The Philosopher's Apprentice (4 page)

“She's breathing,” I said. “Her heart is beating.”

“Vestigial reflexes,” Edwina said. “She's no longer sentient, I promise you.”

For a moment I considered reneging on my contract and going back to Boston. Yes, I needed the money, but did I really want to spend a year among people who routinely fashioned mutant lobsters and breathing trees and God knew what other sorts of biological surrealism?

“‘No growth of moor or coppice,'” Edwina quoted as I returned to my seat, “‘No heather-flower or vine, but bloomless buds of poppies, green grapes of Proserpine.'” She extended her arm and harvested one of the mangrove's fruits. “The world has never met with my approval.”

“You're an idealist,” I said.

“Or a cynic.”

“The same thing.”

It was a glib answer, and we both knew it. Although her polarized lenses mitigated Edwina's scowl, I still felt its impact.

“In any event,” she said, “from the moment of my daughter's birth, I contrived to give her a sheltered existence, educating her entirely at home. Her father would not have assented, but he died before she was born, pancreatic cancer, a banal end for a remarkable man.” She took my hand and pressed the strange fruit into my palm. “Javier calls them ‘rococonuts.' Charnock prefers the term ‘mummy kumquats'—‘mumquats'—for they can make the consumer imagine he's immortal. Be careful where you eat your mumquat, Mason. Avoid precipices and quicksand bogs.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, nesting the fruit in my shirt pocket.

Edwina raised her hand in a halfhearted attempt to conceal a yawn. “By age six Londa was an expert swimmer. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, she dove into a lagoon and struck her head on a rock. Javier fished her out before she could drown. Londa's first trip to the mainland occurred in a medevac chopper. The blow left no scar, but the resultant memory loss remains one of the severest in the annals of amnesia.” She swallowed some coffee. “Gradually it became clear that Londa's childhood recollections weren't the only casualty—she'd also lost her ability to distinguish right from wrong. Depravity is not a diagnosis one makes lightly, but the evidence seems unequivocal.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Edwina expounded upon the sorry
condition of Londa's conscience. The feral adolescent had recently set fire to the rug in the east parlor, stolen cash from Javier's wallet, smashed the dinnerware on the kitchen floor, thrown rocks through the windows of Dr. Charnock's laboratory, eaten mumquats against her mother's orders—the list went on and on.

“In undertaking Londa's cure, you will have one great asset,” Edwina said. “She has retained her ability to pick up any book and absorb its contents at an astonishing speed, a genetic endowment from her maternal grandfather. By devouring most of the Faustino library, she has succeeded in reorienting herself to Western civilization and its cultural norms. As for reality per se, she prefers to account for it in reference to the capricious Yahweh of prerabbinical Judaism. Not the deity I would have picked for her, but probably better than no deity at all, given her present stage of development.”

A disturbing image flitted through my imagination. I was in Sinuhe's surgical theater, Londa lying before me on an operating table. I had scrolled her scalp away from her skullcap, sawed off her cranium, and exposed her brain to daylight. Now all that remained was for me to take up my knife and inscribe the Ten Commandments onto her cerebral cortex.

“I'll be honest, Edwina. I'm hesitant to intervene so radically in another person's psyche.”

“Oh, but Londa
wants
you to intervene.”

Just then Proserpine, for no apparent reason, began to quaver, her exposed roots vibrating like the plucked strings of an immense lyre.

“You're certain the tree has no awareness?” I asked, brushing the nearest branch.

“A complete void,” Edwina said. “No qualia whatsoever. If I thought she was still suffering, I would immediately uproot her, much as I would miss her sweet fruit and cool shade and unfailing companionship. My daughter wants you to intervene, Mason, more than you can possibly imagine. She wants it with the desperation of the damned.”

 

DRESSED NOW IN A BLUE SILK KIMONO
,
Javier reappeared and, taking Edwina's hand, guided her free of the chair. For an instant the two of them seemed to be dancing, and it occurred to me that Javier's duties might include appeasing Edwina's libido. I doubted that he relished these carnal obligations, not if she was as quixotic in bed as in conversation.

