The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  A tempting offer, as I was truly enjoying her company, but my obligation to Natalie came first. “I have an appointment with the Mad Doctor of Blood Island,” I said, edging toward the rolling glass door. “I’ll let you know if I need you to sic Major Powers on him. Anything to get that damn immaculoid out of Natalie’s life.”

  “Not only is he a great conscience, folks, he’s also a loving husband.”

  I slid back the door and crossed the threshold. “If there’s a stone around your neck, it’s because you put it there.”

  “No, Socrates. You did it. I wonder if I’ll ever forgive you.”

  NOON FOUND ME EMBEDDED in a traffic jam on the D.C. Beltway, mired and miserable like the carp Londa had almost drowned on the Faustino patio. I called Natalie and told her I was bound for North Carolina, hot on the trail of Vincent Charnock, the likely source of our difficulties. “Assuming he’s the culprit,” I asked, “is there any message you want me to give him?”

  “John Snow came to my Arthurian Romance class this morning,” Natalie said. “He kept quiet the whole hour, and then he started screaming, ‘She wouldn’t take the risk!’ Here’s my message to Dr. Charnock. ‘I hope you fucking rot in hell.’”

  I circumvented D.C., then headed southeast until I reached Norfolk, where I checked into a Wanderer’s Lodge, flagship of a burgeoning hotel chain whose self-conscious name, postmodern décor, and pop-cult mystique catered to middle-class bohemian nomads who fancied themselves following in Kerouac’s exhaust fumes. My sleep was fitful and dreamless—perhaps I never slept at all—and shortly after 9:00 A.M. I hit the road again, three Wanderer’s Lodge cranberry muffins huddled in my stomach like scoops of library paste. Soon I reached the Carolina border, where the essential sign appeared, JACOB’S NOTCH NEXT EXIT. Once I was within the town proper, getting a fix on Charnock proved simple. The scraggly young man who ran the bait shop, the wisecracking belle behind the 7-Eleven cash register, and the skinny kid skateboarding across the First Baptist Church parking lot all eagerly pointed the way. It was as if the locals knew that one of these days the crazy misanthrope living on the river would have a visitor—an estranged brother, an IRS agent, a private detective, a hit man.

  When I finally came upon my quarry, he was slumped in a captain’s chair on the afterdeck of his houseboat, smoking a cigarette and staring at a stand of cattails, a depleted fifth of Old Kentucky bourbon snugged between his bare feet. He rubbed the bottle with his toes. A tattered straw hat sheltered him from the sun. I couldn’t decide which was the greater wreck, Charnock’s body or the dilapidated vessel he called home. Moored to a floating dock, the Ursula was a conglomeration of warped planks, rusty nails, and a superstructure suggesting a derelict chicken coop. Of the paint job little remained but leprous scabs and burst blisters.

  “Hello, Vincent.”

  Evidently he recognized my voice, for without lifting his head he said, “I figured you’d show up one day, Ambrose. Did you come to question me, kiss me, or kill me?”

  I stepped from the wharf to the afterdeck. Strangely, the boards didn’t crumble beneath my feet. “Kiss you?”

  “For inventing the machine that resurrected your son.”

  “John Snow is not my son.”

  “And Brutus is an honorable man,” Charnock said, winching himself to his feet. He tossed his cigarette in the water, picked up the Old Kentucky bottle, and poured the few remaining swallows into a plastic tumbler embossed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Spiky whiskers speckled his jaw and neck, so that his head suggested an immense seed pod looking to attach itself to a passing sweater. “The bastards betrayed me, Ambrose. They promised to keep me in the loop. They lied.”

  “What bastards?”

  “The ones who hired me to teach them the art of ontogenesis. Their leader was in the news a couple of months ago, railing against Operation Redneck.”

  “Enoch Anthem?”

  “That’s the bastard.”

  “I’ve never even met Enoch Anthem. Why the hell would he single out Natalie and me?”

  “It was the other bastard who singled you out. Anthem’s consigliere—you know who I mean?”

  “No.”

  “That tough-as-nails postrationalist up in Boston. Felix Pielmeister. I gather you two have a history.”

