicycle chain, umbrella frame, clock face—and so Rumpus enlists his young viewers in interpreting each treasure, thus presumably enhancing their powers of inference.
Breaching the rain forest, we headed south along the wall, the ground beneath our feet dissolving in muck and marsh, the air thickening with bird cries, primate calls, and peppery swarms of gnats. The farther inland we ventured, the more Isla de Sangre revealed itself as a world of great beauty and abiding strangeness. We gobbled trail mix under the watchful eyes of an alligator clan whose title to the surrounding swamp we were not about to dispute, drank cranberry juice by an amber waterfall cascading down a series of ridges like ale spilling from an ogre’s keg, and consumed our lunch near a quicksand bog ringed by astonishing conical blossoms as large and golden as French horns.
“Do you always let Donya cheat at croquet?” I asked, eating the last red grape.
“The first time we played, she lost and became instantly hysterical,” Henry replied. “She ran into the kitchen screaming, ‘I’m no good! I’m no good!’ If Chen hadn’t intervened, she would’ve cut off her little finger with a bread knife.”
“Jesus.”
“She’s a far more troubled child than she appears. For the immediate future, we’re wiring the game in her favor.”
“On the day I first met Londa, she tried to kill a carp,” I said in a commiserating tone. I approached the nearest blossom and inhaled its perfume, a heady scent suggesting pumpkin pie topped with mumquat nectar. “We’ve spent the past week acting out ethical dilemmas. I think it’s helping.”
Henry joined me by the flower, savoring its fragrance. “Oddly enough, the therapy that seems to work for Donya is DVDs of moralistic TV programs.”
“You mean like Professor Oolong’s Oompah-pah Zoo?”
“Professor Oolong rarely addressed matters of right and wrong. We started her out on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and we’ve just added that family-values superhero thing from the Jubilation Channel, The Kindness Crusaders. Sure, they’re grinding the usual salvation ax, but the ratio of ethical signal to evangelical noise is much better than you’d expect. Be gentle, be generous, think of someone besides yourself—who can argue with that?”
“And you’ve seen progress?”
Henry raised his eyebrows and dipped his head. “Before the month is out, I believe that Donya will come to us and say, ‘I know you’ve been letting me win at croquet, and I want you to stop it.’”
We resumed our trek, eventually reaching the island’s ragged, craggy spine. Here the wall met a second such concrete barrier, angling off abruptly to the right, the juncture reinforced by a sandstone pillar as white and coarse as the saline remains of Lot’s wife. Henry suggested that we had “nothing to gain by staying inside the box,” and I agreed. It took us only a minute to locate an overhanging kapok limb. We availed ourselves of this natural bridge—despite his bulk, my companion was quite agile—crossing over the rampart without mishap and dropping safely to the ground.
The pillar, we now saw, lay at the hub of three discrete walls. Supplementing the familiar north-to-south barrier were two others, one running southwest along the ridge, its twin coursing southeast into the forest, both stretching past the limits of our vision but seemingly destined for the sea, an arrangement that evidently divided Isla de Sangre into three equal regions. From a frigate bird’s perspective, Henry and I were standing in the cusp of an immense slingshot. We proceeded due south, along the trajectory of an imaginary flung stone, improvising a downward path through a dense and fecund wedge of jungle.
By midafternoon the forest had turned to scrub, and then a ribbon of gravel appeared, perpendicular to our path. To be sure, we were inclined to follow this unexpected road—it might teach us something important about the island, and its pursuit was unlikely to involve alligators or quicksand—but we decided it was probably an enticement, built by Edwina to lure her more inquisitive employees away from places she didn’t want them to see. We crossed the road and continued our journey, descending toward a line of cypress trees, and in time the guttural hiss of the incoming tide reached our ears.
Beyond the cypress windbreak, another surprise awaited us, a Spanish fortress lying in ruins like a sand castle demolished by a wave. Only the central keep remained, emerging from a rocky spit surrounded by a turbulent green bay. The longer I stared at that looming tower, the more ominous it seemed—a twin to Kafka’s castle, perhaps, or an Auschwitz chimney, or a nuclear-tipped missile. Stoicism was an admirable philosophy, and Epicureanism had much to recommend it, but no Greek school would ever equip Londa to comprehend and critique the bombs and rockets of modernity. We must advance to the Enlightenment as soon as possible.
Having come so far without misadventure, Henry and I blithely decided to inspect the woebegone stronghold. We approached slowly, moving among lone acacias and solitary boulders, until at last we reached sea level. A gazebo appeared before us, a bamboo construction as large as a village bandstand, its funnel-shaped roof shading two human figures, one slender and birdlike, the other squat and sluggish.
