The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “Hold me,” she said.

  Obligation. Mine was entirely clear, and now I proceeded to enact it, bestowing what comforts I could as the Dasein leaked out of her. I wrapped my arms around her torso, easing her face against my chest.

  “Are you holding me? I can’t tell. I’m numb as a brick.”

  “I’m holding you.”

  “I love you, Mason Ambrose. Make sure Donya finds out about this place. I can picture her standing on the shore, befriending the Red Witch, telling her what to do. ‘The next time any Phyllistines come sailing by here, counting their gold and spilling their garbage, how about casting a spell on them?’”

  She twitched and trembled in my embrace. “I’m holding you,” I said again.

  “‘Borrow a trick from your sister Circe. Turn the Phyllistines to swine.’”

  “I love you.”

  “Killed by a Spanish sword. That almost happened to Don Quixote. Lots of times. But he always walked away. He got to die in bed.”

  “I love you, Londa Sabacthani.”

  He got to die in bed. Her last words. A few seconds of soft gurgling, and then she grew utterly silent, and her quivering ceased. But of course this was still Mr. Darwin’s planet. In the midst of death, we were in life. Macaws screeched. Howler monkeys cried. A pelican flapped across the sky and landed atop the witch. And now came a fiddler crab, pressing against my heel as if it were the portal to some crustacean heaven, an empyrean to which he might gain admittance by rattling the gates with all his invertebrate resolve.

  FOR AN INDETERMINATE INTERVAL I hugged her vacant frame, the tears falling from my cheeks and giving their substance to the tide pool. Water to water, salt to salt. Human tears, that unique precipitation, their salinity looming large among those facts suggesting that we terrestrials once belonged to the sea.

  When at last my weeping ran its course, I took hold of her body—she was horribly cold but still supple—and carried her beyond the reach of the tide. I set her prone on the white sand, carefully arranging her head and limbs in the posture of one asleep, then entered the forest and harvested a dozen fronds. They covered her completely, head to toe, a green shroud for my beloved.

  I returned to the jungle, soon picking up the trail to the Bahía de Flores, in thrall now to a different obligation, political and perhaps even apocalyptic. Throughout my hike I kept an eye peeled for the Wild Woman, but I didn’t expect to see her. Most likely she’d gone into hiding—perhaps in the mansion, perhaps in her cottage—or else she’d left the island entirely and was now headed to Key West in Captain López’s cabin cruiser.

  Reaching the water, I broke into a jog, following the horseshoe curve of the beach. My obligation assailed me, falling from the sky, bursting from the jungle. I quickened my pace, soon arriving at the dock that Nick, the most ambitious of the primal Edwina’s imported adolescents, had built during Londa’s first summer on earth. Lashed to the piles were four decrepit vessels, a fleet that various Blood Island squatters and intruders had evidently collected over the years and then abandoned, including an ancient rowboat with two oars, a battered kayak and paddle, a swamped catamaran, and a dilapidated outrigger canoe. After studying each option and imagining the particular way it might fail me, I settled on the rowboat. I scrambled aboard, cast off, and pulled free of the dock, all the while keeping a wary eye on the keelson. The boat was leaking, but not disastrously. Unless I hit an iceberg, I would reach the Titanic Redux before dusk.

  Stroke by stroke, breath by breath, I made my way along the shoreline, carefully avoiding the surf on one side and the crimson reef on the other as I navigated the southern hump of Isla de Sangre. And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, you may be sure I felt a strong impulse to reverse course, make my way back to Faustino, enter the kitchen, and obtain the required implement. A paring knife would do, likewise a pizza cutter, corkscrew, or French peeler—and once I’d returned to her secret beach and snipped away some portion of Londa, a fleck of her splendid neck, perhaps, or a bit of perfect thumb, I would bear the specimen to Vincent Charnock in his hidden cove on the Intercoastal Waterway, and together we would visit the island and enter Torre de la Carne with blasphemous intent.

