The Philosopher's Apprentice (8 page)

A PARTICULARLY BAROQUE PRODUCT
of Charnock's genetic engineering skills greeted me when I entered the library the next morning, a winged and feathered iguana boasting the same talent for uncomprehending repetition found also in parrots and poststructuralists. The creature was perched on Londa's shoulder, swathed in her luxurious hair, his forked tongue flicking wildly as he peeked out from behind her tresses like a theater manager counting the house.

“Does he have a name?” I asked.

“Quetzie,” Londa replied, feeding the iguana a handful of dried ants. Her bright yellow sundress gave her the appearance of a gendered banana. “After Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered-serpent god.”

“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said. His plumage was indeed astonishing, a red-and-gold raiment flowing behind him like an emperor's robe.

“Quite so,” I told him.

“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” he said again.

“Indeed.”

“Quetzie is a handsome devil.”

“There's no disputing it.”

“Quetzie is a handsome devil.”

“That will do,” Londa said, and Quetzie apparently understood her—at any rate, he dropped the subject.

“I'd like to see your homework,” I said.

Londa sighed and rubbed up against the conquistador's breastplate like a house cat alerting its owner to the menace of an empty food dish. “Your chapter on the Stoics—I'm not sure how to put this—it simply
amazed
me. My pathetic essay doesn't
begin
to convey what it's like to meet a mind like yours.”

“Chapter four isn't about my ideas. It's about the Stoics' ideas.”

Quetzie hopped from Londa's shoulder to the conquistador's helmet. “Mason is a genius,” the iguana announced from his new perch.

I furrowed my brow and groaned. “Did you
teach
him that dubious proposition,” I asked Londa, “or is it merely something he overheard?”

She smiled coyly, then approached a massive writing desk, ornately carved with flowering creepers—I imagined some mad Caribbean poet at work there, scribbling the national epic of Isla de Sangre, a phantasmagoria of mutant lobsters, sentient mangroves, talking iguanas, greedy conquistadors, and mysterious concrete walls—and retrieved a printout from the top drawer. Retracing her steps, she transferred Quetzie back to her shoulder and presented me with an essay titled “In Praise of Adversity.”

“While you were slaving away on this, I had something of an adventure,” I told her. “I was hiking along the beach and suddenly found myself facing a high concrete wall. Do you know about it?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Evidently it runs far into the jungle. I climbed over—”

“I thought it was high.”

“I used a tree. And you'll never guess what I discovered.”

“The Fountain of Youth?”

“A large house—big as Faustino. Bigger, even. A villa.”

“How strange.”

“A little girl lives there. She calls herself Donya. Is that name familiar to you?”

“I don't think so. Donya?”

“That's right.”

“Since I hit my head”—Londa gulped loudly, as if swallowing a horse pill—“I've forgotten so many things.”

“Is it possible you have a little sister named Donya?”

She blinked in slow motion. “Mother says I'm an only child. What makes you think this Donya person is my sister?”

Londa's morality teacher now proceeded to lie to her. “A wild hunch. I shouldn't have mentioned it.”

“Shit, I
hate
it when the amnesia takes somebody away from me. I goddamn fucking
hate
it.”

“For what it's worth, I believe you've never met the child in question.”

“Know something, Socrates? I'm not enjoying this fucking conversation one little bit.”

“Mason is a genius,” the iguana said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Londa said.

Quetzie took flight and landed atop the globe, perching on the North Pole like a gigantic vulture about to devour the rotting carcass of planet Earth. I apologized to Londa for introducing such a painful topic, promised never to do so again, then suggested that while I negotiated “In Praise of Adversity,” she should amuse herself with a book of her own choosing. She ambled to the fiction collection, plucking out
Pride and Prejudice,
and we sat down together at the reading table.

I was barely two sentences into Londa's essay before realizing that she was uncommonly skilled at articulating her thoughts on paper: not a complete surprise, given the many acres of text she'd
soaked up of late—though, God knows, my Watertown High students had rarely made the leap from reading lucid prose to writing it. Her last paragraph struck me as downright eloquent.

During the ten minutes I spent with her essay, Londa reached the midpoint of
Pride and Prejudice.

“You're a good writer,” I told her.

“You think so?” she asked. “How good?”

“Very good. Excellent, really.”

“I'm not as good as this woman,” she said, tapping her novel. “Jane Austen makes me believe that Elizabeth Bennet is fucking alive.”

“A pithy tribute, Londa, but how about curbing the profanity?”

“Okay. Jane Austen
doesn't
make me believe that Elizabeth Bennet is fucking alive.”

I rolled my eyes and snorted. “You clearly got a lot out of my Stoicism chapter. But there's a small problem. From these pages it almost sounds as if you intend to
become
a Stoic.”

“Of course I do.”

“Stoicism died out fifteen centuries ago.”

“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said.

“As a matter of fact, the experiment has already started,” Londa said with a disconcerting grin. “Yesterday at lunch I had a smaller piece of pecan pie than usual, and I passed up the scoop of vanilla ice cream entirely. It's like I said in my essay. ‘Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a Stoic abhors satiety.' What's more, as you may have noticed, I've stopped smoking.”

“But not swearing.”

“I'm working on it.”

“And how long do you plan to pursue this project?”

“Long as I can. The hardest part will be to stop masturbating.”

“I see.”

“I'm rather well informed about sex,” she told me, as if I'd said she wasn't. “I've read all the books.
Fanny Hill. Justine. Lady Chatterley's Lover.
I know there's a positive side to fucking, but on the whole it's messy and dangerous, wouldn't you say?”

I swiped my tongue across the roof of my mouth, as if to detach a popcorn husk. “Messy. Dangerous. Yes.”

“A person could get a venereal disease.”

