The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  Throughout our return to the island’s saner shore, Henry and I discussed the conception, quickening, and forced maturation of Yolly Sabacthani, trying without success to persuade ourselves that Londa and Donya had not arisen from this same unseemly science. We decided that in each case Edwina must have donated the essential ovum, and we further hypothesized that, once this egg had been fertilized by some Nobel laureate’s sperm, she’d been unable or unwilling to gestate the subsequent zygote. A rational scenario. So far, so good. But why then subject the embryo to that infernal diving bell when dozens of financially desperate women would have gladly leased their natural reproductive apparatus to Edwina? And what did Lady Daedalus hope to accomplish by dumping reams of data into the brains of Yolly and her sisters—yes, it seemed logical to assume that Donya and Londa had been similarly programmed—when conventional schooling would have surely served them better?

  Without particularly meaning to, I ended up escorting Henry all the way to his beachfront bungalow, a stout cinderblock structure set on concrete piles as a defense against the ubiquitous hurricanes. Vibrant paintings of the local monkeys, macaws, flamingos, and toucans decorated the place, each signed with Brock’s filigreed initials, a serene and soothing gallery that soon drove the ape-men and their brethren from my mind. The artist himself had fallen asleep in his armchair, snoring softly before an unfinished canvas of a cone-hatted sorcerer, bent with age and weary with wisdom, staring into a mirror and seeing his youthful self stare back, doubtless a gift for little Donya. Before parting company, Henry and I exchanged cell-phone numbers, agreeing that whoever first sighted Edwina would tell her we’d witnessed what passed for procreation on Isla de Sangre, and therefore a candid conversation among Lady Daedalus and her employees would be in order.

  “I wonder, from now on will we bring some subtle prejudice to our dealings with Donya and Londa?” I asked.

  Henry moaned knowingly. “I’ll get up each morning, and I’ll tell myself that Donya is completely human, but then a sardonic voice will whisper in my ear, ‘What ugly epithet shall we invent for her today? Shall we call Donya a beaker freak? A chamber maid?’”

  “A vatling,” I suggested.

  “Petri doll,” Henry said.

  “Bouillababy.”

  “Gumbo girl.”

  “Tureen queen.”

  “Shame on us,” Henry said.

  “Shame on us,” I agreed.

  TEN HOURS LATER I entered the Faustino library in thrall to a despair whose utter Aristotelian reasonableness—only a fool or a madman would have reacted otherwise to the previous night’s Daedalusian circus—did nothing to lessen its intensity, and so I felt especially grateful when Londa, standing crestfallen beside the conquistador, apologized for attempting to seduce me, calling her scheme “sneaky and snaky.”

  “Those are two good words for it,” I said.

  “I guess I’m still basically crazy, huh, Mason?”

  “Of course not. You’re coming along fine. A few rough edges, but the prince of philosophers will smooth them off for you.”

  “You are a prince, Mason.”

  “I meant Aristotle.”

  “Snakiness aside, I’d like to know whether you find me—what’s the word?—attractive.”

  “Aristotle is commonly regarded as antiquity’s most brilliant mind. Let’s try to find out why.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m terribly ugly.”

  “You’re not ugly, Londa. Once you’re in college, you’ll have dozens of boyfriends.”

  “None of them as interesting as my morality teacher.”

  “Every time I read the Nicomachean Ethics, I find something new.”

  We spent the rest of the lesson on the venerable Greek’s doctrine of the mean—the virtuous man does not burden himself with inhibitions, but neither does he permit his impulses to reign unchecked—and I must admit that this principle now struck me as superficial in the extreme, unlikely to have netted Aristotle a master’s degree from Parsons, much less a Ph.D. from Hawthorne. All through the lesson, I pondered Henry’s astute and disturbing question. Were we now fated to perceive our charges as creatures not quite human? Evidently Londa had been made in a cauldron, like a wizard’s elixir or a witch’s brew. Quite probably she could summon no preadolescent memories for the breathtakingly bizarre reason that she’d had no preadolescence. I still knew her as my pupil, my mentee, my eminently worthy mission—but now she was also my vatling.

