The Philosopher's Apprentice (34 page)

One particularly telling sign of the times was the consummation of Ralph Gittikac's campaign to rebuild the RMS
Titanic.
Much to my amazement, our primal Phyllistine had gotten the luxury liner's doppelgänger off the drawing board and into the water. Gittikac's Getaway Adventures was now taking reservations for the “Great Cathartic Voyage of the
Titanic Redux,
” scheduled to sail from Southampton, England, on the first of July and arrive in New York City on Independence Day.

From the Phyllistine perspective, of course, one felicitous development eclipsed all the others. According to a confluence of rumor, gossip, and paparazzi espionage, Londa Sabacthani was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Evidently she'd been checking herself into one Manhattan mental institution after another, even as her press secretary, the faithful Pauline Chilton, proceeded to frost her client's fruitcake condition with obfuscation and euphemism.

With my marriage a void, my vatling an inmate, and Corporate Christi poised to conquer the world, I found it increasingly difficult to get up in the morning. Day by day I retreated ever farther into the deepest reaches of myself: Mason Ambrose, shipwreck victim, washed up on the deserted shores of his own
Dasein,
a condition that he perversely compounded by disconnecting his phone, selling his computer, and instructing the post office to hold his mail. No man is an island, John Donne had famously insisted—very well, true enough, but I had certainly become whatever landmass entailed an equal measure of estrangement: a tidal peninsula, perhaps, joined to my fellow beings by the narrowest of shoals. Wandering my barren beaches, I encountered no auspicious footprints in the sand, and the corked bottles I retrieved from the surf contained only blank scraps of parchment, their messages long since bleached away by the sun.

My condition worsened, from isolation to desolation. Acting on impulse—if a man gripped by stupefying malaise may be said to act on impulse—I appointed Dexter Padula the sole manager of Pieces of Mind and sold him the bulk of my shares, using the ready cash to pay the rent three months in advance, send anticipatory checks to the gas company, and provision my rooms with certain essentials: a case of canned salmon, the Erlanger House
Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,
twenty bottles of red wine, a stack of Vaughan Williams CDs. I closed the door, turned off the lights, and waited for Godot. The days elapsed at the velocity of molasses. Camus, I decided, had gotten it right—there is only one important philosophi
cal question: why not suicide? My apartment was an embarrassment of possibilities. A set of stainless-steel steak knifes. A heavy-duty extension cord, easily fashioned into a noose. A fire-escape platform offering a thirty-foot fall to a concrete alley.

To this day I'm not certain how I survived my long, dark fortnights of the soul. Through some felicitous synergy of Nietzschean fortitude, cabernet sauvignon, and “The Lark Ascending,” I continued to elude the abyss. And then came my deliverance. I was sitting beside my bedroom window, staring across the alley into the parlor of my closest neighbor, Thomas Cochran, a Medieval Studies professor so ancient of days that his colleagues joked how he'd joined the department back when it was called Contemporary Theology. At some point during my twelve-week immurement, Dr. Cochran had acquired an enormous plasma television set, and to my astonishment the screen now shimmered with a familiar Cinemascope long-shot. There he was, my old mentor Sinuhe, walking the banks of the Nile. Half in jest and half in desperation, I told myself that this sign had arrived from a supernatural realm, and the meaning was unequivocal: my philosophy career had not yet run its course. Rather than become a corpse, I must follow up
Ethics from the Earth
with additional impertinent Darwinist tomes that nobody wanted to read. Isis expected it, Horus would settle for nothing less, and who was I to defy the gods?

 

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER
the Egyptian deities made their wishes known, I received an equally welcome visitation when young Donya came knocking at my door. I was ill-prepared to receive her. Unsightly stubble covered my chin, uncivilized aromas wafted off my skin, and my apartment looked like a rutting ground favored by caribou. She didn't seem to notice—a spontaneous Platonist, that girl, ever on the scent of the eternal, unconcerned with the immediate world's superficial splotches and transient smudges.

