The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Sounds dangerous,” I noted.

  “Only if we do something amazingly stupid,” Londa said.

  “Really dangerous,” I said.

  “We can count on you, right, Mason?” Yolly asked.

  Of course they couldn’t count on me. Who did they think I was, goddamn Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone? “I would say we need two getaway drivers.”

  “Sheesh!” Jordan exclaimed.

  “Mason,” said Yolly through clenched teeth.

  “I’m a philosopher,” I said, “not a fucking commando.”

  Londa unsnapped her seat belt, curling one arm around Quetzie’s cage, the other around my shoulder. “Hey, Socrates, don’t you recognize a second chance when you see one? Help us get those CD-Rs, and the world will forgive you for cooking me up.”

  It wasn’t merely the carrot of redemption that sent me to the Burrito Junction men’s room that afternoon. The ovarian cancer drug also figured in my reasoning, as did the slave traffickers. Initially I bobbled the job, applying the greasepaint so liberally I gave myself a leper’s decaying cheeks, but by rubbing the stuff away with paper towels I eventually acquired the pocked complexion Plan Omega required. Before returning to the minivan, I donned my silver wig and studied my face in the mirror. An aging mackie stared back at me—not a generic aging mackie but the one whose features I knew best, the former inhabitant of an abandoned Boston switch tower. If I could believe his dying words, John Snow 0001 would have refused to join the imminent burning of Themisopolis. He was a highly principled fetus, a fact of which his semifather would always be proud.

  Chapter 12

  TO SNEAK INTO THE OCCUPIED CITY on a mission whose unmasking would surely occasion our deaths—to lay hold of the treasure without drawing the attention of six thousand watchful fetuses—to spirit the data away the instant the immaculoids turned their backs: a foolhardy plan indeed, bound to spark tension and discord within our ad hoc commando unit, and so I was hardly surprised when a heated argument erupted between the Sisters Sabacthani. Londa, our reckless rationalist, wanted Jordan to drive right up to the city gates, on the theory that the mackies would be too distracted to note the incursion. Yolly, our sensible sybarite, insisted that we park at least a mile from the ramparts. Better safe than sorry. Just when it seemed the women might come to blows, Jordan resolved the controversy by stopping the van on a spot she insisted was the precise Pythagorean midpoint between Londa’s impetuosity and Yolly’s prudence.

  At three o’clock, eight hours after our captors had marched us through the police-tape labyrinth, Jordan presented Londa with a Phillips screwdriver, Yolly with a cell phone, and me with a knapsack full of Gatorade and cereal bars. Itching beneath our fetal patinas, we dashed down Avalon Lane past the dormant cherry trees until we reached the encampment. Now Londa increased the pace, leading us through the grid of tents and pavilions to the parking lot. Running faster still, we swerved among the moving vans, buses, and semi-rigs, the air growing ever thicker with the aggressive aroma of gasoline. At last the great portal loomed up, its bronze gates hanging open, doubtless so the mackies could make a quick retreat if the conflagration got out of hand. The noxious fumes became sharper yet, reaming our nostrils, scoring our tonsils, scouring our lungs.

  A final sprint, and we were inside the city, where I beheld a scene so appalling that for a moment I simply stood and stared, frozen in begrudging awe of CHALICE and its fetal minions. Having attached auxiliary pumps, hoses, and nozzles to the forty gasoline trucks, the immaculoids were busily siphoning this liquid munificence and releasing it in wild ejaculatory spurts. Whatever one thought of Enoch Anthem and Felix Pielmeister, they were consummate apocalypticians, men who could envision a Judgment Day of surpassing surrealism and render it in fossil fuel.

  Normally the city’s sewer system would have channeled the deluge underground, but the mackies had stoppered all the gratings with swatches cut from their canvas tents. Slowly, inexorably, the gasoline collected in the streets, the puddles fringed by iridescent rainbows. My brain seemed to float free of my body, a neural balloon, borne by the Texaco zephyrs. Despite the urgency of our situation, or perhaps because of it, the women started squabbling again, Yolly insisting that we proceed at the immaculoids’ characteristically crippled gait, Londa arguing that we run like mad. The right tactic soon became apparent: we needn’t limp at all, the mackies being far too busy constructing their holocaust to notice the impostors in their midst.

