The Philosopher's Apprentice (10 page)

“I think the Nickelodeon people will go ape,” he said. “I just need to show them a couple of spec scripts.”

Breaching the rain forest, we headed south along the wall, the ground beneath our feet dissolving in muck and marsh, the air thickening with bird cries, primate calls, and peppery swarms of gnats. The farther inland we ventured, the more Isla de Sangre revealed itself as a world of great beauty and abiding strangeness. We gobbled trail mix under the watchful eyes of an alligator clan whose title to the surrounding swamp we were not about to dispute, drank cranberry juice by an amber waterfall cascading down a series of ridges like ale spilling from an ogre's keg, and consumed our lunch near a quicksand bog ringed by astonishing conical blossoms as large and golden as French horns.

“Do you always let Donya cheat at croquet?” I asked, eating the last red grape.

“The first time we played, she lost and became instantly hysterical,” Henry replied. “She ran into the kitchen screaming, ‘I'm no good! I'm no good!' If Chen hadn't intervened, she would've cut off her little finger with a bread knife.”

“Jesus.”

“She's a far more troubled child than she appears. For the immediate future, we're wiring the game in her favor.”

“On the day I first met Londa, she tried to kill a carp,” I said in a commiserating tone. I approached the nearest blossom and inhaled its perfume, a heady scent suggesting pumpkin pie topped with mumquat nectar. “We've spent the past week acting out ethical dilemmas. I think it's helping.”

Henry joined me by the flower, savoring its fragrance. “Oddly enough, the therapy that seems to work for Donya is DVDs of moralistic TV programs.”

“You mean like
Professor Oolong's Oompah-pah Zoo
?”

“Professor Oolong rarely addressed matters of right and wrong. We started her out on
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,
and we've just added that family-values superhero thing from the Jubilation Channel,
The Kindness Crusaders.
Sure, they're grinding the usual salvation ax, but the ratio of ethical signal to evangelical noise is much better than you'd expect. Be gentle, be generous, think of someone besides yourself—who can argue with that?”

“And you've seen progress?”

Henry raised his eyebrows and dipped his head. “Before the month is out, I believe that Donya will come to us and say, ‘I know you've been letting me win at croquet, and I want you to stop it.'”

We resumed our trek, eventually reaching the island's ragged, craggy spine. Here the wall met a second such concrete barrier, angling off abruptly to the right, the juncture reinforced by a sandstone pillar as white and coarse as the saline remains of Lot's wife. Henry suggested that we had “nothing to gain by staying inside the box,” and I agreed. It took us only a minute to locate an overhang
ing kapok limb. We availed ourselves of this natural bridge—despite his bulk, my companion was quite agile—crossing over the rampart without mishap and dropping safely to the ground.

The pillar, we now saw, lay at the hub of three discrete walls. Supplementing the familiar north-to-south barrier were two others, one running southwest along the ridge, its twin coursing southeast into the forest, both stretching past the limits of our vision but seemingly destined for the sea, an arrangement that evidently divided Isla de Sangre into three equal regions. From a frigate bird's perspective, Henry and I were standing in the cusp of an immense slingshot. We proceeded due south, along the trajectory of an imaginary flung stone, improvising a downward path through a dense and fecund wedge of jungle.

By midafternoon the forest had turned to scrub, and then a ribbon of gravel appeared, perpendicular to our path. To be sure, we were inclined to follow this unexpected road—it might teach us something important about the island, and its pursuit was unlikely to involve alligators or quicksand—but we decided it was probably an enticement, built by Edwina to lure her more inquisitive employees away from places she didn't want them to see. We crossed the road and continued our journey, descending toward a line of cypress trees, and in time the guttural hiss of the incoming tide reached our ears.

Beyond the cypress windbreak, another surprise awaited us, a Spanish fortress lying in ruins like a sand castle demolished by a wave. Only the central keep remained, emerging from a rocky spit surrounded by a turbulent green bay. The longer I stared at that looming tower, the more ominous it seemed—a twin to Kafka's castle, perhaps, or an Auschwitz chimney, or a nuclear-tipped missile. Stoicism was an admirable philosophy, and Epicureanism had much to recommend it, but no Greek school would ever equip Londa to comprehend and critique the bombs and rockets of modernity. We must advance to the Enlightenment as soon as possible.

