Katabasis — Chapter no 26

Chapter Twenty-Six

Alice slept. She dreamed, and lost herself in the specificity of memory: a spoon clinking against a teacup, driblets spilling out the sides that deepened to blood-red; the teacup became a bladder pouch, and the spoon a knife of bone. Helen Murray’s voice; white teeth, lipstick too bright, smeared over dry skin. What do you want, Alice? Did you think you were the first? Alice in a graveyard, dirt beneath her nails; a shovel in her hands, an ache in her back. Professor Grimes, or at least the pieces she’d found of him; an eye, a lip, a fragment of a nose; all the little pieces on a sheet of wax paper, lined up against a poor pencil sketch; and a nail through his forehead, just to keep it all in place; all the scribbled recordings of the Thessalian witch. The living face imposed over the revived pieces. Those shredded lips moved.

Good morning, he said.

Alice awoke.

A Shade knelt over her; all silvery smoke, his face very close to her own. She jolted upright.

They regarded each other. The Shade had such a slippery face, features lapsing and shifting, as if he couldn’t decide himself what he looked like. If Alice had been pressed to describe him, the best analogy she could have come up with was a grayscale mugshot. Nondescript, fugitive. He looked at her with what Alice could only think of as a wide-eyed hunger, not destructive, but longing, as if he wanted to take her in with all of his senses.

The look of her, the smell of her.

Still—and this was her foggy, starved head thinking—he didn’t seem dangerous. At least he was not warped with that singular meanness of the Shades in Greed, or the suffocating howl of Wrath. He seemed more human than any of them, more in control of his appetites anyhow. If this Shade was going to hurt her, she supposed he would have done it while she was asleep, and for this reason she sat still where she was.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Alice,” she whispered. “Alice Law.”

“You’re one of the living.” His voice was like gravel, like earth shifting.

She didn’t see the point in pretending. “Yes.”

His eyes flickered up and down the chalk stains on her sweater. “You’re

a magician.”

“Yes.”

He burst into laughter.

“Heavens,” he said. “I have been waiting, and waiting, and now here you are.”

This Alice found vaguely threatening. She pulled herself to her feet, and immediately regretted it; a wave of vertigo hit and she swayed, her vision pulsing black.

The Shade put his hands up. “I won’t hurt you.”

“What do you want?”

“Only to speak.” The Shade veered forward, until once again he was inches away. He seemed to have no conception of personal boundaries. No matter how she shifted his face loomed close to hers, as if he were about to lick or kiss her. “But you, of the living—what are you doing here, all alone in Hell?”

What indeed was she doing? Still she had no answer, and she did not think this Shade needed to hear of her regrets. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Where might that someone be?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I’ve searched Upper Hell. I have wandered Wrath, Cruelty, Violence, and Tyranny. I never found him, and I have reason to suspect his sins were not so light.”

“You think he is in Dis.”

“I—yes, that’s right.” Alice had been certain the city was real; all the reliable archives agreed so; but it startled her to hear its name confirmed from the mouth of the dead. So it was there, so it was waiting. “He must

be.”

“And you need to find the gates.”

I have a guide, Alice wished to say, but she saw now Archimedes had absconded; she was again on her own. “I suppose.”

“Come on, then.” The Shade nodded toward the horizon. “I’ll show you.

Safe passage.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for?”

“I don’t mean to offend.” Alice thought of George Edward Moore, mad for a chum. She thought of the Weaver Girl’s girlish laughter. She thought

of Elspeth, righteous and vengeful. “Only we—I haven’t had a wonderful time here. And we are in Lower Hell. Everyone wants something.”

Again the Shade rumbled with laughter. He turned his eyes back on her, and this time they became the most solid things about him; deep stone, hollows of time. “A story for a song,” he said. “That’s all. You want to know of Dis. I want to know of life.”

SO HERE SHE WAS IN THE deepest circles of Hell on a brisk stroll with a Shade whose sins she did not know.

Alice couldn’t determine if she was very lucky or very foolish. At least this Shade—he introduced himself as John Gradus, which seemed an obvious lie—did not pretend to be her friend. His desires were quite clear.

He badgered her for information on the world as she knew it. He was not at all interested in political or historical developments. She tried to tell him about the Soviet Union, and he waved a hand in impatience. Instead he wanted accounts of what brands of chalk were now in vogue (“Shropley’s?

They haven’t gone bankrupt?”), what kinds of foods were then served at dining halls (“Still the same mashed potatoes? Does the Yorkshire pudding still taste like cardboard?”), and how girls’ fashion evolved on campus (Alice felt a bit icky describing this one, but Gradus seemed satisfied with a mumbled answer about skirts and stockings. How short? She didn’t recall.

