Katabasis — Chapter no 3

Chapter Three

The line of white was indeed a wall: a great, flat surface that disappeared into the sky and stretched infinitely into either direction. Below, a great mass of Shades shuffled impatiently about, their voices like wind rustling

through dried leaves.

“Been here for ages—”

“Nothing’s moving—”

“Birth rate’s gone down, they said.”

“Has it?”

“Postwar boom’s over, everywhere’s developed, and all the girls are

taking pills—”

“Oh, is that it?”

“My word.” Peter stood on the tips of his toes, trying to see over the crowd. “It’s worse than Fifth on a Friday.”

“You’ve been to Fifth?” Alice asked.

“I tried. Never got in.”

Alice did feel as if she were stuck outside a nightclub, only the doors were out of sight, and no one was enforcing the queue. “Do you think he’s still here?”

Perspective was not reliable here. It was impossible to tell how quickly the queue was moving, or how much distance separated them from the wall.

Professor Grimes might have passed through days ago. He might have been stuck in line, several yards away. Alice wished she had consulted some material about birth and death rates. How many people in the world had died over the past two months? How many had reincarnated since? She did not recall any archival information about queuing to depart Asphodel— Orpheus and all the rest seemed to just walk right into the courts—but then all the sojourner accounts were from a period when the world was smaller, when a more manageable number of souls came and went. Possibly this wall was a recent development. A sort of postwar chthonic immigration

control.

“We could shout for him,” said Peter.

“Oh, let’s not do that.” Alice had seen no sign of guardian deities yet, but she knew as a general rule it was best when sojourners did not draw attention to themselves. She sized up the queue, then squared her shoulders.

“We might just try and go through.”

The lines looked dense, but weren’t Shades immaterial? Setiya and Penhaligon certainly thought so—Shades had only memories of their bodies, they were spirit stuff alone, and so they could not interact with the physical in any meaningful way. Alice and Peter were flesh and bone, and matter trumped empty space. So suppose she just pushed—but she wasn’t three steps in before she was swarmed by Shades. Irritation exploded

around her.

“Cutting—”

“No cutting—”

“Get out—”

“Rude!”

Icy chill spread throughout her limbs. She felt a slimy pressure against her skin. So she was wrong—it seemed Shades could indeed become something resembling the material when it suited them. She recalled the more intact girl from before, how for an instant she had seemed more solid.

The crowd formed a frothy irascible mass, pushing and squeezing from all sides until she could hardly breathe. The pressure sharpened. She yelped and jumped back out of line. “All right,” she said. “Jesus—no cutting, all right.”

The pressure vanished; the chill eased. The mass subsided back into the queue.

“So that’s out.” Alice rubbed her arms. “Seems like they—ow!”

A Shade had bumped past her, elbowing her so hard she nearly fell to the ground. He seemed to have invested all his corporeal memory into that elbow. It hurt.

“Blasted magicians,” hissed the Shade. “No respect.”

The pain to her ribs was terrible, but Alice was too excited to mind.

“How do you know we’re magicians?”

“Chalk all over your hands,” said the Shade. “Chalk on your kneecaps.

What else are you, cokeheads?”

Here Alice began to suspect this Shade was a mathematician.

Mathematicians hated magicians.

“Have you seen another magician?” Peter asked eagerly. “Here?

Recently?”

“Have I seen a magician,” muttered the Shade. “Have I seen a magician, a snotty arrogant magician, striding about like he owned the place, like the rest of us don’t exist—”

That sounded just like Professor Grimes. “When?” Alice demanded.

“A day,” said the Shade. “A week. A month. Who’s counting?”

“And he’s definitely crossed over?” Peter pressed. “He’s not queuing still?”

“The rate he was going?” The Shade snorted. “Marching on like he had somewhere to be. Would be surprised if he hasn’t reached the Eighth Court by now. They would have admitted him just to get him out of here. And good riddance.”

Alice wanted to sprint up to the gates right then. But the Shades were all casting her dirty looks now, and she doubted they would part politely if she asked. What to do, then? Wait their turn? But even if they got through, Alice didn’t know what deities guarded the end of the queue, or whether they were disposed to help the living. And Professor Grimes was moving fast, with purpose. If he didn’t want to delay, then he was bent on reincarnation.

They couldn’t simply stand here. It was a race against time now, and Alice didn’t know how long the courts could hold a persona like Grimes.

