The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve bought the Titanic Redux, and you and Dagmar plan to spend the summer cruising from port to port, living like royalty.”

  “We haven’t bought her,” Londa explained. “We’ve hijacked her.”

  “Hijacked her? No, Londa, no! Bad idea!”

  “Even as we speak,” Dagmar said, “Colonel Fox’s commandos are parading around the decks, keeping everybody in line.”

  “This is madness!”

  “True, but it’s a very efficient madness,” Londa said. “In a single toss of the net, we caught three hundred of America’s top Phyllistines, all ripe for enlightenment. Enoch Anthem is part of the haul, and your old nemesis Felix Pielmeister.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this!”

  “God knows I wanted to discuss the project with you ahead of time, but you’d disappeared down your spider-hole,” Londa said. “Try withholding your judgment till you’ve grasped the broader picture.”

  “Screw the broader picture! We’re going to have that ethics tutorial, and we’re going to have it right now!”

  “Shut up, Mason!” Dagmar screamed. “You’re making me nervous! Can’t you see I’m trying to fly a goddamn helicopter?”

  At noon we sighted the Titanic Redux, her stem cutting a great billowing furrow in the endless blue field. With the sun almost directly overhead, I couldn’t be certain of her bearing, but a glance at the chopper’s compass confirmed my intuition that, although we were still flying east, the ship was now on an aberrant course, south by southwest. I decided to forgo the ethics tutorial, demanding instead that Londa answer two questions. Why wasn’t the sea swarming with Coast Guard cutters, and why wasn’t the sky dark with CNN helicopters?

  By way of a reply, she produced from her shoulder bag an object suggesting a DVD remote control, its numbered keys encircling a small red button, ominous as a smallpox pustule. Thanks to the Valkyries’ derring-do, she explained, the Titanic’s largest forward hold was filled with plastic explosives of her own design.

  “A momentous instrument, wouldn’t you agree?” she said. “A Godgadget if ever there was one. Colonel Fox and her Valkyries have eight more just like it. The outside world is appropriately impressed. The instant the Coast Guard or a SWAT team or a news organization appears on the scene—ka-boom, the Ship of Dreams gets blown to kingdom come.”

  “Fuck this!” I shouted, a hundred times more furious than when I learned she’d burned her palm in homage to Stoicism. “You’d kill all those Phyllistines, not to mention the other passengers, the officers, the crew, the Valkyries, Dagmar, yourself, and me?”

  “Of course not,” Londa replied. “First we’ll evacuate the innocent, and then we’ll blow up the ship. That’s the whole point of a radio-controlled detonator.” She stroked the metallic casing of her Godgadget. “Now, there’s always a possibility, and I mean a distinct possibility, that this thing is a fake, no more lethal than a water pistol.”

  Her cryptic disavowal soothed me. Not much, but a little. “I want the truth,” I told her. “Is that thing wired to the detonator or not?”

  “Sorry, Mason, my lips are sealed—the only way I can keep your lips sealed, too.”

  “Until I have more data,” I said, “I’ll assume the best of you.”

  “You’re a peach, Socrates. Believe me, we’ll do that ethics tutorial at my earliest convenience.”

  Now the mighty vessel loomed up, her magnificence multiplying with each passing instant, she of the noble prow, majestic decks, soaring masts, and raked funnels exhaling cottony puffs of smoke. A seagoing skyscraper, tilted ninety degrees, plying the waves under full steam. Londa grabbed the radio mike and contacted the bridge, instructing the skipper to hold steady. The man’s reply reverberated through the Plexiglas blister. In a tone wavering between defiance and bewilderment, Captain Drew Pittinger said that, while he would do as instructed, he was still master of Titanic Redux.

  “You are indeed her master,” Londa replied. “And I am her queen.”

  For a full minute, we followed the frothy wake, and then Dagmar increased our speed and circled the stern mast. Anticipating our descent, the assembled voyagers—sunbathers, fishermen, noonday strollers—dispersed in all directions. We dropped from the sky like a slain duck. The poop deck made a perfect helipad.

