The Philosopher's Apprentice (28 page)

Under Hammond's guidance we staggered into a small room lined with leather-bound books, reminiscent of the children's alcove back in Pieces of Mind. Rummaging among the news magazines on the coffee table, Natalie extracted a recent issue of
Time
featuring the annual circulation-boosting “So What's the Big Deal About This Jesus Person?” cover story. I selected the complete works of W. H. Auden, then joined my wife on the Naugahyde sofa. I attempted to read, but the poems kept dissolving into typographic jetsam adrift on a white sea. Eventually we put our printed matter aside and held hands. It was like waiting for a muffler installation, only with harps instead of Johnny Cash.

Hammond appeared right on time, bearing the wildflower urn. While Natalie cradled our fetus's remains, I took care of the bill, $530.75 including tax, charging it on our Visa card.

We immediately agreed that John Snow 0001 must not be consigned to the trunk again. This time he would ride up front on Natalie's lap. By noon we were back in our apartment, setting the ceramic vessel atop the same bookcase where our grasshoppers had resided.

“You were right all along,” I told Natalie. “I'm glad we brought him home.”

“It's the least we owe him.”

I stroked the vessel. “I wonder if he's the only child we'll ever have.”

“He was not our child.”

“He was not our child,” I agreed.

 

GASOLINE AND FIREBRANDS
,
John Snow 0001 had said. City on fire. Jehovah's holy torch. As I entered the kitchen to call Londa's office, my imagination showed me Cinemascope images of siege
towers grinding toward Themisopolis, their turrets crammed with vengeful immaculoids wielding implements of sanctified arson. Gertrude Lingard answered. Her boss, she said, was in Miami evaluating the effectiveness of the Wollstonecraft Fund in helping Cuban and Haitian immigrants find jobs. I tried Londa's cell phone, getting her on the first ring.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you may be sure I was profoundly reluctant to tell my vatling that John Snow 0001 had died. Her annoyance with her ponderous conscience, that philosopher who'd inflicted so many facets on her face and hung the uncast stone around her neck, would surely preclude any genuine expression of sympathy. Imagine my surprise when, learning that the creature was no more, Londa choked up—I don't think she was faking it—then went on to assure me that Natalie and I had lost not a son but a cruelly exploited antiabortion icon who was probably better off dead.

It was only after I changed the subject, describing John Snow 0001's forecast of an imminent attack on the city, that the conversation began to unnerve me, Londa's voice becoming incongruously calm, as if I'd said the immaculoids would be spray-painting the walls with graffiti, not burning them down. Dispassionately she proposed that on Monday we make our separate ways to Harford County Airport and thence to Themisopolis, there to share a leisurely dinner while analyzing my netherson's last words.

Like many an obsessive activist, Londa never stopped working, and neither did Dame Quixote or Weltanschauung Woman, and so predictably enough our meal occurred in her executive suite atop Caedmon Hall. We ate at the conference table, adjacent to the model City of Justice, Quetzie roosting on the Vision Institute. When not discussing the possibility of fetal violence, Londa and I shared vegetarian delicacies—“my homage to little Donya,” she explained, “everybody's favorite animal-rights advocate”—prepared by the Artemis Clinic's live-in cooking staff, each tureen covered by a silver dome suggesting a DUNCE cap. Since our phone conversation, she
had if anything become more cavalier toward the presumed menace. With each new course, I grew increasingly emphatic, averring that a dying immaculoid would not cry “City on fire!” or “Jehovah's holy torch!” without good reason, but only after we'd broached the desserts did Londa deign to explain her nonchalance. She crowned her pecan pie with a globe of vanilla ice cream, ambled toward a filing cabinet, and slid out the upper drawer like a morgue attendant displaying a corpse to a coroner.

“The cornerstone of Themisopolis was barely laid when the threats began,” she said. “Each morning's e-mail includes a dozen hate letters, most of them promising to gun down Yolly and me on sight. When it comes to sending us anthrax and explosives, of course, the Internet doesn't work very well, so the Phyllistines have to use FedEx and UPS. At first I was freaked, but then I became—you'd be proud of me, Socrates—I became philosophical about it. We've got a damn smart bomb squad in the mail room, and their dog is even smarter.” She brushed her fingers across the files, grabbed a random document, and yanked it before her eyes. “‘Your days are numbered, you sick, twisted weirdos,'” she read. She made a second arbitrary choice. “‘You know you're the Antichrist, and I know it, and soon the whole world will know it.'” She slid the drawer home. “Junk mail from Jeremiah. Cassandra learns to spam. Forgive me if I don't take your immaculoid's warning more seriously than the ten thousand that came before it.”

