The Philosopher's Apprentice (44 page)

But she was gone, my errant undine, absconded from our love barge. I drew a slow breath. No need to fret, I told myself. She was merely taking a shower, or once again sharing tea with her mother on the veranda, or enjoying a morning swim in the bay. Or perhaps Londa had acquired the primal Edwina's habit of spending Saturday morning in the conservatory, though I imagined that the place must be more Swinburnian than ever, all canker and rot and wilt.

I slipped into my street clothes and began the search, repeatedly calling Londa's name as I checked the bathrooms on all three floors, then descended to the foyer and headed for the veranda. Suddenly Edwina 0004 stood in my path, dressed in her safari jacket and demanding that I join her for coffee in the geodesic dome. She claimed to know Londa's whereabouts. Our forthcoming conversation would be of epochal significance, she said, keyed to matters of life and death.

“Londa's life, to be specific,” she insisted as we arrived among the languishing orchids and expiring ferns. “Londa's death.”

The coffee urn held a potent mocha java. I filled my mug to the brim and, settling opposite Edwina 0004 at a small wrought-iron table, ventured small electric sips.

“Let me summarize the situation as baldly as I can. My daughter is now my prisoner.” With unnerving sangfroid the Wild Woman poured a fragrant cup of hazelnut from a glass carafe. “Earlier this morning I put your handcuffs on her, then locked her in Dr. Charnock's old laboratory.”

It took me a moment to absorb this unlikely but not unwelcome piece of news. I reached across the table and squeezed the Wild
Woman's wrist. “Believe me, Edwina, you did the right thing.”

“My action knew nothing of virtue. Four hours ago an especially aggressive component of my program kicked in.”

“The next step, I assume, is to contact the authorities.”

For a brief dreamy interval, Edwina 0004 ignored me, casting a weary gaze all around the dome. “I think this is where I died,” she rasped. “Yes, I'm sure of it. How strange. I passed away in this very room, under a mutant mangrove.” She looked me in the eye. “The authorities? If you had the total picture, you would never say that. So here it is, Mr. Ambrose. Full disclosure. Bless me, Father, for I have trafficked in moral ambiguity.”

A ball of lead congealed in my stomach like a failed alchemy experiment. How foolish of me to have forgotten that we were living on Isla de Sangre, illogic's own atoll, locus of the Fountain of Terrible Ideas. “I'm listening,” I said apprehensively.

Edwina 0004 seized a bread knife and sliced a raisin bagel. “I'll start with a question. Why do you suppose Londa created me?”

As would any self-respecting philosopher at this juncture, I frowned pensively and drank more coffee. “She wanted to get her mother back, simultaneously replacing me with a more permissive adviser.”

“Correct. Go on.”

“And apparently she thought your advent would somehow allow the primal Edwina to keep on enjoying the pleasures of motherhood.”

“True, every bit of it, but you've barely scratched the surface.”

“The story of my life.”

“The
real
reason I was brought into the world…I have difficulty saying this.”

“Yes?” I took a measure of coffee into my mouth, allowing it to trickle slowly down my throat.

“Londa created me for the purpose of murdering her.”

I aborted the swallow, spraying coffee into the air. “What?”

“I'm a homicide machine,” the Wild Woman continued. “Or, if you prefer, a suicide implement. I detest this situation, but there's nothing I can do about it. Londa is far more complex than you realize. You can't begin to imagine the intensity of her distress over Enoch Anthem's death. The instant the man stopped kicking, she suffered excruciating pangs of remorse.”

My hands trembled, setting the coffee to swirling in its mug. Was I in fact sitting three feet away from Londa's designated assassin? I wished I had an auxiliary conscience of my own just then, somebody who would tell me exactly what to do—such as dragging Edwina 0004 into the jungle and roping her to a tree.

“Excruciating pangs,” I echoed. “Though not quite excruciating enough”—an unbidden sarcasm entered my voice—“to stop her from killing Corbin Thorndike, too.”

“That second hanging tortured her even more than the first. Her pineal gland began to bleed.” The Wild Woman mortared the halves of her bagel together with cream cheese. “The Londa who stood on the weather deck watching those two Phyllistines twist in the wind, was she a creature out of control? Of course. But here's the thing, Mr. Ambrose. She
knew
she was out of control, and in time she saw the answer, or thought she did, and so she cooked me up, Edwina 0004, Anthem and Thorndike's personal avenger, and that's why she's locked away in Charnock's lab right now, listening for my footsteps, and why we're here in the dome, having this discussion.”