  We charged down Shambhala Avenue, weaving among the ever-expanding petroleum pools, and a few minutes later arrived in Alethia Square. Resolute as ever, bronze heart throbbing with her undying devotion to fairness, Themis held her motorized balance scales aloft. The fumes pursued us like vengeful ghosts. Londa dropped to her knees before the statue, so that she briefly appeared to be a pagan supplicant worshipping an idol—or, more likely in this case, Sinuhe’s iconoclast sister faking adoration—then took out the screwdriver and fitted it into a screw holding the access plate to the pedestal. She rotated her wrist. The screw resisted. She cursed and increased the torque. The screw surrendered. My headache spread through its bony enclosure, colonizing every sinus. Londa loosened all four screws. The access plate hit the flagstones. She thrust the screwdriver into the hollow, triggering the emergency shutoff mechanism. The balance scales ceased oscillating, as if after all these years Lady Justice had finally reached a quintessentially equitable decision. From the depths of the pedestal, Londa retrieved a crumpled Kevlar satchel—it looked like an enormous green change purse—and hugged it to her breast.

  The sewers were backing up rapidly, turning the city into a nightmare Venice, its canals swollen with dark, seething torrents of Regular, Plus, and Supreme. From these ghastly waterways there now arose a shimmering gallery of hydrocarbon mirages. I pulled out the Gatorade bottle and took a big gulp, seeking to wash the Cretaceous taste from my mouth. My eyes swam with tears. My dizziness increased. A blackout seemed imminent, but I fought to forestall it, chewing the insides of my cheeks and slapping my brow with the flat of my hand.

  Yolly yanked the cell phone from her jumpsuit. Obviously the immaculoids had shut off the EMP, for she reached Jordan without difficulty, telling her to expect us shortly. “The data’s in hand,” she informed her guardian, at which instant the fetuses, having set their torches ablaze, thrust them into the gasoline.

  In a blinding flash, Lake Sunoco caught fire, and then the rest ignited, Amoco Run, Getty Lagoon, Texaco Tarn, the river Exxon, and soon all five bodies were flowing together, a confluence of infernos, so that a roaring wall of flame now stood between the city gates and ourselves. A great swell of scalding air rolled toward us like a boiling tsunami. We dropped to the flagstones. For a full minute, we lay prone in the courtyard, gasping and coughing, while Londa explained that we had only one option. We must make our way to the Circus of Atonement, descend to the basement, and hide in the ontogenerator until the firestorm passed.

  “The vat’s lined with silica ceramic,” she noted. “Heat-resistant as hell’s hinges.”

  Clutching the satchel more fiercely yet, Londa lurched to her feet and led us on a frantic dash down Boudicca Street. Billows of smoke filled the sky, vast and black as the clouds whose cache had scrubbed Noah’s contemporaries from the earth. Cinders flew everywhere like squalls of demonic snow. Insectile sparks stung our cheeks and brows, fiery hornets, incandescent wasps.

  As we drew within sight of the Circus, Yolly called Jordan again, informing her of the obvious fact that Themisopolis was burning and the less obvious fact that so far we’d all avoided incineration—a circumstance we intended to prolong by taking refuge in the ontogenerator. Next Londa got on the phone, telling Jordan to move into the nearest hotel and stand ready to retrieve us at a moment’s notice.

  The plaza outside the rotunda was unexpectedly crowded. Galvanized by whatever survival instinct had leaked into their algorithms, the Circus troupers had armed themselves and fled the building—a sensible ste
p but insufficient, for their path was blocked by a fetal battalion, one hundred strong. Clearly a massacre was in the offing, the immaculoids’ assault rifles being considerably more powerful than the troupers’ theatrical props. Joan of Arc wielded her sword, Pope John Paul II his crozier, Davy Crockett his Kentucky rifle, Edward Teller his flagellant’s whip. Mary Baker Eddy had emerged into daylight accompanied by her band of audio-animatronic victims, all of whom had evidently forgiven her, for they gathered protectively around her like a bodyguard of midgets. Fresh from their church wedding, Percival Sarnac and Leopold Ransom brandished gold altar crosses, which they evidently intended to use as cudgels. The most poorly equipped performers were Warren Anderson, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, their only weapons being spindly aluminum stands stolen from the Circus’s lighting system.

  Sensing her authority and perhaps also remembering her victories, the troupers rallied to Joan of Arc’s side. For a fleeting instant, the maid and I exchanged glances of mutual recognition, acknowledging our moment of choreographed passion.

