The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “That’s Joan of Arc’s line.”

  “Written by Londa Sabacthani.”

  “Your nectar’s cooled off by now. Try some. You’ll feel much better.”

  I took a protracted swallow. “Shall I tell you the truth? For a minute there, I imagined you wanted Captain Pittinger to marry us.”

  The perplexity that came to Londa’s face was even deeper than before, as if the issue of my lips had changed from Chinese to bumblebees. She sipped some nectar, then marched to the writing desk: a typical piece of Redux furniture, so graceful it seemed intended solely for penning sestinas and would turn to sawdust the instant anybody used it for paying a bill. Sliding open the top drawer, she removed her fanciful account of her nonexistent preadolescence. “I saved only two mementos from Faustino—Coral Idolatry and this quaint and curious volume.” She deposited The Book of Londa in my hands, its brown leather binding scuffed like an old shoe. “I’ve been using it to scribble down anecdotes from my life. At some point in the story, fiction turns to fact. Note the most recent entry.”

  As the mumquat molecules navigated my bloodstream, I did as Londa instructed. The specified page contained a mere sixty words, rendered in a script so ragged I wondered if she’d composed it under Proserpine’s influence.

  Today my auxiliary conscience and I shared mugs of nectar in my office. We weren’t far into our conversation when he told me he fully supports the grand experiment in social justice now unfolding aboard the Redux. He even offered to sign this entry as a testament to his blessing, hence the “Mason Ambrose” at the bottom of the page.

  She reached into the drawer again and retrieved a fountain pen: a genuine Montblanc, quite possibly the only aristocratic gewgaw she’d allowed herself after stripping the suite of its elitism. “I need your blessing,” she said, pressing the pen into my palm. “It would make all the difference.”

  The nectar bathed my brain, bestowing a simulated serenity, but I was too distressed to enjoy it. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No,” I said, regarding the fancy pen as I would a rattlesnake.

  “Always the philosopher. Always the contrarian. Very well, Socrates—think it over. Think it over a whole fucking bunch. The evening’s young.”

  “I’ve already thought it over.”

  “All I want is your goddamn signature.”

  I threw the pen across the room.

  “I’m supposed to beg you—is that it?” she said.

  “No, you’re supposed to bring the ship about, steam back to Brigantine, and set the hostages free. If Donya were here, she’d tell you the same thing. Yolly, too. Even Edwina.”

  Londa’s eyes grew shadowed and narrow, like visor slots in a knight’s helmet. She gulped some nectar, snatched her journal away, and unleashed a diatribe of vast scope and epic sweep. Left to their own devices, she insisted, Ralph Gittikac and his compatriots would turn the planet into a toxic waste dump. If Enoch Anthem and his brethren retained their stranglehold on the zeitgeist, life would become even more wretched for those Americans who’d made the mistake of being born poor, unhealthy, gay, pigmented, or female. Once Pielmeister and his kind finished bringing Corporate Christi into being, a dark age would descend upon the human spirit, unredeemable by any imaginable renaissance.

  “I forget, Londa, what sorts of weapons did the disciples bring to the Sermon on the Mount? As I recall, Mark says Browning machine guns, but Matthew reports AK-47s.”

  “Don’t become my enemy, Mason. I have enemies enough.”

  In a quick, unbroken gesture, I tore the last page from The Book of Londa and jammed it into the flame beneath the samovar. Londa shuddered but did not move. I pulled my hand away and released the burning page. Buoyed by a draft, it turned into a lamina of ash, then floated to the floor and consumed itself.

  I said, “John writes that the Good Samaritan acquired his legendary benevolence only after Jesus handcuffed him to a fig tree under the scorching sun.”

  “Have it your own way. We won’t be lovers. We won’t be friends. We won’t be fellow warriors in the great crusade.”

  “In Luke’s version, however, the conversion takes a bit longer.”

  “Kindly leave my office before I count to ten. One…two…”

  I strode toward the door. “First Jesus locks the Samaritan in a dungeon for six months, then lays into him with a horsewhip.”

  “Three…four…”

  “Until finally the Samaritan becomes a man of compassion.”

  “Five…six…”

  I was gone before she got to seven.

