The Philosopher's Apprentice (25 page)

“And landed in the armpit. Armpit, North Carolina, to be precise, otherwise known as Jacob's Notch, an insolvent little town on the Pasquotank River. He's become an aquatic hermit, living on a houseboat. Once a month I get a screed from his laptop, no punctuation, all lowercase. Our species has lost its collective mind. Modernity is a swindle. The future belongs to the ants.”

“Did he mention making another vatling?”

“Nope. Shall I have a Valkyrie ride down to Jacob's Notch and give the old man a scare? Major Powers would be good for the job. She'd crack him like a walnut.”

“Thanks. I'd like to try a simple conversation first.”

Not far from the Vision Syndicate replica lay an object resembling a hockey puck. In fact, it was a hockey puck. The label read
CIRCUS OF ATONEMENT
. “And what goes on here?” I asked, pointing to the thick disk. “Gladiatorial combat?”

“Testosterone has no friends in Themisopolis.”

“Then what?”

“Our chief source of recreation.”

“What sort of recreation?”

“A
secret
recreation,” Londa replied, her tone clarifying that the topic would enjoy no further elaboration just then. Again she waved her hand over the model City of Justice. “You'd be amazed at all the details the architects got into this thing.” She pointed toward the building in which our fractious and disjointed encounter was now
occurring. “Pop the roof off Caedmon Hall here, and you'll see a tiny clockwork Londa trading barbs with her old morality teacher. Can you stay for lunch? I'll order Chinese, and afterwards we'll drop by the Circus for some postprandial entertainment.”

A tempting offer, as I was truly enjoying her company, but my obligation to Natalie came first. “I have an appointment with the Mad Doctor of Blood Island,” I said, edging toward the rolling glass door. “I'll let you know if I need you to sic Major Powers on him. Anything to get that damn immaculoid out of Natalie's life.”

“Not only is he a great conscience, folks, he's also a loving husband.”

I slid back the door and crossed the threshold. “If there's a stone around your neck, it's because you put it there.”

“No, Socrates. You did it. I wonder if I'll ever forgive you.”

 

NOON FOUND ME EMBEDDED
in a traffic jam on the D.C. Beltway, mired and miserable like the carp Londa had almost drowned on the Faustino patio. I called Natalie and told her I was bound for North Carolina, hot on the trail of Vincent Charnock, the likely source of our difficulties. “Assuming he's the culprit,” I asked, “is there any message you want me to give him?”

“John Snow came to my Arthurian Romance class this morning,” Natalie said. “He kept quiet the whole hour, and then he started screaming, ‘She wouldn't take the risk!' Here's my message to Dr. Charnock. ‘I hope you fucking rot in hell.'”

I circumvented D.C., then headed southeast until I reached Norfolk, where I checked into a Wanderer's Lodge, flagship of a burgeoning hotel chain whose self-conscious name, postmodern décor, and pop-cult mystique catered to middle-class bohemian nomads who fancied themselves following in Kerouac's exhaust fumes. My sleep was fitful and dreamless—perhaps I never slept at all—and shortly after 9:00
A.M.
I hit the road again, three Wanderer's Lodge cranberry muffins huddled in my stomach like scoops of li
brary paste. Soon I reached the Carolina border, where the essential sign appeared,
JACOB'S NOTCH NEXT EXIT
. Once I was within the town proper, getting a fix on Charnock proved simple. The scraggly young man who ran the bait shop, the wisecracking belle behind the 7-Eleven cash register, and the skinny kid skateboarding across the First Baptist Church parking lot all eagerly pointed the way. It was as if the locals knew that one of these days the crazy misanthrope living on the river would have a visitor—an estranged brother, an IRS agent, a private detective, a hit man.

When I finally came upon my quarry, he was slumped in a captain's chair on the afterdeck of his houseboat, smoking a cigarette and staring at a stand of cattails, a depleted fifth of Old Kentucky bourbon snugged between his bare feet. He rubbed the bottle with his toes. A tattered straw hat sheltered him from the sun. I couldn't decide which was the greater wreck, Charnock's body or the dilapidated vessel he called home. Moored to a floating dock, the
Ursula
was a conglomeration of warped planks, rusty nails, and a superstructure suggesting a derelict chicken coop. Of the paint job little remained but leprous scabs and burst blisters.

