Katabasis — Chapter no 13

Chapter Thirteen

In the winter of their first year, Professor Grimes’s head lab assistant—a fourth-year named Joshua—abruptly quit the program and fled to Canada. It was a big scandal at the time. Rumor had it Joshua’s pregnant girlfriend, fed up with his long hours, imposed an ultimatum that he needed to pay more attention to her and, when that didn’t work, packed everything up and fled to her parents’ home in Ottawa. Joshua dropped everything for love and followed her there. This involved spending all his savings on a last-minute flight and racing to Heathrow at midnight. It was not this drama but the fact that anyone would leave Cambridge for Canada that got the department in a tizzy. Did Canada even have universities, or did everyone just ski and eat maple syrup and run away from bears all year round? Anyhow, as far as anyone knew Joshua was now happily married and working as a tour guide at the Château Laurier.

The relevant part was that Joshua left without wrapping up his projects, or indeed even informing Professor Grimes that he was leaving. This would have been salvageable, if Professor Grimes were not on deadline for a conference presentation at the Royal Academy of Magick in London.

Alice and Peter were thus recruited to fill in the gaps. They champed at the bit. Who cared if it was unpaid overtime? Who cared if it meant thirty extra hours a week for which they would not be credited, at the same time that they were still burdened with coursework? Professor Grimes wanted their help with real research! The thing they’d trained their whole lives to do! They would have been such fools to say no.

They were only friendly acquaintances when they began the work. Alice had seen little of Peter since their first encounter in the garden, as their classes kept taking them in separate directions. She approached their first meeting with trepidation. What if Peter condescended to her? Worse off, what if she came off as stupid?

She needn’t have worried. Difficulty had a way of forging fast friendships; there was no time for interpersonal awkwardness when there was so much to do. How pleasant was the exhaustion of those first days.

Every day at five Alice and Peter met in Professor Grimes’s basement laboratory, loaded down with stacks of manuscripts, hands dusty with chalk.

Those nights they worked frantically for hours and hours until they couldn’t see straight. Those nights they spent on the floor of the lab laughing at their own mistakes, eating chips and curry from halal carts and sometimes, if they felt like treating themselves, chicken tikka masala from the Indian place up north of the bridge. This was the best life had to offer: chalk smears on their faces, turmeric-stained fingerprints on graph paper.

Complete happiness was some form of study, said Aristotle. And they were so happy; covering entire blackboards with chalk in an inspired frenzy, then erasing the whole thing to start over again. Suppressing their giggles, putting on a straight face every time they heard Professor Grimes’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

It was in the midnight hours, when the mind fractured and things stopped making sense and the boundaries of the possible became fluid, that they did their best work. And in these hours, Alice experienced for the first time what she thought it might be like to fall in love.

She was not new to the language of courtship. There were boyfriends in high school, boyfriends in college; nervous young men in button-downs smelling of aftershave who traipsed one after another in a forgettable procession of silent films, fumbling hands. Dimly she understood this kind of socializing turned into “going steady,” into marriage—she just couldn’t understand how, when it all felt an exercise in concealing your distaste.

Peter did not belong to this genre. This was an entirely different type of feeling, and Alice could not consign what they had to the trash heap of romance. This was love, a love she had never known; At last, she thought, this is the real thing—this gradual unfolding of another soul, charting one’s course into privileged inner territory, making discoveries of which you felt you were the first. Alice loved her work for just this reason, so why wouldn’t she fall in love with people, too?

She learned that Peter liked to hum Mendelssohn as he worked, but would blush and stop if she started humming along. She learned that Peter loved lentils, but hated mashed potatoes and bananas because they had a quality he found “deceptively mushy.” She learned that at approximately two in the morning Peter transitioned into what they called his “manic state,” which was when his hair fluffed up and his eyes went wide and started windmilling and he got so excited about everything they were

working on that he was unable to communicate with anything more than a frenzied, “AHHH!”

And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved? For it tickled Alice to hear Peter make observations about her; to announce facts she’d never noticed about herself.

Did she know, for instance, that she flopped her hands like a jellyfish whenever she disagreed with an argument? Did she know that she always ended up with the same diagonal streak across her forehead, left by pushing her hair back with the same chalky fingers? Peter determined that when Alice got sleepy, she lied—not in any malicious way, but in absurd ways; words just streamed from her half-conscious mouth in no sensical order. He was so amused by Alice’s unconscious lying that for weeks he recorded the sillier things she said, all so he could announce at the end of the month: “I have concluded that your lying, sleeping self has a single motive. And it is to continue sleeping for as long as possible. You will answer in any way that convinces your interlocutor to leave you alone. For instance, see here, my transcript from Wednesday—I ask you if you are an eggplant. And you agree you are an eggplant, but that I shouldn’t worry, and that everything is fine. In the past month I have heard you agree that you are the princess of Belgravia, that your toes are really baby hamsters, and that over the holidays, you will join me skiing on the sun. You are incorrigible, Law.

