The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “You asked me to make up a conversation between an Epicurean and an anti-Epicurean,” she said, opening her shoulder bag and taking out a manuscript of perhaps a dozen pages. “Before I knew it, I’d written a one-act play.”

  “That’s swell,” I said mordantly. “Now go change into something that bespeaks the life of the mind. I’ll read your play in the meantime.”

  “I call it Coral Idolatry,” she persisted, depositing the pages in my hands. “I’ve given you the part of Thales, a fictional Greek Epicurean. I’m playing Sythia, a sea nymph seeking to fulfill her destiny. The setting is my secret beach. Follow me.”

  Although Londa’s interpretation of the assignment struck me as too clever by half, I decided that such creativity was to be encouraged, so I allowed her to lead me along a path I’d never taken before. In time the trees and bushes yielded to dunes as white as refined sugar, a pristine canvas that, as we continued our walk, the incoming tide painted in agreeable shades of beige and brown. A quarter mile out to sea, a mound of crimson coral rose from the reef like a buoy, and the instant Londa told me the formation’s name, the Red Witch, I knew exactly what she meant, for it indeed resembled a crone wearing a conical hat.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not about to bore you with a thousand facts about witches,” Londa said.

  Spontaneously I removed my socks and sandals, allowing my toes to savor the sand. Directly before us lay a piece of driftwood that suggested the horned head of a Cretan bull, and Londa now instructed me to sit between the prongs and wait for the curtain to rise. I declined, explaining that the sun was too hot for a pale philosopher from Boston, and if I stayed out here much longer, I’d be broiled alive. Londa responded by retrieving a bottle of sunscreen from her bag and spraying my bare arms.

  “Close your eyes,” she demanded.

  I did so. A vivid bloodscape filled my field of vision. Londa lacquered my brow, jaw, nose, and neck, rubbing the juice into my pores with two contiguous fingertips.

  “Your cue occurs halfway down the page,” she said. “‘Will the man I see before me grant my wish?’”

  She unhitched the towel from her waist, letting it drop in a heap on the sand. Her bikini bottom matched her tube top in color and audacity. She headed toward the Red Witch, wading into the bay until it reached her hips. She took a breath and disappeared. Evidently her diving accident had not left her with an indiscriminate fear of water. I sat on the driftwood and glanced at the script. The setting was a Greek island called Sérifos. According to the stage directions, the undine Sythia would now abandon her home beneath the waves and approach Thales as he relaxed on the shore thinking rarefied Epicurean thoughts.

  “Action!” I called in Londa’s direction.

  Slowly, elegantly, she rose from her aquatic abode, the foam spilling from her hair, cascading down her tube top, trickling along her thighs. She strode toward me through the surf, each step an emphatic splash.

  “‘An undine lives with one purpose in her heart,’” she declaimed, as that was indeed Sythia’s first line. “‘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.’” Gaining the beach, she took a dozen steps forward and stood over Thales, dripping seawater on his script. “‘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 nymphs and willing sylphs. Could it be that my search has finally ended? Might the man I see before me grant my wish?’”

  “‘Forgive me for gaping, but I’m astonished to find myself a mere stone’s throw from a creature of your kind,’” I said. “‘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.’”

  “‘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. I’m equally at odds with the self-indulgent Hedonists and the life-denying Stoics. An Epicurean pursues the quiet virtues. Friendship, conversation, tranquillity.’”

  “‘So for you the nubility of an undine is no more pleasurable than the nobility of an idea?’”

  “‘Quite so.’”

  “‘Could you direct me to the nearest Hedonist?’”

  “‘Alas, there are none on this isle.’”

  “‘I’d heard that Sérifos is swarming with profligates.’”

  “‘You were misinformed.’”

  It was at this point that I had the good sense to skim the next three pages, and what I encountered was so appalling I had no choice but to shut down the production on the spot.

  “Well, Londa,” I said, lurching free of the driftwood and stepping out of character, “you certainly know your Epicureans. I especially enjoyed your wordplay: nubility, nobility. Wonderful. For your next assignment, I’d like you to—”

  “We aren’t finished.”

