The Philosopher’s Apprentice Read online

  “I’ll take the part of Jerome,” I told her, “and you’ll be Alice.”

  “Alice Walker is best known for The Color Purple, published in 1982. Mother tells me you’re from Boston.”

  “Correct. Shall we start the game?”

  “Boston is the capital of Massachusetts.” From her skirt pocket she retrieved a matchbook and a blue pack of Dunhill cigarettes. “During the Boston Tea Party, the colonists dumped three hundred and forty-two crates of cargo into the harbor.”

  “Londa, are you listening?”

  “Our planet has a solid inner core, a molten outer core, a warm rocky mantle, and a thin cool crust. On December seventeenth, 1903, the Wright Brothers made four flights in their propeller-driven glider.”

  “Londa, I need your attention.”

  With a flick of her wrist she prompted a single cigarette to emerge from the pack. “The filter tip goes in my mouth.” She wrapped her lips around the cigarette and slid it free. “The other end receives the match. I’m seventeen years old, and I have many skills. I can bake a cake, drive a nail, unclog a drain, and build a castle out of sand.”

  “Does your mother let you smoke?”

  “Yeah, but she’s not too fucking wild about it.” She struck a match, lit her Dunhill, and launched into a deft impersonation of Edwina. “‘Sweetheart, we know that tobacco is bad for our health.’” She removed the cigarette and coughed. “I’m afraid Mother’s opinions don’t carry a whole lot of weight in my book. Neither do yours, as a matter of fact.”

  I stared at a fire poker, standing in its rack like an arrow in a quiver. During a postwar meeting of the Moral Science Club at King’s College, Wittgenstein had reportedly brandished such an implement in Karl Popper’s face when the latter refused to admit there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles. My urge to similarly threaten Londa just then was not negligible.

  “You’re suffering from a serious dysfunction,” I told her. “It behooves you to cooperate.”

  “I’m well aware of my serious dysfunction. Know something else, Socrates? I’m just as fucking moral as you. Rule one: thou shalt have no other fucking gods before me. Rule seven: thou shalt not commit fucking adultery. I can recite all ten. Can you?”

  “Your mother tells me you set fire to a rug. You’ve thrown rocks through Dr. Charnock’s windows. That doesn’t sound like moral behavior to me.”

  “Me neither.”

  “On Saturday you almost killed a fish for no reason.”

  “If you’re worried I might break your windows, I promise I won’t.” She parked the cigarette in her mouth and stretched out her bare arm, poking the flesh with her thumb. “It’s so strange being wrapped up in this stuff.” The cigarette bobbed up and down as she spoke. “Epidermis, dermis, fascia. I’m always leaking. Blood, sweat, saliva, mucus.”

  “But never tears.”

  Our eyes met. Her irises were two different shades of green. She seemed about to waft out yet another datum but instead offered a faltering smile and a snort of begrudging assent.

  I climbed free of the armchair and, taking Londa’s hand, led her to a mahogany reading table, where I seized a convenient duster, a bouquet of white feathers sprouting from the handle. “Let’s imagine this is the ax.” I waved the duster in Londa’s face. “Good morning, Alice,” I began in a smarmy voice. “How lovely to see you today.”

  Five seconds elapsed. Ten. Fifteen. Londa took a long drag on her cigarette, then flicked the ember into an inverted crab shell that evidently now functioned as an ashtray.

  “Say something, Londa.”

  “The age of once-living matter can be determined by measuring its radioactive carbon-14.”

  “Say something Alice would say. You’re Alice, remember?”

  “In 1959, Los Angeles defeated Chicago to win the World Series.”

  “Londa, say the following: ‘Good morning, Jerome. Thank you for bringing me your ax.’”

  “You’re not Jerome,” she noted, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “You’re Mason Ambrose. A mason jar has a wide mouth and an airtight screw top.”

  “‘Good morning, Jerome.’ Say it, Londa.”

  “The Freemasons are known for their charitable work and secret rites.”

  “Say it.”

  “Why the fuck should I?”

  “Because I’m the teacher and you’re the pupil. ‘Good morning, Jerome.’”

  Londa closed her eyes. She grunted and gritted her teeth. “Good morning, Jerome.” She sounded like a microchip. “Thank you for bringing me your ax. This is bullshit, Mason.”

  “Happy to oblige, Alice. I sharpened the blade this morning—but I forget why you want to borrow it.”

  “I forget, too.”

  “Perhaps you intend to remove a dead limb from a beech tree?”

  “A beech tree, sure, whatever you say, except this is the fucking tropics, and there aren’t any fucking beech trees around here.”

  “How sad. There are plenty of beech trees back in Boston.”

  “Boston cream pie has chocolate icing on top and a custard filling between the layers.”

  “True enough, but you’re wrong about the Boston Tea Party. Three hundred and forty-one crates went into the water, not three hundred and forty-two.”

  “No, three hundred forty-two.”

  “Sorry. Not true.”

  Londa cringed and sucked in a deep breath. “The Encyclopaedia Britannica says so.”

  “An ancestor of mine was there, Londa. He counted the crates. The encyclopedia is in error.”

  Her body contracted as if she were a passenger on a plummeting elevator. “You’re lying!”

  “Books are often in error.”

  “Like holy fuck they are!”

  “Three hundred forty-one,” I insisted.

  “Forty-two!”

  “Forty-one!”

  Londa drifted toward Alonso and, tugging on his boot cuff, dropped her cigarette butt into the cavity. She headed for the ancient-history section. I dogged her steps, the duster tucked under my arm. She sprawled across a russet leather couch, rolled onto her back, and pulled her hair over her face like a veil.

  “Was this a favorite beech tree of yours?” I asked, joining her on the couch. Her sandals brushed my thigh.

  For an entire minute, she made no sound, then at last she swept the hair from her eyes and muttered, “You want me to pretend I’m Alice, is that it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Would you like to hear my poem? ‘The French say merde. We say turd.’”

  I stroked the back of her hand. “You know, Alice, I’d bet money we’re talking about one of your favorite beech trees.”

  A pensive frown furrowed her brow, and she assumed a sitting position, scratching her bare ankle with the opposite toenail. “When I was a little girl in Vermont,” she said slowly, precisely, “my father suspended…an old tire…from the lowest branch. I spent many a goddamn joyful hour swinging back and forth.”

  “Then you must do everything you can to save the tree’s life.” I set the feather duster in her palm and wrapped her fingers around the handle. “However, I expect you to return my ax when I need it again. Can you promise me that?”

  “Sure thing,” she grumbled.

  “The instant I ask for my ax back, you’ll give it to me.”

  “I fucking heard you the first time. I’ll guard your fucking ax with my fucking life.”

  Not a breakthrough, exactly. No sea change in my nihilistic nereid. And yet my spirits rose: I could see the photon at the end of the tunnel. “Londa, you’re doing great. I would even venture to say you’re having fun.”

  “Fun? Right, Socrates. Fun on a bun.” She waved the feather duster about like a pom-pom, then condescended to add, “This is slightly less barfomatic than I was expecting.”

  “You’ve got a real talent for improvisation.”

  “Let’s just get it the fuck over with.”

  “Scene two,” I said quic
kly. “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, concerning 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.”