The Philosopher’s Apprentice Read online

  I found my way to the airport’s ghetto district and boarded a shuttle plane, its seats designed to accommodate hobbits comfortably but not a six-foot-one beanpole like myself. Forty minutes later I touched down in the city of Key West on the island of the same name. As arranged, Edwina Sabacthani’s fellow geneticist, Vincent Charnock, was waiting at the terminal, clutching a white cardboard rectangle on which he’d carefully misspelled my name with a red felt-tip marker: MASON AMBROWSE. A rotund man shaped rather like an Erlenmeyer flask, with thinning hair and eyes set so far back I wondered if he might be legally blind, Dr. Charnock displayed a sardonic smirk that evidently never left his face, while the rest of his countenance, a blobby affair, suggested a waxen Charles Laughton following a breakdown in the air-conditioning system at Madame Tussaud’s.

  So long had I lived in the hermetically sealed world of graduate students, where the daily demands of subsistence teaching and posturing for professors make extroverts of us all, that I was not prepared for Dr. Charnock’s aloof demeanor. As we followed the usual protocols—locating the luggage carousel, retrieving my suitcase, hiring a taxi—my companion remained as taciturn as a tortoise, answering my questions in clipped phrases and uninformative grunts. Did he know my prospective pupil? Yes, he did. Had he ever observed her behave in an antisocial fashion? Yes, he had. Would he like to tell me about those episodes? No, he wouldn’t. Was he glad I’d accepted the position as Londa’s tutor? He wasn’t sure.

  Our destination proved to be the Oceanside Marina on Peninsula Avenue, where a silver-mustached Cuban expatriate waited to facilitate the next leg of our journey. The plan called for Captain López to ferry us to the island in his thirty-foot cabin cruiser, which he normally chartered, himself at the helm, to weekend fishing parties of paunchy CEOs in search of their inner Hemingways. We weighed anchor at one o’clock. The weather was wretched, the sort of chilly, fine-grained precipitation that quickly seeps from skin to ligament to core of bone, and so Charnock and I retreated belowdecks to quarters stinking of kelp and bluefish.

  Our passage to the Tropic of Cancer took nearly four hours, during which interval the rain stopped, so that the thickly forested hills of Isla de Sangre presented themselves clearly to my gaze, dipping and rising like the spine of a sea serpent. We navigated the Bahía de Flores and landed at a ramshackle wooden dock, tying up between a derelict trawler and a battered sailboat. As we disembarked, Charnock deigned to initiate a conversation, explaining that the geography of Blood Island was in a class by itself, “part Florida swamp, part Mexican rain forest,” and how in recent months he and Edwina had “succeeded in making the local flora and fauna more congruent with our personal tastes.”

  “I’ve heard of fixer-upper houses,” I said, “but never a fixer-upper ecosystem.”

  Charnock frowned and informed me that he’d arranged for Edwina’s staff to prepare a meal and leave it for our consumption. He hoped I liked seafood.

  “I have learned to like it,” I said. “Up Boston way, disparaging scrod is considered hate speech.”

  “No scrod on the menu,” Charnock said, “but I think you’ll enjoy our spiny lobsters.”

  All during our long, wordless walk through the jungle, I pondered the psychic dislocations inherent in the advent of jetliners. Ten hours earlier I’d been packing my suitcase while overhearing the chatter of Back Bay children clambering onto their school bus, and now here I was in the tropics, swatting mosquitoes, sweating profusely, and contemplating hundreds of spotted green lizards as they skittered along the tree trunks. I felt not so much like a traveler as a man on whom an operation called travel had been performed. What would modernity bring next? Might a day arrive when I would go to bed as Mason Ambrose and, courtesy of some brave new technology, wake up as someone else?

  A half-hour’s hike brought us within sight of Charnock’s house, a weathered A-frame adjacent to the complex of Quonset huts where he conducted his biology experiments. “Five years ago I was just another molecular geneticist, collaborating with fools and groveling for funds,” he told me. “Whatever impression Dr. Sabacthani makes on you tomorrow, remember that she’s a person of vision. She’s not afraid to ask the big questions, or to have me try to answer them. Why only four bases in a DNA molecule? Why only twenty amino acids in our proteins? What might the world look like if nature had used a bigger set of building blocks? Ever wonder about that, Ambrose?”

  “Guess I’m not a person of vision.”