  “Pielmeister? Jesus.”

  “I also gather that the professor and you and a glamorous complit lady used to hang around the same bookstore, and it wasn’t long before he figured out you and she were an item, eventually a pregnant item. When he realized you’d gotten an abortion, he decided your fetus should become the first of the mackies.”

  I moaned and gripped the gunwale. Pielmeister. Horus help me. Isis be my light. During the past week I’d driven nine hundred miles, traveled through eight different states, and slept in five strange beds, and it turned out that the answer to the mystery lay on my doorstep—or as Dorothy told Glinda at the end of Donya’s favorite movie, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with,” a sentiment whose breathtaking incoherence I’d never fully appreciated before.

  “You have to realize, this project of Pielmeister’s was never mostly about him settling an old score with you,” Charnock continued. “He and Anthem are out to get everybody who did what you did. I must admit, even though they stabbed me in the back, I’m damn impressed with those two. They have moral fiber. Think about it. Six thousand fetuses stalking their unfeeling quasiparents—the greatest antiabortion protest in history!”

  “Six thousand? Thundering Christ.”

  Charnock pressed the tumbler to his lips and let the bourbon trickle into his throat. “Anthem’s organization paid me a fortune for the RXL-313 schematics, and now they’ve got three ontogenerators, maybe four. Your John Snow is actually John Snow 0001. Next will come John Snow 0002, followed by John Snow 0003, not to mention Jane Snow 0001 and all her sisters. I didn’t want the three million dollars. I gave it to the Red Cross. What I wanted was to be in the loop.” He pulled off his straw hat and fanned his sweating face with the brim. “There are wheels within wheels here, Ambrose. Everybody’s heard of the Center for Stable Families, but nobody knows it’s a beard for a subterranean network called CHALICE, the Christian Alliance of Immaculoids, Chiliasts, and Evangelicals. And here’s the rub. The CHALICE biologists don’t understand the RXLs. They miss the nuances. Did you know that if a newborn baby started listening to a recital of the human genome sequence, that monotonous melody of G’s and T’s and C’s and A’s, he’d still be hearing it when he turned fifty, the same damn base notes, guanine, thymine, cytosine, adenine, over and over in countless combinations? As a matter of fact, the song doesn’t end until he’s ready to die. No wonder CHALICE screwed it up. No wonder your son has an atrophied arm and a crooked spine, not to mention his limp—he’s got a limp, right?”

  “And a lazy eye. He says his days are numbered.”

  “When the mackies start dying like flies, Anthem will realize what a blunder he made, taking me out of the loop. Thirsty?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  In a gesture more affectionate than he might normally have accorded an unfeeling quasiparent, Charnock set his hand against my back and guided me toward the superstructure. We crossed a mildewed parlor, its fitted benches stacked with books, mostly Russian novels—I don’t know whether, per his gazebo conversation with Edwina, he’d gotten around to reading War and Peace, but at least he owned a copy—and proceeded to the galley. A diverse collection of half-empty wine and liquor bottles crowded the countertop, obscuring the buckled Formica.

  “What’s your pleasure?”

  “How about a rum and Coke? Hold the rum.”

  Charnock opened his built-in refrigerator and removed a solitary Diet Pepsi. “Don’t you want me to hold the Coke instead?”

  “I never consume alcohol before noon.”

  “Neither do I
.” He handed me the Pepsi, then screwed open a fresh Old Kentucky bottle and splashed several ounces into his Gill Man tumbler.

  “It’s eleven-thirty.”

  “Not in Madrid.”

  I ripped the tab off my Pepsi, then chugged down all twelve ounces in the same short interval that Charnock required to finish his bourbon.

  “So tell me, what’s the most fascinating thing about your son?” he asked. “His bedrock nihilism? His bottomless contempt for his parents?”

  “He’s not my son,” I said.

  “Sorry. Forgot.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Right.”

  I realized I was staring at a box of Earl Grey wedged between a quart of brandy and a fifth of vodka. “Might I have some tea?”