  As Dagmar shut off the engine, Londa explained that the people we’d just sent scurrying inhabited the plebeian confines of F and G decks. On the Titanic Redux, as on her ill-starred predecessor, social stratification was the norm. At the moment, these third-class passengers were more likely to receive engraved invitations to the White House than admittance to the boat-deck promenade.

  “But all that’s about to change,” Londa insisted. “By the time the sun rises tomorrow, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, just like in heaven.”

  Chapter 14

  GO AHEAD, ADOPT AN APE, it sounds like fun, a chimpanzee or maybe even an orangutan, but be prepared to justify your decision when he eats your neighbor’s begonias. By all means, have a baby, you deserve a descendant, but stand ready to defend your parenting skills when he grows up to become a serial killer. Mais oui, acquire a belief in God, theism is a popular and comforting lifestyle, but first do your homework, learning how the world’s great minds have explained the Creator’s seeming indifference to human suffering, lest you waste your time fretting about tsunamis and cystic fibrosis.

  How might I rationalize my initial acquiescence to Operation Pineal Gland? Why did I make no immediate effort to thwart this frankly criminal escapade? In retrospect, I realize that my infatuation with Londa kept me from seeing that her scheme was irredeemable. Then, too, I must confess that my contempt for Ralph Gittikac and his fellow Phyllistines made me believe that at some level they deserved whatever they got. Eventually I started thinking like a moral philosopher again, but throughout my first day aboard the Titanic Redux, I was in thrall to a mixture of love and disgust, that poisonous compound with which the devil’s apothecary is always so well stocked.

  No sooner had I retrieved my suitcase and stepped free of the helicopter than Colonel Fox came striding across the poop deck. She acknowledged her leader with a crisp salute, her leader’s manager with a respectful nod, and her leader’s conscience with a bruising scowl. Obviously she’d not forgiven me for convincing her boss to abandon Themisopolis to the mackies. Londa returned the salute, then hustled me through the nearest hatchway, explaining that I could best serve the cause of justice by lying low for the next twenty-four hours. I replied that the cause of justice and Operation Pineal Gland were evidently two different things, but before I could elaborate, a sprightly, apple-cheeked lieutenant appeared, outfitted in the standard Valkyrie black leather jacket, an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, and introduced herself as Marnie Kristowski, “your faithful aide-de-camp,” though my instincts told me she was expected to function more as my custodian. Londa promptly fobbed me off on this vivacious daughter of Odin, asserting that “the Redux hijacking will in time make complete sense to the entire world, you included, Socrates,” then turned abruptly and headed back to the poop deck.

  “Been a security officer long?” I asked Lieutenant Kristowski as she grabbed my suitcase and directed me toward the companionway.

  “Barely a month, sir. I was one of those kids who grew up reading League of Londa comics. Did you know you’re in number forty-six?”

  What a ghastly thought. “No kidding.”

  “It’s not literally you, but you were clearly the inspiration. Dr. Sabacthani goes back to her birthplace, somewhere in Indonesia, and meets Masai Ambooloy, the kung fu alchemist-philosopher who taught her the way of the Splanx.”

  “The Splanx?”

  “An occult mental discipline. The Splanxist can send out psychic waves that scramble her enemies’ brains. Masai Ambooloy, Mason Ambrose—get it?”

  “Number forty-six? I’ll have to track it down.”

  “My all-time favorite is the lead s
tory in issue thirty-two. A gang of South American drug lords has imprisoned Dr. Sabacthani in a concentration camp, so the Valkyries engineer a flock of giant condors and ride them to the rescue. Those condors are probably the main reason I’m wearing this uniform.”

  We descended to D deck and entered a commodious second-class cabin that, though lacking a porthole, was chockablock with other amenities: a private bath, a writing desk, a refrigerator, a room-service intercom, and—in a break with the period purism that characterized the Redux—a home entertainment center crammed with classical CDs, including, appropriately enough, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung with its stirring “Ride of the Valkyries.” The kitchen staff knew of my special status, Lieutenant Kristowski explained, so whenever I felt hungry, I should simply get on the horn and order any menu items that tickled my fancy.