  Although its isosceles façade suggested a cramped interior, the A-frame proved spacious, complete with a screened back porch bisected by a hammock—the guest room, Charnock explained. The windows held not glass but mosquito netting, and as the gauzy fabric filtered the setting sun, I briefly fancied myself a moth trapped inside a Chinese lantern. As promised, dinner was waiting for us. The servants were nowhere to be seen, which made me feel a bit like Goldilocks about to partake of her illicit porridge. By the time I’d drunk my first cold Dos Equis, however, my unease had vanished, and I no longer imagined that the bears were about to arrive and chase us into the forest.

  Resting on a bed of saffron rice and surrounded by slices of fried mango, the two indigenous spiny lobsters looked delectable, but their anatomy disturbed me. This species had never evolved the fighting claws that characterized its northern cousin, and yet our entrées boasted pincers as large as tin snips. Noting my perplexity, Charnock said, “After nine hundred trials, I managed to endow a Caribbean spiny lobster with a Maine lobster’s claws.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I smiled and said, “Of course, I’d be more impressed if you’d taken an ordinary Caribbean starfish and turned it into a Jewish one.”

  “Jewish?”

  “With six points.”

  “Biology is not a joke, Mr. Ambrose.”

  We finished our dinner in silence, leaving behind two vacant lobster shells and seven empty beer bottles. Outside the house a thousand insects sang and sawed in wondrous harmony, as if a population of Buddhist homunculi now occupied the banana plants and the mangroves, ringing their little bells.

  Wrapped in the beer’s muzzy embrace, I shuffled to the porch and climbed into the hammock. For the next hour, I read my paperback of Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle, wondering whether Londa Sabacthani might be suffering from what Percy called “the loss of the creature,” the alienation that modern man has inflicted on himself by ceding the world’s most valuable things—its natural wonders, artistic marvels, erotic energies, and common sense—to dubious cults of expertise. I extinguished the Coleman lantern and closed my eyes. Half awake and half asleep, half in bed and half in Xanadu, I entertained many strange fancies, eventually imagining that Charnock had experimented on me. In this reverie my hands had become leopard paws, my nose was a boar’s snout, and my gums had sprouted two-inch fangs. When I went to the bathroom later that night to void the residual beer, I made a point of looking in the mirror.

  BEYOND HIS WIZARDRY WITH DNA, Charnock was apparently a competent cook, for I awoke to find him preparing two complex omelets stuffed with cheese, peppers, onions, and morsels of shrimp. The meal passed without conversation. It was not yet eight o’clock, and already I was sweating. I drank two glasses of ice water. Fragrances drifted in from the jungle—sweet gardenias, dulcet hibiscus, silken magnolias. The previous night’s insect musicians had returned to their burrows, and the island now belonged to the birds, filling the air with territorial caws and proprietary arpeggios.

  Shortly after breakfast, a Jeep pulled up outside Charnock’s A-frame, driven by a raffish, safari-jacketed Latino with a drooping black mustache and olive skin, a by-God Ramar of the Jungle pith helmet shadowing his face. He introduced himself as Javier Cotrino, Dr. Sabacthani’s personal assistant, dispatched to chauffeur me to her mansion. For the next twenty minutes, Javier and I lurched and bounced along an unpaved road, descending into a verdant valley flush with hibiscus and bougainvillea, until at last we c
ame to a high chain-link fence surmounted by spirals of barbed wire. We drove beneath a raised crossing gate, angled like a satyr’s intractable erection, then continued past acacia groves and cypress stands toward the rising sun.

  The mansion in question—Faustino, Javier called it—was straight out of the antebellum American South, complete with square columns and great tufts of Spanish moss drooping from the roof like a gallery of beards in a costume shop. As we climbed the steps to the veranda, Javier warned me that Dr. Sabacthani had slept badly the previous night, and I must not take her exhaustion for haughtiness. We passed through the front door, its central panel carved with a bas-relief Aztec deity who’d evidently actualized himself for the sole purpose of being unappeasable, then proceeded to a geodesic dome whose hundred hurricane-proof glass triangles served to shield a private jungle from the ravages of Gulf storms. Ferns, vines, and orchids flourished everywhere. Fumes compounded of humus and nectar filled my nostrils. The air felt like hot glue. At the center of all this Darwinian commotion, an immense mangrove tree emerged from a saltwater pond, its naked roots entwined like acrobatic pythons, its coiling limbs bearing small green fruit suggesting organic Ping-Pong balls. Beneath the tree, dressed in a white lace gown and reading an issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a woman of perhaps forty sat in a wicker chair, its fan-shaped back spreading behind her like Botticelli’s scallop shell giving birth to Venus.