“Say, Law.” Peter was eyeing the wall. From a distance it had seemed a smooth marble edifice, flawless and flat, but up close Alice saw now that the wall was constructed instead of thousands of little bones, stacked up on each other in a dense, ancient mass. Accumulated detritus of millions of years of life. A mountain of preserved time. Though horizontally it was endless, vertically it was not—it appeared to stretch forty, fifty meters before it topped out to a smooth straight line. No taller than the university library.

Peter asked, “How hard do you think that is to climb?”

THEY MARCHED PERPENDICULAR TO THE QUEUE until the crowds thinned away.

Now they could approach the base of the wall undisturbed. The Shades, for whatever reason, seemed uninterested in climbing up—possibly because they had no incentive to rush, and possibly because their tenuous materiality could offer them no purchase against that surface.

A shame, thought Alice, because the wall really was ideal for climbing.

Large bits of bone stuck out all over the place—lovely handholds, easily grasped—and the wall was littered too with grooves, perfect for digging one’s toes in. Alice was grateful that the wall was made of bone only—it seemed all the hair, fur, blood, and gristly bits had eroded long ago. There was no smell nor gore. Texture-wise, they were grand. Alice looked upon the wall and saw the Flatirons and Peak District; saw plentiful bottlenecks, chimneys, and cracks. The only problem, she surmised, would be endurance. But perhaps they could rest at the top.

She took a deep breath, stretched out her shoulders, then dug into her

bag.

“What are you doing?” Peter asked.

Alice was crumbling a stick of chalk between her fingers. “For the grip,” she explained. “It keeps you from slipping when your hands get

sweaty.”

“How do you know that?”

She dusted the chalk across her palms. “I used to climb in Colorado. I climb sometimes still—there’s a mountaineering club on campus.”

“How very American.”

“Hush.” She reached for the nearest bits of protruding bone, found her footholds, and hoisted herself up. “Follow my lead. Don’t look down.”

Up they went. To her delight, Alice found the climb deliciously easy.

The grips were good, the wall full of friction. She yanked at every hold out of caution before she placed her weight against it, but every inch of bone held firm. Eons of accumulation had packed these materials so densely there was not a single loose bit.

For a while she climbed and climbed, relishing the sureness of her grip; how effortlessly she could swing herself from hold to hold. The strain and repetition felt good. It was meditative; it took up all her concentration, so that the anxious radio in her head quieted down. It also felt good to realize she could still do this. She hadn’t taken care of herself these last few months; she had been afraid all her muscles had atrophied. On the other hand, she was so much thinner now. Less weight to pull—which did make a difference, though she wasn’t sure whether this lovely lightness came from actual agility or from starvation fuzzing up her head.

After a while she stopped to glance about. She had loved doing this whenever she climbed in Colorado. She loved to appreciate the sheer

distance to the ground. It never fazed her. At this height she was too far up to do anything about it but keep going, and this immovable fact helped to block out useless feelings like fear.

Hell stretched endless beneath her, plains of silt and rolling dunes. To her tired eyes, this side of Hell abstracted to two rippling blocks of color: silky gray below and an orange burning darkly above, punctuated by a sun that seemed perpetually on the verge of setting. It was quite beautiful.

“This is insane,” she said. “Lovely view, though. Are you doing all

right?”

Peter did not answer.

“Murdoch?”

She glanced down. Peter was much further below her than she’d thought; he must have stopped moving some time ago. All four of his limbs trembled. His forehead shone slick with sweat. He blinked furiously at the wall, and he looked like he was trying not to vomit.

“Murdoch?”

For a moment Peter seemed not to register her voice. Then at last he replied, “I believe I am having a panic attack.”

It was wildly inappropriate, but Alice laughed. “Murdoch, are you afraid of heights?”

“I didn’t want to tell you,” he gasped. “Thought I could just—suck it up

—”

“It was your idea to climb!”

“Yes, but I only meant it in theory,” he whined. “Oh, God, Law—”

“You’re fine, you’re fine,” she said quickly. “Look, you made it this far —”

“But now my brain’s caught up, and I can’t move.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh God oh God—”

“Stop talking. Just breathe.” The gravity of the situation had caught up with her. Alice remained calm. She had talked undergraduates down from quitting Professor Grimes’s seminars before. She had, for better or worse, plenty of practice at talking away fear. “There’s a solid protruding block a few feet up. You can brace your feet against that and lean forward, which will give your arms a rest. Do you think you can make it just a few more holds?”

