The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  She took two steps forward, kissed me squarely on the lips, and, pivoting abruptly like a weather vane in a gale, melted into the night.

  “Your gumbo girl will build a city!” she called out of the darkness. “You don’t believe her, but she’ll do it! The Phyllistines will curse every brick! The downtrodden will cheer!”

  I shifted my eyes from Londa’s retreating form to the flaming tree and then to the bright speckled vault. For a full minute, I stood on the beach and studied the luminous City of Justice. Slowly, one by one, the lamps, windows, and mooring beacons floated free and transmuted into stars again, so I lowered my gaze and turned from the sea and walked into the forest.

  Part II

  Londa Unbound

  Chapter 8

  NO, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I did not unscrew her skullcap, insert her brain into its white vault, and knit her medulla to her spinal cord: someone else performed that operation. Still, I was her creator. I did not take gouts of dripping tissue in my hands and sculpt them around her bones, feeding the scraps to the dog who ate God’s homework: a different person shaped her flesh. She was nevertheless my creature. I did not install her beating heart in its thoracic cavity, lodge her eyeballs in their sockets, or tap her teeth into place with a steel mallet tempered in the Pierian Spring: those duties fell to another. And yet I am responsible for what she became.

  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my detractors speak the truth. For nearly ten years following my departure from the Florida Keys, I pretended to the outside world that I’d played no part in the construction of Londa Sabacthani’s increasingly conspicuous soul. Every time her press secretary, the indefatigable Pauline Chilton, dispatched yet another reporter to my abode, deliriously eager to hear about the Isla de Sangre curriculum and maybe learn what made Londa tick, I would tell the invader that while I had indeed served briefly as Dr. Sabacthani’s private tutor in certain abstruse deontological matters, my influence on her ethical development had been negligible.

  I am still haunted by the case of Emily Seldes, who tearfully begged me to grant her an hour of my time lest she lose her job at the Hartford Courant. When I turned her down, Miss Seldes proceeded to fabricate and publish a story, “Sabacthani’s Mentor Recalls His ‘Moral Prodigy,’” subsequently receiving the boot and descending into clinical depression when the article was exposed as a fraud. An unfortunate episode, but I was immune to regret in those days. Nor could I be moved by avarice. The producers of The Roscoe Fisher Show offered me fifteen thousand dollars for a ten-minute interview. I told them I would appear on condition that we talked about nothing but Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. The powers behind Cordelia Drake Live raised the stakes to twenty thousand dollars. I responded that I was ill-disposed to revisit a closed chapter in my life, but I’d be pleased to tell Cordelia’s viewers why Darwinian materialism offered a more exalted view of humankind than the Book of Genesis.

  Londa herself had no better luck getting my attention. I recycled her letters unopened, erased her phone messages without listening to them, slammed doors in the faces of her envoys, and deleted her e-mails with alacrity. Subject: Mason, I Need You. Subject: Calling All Consciences. Subject: Please, Socrates. Subject: Win a Free Trip to Themisopolis. Subject: Desperately Seeking Superego. Subject: Gumbo Girl on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Subject: For God’s Sake. Subject: I’m Not Kidding. Subject: Jesus Christ! Subject: Fuck You!

  What sense was there in my self-imposed exile? By what lights would a reasonable man dissent from the Sabacthani miracle? Who but the crustiest curmudgeon would disdain the omnibenevolent community that Londa and Yolly had seeded in the rural environs of Bel Air, Maryland? Who but the sourest sophist would gainsay the splendid projects administered within the walls of that Susquehanna River utopia? One thinks immediately of the Mary Wollstonecraft Fund, providing contraceptives and small-business loans to women in underdeveloped countries, not to mention the Susan B. Anthony Trust, running to earth the architects of various international prostitution rings—sexual slavery, the sisters called it with a characteristic contempt for euphemism—as well as the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, tirelessly lobbying against the user-friendly fascism, feel-good theocracy, and creeping Phyllistinism that now dominated the American political landscape. O come, all ye faithful. Come ye to Themisopolis. Come and behold the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations, dedicated to eradicating the female cancers. Tour the Vision Syndicate and chat with its idealistic engineers, fiercely determined to inaugurate a postcarbon age in which fossil-fueled power plants will have gone the way of workhouses and witch trials. Drop by the Artemis Clinic, offering free medical services, including abortions, to pregnant women. Visit Arcadia House, sheltering hundreds of runaway wives, battered girlfriends, pregnant teenagers, abused children, and unadoptable orphans.

