The Philosopher's Apprentice (13 page)

“The irony is not lost on me,” Edwina said. “But at least, thanks to Yolonda, I'll get to experience the totality of motherhood before I die.”

Against my expectations she now became buoyant and effervescent, as if immersed in some inverse ontogenerator that caused its occupants to grow younger. In the months that remained to her, Edwina said, eyes sparkling, fingers dancing as if scurrying along her piano keyboard, she would know the pleasures of nurturing a preschooler. She would likewise experience the delights of amusing, and being amused by, a preadolescent, even as she tackled the challenging but rewarding business of ushering a young woman into adulthood.

“And then, when the end comes, I will have my daughter to comfort me.”

“And who will comfort
them
?” Brock asked, curling his lip.

Edwina turned suddenly defensive, haughtily asserting that she'd “put more thought into Yolonda's future” than we could possibly imagine. The patents she held on various genetically engineered seeds, foodstuffs, and antivirus drugs were “worth several fortunes,” and each sister would inherit a sum sufficient for her to hire whatever caregivers, teachers, and legal advocates she might require.

“If you would like to remain on the island after my death and continue to instruct your charges, that can be arranged,” she told us. “But please don't begrudge me the satisfactions that the coming year promises to bring.”

Before the month was out, we now learned, as soon as Yolly had acquired a rudimentary conscience, Edwina would throw herself into the project, alternately imparting maternal wisdom to the children and lavishing them with love. During any given week, she would circulate among the three domains—Faustino, Casa de los Huesos, and the renovated Spanish fortress on the Bahía de Matecumba—according each daughter at least two days of her undivided attention. She hoped we would allow the girls to continue ascribing their memory gaps to amnesia, and she entreated us to keep them ignorant of one another, so that their energies and affections would stay focused on their mother.

Their “mother.” Edwina kept using that word. This woman was no more a mother than her pearls were her father's eyes.

“So that is my story, gentlemen,” she said. “And now it's your turn to hold forth. Go ahead. Be honest. What do you think of me?”

Without hesitation I said, “I think you're the woman Nietzsche would've wanted for a mother. I think you're the Übermom.”

“I shall take that as a compliment,” Edwina said. “And what is your opinion, Henry? Do you find anything in my project beyond Nietzschean bravado?”

“Here's my promise to you, Edwina,” he replied. “Once Yolly has
grown up and moved out of her tower by the sea, I'm going to hire a mob of peasants with torches to wreck your damn laboratory.”

“I'll be leading the attack,” Brock said, “and by the time we're finished with Charnock's ontogenerator, it won't be good for making a bowl of buttered popcorn, much less a human being.”

“Are you saying you wish to resign?” Edwina asked.

“I would
love
to resign,” Brock replied. “But that wouldn't be fair to Donya.”

“I feel more loyalty to this mangrove tree than I do to you,” Henry said. “I won't desert my post, though, not before Donya's cured.”

“What about you, Mason?” Edwina asked. “Can Londa count on your continued tutelage, or do you plan to walk out the door?”

I reached toward Proserpine's nearest branch, curling my fingers around the pulsing bark. Could Londa count on me? An excellent question. The best question I'd heard all day.

“I must say that Brock's reasoning makes sense to me,” I began. “He and Henry have an obligation to Donya, and they intend to honor it. And I can easily imagine Yolly's tutor hearing the whole story and still deciding to go ahead with it. But my case—that is, Londa's case—is rather different.”

I plucked a mumquat, inhaled the consoling scent, and regarded Edwina with quintessential contempt. Londa, I explained, had entered the world burdened with the flesh and physiology of a seventeen-year-old, and yet, before I took her under my wing, her psyche had been a blank slate—a literal blank slate, not John Locke's hypothetical tabula rasa. It was still largely a blank slate. Apart from our role-playing exercises, she'd had absolutely no experience with confronting ethical dilemmas or making moral choices.

“Don't you see the evil in this, Edwina? Chronological age, seventeen. Deontological age, zero. Don't you see the disconnect? You didn't hire me to
shape
Londa's soul—you hired me to
make
her soul. What right does a mere mortal have to do that?”

