The Philosopher's Apprentice (16 page)

“Gavin was especially impressed with the fireworks,” she told me later that week. “He wants me to add skyrockets to the Savage Rabbit concerts.”

“Skyrockets? That's insane.”

“The
outdoor
concerts. I told him I'd forgotten all that stuff, but my tutor could probably help.”

“Tell him your tutor has forgotten, too.”

“There's a cut on
Spur of the Moment
called ‘My Country, Right or Wrong.' A satire on mindless Phyllistine patriotism.”

“How subversive.”

“Did you know that the man who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' was related to Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice responsible for the Dred Scott decision? Pretty astonishing, huh? Francis Scott Key goes all gushy about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forty-three years later his brother-in-law rules that black people belong to an inferior biological order. All Gavin wants is a bunch of computer-launched rockets turning into flaming pinwheels when the lead vocalist sings about the racists' red glare.”

“I wouldn't know where to begin. Tell your boyfriend that good music doesn't require pyrotechnics.”

It was at this juncture in our uneasy conversation that Londa issued the first negative remark I'd ever heard her make about Gavin. “Listen to any Savage Rabbit CD,” she told me, a wry smile curling her lips, “and you'll decide they need the goddamn Chicago Fire.”

 

ALTHOUGH THE BOOK OF LONDA
was in theory a moot text, its preposterous thumbscrew-wielding vigilante at best peripheral to our work, the wretched thing continued to trouble me. Why had she cultivated in these pages so dark an alter ego, this Crimson Kantian as nearly cruel as the stepmother she'd sought to rehabilitate? Could it be that Londa had merely learned to
mimic
a Stoic love of integrity, an Epicurean taste for virtue, an Enlightenment sense of duty, and a Rawlsian commitment to fairness? At the end of the day, was she still the ambulatory moral vacuum with whom Edwina had first presented me?

From these unhappy thoughts flowed my fateful decision to transport Londa and myself to ancient Judea, circa
A.D.
30. Our itinerary had us following the rising terrain as it resolved into that Jerusalem mount made immortal by the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Continuing upward, we reached the summit and met the prince of paradox himself, delivering his famously counterintuitive sermon.

Londa's first reading of the Beatitudes and their surrounding text left her utterly perplexed, so she decided that, having previously benefited from role-playing exercises, we should apply this same approach to Christian ethics. We began by enacting the story of the Good Samaritan, Londa portraying the title character while I sprawled on the floor as the robbed and beaten wayfarer. She ministered to my imaginary wounds with surpassing kindness. The following morning I repeatedly pantomimed the action of slapping Londa's cheek. After every such assault, she confounded her assailant by inviting him to strike again. Later that week we staged the famous story of the vengeful mob chasing after the woman taken in adultery. Our teenage librarian, Brittany, played the slattern, I was the mob's leader, and Londa became the Nazarene. I can still hear her saying, in her sensually husky voice, “Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Picture two freight trains meeting in a head-on collision, or a tornado corkscrewing through a trailer park, hurtling gas grills and crates of Budweiser every which way, and you will understand the impact that Londa's repeated readings of the Sermon on the Mount had on her psyche. In retrospect it all seems inevitable. Here was a young woman whose encounter with Stoicism had inspired her to burn her palm. The Beatitudes were bound to loosen a few screws as well. But what really got under Londa's skin, I soon learned, was not the Messiah's sermon per se but the discontinuity between its sublime directives and the ignominious course of Western history, a spectacle that, the more we thought about it, increasingly struck
Londa and me as largely a fancy-dress
danse macabre, Titus Andronicus
on a hemispheric and ultimately global scale, though I hastened to point out that the chronicles of other civilizations were likewise awash in blood. What had gone wrong? she wanted to know. When and why had the teachings of Jesus Christ become an optional component of Christianity?

“I'm not the right person to answer that question,” I said. “Try an anthropologist, maybe a religious-studies professor.”

“You know what the world needs, Mason?” she asked. “It needs a Second Coming.”

“I'd say one was quite enough.”

“Not of Christ. Of Christianity. I'm going to make it happen.”

“That's not a very good idea.”