Anger rushed through me like a hit of grappa. Edwina had lied to us. She and Charnock were not in Chicago any more than Henry and I were in Istanbul.
“Rubbish,” my employer was saying. “Pure twaddle.” She stepped toward the gazebo bench, on which rested a glass container the size and shape of a fire hydrant. “You need a vacation, that’s all.”
Henry and I ducked behind the nearest acacia.
“This isn’t fatigue,” Charnock said.
“Who’s the troll?” Henry whispered.
“Biologist named Charnock,” I replied. “Operates a genetic-engineering lab near Faustino. Overstrung, irritable, probably a little nuts.”
“Coming soon to a theater near you,” Henry muttered, “The Mad Doctor of Blood Island.”
“Indeed.”
“That’s a real movie.”
“No doubt.”
Scrutinizing the glass object, I realized it was a huge beaker to which various devices—pump, compressor, oxygen tank—had been retrofitted, presumably to sustain whatever being inhabited the foggy interior.
“I’m experiencing—what should I call it?—a crisis of conscience,” Charnock said. “During this past month, I’ve extinguished forty-three embryos.”
“Naturally you heard their pathetic little screams.” Edwina made no effort to purge her voice of scorn.
“Some screams are silent,” Charnock said.
“Since you so enjoy crying crocodile tears over dead embryos, perhaps you should join a community of like-minded mourners,” Edwina said. “The Roman Catholic Church, for example, or the Republican Party.”
“I had imagined our having a serious discussion.”
Edwina offered no response but instead sat down beside the beaker and contemplated its misty reaches. “You do beautiful work,” she said at last, her tone now free of sarcasm—tender, in fact, almost reverent. “The painter has his pigments, the sculptor his stone, and you have your medium, too.”
“My medium, right,” Charnock said. “Bald egotism combined with rampant ambition and galloping self-deception.” He settled his gelatinous frame onto the bench and heaved a sigh. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need a vacation.”
“Then take one, for Christ’s sake.” Edwina gestured toward the tower. “We can bring everything to fruition as early as…when? Tomorrow afternoon?”
“God rested on Sunday. I intend to do the same.”
“Monday night?”
Charnock grunted in assent.
“And then we’ll send you to the Bahamas,” Edwina said.
“I would prefer Hawaii.”
“Excellent choice. You’ll have a splendid time. I picture you on Waikiki Beach, drinking mai tais and diddling the native girls.”
“I thought I might get around to reading War and Peace,” Charnock said.
At that instant the vapor in the beaker lifted, and I saw a sleek, fishlike something immersed in a translucent fluid. Briefly Charnoc
k and Edwina contemplated the creature, and then the fog rolled in again.
“She’ll be the best of the lot,” Charnock said.
“Do you hear the man, Yolly?” Edwina said. “You’re the best. And don’t worry about living up to your potential. There are people around here who will do that for you.”
NEEDLESS TO SAY—a phrase that any language-obsessed, word-bewitched, Wittgenstein-haunted philosopher like myself uses only with great reluctance—needless to say, Edwina’s duplicity was the principal topic of conversation as Henry and I headed back to Casa de los Huesos. At first, he sought to explain away her presence in the gazebo. Perhaps the artificial-intelligence conference had been canceled. Maybe Edwina and Charnock had given their presentation and flown directly home. But the tension in Henry’s voice suggested that he, too, felt betrayed, and by the time we reached the sandstone pillar, he was imagining how we might deceive Edwina in kind.
“I’ll spare her my incredulity but not my curiosity,” he said. “Come Monday night, when she and Charnock do whatever the hell they’re planning to do, I’m going to be there, hiding in the shadows. Might I persuade you to join me?”
I responded at once, without consulting the more prudent and self-protective areas of my brain—“You bet, Uncle Rumpus, I’m your man”—and so we agreed to become uninvited visitors to the crumbling tower, spying on our employer and her majordomo as they performed their alchemical mischief.
On Monday morning I left the cottage promptly at nine-thirty and headed for Faustino with the aim of tutoring Londa in Epicureanism. Suddenly, with an almost predatory pounce, she burst from the jungle and, landing on her feet, stationed herself directly in my path. Her attire was as minimalist as a knock-knock joke: a yellow spandex tube top revealing regions of skin both tanned and untanned—apparently she favored one-piece bathing suits—plus pink flip-flops and a white towel slung around her waist like a sarong.
“Hardly the proper outfit for a philosophy lesson,” I admonished her. “You’ll have plenty of time to go swimming this afternoon, but right now your business is chapter five.”