  NOW THAT THE GREAT SCHISM had occurred, a rift as wrenching for me as it was doubtless inevitable from the plenary perspective enjoyed by Isis, Horus, Thoth, and the rest of my antique pantheon, I assumed that Londa would exact a swift revenge. I imagined her canceling my room-service privileges and requiring me to join the Phyllistines in waiting on our first-class passengers. And yet I retained my pampered status—though apparently Londa did tell the security force I was no longer to be trusted.

  “It’s none of my business, sir, but I gather that you and Dr. Sabacthani had quite a falling-out,” Lieutenant Kristowski said.

  “True,” I said.

  “What did you do to offend her?”

  “I quoted her to herself.”

  “I used to do that to my boyfriend,” Lieutenant Kristowski said. “It’s why we broke up. I’m sure Dr. Sabacthani doesn’t hate you. Do you hate her?”

  “No.”

  “If I had to take a guess, sir, I’d say you’re in love with her.”

  “That may be the case.”

  “You philosophers like to make things complicated, don’t you? If you ever need a break from your brain, drop by our shooting range on C deck. I’ll teach you how to fire a Galil.”

  Throughout the second week of the voyage, as the ship oscillated aimlessly between the thirty-third and thirty-fifth parallels, I undertook a kind of anthropological study, systematically analyzing the behaviors of victims and oppressors alike as they played out their parts within the privileged precincts of A and B decks. Besides the three dozen former third-class passengers, our local elite included nineteen stewards, twenty-one scullerymen, and—when they weren’t on duty shoveling coal in the boiler rooms—fifteen stokers. As far as I could tell, our entire population of parvenus had already gotten the hang of arrogance. Before making a particular demand, the first-class passenger usually invoked the captive plutocrat’s name: an easily obtained datum since, pursuant to a directive from Major Powers, the Phyllistines had all signed their pajama pockets with indelible Sharpie pens.

  “Albert, old sport, at four o’clock I shall require a repast of oysters and beer on the first-class promenade.”

  “Enoch, this martini glass appears to be empty, a situation I expect you to remedy without delay.”

  “Quentin, would you kindly visit the library and scare me up a Tom Clancy novel?”

  “Donald, be a dear and retrieve your wife’s cardigan from my stateroom.”

  “Felix, my man, it has come to our attention that fresh croissants are now available in the Café Parisien. Bring me a dozen in five minutes flat, and I’ll reward you with a lucre.”

  I wondered what a devout Fabian like George Bernard Shaw would have made of Londa’s deranged experiment in social engineering. He probably would not have approved. It was one thing to argue, per Pygmalion, that the class system was arbitrary and unnatural, quite another to demonstrate that, given the opportunity, the working poor of America, the United Kingdom, and Europe would happily turn themselves into callous egomaniacs every bit as tyrannical as Henry Higgins.

  Owing to both my personal investigations and my daily conversations with Marnie Kristowski, I had a pretty good idea what was happening in the Phyllistines’ heads. As in their previous lives, the subject of money rarely left their thoughts, but the focus of the obsession had changed, from piling up mountains of wealth to figuring out whether they
had enough ready cash to buy toothpaste from the pharmacy and toilet paper from the commissary. For the brute truth was that five lucres a day—thirty-five lucres a week—did not go very far aboard the Redux. In accordance with Londa’s latest fiat, a loaf of bread now cost thirty lucres, a quart of milk forty, and a box of raisins eighty. I shuddered to imagine the consequences if she ever repealed universal health insurance. No doubt she would start charging the same outrageous prices as the druggist in a certain famous moral dilemma.

  It was alternately painful and amusing to watch our hostages laboring in the Grand Saloon and its adjacent kitchen, where their duties included arranging the place settings, taking the orders, serving the food, busing the tables, and doing the dishes. Our first-class passengers showed their inferiors no mercy. They addressed the plutocrats as “garçon” and “Jeeves,” required them to memorize long wine lists, sent back half the entrées, and left worthless tips in the form of dollars, pounds, and euros. At the end of each meal, the more spiteful parvenus heated their plates over the dinner candles, thus guaranteeing that the Phyllistines would have to spend hours scraping away baked-in bits of poached salmon and encrusted morsels of kidney pie.

