The Philosopher's Apprentice (32 page)

Gradually we became aware of the immaculoids, most of them now corpses, having variously succumbed to asphyxiation, dehydration, and the defects bequeathed them by incompetent CHALICE technicians. Of the remaining mackies, barely fifty were yet standing, wandering amid the cinders like extras in a cinematic collaboration between George Romero and Martin Heidegger,
Dasein of the
Dead.
The other survivors floated upon the ocean of ash, gagging and thrashing as the gray waves sucked them down.

In time our fitful journey brought us to Alethia Square. Themis had fallen, her bronze knees turned to butter by the heat. The blindfolded goddess lay supine in the courtyard, scales at her side, staring at the winter sky. Curious, I touched her sword, still warm, whereupon a series of short, sharp reports reached my ears—
pop, pop, pop, pop.

At first I thought it was an automobile backfiring—could Jordan be here already?—or perhaps a metallic echo caused by the cooling of Themis's hollow innards. Then I glanced at Yolly. For an instant she simply stood there, jerking like a gaffed fish. A sound of primal dismay, more animal than human, broke from Londa's throat. Yolly pitched forward and collapsed on the flagstones beside the statue's massive head.

I spun, glancing in all directions. No sniper caught my eye. I saw only the granular air. Londa tossed the satchel aside, sprinted to the statue, and, falling to her knees, cradled her spasming sister.

“Get it out!” Yolly cried.

Lurching forward, I melded with the pietà. Just below Yolly's left shoulder, a ragged wound blossomed like a carnation, petals of blood spreading outward from the axis. Her complexion grew white as alabaster. She pressed her spine against Themis's cheek and shivered.

“Jordan's coming!” I insisted, squeezing Yolly's hand. “We're taking you to the hospital!”—the very words I'd spoken to my netherson five days earlier.

“It burns!” Blood dribbled from Yolly's mouth like the effluence of a punctured scream. “Get it out!”

“We'll get it out!” Londa shouted.

“It burns!”

Yolly's fingers turned to ice. Her eyes rolled upward as if to scan the inside of her skull.

Fetal snorts filled the air. Pivoting away from Yolly's dead and grimacing face, I glanced once again across the square. Smoke pouring from the muzzle of his assault rifle, General John Snow 4099 came gimping down Shambhala Avenue, the last of the immaculoids, manifestly pleased that he'd recognized us beneath our disintegrating disguises. I estimated I had fifteen seconds to live. No philosophical truths flitted through my brain. I did not learn the veracity or falsity of Platonic idealism. I did not see God. I merely let out a yelp of despair and vomited onto the flagstones.

Were it not for Londa's next action—grabbing the satchel and hurling it toward the approaching fetus—we would surely have died then and there, joining Yolly and the Circus troupers on Corporate Christi's roster of victims. Instantly General Snow fell upon the green bag, tearing it to pieces. Soon sixty shining CD-Rs lay strewn around the courtyard like wafers baked for a postindustrial Eucharist. Next the mackie went to work with his rifle butt, an assiduous alchemist grinding pestle against mortar, so that the discs became a thousand glittering shards, but this was not enough, for now he splintered the splinters, transmuting the data into spoonfuls of chaos and pinches of mockery and glittering smidgeons of nothingness.

Acting on raw instinct, Londa and I pulled Yolly's body to a standing position and laid it athwart our shoulders. We began our retreat, hurrying along Shambhala Avenue as the satisfied snarls of the dying fetus grew ever fainter. Passing through the city gates, we staggered across the parking lot and entered the encampment, except there was no parking lot, no encampment, only my Heideggerian hallucination, a bottomless abyss swallowing the tents, pavilions, howitzers, hydraulic lifts, moving vans, buses, semi-rigs, cherry trees, and fountains. One instant Jordan was there, standing beside her minivan, staring at Londa and me and Yolly's corpse, and the next she was gone, consumed along with Avalon Lane and Hypatia Circle and Quehannock State Park, and before the illuso
ry vortex ingested me, I briefly wondered what precise portion of the universe might satisfy its appetite. The answer, of course, lay somewhere in the
Epistemologia,
that omniscient anthology with its recipes for ambrosia, spells for raising the dead, and compendium of methods by which a philosopher might commit suicide without effort or pain. I merely had to crack the spine and read.