“Hello, Vincent.”

Evidently he recognized my voice, for without lifting his head he said, “I figured you'd show up one day, Ambrose. Did you come to question me, kiss me, or kill me?”

I stepped from the wharf to the afterdeck. Strangely, the boards didn't crumble beneath my feet. “Kiss you?”

“For inventing the machine that resurrected your son.”

“John Snow is not my son.”

“And Brutus is an honorable man,” Charnock said, winching himself to his feet. He tossed his cigarette in the water, picked up the Old Kentucky bottle, and poured the few remaining swallows into a plastic tumbler embossed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Spiky whiskers speckled his jaw and neck, so that his head suggested an immense seed pod looking to attach itself to a passing sweater.
“The bastards betrayed me, Ambrose. They promised to keep me in the loop. They lied.”

“What bastards?”

“The ones who hired me to teach them the art of ontogenesis. Their leader was in the news a couple of months ago, railing against Operation Redneck.”

“Enoch Anthem?”

“That's the bastard.”

“I've never even
met
Enoch Anthem. Why the hell would he single out Natalie and me?”

“It was the
other
bastard who singled you out. Anthem's consigliere—you know who I mean?”

“No.”

“That tough-as-nails postrationalist up in Boston. Felix Pielmeister. I gather you two have a history.”

“Pielmeister? Jesus.”

“I also gather that the professor and you and a glamorous complit lady used to hang around the same bookstore, and it wasn't long before he figured out you and she were an item, eventually a pregnant item. When he realized you'd gotten an abortion, he decided your fetus should become the first of the mackies.”

I moaned and gripped the gunwale. Pielmeister. Horus help me. Isis be my light. During the past week I'd driven nine hundred miles, traveled through eight different states, and slept in five strange beds, and it turned out that the answer to the mystery lay on my doorstep—or as Dorothy told Glinda at the end of Donya's favorite movie, “If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with,” a sentiment whose breathtaking incoherence I'd never fully appreciated before.

“You have to realize, this project of Pielmeister's was never mostly about him settling an old score with you,” Charnock continued. “He and Anthem are out to get
everybody
who did what you did.
I must admit, even though they stabbed me in the back, I'm damn impressed with those two. They have moral fiber. Think about it. Six thousand fetuses stalking their unfeeling quasiparents—the greatest antiabortion protest in history!”

“Six thousand? Thundering Christ.”

Charnock pressed the tumbler to his lips and let the bourbon trickle into his throat. “Anthem's organization paid me a fortune for the RXL-313 schematics, and now they've got three ontogenerators, maybe four. Your John Snow is actually John Snow 0001. Next will come John Snow 0002, followed by John Snow 0003, not to mention Jane Snow 0001 and all her sisters. I didn't want the three million dollars. I gave it to the Red Cross. What I wanted was to be in the loop.” He pulled off his straw hat and fanned his sweating face with the brim. “There are wheels within wheels here, Ambrose. Everybody's heard of the Center for Stable Families, but nobody knows it's a beard for a subterranean network called CHALICE, the Christian Alliance of Immaculoids, Chiliasts, and Evangelicals. And here's the rub. The CHALICE biologists don't understand the RXLs. They miss the nuances. Did you know that if a newborn baby started listening to a recital of the human genome sequence, that monotonous melody of G's and T's and C's and A's, he'd still be hearing it when he turned fifty, the same damn base notes, guanine, thymine, cytosine, adenine, over and over in countless combinations? As a matter of fact, the song doesn't end until he's ready to die. No wonder CHALICE screwed it up. No wonder your son has an atrophied arm and a crooked spine, not to mention his limp—he's got a limp, right?”

“And a lazy eye. He says his days are numbered.”

“When the mackies start dying like flies, Anthem will realize what a blunder he made, taking me out of the loop. Thirsty?”

“Now that you mention it.”