  But instead I stuck to my plan, rowing into the Bahía de Colón just as the setting sun was coronating the mangrove trees with a blazing scarlet aura. By the time I sighted the Redux, my whole body felt pummeled. From muscles I hadn’t even realized I owned came every variety of pain and protest. Glancing upward, I beheld a bizarre drama unfolding on the weather deck. Galil pressed against her shoulder, Lieutenant Kristowski was firing round after round at the gulls and vultures circling the corpses on the foremast. I couldn’t tell if she meant to kill the birds or merely scare them off, but in either case she evoked Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner carrying out his ill-conceived design against the albatross.

  “Ahoy, Lieutenant Kristowski! Ahoy! Ahoy!”

  She fired again, and this time her bullet found a gull. The feathery white corpse plummeted to the weather deck. Its fellow scavengers took note of the event and flapped away.

  “Lieutenant Kristowski!”

  She leaned over the rail and, assessing my predicament, began outfitting a davit with a breeches buoy. I lashed the rowboat to the anchor chain, climbed into the harness, and placed my fate in the lieutenant’s hands. Methodically she turned the crank, reeling me free of the rowboat and drawing me skyward like a ripe bouillababy rising from its enzyme bath.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked after I was safely on deck. “You’re covered with blood.”

  “It’s not mine. I must see Colonel Fox. Major Powers, too, and Dagmar Röhrig. There’s no gentle way to say this. Dr. Sabacthani is dead.”

  “Dead, sir? Jesus. Dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “How?”

  “Suicide. She stabbed herself.”

  “With a knife?”

  “A conquistador’s sword.”

  “Dead. That’s awful.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lieutenant Kristowski said.

  TWO HOURS LATER, having taken a shower and changed my clothes, I entered Londa’s denuded suite, slouched against the antique desk, and, gesticulating wildly, stammering like Demosthenes, repeated for Vetruvia Fox, Carmen Powers, and Dagmar Röhrig my various conversations with Edwina 0004. Her ontogenerated origins were not news to my listeners, as both Colonel Fox and Major Powers had attended her birth, firing up the machine on Londa’s instructions, then lowering the fetus into the maturation chamber. My narrative of their leader’s ultimate purpose in bringing forth the Wild Woman, by contrast, took all three hijackers by surprise. As the women fixed me with ever widening gazes, I revealed that Edwina 0004 was in essence the child of her creator’s death wish, that the murderous component of her DUNCE cap program had started functioning about ten hours earlier, and that Londa’s body now lay on an obscure Blood Island beach. I confessed that I could have saved her with a single glance and a six-word sentence but had instead allowed the Wild Woman to carry out the assassination.

  “What a horrible choice,” Colonel Fox said in a voice as flat as glass. I could not tell whether she meant to express sympathy for my plight or disgust with my decision.

  “Londa insisted that this new Edwina was merely her second conscience,” Major Powers said, “but we suspected there was more to the story.”

  “Something crazy and pathological and perverse,” Dagmar said. “Something quintessentially Londa.”

  I studied the weary hijackers, their moist eyes, trembling jaws, quivering lips, each face conveying its own distinctive mixture of anguish and relief. Not for an instant did they imagine that lynching Felix Pielmeister or Corbin Thorndike or Ralph Gittikac would bequeath the earth to the meek—and now, suddenly, here I was among them, revealing that Londa would never again demand such ferocity of her apostles. Even as they grieved, their gratitude washed over me like a wave of warm rococonut milk.

  Slowly, piece by piece,
the women constructed a plan. Its essence was capitulation. Its particulars included removing the corpses from the foremast, putting them on ice, convincing the enlisted Valkyries that surrender made sense, and telling the world that Operation PG had been terminated. But the first order of business, Colonel Fox insisted, was for Major Powers and Lieutenant Kristowski to retrieve Londa’s body, without which the FBI might never regard the case as closed. When the G-men arrived, Colonel Fox would explain that, tortured by guilt and unable to abide captivity, Londa had stabbed herself to death, a story that in its own way was absolutely true.

  “I’ve been honest with you,” I told the hijackers, “and now I’d like some candor in return.”

  I didn’t have to say another word. Moving synchronously, the women took out their Godgadgets and pushed the red buttons in tandem. I steeled myself. No detonation reached my ears. No blast wave shook the hull. The Redux remained at anchor in the tranquil bay.

