The Philosopher's Apprentice (23 page)

“I am an immaculoid,” he continued. “Pure as milk, clean as soap, spotless as the lamb. Maturational age, thirty years. Chronological age, twenty days.”

“Did Charnock send you after me? Dr. Vincent Charnock?”

“Pure, clean, spotless, and yet you scraped me out of the world.”

I staggered toward a newly arrived shipment of Harvard Classics and slumped onto the carton, all the bones and fibers and fancies of
my
Dasein
trembling with perplexity. By what means had the degenerate behind this scheme obtained the residue of Natalie's D and C? Did he pay for the material or simply steal it? No need for the whole fetus, of course. The tiniest scrap of tissue would have sufficed. A single healthy cell.

“All satisfaction is denied my kind,” John Snow said. “We can smell the rose but never savor it. Taste the cherry but never relish it.”

A single cell. Next stop, the petri dish, followed by the high-tech beaker, and then the ontogenerator.

“Never to enjoy the sun's warmth on my face—that's what you did to me.”

And finally the DUNCE cap. John Snow's creator, I decided, was surely Charnock, using the RXL-313 to salve his guilt over sluicing away seven viable embryos.

“Never the sweetness of an ice-cream cone.”

Or, if not Charnock, then…Londa? Unthinkable, but not unimaginable.

My visitor sprawled on a carton of high-school biology texts and stared in fascination at his good hand, as if just now realizing that his arm terminated in this marvelous device. He leaned toward me. Strangely enough, my anxiety faded, supplanted by an unexpected affection. When John Snow moved to kiss me, I did not recoil but submitted my cheek to the gesture.

“Does the name Londa Sabacthani mean anything to you?” I asked.

“Stainless as a saint.” He rose from the biology texts, fixing me with his mother's blue eyes.

“Was Londa your creator?”

“Innocent as rain.” He approached the entryway and, in a surprisingly vigorous move for one so enfeebled, yanked open the door. “Natalie Novak made me. Mason Ambrose made me.”

“Must you leave already?” I asked.

“Never the fragrance of a pine forest.”

“Are you going to visit Natalie?”

“Every child deserves a maternal caress, whether it gives him pleasure or not.”

“Will you see her
tonight
?”

“Not tonight, but soon. I intend to call her Mother. She won't like it. Never the song of a lark. Sleep well, Father. Happy wedding anniversary. You shouldn't have murdered me.”

John Snow slipped soundlessly into the night, closing the door behind him, and for a full ten minutes I simply sat on the Harvard Classics, my mind as blank as a newborn vatling's soul.

MOVED BY THE FRUSTRATION
her lustful son endures when the chaste and lovely Florimell declines his offer of rape, a malevolent woodland witch hatches a plan. She will present her jilted offspring with a simulated maiden, easily overwhelmed and eminently ravishable. Thus does the byzantine plot of
The Faerie Queene
give birth to yet another strange creature, the False Florimell, an alchemical concoction on whom the witch has bestowed burning lamps for eyes, golden wire for hair, and an indwelling sprite “to rule the carcass dead,” the carcass in question being a fusion of painted wax and, of all things, snow, a material the witch presumably selected in sly mockery of the actual Florimell's virginity.

Sly mockery was probably the last thing on the mind of whatever unbalanced biologist had fashioned my nocturnal visitor and named him John Snow. Most probably he wanted to convey his belief that this fetus, like all fetuses, was innocence incarnate, snow become flesh, far closer to God's original intentions for the human race than those depraved
Homo sapiens sapiens
who'd actually inherited the Earth. Smart money said the immaculoid's creator had never read a single word of
The Faerie Queene.

Against all odds, I remembered to check the safe—it was indeed locked—whereupon I left the store and sprinted pell-mell down Comm Ave. By jostling pedestrians and ignoring a half-dozen bright orange
DON'T WALK
signs, I reached our front stoop in under ten minutes. Natalie stood silhouetted in the parlor window: the Sisyphus of Sherborn Street, jogging on her treadmill. I lurched through the front door, rushed across the marble foyer, the cracks running every which way like John Snow's disordered dendrites, and ascended the staircase two steps at a time. In my imagination a horrid tableau appeared, the immaculoid hovering over Natalie as she ran frantically in place, faster and faster. John Snow remained at her side, spewing out accusations.

I burst into the parlor. Natalie threw the switch. The treadmill jerked to a halt.

“Welcome back,” she said, panting.

“Something happened tonight.”

“You look like you've seen a ghost.”

There was ultimately no way to talk about John Snow without upsetting Natalie, but I still decided to broach the subject obliquely. “Do you remember the False Florimell? Sometimes called the Snowy Florimell?”

“What about her?”

“The first doppelgänger in literature, cooked up by an evil witch. Here's the truth of it, darling. Somebody has made a living facsimile of our son.”

“What son?”

“You know what son. He calls himself John Snow.”

“You're not making much sense.”

“Our fetus has come back.”

“That's preposterous.”

“No. Technology.”