“Pielmeister,” I said.

“What?”

“Felix Pielmeister.”

She asked me to elaborate, and I attempted to paraphrase the Augustinian's rant in the Hawthorne parking lot. I told how he'd screamed about geysers of blood, and how before long Corporate Christi would engulf the globe with godly profiteering and eschatological lava.

“He absolutely fucking terrified me,” I said.

“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said.

“And how do you suggest we react to this crisis?” Londa asked dryly.

I couldn't tell whether she wanted my opinion or merely sought to befuddle me into silence. “You're the only superheroine in the room. I'm just another bookseller who never got his Ph.D. I suppose you should post some Valkyries along Avalon Lane and double the watch on the ramparts.”

“Here's my idea,” Londa said brightly. “Let's spend the rest of the week making merry in the Circus of Atonement. That way we'll be in a good mood when the mackies come and put us out of business.”

“Blessed are the facetious.”

“But before we hit the Circus, we have to drop by the cemetery.”

“Cemetery?”

“White Marsh Cemetery.”

“I spent Wednesday morning in a funeral parlor. I have no wish to visit a cemetery.”

“When a gumbo girl goes bad, sweetie, she goes very, very bad. It's possible my case is hopeless. You'll have to judge for yourself.”

 

LONDA WAS THE MOST RECKLESS
person into whose hands I had ever commended my flesh, a driver for whom the Baltimore Beltway was a latter-day Hippodrome where any sufficiently foolhardy charioteer might garner some laurels and a sack of sesterces. While her palpitating passenger scrunched down in the adjacent seat, staring at the recessed letters spelling out
AIR BAG
, she intimidated sedans, bullied SUVs, and antagonized tractor-trailers, all the while treating the 65 mph speed limit merely as a baseline against which to measure the caliber of her nerve. By the time we reached the cemetery, the sun had set, the moon had risen, my heart had entered my mouth, and my stomach had migrated into the new-made cavity.

We stopped outside the main entrance, an austere post-and-lintel affair surmounted by a puffy-cheeked angel blowing a trumpet. A heavy black chain presented itself, slung between the wrought-iron gates like an immense watch fob. Someone, a Valkyrie presumably, had hacksawed open the padlock. In a matter of seconds, we broke into the graveyard, a procedure rather easier than peeling the cellophane off a CD, then got back in the Volvo. As the moon brightened and Jupiter bejeweled its portion of the night, we cruised at a respectful velocity past the brooding tombstones, looming vaults, and naked winter trees.

“Cemeteries are the most philosophical of places,” I told Londa.

“Whatever you say.”

“More philosophical than cafés or beer halls or even the banks of the Nile.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“As Heidegger would have it, by fully facing the fact of death and deliberately engaging the Nothing, a person can learn to live authentically.”

“I'm afraid I don't need a Heideggerian right now, not even one who can deconstruct cemeteries.” She reached past me and unlatched the glove compartment. “What I need is a navigator.” Two folding maps and a tube of lip balm tumbled into my lap. “Get us to the corner of Hyperion Avenue and Chancery Way.”

I spread the map across my knees, edging it into the pool of light cast by the glove compartment's reading lamp, but before I could find the intersection on paper, Londa found it in actuality, thanks to a parked panel truck emblazoned with Lady Justice at full gallop. A half-dozen shadowy figures stood around the adjacent grave like mourners, though their picks and shovels suggested a more controversial agenda. We abandoned the Volvo and joined the leather-clad gang. Upon learning that I was the ethicist who'd supervised their leader's legendary insular youth, the Valkyries presented me with an array of complex facial expressions conveying both their admi
ration of my success in giving her a moral compass and their wish that I'd made that instrument a bit less baroque.