  “There are no just wars!” she exclaimed in obedience to her DUNCE cap programming. “There are no greater goods!”

  So intense was the immaculoids’ delight in having an entire theater company to annihilate, they simply ignored Londa, Yolly, and myself as we slipped behind the Maid of Orléans’s ragtag army. Reaching the rotunda entrance, we paused to survey the pitched battle. It was predictably quick and entirely brutal. Anderson, Kissinger, and Reagan were the first to fall, blasted to pieces as, floodlight stands raised high, they attempted to poke out their assailants’ eyes. The fetuses fired again, killing Sarnac and Ransom before they could bludgeon anyone with their crosses, and then came the third volley, raining down on my poor Joan and leaving her as perforated as St. Sebastian after the archers had martyred him. More bullets flew. Before succumbing to their wounds, the pope coshed a fetus with his crozier, Crockett shot one between the eyes, and Mrs. Eddy issued a piercing battle cry, ordering her entourage into the fray. The audio-animatronic children fought bravely, collectively dragging a mackie to the ground before salvos of lead separated them from their electric intestines.

  Throughout the slaughter I occasionally glanced at Londa, who seemed proud that her troupers were displaying such fortitude in the face of the mackie host. Even before the butchery ended, I realized that while she still detested the primal Ronald Reagan, the original Warren Anderson, and all their Phyllistine kind, their repentant reincarnations had emerged in her eyes as brave and even noble beings. As we slipped into the Circus, Londa looked over her shoulder, anxious to glimpse her slain creations before their bodies turned to ash.

  MANY ARE THE CONDITIONS under which a man might relish intimate confinement with a comely heterosexual woman and her polymorphous-perverse sister, but I soon realized that my interval in the subterranean ontogenerator would not be one of them. Londa and Yolly hated our situation no less than I. True, they were accustomed to these sweltering diving bells, not so much from their prenatal immersions as from the deliberate descent they’d made with Donya in Torre de la Carne several months after their mother’s funeral, an episode they now proceeded to relate in detail, describing how it had reinforced their sisterly bonds even as it enabled them to absolve Edwina of her sins. Nothing in their previous experience, however, had prepared them for this premature burial with its benumbing boredom, unrelieved claustrophobia, and relentless requirement that we twist ourselves into poses suggesting some sadistic school of yoga.

  But for our battery-operated fan—its feeble plastic vanes plying the glutinous atmosphere like spatulas stirring mud, replenishing the vat’s stale air via the vent in the hatch—we might very well have suffocated. Hour after hour we sat on our haunches, simmering like meatballs in a Crock-Pot as the bellowing flames consumed the city. Yolly tried contacting Jordan again, hoping her guardian might use cell-phone technology to send some soothing music our way. The connection failed. Even as it saved our skins, the titanium chamber blocked all communication with the outside world.

  We slaked our thirst courtesy of the Gatorade, assuaged our hunger with the cereal bars, and preserved our sanity by telling stories. For my own contribution to this oral anthology, I drew upon Edmund Spenser’s epic, recounting the Red Cross Knight’s three-day battle with the great dragon, scourge of Faerie Land. When Londa’s turn came, she enumerated the misdeeds of those Phyllistines she’d been intending to put in the Circus: Ethan Pepperhill, of course, as well as Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milošević, and Joseph Stalin, assuming the necessary grave-robbing arrangements could be made. Our stellar performer, predictably, was Yolly, who told us the plot of her evolving fantasy novel. Set in Ondoluria, a feudal world where books were living creatures, The Citadel of Paradox concerned a band of adventurers—three men and four women, ever eager to enter into carnal configurations with one another—who’d undertaken a long, perilous, continent-spanning quest to heal the sole and sickly copy of the Epistemologia, a protoplasmic encyclopedia containing the whole of human and divine knowledge.

  “So what do you think?” Yolly said upon finishing her presentation. “Am I on the right track?”

  “A very Yolly sort of epic,” Londa said approvingly, and indeed it was, full of horses and eros and the juices of life.

  “Maybe the quest should be part of a larger narrative,” I suggested. “Once your adventurers restore the book to health, they attempt to decipher it, and just when they’re about to give up, a cosmic Rosetta stone falls into their laps.”

  “I like that,” Yolly said.

  “What sort of knowledge does the book contain?” Londa asked. “The periodic table of the elements? Maxwell’s equations? The Beatitudes?”