We spent the rest of the night in our claustrophobic kitchen,
talking and drinking coffee, and by dawn Natalie had become convinced that someone—Vincent Charnock or Londa Sabacthani or perhaps a third party—had used the ontogenerator and its collateral DUNCE cap for a stupefyingly sick purpose. Caffeinated but exhausted, we shuffled into the bedroom. A leprous, smirking moon glowed through the window. Heavy traffic growled and squealed its way along Comm Ave.

“He intends to track you down,” I said. “Be prepared to have him call you Mother.”

“Mother, and also murderer?”

“Yes, but that's just the DUNCE cap talking. Believe it or not, I felt a certain tenderness toward him. Especially when he kissed my cheek.”

The last time Natalie and I had gone to bed sobbing in each other's arms, John Snow had been the cause. Tonight, déjà vu—the same desperate embrace, the same passage into sleep on a stream of tears, only now the occasion was not our fetus's death but his equally distressing resurrection. I vowed that if Londa was behind this business, I would accept that long-standing invitation to appear on
Cordelia Drake Live,
telling the viewing public that my former pupil, though ostensibly a humanitarian, was not above dabbling in biological diabolism. If you want my opinion, Cordelia, Dr. Sabacthani is out of her skull.

I awoke at noon and composed an e-mail to Londa, a message that would come as either a bolt from the blue or proof that her plot against me was proceeding apace. In a few terse sentences, I told her about my bookstore, my marriage, my success in publishing
Ethics from the Earth,
and finally my fetus, calling his advent—for I wanted to think the best of her—“a bit of news that will shock you.” I stressed the ambiguity of the situation, the strange combination of pathos and banality that characterized John Snow's speech, his unsettling aura of sadness leavened with menace. “Might we get
together soon and discuss this misbegotten beaker freak?” I clicked on Send and hoped for the best.

Later I went trolling for the Mad Doctor of Blood Island, feeding “Vincent Charnock” into my search engine and, when that failed, “ontogenerator.” Zero. Growing desperate, I hunted for Web pages containing “immaculoid” or “John Snow” or “Smell the rose but never savor it.” Zilch.

On Saturday night Natalie suffered her first visitation. She and Helen Vanderbilt, the self-appointed poet, were leaving a revival of
My Dinner with Andre
at the Coolidge Corner Cinema when a gaunt man shuffled out of the darkness, laid a hand on her shoulder, and introduced himself. Their conversation was brief but pointed. The immaculoid called her “a ruthless exterminator of defenseless babies.” Natalie countered that carrying him to term might have killed her.

“Then there would have been no net loss of life,” he replied.

“Evidently there was an absolute gain,” Natalie said.

“I am not alive,” John Snow asserted.

As he slipped back into the shadows, Helen turned to Natalie and said, “What the fuck?”

The creature kept his distance on Sunday, but then the haunting began in full, continuing unabated for the rest of the week. He attended our every waking minute, sometimes by his physical presence, more often through our troubled thoughts and acid spasms of dread. Each ticking instant lay heavy with this parody of our son—John Snow and his malign purity, his cosmic complaint, his unending devotion to our disquiet.

That summer, owing to the Caligulan protocols by which the Hawthorne English department operated, Natalie was obliged to shoulder a four-course load: Freshman Composition, British Renaissance Poetry, Greek Drama, and Arthurian Romance. Almost every time she entered the classroom, John Snow would be waiting in the far corner, slumped in a chair, clicking his fingernails on the
retractable Formica writing board. He never participated in the discussions, though sometimes a non sequitur would escape his lips like a shout from a Tourette's victim. “Booted into the abyss!” “She praises humanists and murders humans!” “Never to feel my heart soar when Perry Como sings ‘I Believe'!” Natalie told her undergraduates that John Snow was her highly medicated brother, recently delivered into her charge by a state mental institution. Her explanation went unquestioned. Anyone who'd taken a course in the College of Continuing Education had encountered adult students far weirder than this demented auditor.

When not harassing Natalie, the immaculoid would appear at the bookstore, gimping past the shelves, then flopping into an empty chair in the coffee bar. I allowed him to run up a tab. Most of the time he simply sat there, bathing his insensate tongue in a latte and reading a random selection from our science-fiction and fantasy shelves, though occasionally I had to endure his outbursts. “Tossed away like an orange peel!” “Deny the devil his curette!” “Impaled alive by my own parents!” Despite the discomfort he caused our customers, no one asked me to eject him. In those days many a homeless schizophrenic roamed the Boston streets, and by an unspoken ethic we shopkeepers were expected to supply these wretches with free coffee, shelter from the rain, and as much patience as we could muster.

On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, relatively tranquil periods at the store, I usually found time to speak with John Snow. Our encounters were unenlightening. He refused to tell me who had supervised his birth, how he supported himself, or where he spent his time when not hectoring his supposed parents. Only once did a question of mine catch him off guard, and he answered it with a frankness that I suspected would have displeased his maker.

