Katabasis — Chapter no 17

Chapter Seventeen

She must have dozed off without realizing it, for when she awoke Peter was curled in the corner beside her. She checked her watch. Only three in the morning. She propped herself up on an elbow, wriggled over to him, and placed her lips beside his ear. “Murdoch.”

He didn’t stir, so she dug her finger into his side and whispered again.

“Murdoch.”

He jerked away. “What?”

“Shh.” Alice squinted into the stacks but saw nothing but waterlogged books. She supposed Elspeth was still upstairs. “The Dialetheia. Let’s find it.”

Peter was fully awake now. “What are you talking about?”

She kept her voice as low as she could. “Elspeth knows where it is. She thinks she’s close. We need to get it for ourselves.”

She didn’t know where she stood now with Peter. He had ignored her pointedly throughout dinner, had spoken directly to Elspeth as if Alice weren’t present.

But Alice had practice talking to angry men. She had honed this art after years of managing Professor Grimes, of learning to tiptoe on eggshells when he was in a foul mood. So many graduates had ended up on his permanent shit list for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But Alice was like a finely tuned receiver, with an instinctive sense of when to talk him down, when to grovel, and when to stay out of his way.

With angry sulking men, the secret was holding your ground. You didn’t get rebellious, no—that was asking for a slap to the face. But you didn’t self-flagellate, either. When you acted like you ought to be whipped, that only confirmed to them that you should. One should never cower. The secret rather was to keep talking as if you deserved no punishment at all, and then to distract them with something they wanted more than they wanted to hurt you. With Professor Grimes, it had always been upcoming conferences, exciting new papers. With Peter it would have to be their ticket out of Hell. She was fixing this. This was her apology.

“She’s just saved our lives,” whispered Peter.

“Which is proof she can take care of herself, isn’t it? Look. She’s nice and all, I feel rotten about it too. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to be alive anymore. She’s dressing in bones and skinning rats, for heaven’s sake.

She’s hardly a person anymore. What’s she going to do back in Cambridge?”

Peter was quiet for a moment. Alice waited, letting him think. He’d come around. She knew he would, otherwise he wouldn’t have been talking to her.

“It’s been ten years,” he admitted finally.

“You see? There’s nothing for her up there, and the sooner she figures that out, the better. She really ought to just pass on. But, Murdoch!” Alice felt a thrum of excitement, the pleasure of resolve. Yes, she could be bold.

Decisive. She was not falling apart; she could wrangle her mind into action.

She had to take the lead now. This was how she made amends. “If we can get it first, then that’s all our problems, fixed—then we’ve only got to get to Lord Yama’s court and wait. We can bargain for Professor Grimes’s life, and our own exits besides.” She paused. “And then you wouldn’t have to exchange me, you know.”

Peter did not react to this. For a long while all Alice could hear was his deep, even breathing. Then he murmured, “How?”

“We’ll use magick.” Alice had thought this through. “Now we know all it takes is blood. We’ll use something to get her talking. I’ll distract her, and you encircle her in a pentagram, somehow. We’ll use the Liar Paradox.”

Yes, it could be that simple.

Consider the following sentence: This statement is false.

It is devastatingly simple in its breaking of logic. You cannot believe it.

You cannot disbelieve it. It has no truth value that you can settle on. You’re stuck in the middle, thrown on an endless loop from one end of the sentence to the next.

The Liar Paradox was one of the oldest paradoxes of all time, for it violated that central premise of classical logic: the law of the excluded middle. Statements must either be true or false, and nothing in between.

Still no one knew how to resolve the paradox. The Greeks and the Indians had been tooling around with the Liar Paradox for centuries; instead of resolving it, they merely came up with a whole family of related paradoxes, one of which involves Socrates, a crocodile, and a stolen child. It posed

serious problems for the foundations of logic—indeed, Philitas of Cos agonized so much over the solution that he wasted away and died.

