The Philosopher's Apprentice (29 page)

The canopic jar in which she kept her mumquats—authentic Eighth Dynasty, she insisted—evoked for me the most vivid shot in
The Egyptian
: Sinuhe performing his penance in the House of the Dead, a lowly embalmer's apprentice, stirring a stinking vat of natron. Londa made me the promised julep, serving it in a crystal goblet. The nectar did not so much relieve my symptoms as decontextualize them. Once you've been abstracted from your body, the discomfort of an upper respiratory infection loses all claim on your attention.

Bathed in Proserpine's manufactured serenity, I allowed Londa to guide me out of Caedmon Hall and across the flagstone plaza. Soon the Circus of Atonement rose before us, a squat rotunda: black, smooth, featureless—hence the ease with which the architects had
represented it using a hockey puck. We passed through an unmarked entryway as inconspicuous as a stage door and entered a dimly lit foyer appointed only with a coatrack, a water fountain, and a vending machine dispensing fruit juice and granola bars. Londa flashed me a cryptic Sabacthanite smile, a sure sign of heavy weather and sizable ironies ahead, then led me past a fan-folded Chinese screen into the darkness beyond.

As we moved along the central corridor, following the curve of the hockey puck, compact prosceniums emerged on both sides, each featuring a live actor earnestly performing a minimalist drama. Nearly every play seemed well attended, only one or two empty seats per theater, but according to Londa the vatling thespians took no pleasure in their popularity, as their DUNCE cap programs precluded any such sensation. They were zombies to the core, beyond delight, outside despair.

Intrigued by the lurid poster, I suggested that we sample
Motherhood Comes to the Holy Father.
We slipped into the theater, taking care not to annoy the actor or disturb the other audience members, and assumed our seats. I quickly became absorbed in a situation of transcendent tastelessness. Through the machinations of a Wiccan sisterhood, Pope John Paul II had awoken one morning to find himself burdened with an unsolicited uterus and a concomitant unplanned pregnancy. Happily for the supreme pontiff, his silk robe billowed so broadly that his condition, like the fifteen Rosary mysteries, remained obscure. I could not imagine how Londa had obtained the tissue sample, and I did not want to know. The present scene was set in a Vatican clinic. Having dropped beseechingly to his knees, the pontiff was begging an audio-animatronic doctor to give him an abortion. A queasiness spread through me—political theater was one thing, feminist Grand Guignol starring reincarnated ecclesiastics quite another—and I politely told Londa that I wished to see no more. As we exited the theater, the Vatican physician presented the pope with a brochure touting the virtues of adoption.

“Do not begrudge us our diversions,” Londa said defensively. “The Circus is essential to our mental health.”

We continued along the corridor, patronizing each play long enough for the plot to manifest itself. Even as I recoiled at the sheer charnel pornography of it all, Londa's deranged museum brought out the critic in me, and I began evaluating the scripts, performances, and directorial flourishes. Perhaps the mumquat nectar had lowered my standards, but I was deeply moved by
The Martyrs of Modernity,
CEO Warren Anderson's abject apology for the 1984 methyl isocyanate leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India—eight thousand dead in a week, fifteen thousand by the end of the decade, countless mothers yielding toxic breast milk well into the next century—a disaster for which neither he nor his corporation had taken any responsibility at the time, instead sending each victim five hundred dollars. By contrast, I found little to admire in
The Art of Atrocity,
Henry Kissinger's lachrymose lament over the lagniappes he'd added to America's catastrophic involvement in the Vietnam War, including the secret invasion of Cambodia and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. Far more satisfying was
Searching for My Soul,
in which Ronald Reagan denounced himself not only for supporting Central American death squads but also for curtailing heating-fuel assistance to the elderly, declining to speak out against apartheid, refusing to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic until he had no choice, and appointing a secretary of the interior who believed that the imminent Second Coming rendered environmentalism irrelevant.

“Could you give us a publicity quote?” Londa asked as we slipped away. “We're always looking for endorsements from celebrity ethicists.”

