The Philosopher's Apprentice (17 page)

In theorizing about the children's demons, Brock seized upon Henry's remark of the previous summer—“And so they pass their days in solitude, waiting for each other”—and speculated that each girl had somehow intuited the existence of her doppelgängers. These nebulous presences, these intimations of a second self, and a third self after that, were haunting our charges night and day. My own theory was that
Geworfenheit
had started catching up with the girls. Their thrownness was sending them over the edge. The least elaborate and, as it turned out, most accurate explanation came from Jordan, who noted that Edwina's failing health was no longer something she could hide. Her death was now encoded all over her body, and the children had deciphered the woeful text.

Oddly enough, it was little Donya who first put her fear into words, taking Henry and Brock aside and describing her mother's skin, whose mottled brown surface she compared to the peel of an overripe banana. Her tutors told her the analogy was astute, but they said no more. Yolly spoke up next, mentioning with feigned casualness that Edwina seemed to have difficulty drawing her next breath. Jordan admitted that she'd observed the same phenomenon. Only Londa remained silent concerning her mother's symptoms, exhibiting instead a preoccupation with death in the abstract. This development would not have surprised Heidegger. The more clearly the
Dasein
recognizes its thrownness, the more intense the encounter with nothingness.

“Which alternative is worse, I wonder?” she said. “To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “It's ambiguous.”

“If I ever get to be God,” she said, unleashing the grin of the
person who'd invented Largesse, “my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.”

Much to the faculty's dismay, Edwina declined to be honest with her daughters, answering with weasel words and outright lies their questions about her blotchy skin, sunken eyes, and chronic exhaustion. Usually she told the girls she looked haggard merely because she'd been working too hard. Sometimes she mentioned an experimental drug guaranteed to restore her vitality. I could not exactly accuse Edwina of being in denial: privately she still spoke freely of her disease, noble Nefer baring her breast to Sinuhe. But by leaving to us the task of preparing the children for her death, she confirmed my suspicion that this whole byzantine scenario, with its interlaced deceptions and impacted mendacity, was being performed solely to appease her voracious egotism, and the children's ultimate welfare be damned.

“My mother's dying, isn't she?” Londa said abruptly as we sat down to discuss social Darwinism, Mengelism, and other dark chapters in the Galápagos revolution. “Tell me the truth.”

“She's dying. Yes. I'm sorry.”

“I knew it. Fuck. Will she die soon?”

I squeezed her hand between my palms. “Sooner rather than later. I'm so sorry.”

“When I was in love with Gavin, I used to have horrible dreams.” With her free hand Londa wiped away her tears. “Once we went swimming, and he drowned in the bay. Another time Alonso shot him with his musket, and the next thing I knew, Gavin was lying in a coffin.” Approaching the conquistador, she grasped the hilt of his sword. “I crouched over him, trying to push his eyes open with one of his drumsticks, but they were frozen shut.” Abruptly she pulled the sword from its scabbard, sending a harsh clang through the air like the resonance of a diabolical tuning fork. She held the weapon upright, its blade corroded with rust and tinged with dubious battle.
“I would say that my life is underpopulated, wouldn't you? Gavin's gone. My father's gone. Mother's dying. I'm not a happy person, Mason. You'll always be my friend, won't you?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe someday I'll learn how to use a sword,” she said, sheathing the weapon. “A woman should be ready to take the offensive at a moment's notice.”

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING
,
Edwina staged a birthday party for Donya at Casa de los Huesos. The child was now ostensibly seven. I didn't doubt she'd been winched from the vat on that date, and giving her advent the name “birthday” was by no means the most dishonest game Edwina had ever played with the English language, but the whole affair still struck me as pathetic and false.