  She saluted and slipped away, leaving me to spend the next fourteen hours under idyllic circumstances. In the refrigerator lay two dozen cans of Guinness, moist black cylinders of civilization. The bookshelves held a fiction collection ranging from J. R. R. Tolkien’s melancholy optimism to Ernest Hemingway’s bracing fatalism, the reading chair was a foam rubber throne, and the D-deck stewards delivered broiled lobster tails to my door as casually as a mailman bringing the day’s credit-card offers. Even the bed was luxurious—down blankets, silk sheets, satin pillows—though not quite luxurious enough, I soon learned, to quiet my mind and calm my nerves. Londa has not gone insane, I told myself as I thrashed around on the mattress. In time her capsized soul will right itself, and she will be restored to me. But still I could not sleep.

  CONTEMPLATING OPERATION Pineal Gland through the pellucid lens of hindsight, I realize that it comprised a dozen distinct though interconnected strategies, one of which continues to elicit my awe. I speak of Londa’s decision to have Colonel Fox and her thirty bravest soldiers purchase second-class tickets on the maiden voyage of the Titanic Redux. Shortly after coming aboard in Cherbourg, these stalwart commandos had pooled the contents of their steamer trunks, each jammed with ostensibly innocuous materials that, cleverly combined, became a panopoly of automatic weapons and explosive devices. The Uzis and the AK-47s proved every bit as philosophically persuasive as Londa and Colonel Fox had hoped—the famous argument from imminent oblivion—and the Valkyries had little difficulty filling forehold number 3 with plastique, winning the crew’s allegiance, convincing the service personnel to join the insurrection, and coercing Captain Pittinger into informing the outside world that any attempt to foil the hijacking would trigger a horrendous but not unprecedented maritime catastrophe. The coup de grâce had occurred twelve hours before our helicopter landed on the poop deck. With wry smiles on their lips and taut fingers on their triggers, Colonel Fox’s commandos had rounded up all the first-class passengers and ordered them to hunker down in their staterooms until further notice.

  Indulging in her affection for the theatrical, Londa waited until exactly 12:18 A.M. before addressing our captive Phyllistines, for that was when the first-class passengers aboard the original Titanic had been roused from their quarters on April 15, 1912. She even insisted that the hostages dress exactly as had their twentieth-century counterparts, in pajamas and life jackets. Although the majority of her audience—an elite group of two hundred and twenty-five corporation presidents, congressmen, lawyers, judges, arms merchants, government advisers, and political operatives—was predictably male, our catch also included three female CEOs and a woman lobbyist for the petroleum industry. Using their rifle butts like cattle prods, the Valkyries herded their prisoners down the C-deck passageways and into the reception room outside the Grand Dining Saloon, leaving the Phyllistines’ ancillary spouses and children to brood and fidget in their cabins. Dressed in a glossy black microfiber suit, Londa strode past the murmuring crowd with a stateliness appropriate to her status as queen of the ship. Her decision to include her conscience was evidently an afterthought—my invitation had arrived at the stroke of midnight, delivered in person by Lieutenant Kristowski—yet she seemed pleased to have me by her side, and as we ascended the great marble staircase, she squeezed my hand and whispered, “‘She seeks a mortal who will love her, betroth her, and lavish his body upon her….’”

  Colonel Fox and Major Powers awaited us on the first landing. The Valkyries exchanged conspiratorial nods with Londa, who then faced the highborn mob like Marc Antony preparing to turn Rome’s citizens against Caesar’s assassins.

  “Masters of the universe!” she shouted over the hubbub. “Mistresses of creation! Your attention, please! I have astonishing news!”

  The multimillionaires ceased their disgruntled muttering and grew provisionally quiet.

  “My name is Londa Sabacthani, and I’m here to inform you that, like her legendary ancestor, the Titanic Redux has struck an iceberg.”

  Instantly the muttering resumed, though now in a register of outrage. Ralph Gittikac stood up straight, dropped his Hapsburg jaw, and shouted, “I know who you are, but do you know who I am? You’re talking to Ralph Winston Gittikac, CEO of Gittikac’s Getaway Adventures and director of Project Titanic Ascendant, and when this ridiculous caper is over, I’m going to jam your sorry ass in jail!”

  Apparently Gittikac didn’t recall meeting the adolescent Londa twelve years earlier in the Bahía de Flores, and I figured she had no particular reason to remind him of the encounter.