I assumed she was joking, but I replied with a blurb reflecting my genuine enthusiasm for the piece in question. “In real life Ronald Reagan neither received nor deserved an Oscar, but having seen
Searching for My Soul,
I'm ready to give him one.”

We moved on. Davy Crockett's confession, a tour de force called
Moon Over Bexar,
took as its theme the dubious ideals of the Alamo defenders: how they were ultimately seeking to found a republic in which they could own West African slaves, the Mexican government in its wisdom having outlawed that controversial institution. While the beaker freak's bucolic locutions seemed completely natural, he inevitably evoked those scores of post-Crockett scoundrels who'd attained elected office by affecting such folksiness, their talent for faking the common touch matched only by their aptitude for screwing the common man. After sampling the Crockett soliloquy, we dropped by
Jesus Winced,
in which Mary Baker Eddy sought forgiveness from the onstage ghosts of a dozen deceased children whose parents had sacrificed them on the altar of Christian Science. Londa assured me that the youthful specters were audio-animatronic simulacra: no children had been disinterred for this production. Next we joined the audience for what proved to be the evening's most disturbing presentation,
Mega Culpa,
in which the brilliant physicist Edward Teller bemoaned the ebullience with which he'd fathered the hydrogen bomb. At first his anguish captivated me, but then the fusionfamilias tore off his shirt and started chewing into his mortified flesh with a flagellant's whip, and I left in a huff, repulsed by the gratuitous violence.

“Major Powers wrote that script,” Londa muttered as we returned to the corridor. “You're right—it's over the top.”

Before I could elaborate on my dismay with
Mega Culpa,
my hostess hustled me into the vicinity of two recently deceased and copiously mourned clerics. Prior to his death in an auto accident, Percival Sarnac had been Enoch Anthem's right-hand man, tirelessly transmitting God's views on homosexuality via WXPF-AM in Chicago, “your station for salvation.” Before succumbing to leukemia, Leopold Ransom had hosted the talk show
Countdown to Jesus
on the Rapture Channel. And now here they were in the Circus, acting out a love story titled
The Semen on the Mount.
I had to admit
I'd never witnessed a more moving courtship. The fleeting caresses, the furtive kisses, the tender embraces, the candlelit dinner, the passionate grapplings on Ransom's waterbed—it was all impeccably programmed and poignantly performed, and by the time the men had exchanged their wedding vows, most of the attending Valkyries were weeping.

“I have a treat for you,” Londa said, ushering me toward a velvet curtain, red and heavy as a coronation robe, “the dress rehearsal of an epic set in the fifteenth century.” The adjacent poster identified the show as
Clone of Arc.
“Tonight our youngest malefactor runs through my latest script. We bribed about thirty functionaries and broke a dozen international laws, but at long last Saint Joan's charred femur came into our possession.”

“A malefactor? Joan of Arc?”

“I must concede, your admiration for the Maid of Orléans is practically universal. Even the most tough-minded thinker will melt before our dear Joan. Mark Twain devoted his worst novel to her. Bernard Shaw put her at the center of an extraordinarily tedious play—a feat later duplicated by both Jean Anouilh and Maxwell Anderson. She's waiting, Socrates. A private performance. If you liked
Searching for My Soul,
you'll love
Clone of Arc.
”

I stepped behind the red curtain and entered a theater far smaller than the others, barely a dozen seats, all empty. Assuming the best possible vantage, front row center, I fixed on the proscenium, expecting to see the resurrected Joan wearing a prison smock and chained to the notorious stake, her brow speckled with sweat, her eyes glazed with devotion—or perhaps she would be in full armor, mounted on a charger, holding the French standard high as she urged her troops into battle. But instead she stood beside a fir tree rooted in a mound of earth carpeted in lush grass and golden buttercups. She was blindingly beautiful, her raven hair secured in a bun, her voluptuous form wrapped in a muslin shift, her hazel, feline
eyes darting in all directions. A gleaming broadsword—Joan's, no doubt—protruded from the hillock like Excalibur rising from its anvil.