  Major Powers pushed her button a second time. She merely wanted to emphasize the point, but I still flinched. “You see, Mason?” she said. “You were a better conscience than you knew. Londa wasn’t really putting us at risk—not through our Godgadgets anyway.”

  “Are the explosives themselves also a lie,” I asked, “or just the part about their being wired to the transmitters?”

  “Take a trip to forehold three,” Colonel Fox said. “You’ll find a long serpent of plastique weaving through the champagne cases and the sardine crates.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Londa liked to bluff, no doubt about it,” Dagmar said. “But she liked holding aces even more.”

  I SHALL NOT DWELL on the denouement of the Titanic Redux’s maiden voyage, a succession of episodes that found the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Expediency, galloping along her corridors and promenades. The television coverage was both exhaustive and exhausting, and most of the key events were later hashed over ad nauseam by Sabacthani obsessives everywhere. Read their books, visit their Web sites, and you’ll discover that when it comes to recounting the raw historical data, there’s a surprising harmony between the faction that holds Londa a latter-day Joan of Arc and those who believe that she and Judas Iscariot were separated at birth. The dissolution of Operation PG is open to myriad interpretations, but the facts themselves are not in dispute. How Vetruvia Fox broadcast a special edition of The Last Shall Be First disclosing that Dr. Sabacthani was dead and the Valkyries were hoisting the white flag. How the U.S. Coast Guard decided to believe Colonel Fox and forthwith dispatched a cutter to the Ship of Dreams, whereupon the cutter’s officers and crew purged forehold 3 of the plastique, collected the Valkyries’ weapons, and ferried the surviving Phyllistines to Miami along with Londa’s remains and the frozen bodies of Anthem and Thorndike. How the FBI, after accepting the Coast Guard’s assurances that the liner was no longer booby-trapped, landed a succession of helicopters on the poop deck, evacuating the entire Valkyrie brigade within an hour and flying them to a government detention facility in Fort Lauderdale. How the American system of jurisprudence placed the captured women on trial for hijacking, kidnapping, piracy, torture, and premeditated murder. How the Valkyries’ canny and, thanks to Donya’s donations, well-funded attorneys succeeded in casting Londa as the one true villain in the narrative, their clients as mere accessories, with the result that every Valkyrie was spared life imprisonment, receiving instead a sentence of ten to twenty years, a penalty that in most cases transmuted into less than five years behind bars followed by a laissez-faire probation. And, finally, how Ralph Gittikac, reviving his impudent project, sailed the Titanic Redux from Southampton to New York City without incident, so that his original quarry, “those imps, devils, and angels of catastrophe who haunted the North Atlantic on the fateful night of April fifteenth, 1912,” were finally vanquished.

  There is one occurrence, however, that you didn’t see on TV or read about in any Sabacthanite’s blog. I speak of the conversation I had with Felix Pielmeister shortly before he departed the Bahía de Colón for points north. Different ambitions had brought us to the weather deck. The postrationalist merely wanted to get the hell off the ship, the Coast Guard having told him and the other former hostages to gather around the foremast until the evacuation craft was ready to receive them. As for me, I simply needed to survey the rigging and tell myself, over and over, that ten more Phyllistines would have died on these shrouds if I’d terminated the Wild Woman’s mission.

  “It appears that your protégée didn’t sink the ship after all,” Pielmeister said. An ellipsis of white scars arced across his brow, a stark testament to his days down among the furnaces. “My powers of prediction failed me on that one, didn’t they?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Jesus was a poor prophet, too. He said his apostles would live to see the Kingdom come to earth. Matthew sixteen, verse twenty-eight. Mark nine, verse one.”

  A grin broke through Pielmeister’s scraggly beard. “You atheists are such fundamentalists, always quoting Scripture. May I ask you a question?”

  “As long as it’s not about Charles Darwin.”

  “Is it true what I heard? You played a role in the lunatic’s death?”

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “Here’s what else I heard,” he said. “You did it so she wouldn’t order my execution.”

  “I did it so she wouldn’t order anybody’s execution.”

  “But she told you I was next in line.”

  “Maybe. Don’t take it personally. I just wanted to end her tawdry little reign of terror.”

  “Nevertheless, you saved my life.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Thank you,” Pielmeister said humbly.

