The Philosopher's Apprentice (22 page)

 

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING
her D and C, Natalie grew increasingly sad, until it seemed she was in thrall to that wan and manipulative troglodyte from Book One, Canto IX, whom Spenser had with characteristic subtlety named Despair. Nothing helped. When I recommended that we get a cat, she reminded me about her allergies. When I proposed that we fly to the Bahamas for the weekend, she pointed to a stack of ungraded papers. When I suggested she might be a candidate for Prozac, she accused me of wanting her to be “somebody else, anybody else, so long as she isn't Natalie Novak.” We had sex infrequently and indifferently, keeping further
embryos at bay with condoms. Neither of us was surprised when I reverted to my old habit of staying in the store after hours, Mason the Gutenberg ascetic, the hermeneutical hermit, immured by other people's wisdom.

With our romance withering, our affection wilting, and our rapport a thing of the past, we did what any rational couple would do under the circumstances. We got married. The ceremony occurred at the home of Natalie's geeky medievalist brother, Jerry. We decided that no depressing people could attend, which ruled out our parents and most of our relatives. Besides Jerry, our audience was limited to Dexter Padula, my sister Delia—then in the process of transplanting her nonexistent acting career from New York to L.A.—and three of Natalie's friends: willowy Helen Vanderbilt, who'd recently published three chapbooks of unpublishable poetry, zaftig Margery Kaplan, who'd gone to high school with Natalie and now raised basset hounds, and a lantern-jawed Henry James scholar named Abner Cassidy, Natalie's former lover and present adviser, to whom I took an instant liking despite his carnal knowledge of my bride.

“I am grateful to thee, Archimago,” she told me on our wedding night, Archimago being our favorite
Faerie Queene
character, a protean magician deployed by Spenser to symbolize, variously, hypocrisy, Satan, and the pope. “Not every man would put up with a melancholic Emily Brontë freak who can't finish her dissertation.”

“If 'twould please thee, Malecasta, I would fly to the moon and paint it the color of thine eyes,” I replied, Malecasta being the mistress of Castle Joyous, the sensualist's paradise, a magnet for every letch and satyr in Faerie Land.

To consolidate her rising spirits, Natalie began following a regimen that, while it sounded like something out of a particularly vapid self-help book, actually seemed to work. I couldn't say whether her deliverance from Despair—“his raw-bone cheeks, through penury and pine, were shrunk into his jaws, as he did never dine”—traced to her nightly doses of St. John's wort, her twenty daily laps in the
YMCA pool, the Tuesday-night fiction-reading group she'd organized at the Caffeine Fiend, my jovial willingness to be the butt of her jokes, or a combination of all four remedies. In any event the ogre loosened his grip and slunk back to his lair, a place “dark, doleful, dreary like a greedy grave that still for carrion carcasses doth crave.”

It was not long after Natalie's recovery that, courtesy of our subscription to the
Boston Globe,
Londa's name and photograph began appearing routinely in our lives. During that era, of course, hardly a week went by without a Dame Quixote story seeing print, but this was front-page stuff—the revelation by the Reverend Enoch Anthem, founder and chairman of a postrationalist think tank called the Center for Stable Families, of an outrageous scheme hatching in that bastion of degenerate feminism, Themisopolis. Somehow Anthem had obtained an audio recording of a meeting between Londa's staff and the vice president of the Baudrillard Simulacrum Corporation, a Toulouse-based manufacturer of Disneyesque audio-animatronic robots. When the FBI decided that Reverend Anthem's case against Londa was fundamentally preposterous, he took his complaint to the
Washington Post,
whereupon the tale proliferated like a bacterial culture, flourishing coast-to-coast in a thousand cybernetic petri dishes.