  “All of the above, I should imagine,” Yolly said, stroking the green satchel. “Not to mention a cure for ovarian cancer and a map disclosing the whereabouts of every sexual slaver in the galaxy.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY, we decided to take the risk and test the air beyond the ontogenerator. The instant we popped the hatch, an agile breeze wafted into the vat, cooling our cheeks and brows. A gust from the gods, I decided—a breath from noble Horus, a laugh from wise Thoth. The inferno, it seemed, had burned itself out.

  We ascended to street level, reveling in our newly acquired femurs and knees, and exited the rotunda. Yolly called Jordan on the cell phone, telling her to jump into the van and drive like a maniac. Before us lay a lunar plain, bleak, shattered, sterile. Emerging from our titanium womb, we had entered a void. We had been born into death. The fire had gutted the buildings, blasted the trees, and turned the gasoline trucks into amorphous lumps of metal. Galaxies of particulate matter swarmed and swirled everywhere, their motes dancing like cathode-ray static. An unnamable sensation screwed through my nasal passages, a stench compounded of evil resins, depraved plastics, and satanic polymers.

  Like survivors shambling away from a crashed jetliner, we stepped uncertainly across the Circus plaza, moving past the charred bodies of the zombie troupers. Poor Joan of Orléans—twice born, twice burned. We headed down Boudicca Street, Londa hunched protectively over the Kevlar satchel like a mother shielding her infant from a rainstorm. Caedmon Hall, Arcadia House, the Vision Syndicate, the Artemis Clinic, the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations: all had been reduced to naked matrices of blackened beams and melted girders. Combers of ash rolled across the scorched terrain in a vast, unnavigable sea. Parts of the city were still cooking, wisps of smoke rising from the carbonized timbers as the crackling embers issued a disquieting cadence.

  Gradually we became aware of the immaculoids, most of them now corpses, having variously succumbed to asphyxiation, dehydration, and the defects bequeathed them by incompetent CHALICE technicians. Of the remaining mackies, barely fifty were yet standing, wandering amid the cinders like extras in a cinematic collaboration between George Romero and Martin Heidegger, Dasein of the Dead. The other survivors floated upon the ocean of ash, gagging and thrashing as t
he gray waves sucked them down.

  In time our fitful journey brought us to Alethia Square. Themis had fallen, her bronze knees turned to butter by the heat. The blindfolded goddess lay supine in the courtyard, scales at her side, staring at the winter sky. Curious, I touched her sword, still warm, whereupon a series of short, sharp reports reached my ears—pop, pop, pop, pop.

  At first I thought it was an automobile backfiring—could Jordan be here already?—or perhaps a metallic echo caused by the cooling of Themis’s hollow innards. Then I glanced at Yolly. For an instant she simply stood there, jerking like a gaffed fish. A sound of primal dismay, more animal than human, broke from Londa’s throat. Yolly pitched forward and collapsed on the flagstones beside the statue’s massive head.

  I spun, glancing in all directions. No sniper caught my eye. I saw only the granular air. Londa tossed the satchel aside, sprinted to the statue, and, falling to her knees, cradled her spasming sister.

  “Get it out!” Yolly cried.

  Lurching forward, I melded with the pietà. Just below Yolly’s left shoulder, a ragged wound blossomed like a carnation, petals of blood spreading outward from the axis. Her complexion grew white as alabaster. She pressed her spine against Themis’s cheek and shivered.

  “Jordan’s coming!” I insisted, squeezing Yolly’s hand. “We’re taking you to the hospital!”—the very words I’d spoken to my netherson five days earlier.

  “It burns!” Blood dribbled from Yolly’s mouth like the effluence of a punctured scream. “Get it out!”

  “We’ll get it out!” Londa shouted.

  “It burns!”

  Yolly’s fingers turned to ice. Her eyes rolled upward as if to scan the inside of her skull.

  Fetal snorts filled the air. Pivoting away from Yolly’s dead and grimacing face, I glanced once again across the square. Smoke pouring from the muzzle of his assault rifle, General John Snow 4099 came gimping down Shambhala Avenue, the last of the immaculoids, manifestly pleased that he’d recognized us beneath our disintegrating disguises. I estimated I had fifteen seconds to live. No philosophical truths flitted through my brain. I did not learn the veracity or falsity of Platonic idealism. I did not see God. I merely let out a yelp of despair and vomited onto the flagstones.