  “Every Saturday morning,” Javier told me, “you’ll find two elegant and fascinating creatures in our conservatory—my friend Dr. Sabacthani, and this queen of the trees, Proserpine.”

  “The mangrove has a name?” I asked.

  “A Christian name only,” the woman replied in a sandpaper voice. Her face was a disconcerting conjunction of high-cheeked beauty and humorless ambition, as if Katharine Hepburn had been cast in her prime as Catherine de Medici. “The experiment was not sufficiently successful for me to admit Proserpine to the Sabacthani family.” She flipped a pair of gold-framed polarized lenses into place over her eyeglasses, then set her book atop a wheeled cart holding a coffee urn, its shiny convex surface elongating Proserpine’s reflection into an El Greco figure. “Forgive me for not rising to greet you, Mason, but I’ve not been well lately, and etiquette would only aggravate my condition. Call me Edwina. May I offer you some coffee?”

  “The food of philosophers,” I said, though a better case could be made for beer.

  Javier gestured me into a second fan-back chair and, approaching the urn, released an ebony stream into a mug bearing the Odradek Pharmaceuticals logo. He passed me my coffee, filled a second Odradek mug for Edwina, and exited the dome, walking backward with the dexterity of a Hawthorne tour guide showing prospective students around the campus.

  “Tell me, Mason, is sin something that Anglo-American philosophers worry about these days”—Edwina rested a bony hand on the mangrove’s nearest root—“or do you leave all that to your Continental colleagues?”

  “Sin?”

  “No sooner had Dr. Charnock and I given Proserpine a rudimentary brain than it became clear that we had sinned.”

  “A brain?”

  “It’s gone now, most of it. Her first words—”

  “Words?”

  “We also gave her a tongue, a larynx, primitive lungs, and a crude circulatory system. Her first words were, ‘Put me out of my misery.’ Not what we expected to hear. What do you suppose she meant?”

  “Are you testing me?”

  Edwina smiled.

  “Perhaps you’d created a kind of basket case.” I sipped my beverage. It had a heady chocolate flavor, as if Charnock had induced a coffee bush to have sex with a cacao plant. “A being with an inherent desire to move its body through space but lacking any means to do so.”

  “Good,” Edwina said, acclaiming my answer with a clap of her hands. “Dawson did not overestimate you. I told Dr. Charnock we had no choice but to amputate Proserpine’s consciousness. Mercy demanded it. He said such an operation would amount to physician-assisted suicide, a practice he has always found repellent. So I took up a scalpel and performed the procedure myself. There’s a lesson in all this, a parable for the neural-network community as they go about imposing self-awareness on their computers. Beware, ladies and gentlemen. To pour a free-floating intellect into a machine is to risk making an infinitely frustrated soul.”

  “A tormented Dr. Johnson,” I mused, “eternally eager to kick a stone and thus give Berkeley’s idealism the boot. But he can find no stone in his universe, nor a leg with which to kick it.”

  “Well said.”

  Just then a mild tremor passed through the mangrove’s limbs and roots. Edwina and I exchanged freighted glances.

  “You didn’t imagine that,” she said. “I couldn’t excise the entire nervous system without causing death. Every so often, Proserpine shudders.”

  Curious, I rose and picked my way across the saltwater pond, one stepping-stone at a time, then leaned toward the mangrove’s trunk. I froze. A chuffing reached my ears, low and coarse, like the sound of a passing steamboat as apprehended by an eel. Counterpointing Proserpine’s breaths was a second cadence: the thump of the sap pulsing through her xylem.

  “She’s breathing,” I said. “Her heart is beating.”

  “Vestigial reflexes,” Edwina said. “She’s no longer sentient, I promise you.”

  For a moment I considered reneging on my contract and going back to Boston. Yes, I needed the money, but did I really want to spend a year among people who routinely fashioned mutant lobsters and breathing trees and God knew what other sorts of biological surrealism?