If Anthem's account of Baudrillard recording could be believed, many ideas were entertained on that sweltering August afternoon, from the clever to the harebrained. In one particularly wild scenario, an enormous robotic replica of Abraham Lincoln, scaled to the ponderous proportions of the famous D.C. sculpture, would appear on the Capitol steps, screaming a challenge to the assembled representatives. “Does any man amongst you cleave to an ideal higher than his own reelection? Who will tell me of the time he favored the demands of his conscience whilst resisting the tyranny of his constituents?” An equally outlandish project had the Sisters Sabacthani smuggling some simian androids into the Primate House of
the Washington Zoological Gardens. The next day's visitors would witness the New World monkeys lamenting the destruction of their relatives' jungle habitats, a crime readily traceable to American fast-food corporations bent on creating new grazing lands for beef cattle. But it was Operation Redneck, the most demented of the afternoon's brainstorms, that caught Enoch Anthem's attention. The plan called for the Baudrillard people to construct a score of android joggers indistinguishable from their flesh-and-blood prototypes, each decked out in a T-shirt endorsing reproductive rights, gay marriage, evolutionary biology, or some other institution of which Jesus Christ disapproved. Sooner or later a reactionary motorist, intoxicated by beer or piety or both, would run down one of these benighted athletes, a gesture that the motorist would not live to regret, for the robots were in fact ambulatory bombs, wired to explode on impact.

A lardish man whose small head, bulbous frame, and anxious demeanor put me in mind of a bowling pin about to topple, Enoch Anthem spent the next three weeks attacking Operation Redneck through mass mailings, saturation blogging, and dozens of appearances on what Natalie called the “revengelical” networks. He accused Londa of concocting “a terrorist plot worthy of those who crucified our Lord,” and, by the pollsters' reckoning, a majority of Americans agreed. The image of even the sleaziest yahoo being blown sky-high by a leftist French C-3PO did not sit well with Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public.

Ever since Natalie had gotten me to admit that appreciable levels of sexual tension had characterized the classroom climate back on Isla de Sangre, she'd been vaguely jealous of Londa. But, like almost every feminist in the Western world, Natalie also admired Dame Quixote, and she urged me to proclaim publicly that my former pupil would never implement anything so rash as Operation Redneck. I was within hours of phoning the
New York Times
when Pauline Chilton, that canny spinmistress, announced that Dr. Sabacthani would be holding a press conference “for the purpose of
answering Reverend Anthem's absurd accusations.” Once again, it seemed, Isis and Horus and Thoth had come to my rescue. For the immediate future, at least, I would be permitted to remain outside Londa's sphere.

Over a hundred journalists attended the event, which Natalie and I watched on television while consuming gourmet microwave pizza. Londa acquitted herself brilliantly, using the occasion not only to assail Enoch Anthem as “a man who wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked into his house with a duck on its head” but also to remind her fellow Americans that “the Themisopolis community has an impeccable record of eschewing violence in all its forms, which puts us one up on the Center for Stable Families.” Before the week was out, the polls disclosed that Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public had forgiven Dame Quixote her offensive fantasies.

“Londa was wrong about one thing,” I told Natalie. “Operation Redneck was pure whimsy, but there really
is
an ambulatory bomb inside the walls of Themisopolis.”

Natalie had heard me question Londa's sanity before, but she'd never found my arguments persuasive. “How long till she detonates?”

“I'll give her three years at the most.”

“Hey, Archimago, want to hear something you don't want to hear? Okay, sure, you're the Dame Quixote expert around here, and I'll admit it's possible she's riding for a fall. But I can't help wondering whether, deep down, you believe that fighting the good fight against clowns like Anthem is a
man's
job.”

“She snuffed a candle with her palm. She stuck a thorn under her thumbnail.”

“An interesting person, no doubt about it. If you ever see her again, I want her autograph.”

 

ON THE EVENING OF OUR FIRST
wedding anniversary, I came home bearing a dozen roses, presenting them to a startled Natalie
with a theatrical flourish and a facetious remark about the care and feeding of the Japanese beetles inhabiting the bouquet. Our eyes met. Natalie was ravishing even when pained and embarrassed.

“Dear Abby,” I said, “my wife forgot our wedding anniversary. Should I feel hurt by this role reversal, or should I laugh it off?”

Seeking to break the grip of the Spenserian monster Error, Natalie forced a smile, squeezed my hand, and invited me to dine with her at the Tasty Triffid, our favorite vegetarian restaurant. I accepted graciously. We made pagan love on the couch, then went out to eat. I spent the soup course joking about a hypothetical restaurant for total carnivores, the Bleeding Carrot, its menu featuring zucchini-flavored sausage, chicken wings prepared to taste like broccoli, and ersatz cauliflower made from pork. My wife pretended to be amused. She owed me that.