  On Wednesday we mulled over Aristotle’s answer to a paradox first identified by Socrates. How can a human being know what is right and yet do what is wrong? But because neither of us found this puzzle compelling—it seemed a nonproblem, really—we couldn’t get excited by the solution: anger or desire may momentarily compromise a person’s philosophical commitment to virtue. The following day we wrestled with the great man’s notion of justice, and within an hour we’d become so bored with the usual dreary Aristotelian dichotomies—universal justice versus particular justice, distributive justice versus rectificatory justice, household justice versus political justice, natural justice versus legal justice—that we turned our energies to teaching Quetzie the phrase “Hedonism, anyone?” By the time Friday rolled around, Londa and I were heartily sick of Aristotle, and so instead of analyzing his excruciating consideration of pleasure, complete with the usual paean to temperance, we sat down at the chessboard. During the first game, Londa succumbed to my skill with the knight, inadvertently allowing me to fork her queen and her queen’s rook. She learned from her mistake, however, and in game two I barely played her to a draw.

  I passed all of Saturday morning lazing around the cottage, drinking too much coffee and reading too much Gadamer. At noon my cell phone rang. It was Henry, bearing the news that he’d just stumbled upon Edwina, performing Liszt on the villa’s Steinway. She’d stopped playing long enough to announce that she and Dr. Charnock had returned from Chicago the previous evening. “No, you didn’t,” Henry had insisted, then proceeded to explain how he knew this, and so Edwina agreed to meet with him, also Brock and myself, three hours hence in the Faustino conservatory.

  “I imagine she wasn’t too thrilled to hear we’d witnessed Yolly’s birth,” I said.

  “She avoided the subject,” Henry said, “but when she went back to playing Liszt, she switched from the Concerto in D to an aggressive rendition of Totentanz. If music could kill, Mason, I’d be a dead man.”

  BEFORE WE THREE UNHAPPY TUTORS entered the conservatory that afternoon, I warned Henry and Brock about the sentient tree, lest Proserpine’s unnerving habits distract them from the matter at hand. A wise precaution, for throughout our conversation with Edwina the mangrove’s branches quavered, her lungs chuffed, and the sap throbbed audibly in her trunk.

  Lady Daedalus occupied her customary wicker chair, the spiteful ginger cat socketed in her lap. The rest of us were accorded fan-back furniture as well, so that our meeting resembled a gathering of wilting southern aristocrats in some recently unearthed and best forgotten Tennessee Williams play.

  “Had you not already established nourishing relationships with my daughters,” Edwina began, “I would dismiss the three of you as spies and traitors.”

  “Unless we quit first,” I noted.

  “Your prerogative,” she said.

  “Our prerogative,” Henry agreed.

  Edwina heaved a sigh, stroked her cat, and contemplated her anamorphic reflection in the silver coffee urn. As usual she had dressed elegantly, her white lace gown accessorized by a rope of lustrous pearls. “Hear my confession,” she said at last. “If you find my actions unconscionable”—whatever remorse her tone contained failed to conceal the sarcasm—“I’ll put on sackcloth, stuff my mouth with ashes, and otherwise mortify myself.”

  “We’ll settle for severance pay,” Henry said.

  She began by admitting that our pupils owed their existence less to sexual reproduction than to scientific contrivance. By repeatedly fusing her cumulus-cell DNA with anony
mous denucleated donor eggs, nurturing the resulting zygotes in petri dishes, transferring the surviving blastocysts to glass wombs, injecting the three most auspicious embryos with pituitary hormone, allowing them to reach fetushood, and, finally, inserting each genetic twin into Dr. Charnock’s titanium chamber, his RXL-313 ontogenerator, its arcane broth carefully brewed to stimulate the child’s glands, Edwina had brought Londa, Donya, and Yolly into the world.

  “Names that, as you may have noticed, meld rather musically into ‘Yolonda,’” she said.

  By Edwina’s account, Londa possessed the body of a woman in late adolescence, yet she’d been on the planet barely eight weeks. Although she appeared no younger than five years of age, Donya was only six weeks out of the vat. And while Yolly’s growth had been accelerated until she’d come to resemble an eleven-year-old, she was in fact, as Henry and I knew all too well, a newborn.