  When it came to maintaining their staterooms, our first-class passengers held their servants to the highest standards. Every day, whether the task needed doing or not, the plutocrat responsible for a given suite was expected to vacuum the carpet, dust the furniture, disinfect the toilet, launder the linen, wash the portholes, clean the curtains, make the beds, and, after stripping the wardrobe of its jackets and pants—most of which had once belonged to the plutocrats themselves—brush each garment with a lint remover. Our parvenus soon became sticklers for detail, and God help the G-deck passenger who neglected to turn down the sheets or leave a chocolate on the pillow.

  Londa took particular delight in publicizing the astonishing monetary harvest the Phyllistines had been reaping prior to their departure from Southampton. Third-class passenger Gary Pons, the whiz kid behind the Macro-Mart phenomenon, pulled down a cool five million a year, more than three hundred times the take-home pay of his average employee. Sheila Portman, CEO of several fast-food empires, enjoyed an annual salary equal to two hundred times the income of anyone who scrubbed the floors of her Grab-a-Crab restaurants. Morris Hampton, owner of the supernaturally profitable Prester Pharmaceutical Laboratory, had in recent years accumulated sufficient wealth to purchase private yachts for all four of his ne’er-do-well brothers.

  “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, since he’s a physically diminutive chap,” Londa said, wrapping up an especially caustic installment of The Last Shall Be First, “but it turns out that Frank Diffring, the guiding light behind Blue Château hotels, is nine hundred times worthier than the women he hires to change the bedding in those exemplary inns.”

  Thirty-five lucres a week—and if that wasn’t pathetic enough, Londa soon arranged for inflation to plague our unhappy community, so that the plutocrats’ newfound ability to budget judiciously for toothpaste and toilet paper suddenly stopped mattering. Now the big challenge was to get through the day on your meager allotment of plain tofu and rice, supplementing these rations with string beans gleaned from the Grand Saloon floor, bread crumbs scavenged from the parvenus’ plates, and apple cores retrieved from the garbage pails. In short, a low-grade famine had come to the Redux, the second horseman of Londa’s aquatic apocalypse, though whether that wasted rider would trample the Phyllistines or reunite them with their souls, I could not begin to say.

  LIKE MANY BRILLIANT PHILOSOPHERS—and, closer to home, like many middling philosophers who never managed to get their Ph.D.s—I’ve always been susceptible to insomnia. Throughout the voyage of the Redux, this condition visited me with alarming frequency. Typically I would awaken at 5:00 A.M. and, knowing that my restlessness was certain to persist, make my way to the weather deck. For the next ninety minutes, I would pace in circles around the foremast, head tilted back, meditating on Orion, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, that whole glowing host. I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution. At length the constellations would fade, and I would greet the rising sun with an awe verging on adoration—I was no longer Sinuhe just then but another character from The Egyptian, the monotheistic pharaoh Amenhotep IV, prostrating himself before a graven image of his divine and shining Aton—after which a delicious drowsiness overcame me, and I would return to my cabin for a long nap before Londa’s usual nine o’clock broadcast roused me from my dreams.

  On the morning of my thirtieth day aboard the Redux, my post-devotional sleep was terminated by an especially distressing episode of The Last Shall Be First. Londa began by expressing her “profound disappointment” in the hostages’ performance to date. Her office had received myriad complaints: spots on the crystal, stains on the tablecloths, socks inadequately mended, shoes not sufficiently shined, toilets neither spick nor span. But incompetence was not the primary reason that fifty percent of our G-deck passengers were about to lose their jobs. Sheer economic necessity had proved the deciding factor. The fewer superfluous workers we employed in servicing the staterooms and the Grand Saloon, the more likely the voyage was to turn a profit.

  “Downsizing is an imperative with which certain of my listeners are well acquainted—especially you, Corbin Thorndike, president of Aries Athletic Wear, and you, Barry Nelligan, founder of Beyond Style, and you, Wilbur Conant, CEO of Ultra Office, and you, Alexander Lerner, board chairman of General Heuristics. In your former careers as corporate heads, you collectively outsourced two hundred and thirty-four thousand manufacturing jobs to atrociously run factories in Asia and Latin America. But hear me now, masters of the universe. The Redux is a generous ship. Of the one hundred G-deck residents we’re about to drop from the payroll, none will become destitute, for in our compassion we’ve decided to retire all our stokers and offer you their jobs at four lucres a day. True, the boiler rooms are an austere environment—quite similar, in fact, to the sweatshops that figure so crucially in your corporations’ prosperity: long hours, foul air, hazardous working conditions, infrequent bathroom breaks. The temperature is one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. But at least you’ll be gainfully employed.”