Having come so far without misadventure, Henry and I blithely decided to inspect the woebegone stronghold. We approached slowly, moving among lone acacias and solitary boulders, until at last we reached sea level. A gazebo appeared before us, a bamboo construction as large as a village bandstand, its funnel-shaped roof shading two human figures, one slender and birdlike, the other squat and sluggish.

Anger rushed through me like a hit of grappa. Edwina had lied to us. She and Charnock were not in Chicago any more than Henry and I were in Istanbul.

“Rubbish,” my employer was saying. “Pure twaddle.” She stepped toward the gazebo bench, on which rested a glass container the size and shape of a fire hydrant. “You need a vacation, that's all.”

Henry and I ducked behind the nearest acacia.

“This isn't fatigue,” Charnock said.

“Who's the troll?” Henry whispered.

“Biologist named Charnock,” I replied. “Operates a genetic-engineering lab near Faustino. Overstrung, irritable, probably a little nuts.”

“Coming soon to a theater near you,” Henry muttered, “
The Mad Doctor of Blood Island.
”

“Indeed.”

“That's a real movie.”

“No doubt.”

Scrutinizing the glass object, I realized it was a huge beaker to which various devices—pump, compressor, oxygen tank—had been retrofitted, presumably to sustain whatever being inhabited the foggy interior.

“I'm experiencing—what should I call it?—a crisis of conscience,” Charnock said. “During this past month, I've extinguished forty-three embryos.”

“Naturally you heard their pathetic little screams.” Edwina made no effort to purge her voice of scorn.

“Some screams are silent,” Charnock said.

“Since you so enjoy crying crocodile tears over dead embryos, perhaps you should join a community of like-minded mourners,” Edwina said. “The Roman Catholic Church, for example, or the Republican Party.”

“I had imagined our having a serious discussion.”

Edwina offered no response but instead sat down beside the beaker and contemplated its misty reaches. “You do beautiful work,” she said at last, her tone now free of sarcasm—tender, in fact, almost reverent. “The painter has his pigments, the sculptor his stone, and you have your medium, too.”

“My medium, right,” Charnock said. “Bald egotism combined with rampant ambition and galloping self-deception.” He settled his gelatinous frame onto the bench and heaved a sigh. “Maybe you're right. Maybe I need a vacation.”

“Then take one, for Christ's sake.” Edwina gestured toward the tower. “We can bring everything to fruition as early as…when? Tomorrow afternoon?”

“God rested on Sunday. I intend to do the same.”

“Monday night?”

Charnock grunted in assent.

“And then we'll send you to the Bahamas,” Edwina said.

“I would prefer Hawaii.”

“Excellent choice. You'll have a splendid time. I picture you on Waikiki Beach, drinking mai tais and diddling the native girls.”

“I thought I might get around to reading
War and Peace,
” Charnock said.

At that instant the vapor in the beaker lifted, and I saw a sleek, fishlike something immersed in a translucent fluid. Briefly Charnock and Edwina contemplated the creature, and then the fog rolled in again.

“She'll be the best of the lot,” Charnock said.

“Do you hear the man, Yolly?” Edwina said. “You're the best.
And don't worry about living up to your potential. There are people around here who will do that for you.”

 

NEEDLESS TO SAY
—
a phrase that any language-obsessed, word-bewitched, Wittgenstein-haunted philosopher like myself uses only with great reluctance—needless to say, Edwina's duplicity was the principal topic of conversation as Henry and I headed back to Casa de los Huesos. At first, he sought to explain away her presence in the gazebo. Perhaps the artificial-intelligence conference had been canceled. Maybe Edwina and Charnock had given their presentation and flown directly home. But the tension in Henry's voice suggested that he, too, felt betrayed, and by the time we reached the sandstone pillar, he was imagining how we might deceive Edwina in kind.

“I'll spare her my incredulity but not my curiosity,” he said. “Come Monday night, when she and Charnock do whatever the hell they're planning to do, I'm going to be there, hiding in the shadows. Might I persuade you to join me?”