“Yes, my achievement was astonishing,
pas de question,
” she began. “I saved a nation.
Vive la France!
But there is still a difficulty,
un grand problème.
”

In an unbroken and balletic gesture, she untied her sash and laid it along her outstretched forearm. The accessory slithered across her skin and floated to the grass, and suddenly I knew how this untried and untested commander had rallied an entire army to her side. In some lubricious sector of his soul, every French infantryman had imagined himself embracing this divine peasant.

“It's an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow humans, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”

She issued a merry programmed laugh, then hiked up her shift and cast it aside. Her navel contemplated me. Her flesh elicited appreciation from all my senses. Even at this distance, I could smell her lovely pheromones, hear the whisper of her ligaments, feel the softness of her hands, taste her salty thighs.

“I wish I had it to do over again,” Joan said. “I would have tried bargaining with my voices.” She unfastened her hair. Her tresses spilled onto her bare shoulders and cascaded downward, swirling around her eminent breasts like an incoming tide. “I wish I'd said, ‘Why must so many lose their lives, dear God? Why not turn the English swords to glass and their pikes to aspic, so our enemies will
capitulate without a fight? Whence cometh thine appetite for carnage, O my Father? Why this thirst for blood?
Pourquoi le sang?
'” She looked me in the eye. “Come hither, knave.”

I obeyed, joining the maid onstage. She made a circuit of the fir tree, then approached me in all her mind-boggling nubility. I had consumed too much rococonut milk. Deftly she removed my clothes, then guided me to the hillock and bade me lie with her. Her lovely fingers sculpted me into the rigid amoretto her appetite required. The mumquat juice saturated my neurons. She climbed on top, and soon her moist quoit found its object—no resistance from Mason the morality teacher: all that nectar. Synesthesia overcame me, everything melting together, the warmth of her skin, its fine rural fragrance, the hazel of her eyes, the eddies of her hair, the surrounding meadow.

“On the day we broke the siege,” she said, “I disemboweled twenty men, only two of whom were even remotely vile.”

In the dream that now suffused my sleeping mind, John Snow 0001 was still alive. The two of us were standing beside an Isla de Sangre swamp, tossing gobbets of raw meat to the alligators like a couple of Boston Common benchsitters feeding the pigeons.

I awoke in time to catch the end of Joan's soliloquy. “There are no just wars,” she said. “There are no greater goods.”

Evidently I'd wept during my ethereal reunion with John Snow 0001—my cheeks were wet: the dew of my mourning. The maid sprawled beside me, tickling my nose with the stem of a buttercup.

“Four days ago I lost a fetus,” I told her. “A miserable and misbegotten creature, but I'm still very sad.”

“I wish I had it to do over again,” Joan said, echoing herself. “I would have asked God a question or two.”

MANY ARE THE CONSOLATIONS
of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation. Case in point: the Red Cross Knight who dominates Book One of
The Faerie Queene,
as pious a protagonist as might be imagined, a man whose life's ambition is to enter orthodoxy's dictionary—“see also
holiness, probity,
and
St. George
”—single-minded even by the norms of allegory. So how does this chain-mail messiah behave when the degenerate witch Duessa throws herself at him in the guise of the fair maiden Fidessa? We might expect Sir Red Cross to resist. But no. The enchantress has only to wiggle her wiles, and soon our randy chevalier has “poured out in looseness on the grassy ground,” which means exactly what you think it does.

I was staring up at the starry winter sky, drained and sated and vaguely enjoying the sensation of being carried away from the Circus of Atonement on a stretcher borne by Major Powers and another Valkyrie, when it occurred to me that just as Spenser had exonerated his knight, so might Natalie eventually pardon my dalliance with Joan of Arc. Or if my wife failed to forgive me, then perhaps I would in time gain absolution from the readers of the self-serving
memoir I was certain to write one day. Or maybe Joan herself would let me off the hook, coming to me and saying, “Your lack of chivalry appalls me, monsieur, but I must allow for certain extenuating circumstances and tumescent conditions.”