  “Where’s Captain Pittinger?” demanded a lithe Phyllistine whose matinee-idol features were probably not unrelated to his personal fortune. “What’ve you done with him?”

  “Are you aware that I’m a United States senator?” snarled a ruddy man wearing a silk bathrobe over his pajamas. “Have you any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

  “Let’s get something straight!” Colonel Fox snapped, lifting her Uzi high above her head in a pose suggesting the Statue of Liberty’s glamorous young anarchist sister. Her fellow Valkyries likewise brandished their weapons. “There are worse things than listening respectfully to Dr. Sabacthani, like getting blown into such tiny pieces the sharks will use you for spare change, which is exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t shut the fuck up!”

  Silence enshrouded the reception room like snow blanketing a meadow. Surveying the chastened plutocrats, I traded stares of reciprocal contempt with Felix Pielmeister, who appeared dignified despite his pajamas and life jacket, and glances of mutual recognition with Ralph Gittikac, who would have looked like a humorless boor even in a Brooks Brothers suit.

  “As I was saying, the Redux has struck an iceberg,” Londa continued. “Not an ordinary iceberg, but a malignant mass composed of your own frigid vanity and frozen gall.”

  The crowd indulged in snorts and huffs but stayed on the circumspect side of articulation.

  “That’s the bad news,” Londa continued. “The good news is that the ship will not founder. As your damaged souls begin to mend, the gash in our hull will heal as well. In short, masters of the universe, think of us not as your captors but as your teachers.”

  Jowls flapping, nostrils flaring, Enoch Anthem stepped free of the mob and, folding his arms across his barrel chest, addressed Londa in a bravely stentorian voice. “Teachers?! Teachers?! What you are is a bunch of sicko lesbian pirates, and I hope I’m there to see the fireworks when Jesus gets his hands on you!”

  Colonel Fox responded to Anthem’s outburst by aiming her rifle vertically and squeezing off a round. Squalls of plaster sifted down from the shattered ceiling. A dozen arms reached out and pulled Anthem back into the collective Phyllistine body.

  “Allow me to introduce your other benefactors.” Londa leaned toward me and, in a gesture more condescending than affectionate, tweaked my cheek. “This is Mr. Ambrose, my ethical adviser. The woman who fired at the ceiling is Colonel Fox, our chief of security. Beside her stands Major Powers, second in command.” Beaming a smile that would have looked equally at home on Anthem’s sanctimonious face, she abruptly pulled the Godgadget from her jacket. “Yes, mast
ers of the universe, the rumors are true. Our hold is packed with explosives, a fact that has so far kept your would-be liberators at bay. Make no mistake. The instant we get word that a Coast Guard cutter or a SWAT team helicopter is chasing us, we’ll lock you up, flee in the lifeboats, and detonate the plastique.” She extended her index finger and allowed it to hover menacingly near the red button. The plutocrats engaged in a synchronous cringe. “Even as I speak, many of you are imagining you might pave the way for a rescue operation by wresting the transmitter from me. Such a gesture would be futile—am I right, Colonel Fox? Major Powers?”

  The officers flashed their Godgadgets, holding them up like scalpers hawking Super Bowl tickets. “Three of our subordinates have transmitters as well,” Colonel Fox said, “and there are three more hidden around the ship.”

  “But for now let’s drop this depressing talk of bombs and address a happier topic, your imminent ethical growth,” Londa said, repocketing her transmitter. “At dawn we reach our first port of call, Brigantine, New Jersey, where we shall unburden ourselves of your spouses, your children, and our second-class passengers. After the evacuation, you and the third-class passengers will trade places, the latter taking over your staterooms while you all move into the spartan cabins on G deck. It occurs to me that the mere experience of living so close to the waterline might effect your cure. What do you think, Colonel?”

  “I’ve never seen a smarter gaggle of capitalists,” Vetruvia Fox said. “Unless I miss my guess, they’re about to become the most progressive plutocrats in Christendom.”

  “And you, Major?” Londa asked.

  “We’ve caught ourselves some real sharp cookies, and that’s the truth,” Carmen Powers said. “When I think of how deeply they comprehend the stock market, I know they’ll have no trouble with the Beatitudes.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Ambrose, do you share the prevailing optimism?” Londa asked me.