All the guests brought gifts. Chen Lee gave Donya a pair of cuckoo clocks, suggesting that she mount them on opposite sides of her room, so that once an hour the birds would enter into a spirited conversation concerning the time of day. Dr. Charnock presented her with one of his biological contrivances, a colony of twelve sea horses from whose customized bodies sprouted delicate membranous wings. My own contribution was a new addition to Donya's stuffed-animal collection, Septimus Squid, whom I'd crafted from odds and ends found around Faustino—a silk pillow for the body, discarded vacuum-cleaner hoses for the tentacles, tennis balls for the eyes. But the most extravagant offering came from Henry and Brock, the Stargazer Deluxe, a portable planetarium they'd obtained two months earlier during a trip to Orlando. You inflated the
plastic dome with a bicycle pump, thereby creating a cavity large enough for the projector and several amateur astronomers. After everyone squeezed inside, you threw the switch, then watched in awe as dozens of constellations materialized on the walls.

It may have been Donya's party, but it was Edwina's celebration. The Übermom was everywhere at once that afternoon, distributing conical hats and plastic noisemakers, supervising rounds of Pin the Horn on the Unicorn, leading the guests in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You,” and serving the chocolate cake she'd meticulously baked and frosted. From start to finish the event delighted Donya, though occasionally I saw her cast a worried eye on her mother's forearms, the blue veins rising from Edwina's skin like earthworms dispossessed by a rainstorm.

In the name of physical fitness and metaphysical prowess—I was still taking every opportunity to weed my brain of its Aristotelian dandelions—I had jogged to Casa de los Huesos. But being bloated now with chocolate cake and cherry-vanilla ice cream, I was disinclined to repeat the regimen, and so I gladly accepted Charnock's offer of a lift home in his Land Rover.

“I would like your perspective on a philosophical problem,” he said as the villa's silhouette receded in the rearview mirror.

“What sort of philosophical problem?” I asked, cringing. While I was always eager to dally with Lady Philosophy, Charnock was among the last people with whom I could imagine having a substantive discussion about Plato's cave or Heidegger's abyss.

“Ethical.”

My cringe entered the realm of contortion. “I see.”

“I'm impressed by how much you've helped Londa,” Charnock said. “Being the oldest of the three, she was doubtless the hardest to civilize.”

“Civilizing her was a walk in the park. The challenge will be to decivilize her, so she can function in the real world.”

A soft rain descended on the Land Rover and the surrounding scrub. Charnock activated the wipers, thus compounding the visibility problem by smearing grime across the windshield.

“Am I a murderer, Ambrose?” he asked abruptly. “Do I have blood on my hands?”

“I'm not following you,” I said, though in fact I was, his conversation with Edwina in the gazebo having alerted me to his protective attitude toward microscopic beings.

At the press of a button, Charnock caused dual jets of cleaning fluid to intersect the path of the windshield wipers. Three strokes, and the glass was clean again.

Among the steps required to satisfy Edwina's “unfathomable passion,” he explained, “her unhealthy need to create iterations of herself,” was a technique he found repulsive. Yolly's advent had entailed the sacrifice of forty-three embryos. Donya had come into the world at the cost of sixty-eight. Behind Londa lay ninety-seven canceled lives. “Every one of those creatures, placed in the RXL-313, would've become a person. Naturally we always had a
reason
for throwing it away. Spina bifida, dysfunctional heart, malformed kidneys. But in seven cases—I remember them all—in seven cases Edwina asked me to discard the thing merely because she didn't feel right about it. ‘This one isn't my daughter. This one won't do.'”

Absently I fiddled with the favor I'd borne away from Donya's party, a noisemaker capped by a coiled paper tube. “I can hear Edwina saying that.”

“So why did I obey her? I'm not sure. When it came to our mutant mangrove, I wouldn't do the dirty work—I made Edwina extract the cerebrum on her own—but with those embryos I lost my bearings. I dumped them into the Bahía de Matecumba and let the salt water destroy them.”