  “Caffeine is bad for your digestion.” Charnock filled a small copper kettle with water, set it to boiling atop his Primus stove. “Let me tell you something. Even after I came to detest Edwina’s project, I still admired her style. A decisive woman. She got a craving for total motherhood, and so she made it happen. Adorable Donya, vivacious Yolly, brooding Londa.”

  Two minutes later my host yanked the screaming kettle off the stove, filled a grimy ceramic mug, and began dipping a tea bag up and down in the hot water as if making a candle. He gave me my tea, then replenished his tumbler with bourbon. We drank in silence, drifting through the superstructure and back onto the afterdeck. The sun beat down on the river, baking the sodden banks into aromatic loaves of mud.

  “You obviously came to question me,” Charnock said at last. “But what about kiss and kill?”

  “Neither.”

  “You signed off on your own son’s murder, yet you balk at shooting a useless old drunk? Philosophers are supposed to be rational.”

  “The D and C was absolutely necessary,” I hissed. “Natalie might’ve died of a blood clot.” A quick, short leap brought me from the Ursula to the dock. “Thanks for the tea. The conversation, too. My wife sends you a message. ‘I hope you fucking rot in hell.’”

  As I started up the hill toward town, I realized I was still holding Charnock’s ceramic mug, a situation I immediately remedied by smashing it against a rock.

  “They’re coming, Ambrose, six thousand strong!” he called after me. “The greatest political demonstration of all time! The whole world will tremble beneath their unborn feet! Ontological terrorism elevated to an art form!”

  THE IMMACULOIDS WERE COMING. Ontological terrorism. Lurid as it sounded, I had no reason to doubt Charnock’s forecast, and so upon returning to Norfolk I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts, grabbed my phone, and, after pleading my case to Gertrude Lingard, got Londa on the line. If Charnock could be believed, I told her, he’d sold his soul and his schematics to a shadowy society whose members included not only Enoch Anthem but also the very professor with whom I’d sparred during my dissertation defense.

  “They call themselves CHALICE,” I said. “The Christian Alliance of Immaculoids, Chiliasts, and Evangelicals.”

  “Beware of Phyllistines bearing acronyms,” Londa said.

  “Charnock thinks they have at least three ontogenerators. They’re planning to cook up an army of fetuses and set them loose on the world.”

  “What a totally atrocious idea.”

  “It was a dark day when Anthem and Pielmeister found each other, and a darker day when they learned about Charnock’s damn machine.”

  “Raiders of the Lost Christian Consensus. Keep me posted, Socrates.”

  Next I called Natalie. The news of Pielmeister’s involvement flabbergasted her, but she was cheerier than the last time we’d talked. Our fetus had not attended the most recent meetings of British Renaissance Poetry, Greek Drama, or Arthurian Romance.

  “Listen, darling, this shitty thing we’re going through, Charnock says it’s about to happen to lots of couples.”

  “How many is lots?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Is that supposed to comfort me?”

  “I thought it might. Does it?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Hurry home. If I have to deal with that fucker again, I’m going to jump out a window.”

  I spent the next thirteen hours on the road, stopping only to empty my bladder and fill my gas tank. By 2:00 A.M., Natalie and I were lying in bed together, conjoined like adjacent jigsaw-puzzle pieces, drifting off to sleep.

  A storm was raging when I awoke, alone now, the thick gray rain clattering on the windows like scrabbling claws. My stomach seemed filled with electrified acid, as if I were digesting a flashlight battery. I glanced at the alarm clock. It was almost noon. Soon Natalie would be back from British Renaissance Poetry. I staggered to the kitchen and phoned Dexter, telling him about the rarities I’d scored en route to Maryland. He said we’d sold two copies of Ethics from the Earth while I was gone and that the schizophrenic I’d taken under my wing had been asking about me.

  Natalie and I entered the living room from opposite directions, our gaits identical, a despairing shuffle. Stark red veins encircled her eyes like meridians, their lids swollen with weeping.

  “I don’t hate him, not exactly,” she said. “But I can’t take much more of this.”