  “You’re welcome,” I replied icily.

  “No, I mean it. Thank you. If I can ever do you a favor, simply ask.”

  “How about canceling the paradigm shift?”

  He gave me a look of consummate perplexity. Could it be that Pielmeister no longer believed in Corporate Christi? Was it possible that during his sweltering days in boiler room 2 and his polluted nights on G deck he’d forgotten about the twilight of the iconoclasts? With any luck, I figured, this theological giant would continue thinking small for the rest of his life.

  A Coast Guard midshipman approached, a pimply youngster with an Adam’s apple as large as his nose, and, tapping Pielmeister’s shoulder, requested that he go down to E deck. Pielmeister nodded, then faced me squarely and said, “Good-bye, Ambrose. You’re really not such a bad philosopher. Forsake your foolish scientism”—he stretched out his arm, his fingers soliciting contact with mine—“and you might even get your Ph.D.”

  “Know what you can do with that hand of yours?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You can shove it up thy neighbor’s ass,” I said, an answer that I imagined would have pleased Yolly, almost as much as if I’d thrown Pielmeister into the bay.

  Saying nothing, he slid the rejected hand into his pocket. He strode past the foremast and joined the other released hostages, and then the lot of them were swallowed by the sun’s noontime glare. Inevitably I thought of Amenhotep IV’s lyrical hymn to his shining divinity, the Aton. “Whatever flies and alights, they live when thou hast risen for them,” ran the panegyric. “The fish in the river dart before thy face. Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea.” Even Darwin, I decided, could not have said it better.

  IN THEORY IT WOULD BE EASY convincing the FBI that I’d played no part in the Valkyries’ assault on the Titanic Redux. For one thing, I was not a woman. For another, Colonel Fox and Major Powers would vouch for me. Nevertheless, I decided to err on the side of paranoia, and so I secluded myself inside a cold furnace in boiler room 3, crouching amid the carbon detritus and remaining there until the G-men had gotten all their prisoners off the ship.

  Smeared with soot and ash, I climbed free of the furnace and with feline stealth ascended the aft companionways. It seemed entirely
possible that I now had the Redux to myself, though my desire to sit alone in the Café Parisien was nonexistent, likewise my wish to savor a solitary respite in the Turkish bath or enjoy a private screening of Touched by an Angel: The Complete First Season in the ship’s cozy little movie theater. I had but one ruling passion just then—to return to the island and extinguish the last vestige of a technology that my species would be better off without.

  Upon reaching E deck, I entered the maze of corridors and found myself staring at an ax: not the morally charged prop from Plato’s famous parable but a fire ax of no symbolic significance whatsoever, sealed behind a pane of glass stenciled with the words EMERGENCY USE ONLY. I detached the ball peen hammer from the wall, broke the glass, and retrieved the ax. Existential use only, I mused, hurrying away, including personal vendettas against infernal machines. At last I reached the hatch through which the hostages had been evacuated. I turned the lock wheel. The great steel door swung open, revealing a twenty-foot drop to the Bahía de Colón. I inflated my lungs, gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and jumped. Surfacing, I employed a crude approximation of a sidestroke to bear the ax toward the bow of the ship. Warm and smooth and briny, the tropical waters washed the carbon from my skin. Soon I reached my rowboat, still moored to the anchor chain and miraculously afloat, the keelson covered by several gallons of the Gulf of Mexico.

  For the rest of the afternoon the Aton continued to smile upon my mission. Despite a choppy sea, an obstinate breeze, and the weight of my unwanted water, I rowed myself into the Bahía de Matecumba without any serious mishaps—blistered palms, strained muscles, nothing more. I made landfall near the great keep. Ax in hand, I strode across the drawbridge, then climbed the spiral staircase and immediately got to work, wielding my weapon against the RXL-313. I shattered the enzyme tanks, smashed the chamber ports, toppled the gantry, crushed the DUNCE cap, pulverized the plasma monitors, eviscerated the control console. Rampage accomplished, I stood back and surveyed the former laboratory, exhausted, panting, and unconscionably pleased with myself. Even Daedalus, I decided, could sustain no wonders here. Even God would strain to wring from this wreck any creature more substantial than a tick.