Inscribed in a pentagram, the Liar Paradox could suspend truth and falsity entirely. Magicians did not use it often, for most of the time they needed someone to believe something, not to exist in a state of uncertainty.

But Alice didn’t need Elspeth to believe anything in particular about them.

She only needed Elspeth off her guard; willing to talk. And she already knew Elspeth liked to talk. The poor girl was desperate for anyone who would listen.

“That’ll never work,” said Peter. “Everyone knows how to ward off the

Liar Paradox.”

“Not if she’s not expecting it.”

“She might be. She already doesn’t trust us.”

“She does now.” Alice was absolutely sure of this. “She thinks we’re just like her. Depressed, hopeless souls. She thinks we hate Cambridge, too —she thinks we’re on her side.”

“Jesus, Law.” Peter shifted under his blanket. “What is wrong with you?”

“We have to make it count.” She felt a lump in her throat. “All this, I mean. It has to be worth something. We can’t have done this all for

nothing.”

“Hm,” said Peter.

Alice waited, hoping that he might say anything more. Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience. But he remained silent. Eventually his breathing evened out, and she assumed he’d fallen asleep.

Something tickled her cheek. She opened her eyes to see two vast, blinking green pools, inches from her face. Tiny pupils, narrowed to slits.

They seemed quite judgmental.

“Don’t you tell,” Alice whispered.

Archimedes spun round, flicked his tail against her face, and disappeared into the shadow.

Irked, embarrassed for reasons too petty to name, she turned onto her side and closed her eyes.

“I HAVE A THEORY ABOUT WHY you’re so stuck on academia,” an old boyfriend of Alice’s had once told her, shortly before he became an ex. This was during their senior year of college, when she had been single-mindedly obsessed with graduate school applications to the point of neglect—and perhaps downright rudeness, as she had stood him up at least half a dozen times by now. This, paired with this boyfriend’s recent enrollment in a psychoanalysis seminar, made him vindictive. “You’re obsessed with gold stars. You never got over the high school thrill of an A+ at the top of your paper and academia will let you chase those little gold stars for the rest of your life.” He flicked her forehead. “Little ivory tower princess, you.

You’re a teacher’s pet, Alice. You have a fetish for validation.”

“Is that so?” Alice, whose mind was only on the prospect of fat envelopes from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Yale arriving in her mailbox, barely registered what he was saying. Indeed it took her months to realize this nasty monologue had been his attempt to get her into bed. “Yes.

I suppose that’s right.”

They broke up shortly after. Alice reflected on his words in those following months, but only with a thrilling contempt. “You’re giving up too much,” he had told her. “This can’t be worth it.”

But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it.

She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.

Academia was decidedly not about the gold stars. If Alice had ever fallen prey to this notion, she was quickly disabused of it during her first year of coursework, wherein she heard every day a million things wrong with the way she thought, and only the occasional, “Not bad.” If you went into the field for gold stars you were in for disappointment.

No, the point was the high of discovery. No one else understood— certainly not the ex, who went on to do something involving mortgages and making poor people poorer. How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts? That the headache she got after marking up an impenetrable text was like the pain in her gums after masticating on a good steak? The way her whole body thrummed in excitement when she came across the exact algorithm, translation, historical reproduction, she’d spent hours searching for in the

library. The way she always forgot she needed rest as she hunched over a pentagram for hours, sometimes days, scribbling frantically away as idea after idea surged through her mind.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether— when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas.

She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires to eat and fuck and shit. That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.

Sometimes she would jolt, and feel suddenly that she was standing still on a spinning plane while abstract shapes swirled about her, calling to her, revealing themselves in full. The mundane world faded away and she was alone in a field of black, except for the brilliant spots—revelations, directions, connections—dancing in the corners of her vision. Everything else was so insubstantial! The world of the college; of chairs screeching on classroom floors, spoons clicking in cups, umbrellas trembling under constant rain—it was just a front, she realized; only a flimsy glamour. Blink and it was gone. It was in the hidden world where truth resided and concepts begged to be understood. She only had to reach for them, and they would come to her. Yes. She only had to listen, and she would hear the music.