Above the knees? Well, sometimes. Not in college, but sometimes.) She didn’t mind the interrogations. Here her memory came in handy, and she needed only close her eyes, summon photographs to her mind, and recount

the details as they walked.

“The London skyline?”

“There’s been a lot of new construction. They’ve got this big ugly thing, the NatWest tower, sticks straight into the air like a blunt.”

“The music?”

She recalled the window of a record store and told him all the names she had seen there. “Judas Priest. Soup Dragons. Iron Maiden. Talking

Heads.”

“What kind of music is that?”

“Sort of like . . . indie punk, rock, that kind of thing? As in, the opposite of Dusty Springfield?”

She could not tell if these names made any sense to John Gradus. He asked, “Do you like them?”

“They’re a little loud,” she said. “But I’m not very adventurous. I just like the Beatles. And Bach.”

“Pretentious,” he said. “The last meal you had?”

“Lembas Bread.”

“No, I mean before.”

“Oh.” Alice rifled through her mind. “Um. Tea and a toastie.”

“What kind?”

“Cheese. Cheddar, I think.”

“Warmed up?”

“No, cold.” She saw the plastic wrapping in her mind, the generic logo.

Late-night offerings from a buttery about to close. “It didn’t taste very good.”

“A cold toastie,” he muttered. “All the time in the world, and a cold, congealed toastie.”

He hungered for the tangible, the material. He became resentful when he felt she had wasted her time above. Most of all he was irritated about missed gastronomic opportunities. He seemed unable to understand why Alice did not eat three-course, gourmet meals every day. The answer “I wasn’t hungry” made no sense to him. He got such a beady, famished look while Alice spoke that sometimes she felt uneasy; she felt he was siphoning something from her, though she couldn’t put her finger on what. Living force, it felt like. Perhaps when they were done he would be close to alive, and she would be a rumbling mass of gray. Disturbing as this was, it was this naked exploitation that, in turn, let her take him at his word. It could be this easy. It could be the case he truly was taking her to the gates of Dis.

She glanced sideways at him as they walked, trying to make out the face of her guide. Her own Virgil. She wondered if she could recognize him, if his story was one of the many rumors that haunted the academy. Was he the demonologist who fed his infant daughter to Azazel? The cryptologist who sent his students into Faerie without a lifeline?

Unfortunately Gradus had not put nearly as much effort into maintaining a solid form as Elspeth. If she focused too hard on his eyes, or on his build, his features slipped and morphed as if they could not decide what they used to be. Strangely he took the clearest shape when she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, when her imagination could

supply the rest. A straight-backed and bespectacled man, the sort who might carry a briefcase, or who might offer you an umbrella when it rained. A man utterly forgettable. You saw him on the train, or in the university library, or at the bookstore. And then he walked out of your life and you forgot all about him; for shapes like him only existed to fill in the background of your own richer world. Gradus was a man completely without specificity, and Alice suspected he had worked very hard to make this so.

She tried to place him at least geographically or temporally, because then she could at least rack her memory for mention of any horrendous crimes, say, at Yale in the sixties, but Gradus had been so long in the underworld that he made no references to place himself. Sometimes she thought she detected vague Nordic undertones in his speech, but otherwise he had that mysterious mid-Atlantic accent that could belong to a Brit who had spent too much time among Americans, or an American who had spent too much time in England. He was not forthcoming. She tried once simply asking where he was from, and all he said was, “I’d like to see you guess.”

If anything he seemed to take delight in messing with her. He would make references to Roosevelt and Churchill, then insinuate he’d personally known Copernicus.

Once a suspicion struck her, and she asked quickly, so as to catch him off guard, “Jacob?”

Professor Grimes had always liked his little tests.

But John Gradus only hmmed and asked, “What’s that?”

No, he couldn’t be Professor Grimes. Professor Grimes hardly cared so much about the world outside his office. He would never have asked her about Talking Heads. Fashions changed; Professor Grimes stayed the same.

He lived in a castle in the clouds. All that mattered was his ideas, and how far they could take him.

AT LEAST JOHN GRADUS GAVE AS well as he got, so long as she did not inquire much about personal identity. On the topic of Hell he was very forthcoming, if not always helpful. Most of what he said left her with a million more questions. She asked him what those pieces of writing were, and he explained, “Why, dissertations, of course. That much should be

obvious.”

“Dissertations about what?”

“Whatever we’re in for.”

