The Philosopher's Apprentice (33 page)

I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING
,
ladies and gentlemen. The instant I heard Londa speak of transplanting superior pineal glands into the Phyllistines' brains, I should have realized that the loss of Yolly, Themisopolis, and the omnibenevolent data had warped her in ways that went well beyond mere bereavement or simple rage. Were I not myself close to madness in those days, I would have contacted some avatar of the law and explained that the most benign of Londa's selves, the rational and circumspect Scarlet Darwinist, had evidently perished along with her younger sister. Keep an eye on Dr. Sabacthani, I would have implored this hypothetical Javert. Observe her night and day. She has ceded her psyche to the sinister Crimson Kantian and the capricious Purple Pietist. But instead of alerting the agents of justice, I simply limped back home to Boston and attempted to get on with my life.

Perceptive readers that you are, you may have already deduced why Natalie made only a perfunctory effort to contact me during my sojourn in Jordan's Georgetown apartment. But I myself remained clueless. It never occurred to me that my wife had better—that is to say, worse—things to do with her time.

His name was Castorp Muller, his parents having suffered from an unfortunate preoccupation with
The Magic Mountain,
and he was both a Hawthorne M.F.A. candidate in fiction, endlessly noodling with his half-written, half-assed, wholly autobiographical novel, and a member of the Tuesday-night reading group Natalie had organized, for its therapeutic benefits, several months after the abortion. The sea change in their relationship traced to the club's decision to read
Ship of Fools
: an incendiary choice, as it happened, splitting the membership into a feminist contingent obsessed with Katherine Anne Porter's gender, and a humanist faction who believed that refracting the novel through a political lens trivialized the author's larger artistic accomplishment. Eventually these exchanges became so heated that, following each formal meeting at the Caffeine Fiend, everyone would head for the Shepherd's Pie to cool down with lager and stout. At first this drinking society comprised all nine
Ship of Fools
enthusiasts, but in time the demands of academic life reduced their number to five, then three, until finally the party comprised a volatile total of two.

Already a hero in Natalie's eyes for having taken the feminist side in the Porter controversy, Castorp Muller boasted the additional virtue of seeming to enjoy her conversation unreservedly. On only one occasion was I privileged to observe the man in action, but the memory remains vivid. Natalie and I had run into him, looking spiffily world-weary in his goatee, red bandanna, and black fisherman's sweater, at the Coolidge Cinema's weekly midnight revival of
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,
and after the show the three of us retired to a nearby bistro. I soon apprehended the fellow's talent for ostensibly hanging on to Natalie's every word, his uncanny ability to interrupt her so subtly that she never even noticed. I should have thrown in the towel immediately. Here was a man who could bring a woman to orgasm simply by listening to her.

As their Tuesday-night ritual progressed from a pleasant diversion to the week's most passionately anticipated event, the conversa
tion between Castorp and Natalie inevitably focused on John Snow's presence in her life. Apparently Castorp's self-centered empathy enabled Natalie to get through each new phase of the crisis—our netherson's sudden advent, his increasingly abusive behavior, his unexpected Christmas visit, his final disposition in a ceramic urn atop our bookcase. But Castorp the fiction writer began to conceive a broader narrative. By way of helping Natalie discover her heart's own truth, he encouraged her to free-associate like a neurotic on Freud's couch, and before long they had collaboratively constructed a story in which I was the villain and she the victim.

According to the Muller-Novak version of her tribulations, she had wanted to bring the baby to term, but she knew I would never forgive myself if anything bad happened to her during the pregnancy. In other words, her decision to abort was in essence a submission to my will. But for my paranoid attitude toward her blood clots, she would now be enjoying unequivocal motherhood, when instead she'd become the object of her unborn child's infinite scorn.