In keeping with Londa's egalitarian principles, all visiting dignitaries to Themisopolis stayed at Arcadia House, the same neo-Tudor building that sheltered the outcasts and indigents who routinely sought refuge within the city's walls. As she tucked me into bed that night, Major Powers reported that the present population of this heartbreak hotel included seventeen orphans, eleven pregnant adolescents, ten battered wives, five abused girlfriends, and fourteen general pariahs who until recently had been eating out of restaurant garbage pails. Lolling on the mattress, I imagined that I could hear my fellow residents' sobs, whimpers, and moans seeping through the walls: a distressing cacophony, and yet I was glad now to be among these wretches, whose phantom lamentations were serving to deepen my admiration for Londa. Yes, the woman was out of whack, unbalanced by her profligate conscience—how else to interpret the Circus of Atonement?—and yet the harvest of that disharmony, this refuge for the dispossessed, was surely among the world's great marvels.

The following morning, surfacing into consciousness, I immediately wished that I was still asleep. My skull had become a winepress, squeezing forth the latest vintage from the Château de Spinal Fluid. My throat and stomach were joined by an esophagus once owned by a sword swallower. By punching a bedside button labeled
NURSE
, I prompted a lovely young paramedic to flutter into the room, and presently she confirmed my self-diagnosis: I had the flu, complete with a 102-degree fever. My angel prescribed water, electrolytes, aspirin, and bed rest. I decided to start with the last regimen, wrapping the pillow around my head and snuggling beneath the patchwork quilt.

Several hours later the telephone wrenched me from my dream—Donya and I were wandering the beaches of Isla de Sangre, rescuing
stranded sea urchins—and dumped me back into my febrile body. The caller was Londa, inquiring after my health.

“I expect to be on my feet in a day or so,” I told her. I wondered if she'd written the
Clone of Arc
script solely with her old tutor in mind: a kinky recapitulation of her seduction attempt back on the island, though with a different climax. “Tell me honestly, dear, did you get a vicarious thrill from my misbehavior last night?”

“What misbehavior might that be?”

I grunted indignantly.

“I'm not a voyeur,” Londa said. “I have no idea what happened between you and Joan.”

“You wrote the damn script.”

“And you chose to
follow
it?” she said with fake dismay. “Am I to infer that you ravished that poor dead gamine? I'm shocked.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“You ran the bases, Socrates. Fornication, adultery, pedophilia, and necrophilia, all in one fell shtup.”

“I didn't ravish anybody. The Circus troupers are zombies. You said so yourself.”

“Hey, Mason, I would
love
to spend the afternoon discussing the inner lives of beaker freaks, but I've got a million things on my plate right now. It seems you were right about Pielmeister and CHALICE having grand ideas. Get well, sir. And don't worry about our Joan. She's one tough gumbo girl.”

“Grand ideas? What's going on?”

“Gotta run. Drink lots of fluids. Ciao.”

I didn't want to stick Themisopolis for a long-distance call, so I hauled myself out of bed and retrieved the cell phone from my bomber jacket, which Major Powers had thoughtfully draped across the solitary chair. My efforts were rewarded not with Natalie's dulcet tones but with a computerized voice urging me to leave a message. What to say? “Reached Maryland safely, caught the flu, had wild, illicit sex with a reincarnated Joan of Arc, miss you, will
call again tomorrow, bye”? When the beep sounded, I told Natalie I was sick in bed and hoped to be home in two days.

Briefly I surveyed my quarters. Somebody had retrieved my overnight bag from Caedmon Hall and set it on the dresser, a sturdy antique with a pristine mirror, adjacent to which hung a paint-by-numbers canvas depicting a Gospel narrative that had figured prominently in the emergence of Londa's Purple Pietest self, the episode of the woman taken in adultery. At the center of the tableau stood a seraphic Jesus who looked about as Semitic as Peter O'Toole. “Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone,” ran the superfluous caption, rendered in an Old English font. As I climbed back into bed, it occurred to me that, from CHALICE's viewpoint, Londa and her colleagues had already cast many first stones, rocks of relativism, clods of infanticide, not to mention the megaliths of Lesbos, and it was high time they got their geologic comeuppance.