The three of us followed the labyrinth of shrubs and bushes to a frosted-glass door that Javier slid back to reveal a courtyard tiled with ceramic hexagons and girded by great ropy masses of jungle. A fishpond lay at the center of the patio, complete with a school of golden carp flashing through the shallow water like pennies sparkling in a fountain. Edwina led me to a round table swathed in white linen and arrayed with porcelain bowls from which rose fragrant twists of steam. Sliding into the nearest chair, I saw that we'd be dining on calamari stew, and I wondered whether before turning them over to the kitchen staff Charnock had given the little squids fins or wings or some other capricious enhancement.

“The chardonnay or the merlot?” Javier asked Edwina as she assumed her chair.

“Our guest will decide,” she replied, presenting me with a blank stare. “Though personally I believe it's barbaric to consume red wine with seafood.”

“The chardonnay is fine,” I said, inhaling the perfume of the hibiscus.

“Londa will have the usual,” Edwina informed her assistant.

As Javier passed through the patio doorway, a ginger cat with a flat, churlish face escaped from the conservatory, scurried across the tiles, and leaped into Edwina's lap.

“In making your diagnosis,” she said, gesturing toward a dirt path emerging from the forest, “you must not hesitate to risk Londa's annoyance. If we spare her feelings, she'll never get well.”

Branches rustled, vines swayed, a macaw took flight, and the
jungle brought forth a young woman of commanding height and abundant auburn hair, flipping through a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as if hunting up a favorite recipe in a cookbook. Was she in fact reading the thing so quickly? Comprehending it? She did not so much enter the patio as alight upon it—such was the fluidity of her tread, the delicacy of her carriage. Bronzed by the tropical sun, her arms extended from a white cotton blouse, her legs from khaki shorts. Her cheek and jaw muscles seemed atrophied, giving her a vacuous, uninhabited expression, but her eyes were as large and green as mumquats, and her lips had matured into an appealing pout. To cure this adolescent's malaise, I realized, would be to awaken a face of great beauty.

Edwina grasped her daughter's free hand, pressing it between her palms. “Darling, meet Mason Ambrose. He flew over a thousand miles to help us with our difficulties.”

“Hello, Londa,” I said.

She set her book on the table and, extending her arm, gave me a surprisingly vital handshake. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Ambrose,” she said. Her voice had a hollow, ethereal timbre, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

The instant Londa slid into her chair, Javier reappeared pushing a tea trolley on which rested the chardonnay and a carafe containing a mysterious ochre fluid. He filled Edwina's goblet and my own with wine. Londa received the unknown offering.

“Iced tea?” I asked.

“Coca-Cola,” Londa said. “At one time its promoters favored the slogan ‘Coke is it,' an assertion I find totally incoherent. Will there be pecan pie for dessert, Mother?”

“Naturally.” Edwina brushed Londa's forearm. “Some people would say that by indulging my daughter I inflate her ego, but here at Faustino we have little use for received wisdom.”

We proceeded to eat our stew, the silence growing increasingly conspicuous. I doubt that Edwina consumed more than a mouthful
or two, although the wine occasioned no such prudence, and she eagerly drank three full glasses.

“The
Kama Sutra
catalogs seventy arts of graciousness,” Londa said abruptly, staring at her half-empty bowl. “In 1859 the French daredevil Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The phylum Schizophyta comprises two thousand species of bacteria. Cyrus the Great, Persia's brilliant warrior and statesman, conquered Babylon in 500
B.C.
”

“That's very interesting,” I said.

“According to Sumerian mythology, the universe was fashioned out of the primeval sea and divided into heaven and earth by Enlil, god of air and storms. All igneous rocks begin as magma. In 1972 the American swimmer Mark Spitz won seven gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Munich. The carrion-eating caracara bird has sharp hooks on its beak for tearing open animal hide.”

I decided to begin my evaluation with the closest thing Western philosophy has to a sacred text, Plato's
Republic.
In Book One, Cephalus defines “justice” as speaking the truth and paying one's debts. Socrates refutes this notion by suggesting it would be wrong to repay certain debts—for example, to return a borrowed ax to its mentally imbalanced owner.