  The headgear through which the girls’ brains had been flooded with facts, programmed with purpose, and marinated in mores was quite possibly the most complex machine-human interface on the planet. Its inventor, Vincent Charnock, had dubbed the thing a DUNCE cap: Data Upload for Normal Cognitive Efficacy. As Edwina proceeded to describe in detail the ontogenerator and its concomitant DUNCE cap, I soon realized that her enthusiasm for this technology bordered on fetishism, and I found myself rejecting her claim that, alienation and anomie notwithstanding, Londa, Donya, and Yolly had all left the laboratory as whole and healthy persons. Even the lesions in her children’s superegos gave Edwina no genuine pause. After all, this pathology could evidently be circumvented by a competent professional—Yolly’s tutor, a female psychologist from Baltimore named Jordan Frazier, would arrive before the week was out—and so there was little reason to doubt that her progeny would enjoy normal and happy lives.

  “And has your sick little enterprise run its course,” Henry asked, “or are you building up to a lacrosse team?”

  “Yolly is the last,” Edwina said. “From your long faces and low comedy, gentlemen, I surmise that you find my project unsavory.”

  The three of us nodded in unison.

  “Unsavory, unseemly, and self-centered,” Henry said.

  “Your children aren’t the only ones around here with an ethics problem,” Brock noted.

  “Question, Edwina,” I said. “When you told me Londa’s father died of pancreatic cancer, was that a total falsehood, or did you in fact once have a husband?”

  “For ten years I was married to a plastic surgeon named Francis Ulmer,” she replied. “Our union was without issue. At last report he’d moved his practice to New York City and committed himself to helping Park Avenue matrons stay off the mortality track.” She took a long sip of mumquat-enhanced coffee. “If only you could comprehend the depth of a woman’s need to have children. But such empathy is probably beyond the male imagination.”

  “No, Edwina,” I said, cheeks burning with anger, “I can comprehend it just fine. What I can’t grasp is a woman bringing three duplicates of herself into the world without their consent.”

  “We all come into the world without our consent,” she noted.

  Henry issued an indignant snort. “As babies, Edwina, as babies, not as morally impaired doppelgängers who’ve been told they’re amnesiacs. I can respect your desire to have children, but I can hardly condone the way you’ve denied Donya her infancy and Yolly her childhood and Londa her preadolescence.”

  “You’ve stolen years from the lives of those girls,” Brock added, “and given them only books and toys and tutors in return.”

  Edwina raised a hand to her collar, nervously manipulating her pearls like a merchant working an abacus. “True enough,” she said, slowly and without affect. “But it happens that I shall never have the luxury of watching a child of mine pursue a conventional developmental path. In a year, give or take two months, I shall be dead. I might even die before Christmas.”

  Decades after Edwina’s abrupt announcement, I still remember how it stunned and disoriented and—yes—infuriated me. The woman was terminally ill. Most lamentable. The Reaper had her on his radar. What a shame. And yet her attempt to redeem her imminent oblivion through this recombinant-DNA carnival, this genomic jamboree, seemed utterly deranged to me, narcissism promoted to a psychosis, vanity evolved into pornography.

  “My disease is so rare the hematologists need three Latin words to name it,” she continued. “Gradually but relentlessly, my blood is turning to water. Happily for Yolonda, the etiology is not genetic but traces to certain toxins I encountered during my years at Odradek Pharmaceuticals.”

  “How sad that you have such a knack for bending nature to your will,” I said, “and yet you can’t cure yourself.” A cruel remark, but sparing Lady Daedalus’s feelings wasn’t my top priority just then.

  “The irony is not lost on me,” Edwina said. “But at least, thanks to Yolonda, I’ll get to experience the totality of motherhood before I die.”

  Against my expectations she now became buoyant and effervescent, as if immersed in some inverse ontogenerator that caused its occupants to grow younger. In the months that remained to her, Edwina said, eyes sparkling, fingers dancing as if scurrying along her piano keyboard, she would know the pleasures of nurturing a preschooler. She would likewise experience the delights of amusing, and being amused by, a preadolescent, even as she tackled the challenging but rewarding business of ushering a young woman into adulthood.

