The Philosopher’s Apprentice Read online

  “The chardonnay or the merlot?” Javier asked Edwina as she assumed her chair.

  “Our guest will decide,” she replied, presenting me with a blank stare. “Though personally I believe it’s barbaric to consume red wine with seafood.”

  “The chardonnay is fine,” I said, inhaling the perfume of the hibiscus.

  “Londa will have the usual,” Edwina informed her assistant.

  As Javier passed through the patio doorway, a ginger cat with a flat, churlish face escaped from the conservatory, scurried across the tiles, and leaped into Edwina’s lap.

  “In making your diagnosis,” she said, gesturing toward a dirt path emerging from the forest, “you must not hesitate to risk Londa’s annoyance. If we spare her feelings, she’ll never get well.”

  Branches rustled, vines swayed, a macaw took flight, and the jungle brought forth a young woman of commanding height and abundant auburn hair, flipping through a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as if hunting up a favorite recipe in a cookbook. Was she in fact reading the thing so quickly? Comprehending it? She did not so much enter the patio as alight upon it—such was the fluidity of her tread, the delicacy of her carriage. Bronzed by the tropical sun, her arms extended from a white cotton blouse, her legs from khaki shorts. Her cheek and jaw muscles seemed atrophied, giving her a vacuous, uninhabited expression, but her eyes were as large and green as mumquats, and her lips had matured into an appealing pout. To cure this adolescent’s malaise, I realized, would be to awaken a face of great beauty.

  Edwina grasped her daughter’s free hand, pressing it between her palms. “Darling, meet Mason Ambrose. He flew over a thousand miles to help us with our difficulties.”

  “Hello, Londa,” I said.

  She set her book on the table and, extending her arm, gave me a surprisingly vital handshake. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Ambrose,” she said. Her voice had a hollow, ethereal timbre, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

  The instant Londa slid into her chair, Javier reappeared pushing a tea trolley on which rested the chardonnay and a carafe containing a mysterious ochre fluid. He filled Edwina’s goblet and my own with wine. Londa received the unknown offering.

  “Iced tea?” I asked.

  “Coca-Cola,” Londa said. “At one time its promoters favored the slogan ‘Coke is it,’ an assertion I find totally incoherent. Will there be pecan pie for dessert, Mother?”

  “Naturally.” Edwina brushed Londa’s forearm. “Some people would say that by indulging my daughter I inflate her ego, but here at Faustino we have little use for received wisdom.”

  We proceeded to eat our stew, the silence growing increasingly conspicuous. I doubt that Edwina consumed more than a mouthful or two, although the wine occasioned no such prudence, and she eagerly drank three full glasses.

  “The Kama Sutra catalogs seventy arts of graciousness,” Londa said abruptly, staring at her half-empty bowl. “In 1859 the French daredevil Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The phylum Schizophyta comprises two thousand species of bacteria. Cyrus the Great, Persia’s brilliant warrior and statesman, conquered Babylon in 500 B.C.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I said.

  “According to Sumerian mythology, the universe was fashioned out of the primeval sea and divided into heaven and earth by Enlil, god of air and storms. All igneous rocks begin as magma. In 1972 the American swimmer Mark Spitz won seven gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Munich. The carrion-eating caracara bird has sharp hooks on its beak for tearing open animal hide.”

  I decided to begin my evaluation with the closest thing Western philosophy has to a sacred text, Plato’s Republic. In Book One, Cephalus defines “justice” as speaking the truth and paying one’s debts. Socrates refutes this notion by suggesting it would be wrong to repay certain debts—for example, to return a borrowed ax to its mentally imbalanced owner.

  I lifted a morsel of calamari to my mouth, chewed the rubbery tissue, and said, “Londa, may I ask you a question? I would like you to imagine that a woman named Alice has borrowed an ax from her friend Jerome so she can chop a dead limb off her beech tree. When Jerome comes to reclaim his ax, he’s obviously very agitated—”

  “You mean he’s like me?”

  “Like you?”

  “Insane.”