  “I glanced ahead,” I told her. “The script requires you to kiss me on the lips.”

  “No, the script requires Sythia to kiss Thales on the lips. And for Thales to kiss her back, and before you know it, they’re following their pagan impulses.”

  “Only last Thursday, you described that sort of behavior as messy and dangerous. An Epicurean eschews all pleasures that have potentially painful consequences. Bacchanals, binges, fornication.”

  “But that’s what makes the play interesting,” Londa insisted, running a hooked finger along her thigh to remove a furl in her bikini bottom. Her nipples had molded the yellow spandex into lemon drops of such magnificence they would have confounded any passing postmodernist bearing theories of gender as a social construction. “Thales is torn in two. He can’t decide between his desire for the undine and his loyalty to Epicureanism.”

  “Your assignment for tomorrow is to read my chapter on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” I said. “We’ll sit in the library and discuss it wearing street clothes.”

  “Of course, after Sythia and Thales have their roll in the clover, he realizes that pleasure does come in degrees.” Londa took hold of her beach towel, spreading it across the sand as if fitting a sheet to a mattress. “And once Thales realizes that Epicureanism is flawed, he no longer hesitates to bend its rules.”

  This was not an unprecedented situation. Such circumstances had arisen before. Young teacher, moonstruck student, sufficient privacy. On numerous occasions throughout human history, these very factors had come into conjunction.

  “I’m not going to kiss you,” I said.

  “Once you give me a conscience,” she replied, setting her rump on the towel, “I’ll become a completely honest person, won’t I?”

  “No one’s completely honest.”

  “But it’s an ideal worth striving for, right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Do you want to kiss me, Mason? Tell me honestly.”

  Saying nothing, I resumed my driftwood seat and pulled my socks back on without bothering to shake out the sand. I restored my sandals, the straps and buckles vibrating in my hands. Londa stayed on her towel, smiling broadly as she arranged herself in a lotus position.

  “The Aristotle chapter is one of my better efforts,” I said. “Study it thoroughly.”

  “Don’t you want to fuck me?” she asked.

  “Pay particular attention to the notion that virtue consists in avoiding extremes. When Aristotle speaks of the optimum response to a stimulus, he’s not endorsing mediocrity. He’s celebrating harmony.”

  “Mother is still in Chicago. Dr. Charnock never comes here. We could fuck until our eyes fell out, and nobody would know.”

  My stomach seemed to break free of its moorings and, ascending, collide with my heart. An erotic lava gushed t
hrough my veins. “This sunscreen isn’t working very well,” I said, starting into the jungle. “I’m getting burned.”

  “What did you think of my play?” she called after me.

  “B-plus at the very least, perhaps an A-minus!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Class dismissed!” I cried, running toward my cottage as fast as my conscience could carry me.

  A SIMPLE CONCRETE WALL, an unremarkable rampart of sand and cement—but as Henry and I followed its southerly course that evening, our path lit by moonbeams and the glow of our Coleman lanterns, I felt as if the thing had replicated itself, again and again and again, so that we were negotiating a maze as complex as the one Daedalus had designed to confine the Minotaur. I suspected that Edwina and Charnock counted Daedalus among their heroes, for that audacious artificer was arguably the world’s first genetic engineer, having supervised the synthesis of a beast as chimeric and unnatural as Proserpine. If I’d correctly interpreted the conversation in the gazebo, tonight Henry and I would witness the birth of a biological contrivance called Yolly, though I could not imagine whether its lineage would be piscean, reptilian, amphibian, mammalian, or some profane amalgam of all four.

  “Londa tried to seduce me this morning,” I said as we approached the sandstone pillar.

  “Tell me more,” Henry said. “I’ll try to keep an open mind.”

  “There’s nothing more to tell, I’m happy to say. I ran away before things got out of hand.”

  “A wise policy. Stick to it.”