“A scintillating distinction, Mason, but you haven't answered my question,” Edwina said. “Are you going to walk out the door or not?”

 

CALL IT MY SIN, DEAR READER.
My fall from grace, my plunge into presumption, my seduction by pride. I did not walk out the door that afternoon. Instead this mere mortal fixed Edwina with an incandescent eye and said, “If I don't finish my work with Londa, you'll simply hire another philosopher, somebody who doesn't know Epicurus from ipecac.”

“Good decision,” Edwina said.

“God help me,” I said.

“God help us all,” Henry said.

During the remainder of this fractious gathering, we three teachers struck a bargain with our woefully ill and possibly insane employer. Professional ethics, we insisted, forbade us to sit back and watch her deceive yet another member of our fellowship. We fully intended to give Jordan Frazier of Baltimore a complete account of Yolly's genesis, making it clear that, for better or worse, Jordan would not merely be tutoring the girl but crafting her moral essence, and if Edwina contradicted us on any point, we would gleefully tell the children that they each had two sisters—three, counting Edwina. For our part, we would allow Londa and Donya to continue believing they were amnesiacs bereft of siblings, and we would prevail upon Jordan to nurture the same illusion in Yolly.

My colleagues persuaded me to spend the rest of the afternoon in their bungalow, sampling beers imported from various Miami microbreweries and attending what Henry called “the first official meeting of the faculty of Hubris Academy.” I wasn't sure to whose hubris he was referring, ours or Edwina's, but the name fit in either case. As our colloquy progressed, we gradually convinced ourselves to adopt a more generous attitude toward Lady Daedalus's scheming, something between acquiescence and acceptance. After
all, beyond their deontological difficulties, both Londa and Donya seemed fairly well adjusted, and Yolly was probably equally sound of mind and body. True, Edwina meant to exploit them, but it so happened that this exploitation looked a great deal like love.

“I'm afraid our efforts to help the children may prove even trickier than we imagine,” I confessed, sipping my coconut ale.

“I don't want to hear this,” Henry said.

“Martin Heidegger,” I said.

“Heidegger was a Nazi,” Brock said.

“A Nazi, a nitpicker, and the worst sort of pedant, but I still have to respect his concept of
Geworfenheit,
” I said.

“Sounds like a character out of the Brothers Grimm,” Henry said, sampling his mango lager. “‘Geworfenheit and the Enchanted Lederhosen.'”

“
Geworfenheit,
thrownness, the paramount fact of the human condition,” I said. “Every person is hurled into a world, a culture, a set of immediate circumstances not of his own choosing. The authentic life is a quest to comprehend one's status as a mortal
Dasein,
a self-conscious subject, an entity for whom the riddle of situated existence—being there, inhabiting the given—is a central problem, if not
the
central problem.”

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” Henry said irritably, an attitude I attributed to his enthusiastic beer consumption.

“But if the average person is
thrown
into the world,” I continued, “then Edwina's offspring have been
shot
into the world, like a circus performer getting blasted out of a cannon. For most of us, pondering the mystery of
Dasein
leads to anxiety. For Londa and Donya and Yolly…well, I shudder to imagine what they might be facing down the road. Exponential despair. Angst to the nth. But there's reason for hope. According to Heidegger, a
Dasein
can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by adopting a nurturing attitude toward other beings.”

“And according to me, a
Dasein
can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by not reading Heidegger,” Henry said.

“I'm feeling pretty anxious myself right now, but it has nothing to do with my thrownness,” Brock said, taking a long swallow of velvet cream porter. “I keep thinking about that ontogenerator thing. I'm jealous of it.”

“You're jealous of a
machine
?” Henry said.

“It got to Donya before we did,” Brock explained, “filling her brain with whatever crap Edwina and Charnock thought she'd need to survive. I feel like—this sounds strange, but I feel like
I
should've been Donya's first tutor, not that damn DUNCE cap. I want to go to Edwina and say, ‘The next time you ask Henry and me to forge somebody's soul, invite us in sooner, and leave technology out of it.'”

