The Philosopher's Apprentice (6 page)

“Scene two,” I said quickly. “One week later. Jerome has come
back for his ax.” Seeking to make the game as engagingly lurid as possible, I bared my teeth and presented Londa with the fierce, burning gaze of Edward Hyde transfixing a barmaid. “I need my
ax,
Alice,” I snarled, “and I need it
now
!”

My savagery seemed to gratify her. “Thundering fuck, Jerome, you look
upset
!” she yelled, flourishing the duster in my face.

“My wife and I had a dreadful argument last night. With any luck I'll catch her by surprise.”

“Holy shit, are you saying you intend to
kill
your wife? In Exodus, chapter twenty, God says it's
wrong
to kill!”

“It's
also
wrong to break a promise. You said you'd return the ax when I needed it. Now keep your half of the bargain.”

Reveling in the crude melodrama of it all, Londa marched to the nearest window, threw open the shutters, and hurled the duster into the jungle.

“Straight to the bottom of the sea!”

“Our friendship is over, Alice!”

She pivoted toward me, her grin as wide and moist as a slice of melon. Hunching her shoulders, she released a high whistled C-note and hugged herself with palpable delight.

“Curtain,” I said, dipping my head in a gesture of admiration. “Congratulations, Londa. You just saved a human life.”

“Fun on a bun,” she said again, in a tone that, if not exactly amicable, was nevertheless a full octave of sarcasm lower than last time.

“I'm going to reward you by ending the lesson right now. Class dismissed. See you tomorrow morning.”

“Will we be doing another fucking theater game?”

“That was my plan, yes.”

“Will it be more interesting than this Alice-and-Jerome shit?”

“I think you'll like it.”

“I was planning to play hooky,” she said, lighting a second cigarette, “but maybe I'll fucking show up after all.”

 

ALTHOUGH IT WAS
Edmund Purdom's wooden portrayal of
The Egyptian
that inspired me to study philosophy, the sensibility that underlay
Ethics from the Earth
was shaped no less by my father's unmarried and peculiar sister Clara, who lived with us until, shortly after my twelfth birthday, an ambulance took her besieged body to a Germantown hospice from whose benevolent chemical embrace she would never return. Aunt Clara was certainly no devotee of evolutionary theory—she believed wholeheartedly in the affable Creator-God of middle-class Methodist revelation—and yet for me her awed appreciation of the world's unglamorous species, its humble finches and homely toads and mundane chipmunks, was in the very best Darwinian tradition. Were I to paint the woman's portrait, I would depict her standing in our backyard, offering a squirrel peanuts with one hand while holding a bird feeder aloft with the other.

Her passing was an event on which I needn't dwell. I shall merely report that as Londa and I pursued our second lesson, an improvisation based on Kohlberg's Fable of the Stolen Radium, wrenching memories of Aunt Clara's ill-advised radiation treatments inevitably rushed back. Yet I persisted, imagining that this eccentric reincarnation of St. Francis was looking down from on high and blessing my attempt to give my pupil a robust naturalist ethics. Londa took the part of Helga Eschbach, the woman whose husband was dying of bone cancer. I cast myself as Jürgen Hammerschmidt, the police inspector who apprehends her after she breaks into Fritz's pharmacy and steals the radium extract. An empty Perrier bottle served for an ampoule of the vital drug.

“What's going on here?” I demanded.

Londa puffed on her cigarette and clutched the green bottle to her chest. “My name is Helga Eschbach, and my husband has a malignant tumor. Radium therapy might cure him.”

“Well, Frau Eschbach, it appears I've caught a thief.”

“Put me in jail—I don't mind.” She hunched protectively over
the bottle. “But first let me take this ampoule to my husband and give him a hypodermic injection.”

“My duty is to uphold the law, not to facilitate the transportation of stolen goods.” I snatched the Perrier bottle away and, grabbing Londa's arm, escorted her across the library toward the local prison.

“The pharmacist pays only one hundred deutsche marks for each specimen of raw radium!” she protested. “He charges a thousand for the extract!”

Halting beside the conquistador, I absently took his sword by the hilt and pulled it several inches clear of the scabbard. “A thousand marks?” I said. “A tenfold profit?”