After revealing that she now lived a mere two hours from
Boston, her e-mail correspondence with several renowned marine biologists having netted her a summer internship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Donya explained herself. Everybody was concerned about dear old Mason—Donya, Henry, Brock, Jordan, especially Londa—so Henry had persuaded the younger Sister Sabacthani, the only Massachusetts member of our fellowship, to track me down. I related how the collapse of my marriage had landed me in Spenser's Cave of Despair, but I had more or less recovered, having found a provisional answer to Camus's notorious question. Any day now, I told Donya, I would start writing a new treatise on evolutionary ethics.

“To be honest, I wasn't terribly anxious about you,” she said. “Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can't, teach philosophy. It's weird big sister who's got me worried. Did you know her iguana died?”

I shook my head. “You're worried about Londa because her iguana died?”

“I'm worried about Londa because she's Londa.”

“Poor old Quetzie. What happened?”

“Nothing. A bad case of mortality. At least she has a clear conscience on that score.”

Forty minutes later, having disinfected myself, put on a clean shirt, and located a viable credit card, I accompanied Donya to the Tao of Sprouts in Copley Square. The best local vegetarian restaurant was still the Tasty Triffid, but returning there without Natalie on my arm would have been excruciating. While the chef heated our ratatouille, Donya reminisced about her childhood, breezily recounting a Yolly story I'd never heard before—how she'd once made a hilarious home video by taking her documentary footage of Blood Island fiddler crabs and altering the soundtrack, so that the creatures appeared to be playing a Beethoven string quartet. Throughout Donya's anecdote my eyes rarely left her face. How strange to be sitting across from this willowy adult version of the
diminutive six-year-old who'd once served me peanut-butter sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies in a tree house. Strange, and also a little sad, because the preschool Donya was gone forever now—wasn't she?—as irretrievable as Edwina or Yolly or John Snow 0001.

Our ratatouille arrived. We consumed several ambrosial morsels, then broached the evening's unhappy topic.

“Apparently she's plotting something—a weird big sister sort of something, ingenious and dangerous and very likely to end badly,” Donya said.

“The last I heard, she was on a grand tour of New York's loony bins.”

“A subterfuge.”

From her shoulder bag Donya produced a sheaf of computer printouts, crumpled like the treasure maps Brock used to create for her cartography lessons. E-mails from Londa, she explained, then read me a series of snippets, and I soon concluded that Donya was correct concerning her sister's sanity. These weren't the ravings of a madwoman but something even more disturbing: the effusions of a frighteningly rational person systematically setting a trap for her enemies.

“What do you suppose the PG stands for?” Donya asked. “Parental guidance? Pride goeth? Phyllistine Götterdämmerung?”

“Pineal gland,” I groaned. “Londa's into Cartesian physiology.”

“I've got her last message memorized. ‘Zero hour is barely a week away, so please make every effort to locate Mason. The plan requires his input.'”

“Zero hour. Christ.”

Donya pulled a phone from her jacket, plunking it down on the table with the weary air of a jaded Russian-roulette referee preparing to adjudicate a game. “Every time I call, she chatters merrily until the subject turns to Operation PG, and then she clams up. You'll probably have better luck.”

Londa answered with a chipper “All you need is love.” After insisting how wonderful it was to hear my voice, she turned suddenly somber and proceeded, characteristically, to take charge of my life. I was to catch the 6:45
A.M
. Amtrak out of South Station and get off four hours later in Manhattan. She would meet me in Pennsylvania Station near the Seventh Avenue exit, right by Hudson News.

“I hope your wife can spare you for a while,” Londa said. “I'm in dire need of an ethics tutorial.”

“Three months ago Natalie ran off with a failed novelist who found fucking easier than plotting. I'm free as a bird.”

“Oh, my poor Socrates, you didn't deserve that. Was Joan of Arc part of the problem?”

“Not as much as Katherine Anne Porter.”

“Are you on the mend?”