 

THESE DAYS MANY HISTORIANS
and social commentators perceive a tragic grandeur in the fall of Themisopolis. According to this theory, Londa and Yolly Sabacthani were too spiritually advanced to prosper in the mundane world, their vision too noble to survive the slings and arrows of Corporate Christi. The destruction of the city, the loss of the data, the murder of Yolly—these disasters were inevitable given the rarefied plane on which the sisters' souls resided.

While I would award this interpretation high marks for romanticism, I personally favor a more prosaic argument. In my view, Londa and Yolly made the banal and common mistake of underestimating the opposition. The vatlings' tragedy lay not in their presumed surfeit of purity but merely in their failure to appreciate the enemy's surplus ruthlessness.

Unlike her superstar twin, Yolly had never been accorded her own action figure, trading cards, board game, or comic-book series, and yet she was a celebrity in her own right, and I was not surprised when her death made the front page of the
Harford County Aegis,
the
Baltimore Sun,
and the
Washington Post
—plus several hundred other papers, I later learned, commanding more ink in some cases than the collateral incineration of Themisopolis. Predictably, Maryland's Governor Winthrop told the reporters that Yolly had “died accidentally when a legitimate antiabortion protest went awry,” and at the time Londa, Jordan, and I were too dazed and depleted to offer a rebuttal. Instead we simply huddled in Jordan's Georgetown apartment, trying to reweave the unraveled threads of our lives.

Throughout this wretched period, the emotional atmosphere
among us was, to say the least, tempestuous. Jordan blamed Londa for talking her into Plan Omega and me for not talking Londa out of it. Londa reviled her former tutor for giving her such a malignantly idealistic psyche, even as she faulted Jordan for making Yolly only slightly less obsessed. As for me, I alternately heaped scorn on Londa for thinking up the whole crazy Omega scheme and abuse on Jordan for facilitating it.

When not trading accusations with my roommates, I instinctively sought solace from Natalie, telephoning her every morning and afternoon, but I never caught her at home. The one time she called back, leaving a message expressing her sorrow over Yolly's death and her frustration that we weren't connecting, I was down the street buying whole wheat bread and red wine, the staples of our unhappy community.

In deference to Yolly, we all agreed to suspend our mutual antipathy long enough to select a burial site—an easy task, as it happened. Two years earlier, on a pellucid October afternoon, Yolly and Jordan had gone hiking around Parnassus Acres, the Virginia horse farm where Oyster was spending his dotage. When they reached the cherry grove, Yolly had casually mentioned that in the world of her novel an Ondolurian normally arranged to be buried in an orchard, so that his remains might nourish the trees and his descendants continue to know him in the succulent person of apples, pears, peaches, figs, or plums.

Parnassus Acres belonged to a divorcée named Sally Quattrone, a middle-aged neo-hippie who practiced shamanic trance, Tibetan channeling, and other disciplines that in her neighbors' eyes verged on sexual perversion. When we approached Sally with the idea of interring Yolly among the cherry trees, she was understandably nonplussed, but then we gave her the extant pages of
The Citadel of Paradox
—Jordan had been keeping a printout in her apartment, reading it with an eye to one day offering Yolly a critique—and a single perusal was sufficient to win Sally over. She would happily
facilitate our scheme, providing we didn't harm any roots, a point she underscored with a quotation from the novel celebrating “those fleshy, fibrous anchors binding Tolvaganum the Oak to Goncelia the Earth, and Goncelia the Earth to Tolvaganum the Oak.”

Two burly Valkyries helped us dig the grave, a familiar enough task for them: six days earlier they'd driven their shovels into the frozen ground of White Marsh Cemetery in prelude to disinterring Ethan Pepperhill. After wrapping Yolly's remains in a shroud, Jordan, Londa, and I lowered the corpse into the cavity, threading it through the tangle of roots. The task proved emotionally draining for both women, and they immediately fled the scene, leaving the Valkyries and myself to restore the dirt.