  We vaulted the wall, advanced to the scrub, and, fearful of encountering some armed sentry with a damaged superego, jogged all the way to the cypress windbreak. By the time we reached sea level, the heavens were rumbling with the kettledrum cadence of an incipient thunderstorm. Moments later the deluge arrived. We took refuge in the gazebo long enough to catch our breath and shake off the rainwater. Staring through the downpour, I beheld a trellis of lightning flash behind the Spanish fortress like puppet strings affixed to a cosmic marionette. The tower was dark but for the uppermost window, which emitted a luminous white shaft as bright as a lighthouse beacon.

  We abandoned the gazebo, negotiated the ragged spit, and followed the span of a lowered drawbridge extending from the keep like an impertinent tongue, crossing the frothy channel spawned by the restless bay. Although Henry had thought to bring along what he called his “Official Professor Oolong Breaking-and-Entering Kit”—a satchel packed with a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and a coil of rope—it proved superfluous, for to breach the keep one needed merely to push open a squat wooden door that nobody had bothered to lock.

  Cleaving to the shadows and shedding raindrops, we made our way along the perimeter of the great hall, a pristine and convivial space, clearly intended for human habitation: new furniture, linen drapes, oriental carpets. We crept up the main staircase, a stone helix winding ever upward like the rifling in a gun barrel, until we gained the topmost landing, where a steel door presented itself. Henry twisted the knob. The door pivoted quietly on well-oiled hinges, and so we slipped unnoticed into the room beyond, hiding behind a freestanding glass cabinet jammed with surgical instruments, perhaps including the very scalpel Edwina had used to rid Proserpine of her brain.

  The laboratory proper was a sunken affair resembling a theater-in-the-round, harshly illuminated by halogen lamps and dominated by a worktable on which rested the mysterious beaker with its retrofitted pump, compressor, and oxygen tank. Dressed in black rubber aprons and neoprene gloves, Edwina and Dr. Charnock peered into the vessel’s mouth. I stifled a gasp. Sitting amid the whorls of mist was a female human fetus—eyes closed, lips sealed with silver tape, body immersed in a clear fluid. A newborn? Doubtful, for it could not yet breathe on its own, or so I surmised from the pair of delicate plastic tubes connecting the nostrils to the air supply.

  At the far end of the worktable rose a steel gantry culminating in a pulley from which hung a nylon cord that, before reaching the beaker, split into two strands that looped around the fetus’s upper arms, giving the creature the appearance of a Christmas-pageant angel bound for the rafters of a small-town church. No sooner had I absorbed this weird tableau than Edwina drew near the gantry and began cranking the winch, slowly, carefully, clockwise, raveling up the cord and lifting the fetus from its amniotic bath. I glanced at the ceiling. An array of plasma computer monitors lined the dome, each screen displaying a sea of shivering gray static. The fetus continued its ascent, beaker fluid trickling from its miniature fingers and toes.

  Now Edwina pivoted the gantry, so that the fetus traveled horizontally across the laboratory until it dangled above the sealed hatch of a cobalt-blue metallic chamber that, with its spherical shape, riveted plates, and bellyband of portholes, suggested nothing so much as an antique diving bell. Charnock locked his gaze on four glass tanks stacked like aquariums in a pet store, each holding a vivid liquid—gold, crimson, violet, turquoise—and connected to the diving bell via a mesh of translucent corrugated hoses. Approaching a console bristling with valves and regulators, he proceeded to turn the handles in tiny increments, thus controlling the force and generosity with which the tanks delivered their contents to the riveted sphere. In less than fifteen minutes, the chamber had acquired a dark seething soup in which millions of bubbles cavorted like fireflies speckling a summer night.

  Charnock threw a lever on the console, causing the chamber hatch to groan and creak and finally flip back like a cranium yielding to Sinuhe’s fingers. Coils of steam rose from the vat, plus a nauseating fragrance redolent of burning hair. A burst of lightning filled the laboratory with a sudden radiance, turning the suspended fetus as white as a christening gown, and an instant later the thunder boomed.