In a gesture more affectionate than he might normally have accorded an unfeeling quasiparent, Charnock set his hand against my
back and guided me toward the superstructure. We crossed a mildewed parlor, its fitted benches stacked with books, mostly Russian novels—I don't know whether, per his gazebo conversation with Edwina, he'd gotten around to reading
War and Peace,
but at least he owned a copy—and proceeded to the galley. A diverse collection of half-empty wine and liquor bottles crowded the countertop, obscuring the buckled Formica.

“What's your pleasure?”

“How about a rum and Coke? Hold the rum.”

Charnock opened his built-in refrigerator and removed a solitary Diet Pepsi. “Don't you want me to hold the Coke instead?”

“I never consume alcohol before noon.”

“Neither do I.” He handed me the Pepsi, then screwed open a fresh Old Kentucky bottle and splashed several ounces into his Gill Man tumbler.

“It's eleven-thirty.”

“Not in Madrid.”

I ripped the tab off my Pepsi, then chugged down all twelve ounces in the same short interval that Charnock required to finish his bourbon.

“So tell me, what's the most fascinating thing about your son?” he asked. “His bedrock nihilism? His bottomless contempt for his parents?”

“He's not my son,” I said.

“Sorry. Forgot.”

“He's not.”

“Right.”

I realized I was staring at a box of Earl Grey wedged between a quart of brandy and a fifth of vodka. “Might I have some tea?”

“Caffeine is bad for your digestion.” Charnock filled a small copper kettle with water, set it to boiling atop his Primus stove. “Let me tell you something. Even after I came to detest Edwina's proj
ect, I still admired her style. A decisive woman. She got a craving for total motherhood, and so she made it happen. Adorable Donya, vivacious Yolly, brooding Londa.”

Two minutes later my host yanked the screaming kettle off the stove, filled a grimy ceramic mug, and began dipping a tea bag up and down in the hot water as if making a candle. He gave me my tea, then replenished his tumbler with bourbon. We drank in silence, drifting through the superstructure and back onto the afterdeck. The sun beat down on the river, baking the sodden banks into aromatic loaves of mud.

“You obviously came to question me,” Charnock said at last. “But what about kiss and kill?”

“Neither.”

“You signed off on your own son's murder, yet you balk at shooting a useless old drunk? Philosophers are supposed to be rational.”

“The D and C was absolutely necessary,” I hissed. “Natalie might've died of a blood clot.” A quick, short leap brought me from the
Ursula
to the dock. “Thanks for the tea. The conversation, too. My wife sends you a message. ‘I hope you fucking rot in hell.'”

As I started up the hill toward town, I realized I was still holding Charnock's ceramic mug, a situation I immediately remedied by smashing it against a rock.

“They're coming, Ambrose, six thousand strong!” he called after me. “The greatest political demonstration of all time! The whole world will tremble beneath their unborn feet! Ontological terrorism elevated to an art form!”

 

THE IMMACULOIDS WERE COMING
.
Ontological terrorism. Lurid as it sounded, I had no reason to doubt Charnock's forecast, and so upon returning to Norfolk I pulled into a Dunkin' Donuts, grabbed my phone, and, after pleading my case to Gertrude Lingard, got Londa on the line. If Charnock could be believed, I told her, he'd sold his soul and his schematics to a shadowy society whose
members included not only Enoch Anthem but also the very professor with whom I'd sparred during my dissertation defense.

“They call themselves CHALICE,” I said. “The Christian Alliance of Immaculoids, Chiliasts, and Evangelicals.”

“Beware of Phyllistines bearing acronyms,” Londa said.

“Charnock thinks they have at least three ontogenerators. They're planning to cook up an army of fetuses and set them loose on the world.”

“What a totally atrocious idea.”

“It was a dark day when Anthem and Pielmeister found each other, and a darker day when they learned about Charnock's damn machine.”

“Raiders of the Lost Christian Consensus. Keep me posted, Socrates.”

Next I called Natalie. The news of Pielmeister's involvement flabbergasted her, but she was cheerier than the last time we'd talked. Our fetus had not attended the most recent meetings of British Renaissance Poetry, Greek Drama, or Arthurian Romance.

“Listen, darling, this shitty thing we're going through, Charnock says it's about to happen to
lots
of couples.”

“How many is lots?”