Twenty-four hours before the scheduled memorial service, Henry, Brock, and Donya flew from Key West to D.C. and checked into the Mayflower Hotel. I could hardly imagine a sadder set of circumstances under which the Hubris Academy faculty might hold a reunion, and yet the arrival of the Isla de Sangre contingent had an immediate and salutary effect. Simply knowing that the youngest Sister Sabacthani was in town—Donya, the better angel of all our natures—inspired Londa, Jordan, and me to stop quarreling and cultivate a more seemly grief.

On the morning of the funeral, we all met for breakfast at an Art Deco café near Jordan's apartment. My male colleagues had come through the decade unspoiled. Far from diminishing his good looks, Brock's wrinkles actually augmented his aura of bohemian rascality, and it occurred to me that he might have applied the lines himself: the Mad Artist of Blood Island, embossing his face with an exquisite chisel. Henry's billowing paunch struck me less as a sign of laxity than as a deliberately acquired enhancement. He arrived bearing good news. After years of being strung along by various Nickelodeon executives, he'd just learned that the current regime had loved, absolutely loved, his concept for
Uncle Rumpus's Magic Island,
and they were equally enamored of his sample scripts. As soon as Donya
was safely installed in the freshman class at Yale, her guardians would head to New York City, Henry to attend a series of preproduction meetings, Brock to start designing Plessey the Plesiosaur, Siegfried the Snapping Turtle, Basso Profundo the Bullfrog, and the rest of Uncle Rumpus's friends.

The instant I laid eyes on Donya, I realized I'd been wrong to stay away from Isla de Sangre all these years. In maturing from a freckled preschooler to a feline eighteen-year-old, she'd become the spitting image of the adolescent Londa—lithe, graceful, tall as a sunflower—but the resemblance, thank heaven, was confined to the physical. She had none of Londa's scary intensity, none of the fervor that had raised and then razed Themisopolis. It was hard to believe that the self-possessed young woman now sitting before me eating a vegetarian omelet had once almost severed her little finger to protest the outcome of a croquet game.

We finished our breakfast, climbed into Jordan's van, and drove to Parnassus Acres, where Dagmar Röhrig and Vetruvia Fox joined our mournful company. Somehow Londa's disciples had gotten wind of the imminent ritual, and about three hundred were waiting for us, wearing
W
eltanschauung Woman sweatshirts and Dame Quixote baseball caps. Patiently but firmly, Colonel Fox explained to the acolytes that gate-crashing the funeral would be a poor way to honor either sister, and so the Sabacthanites retreated to the adjacent dairy farm, where they milled around smoking dope, strumming guitars, and singing songs from Pischel and Ploog's Tony Award–winning rock opera about Londa,
Doctor Madonna.

For several minutes the six of us stood in the orchard and said nothing, the communal aphasia of the bereaved, and then the ceremony officially began with Jordan reading a passage from
The Citadel of Paradox
in which a vain prince suddenly grasps the inner beauty of the hideous toads of Nobdagob Bog, “who asked nothing of the world save mud and methane, swamp and solitude.” Henry came forward next, setting a bouquet of amaranth on the grave, after
which Londa recited Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” and then I offered up my favorite stanza of all time, Lord Byron's “She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that's best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes….” The instant he'd heard the news, Brock had sculpted a piece of Blood Island driftwood into a little horse, and now he used Sally Quattrone's trowel to plant this elegant eohippus several inches down, beneath a rock that marked the spot—I could guide his hand with great confidence—where Yolly's heart lay.

Shivering in her windbreaker, tears trickling down her face like meltwater from an icicle, Donya delivered an oration she'd composed the night before, a verbal collage assembled from her e-mail exchanges with her elder sister. Repeatedly, with great patience, Yolly had explained to Donya why there was no shame in being a gumbo girl, and she'd also helped her little sister undertake an Internet search for Edwina's mother and father—that is to say, Donya's mother and father, and Yolly's, too, and Londa's. Before they died, Francine Sabacthani, née Miller, and her husband, Arthur Sabacthani, had been high school biology teachers, dedicated to their profession, beloved by their students, and bewildered that their only child had turned out to be a genius.

Not long after Donya's tribute ended, Londa slipped away without explanation, sidling into the swamp like an Ondolurian setting out to save the
Epistemologia.
Although Dagmar insisted that Londa simply needed to be alone for a while, Donya soon grew fretful. Perhaps her remaining sister was going to shoot herself, she speculated, or maybe she intended to jump into a pool of quicksand.