“Does everyone write them?”

“We all must write them.”

“Who reads them?”

“Whoever is in charge. The Furies. Lord Yama himself. Who knows?

I’ve yet to witness anyone read them, mind, but then it’s a rare dissertation that passes muster. They say to write until you’ve done your best work, and when you’ve done your best work, the ships will come to bring you across

the Lethe.”

“What’s the point of them?”

“Entertainment, I’m sure. I certainly enjoy reading others’ drafts. I came upon a whole stack subtitled My Lolita the other day. Now, that one was really fun!”

“I mean, what makes a good dissertation?”

“Bugger if I know. That’s the whole puzzle, isn’t it?”

She couldn’t tell if he was being flippant on purpose or if he truly did not know. “Is that how you’re being punished, then? You don’t get out until you’ve thoroughly understood your own crime?”

“Some think that.”

“Then how do you pass?”

This made Gradus hem and haw. After a pause he said, “The only thing anyone knows for sure is that they say you have to tell the truth. That’s all.”

“Is it very hard to tell the truth?”

“It must be. Never seen anyone get out.”

“It must drive them crazy,” Alice mused. She knew her fair share of dissertating students. At Cambridge it seemed the standard for a good dissertation was asymptotic. The closer you got, the more obvious it became that you would never hit the limit. Eventually what decided things were the restrictions of time—you turned work in on the deadline, perfect or not. But there were no deadlines in Hell. You had an eternity for

mistakes. “I bet it’s agonizing.”

“Probably,” said Gradus. “I don’t try.”

“Why not?”

“No more questions,” he said. “Our deal is that you entertain me.”

“Oh, fine.”

“What about this man you’re looking for? What’s he dissertating on?”

“Oh—well, I don’t really know.” Alice paused a moment. What was the worst sin Professor Grimes had ever committed? When she put her mind to it, she couldn’t come up with anything but the vaguest descriptors, and none of them rang true. He stole (but for good reason). He was cruel (with good purpose, to those who deserved it). “We both had our theories, but I don’t think there’s any way to know.”

Gradus’s voice sharpened, a hook finding purchase. “You both?”

“Oh,” said Alice.

Gradus’s footsteps slowed. His essence billowed out like a pleased, squatting cat. “Now, this is interesting.”

Her pain delighted him. He kept rubbing his smoky hands together, like a child in glee over a bedtime story. Then what? He kept asking this. Then what? Then what? Like a child demanding more sweets, relishing all the droplets of living affect he could wring from her. She told him about the Weaver Girl but kept vague about Elspeth; she described the bog in Wrath, and the Escher trap, the cuckoo clock, Peter’s sacrifice. The screech of metal. The Kripkes’ delight.

“Hold on.” Gradus stopped walking then. His aura changed. The swishy, indifferent whirl of gray stilled to something human—a chill Alice recognized well. The clammy chill of fear. “The Kripkes are after you?”

“Why would you be afraid of the Kripkes?”

“They are fiends,” said Gradus. “They are the worst things to haunt this land.”

“But you’re already dead, you—” But then Alice remembered Elspeth’s words. I’ve seen the Kripkes murder a soul. “Well. I suppose we’d better walk faster.”

“But now this is exciting!” Gradus spread his hands, palms open. “A tragedy, a revenge story, a rescue, a race against time. Will you escape the Kripkes? Or will they hunt you down, before you can finish your fallen

comrade’s quest?”

“I suppose.”

“What do you mean, you suppose?”

“I mean, that sounds like a fine script.” Alice felt very tired. “I suppose I’ll follow it.”

“What do you mean, you’ll follow it?” Somehow she had agitated Gradus. His coat started whipping around both their heels, as if he could

encircle her in a vortex of his irritation. “Aren’t you upset?” he demanded.

“Aren’t you devastated?”

“Sure, Gradus.”

“You sound as if you don’t even know what you’re doing here.”

“That’s just it.” His frustration was exhausting. She wanted to swat him away like a fly. “I don’t know. I’m just tired.”

“But don’t you care about anything?”

“I suppose I should.”

How could she explain to him this numbness? It wasn’t that Alice didn’t care, it was that she had cared so much, and a thread had snapped. Some fundamental capacity was broken. She felt hurled out of the world of meaning, feeling, attachment. She couldn’t bleed anymore. She was drained already. Scripts were all she had now, and they were enough to keep her walking, but not enough for her heart to start beating.

“But you’re alive,” said Gradus, as if this were the answer to

everything.

“Against all my desires. Yes.”

