Page 122 of Katabasis
“Clearly, yes.”
“Why don’t you sit down over there,” said the knob. “He’s new, too.”
Alice turned to where the knob gestured. A stone bench lined the path. But she didn’t see anyone else, only more undergrowth.
“Who?”
“I’m not sure about his name. We don’t have much use for names.”
Alice took a second glance at the undergrowth and saw that the cluster of greenery on the edge looked younger and greener than the rest. The leaves were small and tender. The branches hadn’t yet grown thorns.
“Why don’t you sit,” said the knob again.
Alice perched gingerly at the edge of the bench. “But what do I do now?”
“Why,” said the knob, “now you rest.”
Alice crossed her ankles, then uncrossed them. She felt oddly self-conscious. She half expected leaves to start budding on her own limbs, but nothing happened. “You mean, like this?”
“However you like.” The knob shrank back against its stump. “Only settle down, and rest.”
“Rest how?”
“Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go.”
“And then I’ll turn into a tree?”
“You’ll take root,” said the knob. “You’ll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.”
Alice’s chest felt tight. The groves were too still, too silent. There was something terrible about leaves with no rustle, stones with no sound of water. A courtyard needed wind. She felt dread trickling in her stomach. She tried to ignore this; tried to remind herself that she should be at peace now, that nothing and no one could hurt her. But of course this was the wrong thing to think. For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.
A great pressure built up in the back of her skull; bottled-up memories, demanding release. Now hear the screams. Now taste the metal. Now feel the blood, enormous volumes of it, smearing her eyes, salting her tongue. She had never imagined the human body contained so much blood. Professor Grimes’s panic—the way he spun toward her, the reproach in his eyes, the way heknew—
Knew what? After all this time, she still could not make a coherent narrative from the mess, could not sort those impressions into a structured story that offered any clarity about what she had done and what she owed. Here was the Gordian knot: her memories were perfect, but she could only sort through impressions as they had first occurred to her. And the day of Professor Grimes’s death was so jumbled and confused that, months later, and after a million times of reviewing the evidence, she still had no idea what to think. Certainly she hated him. Certainly in the weeks before the accident she had often looked into his face—that crevassed, savage, handsome thing—and fantasized about smashing it apart so it no longer had value, could not enchant. Was that killing intent? Was intent enough? But she didn’t want him dead. She never wanted him dead. She only wanted him to feel a shred of what she felt, only so that he wouldunderstand—only so he wouldn’t look down on her so. And she remembered gazing at him and not wishing he were gone, but that things could go back to normal; that she could keep dancing on the line, flirting with danger, have her cake, eat it too.
She could not define her guilt. All she had was fragments, and these she went over compulsively. The whoosh in her mind when she entered the lab that day. How his voice alone made her dizzy.Don’t look at me, she had thought;forget I am here. Her shaking hand, the chalk wobbly in her grasp. A broken white line. She saw it, she saw it clearly, otherwise she wouldn’t have this memory; she saw the gap between one statement and the next, and she didn’t do anything about it. But did itregister? Did she know what it meant to ignore it? She saw the gap, she blinked, she stood up, she said they were ready to go. Alice ran this sequence back in her mind a thousand times over but each time it offered no answers, only a building urge; a screaming desire—for what? A confession, a correction,something—something had to change, something had to give; she could not go on under these conditions. She fidgeted. The groves hissed, and Alice strained not to scream.
Settle, whispered the forest.Settle, settle—
“I can’t,” she gasped.
Just try, whispered the forest.Hold your thoughts at arm’s length, and go—empty.
An impossible task. They might as well have asked her to retrieve the moon.
She knew very well how hard it was to dull your own mind. The radio blared at all hours. You could not turn it off. You smashed it, and it screamed louder. Most times, all you could do was manage the pain. In the past year Alice had learned a million and one tricks for distracting her mind from wanting to die. Rituals helped. Keeping herself busy helped. She was not one of the depressives who lay stinking in bed; she could not justliethere, the stillness hurt worse. Moving staved the agony. Laundry day was wonderful because that was at least two hours of guaranteed distraction, of tasks she absolutely needed to do. So too was grading day, when she could take her stack of tests to the pub and lose herself in the rote activity of checking, circling, calculating, and scrawling marks at the top. The trick, in those days, was to cram her mind with as many thoughts as possible to keep the memories at bay. At home alone, she read everything within reach. She did tasks one-handed so she could hold something to her face with the other. Shampoo bottle instructions. Canned soup nutritional information. She pored a million times over the newspaper while mindlessly chewing her cereal. She kept the grainy television set on at all hours in the lounge, and if her housemates were bothered at least they left her alone.Doctor Whowent on trial. Ringo Starr played with toy trains. This did not dissuade the bad thoughts. They were always playing in the forefront, in bright colors, on full volume. The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to full volume as well, so that the airwaves canceled each other out, and the cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.
But it all made her so tired. You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another. It wrung you out, stretched your mind thin. She did not have a tolerance for repetition. Somewhere buried there was the deep, curious spark that rebelled at boredom, which longed to be productive, or at least engaged with the world. Only that spark was too dulled now to do much more than hurt.
She had tried meditation. It was all the rage on campus those days; you couldn’t cross the street without glimpsing a New Age poster promising enlightenment, transcendental out-of-body experiences. Alice had been desperate; she had tried everything. She had sat cross-legged on strangers’ carpets and hummed and remained for hours in perfect stillness, chasing that promised calm, trying not to hate everyone in the room, trying to believe the lie.
She tried those methods again now, because she wanted what the forest promised. She wanted to be good for the knob. She squeezed her eyes shut. She slowed her breathing. She summoned the image of a candle flame—all the Cambridge yogis had mentioned a candle flame; warm and happy, the fire of life—and focused all her attention on keeping the flickering at the fore, and that heap of broken images dimly in the back.
She couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Five minutes, ten, twenty, an hour. But then it didn’t matter, did it? There was no end point, it didn’t count for anything. She could reach a state of transcendental calm and it would still count for nothing. When she woke up a hundred years might have passed, and there would still be a hundred years to go, and a hundred more after that. This bargain was terrible. All that effort, and no reward.
A crystal shattered in her mind. The illusion could not hold; impatience exploded; a million ants crawling over her skin.
“Oh,” she cried, “I can’tstandit, I can’t be here—”