I responded at once, without consulting the more prudent and self-protective areas of my brain—“You bet, Uncle Rumpus, I'm your man”—and so we agreed to become uninvited visitors to the crumbling tower, spying on our employer and her majordomo as they performed their alchemical mischief.

On Monday morning I left the cottage promptly at nine-thirty and headed for Faustino with the aim of tutoring Londa in Epicureanism. Suddenly, with an almost predatory pounce, she burst from the jungle and, landing on her feet, stationed herself directly in my path. Her attire was as minimalist as a knock-knock joke: a yellow spandex tube top revealing regions of skin both tanned and untanned—apparently she favored one-piece bathing suits—plus pink flip-flops and a white towel slung around her waist like a sarong.

“Hardly the proper outfit for a philosophy lesson,” I admon
ished her. “You'll have plenty of time to go swimming this afternoon, but right now your business is chapter five.”

“You asked me to make up a conversation between an Epicurean and an anti-Epicurean,” she said, opening her shoulder bag and taking out a manuscript of perhaps a dozen pages. “Before I knew it, I'd written a one-act play.”

“That's swell,” I said mordantly. “Now go change into something that bespeaks the life of the mind. I'll read your play in the meantime.”

“I call it
Coral Idolatry,
” she persisted, depositing the pages in my hands. “I've given you the part of Thales, a fictional Greek Epicurean. I'm playing Sythia, a sea nymph seeking to fulfill her destiny. The setting is my secret beach. Follow me.”

Although Londa's interpretation of the assignment struck me as too clever by half, I decided that such creativity was to be encouraged, so I allowed her to lead me along a path I'd never taken before. In time the trees and bushes yielded to dunes as white as refined sugar, a pristine canvas that, as we continued our walk, the incoming tide painted in agreeable shades of beige and brown. A quarter mile out to sea, a mound of crimson coral rose from the reef like a buoy, and the instant Londa told me the formation's name, the Red Witch, I knew exactly what she meant, for it indeed resembled a crone wearing a conical hat.

“Don't worry, I'm not about to bore you with a thousand facts about witches,” Londa said.

Spontaneously I removed my socks and sandals, allowing my toes to savor the sand. Directly before us lay a piece of driftwood that suggested the horned head of a Cretan bull, and Londa now instructed me to sit between the prongs and wait for the curtain to rise. I declined, explaining that the sun was too hot for a pale philosopher from Boston, and if I stayed out here much longer, I'd be broiled alive. Londa responded by retrieving a bottle of sunscreen from her bag and spraying my bare arms.

“Close your eyes,” she demanded.

I did so. A vivid bloodscape filled my field of vision. Londa lacquered my brow, jaw, nose, and neck, rubbing the juice into my pores with two contiguous fingertips.

“Your cue occurs halfway down the page,” she said. “‘Will the man I see before me grant my wish?'”

She unhitched the towel from her waist, letting it drop in a heap on the sand. Her bikini bottom matched her tube top in color and audacity. She headed toward the Red Witch, wading into the bay until it reached her hips. She took a breath and disappeared. Evidently her diving accident had not left her with an indiscriminate fear of water. I sat on the driftwood and glanced at the script. The setting was a Greek island called Sérifos. According to the stage directions, the undine Sythia would now abandon her home beneath the waves and approach Thales as he relaxed on the shore thinking rarefied Epicurean thoughts.

“Action!” I called in Londa's direction.

Slowly, elegantly, she rose from her aquatic abode, the foam spilling from her hair, cascading down her tube top, trickling along her thighs. She strode toward me through the surf, each step an emphatic splash.

“‘An undine lives with one purpose in her heart,'” she declaimed, as that was indeed Sythia's first line. “‘She seeks a mortal who will love her, betroth her, and lavish his body upon her, for in this manner alone might she acquire a soul.'” Gaining the beach, she took a dozen steps forward and stood over Thales, dripping seawater on his script. “‘Two hundred days have I followed the submarine currents, seeking the legendary Isle of Sérifos, whose pleasure-loving Hedonists never hesitate to avail themselves of succulent nymphs and willing sylphs. Could it be that my search has finally ended? Might the man I see before me grant my wish?'”