  “We’re not insane,” Edwina said.

  “Alice becomes afraid that Jerome may use the ax to kill someone,” I said. “So here’s my question. Should Alice give it back?”

  Londa closed her eyes. “In 1088 the Patzinak Turks settled between the Danube and the Balkans. The talking drum of Nigeria’s Yoruba people has strings that, when squeezed, can produce notes ranging over an octave or more.”

  “Please try to cooperate, dear,” Edwina said.

  “The question has no answer,” Londa snapped.

  “Many philosophers would argue that the question has a very good answer,” I said.

  “It doesn’t,” Londa insisted. “‘Dilemma, noun, a situation in which a person must choose between two undesirable alternatives.’”

  I glanced toward the nearest hibiscus. A swarm of butterflies moved among the blossoms with rapid stitching motions, as if fashioning a transparent gown with needle and thread. I fixed on Londa and said, “May I ask you a second question?”

  “Another fucking dilemma?”

  Edwina winced. “Londa, darling, we do not say ‘fucking’ at lunch.”

  Having failed to get anywhere with Socrates’ ax, I decided to try Lawrence Kohlberg’s variation on Jean Valjean stealing the loaf of bread.

  “Once upon a time in Europe,” I said, “a man was near death from bone cancer. The doctors thought a particular drug might save him, a radium extract that Fritz, the local pharmacist, had recently discovered. Although Fritz paid only one hundred deutsche marks for each specimen of raw radium—enough to prepare one ampoule for hypodermic injection—he priced the dose at a thousand marks. The sick man’s wife, Helga, went to everyone she knew to borrow the money, but in the end she could scrape together only four hundred marks. Desperate now, Helga begged Fritz to either lower his price or let her pay the remaining six hundred marks in installments. But the pharmacist said, ‘No, I discovered the extract, and I’m going to profit from it.’ That very night Helga broke into Fritz’s store and stole an ampoule of the drug. Now, Londa, here’s the problem. Did Helga do the right thing?”

  Her eyes narrowed to a livid squint. “Why would you ask me a question like that?”

  “It’s just a game,” I said.

  “It’s a stupid game! You’re trying to trick me! You’re trying to make me even crazier than I am!”

  Edwina said, “Sweetheart, we’re not being fair to our teacher.”

  A howl erupted from deep within Londa’s coltish frame, and the next thing I knew she’d tilted her bowl ninety degrees, sending the remainder of her stew slopping across the table. She bolted from her chair and, kneeling beside the fishpond, dipped the empty bowl into the water like a ladle. In a matter of seconds, she’d made a helpless carp her prisoner.

  “Londa, no!” Edwina screamed, startling her misanthropic cat, who bailed out and disappeared down the jungle path. “The fish did nothing to deserve that!”

  “Titanium is the ninth-most-abundant element!” Londa wailed. “In 1962, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize in Physiology!”

  Still on her knees, she upended the bowl, dumping both the captive fish and its liquid habitat onto the patio. Somehow the creature flipped from its left side to its abdomen, dorsal fin up. Inspired by its success, the carp next attempted to navigate the tiles in a pathetic mockery of swimming. It got nowhere, mired by friction and the malign indifference of the carp gods.

  “The rules of the ancient Chinese game of liu-po have been lost to history! The bubonic plague of the 1340s killed nearly one-third of Europe’s population!”

  “Put the fish back!” Edwina shouted.


  I leaped from my chair, seized the valiant carp, and heaved it into the pond.

  “In 1900 the cakewalk became the most fashionable dance in the United States!”

  Crouching beside Londa, I set my fingertips beneath her chin and lifted her head until our gazes met. Her nostrils quivered. Her lips grew taut. Her eyes looked desiccated, as hard and dry as ball bearings. Never had I seen such anguish in another human face, and so it was that as the warblers sang merrily and the tanagers trilled with unreflective joy, I vowed to Isis and Horus and most especially to myself that somehow, some way, I would teach my sad and sorry pupil how to weep.