“Well,
somebody
has to arrange for the merciful and the meek and the peacemakers to take over. The Phyllistines can't remain in charge
forever.
”

“Beatitudes by fiat—right, Londa, sure, that's just the ticket,” I said, rolling my eyes. “May I be frank, my dear? You don't want to become a Christian. You want Christianity to become
you.
That way lies madness.”

On certain days my pupil's hungering and thirsting after righteousness seemed so intense that I half expected her to flagellate herself, put on a hair shirt, or walk barefoot on broken glass, but she settled for a less florid saintliness, persuading Javier to become an organ donor, Dr. Charnock to join Amnesty International, her morality teacher to send his parents a smarmy e-mail (“You sacrificed so much for my benefit…”), and Edwina to write a million-dollar check to the Heifer Project, a nondenominational Christian foundation providing domestic animals to families in impoverished countries. Poor Gavin Ackerman, he didn't stand a chance. He thought he'd been blessed with a dreamy and eccentric but eminently desirable girlfriend, and suddenly he had a hyperventilating, whack-job Joan of Arc on his hands. It all came to a boil when
Gavin mentioned that his mother used to drag him to Lutheran services in Orlando. From that moment on, there was no stopping Londa. She simply
had
to know whether he'd taken the Beatitudes to heart.

“I asked him to imagine that Savage Rabbit had become an overnight sensation,” she told me. “Would he be willing to give his newfound fortune to the poor, after which we'd run off together and start an AIDS hospice in Nigeria? You'll never guess what he said. He said that if he
kept
his money, we'd find it a lot easier to start an AIDS hospice in Nigeria.”

“I can follow his logic.”

“Then I told him to imagine he'd turned Savage Rabbit into a success only by making enemies. Might he see his way clear to
loving
those enemies instead of hating them?”

“A provocative question,” I said, suppressing a smirk. “What did he say?”

“He said I was getting on his nerves, and he didn't know how he felt about me anymore, and then he confessed he was thinking of dating Brittany, which I said was fine by me, but I would appreciate it if he didn't fuck her in the same places we'd used, and he said he would fuck her wherever he felt like, and then we got into a big fight, and then we broke up.”

“I'm sorry, Londa.”

“Don't be. He's really a very immature person.”

At Londa's request we spent the rest of the morning talking about Jesus's cryptic concept of the Kingdom, and whether it was earthly or ethereal, but my thoughts kept drifting to the schism between Londa and Gavin. This was probably not the first time the Sermon on the Mount had wrecked an adolescent romance, but I was disturbed by the vehemence with which she'd forced the issue. Love me, love my Beatitudes. The Crimson Kantian had much to answer for, but this new version of Londa, this
belle dame avec trop de merci,
this Purple Pietist, was hardly an improvement. The sooner we left
first-century Judea, fleeing across the Mediterranean like the Trois Maries of Provençal legend, the better.

 

FOR THE REST OF THE SUMMER
,
Londa and Gavin engaged in an elaborate dance of mutual avoidance, until it came time for our youthful roustabouts to scramble aboard their vessels and go home. The kids had acquitted themselves well. A sturdy sandstone wall now encircled the patio, a magnificent new dock jutted into the Bahía de Flores, the Dewey decimal system had wrought its rationality upon our previously chaotic library, and the manor gardens boasted a vitality that would have sent Edwina's beloved Swinburne retreating pell-mell into his gaunt and glamorous wasteland. Being a romantic at heart, I imagined a last-minute rapprochement between Londa and Gavin, but when I asked her about his departure, she reported, with magisterial indifference, that he'd sailed off without saying good-bye.

As September came to Isla de Sangre, Londa and I took a much-needed imaginary cruise to the Galápagos Islands and thence into the luminous heart of Darwinism. Just as I'd hoped, the core chapters of my
Ethics,
with their argument that a universal and robust morality lay dormant within the theory of natural selection, seemed to bring Londa to her senses. Whenever we talked about our planet's vast ecological tapestry with its innumerable species pursuing their interconnected existences, and how the Phyllistine megamachine with its insatiable appetite for forests and wetlands and other fragile habitats—Gittikac's Getaway Apocalypse—was tearing that tapestry to pieces, she would occasionally spice the conversation with a Beatitude or two. But she had evidently abandoned, or at least postponed, her ambition to supervise the Second Coming of Christianity. Just as the Crimson Kantian had deferred to the Purple Pietist, so was the Purple Pietist now yielding to a thoughtful and humble Scarlet Darwinist.