 

A TRIBAL CHANT—BASSO
,
growling, ominous. A frenzied drumming, as if rival marching bands had assembled outside my window, rehearsing halftime routines for the Bedlam-Charenton all-lunatic gridiron match. I blinked myself awake. Morning, or so I guessed. Day four of my Arcadia House sojourn. Throat healed, sinuses drained, fever broken.

“Feeling better?”

A grain of sand had nestled in my eye, bringing a tear, so that Londa seemed encapsulated, a bouillababy in a bubble. “Much,” I said, wiping the grit away. The adamant song and the awful pounding continued, threatening to revive my headache. “What's that damn racket?”

Instead of answering, she made a circuit of the room, gathering up my socks, underwear, and street clothes like a suburban mom on laundry day. She tossed the pile on the bed.

“The barbarians are at the gates,” she said, and it was then that I noticed her face, as pale and stiff as Senator Pepperhill's. “Get dressed.”

I did as instructed, then grabbed my phone, intending to contact Natalie. Before I could key in the number, Londa told me not to bother. The immaculoids were jamming all transmissions from Themisopolis.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“You will,” she said.

We left the building and hurried down Shambhala Avenue, the raucous voices and the unruly percussion growing louder by the minute. Reaching the main entrance, we stepped into Londa's private elevator—all plush Victorian velvet, like a dumbwaiter on Captain Nemo's submarine—and ascended to the top of the rampart. Apprehension throbbing in my chest, I crossed the windy causeway and, accepting Londa's offer of binoculars, set about absorbing the coming of Corporate Christi in all its lurid spectacle.

An army was bivouacked outside the city, a seething fetal sea, roiling, churning, three thousand pock-faced, silver-haired immaculoids deployed amid rows of canvas tents and nylon pavilions, plus another three thousand arrayed in protest along Avalon Lane, their legions spilling into the snow-covered cherry orchard beyond. Dozens of bazookas, assault rifles, and grenade launchers glistened beneath the gelid eye of the January sun. Scores of placards trembled in the wind, rank upon rank of epigrammatic anger:
EVERY CONDOM IS A NOOSE. SPOTLESS AS THE LAMB. NEVER TO SAVOR THE ROSE. D & C = DESTRUCTION & CRUELTY.
Dressed in identical orange jumpsuits, the fetuses banged lug wrenches against trash receptacles and beat on fifty-five-gallon drums with clawhammers, simultaneously chanting like institutionalized monks convinced that their madhouse was a monastery.

“They've had us sealed in since Monday afternoon,” Londa said, “commuters and residents alike.” Elaborating, she explained that upon their arrival the fetuses had employed an electromagnetic pulse to disable the city's cell phones, satellite dishes, and wireless modems, and shortly thereafter they'd severed all phone lines and
coaxial cables. “Yolly and I were watching the TV coverage of the siege when—kablooey—the screen turned to static.”

“TV coverage?” I said. “Good, great,
that
should put a crimp in Pielmeister's paradigm shift.”

“Don't count on it. Two days ago the news helicopters were thick as mosquitoes, but the pilots got jittery when the bazookas came out. Whatever the mackies pull next, the viewing public won't see it.”

The sun glinted off the snow, lancing through my irises, skating across my retinas. I yanked the Ray-Bans from my bomber jacket and slid them into place. “Is Pielmeister down there? Anthem?”

“Our favorite Phyllistines are keeping their distance. When CNN interviewed Anthem, he said he couldn't imagine who'd encouraged the immaculoids to bring their complaint to our door.”

