Page 136 of Katabasis
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—letme be a monument to Peter—if I am an otherwise empty shell on thisdesert, 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 inMenofor 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.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
When Alice came to, they were sitting at the prow of theNeurath, the shore a faint line behind them. Archimedes sat contently in Elspeth’s lap. His forelegs were neatly wrapped up, bandages tied with precise little bows. She stroked the back of her index finger along his spine and he arched, purring, into her touch.
Alice straightened up. “Elspeth?”
“Yes.”
“How old is that cat?”
Elspeth blinked and cocked her head, as if the thought had only now crossed her mind. She tapped a finger against Archimedes’s nose, and Archimedes sneezed. “Are you still letting him drink out of that same water bowl?”
“What water bowl?” Alice thought hard. “That thing in the garden?”
“My God.” Elspeth was laughing. “We turned it into a Perpetual Flask, so we wouldn’t have to keep filling it. It’s still there?”
Archimedes rubbed his cheek against Elspeth’s elbow, drawing her hand back to his spine. Then he stretched himself out across Elspeth’s legs, nearly doubling in length, and stayed that way. He looked very pleased with himself.
“Look at you.” Elspeth leaned in toward Alice. “You’ve learned to dress just like them.”
Alice glanced down and ran her fingers over the cat’s rib cage, embarrassed. “I thought some armor would be nice.”
“Where did you get it?” Elspeth took in Alice’s wan face, the dried blood across her cheeks and arms, then shook her head. “Never mind. I can imagine.”
“It saved my life,” murmured Alice. She felt she had to give credit to the cat. “It stilled their blades.”