  But you see, ladies and gentlemen, despite Londa’s munificence, or maybe because of it, there was never a moment when she did not seem monstrous in my eyes, beauty and beast in a single skin. The woman frightened me. She scared me to death. Whenever I started to compose an e-mail to my vatling, images of her stigmata flooded my brain—the burn scar on her palm, the thorn under her thumbnail—and I shut down the computer. Each time I picked up the phone to call her, the vindictive Crimson Kantian from The Book of Londa rose in my imagination, and I returned the handset to its cradle, knowing that for the sake of my sanity, and perhaps hers as well, I must continue to banish her from my life.

  And so it happens that these pages contain a dearth of inside dope concerning Londa’s ascent from biology major to celebrity saint. You will find herein nothing to supplement the standard narrative—how a beautiful and brilliant molecular geneticist from Johns Hopkins burst one day upon the clinical-research scene, perfecting a therapeutic technique whereby specially designed patches of healthy DNA were knitted into the chromosomes of patients suffering from malign mutations; how this same prodigy ultimately turned her back on avant-garde chimeraplasty and announced that she intended to pursue an even grander agenda; how she then joined forces with her younger sister, Yolly, her personal manager, Dagmar Röhrig, and her eternal inspiration, the Good Samaritan, to bring a substantial tract of paradise to earth, in time earning the sobriquet Dame Quixote. No gossip today, ladies and gentlemen. No jaw-dropping disclosures. If you want to learn about the Golden Age of Themisopolis, rent the PBS documentary She Walked Among Us. Read Sandra Granger’s surprise bestseller, Weltanschauung Woman. Hunt out back issues of that old Marvel Comics series The League of Londa, the first of which currently commands a $350 minimum bid on eBay. Collect the trading cards. Play the board game. Fondle the action figure.

  So extreme was my wariness that it extended even to Londa’s youngest sister back on the island. Every time Donya invited me to Casa de los Huesos, I invented a pretext for staying put—poor health, low spirits, a deadline for delivering a revision of Ethics from the Earth to a prospective publisher—though I did agree to exchange e-mails and Christmas cards with her. When Omar the Doberman went to the Elysium of Endless Bones at the ripe old age of fifteen, I composed a five-stanza elegy, “I Just Got a Postcard from My Dog,” that, as Henry put it, “helped us move our favorite little girl from mourning to remembrance.”

  By Donya’s account, all was well on Isla de Sangre. Henry had written a half-dozen scripts for Uncle Rumpus’s Magic Island, “and they’re really, really funny,” she assured me. Brock’s emerging surrealist cyclorama “makes you feel like your eyeballs have fallen out and gone rolling around on a Day-Glo pool table,” which I took to be a recommendation. As for Donya herself, while her handcrafted conscience was probably no less extravagant than Londa’s or Yolly’s, her messages betrayed little of the unbounded swashbucklery that had made her older sisters the decade’s most beloved and vilified women. When not marking the Bahía de Flores with signs imploring passing yachtsmen to keep their refuse out of the water, she was protecting newly laid sea-turtle eggs from predatory egrets and petitioning the federal
government to designate the island a National Wildlife Refuge. I imagined that Donya might one day redirect these pastoral passions, scaling her ambitions upward from her local ecosystem to planet Earth, but just then, for better or worse—better, I felt—she seemed happy to circumscribe her dreams.

  Had I been utterly determined to keep Londa from crossing my path, of course, I would have moved as far from Maryland as possible—to San Francisco, maybe, or London. But instead I returned to Boston—to my old haunts, in fact, Hawthorne University and environs. My goal was not to engage in further tussles with Felix Pielmeister, nor was it to resurrect my Ph.D. candidacy. What drove me was my craving for philosophical discourse, the desire that Sinuhe’s riverside ruminations had sparked in me at such an impressionable age. I needed to hear sentences ornamented with “categorical imperative,” “Cartesian dualism,” “Hegelian idealism,” and “the encounter with nothingness” the way a believing Sabacthanite needed the latest issue of The League of Londa.