  Edwina worked the gantry winch, counterclockwise this time, and the fetus began its descent, soon disappearing into the broth, oxygen tubes trailing behind it like filaments from a silkworm. Henry and I fixed on the nearest porthole, peering into the milky fluid in hopes of learning the creature’s fate. Briefly I entertained the darkest of all possible notions—the scientists were dissolving the nascent baby in a caustic fluid, sacrificing it to some god to whom only Daedalus and Edwina and Charnock prayed—but then I realized that a different phenomenon was unfolding. The fetus was growing, its flesh and bones pressing ever outward in an image evoking a set of Russian nested dolls being packed safely away, each hollow soul subsumed by its ancestors.

  For a full hour, as the thunder crashed and the lightning ornamented the sky with quicksilver stitchery, the fetus continued to undergo its hyperbolic maturation, steadily progressing from the tender flesh of infancy to the pliant lines of childhood to the supple contours of preadolescence.

  “Finished!” Charnock cried.

  Henry and I exchanged horrified glances. In recent years I’d seen Max Crippen’s sculpture of the Crucifixion rendered entirely in LEGOs, Valerio Caparelli’s Norman Rockwell-style painting of God inseminating the Virgin Mary on their first date, and Leonard Steele’s rock opera set in the Vatican’s luxury suite for retired pedophile priests, but what Edwina and Charnock had achieved was sacrilege of a wholly different order, blasphemy beyond the meaning of the word.

  Edwina rotated the winch. The girl rose from the diving bell, oscillating like a criminal in a gibbet, the dark fluid sluicing down her limbs and along her oxygen tubes, her flesh glistening under the halogen lamps.

  Now came the final flourish, the last ingredient in the stew of her nativity. From a black box embedded in the dome, a gleaming inverted bowl descended on a golden thread. Bristling with bright nubs and silvery nodes, the device resembled a motorcycle helmet customized by a schizophrenic bent on receiving messages from Alpha Centauri. Even as the strange gear settled over the girl’s damp hair, snugging against her cranium, the computer monitors flared to life, their static yielding to frenetic montages. Trees, plants, flowers, insects, birds, fish, snakes, lizards, turtles, toads, rodents, and ruminants paraded across the screens—kind after kind, beast upon beast—soon yie
lding to pots, pans, lightbulbs, hammers, saws, hats, gloves, guns, eyeglasses, automobiles, and ten thousand other artifacts, and then came a cavalcade of kings, queens, emperors, empresses, caliphs, pharaohs, rajas, shahs, dictators, prime ministers, and presidents, followed by those mathematical signs denoting addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, ratios, percentages, and square roots. The child learned of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and still more kings, each input registering for a fraction of a second, like pips on playing cards being shuffled by a manic croupier.

  Edwina and Charnock approached the diving bell and cast their gazes upward.

  “Yolly, this is your mother,” Charnock said.

  “Welcome to the world,” Lady Daedalus said, “my dearest, sweetest darling.”

  Yolly’s lids flickered open. Her eyes, mismatched emeralds, glowed and pulsed in her skull like luminous moons orbiting her cerebrum. She raised one hand and tore the silver tape from her lips. She clucked her tongue and coughed, but it was only when she released a howl compounded of fear, shock, and dismay that I grew certain of her lineage. The creature suspended before Henry and me was Londa’s newborn sister, and Donya’s sister, too, bereft of ethics, barren in experience, and condemned to live whatever facsimile of a life Edwina had designed for her.

  Chapter 5

  MANTLES AGLOW LIKE LUMINOUS MUMQUATS, our Coleman lanterns lit the way as Henry and I doubled back through the jungle, every leaf and branch dripping with the residue of the recent storm. The surrounding darkness colluded with my fevered imagination to populate Isla de Sangre with monsters—misbegotten beasts spawned by Edwina’s ambition and Charnock’s art. I saw a colony of shaggy primates, half-man, half-ape, sucking up water from the swamp. An immense spider spinning a web whose jagged geometry suggested a windshield bashed by a mailed fist. A python coiled around an acacia, its tubular body studded with a hundred eyeballs, so that not only could the creature see in all directions, it could see itself seeing in all directions.