“I think I'm almost cured,” she told me. “I feel like a lizard who's
had his tail cut off, and now the thing's growing back. I'm ashamed of the person I used to be. Setting fires. Killing fish. The old Londa makes me want to puke.”

“We're
all
ashamed of the person we used to be,” I said.

As for Donya and Yolly, their tutors were convinced that both girls had finally conquered the void to which their ontogenerated flesh was heir. For a while Henry and Brock considered celebrating Donya's breakthrough by giving her some objective correlative of a conscience, a statuette of a Kindness Crusader, perhaps, or a heart-shaped clock like the one Professor Marvel awarded the Tin Man. Jordan likewise imagined presenting her pupil with a trophy, and Brock, our resident artist, soon hit upon a concept we liked: a Lucite slab in which was suspended a shiny blue sphere representing the human soul. But in the end my colleagues decided that any such material prize would trivialize their students' accomplishment.

Despite our apparent success in providing each Sister Sabacthani with a moral compass, Jordan argued that we still had work to do. In her view we were now obliged to give our charges what educators of her epistemological persuasion called “conceptual artifacts,” so that the ultimate fruit of the girls' DUNCE cap programming and subsequent consumption of book after book after book would be “minds enlivened by knowledge, as opposed to brains anesthetized by data.” Her pitch made sense to the rest of us, and so we all set about enriching the Hubris Academy curriculum. Our lesson plans boasted a theatricality that I believe fell short of gimmickry. To give Donya an experience in cartography, Brock buried a box filled with costume jewelry behind Casa de los Huesos, drew a pirate map on a crumpled sheet of coffee-stained paper, and cheered his pupil on as she moved, chart in one hand, spade in the other, from the patio to an oleander bush to a garden gnome and finally to the rock beneath which the treasure lay. To introduce a unit on astronomy, Jordan had Yolly study the night sky, thread the stars into novel constellations, and then invent her own myths accounting for these sparkling beasts
and glimmering gods. To help Londa grasp the poetry of mathematics, I invited her to recapitulate the steps, so elegant, so exquisite, by which Euclid had proved the Pythagorean theorem.

“He didn't need algebra at all,” I noted as we bent over my diagrams. “Look, he brings it off entirely with geometry. His stroke of genius was to frame the right triangle with three perfect squares, so that the proof becomes a matter of—”

“A matter of showing that the big square is the same size as the two smaller squares combined!”

“Shazam!”

So Hubris Academy was a lively place, with nearly every lesson occasioning an intellectual epiphany, a eureka moment, a flash of rational revelation. We were all taken aback, therefore, when a strange malaise descended upon the Sisters Sabacthani, a condition that had them nodding off in class and moving about the island with the lethargic gait of deep-sea divers shuffling along the ocean floor. By monitoring the girls' sleeping habits, we soon cleared up the mystery. In the middle of the night, Londa would rise from her bed, wander down to the Bahía de Flores, and spend hours staring at the rollers as they crashed against the rocks. Yolly's nocturnal anxiety prompted her to saddle up Oyster and go galloping through the surf like a banshee making a house call. Even little Donya's nights were plagued. At the godforsaken hour of 4:00
A.M
., she would come suddenly awake, possessed by a phantasm, thrashing and writhing and tearing the sheets until she broke free of its clawed and scaly clutches.

Upon learning of her daughters' insomnia, Edwina decided to give Yolly and Londa sleeping remedies from her personal store, a therapy that proved generally effective, though Jordan complained that Edwina was treating the symptoms and not the cause. The Übermom's approach to Donya's disquiet was less mechanistic. She installed an extra bed in the child's room, so that at the earliest sign of distress, whoever was on duty—Henry, Brock, Chen Lee, Edwina
herself—could hug Donya reassuringly and tell her, over and over, that she wasn't really sinking in quicksand or fleeing from hornets or climbing the branches of a burning tree.