Your unconscious id is fiercely protective of being left alone.”

There were no thoughts they could not share. They reached that rare state of comfort with another person, in which speaking out loud was just the same as thinking in your head—nothing filtered, nothing hidden. Often, instead of going home to sleep, they would stay up until the latest hours of the morning talking. They argued over the Monty Hall problem. Peter thought it obvious you should switch; Alice refused to be convinced. They argued over whether numbers had colors and personalities. Peter insisted they did: three was blue, five was red, two was yellow, and four was orange; eight was a ponderous bore, and nine was a voluptuous seductress —and what color? Oh, obviously, burgundy. Nine was wine. Alice thought he was making this up for attention. They argued over whether, on the question of language’s relationship to reality, Wittgenstein and Lacan were climbing the same mountain from different sides (possibly, they concluded, but neither of them could comprehend Lacan well enough to say for certain).

Peter was the best kind of interlocutor: generous, open-minded, inquisitive. He thought every new discipline was fascinating, and he asked her questions about her own field she’d never considered before.

“What’s Jakobson say about language?” he would ask. “What’s metonymy? What’s metaphor? What does it mean for the unconscious to be structured like a language? What is a language?”

When they spoke he would stare, unblinking, at her face in a manner that, every now and then, made her stutter and drop what she was holding.

It was hard for her to receive Peter’s attention. She had wondered for so long what it would take to get it, and now, although she had it in spades, it paralyzed her.

He taught her that maths could be fun, sometimes, so long as you were solving paradoxes about potatoes. Suppose you have a hundred kilos of potatoes. They are 99 percent water. Suppose overnight they dry, so that they are now only 98 percent water. How many kilos of potatoes do you have? Only fifty! Fifty? Yes, fifty, down from one hundred! But you’ve only lost 1 percent water. But how could this be? “It’s simple arithmetic,” he said, but Alice did not believe.

Alice, in turn, taught him about Chinese acrostic poems—written so as to be intelligible no matter which direction you read them in. She taught him about the intricacies of Chinese grammar, or really how there was none, and how in Chinese the conceptual metaphors for time and space were the opposite of in English. The Chinese believe you can see the past, but not the future, she explained; therefore you can only walk backward into the future. And Peter, fascinated, declared he was going to learn Chinese so he could understand her better, until a brief exercise with tones —and tone-deafness—disabused him of the hope it could be so easy.

Back then they even developed their own shorthand language, an idiotic combination of symbolic logic—which was just funny to utter out loud— and French, which only Alice spoke and which Peter thought sounded funny. There was a lot of honking, in lieu of actual French. This language was not at all efficient, but it amused them; it made them feel even more that they existed on a mental plane removed from everyone else, that soon they would disappear into their own symbolic order and never be understood by anyone else again but each other.

Often they descended into incoherent laughter. Oh, how she loved his laugh. At a certain point past midnight when their minds were addled they

would start to giggle at everything, but every now and then Alice said something so absurd it made Peter erupt into helpless, full-body laughter. It lurched through him, syncopated his breath, made his arms flail, elbows up before his chest like if he didn’t try to hold himself together that laughter would break him into a million pieces. When Peter laughed it felt like the entire warmth of the sun was turned on her, because she had done it, she had uttered the words that so surprised and delighted him that he couldn’t even breathe.

There was a time when she felt all she ever wanted to do was to make Peter Murdoch laugh.

Just as often, they fell into a happy silence as they worked. They could go for hours without speaking; they’d developed such a comfortable natural rhythm around each other. All Alice needed for company was the confident scribble of Peter’s chalk beside her. She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency. And really that was the happiest Alice had ever felt—how wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

Anyhow.

All this happened before the period when Alice remembered everything, so it was a mere fog to her now. And even if she could remember, she suspected it would feel absurdly distant no matter what, like a life lived by two entirely different people—younger, happier, more innocent people.

They were not the same people. Distant cousins, maybe. Passing resemblance.