  My bright idea was to open a used-book store, an amenity to be found nowhere within a six-block radius of the campus. A solid nut of one hundred thousand dollars remained from my Isla de Sangre salary, and this proved sufficient for me to attract a business partner, easygoing Dexter Padula, a member of that ubiquitous academic breed, the professional graduate student, forever revising his dissertation while eyeing external reality with the anxious demeanor of a nursing infant struggling to imagine life beyond the tit. Dexter stood out from his fellows on four counts. He was not on antidepressants; he knew how to groom himself; he had a plan for finishing his book—Overlapping Intersubjectivities in “The Canterbury Tales”—before the year was up; and he’d inherited a bundle from his father, though apparently the bundle would have been bigger had Dexter decided to become a lawyer instead of a Chaucerian. In a matter of weeks, we’d secured a two-year lease on 1,924 square feet of the Pequot Building, an easy and picturesque walk from campus, and we’d also acquired the private libraries of four bibliophiles whose ability to enjoy their collections had been compromised by, respectively, illness, impoverishment, blindness, and death. After making these moves, we still had sufficient funds for several part-time employees and a hand-carved sign reading PIECES OF MIND: USED BOOKS, FRESH COFFEE, LIVELY CONVERSATION.

  Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success. Was it possible that those Egyptian gods to whom Sinuhe had declined to defer—royal Isis, valiant Horus, wise Thoth, and the rest—were not only real but sending their smiles our way? I liked to think so, though when we did the math, it appeared that the decisive factor was not divine intervention but the espresso machine in the back of the store, tirelessly transforming brown beans into black ink.

  We’d been in business barely three months when another stroke of luck augmented my bank account. After collecting a dozen rejection letters, I somehow persuaded Bellerophon Books to publish an abridged version of Ethics from the Earth. Defying expectations, my opinionated opus soon earned out its thousand-dollar advance, and then the biannual royalties began to arrive. Sometimes the payment would be as much as two hundred dollars, more than enough to cover our combined cream, sugar, and toilet-paper budget for a month.

  Although we were thriving in the material realm, my grander vision for Pieces of Mind never came to pass. My dream was that while Daphne and Forrest and our other student employees attended to the tedious tasks—shelving the merchandise, working the cash register, posting inventory on the Internet—I would sashay through the coffee bar, inviting myself into whatever fascinating discussions caught my ear. A foolish notion. A delusion on stilts. For one thing, the owner of a used-book store does not sashay. He runs around putting out fires—the irate customer, the overdue phone bill, the crashed computer, the housewife from Chelsea who’s just shown up expecting a hundred dollars for her worthless carton of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Furthermore, even if I’d had time to mingle, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, for what emerged from my customers’ mouths was not so much conversation as a litany of complaint. The undergraduates lamented the high price of textbooks and the equally outrageous fact that they were expected to read them. The graduate students bemoaned their small stipends and large workloads. The professors apportioned their spleen among the graduate students, the administrators, and one another. Indeed, during the store’s entire life span, I never encountered a single spontaneous seminar concerning Foucault or Derrida, though I learned more than I wanted to about tenure. Sad to say, the one time I heard the delectable question “How, then, should we live?” within the walls of Pieces of Mind, the speaker turned out to be Felix Pielmeister. I instantly made an about-face and retreated to the children’s section.

  If my little haven was no agora, there were compensations nonetheless. It became my habit, after closing up for the evening, to pour myself a glass of cabernet sauvignon, sprawl on the couch, and think, taking incalculable delight in what I’d wrought, this bibliographic cornucopia, this box seat in God’s brain. Then, too, there was the happy fact that managing a bookstore is a terrific way to meet women. Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress? I see you’re a Joseph Heller aficionada—allow me to argue that Something Happened is a greater achievement than Catch-22. No, we don’t have A Prayer for Owen Meany, but in my opinion The Cider House Rules is a much better novel.