  AFTER LONDA TOOK LEAVE OF US, loping into the jungle with the fretful gait of a gazelle who’d lingered too long at the lions’ watering hole, Edwina rose and approached the pond. She stared into its depths, counting the local population.

  “Apparently this was her first carp attack,” she said. “Give me your verdict, Mason. As a professional ethicist, would you say Londa is a full-blown sociopath?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not a professional ethicist. In my opinion, nobody is.”

  “Cruelty to animals is a strong predictor of future criminality,” Edwina said. “Most serial killers got started by torturing their pets.”

  We drank a final glass of wine, then talked about my contract. Once it was clear that I understood the terms—beginning on Monday, I would tutor Londa every weekday morning over the next ten months, two hours per session—the conversation turned to my living accommodations. Although Dr. Charnock would be happy to offer me his hospitality, Edwina explained, I would instead occupy a cottage on the very lagoon where Londa had fractured her skull. I was about to contradict this assessment, noting that Charnock did not seem like a person who cherished guests—I doubted he felt comfortable hosting himself, much less intruders from the mainland—when Javier returned waving a cashier’s check for twenty-five thousand dollars and explained that I could expect an identical payment every three months. I decided that I would order myself a laptop and also start sending regular grants from the Ambrose Arts Foundation to my sister Delia in New York, so she could spend more time attending auditions and less time waiting tables.

  As dusk came to Isla de Sangre, Javier dropped me off at Charnock’s A-frame. The biologist was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was in his laboratory, concocting our Jewish starfish. Beguiled by the sound of the surf, I pulled off my shoes and socks and walked down to the beach. The tide was going out. Again and again the sea threw itself upon the shore and glided away, losing ground with each cycle, a liquid Sisyphus.

  “‘Pale beds of blowing rushes,’” I muttered, “‘where no leaf blooms or blushes, save this whereout she crushes for dead men deadly wine.’”

  I took the mumquat from my shirt pocket, then knelt beside a tide pool and washed the skin clean. Rising, I popped the fruit into my mouth. The flesh fell away from the pit and melted into a thick, sweet syrup that rolled across my tongue and, trickling downward, caressed my gullet with a viscous warmth. I wrapped my tongue around the stippled stone and spit it out.

  Barefoot, I waded into the surf, and as the mumquat took charge of my mind, I looked up and saw that Orion and Canis Major had left their dark niches and were now romping together across the sky. Even as the hunter and his dog gamboled through the celestial meadow, my monarch butterfly fluttered into view, and behind this regal creature flew ten thousand more, their wings beating so vigorously I could feel the wind against my cheeks. Soon every heavenly body above Isla de Sangre had transmuted into a radiant insect, flitting and floating and pollinating the night with countless new stars, and for the moment I was master of them all, an immortal being, a god who answered only to himself.

  Chapter 3

  PLATO HAD HIS REPUBLIC, Francis Bacon his New Atlantis, Candide his El Dorado, and I my private cottage in the jungle, an easy walk to Edwina’s estate. Among the amenities of this pocket utopia, two delighted me in particular: a sturdy wooden deck overlooking the algae-coated expanse of Laguna Zafira, and a home entertainment center complete with a CD collection featuring the sorts of orchestral music that would incline even the most stringent interstellar cultural commission to rank Earth a civilized planet. On the night before I was scheduled to give my pupil her first lesson, I settled into the chaise longue, uncapped a beer, and made ready to let Ralph Vaughan Williams liberate me from the prison of my skin.

  Although “Sinfonia Antarctica” sounded as sublime as ever, its pleasures were insufficient to keep me from brooding. Who was this lost young woman whose broken moral compass I was expected to repair? Would I need to teach Londa Sabacthani every ethical principle since “Don’t eat of the tree,” or merely help her recover certain previously assimilated rules that the amnesia had obscured? How might I follow in the footsteps of Sinuhe’s father, finding and extracting the secret splinter that had paralyzed her conscience?