“But you
love
Londa. You're her
mother.
”

“I'm her mother, yes. But I'm also my algorithms.”

“No, Edwina. This is
crazy.
”

“Are you appealing to my conscience, Mr. Ambrose? I don't have one. There was no convenient ethicist around when I was growing up.”

My coffee kept swirling. I slammed the mug onto the table. “Listen, Edwina, there's no need to
murder
her. Here's the plan.
We'll go to Charnock's lab, take her into custody, turn her over to the G-men—and then we'll try our damnedest to make sure she gets a fair trial.”

“Perhaps some hypothetical Edwina could do that,” the Wild Woman said, voraciously consuming her bagel. “Edwina 0005 maybe, or Edwina 0006, or conceivably even the primal Edwina. Not I. My program won't permit it. I shall execute Londa, or I shall set her free. Either, or—that's me. Utterly binary. Totally digital. But there's
another
reason we won't be turning her over to the G-men. The symptoms should arrive any second now.”

“Symptoms?”

“First a tingling in your hands and feet, then a throbbing behind your eyes, and finally a loss of gross motor functions.”

My heart began racing, not only in reaction to the Wild Woman's revelation but also, no doubt, from the chemical contents of her treachery. “You
drugged
me? You goddamn fucking
drugged
me?”

“More of Londa's ingenuity, a mixture of nectar and curare. It attacks the midbrain and spinal cord only. You needn't worry about blindness, aphasia, or respiratory complications.”

My best course, I decided, would be to find an emetic and cleanse myself of the contaminated coffee. I bolted from my chair, started toward the dome entrance—and then it happened: not the predicted tingling, not a throbbing behind my eyes, but something considerably more frightening, a sharp blow, whack, as if Socrates's borrowed ax had contacted my cranium. My knees went rubbery, my spine became jelly, and I collapsed on the dirt floor.

“If Londa has calculated correctly, you won't black out.” The Wild Woman stood over me, devouring the last of her bagel. “The paralysis, however, should last at least two hours, and by then she'll be beyond all medical and philosophical intervention.”

I languished on my back and stared at the glass ceiling, wheeling my limbs like a beetle pinned to an entomologist's corkboard. The curare colonized still more of my nervous system, so that the same
tragedy that had befallen Proserpine now visited me. I was a basket case, stranded in my cortex. “Edwina—please—you don't have to
kill
her.”

“That statement is more accurate than you might imagine.” She crouched beside me like a mother helping her toddler build a tower from alphabet blocks. “Permit me to describe my program's most provocative feature. If you were to look me in the eye right now and forbid me to destroy Londa—you and only you, Mr. Ambrose—my need to murder her would vanish, replaced by a compulsion to go unlock Charnock's lab and remove her handcuffs. Isn't that remarkable? Six words from you, ‘Thou shalt not murder thy daughter,' and the death sentence is lifted. But then, of course, Londa will start doing those things we've come to expect of the world's most famous vatling. Calling up the Valkyries, for example, and instructing them to lynch Felix Pielmeister.”

“Shit.”

“I'm not sure
why
she placed her fate in your hands. My guess is that she's never forgiven you for declining to sign
The Book of Londa
. Go ahead, Mr. Ambrose. Say, ‘Thou shalt not murder thy daughter,' and I'll set her free.”

“Set her free to murder Pielmeister.”

“Most likely. But maybe not. We all know how unpredictable she is. She'll probably hang a second hostage in the bargain. Gittikac, Wintergreen, North—there are nine Phyllistines in the queue. Give me your answer.”

“I
can't.
”

“I know, but give it to me anyway. Come on, Mr. Ambrose. You're fond of ethical dilemmas. What's the lesser evil here? What's the greater good? Make your choice—
now.
Pick the door that leads to the lady, because the tiger is ravenous this morning.”

My decision to walk out on my dissertation defense—that had been a choice. My resolve to continue tutoring Londa after learning her true heritage—that, too, had been a choice. My insistence that
she abandon Themisopolis and allow the immaculoids to burn it—once again, a choice. But this wasn't a choice. This was something else. This was the death of a thousand cuts.

I boxed the compass with my eyes—north, north-northeast, northeast, east-northeast, east, east-southeast, southeast, all the way to north-northwest—until at last my gaze came to rest on the Wild Woman. “I'm going insane.”