How quickly things could change. The term ended. The project concluded. Professor Grimes gave his presentation in Bruges to a standing ovation, and Alice and Peter no longer had any reason to grind midnights at the lab. And instantly, Peter pulled away.

It took Alice far too long to get the hint. Fool that she was, she thought their friendship extended outside the lab; that whatever had happened across all those midnight hours would endure. She thought he’d felt it too.

They had no classes together, but she invented reasons to come across him.

She started lingering in the graduate students’ lounge, just in case he came in for a coffee. Weeknights she would swing by the halal cart hoping she would find him ordering his usual chips and curry. She had no particular goal in mind. Nothing so concrete as a dinner date. Nothing so bold. She

had not thought that far; the question did not even take form. She only

wanted to hear him laugh.

But he was never there.

She could not blame him for this. Their teaching schedules did not overlap. They shared no lab assignments, nor were they taking any classes together. There was no reason they ought to spend time together, except that she had enjoyed it, and wanted to do it more. But he had not promised her his time. He did not owe her anything. He was busy, they all were, and increasingly so as their responsibilities doubled. She couldn’t begrudge him that.

But even this did not account for the way he behaved when their paths did cross. When they walked past one another in the hallway—one leaving Grimes’s office, one about to enter—he only nodded. When they attended the same department functions, they exchanged nothing but bland pleasantries. Hi, how are you? Fine, yeah, same old, grinding away—great, yeah, good to see you, take care. She cracked jokes, references meant only for him, but he did not laugh, or did not hear. On many occasions she lingered at doorways, hoping to walk out with him, but he walked past without seeing her.

It was so humiliating the way she’d lingered, hoping for his attention— like a dog that didn’t know that it had been abandoned, that kept on coming back. He was not rude to her. In fact he was perfectly polite, wearing that classic Murdoch smile. He gave her the same kind attentiveness that he would to any stranger.

But this hurt, for she had thought they were anything but.

And when at last the fact of the matter sank in—that Peter did not wish to see her, and did not hold her in special regard—she still could not wrap her mind around it. She could not understand how you could open your mind to someone so completely, for so long, and then slam it shut again.

She wanted to ask him what had happened but could not formulate the question in a way that wasn’t childish. Why don’t you like me anymore?

Why don’t you want to be my friend? Questions for the playground; pathetic utterances. She would not say them, she would not confirm for him that she was too dull for his attention.

That following term she cycled through every emotion she might have felt toward Peter—disappointment, anger, resentment, longing—a whole slew of one-sided angst. But above all she was confused. All the walls were

up. She had been thrown out in the cold. An abyss lay between them, and she did not know how she had caused this.

Then she went to Venice. Then several things happened in Venice, and Alice began to feel everything slipping away from her. That was the start, she had since realized; the moment she learned that when it came to Professor Grimes, she really had no ability to say no.

And then she came back, and everything went wrong, and for the last year, Alice had been unable to pass Peter in the hallway without dropping her gaze.

There was a time when everything was going sideways that Alice tried to fix things. Let the record display she did not give up so easily on love: that she actually did try to sit down, hammer it all out, and understand what was going on. Peter was still avoiding her, so she slipped a note into his pidge instead. She put it right on top of his stack of correspondence, a place where he could not fail to see. It had been a while, she wrote. She was wondering how he was. She wanted to sit down together. Have a cup of tea.

Talk.

He saw the note. She knew he did, because the next morning when she checked, the note was gone. Peter knew she had tried. He simply never responded.

If she’d had her perfect memory back then, then she could pick through their interactions—all those late nights, all those smiles—for clues, if not the sheer comfort of reminiscence. But all she had now was icy nods in the hallway; curt greetings; and the flap of his coat, the back of his head, as he hurried out the door.

And then the gossip; the innuendoes, the laughter. Footsteps disappearing down the hall.

That summer, the philosopher Derek Parfit published the very controversial Reasons and Persons, and for a while it was all that anyone at Cambridge or Oxford would talk about. Alice read it with great interest. In fact, it helped her sort through much of her confusion. Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime.

Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same

cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves.

But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essential us hovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.

Now, Alice did not understand much about moral philosophy, and she was inclined to be skeptical that some thought experiments about tele- transportation could disprove the idea of an immortal soul, but she did find this perspective liberating. It helped her understand that she had never really known Peter, and he had never really known her. She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time. But without those hazy recollections, without the historical fact that she had once giggled helplessly with her head lolling on Peter’s shoulder, she had no significant relationship to the Alice Law who was falling in love with Peter Murdoch at all. And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?

And if that was true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction. And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.

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