  “Sinfonia Antarctica” yielded to the “The Lark Ascending,” a composition through which Williams, during my worst bout of junior-year depression at Villanova, had single-handedly persuaded me that the world was not in fact a festering cesspool of such primordial meaninglessness that even suicide would seem like a gesture of assent. I drank one beer per movement, falling asleep in my chair.

  Shortly before dawn I awoke to find my bladder distended and, less predictably, my mind ablaze with a bright idea. What Londa needed, I decided, was to participate directly and viscerally in the sorts of ethical dilemmas devised by Plato and Kohlberg. Instead of simply pondering morality with her intellect, she must perform morality with her hands and feet and organs of speech. To wit, I would turn the Riddle of the Borrowed Ax and the Fable of the Stolen Radium into drama improvisations, placing my student at the center of both crises.

  Somewhere in the void, the spirit of John Dewey, America’s greatest philosopher and a tireless champion of learning by doing, looked down on Laguna Zafira and smiled.

  LATER THAT MORNING I jogged to the manor, flying past a dozen languid iguanas sunning themselves along the forest trail. As I mounted the steps to the veranda, Edwina came gliding toward me, her chronically disaffected ginger cat curled around her neck like a yoke. The beast hissed at me. I hissed back. Edwina explained that her daughter’s rehabilitation would occur amid the estate’s vast book collection, then guided me down the hall, through a set of French doors, and into the library. Scanning my new classroom, I felt a surge of optimism: the ranks of handsome hardcovers, the globe as big as a wrecking ball, the pair of corpulent armchairs by the hearth—it all seemed conducive to moral discourse of the highest order.

  The one anomalous feature was a department-store mannequin, its tawny plastic flesh dressed in the incised breastplate, morion helmet, and leather hip boots of a Spanish conquistador. Armed with sword and musket, this vigilant agent of the Inquisition stood guard beside the philosophy section, as if charged with making sure nobody checked out a work by David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, or any other heretic.

  “We call him Alonso,” Edwina said. “He came with the mansion. Javier likes to make up stories about him. Evidently it was Alonso who convinced Ponce de León to quit the governorship of Puerto Rico and go seek the fabled island of Bimini and its legendary Fountain of Youth. In 1514, Ponce and Alonso stumbled upon a great landmass, which they called Pascua Florida, flowery Easter, because it was Easter Sunday.”

  Before Edwina could continue Alonso’s biography, Londa floated into the room wearing white shorts and a red polo shirt. Her mother and I wished her good morning. Ignoring us, she approached the hearth and flopped into an armchair. She stared into space, saying nothing.

  “Ponce and Alonso then embarked on a series of exploits,” Edwina said. “Conquering the Florida Indians, quelling Taíno rebellions back in Puerto Rico, and making pathetic attempts to circumnavigate their newly discovered island, not realizing it was a peninsula.” She drew me to her side and continued in a whisper. “I would say you’ve succeeded
with Londa when she can see the irony in a gang of adventurers seeking eternal youth while leaving corpses wherever they went.”

  Edwina slipped out of the room, closing the French doors behind her. I settled into the vacant armchair and faced the dormant fireplace—a peculiar installation here in the tropics, as incongruous as a pinball machine in a funeral parlor.

  “Mother doesn’t know jack shit about Ponce de León,” Londa said abruptly. “He discovered Florida in 1513, not 1514.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

  “It’s in the fucking Encyclopaedia Britannica. And he never massacred the Indians. They kicked his Castilian ass.”

  “I’m sure they did. Ready for your lesson?”

  “No.”

  “This morning we’re going to try something called a theater game. You and I will play roles, like the actors and actresses you see on television.”

  “Mother doesn’t like me to watch television, but I do it anyway. The comedians make me laugh. So do the soap operas and the tornados and the children who’ve fallen down mine shafts.”

  “Do you remember the story of Alice and Jerome and the borrowed ax?”

  Londa tugged absently at her auburn hair. “How could I forget?” Issuing as they did from her infinitely absorbent brain, her words had a double meaning: the story was memorable, and she couldn’t have forgotten it if she’d wanted to.