  My anger was primal, fury refined to a malignant elixir. I became my own sort of immaculoid, pure in wrath, pristine in spite, and it was this incarnation of Mason Ambrose who now grabbed an umbrella, rushed into the storm, and drove nine blocks to the Silbersack Building, home of the philosophy department. I dashed down the second-floor hallway like a small but implacable cyclone, then blew uninvited into Pielmeister’s office, an exquisite little sanctum, all oak wainscoting, teak molding, and cedar beams. No doubt he had appointed it himself. Augustinians knew their wood.

  Pielmeister stood hunched over a cardboard carton, filling it with books. He was doing it exactly wrong, jamming the corners of the covers against each other when he should have been laying the volumes spine to spine. The denuded shelves held only a few forlorn paperbacks, plus the half dozen awards he’d won for his theological treatises. One such commendation depicted Hugh of St. Victor, another represented Thomas Aquinas. Spiritual bowling trophies.

  “Good afternoon, Ambrose.” His supreme tranquillity sent a chill through my bones. “Let me guess. You’ve been connecting the dots.”

  “I’d like to connect a gila monster to your scrotum.”

  He fiddled with the carton flaps and after several attempts managed to interlace them. “Whatever inconvenience John Snow is causing you, it’s nothing compared with the anguish you inflicted on him.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me indeed. But why confine ourselves to generalities? If we’re going to have one of your nuanced secular discussions, let’s fuck me in the ear and fuck me in the eye and fuck me up the ass.”

  He seized the carton and bustled out of the room. I followed directly behind him like a mackie dogging its quasiparent.

  “Changing offices?” I asked. “Or did you get fired for bullying one too many grad students?”

  “I’m leaving this place.”

  “Really? You’re breaking my heart. I’ll have to keep reminding myself that the Hawthorne community’s loss is Enoch Anthem’s gain. I’m right, aren’t I? Anthem offered you a job?”

  “Matter of fact, I’ll be heading up his Bureau of Apologetics.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, then added, hoping to unnerve him, “Maybe you’ll get to lead the great antiabortion protest Charnock told me about.”

  Pielmeister remained his usual granite self. “You would do well to ignore half of what Charnock says and discount the other half. The man’s delusional.”

  “Ontological terrorism, he called it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  For the next several minutes, I became Pielmeister’s doppelgänger, matching his steps as he exited the building and made his way across Parking Area C to his Ford SUV. The rain had stopped. Puddles dotted the macadam like shards of a shattered
mirror. Pielmeister opened the hatch, which was already stuffed with book boxes, and attempted to insert the last carton. He failed. He rotated the carton about its horizontal axis. Again he failed. He tried the vertical axis. No luck. I’d always known that academics were people who got paid to problematize the putting of square pegs into square holes, but I’d never before seen such a vivid demonstration.

  Pielmeister set the carton on the passenger seat, slammed the door, and looked me in the eye. “Wake up, Ambrose. History is happening right in front of your nose, and you’re totally blind to it. Even as we speak, Protestantism and Anglicanism are melting back into their parent Catholicism, and soon that great insatiable body will suck up all the rest, Eastern Orthodox Mariolaters, American heartland charismatics, sodbusting Mormon polygamists, speakers-in-tongues, thinkers-in-apocalypses, snake handlers, scorpion swallowers, wasp whisperers, until Christendom has once again been made whole, pole to pole, crust to core, Greenwich to Gisborne and back again!”

  “With liberty and justice for all blastocysts.”

  “Go ahead, scoff. Scoff all you want. The paradigm shift is upon us, sweeping away the things of Caesar and Sabacthani. Nominalist and humanist, queer and condom monger, peacenik and Bolshevik—doomed, damned, every last one of you. Checkmate, sir. Twilight of the iconoclasts. Secularism is dead, Christ has switched off the Enlightenment, and that exotic bird, the ruby-throated Darwinist, will soon go extinct as the dodo.”

  “Charnock tells me you’ve got thousands of immaculoids in the works.”

  “Give up, Ambrose,” Pielmeister said, smiling through his beard. “Tip your king. Corporate Christi has arrived. We’re putting the crucifixion back where it belongs, dead center, but this time no silly trickles when the spike hits the Savior—now we’ll get a geyser, spurt city, oiling the gears of the paradigm shift, jetting clear to heaven.”