“A thousand fucking marks,” she said, twisting free of my grip.

“How terribly unfair.”

“I pawned my wedding ring, sold our furniture, begged money from friends. It wasn't enough.”

“I must say, Frau Eschbach, I admire your effort.”

“I love my husband,” Londa said.

I let the blade slide back into place. “Even if the pharmacist charged only five hundred marks, he would still be engaged in an immoral activity.”

“But not an illegal activity?”

“Alas, no,” I said. “Whereas you are engaged in an illegal activity—”

“But not an immoral one.” Londa took a drag and flashed a triumphant smile.

“On the contrary, Frau Eschbach. What you're doing is—”

“It's pretty goddamn moral, isn't it?”

I returned the Perrier bottle to Londa's grasp. “Here. Give your husband the treatment. I never saw you tonight, and you never saw me—understood?”

“Understood.”

“Herr Eschbach is fortunate to have such a wife.”

She stubbed out her cigarette on the conquistador's breastplate, then dropped the butt down the barrel of his musket. “Tell me your name.”

“Hammerschmidt,” I said.

“I shall not forget your charity, Inspector Hammerschmidt.”

“In certain contexts, Frau Eschbach, the sacredness of love counts for more than the sanctity of law.”

“Why, Inspector—you're a fucking philosopher.”

Much to Londa's satisfaction, I laughed spontaneously, and then, stepping completely out of character, gave her a tentative, avuncular hug. “Take your curtain call, dear. Soak up the applause. Catch the bouquets. Great job.”

In a gesture that managed to be at once the soul of innocence and the quintessence of suggestiveness, Londa took my hand, led me into the biography alcove, and stamped my cheek with a moist kiss.

“I'll never forget Herr Hammerschmidt's charity, and I'll never forget
your
charity either,” she told me, pursing her lips. “I hope you'll always be my teacher, Mason, even after I get my conscience back.”

 

A BORROWED AX
,
a beech tree, an ampoule of radium extract. Three physical objects that had figured crucially in my efforts to rehabilitate Londa, each with a unique essence, its axness, treeness, ampoularity. But as Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, in the case of human beings this metaphysic is reversed: a person's existence precedes his essence—he is a subject among objects. The danger, says Sartre, following Heidegger, is that he will “fall” into the world of objects, becoming ever after the prisoner of arbitrary strictures masquerading as universal principles. And so it was that I resolved to give Londa a taste of Sartrean existential freedom, confronting her with a dilemma beyond the competence of any canon.

The conundrum was one that Sartre himself had devised, con
cerning a student whose elder brother has died in the German offensive of 1940. The student resolves to join the Free French and help defeat the Nazi beasts who killed his brother, but his invalid mother wants him to stay home. He is her only consolation, and she can't adequately care for herself.

To minimize the strain on Londa's imagination, I decided that the embittered student should be female. I cast Edwina as the mother. Though preoccupied with packing—in twenty-four hours she would join Charnock for a weeklong artificial-intelligence conference in Chicago, where they would implore the neural-network community not to make basket cases of their computers—Edwina gladly took the part, and in a matter of minutes, the two actors had fully immersed themselves in the bedeviling scenario.

“
S'il te plaît,
Madeleine—reconsider,” Edwina gasped. “We've already lost your brother. I couldn't bear to lose you as well.”

“Claude would want me to avenge his death,” Londa said.

“Claude would want you to look after me,” Edwina insisted.

“If I stay here, I'll spend every waking minute thinking of the Resistance.” Londa grimaced and winced, as impressive an impersonation of psychic torment as I'd ever seen. “On the other hand, if I join the Resistance, I'll spend every waking minute thinking of
you.
”

“Exactly my point,” Edwina said. “Stay with me.”

“But, oh,
Maman,
consider the implications of driving the Germans out of France! Thousands of mothers—not just you,
thousands
will get to spend their dotages with sons and daughters who might've otherwise fallen into the Nazis' clutches!”

Edwina cupped her palms around Londa's shoulders, drawing the child so close that their noses practically touched. “Dearest Madeleine, how can you sacrifice my happiness to this futile business of sniping at Nazis? How can you make a bargain like that?”