At some point during the siege of Themisopolis, this cute couple began enjoying illicit afternoons in Castorp's apartment, a situation that Natalie successfully—and, I'm chagrined to report, effortlessly—kept under wraps for two whole months following my return from D.C. Ever on the lookout for a way to break the bad news, she finally got an opportunity courtesy of the same reading group that had blessed her with Castorp. Arriving home one evening after drumming Victorian poetry into several dozen pairs of indifferent undergraduate ears, she noticed that idle curiosity had prompted me to remove the seminar's current selection, Harry Mulisch's
The Procedure,
from the coffee table. Years ago at Villanova, I'd been assigned this neglected but beguiling moral fable, in which Mulisch takes a twelfth-century kabbalist's ambition to create a clay golem and cleverly counterpoints it with a contemporary Dutch biologist's success in wringing organic molecules from the same substance. Natalie immediately plucked the book from my hands and recited
a passage concerning Rabbi Löw's attempt to enlist his son-in-law, Isaac, in the momentous project.

“‘Isaac's hair and beard are red as a blazing fire,'” she read, “‘which seems to point to an ecstatic character, but the opposite is the case. Esther, Löw's daughter, also found that out too late; but that's nothing out of the ordinary, since virtually everyone marries the wrong person.'”

She closed
The Procedure
and said, “Is Mulisch right? Does virtually everyone marry the wrong person?”

“I recently saw a statistic suggesting that mutually satisfying marriages are not the norm,” I said.

“There's something I've been meaning to tell you. I believe I married the wrong person.”

I chuckled in amusement. She laughed in distress.

“In fact, I
know
I married the wrong person,” Natalie continued, whereupon I began to feel sick, and then it all spilled out, the trysts with Castorp, the joys of having a friend who would rather talk to her than read Kierkegaard, my determination to maneuver her into the abortion clinic, my failure to comfort her adequately back when John Snow 0001 was calling her a murderer, my initial resistance to bringing the immaculoid's ashes home.

I freely admitted that these accusations were not without merit, which of course did me no good, since this wasn't about my shortcomings—it was about Natalie being in love with Castorp. We wandered into the living room and took up positions on opposite sides of the couch, goalies in that most ancient of indoor sports, domestic discord. For the next four hours, we vilified one another as our marriage burned down all around us. At the dismal hour of 2:00
A.M
., my desperation peaked, and I declared that I would seek out Dr. Charnock and convince him to fashion an infant from John Snow 0001's bottled ashes, so that we would have our son again. Natalie reminded me that we'd never regarded the immaculoid as even the remotest simulacrum of a son, ours
or anybody else's, and this was not the time to start pretending otherwise.

“You're taking this much harder than I'd imagined,” she said. “Look at it this way. Now you're free to go chasing after Londa. You've always been half in love with her.”

“Londa is a deeply disturbed person. You're the woman I love.”

“Hey, Mason, I'm willing to sit here and talk till dawn, but we'll just keep covering the same damn ground.”

“You want to be with Castorp right now, don't you?” I said.

“More than you can imagine.”

“I'm sure you're being truthful. Philosophers appreciate the truth. Now please lie to me. Tell me I have a chance.”

“It's over, Mason. Sorry. I'm so crazy about Castorp, I can hardly stop singing.”

At the methodical pace of a pallbearer, I rose from the couch, walked to the bookcase, and with both hands took hold of our fetus's brittle sarcophagus.

“Don't do something you'll regret later,” she said.

“Fuck you.”

I raised the urn high above my head and sent it on a collision course with the hardwood floor. The moment of impact was gratifyingly spectacular, ten thousand glittery splinters radiating outward from the impact point. I thought of bombs exploding, universes expanding, paradigms shifting. With a demented cackle I dropped to my knees and, reaching into the rubble, closed my fist around a scraggly carbon glob.

“I hope you and Castorp have lots of children.” Rising, I assumed the posture of a catapult. “I hope you have so goddamn many children the
Catholic Worker
names you Baby Factory of the Year.”

“Mason, don't,” she said between gritted teeth.

“Heads up, Natalie! John is coming to get you! This snowball has your name on it!”

I laughed and launched the projectile. The lumpish remains
found their target, splattering across Natalie's chest. She screamed and called me a piece of shit, a not inaccurate evaluation under the circumstances, then stormed out of the apartment. There could be no doubt concerning her destination.