“I'll tell you what's got
me
rattled,” Henry said. “It's not that Edwina decided to make three copies of herself. It's that she insists on collapsing them into a single person.”

“E pluribus unum,”
Brock said, nodding.

“Exactly,” I said.

Henry said, “So now all Edwina has to do is exile good old-fashioned linear time from Isla de Sangre—a simple enough trick if you're the Übermom—and she gets to nurture her precious Yolonda in a grand spasm of maternal self-actualization.”

“E pluribus unum,”
Brock repeated. “And Jesus H. Christ.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I echoed, lifting the coconut lager to my lips. “A man who, if you subscribe to the Western world's most popular theology”—I took a final sip—“was likewise three persons in one.”

 

SUNDAY AFTERNOON FOUND ME
browsing through the Faustino library, searching for whatever Heidegger works might be in residence. I'd decided that the more deeply I plumbed his notions of
Dasein
and
Geworfenheit,
the more effective I might be in treating Londa's nascent despair. I didn't expect to come across
Being and
Time,
that Mount Everest of philosophy tomes, but the collection did boast
What Is Metaphysics?
sandwiched alphabetically between Hegel's
Aesthetics
and Husserl's
Logical Investigations.
I abducted the book from beneath the conquistador's vigilant gaze, returned to my cottage, climbed into bed, and began the ascent.

My initial perusal of
What Is Metaphysics?
yielded no insights into Londa's situation, but my efforts were nevertheless rewarded. “Only because the Nothing is revealed in the very basis of our
Dasein
is it possible for the utter strangeness of what-is to dawn on us. Only when the strangeness of what-is forces itself upon us does it awaken and invite our wonder. Only because of wonder, that is to say, the revelation of the Nothing, does the ‘Why?' spring to our lips.” Where else but in Heidegger could a person find such exhilarating obscurity? This wasn't the Food Channel. This wasn't
Chicken Soup for the Credulous.
This wasn't Jesus on a stick. This was philosophy, by God, red in tooth and claw, Sinuhe wandering the banks of the Nile, asking the great “Why?” question until Isis and Horus and even wise Thoth himself were sick of hearing it.

A frenzied pounding interrupted my idyll. Reluctantly I abandoned Heidegger and stumbled to the door. My visitor was Edwina, breathlessly announcing that Londa was in trouble.

“An ark full of assholes has run aground in the cove,” she elaborated. “They're driving her crazy, which speaks well of her ethical development, but she could use our help.”

“Huh?”

“Get dressed.”

As always, I bristled at the Übermom's presumptuous manner, but if Londa indeed needed me, then my obligation was clear. I buckled on my sandals, then joined Edwina as, huffing and puffing, she made her way down to the Bahía de Flores.

Our three intruders, beefy men in Bermuda shorts and strident Hawaiian shirts, had recently enjoyed a picnic supper on the dunes, or so I guessed from the smoldering cooking fire and the trail of
trash strewn between the campsite and their beached dinghy, a procession of beer bottles, soft drink cans, empty Kraft marshmallow bags, hot-dog wrappers, white plastic utensils, and paper plates streaked with grease. In the middle of the bay, a sleek fiberglass cabin cruiser, the
Phyllis II
according to her stern, lay jammed against the coral reef. Not only had the intruders despoiled the beach, they were also polluting the water. A profane halo of full-spectrum, iridescent petroleum surrounded the yacht's hull, spreading outward like the rainbow through which Satan had sealed his covenant with Exxon in Genesis 9:13.

Londa was wandering around the picnic site, conscientiously picking up the trash and placing it in a burlap sack. The intruders showed no inclination to assist her, being content to play Frisbee in the gathering dusk, killing time while waiting for the rising tide to free their yacht.

Upon spotting her mother and me, Londa halted her bagging operation and strode toward us wearing an expression of supreme dismay.

“This is a private island, not a public dump,” Edwina informed the nearest sailor, a bearish man with a Hapsburg jaw. “Kindly dispose of your crap.”