“I can't help noticing you aren't a well man,” I told him. “Does an immaculoid have a normal life span?”

He shook his misshapen head and coughed. “My days are numbered.”

“Do you anticipate living for five more years? One more year?”

“Soon my purpose will be complete.”

“What purpose? To drive me crazy? To make Natalie miserable?”

But the fetus had exhausted his reserves of candor. With the apparent aim of ending our conversation, he leaped from his chair and screamed, “Masturbate I must, but each orgasm is duller than the last!”

The customers variously gasped, moaned, giggled, and pretended to be somewhere else.

“Ejaculation without elation! Can you imagine?”

On Sunday morning Londa finally answered my e-mail. No greeting, no “Dear Mason,” just a single sarcastic sentence. “When the gumbo girl was anxious to communicate with her old morality teacher, he hit Delete, and now she's supposed to roll out the fucking red carpet?”

My answer was simple. “You owe me a civil reply, and you know it.”

She was back at her keyboard within the hour. “I have many enemies, but Mason Ambrose isn't one of them.” She went on to say that my success as a bookseller delighted her, that she'd made
Ethics from the Earth
required reading among her staff, and that Natalie must be “a very smart lady if she decided to marry you.” Concerning the John Snow crisis, Londa claimed to be as much in the dark as I. “How strange to think there's a fourth beaker freak in the world. Find your way to my door, Socrates, sooner rather than later, and we'll talk of life and its mysteries. Yolly will be thrilled to see you—Quetzie, too—and once you're actually standing in my presence, I might deign to give you a hug.”

 

I JOURNEYED TO THEMISOPOLIS
at a leisurely pace, sleeping in funky motels and prospecting for bibliographic gold in every
thrift store and antique shop between Boston and Philadelphia. By the time I'd crossed the Maryland border, the trunk of my Subaru wagon held some rare Willa Cathers, a couple of Theodore Dreiser first editions, and the obscure Thomas Bergin translation of
The Divine Comedy.
I checked into a Chadds Ford bed-and-breakfast called Harriet's Hideaway, then switched on my cell phone and contacted Londa's reedy-voiced appointments secretary, who told me that tomorrow's password would be “Godzilla.” I slept in Harriet's guest room, snatched a couple of warm bagels from the breakfast spread, and continued down Route 1.

No artist's brush, no photographer's lens, no digital Da Vinci's pixels could have captured the grandeur of Themisopolis in its glory days, though I could imagine Edmund Spenser's quill rising to the occasion. Book One of
The Faerie Queene
is not long under way when the Red Cross Knight is obliged to enter “a stately palace built of squared brick, which cunningly was without mortar laid.” Our hero takes particular delight in the gleaming walls, “golden foil all over them displayed, that purest sky with brightness they dismayed.” Approaching the City of Justice for the first time, I gasped in astonishment at the flowering cherry trees flanking Avalon Lane, the billowing fountains of Hypatia Circle, and, in the distance, the luminous marble walls of Themisopolis proper. Only when I reached the main entrance, its bronze gates flashing in the sun like the doors to God's private bank vault, did my awe turn to bewilderment. Here on the periphery of Quehannock State Park had arisen an institution consecrated to benevolence and the Beatitudes, yet it presented to the world a face as formidable as any maximum-security prison.

I deposited the Subaru in Visitor Parking and proceeded on foot, inhaling the candied scent of the cherry blossoms. Observing my approach, a wiry woman with a buzz cut sauntered out of the sentry box holding an acrylic clipboard, her sturdy frame clothed
in a black leather jacket studded with surly nodes of metal. From her shoulder holster poked the snoutish grip of an automatic pistol.

“Godzilla,” I said.

“Name?”

“Mason Ambrose.”

The guard consulted her clipboard, handed me a map, and thumbed a button on her remote control. Gradually the mammoth gates parted, clanking and creaking as they disclosed a lavish panorama of spires, gables, clock towers, and groves of sycamores and maples.

It wasn't really a city, of course. As I strolled down Shambhala Avenue, surveying the sunny piazzas, commodious bike paths, neo-Bauhaus buildings, pleasant manicured quadrangles, and knots of passersby—scientists in lab coats, engineers in button-down denim shirts, graduate students in turtleneck sweaters—Themisopolis struck me more as a genteel community college, or perhaps a meditation retreat for Westernized Buddhists who saw no incompatibility between higher consciousness and creature comforts. Reaching the Boudicca Street intersection, I started across Alethia Square, a flagstone courtyard featuring a bronze statue of Themis herself, blindfolded as always, sword held high, her famous balance scales connected to an electric motor, so that the two pans moved in a seesaw cycle, up, down, up, down, beneath the weight of invisible deliberations.

A woman came zooming toward me on a Vespa. She jammed on the brakes, dismounted, and pulled off her helmet, unfurling a banner of auburn hair.

“Londa!” I shouted.

She looked almost the same as on that long-ago night when she'd kissed me following Proserpine's immolation—older, of course, but not significantly older: barely a day over twenty-five.