“I can’t let go.” Peter whined again. “My wrists . . .”

“Do it or you’ll die,” Alice snapped. “Move, Murdoch. Don’t think, just do it.”

Miraculously, Peter obeyed. His feet found purchase, and he leaned forward against the wall, hands splayed for balance. His chest heaved with exhaustion.

“Very good,” said Alice. “Now, let’s—let’s just take stock, have a reset . . .”

“My forearms are burning,” Peter gasped.

“You’re using your thumbs too much. Look.” She demonstrated with one hand. “Try hanging from your top four fingers instead. They’ll give you all the traction you need. Hook, don’t pinch.”

Peter spent a long moment breathing against the wall. Alice wondered if he’d heard her at all. But then he reached out with one tentative hand, the other bracing against the wall for balance, and flexed his fingers.

“Okay,” he said. “I think . . . that makes sense.”

“And if you ever need to rest, get your feet on a good hold, stand up straight, and lean against the wall like you are now. That’ll take some of the pressure off your arms. Do you understand?”

He nodded vigorously, eyes wide.

“Hesitation is your worst enemy. If you see a hold, just swing for it. The longer you dither back and forth, the more you exhaust yourself. Do you

understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Shush, Murdoch, I’m saving your life.” She dusted her hands with a fresh piece of chalk, then passed it down. “Chalk up, you’re sweating.”

Peter obeyed. Up again they went. From this angle Alice could not tell how far they’d come, whether they’d reached the halfway point or not. All distance and texture were reduced to abstractions, lines on canvas, and all she could see on either side was an endless stretch of jagged white, then sky, or ground. There was no pacing herself to the finish. All she could do was ignore the passage of time, and the rapidly approaching limits of her own endurance, and keep throwing one arm up over the next. A watched distance never shrank. Hands, hands, toes, toes. Hands, hands, toes, toes.

Finally her right hand met a flat, wide surface. She dared to tilt her head up. That was it—there was no more wall, only sky, she’d made it. Topping out, they called it at the gym. She took a deep breath and pushed herself

over the edge in one massive go. Then she scampered onto her knees and looked down.

Peter gazed up at her, eyes huge with fright. He was shaking quite badly. She was afraid he might let go, and he was still several feet below her, too far for her to pull him up.

“You’re so close,” she called. “You’re almost there. And it’s flat up here —almost three feet wide—we can rest up here, you’ve just got to finish out.”

He might have said something in response, but she couldn’t tell what.

All she heard was a pained wheezing.

“Just look at me,” she said. He raised his head. “There you go.”

He reached with trembling hands for the next hold. Then the next.

“Now move your toes,” she whispered. “Steady now—good, good— now one more.”

He got one hand up to the top. She seized his wrist. He got another hand up, just far enough for her to pull him up and over. One great heave, and then Peter collapsed on top of her with a shout.

They lay still for a long moment, breathing hard. Alice felt something wet against her skin. She tilted her head down and saw Peter’s face crumpled against her neck. He was crying.

“You’re all right,” she murmured. “It’s okay.”

She would have wriggled away, but Peter was still shaking—a bit, Alice thought inappropriately, like a man after sex—and she thought it better to let him have this moment. She laid her head back and closed her eyes, relishing the sweet fatigue that pulsed through her limbs.

Good God. She hadn’t felt this sort of pain in a long time. She’d been exhausted, yes, but this throbbing soreness—this screaming reminder that she’d pushed her body to the limit, and hadn’t broken; indeed, that she had a body that could do what it did—felt good.

She tried to focus on that pleasant burn. Not Peter’s warmth against her chest. Not the absurdity of Peter lying on top of her, which was somehow, compared to rock climbing in Hell, the most ridiculous thing about this situation. Not the very weird stir in her gut she felt at his being vulnerable, depending on her, and how very unsatisfying this was despite the fact that she’d wished for so long that Peter might reveal to her any weakness at all.

But all this did was make him seem human, and the more human Peter seemed, the more he baffled her.

At last his sobs subsided. “I’m sorry.” He pulled himself off of her and sat up. “I feel very embarrassed.”

“Don’t be,” Alice murmured, eyes still closed.

“I’m just so afraid. I think I’ve never been so afraid in my entire life.”

“That’s natural.”

“I think with every move I’m going to fall. Every time I let go I think it’s about to be the end.”