  She went on to assure our former third-class passengers that those plutocrats not assigned to the boiler rooms would start working double shifts. To wit, the parvenus needn’t fear a decline in the stateroom service, and the Grand Saloon would remain a place where one might enjoy a gracious dining experience along with the collateral satisfactions of treating the staff like dirt.

  “For many of you, I imagine, the thought of your imminent demotion is distressing,” Londa said. “But here’s a late-breaking story to cheer you. Despite frenzied efforts by well-funded lobbyists, we shall continue to bless all G-deck residents with free health insurance. In other words, your pill bottles will remain full, and should you perchance fall sick, the Redux will cover your medical bills.”

  The new economic order was in place barely a week when a combination of curiosity and boredom persuaded me to venture into the bowels of the ship and observe the situation in the boiler rooms. My Virgil for this Dantean descent was Lieutenant Kristowski, who gladly accepted my offer to assist in her daily task of bringing tepid water to the patrician stokers, along with cold beer for their guardian Valkyries. Prior to our departure, we loaded our backpacks with plastic pints of Poland Spring and crammed twelve thermoses of Tadcaster ale into a canvas duffel bag. We shouldered the water and set off, the bag swinging between us like a hammock as we clambered down a series of aft companionways reminiscent of a fire escape, though in this case we were seeking, not fleeing, an inferno. Throughout our journey we discussed that most fascinating and confounding of topics, Londa Sabacthani. In a tone more equivocal than she probably intended, Lieutenant Kristowski announced that she’d decided to give her employer the benefit of the
doubt concerning the boiler-room scheme, and I replied that thus far I could discern no doubt on which to predicate a benefit.

  As we reached the lowest deck, a stifling gust of heat blew toward us, and our conversation tapered into silence, as if the blistering air had melted our words away. A huge iron slab, embroidered with rivets, blocked our progress. The presiding sentry, a statuesque Valkyrie sergeant whose name patch read SKEGGS, thanked us so extravagantly for her gift thermos that if a video camera had caught her reaction, the result would’ve been a singularly persuasive commercial for Tadcaster ale.

  “It’s a real honor having you visit us, Mr. Ambrose,” said Sergeant Skeggs, draining the thermos. “May I ask you a question? My boyfriend could use some ethical fine-tuning himself, so I’m wondering—how did you make Dr. Sabacthani the way she is?”

  “Londa was a blank slate when she became my student,” I said. “I doubt that her story is relevant to your problem.”

  “You don’t know Douglas.”

  “He’s not a tabula rasa—I can tell you that.”

  “Maybe,” said Sergeant Skeggs. “In any case, what did you do?”

  “We started with role-playing exercises,” I said. “Get your search engine to track down ‘Lawrence Kohlberg’ and ‘moral dilemmas.’ K-o-h-l-b-e-r-g.”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Eventually we did Jesus. Be careful with the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not for amateurs.”

  “I hear you. Thanks. It all sounds a lot easier than hijacking a fucking ocean liner.”

  The guard threw a switch on the wall, whereupon the watertight door screeched and squealed its way upward like a portcullis. Lieutenant Kristowski and I crossed the threshold. Swathed in swirling tendrils of sallow steam, eight enormous horizontal cylinders dominated boiler room 1, each demanding ceaseless attention from a team of Phyllistines, the first member responsible for opening the furnace door and feeding the fire with shovelfuls of coal, the second for stirring the burning fuel with an iron lance inserted through the stokehole, the third for keeping the adjacent bin filled with wheelbarrow loads of anthracite drawn from a communal heap. The spectacle transfixed me. For a full minute, I simply stood and stared, my eyes dazzled by the glare, my ears throbbing with the roar of the furnaces, the billows of horrific scarlet heat casting my mind back to Themisopolis’s fiery demise. Now the lieutenant and I started working the room, moving among the stokers like a couple of minor-league angels ministering to Ben-Hur and his fellow galley slaves. My first customer was chubby Wilbur Conant—so read the name on his sweat-soaked pajama top—his soft features and stern expression suggesting a teddy bear who’d gotten in touch with his dark side. Upon receiving his pint, the CEO of Ultra Office set down his shovel, removed the cap with a single twist of the wrist, and consumed the entire portion in a prolonged gulp.