Katabasis — Chapter no 32

Chapter Thirty-Two

A blur, a gasp, a splash, and the shock.

The fall was not far, but the water was shallow and the rocks so hard.

For a moment Alice could not see for the pain. All her limbs exploded white, an electric field that only gradually dimmed to throbbing red bursts.

She lifted her head, then her arms. Her legs would not move. All she could manage was a dazed half-sit so she did not lie submerged while she processed which pieces were still attached to her body. She blinked at the sky. A pale circle hung straight above her, barely visible. It was less a defined shape than a ripple in the sky. If one looked askance, it disappeared back into the orange. Oh, she thought. The moon. So that’s where she’s been.

Several feet away Nick Kripke hauled himself upright. Water came up to his ankles.

He glanced down at his feet, head cocked, as if he could not comprehend where he stood. He blinked, then raised his head slightly, staring ahead at nothing. He seemed like an old man who’d come down to the kitchen for a glass of water and forgotten what he was doing.

He looked to Alice.

“Excuse me,” he rasped, and Alice was stunned to hear a voice wholly human from that armored throat. “I seem . . . I seem to have left . . .”

Then that gleaming intelligence came back to his eyes, and Nick Kripke realized where he was. With a shout he lifted one foot out of the water, then the other, then jumped pointlessly on alternating feet as simple physics caught up to him. Alas, he could not levitate. Alice watched, fascinated, as Nick danced a desperate jig toward the shore while memories streamed out of him, fast and urgent, a vast and building current. They flowed past her with frightening speed. A film sped up eight times, sixteen, thirty-two; too fast to make out anything distinct except the most glancing impressions. A campus in the dark, white chalk on a board. The current grew larger and Nick grew smaller. A Popsicle in a boiling pot, thought Alice. When he reaches the edge, how much will be left? He’d nearly made it, he was only

several steps from shore. But the memories seemed to have an attractive force of their own. The current was too great; the memories lost clung to the memories remaining. The current swelled. Nick Kripke tipped forward, fingers clawing for the bank. Alice saw on his face a look of utter terror. He met her eyes, and his right hand twitched—begging? Supplication? By instinct she moved to help him. But her limbs hurt so; pain exploded when she tried to stand up. She could only stare back at Nick, mute. For what was there to say? At that moment her mind went to the Lewis Carroll story.

“Balbus’s Essay.” Such a funny tale. An item submerged in liquid will displace liquid equivalent to its mass, but when the liquid is displaced, the water level must rise, but if the water level rises, the item is submerged further, and so the water must rise further, and on and on, until a man at the edge of the sea, who even just dips in his toes, must soon be drowned.

Shouldn’t he?

In this case, yes. A wave of black water rumbled forth, and when it

receded, Nick Kripke was gone.

Alice sat staring at the empty waves.

So that was all it took. She could not believe the waters could lie so still.

The waves had ceased their churning; now the surface was glasslike, deceptive. Several seconds, and a lifetime of hurt just wiped clean, forgotten by the universe. No punishments, no redemption, just nonbeing.

Like Nick Kripke had never happened to begin with. You ass, Alice thought.

You lucky, lucky ass.

She heard footsteps padding on the sand, then the screech of a blade.

She turned and looked up. Magnolia stood looming above her, her knife drawn by her side. Theophrastus trailed in her wake. They’d broken free; she knew not how. Both gazed upon the waves, where the last traces of husband and father spiraled out into the black. Magnolia tilted her head back. From her throat emitted an awful, wordless moan. Theophrastus joined her. His high-pitched screech entwined with her low rasp, and for a moment it seemed like the whole world was howling.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said weakly, for indeed she was, though this was all

her doing.

Theophrastus approached.

He was so very small. He must have been about ten when he died, so he was small even for his age. He barely reached his mother’s waist. Alice wondered if anyone called ever him Theo. He looked so much like a Theo.

A lisp of a name for a wisp of a boy; soft, skinny limbs hidden behind all that borrowed bone. But still strong enough to wield a blade, and bring it down.

Alice shut her eyes, awaiting the blow. It would not be so bad, she told herself. A bit of pain, some pressure at her neck, and then it would be over.

And then her soul would be free to fly off to wherever Peter was, and even if that place was nowhere, nowhere was good enough.