“This is true.”

“Do you have a girlfriend, Mason?”

“Not right now.”

“What about in the past?”

“Several girlfriends. You wrote a marvelous essay.”

“Did you fuck them?”

“We're drifting away from the topic.”

She snickered and said, “Stoicism: putting pleasure in its place. The Stoics believed that in bearing pain without complaint, a mortal might transcend the mundane world and enter the eternal matrix of divine thought—so that's part of my experiment, too.”

“What is?”

“Pain.”

“I don't understand.”

“Pain is part of my experiment.”

Several harsh and foreign chemicals flooded into my stomach. “Pain has nothing to teach you, Londa.”

“Not according to chapter four.”

“The Stoics did not deliberately hurt themselves.”

“I intend to build on their work.”

The chemicals roiled around, interacting with the native acids.
“Listen to me, Londa. You will not, under any conditions, you will
not
hurt yourself.”

“Last night I snuffed out a candle with my hand.”

She held up her left palm. A shudder of alarm passed through me. At the juncture of her head line and fate line, the very spot I'd massaged twenty-four hours earlier, lay a stark white blister.

“Fuck,” I said, frightened and confused but mostly angry.

“A useful word, huh?”

“I don't believe this.”

“I moaned and whimpered, but I didn't shriek. I also did stuff with a rose thorn.” She extended her right thumb. An angry red welt was blooming beneath the nail.

“Christ, Londa, I think it's
infected
!”

“It hurts like hell.” She sounded pleased. “Later today I'm going to sit in the conservatory and push a sewing needle through my tongue and open my heart to the divine matrix.”

I clasped Londa's shoulders and shook her, rhythmically, emphatically, as if I might dislodge her fantasies as I would a quarter stolen by a vending machine. “You will
not
push a needle through your tongue! Not today or any other day! You have to promise me that!”

“This is really important to you, isn't it, Mason?”

“
Promise
me.”

“All right, if that's what you want, I promise.” She approached the world-eating iguana and gently stroked his tail feathers. “But I don't see how I'm supposed to get cured if I can't take my lessons seriously.”

 

WE PASSED THE REST OF THE MORNING
in a heated and unhappy conversation, during which I tried convincing Londa that a person could comprehend a moral principle without becoming obligated to act on it. After a two-hour debate, she finally conceded that self-mutilation was not essential to the pursuit of ethics, but
her words sprang more from acquiescence than assent. Before our next meeting, I told her, she must reread chapter four, searching for the nuances she'd missed the first time around, the better to benefit from our upcoming Stoicism role-playing exercise.

I did not so much leave Faustino that afternoon as flee it, seeking the buoyant company of Donya and the Edenic serenity of her tree house. Jogging frantically along the beach, I vowed to begin Friday's lesson by inspecting Londa's tongue and every other part of her that lent itself to scrutiny. If I saw the slightest evidence of violence, I would probably conclude that I was out of my depth, return to Boston, and send Edwina an e-mail advising her to replace me with some fuck-the-Enlightenment Lyotard disciple from Vassar.

By the time I reached the concrete wall, a storm had broken over Blood Island, not quite a Gulf hurricane but still fearsome, with lashing winds and sheets of rain, and I was not surprised, after scaling the rampart and surveying the banyan tree, to find Donya's little elevated cottage empty. I proceeded to the villa. The doorknocker was a brass quoit fixed in the jaws of the same Aztec god who decorated the portal to Faustino. I banged the ring forcefully, thereby setting Donya's Doberman to barking.

“Omar, be quiet!” came a man's voice, chirping through the loudspeaker above my head.

“It's Mason Ambrose. I'm a friend of Donya's.”

“Your reputation precedes you.”

Omar kept on barking. The door swung back to reveal the frantic dog, bouncing up and down, bellowing madly, not far from canine hysterics. Holding Omar's collar was a portly middle-aged man who introduced himself as Henry Cushing. His beard was white, his brow sunburned, his manner genial: a Santa Claus for adults, I mused, bringing tax refunds and nonaddictive hallucinogens to good grown-ups everywhere. Whatever explanation this fellow might offer for Edwina's schizoid approach to parenthood, I would take it at face value.

At last recognizing my scent, Omar grew calm.

“When I saw Donya escorting you to the tree house, my impulse was to run over and check you out,” Henry said. “But she and Omar had obviously found you acceptable”—he released the dog's collar—“and they're both excellent judges of character, so I decided not to intrude.”

“She charmed me off my feet.” I staggered into the foyer, carrying with me a condensed edition of the outside storm, the rain spouting from the sleeves of my anorak to form puddles on the stone floor.

“Preschool children,” Henry said, “they're one of the
better
things in the world—wouldn't you agree?—like red wine and
New Yorker
cartoons and Christina Rossetti. ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me. Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress-tree.'”

I peeled off my soggy jacket and hung it on the coatrack. “You left out George Gershwin.”

“Don't tell Brock. He'd never forgive me.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“‘Be the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet. And if thou wilt, remember. And if thou wilt, forget.'”

Omar returned to his post, settling down on the rug before the door. Henry led me into a Gothic parlor, its fluted pillars ascending to a vaulted ceiling, its stained-glass windows thrusting ever heavenward like rectangles who'd found Jesus. Dressed in an oilcloth smock and gripping a paintbrush, Donya stood before an artist's easel, staring at a half-finished watercolor of Deedee the chimpanzee. Her subject sat two feet away on a Windsor chair, self-possessed as only a professional model or a stuffed animal could be.

“Donya, look who's here,” Henry said.

“Mason!” She dashed across the room and threw her arms around me as if I were Edward Bear himself, dropping by for a game
of Candy Land. “I'm so glad to see you! I told Henry and Brock all about our tea party!”