“It takes a lot to fall.” Alice hauled herself up to sitting, then reached out to pat his knee. “Trust your body. You’re not going to fall.”

What she didn’t tell him was how common it was to slip, or how good it felt when you did. The shock of the release. That split-second moment when you lost all touch with the wall, when all your supports gave. The subsequent weightlessness. The thump. Back in Colorado, people were always flinging themselves off the rock wall in various embarrassing positions, just to make their friends laugh.

Sometimes she did it on purpose. She let go when she was nearly at the top of a problem, or let her fingers slide off holds that were designed for beginners. These pleased her the most. They were so firm; convex so as to catch the curve of your fingers. It took real effort to slip off those. You had to want to fall.

She was pleased by the tenuousness of it all. How quick the ground would rise if for one moment you stopped paying attention. If you loosed a breath, made your peace, and just. Let. Go. It felt good, knowing how to fall. Feeling out the worst. Knowing that was an option.

She realized this knowledge was not very helpful at the moment, so she kept it to herself.

“Think you can go again?” She glanced over her shoulder, and just then caught Peter looking at her with the oddest expression on his face.

She couldn’t make sense of it. Not wonder, no. Certainly not desire. But a kind of wide-eyed, open-mouthed vulnerability—a childish openness, really, was the best way she could describe it. She didn’t like it. It was too familiar. It recalled a version of her, of them, that no longer was. It made her feel things—and this was unacceptable, because over the last year Alice and Peter had determined the best way to behave around one another was to pretend they were both invulnerable as stone.

The moment stretched—so long, indeed, Alice had opened her mouth, casting about for anything with which to break the silence. But then it

passed. Peter blinked down, rubbed his hands across his thighs, then pivoted on his knees to peer down the other side of the wall. “My God.”

Alice joined him.

She thought at first that she was gazing upon a sea, for her first impression was of roiling, nauseating movement; a steady churn of mass. I am dreaming, she thought. And then, Oh no, not again. For this happened sometimes, all the time in fact; when she let her gaze go slack, then all sorts of things started creeping in at the edges, fantastic things: serpents with many heads; wolves devouring the sun. A friend studying neuroscience had told her once that eyesight was largely memory, that your brain saw a pattern and filled in the rest. Alas, Alice’s memory bank was bursting at the seams. The mix-and-match mechanism was broken, and her brain filled in patterns with the most inappropriate things. Chalkboards became parking lots. Apple trees became Jesus on the cross. Often she stood in the checkout line at Sainsbury’s and saw corpses instead of cabbages on the belt.

But this only happened if she did not concentrate. She was concentrating very hard now, and every time her gaze fell upon a single point, the plane stabilized, and she could make out the contours of a recognizable terrain—mountains and deserts, winding paths, demarcated territories that she hoped numbered eight. Once she blinked, and she saw what seemed like Cambridge from a bird’s-eye view; bell towers, college courts, old stone department buildings along cobbled roads. But try as she might she could not sustain her gaze for long. This was not her fault; the landscape was playing with her. It was like standing before an autostereogram illusion. If her eyes shifted focus ever so slightly, then the image transformed. She saw straight paths morph into winding labyrinths.

She saw a sprawling terrain morph into a radial pattern. She saw reefs of coral. She saw a shimmering black line that at times seemed to bind the entire plane; but at others, it vanished into a pinprick at the center of a circle, a black hole that pulled everything within it.

Alice tried to focus, to forcefully wrestle Hell into a mappable image.

But then she felt an acute pain behind her eyes, and she had to look away.

Peter’s palms were pressed against his temples. Thank God, thought Alice; he sees it too.

“We’re going in there.” His voice was strained.

“Yes.”

He looked wan. “It will swallow us up.”

“No, it won’t.” Alice had no idea what gave her this confidence, except that none of the other sojourner accounts mentioned a carnivalesque fun house terrain. Everyone else had enjoyed a pleasant ramble of the standard Euclidean sort, and it just seemed fair that they should as well.

It was only a problem of perspective, she decided. The mountains she’d grown up climbing had the same effect. The scale could be dizzying. You reached the mountain base and craned your neck to find the peaks, and the ground seemed to fall away behind you. But then you trained your gaze back on the dirt you stood on, and focused on putting one foot in front of another, and before you knew it, you were at the top.

“We only need to get down,” she told Peter. For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional. “I’m sure it’s very nice below.”

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