“Healthy as a horse. Speaking of health, Donya tells me you've found a way to rehabilitate the Phyllistines. Operation PG. Let me guess: pineal gland.”

“Details at eleven.”

Throughout the rest of our meal, Donya brought me up to date on the Hubris Academy faculty. Traumatized by the Themisopolis catastrophe and despondent over the loss of Yolly, Jordan had disavowed political activism and was now pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. Henry had begun portraying the host of
Uncle Rumpus's Magic Island
on Nickelodeon, and the initial ratings suggested that America's four-year-olds had found a new idol. The Rumpus franchise had also proved a boon to Brock, whose agent had arranged for him to receive a portion of the licensing fees generated by the characters he'd created for the show. Thanks to Plessey the Plesiosaur and friends, Brock was in danger of becoming embarrassingly rich.

Later, as Donya and I strolled down Beacon Street, she rhapsodized about the Oceanographic Institute—by her account a truly utopian community, its scientists ever eager to pour their molten obsessions into the crucible of her curiosity. Her immediate guru was a cephalopod expert, whose explorations of the giant squid's singularly accessible nervous system bade fair to revolutionize the field of neurophysiology. The resident arthropod aficionado had likewise taken an interest in Donya, initiating her into the cult of the preternaturally primitive horseshoe crab. Somehow we managed to get all the way to her car without mentioning Londa again, a fact on which Donya remarked as she slid behind the wheel.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “even while I was talking about squids, I was thinking about you-know-who.”

“Me, too.”

“Watch over her, will you, Mason?” Donya snapped her seat belt into place, then twisted the ignition key. The engine coughed to life. “Back on the island, she needed a morality teacher, and now she needs a guardian angel, and once again you're the man for the job.”

 

ALTHOUGH THE AMTRAK
timetable had promised a noon arrival, my train didn't pull into Pennsylvania Station until 12:13
P.M
., which meant that by the corporation's amoeboid clock, ever beholden to the whims of the freight lines, we'd actually hit New York ahead of schedule. We were nevertheless objectively late, and I was not surprised when, approaching the Seventh Avenue exit, suitcase in hand, I came upon Londa pacing in circles and checking her watch. Still very much a celebrity and hence vulnerable to unwanted attention, she had affected a disguise: dark sunglasses, scarf across her mouth, hair stuffed beneath a black beret. Only after we were secluded in a Yellow Cab, moving uptown in fits and starts, did I get a good look at her face. I hadn't seen her since Yolly's funeral, an afternoon on which grief had bloated her features. Today I was sharing a taxi with the most attractive woman in Manhattan, a svelte enchantress with high cheekbones and opalescent eyes.

“Donya told me about Quetzie,” I said. “Please accept my condolences.”

“It's all right,” she said wistfully. “He didn't know he was supposed to live any longer. Maybe he wasn't.”

“That lizard had a more complicated relationship with language than Wittgenstein. Hey, Londa, I've never seen you looking better.”

“That's hard to believe. I've been working around the clock.”

“On curing the Phyllistines?”

“I even worked on my birthday. We beaker freaks have birthdays—you knew that, didn't you?”

“Of course.”

“Naked came I from my mother's vat.”

Later that afternoon, surveying Londa's claustrophobic living room on the second floor of 56 West Eighty-second Street, I tried to decide whether she was a tidy housekeeper. The place was awash in clutter, but on closer inspection I realized that most of the detritus traced to a single source, her preoccupation with both the maiden voyage of the original
Titanic
and the imminent cruise of Ralph Gittikac's
Titanic Redux.
Her apartment would
probably seem quite neat were she to jettison the myriad books, DVDs, news clippings, brochures, handbills, and blueprints concerning the primal Ship of Dreams and its equally decadent descendant.

“Want my advice?” I wedged my denim jacket into a hall closet crammed with jeans, blouses, skirts, and sweatshirts. “Stop brooding about the
Redux.
Rich people get to go on luxury cruises, poor people don't, and there's nothing you or I or Thoth on his throne can do about it.”