The road from Casa de los Huesos now brought us to the soar
ing façade of the southwest wall, its spiky iron gate padlocked shut so that Donya's life would never accidentally spill into Yolly's. Charnock had the key, and thus we passed without incident into the principality of Torre de la Carne.

“I'm afraid Western philosophy can't answer your question,” I said. “Aristotle never told us what basket to put our eggs in. Is a zygote a human being, an insensate speck, or something else? For once in his life, he neglected to categorize something.”

“I can feel the blood,” Charnock said. “Coagulating on my fingertips, crusting under my nails.”

A mile beyond the gate, the road split, one branch running southeast toward the Spanish fortress, the other becoming the east-west gravel strip that Henry and I had encountered during our explorations. Had Charnock and I followed the lower fork, we might have seen Yolly—Yolly and her Chincoteague pony and her forty-three phantom sisters—but we logically took the alternative, heading for the wall demarking Londa's domain with its ninety-seven ghostly blastocysts.

“Western philosophy can't help you,” I told Charnock, “but maybe I can. I think you're being too hard on yourself. It's all very well to become an antiabortion activist and spend every waking hour fetishizing fetuses, but those seven discarded embryos belong to a different class altogether.”

“Let's not call them fetishists,” he admonished me. “Let's not stoop to caricature.”

I blushed profusely, a crimson chagrin made even redder by my anger at Charnock. Yes, I'd maligned the embryophiles, unfairly for all I knew, but I hated being scolded about it by this creepy curmudgeon. “My point is that when most people speak of the rights of the unborn, they're simply expressing a hope that every existing pregnancy will come to term. They don't mean that all conceivable souls must immediately achieve
Dasein.
Otherwise their motto would be ‘Fuck now.'”

Charnock laughed—probably not for the first time in his life, though I couldn't be sure. “‘Fuck now.' Not a slogan you're likely to find on Father O'Malley's rear bumper.”

I placed the noisemaker to my lips and blew, producing a festive toot. “If Father O'Malley came upon the schematics for your RXL-313, would he set about building one of his own, so he could pass his evenings manufacturing children in his basement? I think not. Most likely he'd burn the schematics on the spot.”

“A beaker is not a uterine wall,” Charnock said haughtily. “An ontogenerator is not a womb. I knew that before we began this conversation.” He lifted his hand level with his face, studying the pudgy digits. “No solvent can remove this stain. Not soap, not turpentine, not sulfuric acid.”

I offered him a commiserating grunt, saying I was sorry that I hadn't relieved his guilt.

“I didn't expect you would.” He restored his tainted hand to the steering wheel. “Nevertheless, I found our exchange fruitful. Having heard your incoherent thoughts on embryos, I realize what I should do with my life. Edwina has—what?—two months to live. After she passes away, I'll shut down my laboratory, forsake molecular genetics, and devote myself to a different domain.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“The spiritual realm.”

“Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.

Charnock firmed his grip on the wheel, squeezing until his fingers turned white. “‘This one is not my daughter. This one won't do.' Seven different times she said it, and then she gave me the beaker, and I made my decision, the vat or the bay? In each case I would swish the fluid around and watch the embryo swimming in its little universe. I always flushed the creature away. I'm not sure whether I still believe in God, Ambrose, but I know I no longer believe in biology.”

 

EDWINA DECIDED TO ACCOMPLISH HER DYING
where she'd done so much of her living, in the Faustino conservatory with its damp, coagulated air and Mesozoic fragrances. Somehow Javier had maneuvered her bed, a wide gurney hedged with satin pillows, through the labyrinth of ferns and vines, bringing it to rest alongside Proserpine's salt pond. Instead of obeying God's banishment decree, this Eve would stand her ground and die in the Garden, prostrate before the Tree of Knowledge.