“You'd be well within your rights to do that, but first you must flip the coin. On the count of ten. One…two…three…”

“I need more time.”

“Four…five…six…”

“
You're
the one who should die,” I protested.

“I don't disagree. Seven…eight…nine…do I hear it? Do I hear ‘Thou shalt not murder thy daughter'?”

Like my tongue, lips, larynx, and ocular muscles, my salivary glands remained in working order. I did my best to spit in Edwina 0004's face, but the projectile fell short and landed on her safari jacket.

“Know something, Mr. Ambrose? In your shoes I would've answered that way, too.” She stood up, straight and tall as when she'd first come toward me in the skiff. “But I'm not in your shoes. I'm in my own shoes, a mother's shoes, so naturally I've decided to use those shoes to kick you in the teeth.”

It was not a shoe, however, but the pointed tip of a hard leather boot that collided with my mouth. Thanks to the curare, I didn't feel a thing. Apparently she struck me pretty hard. There was much blood.

“If you wish to bury the body, come down to the beach,” said the Wild Woman, striding away. “She hopes to draw her last breath in sight of the Red Witch.”

The blood continued pouring from my mouth and streaming onto the floor. Had my nervous system been more functional, I could have shifted to a prone position and, extending my index finger,
used the spilled blood to draw a stick figure on the flagstone path, or scrawl an Egyptian hieroglyph, or write my name. But instead I simply lay there, glued in place and transfixed by an astonishing thought. I had just saved the life of my worst enemy, even while arranging the annihilation of the person I loved best.

TO HOBBLE THE BODY
,
a good Cartesian dualist would say, is not necessarily to impede its complementary opposite, the mind. A Hegelian idealist might take the argument even further, asserting that a physical handicap may under certain circumstances increase a person's mental prowess. By this theory, Charles Darwin's chronic exhaustion became a lens focusing his intellectual energies on the origin of species, Friedrich Nietzsche's racking ailments sponsored the composition of his wrenching aphorisms, and Stephen Hawking's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis underwrote his exploration of those astronomical abysses he called black holes.

The longer I lay paralyzed in the geodesic dome, however, the more skeptical I grew regarding any attempts to correlate suffering with wisdom. Stuck on my back like an inverted turtle, staring at the play of morning sunlight on the glass triangles, I reviewed the shocks of the past forty-eight hours—the corpses on the foremast, the Wild Woman's lineage, Londa's suicide scheme, the curare in my coffee—searching for insights. In declining to shut down Edwina 0004's assassination program, had I committed a terrible sin? Prevented the executions of ten innocent Phyllistines? Become a party
to a murder? A hero to the angels? I contemplated the triangles, and pondered my questions, and arrived at the nexus of nowhere.

My material self, it seemed, had fallen prey to a kind of neuromuscular relativism. We recognize no universal requirement to serve you, my brain cells declared. We have no absolute duties, my tissues insisted. But after two hours of such discourse, the very interval predicted by the Wild Woman, my body transcended its chemically induced indifference and regained its traditional sense of mission. Joint by joint, ligament by ligament, I struggled to my feet, then spent a minute reacquainting my flesh with my spirit. I wriggled my toes, splayed my fingers, clapped my hands, massaged my neck. As my pain receptors came back on line, my gums started smarting from the damage inflicted by the Wild Woman's boot.

“She hopes to draw her last breath in sight of the Red Witch,” Edwina 0004 had said. “Draw her last breath,” a locution that suggested a gradual passage, not the abrupt obliteration of “drop dead” or “keel over.”

I raced to the primal Edwina's bedchamber and retrieved the mumquat flagon. Chimes filled the hall, the ominous bongs of the grandfather clock, tolling the noon hour. Each brassy reverberation energized me, and before the twelfth chime sounded I had dashed across the veranda, raced down the steps, and hurled myself into the forest.

 

IN THE TWENTY YEARS
that had elapsed since Londa attempted to stage
Coral Idolatry
on her secret beach, the crimson invertebrates had kept adding their exoskeletons to the Red Witch, so that her once-conical hat now resembled a jester's cap and bells. Otherwise the place hadn't changed much. Conch shells, glistery pebbles, tufts of seaweed, a few dead starfish. Even the piece of Cretan bull driftwood remained intact. The tide advanced in thick staccato whispers, like syllables of an incantation sprung from the witch's brittle lips.

