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The boy clutched the small brown leather kit all through the long drive downstate, sitting quietly in the passenger seat as Will drove . He seemed to be afraid that it would vanish if he set it down, and that he might vanish with it - which, Will supposed, was the rather case. That kit, with its previous cargo of serum, and the boy, holding it, were all that was left of Project Daedalus.
As ever, Marlowe had surged forward imprudently, calling in others to deal with the wreckage, if a child whose feet only just reached the floor of the car could rightly be called wreckage. Marlowe had written to him only to bemoan the failure of the project, declared after that grisly business with the last of the soldiers; it was only after Will enquired after the young polio ward Marlowe had previously mentioned that he learned about the totality of Marlowe’s clean-up strategy.
Jericho Jones: a ponderous name for an eight-year-old boy to bear. Marlowe had said he was big for his age, but Will was at a loss for comparisons. His students generally came to him grown in body, if often woefully underdeveloped in mind. There were so many things that a boy this size would need. There were physical needs: shelter, food, clothing, so many clothes, Will could remember going through trousers like they were handkerchiefs at his age, either through wear or through shooting up like a weed. Will thought that those, he could likely handle, though his small suite of rooms above the museum would be a bit cramped for two, and he might need to let a flat when Jericho outgrew the daybed. It was all the other parts of raising a child that worried Will; children needed moral guidance, and comfort, and to go to bed at a reasonable hour, none of which Will had ever been particularly talented at for his own sake, let alone for another’s. If Rotke were here -
“Dr. Fitzgerald?” A small, somber voice interrupted Will’s train of thought. Will startled. For all that the boy had occupied his mind, Will had almost forgotten that he was there.
“Yes, Jericho?”
“What will I do, when we get to New York?”
An excellent question. Will glanced over at the child for as long as he dared take his eyes off the road. What was he to do with this small, tow-headed boy, with pipes for veins and a stare that could strip paint?
Marlowe had mentioned that the boy liked to read.
“Well,” Will said at last, breaking the silence. “I suppose you’ll go to school.”
***
One aspect of child-rearing that Will had had plenty of time to consider over the past months was how noisy they could be. He could hear the clomp – whoever had dictated “pitter-pat” as the appropriate onomatopoeia for children’s footsteps had never met a child – the clomp of Jericho’s feet barging through the museum after school long before Jericho proper made his appearance. He flung open the door with a bang, however, and that was odd; usually, Jericho acted as if he had forgotten about the carrying properties of sound right up until he got to the door, at which point he became exaggeratedly quiet so as “not to disturb” Will.
“Dr. Fitzgerald? Where would I check, if I needed to know whether something was right or wrong?”
“Coat on the peg, Jericho,” Will said, not bothering to glance up from the stack of abysmal essays he was marking on the small kitchen table. He hear the rustle of Jericho obediently shrugging out of his coat and hanging it on the lowest peg of the new coatrack Will had purchased when it became clear that not even by jumping could Jericho reach to use the old one, and the smaller, but still substantial thud his bookbag made as he dropped it in its appointed spot on the small folding table Will had set up for Jericho to do his schoolwork.
“There. Now, where would I check?”
Will continued to scan through one student’s butchered analysis of the origins of Puritan spiritual practices. “Jericho, I commend to you the library. You'll find that almost all books wrestle with questions of morality to some extent, barring a few of the drier natural science texts.”
“I know, but I need to know now.”
Will finally looked up. Jericho was rarely what one might consider a relaxed child; at the happiest of times, he seemed still somber. Now, however, he seemed to burn with a particular fury, all the more potent for being condensed into such a small package.
Will stared at Jericho for a long moment, then adjusted his glasses. “May I ask what prompts this urgent question?”
In response to this, Jericho deflated somewhat, sitting down across the table. Will shifted his stack of essays to provide a better line of site.
“We had Sister Mary Ignatius for Religion today.”
“Ah,” Will said noncommittally. He had met Sister Mary Ignatius once, when enrolling Jericho at the local parochial school. “Battleaxe” had been the word that came to mind.
“She was lecturing us about mortal and venial sin, and she said-” Jericho paused, collecting himself. “She said that – that suicide was the one mortal sin that couldn’t be forgiven. That people who so thoroughly rejected God’s love could never go to heaven, and would burn in hell. But that can’t be right! It just – it just can’t!” Here Jericho became agitated again, the words bursting forth. “Either God’s mercy is infinite, and all sins can be forgiven, or it isn’t, and God isn’t all-powerful! Either way, she’s wrong!”
“Ah,” Will said again, perplexed at the strength of Jericho’s reaction. Previously, the boy had seemed rather indifferent about religion; certainly he hadn’t complained that Will’s Sunday routine included the New-York Tribune and diner waffles, rather than any more elevated fare. It almost seemed a personal affair –
Ah. The unfortunate soldier. Marlowe had mentioned offhandedly that Jericho had befriended some of the veterans who had also enrolled in the program.
Yes, that did provide some perspective.