  “‘No growth of moor or coppice,’” Edwina quoted as I returned to my seat, “‘No heather-flower or vine, but bloomless buds of poppies, green grapes of Proserpine.’” She extended her arm and harvested one of the mangrove’s fruits. “The world has never met with my approval.”

  “You’re an idealist,” I said.

  “Or a cynic.”

  “The same thing.”

  It was a glib answer, and we both knew it. Although her polarized lenses mitigated Edwina’s scowl, I still felt its impact.

  “In any event,” she said, “from the moment of my daughter’s birth, I contrived to give her a sheltered existence, educating her entirely at home. Her father would not have assented, but he died before she was born, pancreatic cancer, a banal end for a remarkable man.” She took my hand and pressed the strange fruit into my palm. “Javier calls them ‘rococonuts.’ Charnock prefers the term ‘mummy kumquats’—‘mumquats’—for they can make the consumer imagine he’s immortal. Be careful where you eat your mumquat, Mason. Avoid precipices and quicksand bogs.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said, nesting the fruit in my shirt pocket.

  Edwina raised her hand in a halfhearted attempt to conceal a yawn. “By age six Londa was an expert swimmer. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, she dove into a lagoon and struck her head on a rock. Javier fished her out before she could drown. Londa’s first trip to the mainland occurred in a medevac chopper. The blow left no scar, but the resultant memory loss remains one of the severest in the annals of amnesia.” She swallowed some coffee. “Gradually it became clear that Londa’s childhood recollections weren’t the only casualty—she’d also lost her ability to distinguish right from wrong. Depravity is not a diagnosis one makes lightly, but the evidence seems unequivocal.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Edwina expounded upon the sorry condition of Londa’s conscience. The feral adolescent had recently set fire to the rug in the east parlor, stolen cash from Javier’s wallet, smashed the dinnerware on the kitchen floor, thrown rocks through the windows of Dr. Charnock’s laboratory, eaten mumquats against her mother’s orders—the list went on and on.

  “In undertaking Londa’s cure, you will have one great asset,” Edwina said. “She has retained her ability to pick up any book and absorb its contents at an astonishing speed, a genetic endowment from her maternal gran
dfather. By devouring most of the Faustino library, she has succeeded in reorienting herself to Western civilization and its cultural norms. As for reality per se, she prefers to account for it in reference to the capricious Yahweh of prerabbinical Judaism. Not the deity I would have picked for her, but probably better than no deity at all, given her present stage of development.”

  A disturbing image flitted through my imagination. I was in Sinuhe’s surgical theater, Londa lying before me on an operating table. I had scrolled her scalp away from her skullcap, sawed off her cranium, and exposed her brain to daylight. Now all that remained was for me to take up my knife and inscribe the Ten Commandments onto her cerebral cortex.

  “I’ll be honest, Edwina. I’m hesitant to intervene so radically in another person’s psyche.”

  “Oh, but Londa wants you to intervene.”

  Just then Proserpine, for no apparent reason, began to quaver, her exposed roots vibrating like the plucked strings of an immense lyre.

  “You’re certain the tree has no awareness?” I asked, brushing the nearest branch.

  “A complete void,” Edwina said. “No qualia whatsoever. If I thought she was still suffering, I would immediately uproot her, much as I would miss her sweet fruit and cool shade and unfailing companionship. My daughter wants you to intervene, Mason, more than you can possibly imagine. She wants it with the desperation of the damned.”

  DRESSED NOW IN A BLUE SILK KIMONO, Javier reappeared and, taking Edwina’s hand, guided her free of the chair. For an instant the two of them seemed to be dancing, and it occurred to me that Javier’s duties might include appeasing Edwina’s libido. I doubted that he relished these carnal obligations, not if she was as quixotic in bed as in conversation.

  The three of us followed the labyrinth of shrubs and bushes to a frosted-glass door that Javier slid back to reveal a courtyard tiled with ceramic hexagons and girded by great ropy masses of jungle. A fishpond lay at the center of the patio, complete with a school of golden carp flashing through the shallow water like pennies sparkling in a fountain. Edwina led me to a round table swathed in white linen and arrayed with porcelain bowls from which rose fragrant twists of steam. Sliding into the nearest chair, I saw that we’d be dining on calamari stew, and I wondered whether before turning them over to the kitchen staff Charnock had given the little squids fins or wings or some other capricious enhancement.