Londa now introduced me to Major Carmen Powers, a short, perky woman with chipmunk cheeks and a pageboy haircut parted laterally by the metal strap connecting her earmuffs, “the second-highest-ranking member of the Themisopolis security force.” The Valkyries' highest-ranking member evidently had better things to do that night than creeping around a freezing graveyard.

I fixed on the tombstone, which shimmered in the full moon like a radioactive menhir. Two bas-relief cherubs protruded from the granite, their pudgy bodies framing an inscription:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF ETHAN AND AMELIA PEPPERHILL
.

“Ethan Pepperhill,” I said. “
The
Ethan Pepperhill?”

Londa grunted in the affirmative.

Of all the congressmen who'd labored to shield the American tobacco industry from the unpatriotic lawsuits of lung-cancer victims, none had been more successful than Ethan Pepperhill of North Carolina. “What's he doing
here
?”

“Naturally he wanted to be buried in his home state,” Londa explained, “but he wanted to share the sod with Mrs. Pepperhill even more, and she'd already joined her parents in this neck of the netherworld.”

A few errant snowflakes sifted down from the sparkling sky, the swirling crystals meeting the moonlight and turning bright as fireflies. I zipped up my bomber jacket. The Valkyries set to work, breaking the hard January earth with their steel tools. It took them only twenty minutes to penetrate the frost line and begin shoveling away the pliant dirt below. They excavated the glossy oblong box, lifted it free of the hole, and, like newlyweds installing their first refrigerator, set it upright on the mound of freshly turned soil. Major Carmen Powers smashed the clasps with her shovel, and the lid fell away, tumbling into the open grave. Like a gust from a blast furnace, the stench swept over us, and we all went for our scarves
and handkerchiefs, pressing them against our faces like poultices. My eyes teared up. I wiped away the salt water and there it was, limned by the lunar glow, the erect remains of the Winston-Salem Corporation's greatest benefactor, dressed in a crumbling tuxedo. Being dead, he looked understandably peaked, though still prepared to wage one more battle against the enemies of free enterprise and spiked tobacco.

A fleeting but bizarre episode followed, grisly even by the norms of this night. Carmen Powers took out her Swiss Army knife, waded through the ghastly fumes, and sawed off Senator Pepperhill's little finger. An unexpected gesture, yet I intuitively apprehended its significance.

I turned to Londa and said, “You've got your own ontogenerator.”

“The next big consumer item,” she replied, accepting the detached finger from the major.

“This carnival of yours—the performers are all beaker freaks?”

Londa offered me a corroborative smirk, then slid a Baggie from her coat pocket and sealed the finger in plastic. “We'll have Pepperhill on the playbill in a month or two. I picture him walking into a cancer ward with an ice chest containing his recently extracted lungs, offering them free of charge to whoever speaks up first.”

I gestured toward the corpse and scowled. “A reverent person—not myself, certainly, but a reverent person would call this desecration.”

“No, Socrates,
this
is desecration,” Londa said, drawing out a pack of her customary Dunhills. She approached the senator and inserted a cigarette between his lips.

“I thought you'd given up smoking.”

“I use these for political purposes only,” she explained, then turned to Carmen and said, “It would be fun to read about this in tomorrow's paper. Send an anonymous tip to the night desk at the
Sun.
”

“Christ, Londa, aren't you going to rebury him?” I gasped.

“Thanks to Jordan's lobbying efforts, the American Brotherhood of Gravediggers has secured a fair wage for its members. Whoever puts him in the ground tomorrow will be whistling while he works.”

“Fuck.”

“Lighten up, sweetie.” Londa provided the senator with a second cigarette, so that he suddenly seemed to possess the elongated canine teeth of a vampire. “And now we're off to watch the Circus troupers play their parts, the most popular way to pass a Saturday night in Themisopolis. You're only young once, Socrates. Carpe diem.”

 

DEPRESSED BY RECENT EVENTS
in White Marsh Cemetery and certain that I would derive no delight from the Circus of Atonement, I spent most of our return trip telling Londa, truthfully, that I was bone tired and felt a cold coming on, if not the flu, so could she please take me to the Themisopolis guesthouse or, better still, a motel, sending along my overnight bag at her earliest convenience? My vatling would hear none of it. What I needed, she insisted, was a rococonut julep followed by a Circus act or two, and within the space of an hour I found myself in her lofty office.