Will allowed himself here a brief moment to quietly, internally, discreetly, panic. This, then, was the test he had been anticipating for weeks; he felt in no way adequate to it. His own moral compass felt thoroughly demagnetized after the work of the last decade; who was he to say what was right and wrong, after all that he had done, and failed to do?
But. Jericho had not asked whether suicide was morally wrong. Jericho had asked where to look to know whether suicide was wrong.
Morality might be beyond Will at present, but library economy and epistemology were old friends.
“Come with me.” Will exited the small flat and strode briskly towards the library, trusting Jericho to keep pace. He entered, holding the heavy doors open for Jericho, and climbed the small spiral stair to the second level, walking about until he reached the section guarded by a dust-streaked bust of Plato. He slapped the side of the bookcase fondly, drawing strength from it.
“This, Jericho, is our Philosophy section, from Ptahhotep to Russell. For ethical questions, you will find no better resource. You may also wish to peruse selected works of religion, but those tend to have some extraneous material that is beyond the scope of this course.”
“All this?” Jericho said, looking slightly daunted.
“Had we all world enough and time, Mr. Jones, I would recommend that you begin at the beginning, move on to the middle, and -”
“And when I get to the end, stop.” Jericho said. “My mother used to say that, when I asked her how I was supposed to get through all my chores. I don’t – I don’t have time for that, right now.” His voice cracked a little at the end.
“Oh no, Jericho. When it comes to scholarly pursuits, particularly philosophy, I would never suggest that you stop,” Will said. “In fact, it is impossible to even come to the end. This book,” Will reached out and tapped a cracking leather-bound volume, about halfway up one of the shelves, “is Seneca’s Epistulae morales ad Lucilium. In this set of letters, Seneca expound upon the Stoic ideals hinted at in his more famous plays. An interesting group, the Stoics. They believed that suicide was, on occasion, the only honorable course in a dishonorable world; that when a man could no longer live, he could at least choose the manner of his death.”
At this, Jericho began to show more interest, but Will chose not to linger and do his point a disservice. He moved on to find the next old friend.
“Seneca’s ideals heavily influenced Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, a 1677 work challenging the notion of organized religion as a whole. Spinoza was born a Jew, but later rejected all views that conceptualized God as an active moral presence. Instead, he conceptualized nature as God. The task of human beings was instead to try to understand nature, and, in doing so, submit to the will of the natural God. Spinoza believed that no man could actually commit suicide; rather, all suicides owe their death to causes external. Spinoza’s views, in turn, influenced the work of Frederich Nietzsche -”
Will paused. Perhaps Nietzsche’s “great consolation” was not the best topic for a boy who still seemed too somber for this world.
“At any rate. You are not the first, nor the tenth, nor the ten thousandth person to ponder this question.
“Personally, I find the notion of suicide unfathomable. But then, I have never been faced with a predicament quite like the one granted to your singularly determined friend.” At this, Jericho started guiltily, looking like he had been caught out. “Yes, Jericho, Mr. Marlowe did inform me of some of the particulars of the last days of the program. It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to make the connection.” Will took a deep breath, and knelt down to look Jericho in the eye directly. He seemed to be fighting a great battle within himself.
“I cannot say whether your friend acted rightly or wrongly. I believe that it is given to each of us to carve out our own system of belief, standing always on the shoulders of the moral giants of the past, and looking always to the well-being of our fellows as the greatest good. It may be that your friend fell victim to Spinoza’s ‘causes external,’ and felt that living was too great a burden to bear. But consider; in his death, he passes that burden on to those who knew him, and wonder what they could have done to lift those causes.” Will thought here of Marlowe, raising up hopes and dashing them when they became inconvenient, and looked Jericho squarely in the eye. “I am sure that whatever that young man was carrying in his mind, you did whatever you could to lighten his burden in his last days.”
At this, something seemed to break within Jericho. He pitched forward into Will’s arms and hugged him, sobbing into his lapels. Startled, Will returned the embrace, realizing as he did that this was the first time he had touched the boy, other than to give him his shot or nudge him out of the way in the apartment.
Jericho cried for a good long time, it seemed, as Will held him, until he pushed back, scrubbing at his face with one fist.
“Thank you,” Jericho said, his voice hoarse. “Where would you recommend that I begin?”
Will recognized the out and took it. He was not an emotionally adept man, and this had taxed his resources. “Plato, I think. While he is not chronologically the first of the great philosophers, his influence is so disproportionate in the West that to study any of the Eastern greats without a grounding in him that you leave yourself at risk of misunderstanding the inevitable comparisons that proliferate throughout the analytic texts…”
As Will talked, and fetched down books to stack in an ever-growing pile in Jericho’s arms as the boy asked questions about this commentary or that, it occurred to Will that caring for the boy provided a unique opportunity. How often had he wished that he could learn a subject anew for the first time, study a text with a fresh and unbiased perspective? And now here he had one, not firsthand perhaps, but secondhand surely enough, and with a ready mind, if his questions were any indication.
Perhaps he wouldn’t do so poorly at this after all.