“I can make such a bargain because…”

“Yes?”

“Because…”

“I'm listening.”

A tremulous moan broke from Londa's throat. She lurched away, rushing toward the conquistador. “Shit, Mason, you're doing it
again
! You're trying to drive me crazy!”

“Londa, that assertion gained nothing from the word ‘shit,'” Edwina said.

“My head's spinning,” Londa said. “I need…”

“A rule?” I suggested. “A binding principle? An eleventh commandment?”

Gasping like the carp she'd almost murdered, Londa slumped against Alonso. “The antimalarial drug quinine comes from the cinchona tree! In Riemann geometry a curved line is the shortest path between two points!”

“There are no rules for dealing with a dilemma like this,” I said.

“An adult human skeleton contains two hundred and six bones! Galaxies can be categorized as elliptical or spiral! Joyce Kilmer wrote ‘Trees'!”

“Instead of applying a rule, you need to engage all your powers of moral reasoning.”

“I
hate
this fucking lesson!”

Edwina cringed. “Londa, darling, we do not say ‘fucking' in school.”

Approaching my pupil, I took her right hand and massaged the palm as if to heal a Christly stigma. She heaved a sigh, then relaxed.

“Let's call it quits for today, okay?” I said.

“Good idea.” Londa inhaled audibly, filtering the stuffy air through her clenched teeth. “Best fucking idea I've heard all morning.”

I retrieved my backpack from the reading table and pulled out
Ethics from the Earth.
“For your homework tonight, please read
chapter four and write a thousand-word essay giving your personal reaction to the Stoics' worldview.”

She assumed a facial expression combining forced exasperation with genuine annoyance. “Well,
that
certainly doesn't sound like much fun.”

“It's not supposed to be fun.”

“Haven't you read the goddamn U.S. Constitution, Mason? Cruel and unusual punishments are forbidden.”

Edwina said, “Londa, sweetheart, we do not stoop to sarcasm during our lessons.”

Snatching the book away, Londa announced that she intended to prepare herself “a morally degenerate lunch full of saturated fats and refined sugar,” then exited the room with the punctuated jumps of a nine-year-old playing hopscotch.

Edwina and I locked gazes, and I saw that Londa's mismatched green irises were a legacy from her mother. She laid her delicate fingers against my cheek like a psychic healer performing a root canal.

“She's doing awfully well, wouldn't you say?” Edwina ventured.

“I see progress,” I replied, trying not to sound too satisfied with myself. How many real philosophers, the kind with Ph.D.s, could have brought Londa so far so fast?

“She knew why Madeleine felt compelled to fight the Nazis, but she understood the mother's feelings, too. Before you came here, Londa couldn't empathize with anybody except herself. ‘Progress' is an understatement. I'd say she's practically cured.”

 

THE LONGER I STAYED ON ISLA DE SANGRE
,
this tropical Eden with its squawking birds, squalling monkeys, and murmuring surf, the more certain I became that my years in academia had wrought a serious imbalance in my mental ecosystem. Thanks to Hawthorne University, a kind of Aristotelian kudzu had taken root
in my skull, choking out the more dynamic blooms and covering the whole terrain with a creeping carpet of rationality. It was high time for me to reclaim my natural right to entertain whimsical notions and formulate indefensible ideas.

I resolved to spend Wednesday afternoon trekking around the island, admitting to my consciousness every species of thought, no matter how grandiose. If so moved by Lady Philosophy, I would prove once and for all that humans possess
a priori
knowledge, devise an airtight case against
a priori
knowledge, and pronounce so pompously on the mystery of Being that every Heideggerian within earshot would reach for his gun. This strange vision quest, with its aim not of spiritual enlightenment but of intellectual decadence, began immediately after lunch. I donned my hiking clothes—the crate containing my earthly possessions had arrived from Boston the previous evening—stuffed my backpack with three bottles of Evian and a half dozen PowerBars, and set off for the beach, humming my favorite melodic idea from “The Lark Ascending,” that passage through which Vaughan Williams arranges for the listener's soul and the Hegelian World Spirit to fall madly and eternally in love.