Page 111 of Katabasis
“That’s just it.” His frustration was exhausting. She wanted to swat him away like a fly. “Idon’tknow. 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’realive,” 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. “Thereit 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’sAeneid, 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.”