  Throughout this period, Pieces of Mind netted me dozens of dates and several unexpected seductions. I suffered three broken hearts and inflicted as many such casualties in turn. Then one day the woman of my dreams walked into the store, and my life was changed forever.

  LIKE DANTE CATCHING his fateful glimpse of Beatrice, I first spied her from afar—or, rather, from above. I was standing on the stepladder, shelving a near-mint collection of Heinlein juveniles in the topmost loft of our science-fiction and fantasy section, when a female voice called out from the precincts of J. R. R. Tolkien below.

  “Excuse me. I’m looking for a hardcover Faerie Queene. Is there such a thing?”

  I glanced downward, and my eyes met the upturned face of a goddess with generous lips, endearing dimples, and the sort of large, intelligent eyes behind which, if I was any sort of judge, elegant thoughts were routinely entertained.

  “It’s not with the poetry,” she continued, “and I tried literature, too, so maybe somebody shelved it with your wizards and elves?”

  As luck would have it, two days earlier a retiring professor of British literature had dropped off a complete run of those lavishly illustrated, out-of-print marvels known as the Erlanger House Classics, including a slipcased incarnation of The Faerie Queene, so I could assess their condition and make him an offer. “There’s a rare three-volume set on the premises, but I haven’t priced it yet,” I told my adorable Spenserian, then carelessly followed up with a question that a retailer must never, under any circumstances, ask a customer. “How much are you willing to pay?”

  “Anything,” she said. “Three hundred dollars.”

  Assuming it was in good shape, I would happily give the professor four hundred dollars for his Faerie Queene, which would probably fetch seven hundred on the Internet. “You can have it for two hundred and fifty,” I told her. “Meet me at the cash register.”

  Leaving my heart aloft, I descended to earth and floated into the back room, where I unsheathed all three volumes and leafed through them in search of underlinings and dog-ears. The books seemed free of blemishes. I considered lowering the price to two hundred dollars, then decided that if my goddess ever found out what this edition was really worth, she would think me an idiot.

  “We don’t get many Spenserians in here,” I said, approaching the sales counter.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  As if Isis and Horus hadn’t alre
ady done enough for me, the object of my infatuation wrote the store a personal check, and thus I learned not only her alliterative name, Natalie Novak, but also her address and phone number.

  I probed, I pried, I snooped, I sleuthed, and by the end of the month the salient facts were mine. An ABD in the English department, Natalie divided her time between writing her dissertation, something about the function of Providence in Emily Brontë, and teaching a panoply of courses ranging from Elizabethan Tragedy to the Twentieth-Century Novel. On agreeable spring days, she was not embarrassed to escort her Victorian Poetry class down to the Charles and recite “The Lady of Shalott” aloud while the students imagined the hapless maiden drifting past on her funeral barge. But the surest route to Natalie’s heart doubtless lay in Spenser’s Faerie Land, and so I undertook a journey to that extravagant realm.

  For six full weeks, I immersed myself in the epic, keeping company with its valiant knights, foul witches, beautiful shepherdesses, lustful giants, virtuous adventurers, and depraved magicians. I accomplished this feat even though The Faerie Queene suffers from the defect of not being very good, or such was my reaction to its stone-obvious moralizing, in-your-face allegory, and retrograde political dogma. It wasn’t easy working up affection for this god-awful masterpiece, but somehow I suspended my revulsion long enough to start appreciating its positive aspects: the occasional neat plot twist, the intermittent linguistic felicity. “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, / Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.” A fine couplet, no question. “Her angel’s face / As the great eye of heaven shined bright, / And made a sunshine in the shady place.” Well done, sir. “Her birth was of the womb of morning dew.” I had no idea what that meant, but I liked it.

  One golden April afternoon, I decided to bring my project to fruition. I left Dexter in charge of the store, rode my bike to the river, and hid behind a forsythia bush. Right on schedule Natalie appeared, her fifteen Shakespeare 101 students trailing behind her like imprinted ducklings. For the next forty-five minutes, she lectured on Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that it was at once the most cerebral and the most emotional of the tragedies. She fielded some questions, answered them astutely, then bade her ducklings scatter. Time for me to make my move.