Gradus said nothing. She walked and waited, hoping he would change the subject, but he remained silent. She sensed she had upset him, but how, she could not say. Gradus had not seemed the sensitive type. Until now she’d been comfortable in their callous rapport. At one point she had insinuated he was Jack the Ripper, and he had only laughed.

But he asked no more questions. For the rest of the morning they walked in silence. Once or twice he muttered to himself, but she could not make out what he said. She sensed only his resentment, a bitter and hostile wave, as abrupt as it was confusing. And Alice, well accustomed to placating volatile men, knew only to await her punishment.

“SO.” GRADUS SPOKE AT LAST. “THERE it is.”

For the past hour they had climbed up a steep and rocky hill. Alice was nearly bent over with exhaustion, hands over her knees. Her eyes had rarely left the ground in front of her. Now she lifted her head, straightened up, and gasped.

There lay the city of Dis. It was so much more marvelous than she had ever imagined: a gleaming white castle, three rings thronged at the bottom by snaking inlets of water that churned against its foundations, black waves

smashing so furiously against stone, bone, brick, that Alice could hear the distant roar where she stood.

She had read much literature about Dis. The Land of the Damned. The Doleful City. For Virgil’s Aeneid, Dis was the name for all of Hell itself, and, within its realm, a fortress ringed by three walls, surrounded by a river of fire. For Dante, Dis was only the city for the sixth through ninth circles of Hell, a great fortress in a land littered with broken sepulchers. Others said the city of Dis and Pandemonium were one and the same; the realm of Lucifer and the demons. They said Dis was a foul and evil place, forsaken by God.

No one had prepared her for the city’s beauty.

Dante mentioned only that the city had high walls. He did not describe how those walls were the perfect mirror image of the sacred places its inhabitants had scorned; how Dis’s architecture was a clear rebuke to the Vatican. No; in truth, it put the Vatican to shame. Michelangelo and Raphael had had only one lifetime to praise their God, but the inhabitants of Dis had eons. Dis was the extremes of human perfection. Dis was faultless marble, balustrades and domes, tiled courtyards lined with columns. Borges had written that the city was horrific, so horrific that the mere fact of its existence polluted the past and future, and compromised the stars; but had Alice and Borges witnessed the same city? Where Borges had found a perversion, Alice found a miracle. Dis was a millennium of effort, a haven constructed by those without salvation. Alice could see so clearly what it was trying to be, and what it could never be. But even in that fundamental lack there was something lovely, transcendent, a testament to human will.

The city of Dis was defiant to the idea of an afterworld itself. They had left the campus behind now; this was a temple. Damn us, it said, and we will make Hell shine.

Gradus’s voice had a funny lilt to it. “Suppose your man’s in there.”

Alice felt a prickle across her skin. “Is it dangerous?”

“Hardly,” said Gradus. “Those in Dis are no threat to you. You’ll see.

They are very particular sinners.”

“What do you mean? Who’s in there?”

“Traitors. Oath-breakers. Those who made a promise and failed to keep it.”

This answer disappointed her. She had always assumed Dante was exaggerating. “That doesn’t seem so bad.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Well, I mean, everyone breaks promises.”

“There are trivial promises,” agreed Gradus. “And then there are declarations. Promises that say, This is what you mean to me, and this is what I owe to you. The kinds of promises a husband makes to a wife. That which a parent makes to a child. That which a teacher makes to a student.”

A chill ran over Alice’s spine.

Staring at Dis, she felt as if a shard of ice were pressing against her bosom. That beauty took on a vicious gleam. She sensed its inner sin—a biting, evil thing; that force that poisoned bonds, turned friend against friend and kin against kin. She could only describe that feeling as a violation; the sharpest, severest pain, that which pierced in her inner depths where she felt most safe.

“So what did you do, Gradus?” she asked. “Who did you betray?”

Some part of her wanted to get back at him, though she couldn’t say for what. His silence? His sudden coldness? She felt judged and shamed by him, and now that he was speaking again, she wanted to make him hurt.

Anyhow, he’d been so callous with his own questions, and she felt she

could now be callous in return.

“You didn’t ask that,” said Gradus.

“Yes I did. What did you do? Why aren’t you writing?”

“Never ask that.”

Come on, she nearly said, but realized he was serious. There was no laughter in his face.

“I am warning you, Alice Law.” Gradus’s eyes were stone. He can’t be from this century, Alice thought suddenly, no one from this century has such time-deadened eyes. He has been here for lifetimes. “You may take confessions if freely offered. That is permitted. But if you wish to survive, remember this one rule about Dis. Never ask.”

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