In her freshman year, Alice had a professor whose lecturing style was defined by deep, spontaneous sighs. You could tell those weren’t preplanned sighs. Some professors sighed as a performance, obnoxiously, to inject profundity where really there was none, but no—this professor was simply so overwhelmed by the moment, by the tangled thoughts waiting to be undone and then articulated, that he would stare off into space and look deeply bothered and tap his fingers together until he figured out in what order to convey it all—and then his spindly shoulders would shake and he would rock back and forth, as if he were a mere vessel, and his body an imperfect tool to convey a message from the gods. Alice’s classmates found it funny. They would imitate Professor Eklund in the cafeteria, the way he sometimes lifted his entire knee onto the table as he rocked back and forth.

What a dork, they said. What a poser, who does he think he is, who does he think he’s fooling? But Alice knew it was not a front. Professor Eklund was

in that dark, spinning plane, hearing the music. She could see it in his eyes.

She wanted to follow him there.

No, prestige wasn’t the point. Elspeth was wrong. Elspeth had invested all her hopes in the wrong symbols. The symbolic order—the paper publications, the applause, the job postings, the grants—was not the point.

Even the Oxbridge credentials, which Alice’s ex had assumed were solely what she was after, were not the point. Those were only instrumentally valuable to secure what Alice really wanted, which was unhampered time and access to the necessary resources to think.

This was why she kept at it for years. This was why every graduate student she knew didn’t mind the low pay, the exhausting teaching assignments, or the nonexistent health care. They were all doing their best to extricate themselves from their bodies because they’d been told this was simply what they had to do. The whole system could be broken, and it wouldn’t matter. They’d put up with anything, only for the promise of access to that abstract plane.

Peter understood. She’d seen the pure, serene bliss on his face as he stood at the blackboard, copying out equations so quickly she feared his wrist would cramp. That mode of concentration so deep you couldn’t snap him out of it if you tried, and nor would you want to. It was too lovely to watch a mind at ferocious work.

Anyhow, it wasn’t just pretentious asceticism. There were the good nights, too. She remembered an end-of-term social her first year, when they’d all congregated at the local pizza shop and ordered a massive sourdough margherita to share. Even Peter had come that night, and everyone, Alice included, was too delighted by his presence to ask why he’d stood them up a dozen times throughout the semester. They’d started arguing about dialects and the reliability of regional studies, and from there moved on to debating what it meant to do close reading versus distance reading, and whether it made any sense to impose a third criterion called middle reading.

Alice had never been so fond of her classmates until that night. It helped that the faculty were not present, and it helped that everyone was a little drunk, and no longer speaking to make the right impressions. They had the freedom to be wrong, which meant the freedom to get silly. And they got very silly. What was the difference between Kant’s noumena and Plato’s forms, they wondered. What was the precise definition of a sandwich, and

was it still a sandwich if you ate it vertically? Was the horizontal definition sufficient to exclude tacos? Also, where were the aliens? From aliens they moved to Aristotle’s schema of cosmological physics—earth, water, air, the stars expanding outward from the center like shells, and above it all a celestial body—a “celestial space worm,” Michele called it, because it was more fun to think of this enormous, rotating, writhing being causing all the motion in the lower shells because it was thinking so hard about God, the unmoved first mover.

At some point Peter and Michele started debating Michele’s rather dubious theory of personhood, which entailed that people died when they fell asleep, and woke up new versions of themselves that were related to, but were not quite, the person they’d been before. Consciousness can’t take breaks, Michele argued; when you fall asleep that’s it for you.

“But what about dreams?” Peter asked. “Who is having the dreams?”

“A half consciousness,” Michele insisted. “A soul neither living nor dead. An imprint. An eidolon.”

Peter found this absurd, and Belinda found it romantic, and they all had a go at dissecting its implications before the conversation turned abruptly to the question of whether it was all right to have sex with trains, particularly if it violated Aristotle’s teaching that things should be used for their given functions (“Then what about people who use toothbrushes to masturbate?”

Michele wanted to know, which made Belinda blush), and then under what particular circumstances one could, if one wanted, have sex with trains. For whatever reason this hit a vein, and their voices grew louder. At one point Belinda and Michele stood up, shouting over the table.

Alice sat watching, cradling her beer, and she was so happy she could have cried.

Here she belonged. Here she could utter things, could be honest about where her mind had drifted, and they wouldn’t look at her like she was mad.

All her life she had bumbled through social contact like the only actor who’d forgotten to look at the script. She had been the weird one, the troubled one, the one no one wanted to sit with. But they were all the weird ones here. And here no one punished you for caring too much, thinking too deeply. Here you could jump down any rabbit hole you liked, and everyone would tunnel down with you.

And no, perhaps their pub debates were not in the field of pure truth that Professor Grimes liked to go on about. Perhaps these were not the

discoveries that would change the world for anyone except for people very sexually attracted to trains. But was it not at least training for something similar? To rejoice in the acrobatics of thought—not as Stoics did, which was to manipulate language for mean and personal gain, but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging. What greater pleasure could there be? What else was life for?

There was a time when she felt this energy everywhere she went, with everyone she met. She lived the Platonic ideal of the university back then.

She was purposefully naïve about it, because a naïve mind, open to childlike wonder, was the happiest mind in a place like Cambridge. She liked to drift across conversations in hall, listening along, absorbing the excitement, asking simple questions, and receiving dazzlingly complex answers. She loved all her interlocutors. The comparative literature scholar meticulously describing E. A. Nida’s translation theory of dynamic equivalence, and its resonance with traditional Chinese translation theory.

The paleontologists going on about the complete dinosaur skeleton they’d just found in Surrey, and whether it was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs after all. The dear boys in the maths department cackling with delight over things called knots and manifolds.

Sometimes the shining faith of the scientists rattled her. For here they were making things, changing the world. It was the era of endless discovery. The physicians had made an artificial human heart. The astronomers were peering at the rings of Neptune; the geneticists were eradicating smallpox and stemming hepatitis B; the physicists were working out string theory; the geneticists were decoding human DNA. It seemed the whole world was spinning faster, growing more complex and exciting, and yet the field of magick seemed stuck in the mud, scholars driving themselves down increasingly tiny rabbit holes over minute disagreements rather than exploding the boundaries of what they could do.

She turned once to Professor Grimes, seeking reassurance. It’s all sand, she said; it’s fake, it’s just words, just momentary glimmers of an illusion, what’s the point? And it was one of the rare moments in their relationship that he gave her exactly what she needed. He was a good teacher, after all; he knew how to mesmerize.

“Schopenhauer argued that all art is merely representational and allegorical except for music, which is the closest thing to pure will,” he told her. “But I find in our pentagrams something akin to music. Not in its total

abstraction from everyday phenomena, but in its ability to pierce through to the center of them. That shining, cloudless plane of truth on which nothing else matters. It is as Heisenberg said, dear Alice. That modern physics has decided in favor of Plato, that the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but forms, and ideas. And when you have complete mastery of these ideas, when you can hold them in your palm and twist and tease them at will—then you will have stepped closer to God. It will feel meticulous, yes. Petty, fleeting, pedantic. But all the more reason to double your drive, and clutch at every precious wisp of truth you glimpse.” And this sent her away spinning, delirious, enraptured by the hidden world.

It was this simple: Alice loved her work.

It was only the social world, the institution, that got in the way. Yes, it was aggravating; yes, it was a world of hurt. But unlike Elspeth, she was not ready to give up on it all. Elspeth was wrong. It was not devoid of meaning. There was something still worth fighting for. Alice had located something in that cloud of symbols, a value that was not nonsense, and she believed in it with her entire being. She believed in it still. She only needed to survive the rest.

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