  “And then, when the end comes, I will have my daughter to comfort me.”

  “And who will comfort them?” Brock asked, curling his lip.

  Edwina turned suddenly defensive, haughtily asserting that she’d “put more thought into Yolonda’s future” than we could possibly imagine. The patents she held on various genetically engineered seeds, foodstuffs, and antivirus drugs were “worth several fortunes,” and each sister would inherit a sum sufficient for her to hire whatever caregivers, teachers, and legal advocates she might require.

  “If you would like to remain on the island after my death and continue to instruct your charges, that can be arranged,” she told us. “But please don’t begrudge me the satisfactions that the coming year promises to bring.”

  Before the month was out, we now learned, as soon as Yolly had acquired a rudimentary conscience, Edwina would throw herself into the project, alternately imparting maternal wisdom to the children and lavishing them with love. During any given week, she would circulate among the three domains—Faustino, Casa de los Huesos, and the renovated Spanish fortress on the Bahía de Matecumba—according each daughter at least two days of her undivided attention. She hoped we would allow the girls to continue ascribing their memory gaps to amnesia, and she entreated us to keep them ignorant of one another, so that their energies and affections would stay focused on their mother.

  Their “mother.” Edwina kept using that word. This woman was no more a mother than her pearls were her father’s eyes.

  “So that is my story, gentlemen,” she said. “And now it’s your turn to hold forth. Go ahead. Be honest. What do you think of me?”

  Without hesitation I said, “I think you’re the woman Nietzsche would’ve wanted for a mother. I think you’re the Übermom.”

  “I shall take that as a compliment,” Edwina said. “And what is your opinion, Henry? Do you find anything in my project beyond Nietzschean bravado?”

  “Here’s my promise to you, Edwina,” he replied. “Once Yolly has grown up and moved out of her tower by the sea, I’m going to hire a mob of peasants with torches to wreck your damn laboratory.”

  “I’ll be leading the attack,” Brock said, “and by the time we’re finished with Charnock’s ontogenerator, it won’t be good for making a bowl of buttered popcorn, much less a human being.”

  “Are you saying you wish to resign?” Edwina asked.

  “I would love to resign,” Brock replied. “But that wouldn’t be fair to Donya.”

  “I feel more loyalty to this mangrove tree than I d
o to you,” Henry said. “I won’t desert my post, though, not before Donya’s cured.”

  “What about you, Mason?” Edwina asked. “Can Londa count on your continued tutelage, or do you plan to walk out the door?”

  I reached toward Proserpine’s nearest branch, curling my fingers around the pulsing bark. Could Londa count on me? An excellent question. The best question I’d heard all day.

  “I must say that Brock’s reasoning makes sense to me,” I began. “He and Henry have an obligation to Donya, and they intend to honor it. And I can easily imagine Yolly’s tutor hearing the whole story and still deciding to go ahead with it. But my case—that is, Londa’s case—is rather different.”

  I plucked a mumquat, inhaled the consoling scent, and regarded Edwina with quintessential contempt. Londa, I explained, had entered the world burdened with the flesh and physiology of a seventeen-year-old, and yet, before I took her under my wing, her psyche had been a blank slate—a literal blank slate, not John Locke’s hypothetical tabula rasa. It was still largely a blank slate. Apart from our role-playing exercises, she’d had absolutely no experience with confronting ethical dilemmas or making moral choices.

  “Don’t you see the evil in this, Edwina? Chronological age, seventeen. Deontological age, zero. Don’t you see the disconnect? You didn’t hire me to shape Londa’s soul—you hired me to make her soul. What right does a mere mortal have to do that?”

  “A scintillating distinction, Mason, but you haven’t answered my question,” Edwina said. “Are you going to walk out the door or not?”

  CALL IT MY SIN, DEAR READER. My fall from grace, my plunge into presumption, my seduction by pride. I did not walk out the door that afternoon. Instead this mere mortal fixed Edwina with an incandescent eye and said, “If I don’t finish my work with Londa, you’ll simply hire another philosopher, somebody who doesn’t know Epicurus from ipecac.”

  “Good decision,” Edwina said.

  “God help me,” I said.

  “God help us all,” Henry said.