Later, standing on the front stoop while Natalie rummaged through her handbag searching for her keys, I realized I might have forgotten to lock the store safe: hardly a crisis—the chances of a break-in were low. Still, I felt compelled to check. I told Natalie I'd be back in time for another roll in the bower, then dashed off.

My habitual pedestrian commute took me along an asphalt path girding the south bank of the Charles, a pleasant twenty-minute stroll past willow trees and park benches. By day this promenade teemed with joggers, bicyclers, mothers pushing strollers, and those good-hearted folk whom the ducks had conditioned to toss bread into the water, but by night it was normally deserted, despite secondhand illumination from the Storrow Drive streetlamps. Alone, I moved through the soft summer air, listening to the river lap the shore with the soft, rhythmic gurgling of Error suckling her progeny.

My solitude did not last. Within minutes I became aware, subliminally at first, then with a disquieting certainty, of a stooped and sinister presence dogging my steps, flitting in and out of the shadows like an immense luna moth paying court to the moon. An asthma victim, evidently, every breath an effort. Doubtless Boston had its
share of compulsive stalkers and after-dark psychos, but why had this wheezing Jack the Ripper picked
me
?

Keep moving, Mason. Left foot, right foot, left, right. I patted my jacket pockets, hoping I'd brought the cell phone. No such luck. The nearest police station occupied a location known to several thousand Bostonians, and God, but not to me. In my spinning brain, a tactic materialized. If I sprinted to the store, I could probably put a locked door between Jack and myself in a matter of minutes.

The stalker drew nearer, hyperventilating like an expectant mother practicing her Lamaze exercises. I broke into a run. Parked cars flew past, lighted windows, dark trees, malevolent Dumpsters. At last the store loomed up. The key vibrated in my hand. Somehow I jiggered it into the lock. Securing the door behind me, I fingered every switch within reach. The secular radiance of sodium vapor flowed forth. I drew a thick breath, my heart thumping in my rib cage as I wondered what to do next: call the cops, call Natalie, or arm myself with the clawhammer from the toolbox Dexter kept under the counter.

The hammer seemed the best option, and I was about to grab it when Jack hobbled into view, his silhouette filling the doorframe, his voice effortlessly penetrating the bulletproof pane. “Keep the door shut,” he insisted, four clipped and staccato syllables. “When you let me in, it must be a free choice, no coercion, no threats.”

“What do you want?”

He ignored my question. “I'm completely serious,” he said. “A free choice.”

“Who are you?”

“Like that
other
free choice you made about me.”

“I've never met you.”

“This is true, Father. Acknowledge me when you're ready. I'm a patient fetus.”

My intestines tightened. Father? Fetus? What?

“Where are you from?” I asked the man who thought he was my
son. “Which institution? I can't help you. Really. Only the doctors can help you.”

“Perhaps you and Mother would've named me Peter. Or Nigel. Biff. Oliver. Marcus. Kelton. Call me John Snow. Things would go better between us if you unlocked the door. John Snow and Mason Ambrose, talking face-to-face.”

Without knowing why, I did as the intruder requested. As he struggled across the threshold, I thought of the second Kohlbergian dilemma with which I'd presented Londa: Helga Eschbach breaking into the pharmacy to steal the radium extract.

Not until he'd reeled into the light did I realize that, far from being a conventional urban menace, this vagabond was fundamentally pathetic, not Jack the Ripper but John the Broken. He moved with the gait of an arthritic locust. His defective spine had imprisoned him in a permanent cringe. His right arm hung limp as a bell rope, while his left eye, unyoked from his nervous system, turned upward in perpetual contemplation of clouds and geese.

“You called me Father,” I said.

“Would you prefer Papa?
Mon vieux père
?”

A spasm of sorrow contorted John Snow's face, which was pocked and stippled like a golf ball. He wore torn Levi's, a soiled beige windbreaker, and a scuffed baseball cap sporting the Red Sox logo. Shuffling forward, he fixed me with an expression mingling disdain with curiosity, and I saw to my horror that his bushy eyebrows and Roman nose corresponded to my own, even as Natalie's genes accounted for his ample lips and dimpled cheeks.