My heated brain became home to a lurid psychodrama. In this dark reverie, I removed my clothes and rolled around naked on the floor, grinding the urn fragments into my back, after which I sought out Natalie and showed her my mortified flesh. But martyrdom has never been my métier, and in this case it wouldn't have accomplished anything, so I simply located the dustpan and returned to my knees and got to work.

 

IT TOOK US
a mere five weeks to legalize our enmity. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had long ago recognized the pragmatic concept of no-fault divorce, which during the course of our negotiations I started calling recursive-blame divorce, and because our mutual assets were few and our children nonexistent, the whole process set us each back only three hundred dollars. When it was over, we shook hands on the steps of the Massachusetts State House, wished one another well, returned to our separate domiciles—Natalie and Castorp had just bought a condo on Beacon Hill—and set about the business of never seeing each other again.

The rest of my winter passed in three unrelated activities: feeling sorry for myself, presiding perfunctorily over Pieces of Mind, and appearing before Virgil Harkness's Congressional Commission on Fetal Activism. Although his heart wasn't in it, Senator Harkness had hastily convened his panel upon realizing that for most Americans the immaculoid phenomenon had proved impossibly distressing, and these shaken citizens wanted the government to protect them from any future such invasions. The initial sessions were televised, but C-Span viewers soon found them unpalatable (too much talk about mackies driving their quasiparents to suicide), and so the network began broadcasting the far livelier Chaffey Hearings
into allegations that certain gratuitously compassionate physicians in Pennsylvania were systematically violating the Mother Teresa Anti-Euthanasia Laws. Somewhere in my disorganized cache of DVDs is the C-Span coverage of a bitter Londa, a shattered Jordan, and a depressed Mason presenting their testimony to Harkness and his colleagues. Among the highlights of this
digital vérité
collector's item is a sound bite of Londa admitting that her now-defunct Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations had “acquired an RXL-313 ontogenerator with an eye to conducting human duplication experiments” and forthwith urging the committee to “excavate this treacherous device from the ashes of Themisopolis and oversee its destruction.” The C-Span video also includes a brief segment of Jordan imploring Harkness to hunt down the “self-righteous criminals” who, through their fetal proxy General John Snow 4099, had “murdered Yolly Sabacthani in cold blood.” But my favorite clip shows me assuming a gesture of more
j'accuse
while explaining that, if I knew their exact location just then, I would point my indignant digit directly at Enoch Anthem and Felix Pielmeister, “who almost certainly convinced General John Snow 4099 that it was open season on the Sisters Sabacthani.”

As unimaginative sycophants go, Harkness was a fairly decent chap, and he took my indictment of Anthem and Pielmeister seriously enough to dispatch a team of FBI agents to the Center for Stable Families. In giving their depositions to the G-men, Anthem and Pielmeister vociferously denied any connection to the mackies beyond, as Pielmeister put it, “an unashamed sympathy for their pro-life agenda,” but eventually it became obvious that the two suspects and the Harkness Commission had struck a deal, for a week later the FBI invaded an abandoned limestone processing plant near Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, and found therein a clandestine bioengineering laboratory. The prize of the haul was three ontogenerators, and the following day Harkness, in keeping with Londa's recommendation, convinced Governor Winthrop to send a Mary
land National Guard unit to Themisopolis and recover the device through which she'd populated the Circus. Before the month was out, the Harkness Commission had arranged for the effective extinction of this technology, contracting with the U.S. Coast Guard to load all four ontogenerators onto a container ship, bear them twenty leagues due east of Cape Hatteras, and there consign the machines to a watery grave.

Even though the chances of another grand-scale immaculoid protest were essentially zero, there being no more RXL-313s in the world save the moldering remains of the prototype back on Isla de Sangre, I suspect that for the likes of Felix Pielmeister, Enoch Anthem, and Tucker Winthrop this was a golden age. Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem's newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands. As for the dubious projects nurtured by the so-called City of Justice, it would be years, perhaps a decade, before the data pulverized in Alethia Square could be replicated by the scattered staff of the Susan B. Anthony Trust and the tattered remains of the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations.