Katabasis — Chapter no 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

Peter Murdoch never meant to hurt anyone. He was not like Alice; he didn’t have vicious determination. Peter did not hold grudges or acknowledge rivals, in part because he was so used to winning by default.

Peter Murdoch was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a stick of chalk in hand. For him academia was a playground, not a battlefield, and he was just so good at all the games.

Yet this made him dangerous in his own way. For Peter had gone through life blithely assuming things would just fall in place precisely how he needed them, since in most respects, they always had. This made him careless. He never thought much of the consequences, or about much in particular except his own research. And it was only when things went sideways, when things got carried away, when the domino effects of his whims cascaded far beyond anything he’d hoped or intended—only then did he discover how dangerous being careless could be.

PETER WAS FIVE WHEN HIS GENIUS became evident. He was stuck ill at home, and was not getting better as quickly as hoped, and his parents had deemed it necessary to engage a home maths tutor so that Peter would not fall behind. This tutor—one of his father’s advisees, who would have happily done anything else if not for need of pocket money—took the pedagogically irresponsible approach of feeding him one algebraic exercise at a time while distracted by his own pile of problem sets to grade.

Peter traipsed happily through the problems. And since he was not in a classroom full of children cooing over crayons, and since all his attention wasn’t spent on not drawing attention to himself, he let himself skate through the next lesson, and then the next. The way Peter saw it, he was only happily solving the next problem as it appeared. He didn’t notice his tutor’s jaw slackening over the hour.

“He’s astonishing,” the postgrad reported to his father. “He doesn’t belong in year one, you’ve got to get him out of there.”

Peter’s parents—his dad a mathematician, his mum a biologist—were overjoyed by this news; for all academic parents hope and expect to have smart children but don’t dare admit out loud that they want genius children.

But it seemed Peter was in fact a genius, and so they made arrangements for him to be surrounded by tutors all the time, stimulating his brain with advanced studies.

This was a good thing, for otherwise Peter’s childhood would have passed in tedious solitude. For the other defining trait about Peter was that he was so often sick. At first it seemed he was a classically persnickety child, always caught up with a round of upset tummy or food poisoning or diarrhea or constipation. He’ll grow out of it, said his grandparents; some children just like to catch every germ in the air. By the time he was six, however, it became clear that whatever Peter had was severe and chronic.

Medical research on inflammatory bowel diseases would come quite a long way over the course of Peter’s lifetime. But in his early childhood, the most that any doctor could tell his family was that his colon seemed to be getting inflamed for no apparent reason, and that he would do best to avoid wheat flour. This later expanded to include dairy, nuts, and raw vegetables— indeed, Peter spent a lot of time on elimination diets. They couldn’t tell if any of it helped, only that all-liquid diets—that is, bone broth and apple juice—seemed to improve things when he was at his worst, but only because it meant there was nothing in his bowels left to clear.

At last, after many specialist visits and misdiagnoses, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic inflammatory bowel disease with no known cause and no cure. Peter and his parents began referring to his condition as the Beast. It helped to personify the disease, for otherwise it was just a mysterious thing that messed with his sense of self. His own immune system was attacking his own cells for no clear reason. Easier to think of it as some capricious, alien entity. Sometimes the Beast left him alone. Sometimes it gnawed relentlessly at his insides. Sometimes it withdrew for several weeks, just long enough for him to make plans to go to birthday parties and the beach and go hiking, which he’d still never done, before returning with a vengeance. The Beast was unknowable, unpredictable. The only constant they knew about the Beast was that it

couldn’t ever be vanquished; only kept at bay, hidden from, for brief pockets of time.

Peter grew used to doctor’s visits. Crohn’s had a number of side effects as a consequence of malnutrition. His eyes were always red and scabby. His teeth were all wrong. Every now and then a big red rash appeared all over his back, which no number of oatmeal baths would alleviate. He was chronically underweight, and because the first course of treatment for a Crohn’s flare was immunosuppressants, he was also chronically suffering from whatever seasonal bug was floating around. There was never a time when Peter was not coughing or sniffling or vomiting; indeed, if ever the rare day came when he appeared in good health, his parents only braced themselves for a vicious flare to come.

Peter took this all in good cheer. He had no siblings nor friends in the neighborhood; he did not have a “normal childhood” as a comparison case.

Poor health was just something he had to deal with. Otherwise, he had his tutors. He didn’t need sports when he could stretch his mind; he didn’t need the outdoors when he had entire abstract universes unfolding in his imagination, their secrets waiting to be explored.

He loved numbers because they behaved the way they were supposed to, because the rules never changed. The square root of sixty-four never ceased to be eight.

Most of the time, he had such fun that he nearly forgot he was a sick child, shut up in his room, with no friends.

Still, Peter’s parents felt that he needed to spend some time with children his own age. Therefore on his eighth birthday, during a months- long stretch in which Peter was actually feeling quite well, his parents invited his third-grade class over for a birthday party. Peter had spent so little time in class that semester that he hardly knew anyone’s names, yet everyone invited turned up to his home, bringing presents and good cheer.

“Look who’s popular,” said his mother.

Peter, venturing out of his bedroom, felt quite overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked.

“Socialize,” said his father. “It’s good for your development.”

“But how?”

“Just give it a try.” His father pushed him toward the stairs. “Have fun.”

He did try, and he had enormous fun. Peter had never spent so much time with other children; he had never experienced the joys of hide-and-

seek, or playing tag, or pin the tail on the donkey. And even though he was terrible at finding hiding places, and even though he was by far the slowest in the group, everyone cheered at his minor victories; everyone laughed with him, not at him.

For three hours that afternoon Peter felt funny, charming, adored.

Everyone was so nice! And he even seemed to keep catching the attention of Jemma Davies, who even Peter knew was widely acknowledged as the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, with great big brown eyes and chestnut hair so smooth it shone.

When it came time for cake and candles, Jemma sat down beside him, placed her little hand upon his, and said in a very prim and grown-up voice, “I’m so glad you’re having us over. Company is good for invalids.”

“Invalids,” repeated Peter.

“Well, you’re very sick, aren’t you?” Jemma squeezed his hand. “I heard your mum telling my mum. That’s why we’ve all come. We’re going to make you feel better.”

She beamed at him. Peter smiled back. But everything tasted like ashes now in his mouth. He feigned a smile through the singing and candle- blowing, through the enormous pile of presents and the endless party games that came after—but the day was ruined, and he could not receive anyone’s goodwill except with suspicion.

At the end of the night, he kissed Jemma Davies on the cheek and told her, “Your charity has been much appreciated.” And then he shut the door.

After the cups and plates had been cleaned and the presents put away, Peter asked his parents if he might be homeschooled through his A-levels.

Oh dear, they fretted; had the children been mean, had he been bullied? Not at all, he answered; they were perfectly pleasant, only he just didn’t think he could get much out of socializing with inferior minds. This could not be good for his development.

That night he listened as his parents argued behind closed doors. He’s right, said his father; he is advanced, there’s no reason to hold him back.

But he’s grown cold, said his mother. Inferior minds, what a term, where did he pick that up? We can’t have him growing up thinking he’s better than everyone else.

This was fine, thought Peter. Let them think him cold, rude, antisocial.

Growing up with a chronic illness just meant choosing between bad and

worse, and Peter had determined that day that no matter what else happened, he was never again to be the object of pity.

BY THE TIME PETER WAS SITTING his A-levels, his doctors had finally settled upon a course of medication that seemed to work better than the others. It was called mercaptopurine, and it interfered with DNA synthesis so that inflamed cells could not easily divide. This had the unfortunate side effect of suppressing the rest of his immune system, which meant that Peter had to wash his hands obsessively and avoid large crowds during the winter flu season. But otherwise he could eat all the same foods, and do all the same things, as everyone else his age. So three weeks after his seventeenth birthday off he went, two trunks in tow, to the same university where his parents had met and fallen in love.

Peter blossomed at Oxford. His coursework enthralled him; his tutors adored him. He tried champagne for the first time. He rode a bicycle for the first time. One week into his first term he attended a public lecture on basic paradoxes in magick and fell in love with the field; its caprice, its unknowability. Before, he had planned on entering maths or physics. But magick, it seemed, was a vast big iceberg of which they had seen only a glimpse of the tip, and it thrilled him to know how much more was left to be discovered. In those years, people were publishing groundbreaking discoveries every day. They’d just started investigations at Carne Abbas.

They’d just found chalk deposits at the Agora. They were just now discovering the foundations of magick underwriting the history of the ancient world, and here he was at the center of it. Sometimes he took long walks around the colleges with no aim at all, so giddy with excitement that he could not sleep.

It also became clear to him during this time that he had become what some people might call attractive. It was a marvel he grew up as tall as he did, as he’d spent most of his childhood in the bottom percentiles for his weight. But when puberty knocked it was like some trickster god pulled him by the head and ankles and stretched him out like Silly Putty, until he’d become some unrecognizable assortment of floppy hair and gangly limbs— a concoction that, when you stuffed it into a suit and tie, the boys and girls of Oxford rather liked. His proportions made him good at rowing, and once he started rowing he noticed a whole host of nice new things about his

body. His arms grew strong, his chest filled out, and he learned to rub just a small squeeze of gel through his hair so it stood halfway up.

All this to say, Peter got a little silly during those Oxford years.

His remission was not perfect. The Beast still came every few months, and this meant hospital stays, IV steroids, and bed rest. But no one cared, Peter learned, so long as he didn’t tell anyone what was the matter, so long as he let them fill in the gaps with conjectures of their own. Never once did he say he wasn’t feeling well; he just refused to make excuses at all. He found he could get away with more and more. He could miss days of class.

Weeks, even, though he tried not to be excessive. He did try never to stay home unless he was bedridden. No one ever complained; if anything his friends and tutors took it all in stride. Oh, they said; that’s just like Murdoch. Does whatever he wants, what a crazy lad. So over his three years at Oxford, he developed this reputation—an absent, erratic genius.

Perhaps he leaned into it. Perhaps he put on an affectation sometimes— he would talk about solutions to problem sets in a dreamy, indifferent voice as if he hadn’t spent hours working through them, or pretend he hadn’t done the reading when in fact he’d stayed up all night. If ever he had to leave class for the bathroom, he claimed he was going for a smoke. And if ever his hospital stay lasted more than a week, he pretended he’d buggered off to Barcelona or Göttingen—this was sometimes true, since his parents liked to attend conferences and he liked to accompany them—or just stayed home and slept, because he felt like it, because Peter Murdoch didn’t need to attend lectures to ace a class.

He was astonished by how well this worked. No one resented him for his absences; they only got so much more excited when he showed up.

Murdoch was a rare presence; his appearance was a blessing. In a world defined by perception, Peter was learning now to construct a most compelling front. Geniuses could be excused any idiosyncrasy. They would forgive an ailing body, Peter determined, so long as they were intimidated by the mind. And oh, what a mind he would become.

WHEN IT CAME TIME TO DISCUSS his future, Peter had decided firmly on a PhD in analytic magick. Maths and physics entertained him, but he was seduced by the slippery unknown; the way grappling with truth in magick felt like trying to clutch sunlight in your palm. Now, this would have made

Cambridge the obvious choice, if only his parents did not have such reservations. Aoife and Howard Murdoch had done their doctorates at Oxford, which was in their view the greatest institution on earth. They were also deeply connected in the social circles of British academia, so of course they’d heard the rumors.

“That man is a brute,” said his mother. “Anyhow, won’t you be happier somewhere . . . more comfortable? Why not stay at Oxford?”

“Or even the New World,” said his father, who still insisted on referring to it as the New World as a bit, though no one ever laughed. “They’re doing quite innovative stuff these days, you’ll have a grand old time. Why muddle your best years away at Cambridge?”

What neither of them said out loud: Are you sure you can bear it?

But Peter, since childhood, had operated by two interrelated principles.

First, he was only interested in doing the hardest possible thing. He was Nietzschean in this regard. Not in the weird and antisocial Übermensch way, which so many young men at Oxford had taken to heart. He was Nietzschean in the broader sense that he felt life only had purpose if he was constantly pushing himself past his own limits. He believed only the faculty at Cambridge could help him reach his limits. And he would not waste his time doing anything but his best work.

Second, he hated to ever make exceptions on account of his constitution. Peter had spent his entire life being the sickly Murdoch boy.

He’d been informed since childhood, usually by well-meaning and sympathetic teachers, that it was all right if he sat out this game, if he didn’t come on this field trip, if he couldn’t sit his exams, if he didn’t want to run the last lap. Peter had had quite enough of other people feeling sorry for him. He was not interested in merely keeping up with everyone else; in doing what someone without Crohn’s could. He wanted to do what people without Crohn’s could not. So when he heard the horror stories—the lab assistants who had quit, the grad students who regularly stormed out of Grimes’s office in tears—Peter took it as a challenge.

Now, perhaps his time at Oxford made him overconfident in his own charm. Perhaps his peers and professors had fawned a bit much; perhaps his ego had grown a touch larger than was good for him. But Peter did not think he was wrong believing that he was something quite special—and that if anyone could ever impress Jacob Grimes, it was him.

CAMBRIDGE! PETER LOVED IT INSTANTLY; THE cobblestone alleys, the winding river, the green and peaceful banks. He’d gotten the clubbing out of his system as an undergraduate—several sticky semesters at Wetherspoons were quite enough—and now he appreciated Cambridge’s quiet. There was always too much going on at Oxford. Cambridge, out in the fens, seemed like the sort of place where you could focus and get things done. The boys angling for Westminster were all studying politics, philosophy, and economics at the other place; here at Cambridge, the scientists came to dream. The Department of Analytic Magick, too, was everything he’d been promised—brilliant faculty, brilliant classmates, and a bottomless budget for chalk. Professor Grimes was exacting and formidable, just as Peter had hoped; under his tutelage Peter felt his mind being honed, a knife scraped

sharp against a whetstone.

And there was Alice.

Alice Law. How many nights during that first year did he bike home long after midnight, giddy with the memory of her laughter? Peter had never known anyone like her—prickly, stubborn, ridiculous Alice. She had an underdog’s persistence, an artist’s creativity, and best of all she thought so differently from everyone he’d trained with at Oxford. Perhaps it was the American influence (Peter had never been to America but his father had led him to believe it was a land of iconoclasts), or perhaps it was Alice’s off- kilter sensibilities, but something about her mind was—well, rhizomatic was the best way he could describe it. She didn’t think in straight lines; she was always zigzagging outward. She was always wondering how unrelated disciplines might speak to one another, or dredging up random shit from archives no one had ever heard of. Can you imagine a world without memory? she would ask. Can we form meaningful relationships if we have the memories of goldfish? Does your pet know that they will one day die?

Does teleportation equal death? Now suppose you do think teleportation is death—if you woke up, and your spouse professed they had been teleported from one side of the bed to another, would you mourn them? Never before had he met a thinker whose thoughts spiraled out into places he could not easily follow. He so loved watching her think out loud, hearing her fragmented thoughts spin into complete arguments, seeing her eyes dart around a point in space he could not see.

It wasn’t just that she was brilliant. Everyone around him was brilliant; brilliance here was boring. Alice was a challenge. Alice kept him on his

toes. Watch out for that one, Professor Grimes told him over tea at the faculty club. She’ll either flame out early, or she’ll win a Nobel.

Yes, Peter did a lot of watching Alice. At night he dreamed of a birdlike silhouette stretching on tiptoes before a chalkboard. Head tilted, considering.

It was all so romantic. For a short while Peter Murdoch had everything he had ever hoped for: an advisor who inspired him, a best friend who challenged and excited him, and a body that was stunningly cooperative.

Every few weeks he biked down to the hospital for a checkup with his gastroenterologist, though deep down he’d started to suspect this was unnecessary. He was now on the longest stretch he’d ever been without a flare. Sometimes, unbelievably, it took active effort to remember the Beast at all.

They said you could go into remission for decades. The Crohn’s information pamphlets were crammed with testimonials by people who one day woke up without pain, without cramps, and never felt it again for years and years. No one knows what induces remission, they said; remission is a miracle; sometimes your body just decides to stop attacking itself.

Throughout his childhood Peter had never let himself dare. But as more time passed, the more it felt reasonable to hope that this was it—that he’d left the Beast behind him forever, and now he could run free.

THE SWITCH FLIPPED MIDWAY THROUGH HIS first year.

Crohn’s could do that to you. He ought to have remembered. The Beast was never vanquished, only banished into hiding. One night he was eating spicy curries and drinking rose cardamom lassi at the Indian place across the bridge. The next morning his stomach was tight with telltale cramps; only mild just yet, but a harbinger of things to come.

It escalated so quickly. This was the worst bout Peter had experienced since he was twelve. Things had gone well for so long that he had forgotten how horrific it could be—the double anvils of constant diarrhea and dehydration, the cramps and hemorrhoids, the revulsion toward putting anything in his mouth for fear it would only come back up again. In a single month he went four times to the hospital; twice first for IV drips, the third and fourth for intravenous steroid courses. He seemed to have developed a resistance to mercaptopurine, and this meant his treatment plan now

consisted of hurling various things at a wall and seeing what stuck. His weight plummeted. His skin turned a translucent pale; when he looked in the mirror, he could see his veins, blue and spindly, floating underneath.

He told no one. When you’d earned the reputation he had, the world afforded you a certain privacy. Everyone already had their theories about Peter Murdoch and so, when he started skipping lab days to curl up in bed, when he simply failed to turn in his grading assignments, they simply amplified those theories. Murdoch can’t be bothered. Murdoch doesn’t care.

His goodwill was running out. Erratic was one thing; irresponsible was another. Jesus, Peter, Belinda snapped once, when he leaned on her one too many times to cover his sections, it’s not like the whole world revolves around you.

But anything was better than being vulnerable. In Peter’s imagination, the moment anyone found out would be the moment Peter the Great’s reputation vanished, replaced by Peter the Sick’s. Peter the Invalid’s. And so even by the time he could no longer cycle home for fear of collapsing in the road, he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone knowing. Least of all Alice.

He knew he’d hurt her. He saw her wounded passing looks. He felt terrible about the way he’d left things off. Never before had he felt he owed anyone an explanation, because never before had he become so close to someone that his sudden disappearance could impact their life. Before, Peter had simply slid into the background, out of orbit. He passed in and out of friendships, always a prized acquaintance, never a constant. Here Alice had become a constant. He could not give her up.

Still, the memory of little Jemma Davies was stamped in his mind, and so too the terrifying moment when he could no longer tell friendship from charity. He figured he could always apologize later, make excuses, win her back over. But if they were ever to be friends again, then Alice could never know.

The one person he could not lie to was Professor Grimes. Things had come to their breaking point—he was behind on too many assignments, he’d missed too many meetings. It was impossible now to skate by on reputation alone. At this point he risked losing his funding.

So Peter went to his advisor’s office, medical records in hand, to beg for mercy.

“But you look just fine,” said Professor Grimes, who must not have been looking very hard, for Peter by this point had lost twenty pounds and could count all his ribs in the mirror.

“It’s, ah, not the kind of thing that’s so visibly apparent.”

“And you’ve had it all your life.”

“Diagnosed when I was six.”

“But it’s only just now gotten worse.”

“Seems like it,” said Peter. “I’m obviously very disappointed.”

Professor Grimes frowned. “Well, how long will this last?”

“Nobody knows. It comes and goes, there’s never a set pattern.”

“So you could be incapacitated for over a year.”

Peter winced. “I hope not, sir.”

“Isn’t there something you can take for it?”

“There was,” said Peter. “It’s stopped working. There are newer medications that might work better, but they’ll take some time, and before we try that we need to control the symptoms first. And that’ll take weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how much I can do.”

Professor Grimes seemed thoroughly unconvinced. “I see.”

Peter was not sure he would have believed himself. This seemed precisely the lie a shifty, unreliable doctoral student who had reached his limit would concoct. Perhaps it would have been better if he were missing a limb, or if a jagged scar cut across his body. Then at least the contours of his loss, and incapacity, would have been clear. As it was, Crohn’s was coming off as something completely, conveniently, made-up. A beast gnaws at me at all hours of the day, but you can’t see it. I feel so weak and scattered my mind won’t work—but here I am, speaking to you, clearly alert. My tummy hurts—what a joke.

“Well.” Professor Grimes seemed unsure about what to say. Watching him try to give comfort was like watching a duck put on a suit. Aristotle said it best; certain beings were just not meant for certain functions.

“Well . . . just try to get through it as best you can, won’t you?”

“I will, sir,” said Peter. As if it were so easy; as if he could dismiss it all with sheer force of mind. “You won’t hear about it again.”

He was halfway out the door when Professor Grimes called after him:

“Murdoch—a word of advice.”

He halted. “Yes?”

“Try not to feel so sorry for yourself.”

“I—well, I try, Professor.”

“I mean there are great minds who were disabled. Edison, for one. That fellow over in Cosmology.” Peter could not tell whether Professor Grimes was mocking him, or if this was some genuine and horrifying attempt at comfort. Professor Grimes continued, “It is a great liberty, from a certain perspective—to be free of the normal human desires and distractions. I knew a great mathematician once—one Irene Fulmencio. Remarkable woman. We met in Venezuela; she’d never left her hometown. She was crippled by a childhood illness and spent her days in bedridden contemplation. She lived in a world of ideas. She thought of nothing else.

She was able to think of nothing else. Her mind transcended to pure abstraction—her body was an afterthought. It was a great liberation, really.”

Peter was too astonished to explain that his particular illness rather never let him forget how embodied he was.

“Anyhow, hire an undergrad to take down dictation if you really can’t get out of bed.” Professor Grimes turned back to his desk. “Heavens knows you’re paid enough.”

THINGS GOT A LITTLE BETTER BEFORE they got worse, as these things tend to do. For a few weeks the steroids seemed to work, and the inflammation went down, during which Peter worked like the devil to make up for lost time. He finished the last of his grading assignments. He gave Belinda a bouquet of thank-you flowers, which earned him a flurry of cheek kisses.

He passed his exams with flying colors.

And then, because he had always been an overachiever, and because his best research insights always arrived during such frenzied spells, he developed an algorithm that would change the field of categorization forever.

This may have sounded boring to the casual observer—and, indeed, was boring to most people in magick. Categorization was, however, of immense import to any logician. The question of how to sort and describe the world had bearing on almost every other field. Peter’s innovation was in a subtle variation of Russell’s Paradox, wherein sets themselves were not members of the sets they described—meaning things could be both normal and abnormal, or neither normal or abnormal. This had a whole range of implications for how you might suspend the nature of things, but in the

interim, Peter was interested in how you might situate human beings temporarily outside of space and time. Beginner stuff.

“Not bad,” said Professor Grimes, which was the highest praise Peter had ever heard him utter. “Finish your pentagram sketches and we’ll come back next week to test it.”

“Yes, sir.” Peter went home, ate an ill-advised burger, and spent the next twelve hours in the bathroom.

He wept often with frustration over that next week. He knew precisely what he needed to do to finish this paper. He knew the shape of the problem, knew the journey his thoughts needed to take—he simply couldn’t take his mind across. Instead he had to dwell on the number of bowel movements he had in an hour; the calories he’d ingested that day; whether two boxes of Saltine crackers was enough to keep him out of the hospital.

He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford

him this.

A horrible impulse overtook him then.

He decided he would not get help. Not this time. No doctors, no hospital, no medications, no waiting and watching to see how he responded to various courses of treatment. No steroids, no side effects. He was exhausted by the entire cycle. No, he would not have his mother come up and sit fretfully by his bedside, watching his every movement, flinching every time he moaned, staring at him intently as if she could heal him with the sheer force of her will. It was an outrageous and possibly suicidal commitment but once he conceived it his mind was set. It seemed the only degree of freedom he had left. The universe was unfair, so he would bait the universe. Do your fucking best, he told it. Put me in the ground.

What happened is precisely what any doctor would have expected, which is that Peter rapidly deteriorated.

He could never forget that final night. Lying on the bathroom floor, crying pitifully from the pain, stomach spasming every few minutes like it was tying itself into ever smaller knots. Always he would remember the burn of the bath mat against his face, that mildewed smell of wet feet. So many students have come through these quarters, he thought, and I might be the first to die here. Always he would remember praying, something he had not done for years; kneeling on his hands and knees on the bile-

splattered bathroom tiles, uttering half-remembered lines from Mass—Have mercy on me, oh Lord—Christe, eleison— God don’t let me die I don’t want to die God— He did not die. The scout came in to clean the next morning and, hearing no response to his knock, decided the room was empty and came on in. Peter was unconscious on the floor. Calls were made; ambulances summoned. Peter awoke in the hospital, hooked up to an IV and steroid drip. His mother had come up from London that afternoon. A doctor came in and explained Peter needed part of his colon removed. The inflammation had grown so severe that recovery was beyond hope; he now had a stricture in his colon, and a colectomy was the only thing that might relieve his symptoms. They would take out the diseased half of his colon and reattach the nondiseased ends together. This was if Peter was lucky. If not, he’d need the whole colon out, and spend the rest of his life carrying around a stoma bag. And even if everything went well, Peter might need the whole colon out anyway—colectomies were only temporary solutions, after all; they did not cure the root disease.

On the bright side there was very little Peter could have done to prevent this. Crohn’s reached this stage sooner or later; drugs stopped working, and inflamed tissue became unusable. He might have gone to the hospital earlier, but it would have made no difference, only accelerated his surgery.

So despite his mother’s sullen recriminations, Peter could not blame his stubbornness for this development. Only his flawed biology.

“Still,” said the gastroenterologist. “Next time we recommend coming in before you’re at risk of sepsis.”

Peter did not want to hear any more. He sat through his consultations, eyes glazed over. Do whatever you need, he told his doctors; just wake me up when you’re finished.

SIX WEEKS LATER PETER RETURNED ON shaky feet to the department. He was prepared for some backlash. He had not told anyone he was getting surgery, after all; he’d only disappeared off the face of the earth and assumed he could clean up the mess when he returned. This had always worked for him before. But people were always inevitably upset, miffed; he’d always needed to smooth things over.

Instead, all everyone wanted to talk about was the paper that Professor Grimes was publishing soon in Arcana. Had Peter heard? Apparently it was groundbreaking, was going to revolutionize the way we thought about categories. It had to do with Russell’s Paradox; wasn’t that the subject of Peter’s dissertation? They’d circulated drafts at a work in progress presentation last week; here, he could have a copy.

Peter should have known, but still, reading the byline was like taking a slap to the face:

NEW APPLICATIONS OF RUSSELL’S PARADOX

By: Jacob Grimes

Department of Arcane Magick Cambridge University

Peter had never in his life had people refuse to listen to him, so he barged into Professor Grimes’s office that very afternoon with full confidence he could set this right.

“That’s my research.” He slammed the draft manuscript on the desk between them. “Those are my ideas.”

“And what very good ideas they are.” Professor Grimes leaned back in his chair. “Welcome back, Mr. Murdoch. Care to explain where you’ve been?”

Peter pointed to the byline. “Why aren’t I a coauthor?”

“Perhaps because you didn’t author any of it.”

“This is theft.”

“Is that so?”

“I could report you.

“Would you, now?”

“There’s procedures,” Peter sputtered. “I could go to the board—”

“And say what, precisely? That you wrote this paper? You did not. That I stole your ideas? I did not.” Professor Grimes’s voice grew louder; the whole room seemed to shrink. “From my point of view, Mr. Murdoch, you were a happy collaborator until you quit. You haven’t signed in to the lab since January. I have called and written many times, to no response. You have offered no explanation and no apologies. You dropped off the face of the map for over a month and expected me to do nothing with our findings?”

I’ve been sick, Peter wanted to say, I’ve been in a hospital bed, having diseased tissue cut out of me. But an entire lifetime of denial—the anticipated disbelief; the conviction that, despite everything, he was exaggerating his own suffering for special treatment—stifled his words, and his tongue stuck in his throat.

“Listen, Murdoch. I will make many excuses for talent. Great minds work at their own tempos. I know this. But you are getting lazy. And laziness does not get you published in Arcana. It gets you expelled.”

What defense could Peter make? Guilty, guilty on all accounts—he had not been diligent enough; he had not met his deadlines; he had not overcome. A weak body was just the same thing as a weak mind; either might afflict you, and both disqualified you from genius.

He slunk out of the office, head bowed. The lab outside was silent; everyone was looking at him. Alice met his eyes; she stepped forward, as if to speak. But Peter’s vision had narrowed to a pinprick around the door, and he brushed past her as if she were not there.

PETER COULD ONLY ATTRIBUTE WHAT HE did next to childish pride.

To add insult to injury, Professor Grimes had asked Peter to contribute the proofs to the final drafts. A portion of each publication needed to involve documentation of multiple repetitions of each pentagrammic component before you could activate them with a human subject, and then documentation of multiple repetitions of all human-based iterations. This meant Peter had to go over his own stolen research with a red pen, and report back on all the mistakes he might have overlooked. Of course Peter agreed; no one could refuse a direct request from Professor Grimes and keep their funding. But this did not mean he needed to do a good job.

He swore to God—he never meant to hurt anyone. The most malicious thought he ever held was that it might be nice to embarrass the professor.

He knew Grimes did not double-check his own work; it was an open secret that Grimes had long gotten sloppy at details, would never finish a paper if it weren’t for an army of assistants looking things up for him. In Peter’s imagination, all this culminated in some grand public embarrassment at the summer conference of the Royal Academy of Magick perhaps, when Professor Grimes got booed and laughed off the stage for making mistakes an undergraduate would have caught.

And really, Peter’s dominant motivation was just not to spend more time on the paper than Professor Grimes deserved. Why bother, if he wasn’t getting any credit?

So he went through the whole stack in a single night, propped up in bed, half-heartedly scribbling corrections in the margins. He didn’t bother with retracing every pentagrammic iteration; it took so much bloody time, and required so many back-translations from Latin and Greek. Briefly he skimmed the algorithms—some other postgrad had put it all together, he was sure everything was fine—and scribbled at the top: Looks good. Minor corrections, see below. Can continue.

Then he trudged back to the department, dropped the draft in Professor Grimes’s tray, and left without thinking twice.

AS SOON AS HE REACHED THE department the next morning, he knew. Police cars and fire trucks were parked all round the front entrance. Caution tape covered the doors and windows; an officer stood by the front door, warding off anyone who tried to get in. Peter stood among the crowd, heart pounding as he watched uniformed figures emerge from inside. Two med techs came out bearing an empty stretcher.

“There’s no point,” he heard an EMT say. “We’d need a bucket.”

By then the whole department was gathered outside. Their whispering grew frantic; voices swelled, theories flew as they counted who was among them and who wasn’t. A gaggle of undergraduates were so distressed they’d started crying. “Who’s in charge here?” Helen Murray kept shouting.

“What’s going on? Can’t someone tell us what’s happened?”

Peter pushed his way back through the crowd, stumbled home, and threw up all over his sink.

Several solutions crossed his mind that night.

He did consider killing himself. He spun out all the scenarios in his head. Hanging, ovens, cyanide apples—what demanded the least amount of effort? Probably the oven, except the graduate cottage only had a shared oven and it was too low to the ground for him to get his head comfortably inside. Yes, that was his excuse. I am too tall to comfortably kill myself. He also considered turning himself in, confessing his deeds, and letting the Royal Academy of Magick punish him as they pleased—which would be akin to killing himself, since if he couldn’t do magick than he might as well

be dead. But dying seemed so unpleasant, and in any case he couldn’t put his parents through that kind of grief.

Anyhow it seemed the most obvious—and most difficult—way to put things right would be to retrieve Professor Grimes’s soul from the underworld. And hadn’t Peter always been motivated by doing the hardest possible thing?

Still, planning his sojourn took him longer than he thought. The formula for exchange was the easy part—the Alchemists had found it a long time ago; it was only rarely ever used because no one wanted to pay the price.

The gateway to Hell was harder. He had the basic idea, but certain texts containing the details he wanted to cross-check kept disappearing from the library. Some ghost seemed to haunt the archives, always one step ahead of him.

One night he came into the lab just as Alice was departing. She bumped his arm on the way out, but she said not a word. In fact she hardly seemed to register his presence at all; she only cast him a wide-eyed look that was not looking, then hurried down the hallway wobbling under the weight of books balanced in her arms. Chalk was smeared all over her hands and face.

And on the hastily wiped board behind her, Peter could see the traces of a summation he’d recently come to know quite well. He recognized it all in a glance.

Ramanujan’s Summation. Setiya’s Modifications. Two columns knocked together then in his head; two premises that concluded with his redemption; at that moment, the only valid thing in the world.

First: Alice Law was headed to Hell.

Second: he must go with her.

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