Two male nurses from Miami, solemn Hector and jovial Sebastian, supervised the requisite technology—no votive candles for Edwina, no smoking censers or hovering priests—an array that included a cardiac monitor, a liquid-nutrient fount, and a computerized morphine dispenser, this last machine deployed to guarantee that in the end she could elect to trade lucidity for lack of pain. With their immaculate white jackets and equally immaculate trousers, Hector and Sebastian looked less like medical personnel than stewards on a cruise ship—and the conservatory had indeed become such a vessel, the sleek and seaworthy
Lady Daedalus,
bearing Edwina to that distant keep where even the wealthiest woman is beyond the reach of ransom.

Not surprisingly, the Übermom had written an endgame scenario that would enable her to continue regarding Donya, Londa, and Yolly as a single individual occupying three distinct space-time domains. The plan called for each child to pay her mother a separate farewell visit, so Edwina would feel she was experiencing a succession of adieus from the same daughter. Only after she was dead might we teachers escort our pupils out of the conservatory, introduce them to one another, and help them weather the hurricane of cognitive dissonance that was certain to follow.

While Henry, Brock, and I all thought it was a bad idea for Donya to attend Edwina's passing, Jordan took the opposite view. She did not recommend that Donya be present when Edwina actually drew
her last breath, but she insisted that the child join the vigil, lest she spend the rest of her life vaguely anticipating her mother's return. A logical argument, and it soon gained everyone's assent, though it seemed to me that if we didn't whisk Donya away in time, she might spend that same life trying to forget her mother's death throes.

Shortly after dawn on the first Friday in June, as golden spokes of sunlight filled the eastern sky, and the toucans and parrots loudly proclaimed the acoustic borders of their territories, Javier telephoned to say that within the hour Henry, Brock, and Donya would arrive at Faustino and proceed to the geodesic dome. Londa and I, meanwhile, should go to the library, where we must wait until summoned, even as Jordan and Yolly bided their time in the drawing room.

Twenty minutes later Londa and I settled into the russet leather couch before the ancient-history section, her head pressed against my shoulder in a posture recalling one of Jordan's best digital photos: Oyster nuzzling Yolly, captioned “I Love You, Now How About Some Oats?” Evidently aware that something was amiss, Quetzie fluttered around the room in erratic ellipses. A soft staccato wheezing rose from deep within Londa's frame, a kind of anticipatory dirge. Part of me wanted to reveal that her mother's death would not be the most disorienting of the day's events, but having kept my promise to Edwina all these months, I wasn't about to break it now.

The morose Hector appeared and announced that Edwina required a sponge bath, after which she would receive her beloved daughter, “sponge bath” no doubt being a code term for Donya's visit to the deathbed. There was little conviction in the man's voice—I hoped he was better at nursing than deceit—but Londa seemed to accept his story. As Hector slipped out of the library, Quetzie landed on the conquistador's helmet and squawked out his newest sentence,
“Cogito ergo sum,”
which Londa had taught him the previous month by way of commemorating, as she'd put it, “the first anniversary of
that fateful meeting between a Boston philosopher and a crazy teenager without a conscience.”

A cry of grief slashed through the glutinous air. I knew its source immediately. Little Donya's scream contained a greater measure of cosmic despair than I thought a seven-year-old's soul could hold.

“That sounded like a child,” Londa said.

“It did,” I muttered. “It was,” I added.

A second cry, same voice, penetrated the library.

“What child?” demanded Londa. “Do you know her?”

Now that Donya had revealed herself to Londa, should I continue cleaving to Edwina's script? I felt no such duty. Given this turn of events, the charade was surely beyond salvation.

“I've eaten cookies in her tree house,” I said.

“Who is she?”

A third shriek. The iguana, frightened, hopped from the conquistador to Londa's shoulder. Without a moment's hesitation, Londa strode through the French doors and scanned the hallway.
“Cogito ergo sum,”
Quetzie repeated with inimitable reptilian dismay.

“Remember the day I theorized that you might have a sister named Donya?” I said, drawing abreast of Londa. “In point of fact, the person making those sounds—”