The blow never came. Alice glanced up. Magnolia’s hand lay upon Theophrastus’s shoulder. Mother and son regarded Alice, unmoving. Alice tried but could not read any emotion on those harrowed, alien faces.

Magnolia reached down and grasped Theophrastus under the shoulders.

It was the most human movement Alice had ever seen Magnolia make; a swift, practiced mother’s hug. She hoisted Theophrastus up and balanced him against her waist. Then she trudged down the bank toward the waters.

“No.” Alice tried to prop herself up on her elbows, and a terrible pain shot through her back. She could not get up. “Stop, don’t—”

Magnolia ignored her. Her lips moved against Theophrastus’s ear.

Theophrastus’s head bobbed. Magnolia continued toward the river, moving with singular purpose, one steady foot after the other. Theophrastus leaned against her neck.

“Wait,” Alice said again, but realized then she had nothing more to say.

What could she offer Magnolia now? A way back to humanity? This was not in her power.

She could only let them finish what she had started.

Mother and son trod forth step by step into the depths until the waves washed over their heads. Then their memories began to peel away. Little things at first, astonishingly vibrant in the black. A toy wagon. A box of colored chalk; a child’s chalkboard, covered in white and purple flowers.

Then the memories swirled outward, the things that defined Magnolia the most, the things she’d held on to despite years of whittling away the rest.

Theophrastus’s beaming face. He wore thin wire glasses—of course he’d worn glasses. Steps to a stage. Brilliant lights. The glossy wood paneling of a lectern. Lights so bright that all the faces blurred to nothing. Sweat pooling in your palms. Then applause, thunderous applause that shook the floor, shook your bones, shook you right out of your body. All those dinner- plate eyes, hungry gazes, trained upon you. Magnolia unspooled and Alice stared, entranced, at the life she had always thought she wanted.

She used to admire Magnolia so much.

Once, in her freshman year of college, she had snuck into a talk by the Kripkes. The colloquium was restricted to graduate students and faculty, but she’d snuck in through the door when the ticket checkers weren’t looking, and once she was in her seat nobody questioned her.

Then the talk began, and Alice was entranced. The research alone was brilliant. If Alice had merely read Magnolia’s papers, that would have been enough to make her fall in love. She had the loveliest prose style. Later the establishment would treat her lyricism as evidence that she lacked methodological rigor, but at the time Alice was amazed by how Magnolia could make the driest strings of logic sing.

But Magnolia was so much more than her proofs. Alice had never seen a woman scholar perform like this in public before. Oh, Magnolia Kripke, of the raven-black hair and creamy, ageless skin. Her voice was sonorous, melodic. She carried herself, and all the womanly parts of her—breasts, hips, curves—with a poised confidence. She did not shy from flaunting her beauty. She did not hide it under baggy clothes and bad posture, the way so many women did. She made herself the center of attention. She knew everyone’s eyes fell upon her, for the right reasons or wrong. She seized that attention. It was the subtle ways she moved—smoothed her skirt, flipped her hair over her shoulder. No one could look away.

Alice sat rapt, stunned by this living instantiation of the impossible type.

She had heard of other couples in academia, usually through gossip about their impending breakdown. A pair of professors at Yale were married —she a classicist, he a logician—and they were constantly unhappy, their students and advisees caught in the crossfire of their disputes. The trouble was that she’d left a tenure-track position at Stanford to join him at Yale as his spousal hire, meaning that her tenure was dependent on his; he was a full professor, and she would only ever be a lecturer. He had edited three volumes; she had only published a handful of papers, and rumors proliferated that she’d asked him many times to help her further her career but he had refused on the grounds of nepotism. Supposedly he was also sleeping with his teaching assistant, a sloe-eyed and glossy-haired Radcliffe graduate who pranced around in colorful scarves and thigh-high boots.

They all thought she—the wife—should divorce him. But she could not leave the marriage. If they separated, the university might fire her the next day. Why waste her salary? Anyone could teach Introduction to Tragedy.

The Yale case was nothing special. Hear one story and you’d heard them all; the nasty divorce at Cornell, the married teaching assistant at the Sorbonne. The husband was the star. The wife taught undergraduates who didn’t know the title lecturer could only mean “recent hire or spouse,” and then she left to raise their babies.

But here was a woman scholar with prestige, a husband, and a baby. It was remarkable how Nick treated Magnolia. He hardly spoke that afternoon. He introduced his wife—this aspect of their research had been all her doing, he said—and then he left the stage. Throughout the talk Alice kept glancing toward him, wondering when his adoring attention would give way to boredom. But he was utterly infatuated with her. He laughed at all her jokes; he nodded appreciatively whenever she unpacked a particularly tricky theoretical knot. Not once did his eyes leave her face. So this is true love, Alice had thought. I wonder if anyone will ever look at me this way.

And when Magnolia left the stage, she didn’t seem to step out of her role; didn’t transition from star to wife and mother. Rather she was just as vibrant and magnificent as she had been at the lectern, husband and son orbiting her like moons. Magnolia was just who she was at all times. She was, impossibly, all things at once.

You were the best of us, Alice wanted to tell her. You made it all seem possible. But Magnolia was too deep in the waves now; up to her neck, head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape in an expression too like ecstasy. All Alice could do was watch from the sands as mother and son

disappeared beneath the surface.

“Good riddance,” said John Gradus.

Once more Alice turned round. Gradus drifted, gloating, over the sands.

Could she stand, she would have thrown her arms over his shoulders and

kissed him.

“You came,” she said. “Why?”

“An act of grace,” he crowed. “And it wasn’t God, Alice Law. It was me.”

She reached for him, but he, like Magnolia, strode past her toward the

waves.

“Gradus . . . ?”

He walked straight into the water. Alice made a distressed noise, but Gradus did not disintegrate. Rather he stepped lightly onto the Lethe’s

surface. The waters stilled beneath his feet, held him up as if he were made of marble. Then Alice saw what Gradus saw: a boat growing larger on the horizon. It was a slender, beautiful thing, its body a single, curved stroke of bright autumn wood, and its sails a rippling silken sheen. So it was true; so those Shades were right to hope.

Gradus waded further out to meet the ship. His cloak billowed open and his arms splayed at his sides, as if he was presenting himself in full.

“John Gradus,” Alice called, “who were you?”

He didn’t bristle at this question like he once had. Rather it slid off him like water. He shrugged. “No one, now.” He turned and waved an arm.

“Goodbye, Alice Law! May we never meet again!”

“Goodbye,” she cried. “Good luck . . .”

The boat was very close now. Alice saw a figure standing at the prow; a being clothed all in white, shining so bright against the dark horizon that it hurt Alice’s eyes to look. She had to squint. She could only make out the vaguest outlines as the figure helped Gradus onto the boat and offered him a bowl. Gradus tipped the bowl back and drank lustily, shoulders heaving.

Great swaths of memory began peeling out of him then. His grayness was like a fish belly sliced open, spilling all its guts and waste out into the ocean. Alice saw images flickering in that viscera. They confirmed her worst suspicions—a twisting of bodies, a splatter of blood, the shadow of a great, spindly elm. But she did not look too closely. She did not think it mattered anymore.

Then Gradus was not Gradus anymore, but a shimmering glow; immaterial in a wholly different way than Shades. For Shades were imprints, persistent past, but this Spirit-Not-Gradus was undefined future, brilliant in its potential. The Spirit-Not-Gradus turned away and went to sit at the bow, his face turned toward that promised shore.

“Wait—” Alice stretched her own hand out, hoping, against foolish hope, the boat might take her too.

But the figure in the boat seemed to smile, and withdrew its hand. It did so not in cruelty; only in acknowledgment of rules that Alice, too, was expected to know.

The boat pulled away. In its wake, a wave pushed out at Alice, rippling and insistent. Her limbs went limp; she had not the strength to resist it. But it was not the kind to force her underwater. Rather it carried her insistently toward shore, as if the water had arms and was flinging her out. Not you, it

said. Not yet. Gently it nudged her away until Alice lay curled on her side on the sand, just out of the river’s reach.

There she lay, dazed and breathing, watching the waves dart up just close enough to say hello.

Eventually she registered the pain in her arm.

She lifted the arm to her face and watched, amazed, as black water seeped in at the edges of her tattoo. She had spent so many nights pinching and rubbing at her skin, worrying at Professor Grimes’s handwriting. She had thought nothing except for cleaving off her own flesh would ever dull those sharp white lines. Yet now the writing fizzled at the edges and frothed wherever the water touched. Little chemical reactions burned all over her skin. It did hurt, but no more than the sting of matches against wet fingertips. Besides, the pain dimmed against the overwhelming relief. She felt a tension disappearing from her skull; a great weight whose presence she had lived with so long, she didn’t notice it anymore except when it released.

She tested her memory. She reached for Linear B, something she never used, a file her mind just wouldn’t throw away, and was delighted to find that she came up empty. She reached for page 52 of the Tractatus. She couldn’t see it.

Belatedly she realized she might be in trouble.

There was no getting dry of the water. She was soaked all the way through; clothes sodden, boots waterlogged. She made some effort to wipe her arms dry, but it seemed pointless. The stinging now spread to every bit of exposed skin. When she shifted against the sand, bits of color came

away.

Her delight gave way to panic.

She riffled through her thoughts, reaching for and clinging to the things she could not lose. I am Alice Law, I am a magician, and I am here because

Peter Murdoch— Oh please, do not let me forget Peter.

She tried to hold his face in her head. She had no idea what else she was losing, and no idea if she could prevent it, but still she tried to chisel Peter’s image into her brain—that floppy hair, those wide brown eyes. The loose, ready smile. She remembered the hunch of his shoulders and the sprawl of his hair; the way he twirled chalk, the way he pinched his wrist when he had nothing to fidget with. The sound of his laughter. The crackling

electricity of his thoughts. She put all these remembrances in a little box and locked it and held it at the forefront of her mind, as if she could keep it there with sheer force of will. Give me Peter—let me be a monument to Peter—if I am an otherwise empty shell on this desert, a broken record that plays one memory, that will be all right.

But her mind was fracturing now, and she could not stop her thoughts from sliding sideways. The locked box slid out of her grasp, tumbling down the sands. Memories played their final burst like reels of film spinning out before they burned. Enormous banks of detail went first. Mundane repetitions. Boots splashing in mud. Darkening skies; the mist, the rain. The turn of a key, the click of a lock; day in, day out. Spoons in teacups stirring, clinking, going round and round and round . . .

Then the abstract, too, burst and faded like fireworks. Swaths of knowledge vivid before her eyes. Jakobson, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari. What had they said? Who knew anymore. Her languages were going. Visions of dictionaries; great vocabulary lists she’d stored and never used. Mar sin leat, do svidaniya, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye.

Plato had argued in Meno for a theory of anamnesis—that souls were immortal, knowledge was innate, and learning just was a process of rediscovering that which you had forgotten. Reason functions to tether a knowledge that was always there. When a slave boy learns geometry he is not making a discovery, he is only recollecting what he once knew. Then what would Plato make of Alice? Did she forget now only the muddled truths that stood in reason’s way? Or was she forgetting all that innate knowledge as well?

What will I be when I am an empty container? she wondered. How will it feel to be nothing?

Nothing, null, zero—what an interesting concept. Whole schools of thought were possible only because of the acceptance of zero. Her mind tumbled back to that popular fresher’s riddle; a syllogism told so many times that its premises and conclusion had taken on the cadence of a nursery rhyme.

Nothing is better than eternal happiness.

A cheese toastie is better than nothing.

Shouldn’t it stand to reason, then, that a cheese toastie is better than eternal happiness?

Wouldn’t that be nice, Alice thought. A cheese toastie here, at the end of the world.

Her lids felt so heavy. It would take too much effort to remain upright— indeed, it took so much effort to panic—so instead she let her whole self go limp. Her head thumped against the sand. She felt a little thrill—that sneaky pleasure at the thought of her own demise that, despite everything, would never entirely vanish. It’s happening for me, she thought, when I feared it never could. I will go the way of the Kripkes, and soon I will not be a self at all. How exciting this is. I have never known what it was like not to be.

Witness now my last trick: I disappear!

“Hey.”

Something hard prodded her shoulder. Alice moaned and made a desultory gesture to swat it away. Let me fade in peace.

“Get up. You’re not so bad.”

Alice moaned more insistently.

“Oh, shush.” Two hands jammed under her torso and rolled her over onto her back. Alice cracked one eye open and saw the hollow curve of a bird’s skull over a thin, bright face. Beside her, a smug and tail-swishing cat.

“Christ,” said Elspeth. “The look of you.”

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