Although nearly half of Londa's staff commuted to work, the parking lot was barren of all private sedans, station wagons, and SUVs. Instead the macadam held more than a hundred Greyhound buses, plus ten Mayflower moving vans and seven semi-rigs sporting the Mountain Dew logo: not a surprising sight, really—how else could CHALICE have gotten so many mackies and their camping gear onto the scene? Far more disturbing than the mobilization vehicles was the battery of howitzers, ideal for pulverizing our gates, not to mention the thirty-odd Caterpillar hydraulic lifts, perfect for sending waves of fetuses over our walls, and the forty or so diesel tractors pulling trailers filled with gasoline. Texaco was the principal donor, but Exxon, Sunoco, Getty, and Amoco had also made their contributions to the paradigm shift.

“City on fire,” I muttered. “Jehovah's holy torch.”

“That appears to be their intention,” Londa said, each syllable dipped in venom.

“The Maryland governor, what's his name—Winthrop—he'll have to call in the National Guard, right?”

“Tucker Winthrop? Are you kidding? A major Phyllistine.”
Londa slipped on her mirror shades. “The last thing Yolly and I saw on CNN was Winthrop's press conference. Quote: ‘These poor innocent fetuses are exercising their right of peaceable assembly, and my office has no reason to thwart them.'”

I heaved a sigh and said, “Not to mention their right of peaceable arson.”

Londa strode back and forth across the causeway, an image that evoked various Hollywood depictions of Davy Crockett—repentant protagonist of
Moon Over Bexar
—sizing up Santa Anna's army as it paraded past the Alamo. “I'm supposed to join Yolly and our security chief for a noon meeting with the mackie general. I'd like my conscience to come along.”

“Your conscience has nothing better to do.”

“I appreciate that.”

Again I heaved a sigh. “Suppose they gave a paradigm shift and nobody came?”

 

WE ENTERED THE VICTORIAN
elevator and returned to the ground. Yolly was pacing around by the main entrance, accompanied by Dagmar Röhrig and a leather-jacketed Valkyrie who introduced herself as Colonel Vetruvia Fox: an astonishingly intense woman, small but fearsome, a lark of prey. An instant later the gates pivoted away with the ponderous force of a hippopotamus shifting in its wallow of mud. Remote control in hand, our escort stepped forward, Captain John Snow 0851 according to the embroidery on his jumpsuit, a cadaverous mackie with hair the texture of a Brillo pad. He asked Colonel Fox for her sidearm. She surrendered her Glock 19 with a resentful snort. The fetal army had stopped chanting and drumming, but we still endured a barrage of bitter grunts and toxic glances as, burdened by his immaculoid limp, Captain Snow led us through the encampment. Angry words appeared wherever we turned.
BURN, BABY KILLER, BURN. OUR PORTION WAS ABORTION. NEVER TO FEEL A PUPPY'S TONGUE. ABLATED LIKE A TUMOR
.

Our destination proved to be a prefabricated tin shanty reminiscent of Charnock's Quonset-hut complex back on the island, cold as an igloo, drafty as a crypt, without a single kerosene heater in sight. Apparently these immaculoids were all still strangers to sensation. Captain Snow seated us at a collapsible aluminum picnic table, directly across from a short, scowling fetus labeled Major John Snow 3227 and his commanding officer, the squint-eyed, simian-shouldered General John Snow 4099. Wrapped in shadows, a dozen mackies of indeterminate rank stirred in the background.

“The evacuation begins at dawn,” General Snow announced, his exhalations turning visible in the frigid air.

“We expect you all to show up promptly,” Major Snow said. More palpable breaths. Everyone seemed to be speaking in
League of Londa
dialogue balloons.

“Evacuation?” snarled Colonel Fox.

“What?” gasped Dagmar.

For some reason Captain Snow preferred to remain erect, strutting back and forth on the dirt floor. “We'll march the lot of you to Quehannock State Park, where your commuters will find their missing cars and vans,” he said. “Next we'll issue cell phones to your residents, so they can commission private transportation and thereby continue the exodus.”