Londa sat on the sand beside a tide pool, head bobbing, legs splayed, back pressed against a boulder. Firming my grip on the flagon, I vaulted the bull and ran toward her. My vatling's eyes were closed, her cheeks pale, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace. A low, liquid moan soughed through her clenched teeth.

The Wild Woman had pursued her program with a vengeance. She had played her part in full. A rivulet of dark, frothy blood streamed from the midriff of Londa's white cotton blouse. It rolled down her white denim shorts, spilled across her thighs, bubbled onto the sand, and flowed along the beach like a freshet bound for the sea.

She pressed her manacled hands against the wound, but the blood kept coming, coating her fingers like potter's slip. She shivered as if packed in ice. For an indeterminate interval, my thoughts stopped dead—perhaps some residual curare had penetrated my brain—and then the questions came, flooding my cranium like the petroleum that had inundated Londa's city. Should I tear off my shirt and bind her wound on the spot? Carry her back to the mansion? Would the act of moving her reverse whatever clotting process had already begun?

I planted a foot in the tide pool, got down on one knee. The scent of iron filled my nostrils. Londa's eyes flickered open. Her tongue thrust forward, accompanied by two dribbles of blood that scored her jaw with crisp red lines, giving her the appearance of a ventriloquist's mute puppet. I expected a scream of pain to follow, but instead she winced and said, with typical Weltanschauung Woman bravado, “Present evidence suggests that the curare did not kill you.”

“Christ. What happened?”

“She stabbed me.”

“With a knife?”

“Sword. My idea. It came from our conquistador.”

“Alonso?”

“Yes. Don Quixote's first name—did you know that? Alonso.”

“I brought you some nectar.”

“Good. Great. Lay it on me, Socrates. Turns out I'm not much of a Stoic after all.”

She tried to speak again, but the words lodged in her throat. Her molars came together, clicking out a meaningless message in an unknowable code. I brought the flagon to her lips. She drank greedily, sputtering and gagging like my netherson perishing in his tumbledown tower.

“Get out your notebook,” she said at last. “It's not every day a philosopher is privileged to watch somebody die. I might say something profound.”

“I'm taking you to Faustino,” I told her. “We'll call in a medevac chopper.”

“I was expecting a razor-sharp pain. Instead it's more like somebody's punching me in the stomach, again and again and again.”

I gave her a second swallow, then slid one arm beneath her legs, another around her shoulders. Her face relaxed, and her teeth stopped chattering. She smiled, awash in the nectar's counterfeit contentment.

“Brace yourself,” I said. “On the count of three, I'm going to pick you up.”

“No, Socrates. Sorry. I've lost too much blood. The sand soaked it up. Imagine the castle we could build. Take your arms away.”

“Faustino, that's the plan. Faustino, then a chopper.”

The nectar continued to bless her. “What's eating you, Socrates? Ashamed of your complicity in all this? Cheer up. You made the best of a bad situation: kill one beaker freak, save ten Phyllistines. Very Utilitarian. Let me go. I mean it.”

I relaxed my muscles but kept my arms in place. “They won't convict you, I promise. We'll hire the best lawyers money can buy.”

“Praise the humble mumquat. Glory be to all rococonuts everywhere. Other than raw existential terror, I don't feel a thing.” And still she bled, growing paler with each passing instant. “Your arms are really bothering me.”

“And once your trial is over, you can go back to work. Londa Sabacthani, bane of Phyllistines, bulwark against Corporate Christi.”

“Sorry. No. This doesn't end happily. Get that through your thick philosopher's skull. I won't be dragged in chains to Rome. Cleopatra had the right idea. She opted for the asp.”

Isis forgive me, Thoth absolve me, I did as Londa wished, withdrawing my arms and jamming my hands into my pockets.

“‘When I am dead, my dearest'—do you know Christina Rossetti's poem?” she said. “Henry taught it to Donya, and Donya taught it to the rest of us. ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me. Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress-tree.'” A sudden spasm contorted her features. “I wrote you a letter. A confession, actually. Like it or not, your gumbo girl gets the last word. You can't contradict a corpse.”

“What sort of confession?”

“Go to the library. Everything's getting dark. Look inside the obligation book.”

“
Against Ethics
?”

“Obligation. I think I'm going blind. Kiss me.”

I pressed my lips to hers. “This is all my fault.” I kissed her mouth, brow, cheeks, and eyes. I kissed her bloody jaw.

“‘Be the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet. And if thou wilt, remember. And if thou wilt, forget.'”

“Of course I'll remember,” I said.

“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.