I lifted a morsel of calamari to my mouth, chewed the rubbery tissue, and said, “Londa, may I ask you a question? I would like you to imagine that a woman named Alice has borrowed an ax from her friend Jerome so she can chop a dead limb off her beech tree. When Jerome comes to reclaim his ax, he's obviously very agitated—”

“You mean he's like me?”

“Like you?”

“Insane.”

“We're not insane,” Edwina said.

“Alice becomes afraid that Jerome may use the ax to kill someone,” I said. “So here's my question. Should Alice give it back?”

Londa closed her eyes. “In 1088 the Patzinak Turks settled be
tween the Danube and the Balkans. The talking drum of Nigeria's Yoruba people has strings that, when squeezed, can produce notes ranging over an octave or more.”

“Please try to cooperate, dear,” Edwina said.

“The question has no answer,” Londa snapped.

“Many philosophers would argue that the question has a very
good
answer,” I said.

“It doesn't,” Londa insisted. “‘Dilemma, noun, a situation in which a person must choose between two undesirable alternatives.'”

I glanced toward the nearest hibiscus. A swarm of butterflies moved among the blossoms with rapid stitching motions, as if fashioning a transparent gown with needle and thread. I fixed on Londa and said, “May I ask you a second question?”

“Another fucking dilemma?”

Edwina winced. “Londa, darling, we do not say ‘fucking' at lunch.”

Having failed to get anywhere with Socrates' ax, I decided to try Lawrence Kohlberg's variation on Jean Valjean stealing the loaf of bread.

“Once upon a time in Europe,” I said, “a man was near death from bone cancer. The doctors thought a particular drug might save him, a radium extract that Fritz, the local pharmacist, had recently discovered. Although Fritz paid only one hundred deutsche marks for each specimen of raw radium—enough to prepare one ampoule for hypodermic injection—he priced the dose at a thousand marks. The sick man's wife, Helga, went to everyone she knew to borrow the money, but in the end she could scrape together only four hundred marks. Desperate now, Helga begged Fritz to either lower his price or let her pay the remaining six hundred marks in installments. But the pharmacist said, ‘No, I discovered the extract, and I'm going to profit from it.' That very night Helga broke into Fritz's store and
stole an ampoule of the drug. Now, Londa, here's the problem. Did Helga do the right thing?”

Her eyes narrowed to a livid squint. “Why would you ask me a question like that?”

“It's just a game,” I said.

“It's a stupid game! You're trying to trick me! You're trying to make me even crazier than I am!”

Edwina said, “Sweetheart, we're not being fair to our teacher.”

A howl erupted from deep within Londa's coltish frame, and the next thing I knew she'd tilted her bowl ninety degrees, sending the remainder of her stew slopping across the table. She bolted from her chair and, kneeling beside the fishpond, dipped the empty bowl into the water like a ladle. In a matter of seconds, she'd made a helpless carp her prisoner.

“Londa, no!” Edwina screamed, startling her misanthropic cat, who bailed out and disappeared down the jungle path. “The fish did nothing to deserve that!”

“Titanium is the ninth-most-abundant element!” Londa wailed. “In 1962, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize in Physiology!”

Still on her knees, she upended the bowl, dumping both the captive fish and its liquid habitat onto the patio. Somehow the creature flipped from its left side to its abdomen, dorsal fin up. Inspired by its success, the carp next attempted to navigate the tiles in a pathetic mockery of swimming. It got nowhere, mired by friction and the malign indifference of the carp gods.

“The rules of the ancient Chinese game of liu-po have been lost to history! The bubonic plague of the 1340s killed nearly one-third of Europe's population!”

“Put the fish back!” Edwina shouted.

I leaped from my chair, seized the valiant carp, and heaved it into the pond.

“In 1900 the cakewalk became the most fashionable dance in the United States!”

Crouching beside Londa, I set my fingertips beneath her chin and lifted her head until our gazes met. Her nostrils quivered. Her lips grew taut. Her eyes looked desiccated, as hard and dry as ball bearings. Never had I seen such anguish in another human face, and so it was that as the warblers sang merrily and the tanagers trilled with unreflective joy, I vowed to Isis and Horus and most especially to myself that somehow, some way, I would teach my sad and sorry pupil how to weep.