Page 14 of Katabasis
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, ofthem, that no longer was. It made her feelthings—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.”
Chapter Four
Down-climbing was harder than going up.
For one thing you couldn’t see your next foothold and just had to assume that if you shimmied down, then your toes would find something to latch on to. And climbing down was no easier on tired arms, for one expended just as much energy making sure that the downward momentum didn’t take you too far.
But Peter fared better this time around. It helped, psychologically, that they were shrinking rather than growing the distance from the ground. It helped also that, halfway to the bottom, he shrugged off his rucksack and let it thump to the ground. “Just books,” he panted. “They’ll survive.”
He tumbled the last meter but landed all in one piece. Alice jumped down beside him and landed sprightly on her feet. This hurt her heels, but she had a silly urge to impress Peter. People in the climbing club were always impressing each other by landing like cats. Sadly, he did not notice.
Hell, on this side of the wall, appeared as a flat, empty field—no Shades, no paths, no shape on the horizon that indicated any place or thing. Gone was that rolling plain. They were stuck again in endless desert, with no clear destination. Alice felt a dull panic at this sight, for they had nothing to show for a whole day’s effort, and she hated to ever pause her work without an idea of where to pick up next. But their limbs were jelly, and their brains complete fuzz, and they agreed between them to leave this puzzle for tomorrow.
They made camp in the shadow of the wall. The literature had been split on whether day and night existed in Hell—the more dramatic accounts claimed endless night—but it turned out that the too-dim sun did eventually set, and the air did chill, and about half past six Cambridge time (Alice’s watch still worked) everything turned pitch-black. It seemed Hell had no moon, or if it did, she was hiding. They sat alone in the solid dark, and their only comfort was the silence—for if anything lurked beyond, at least they didn’t know.
Alice made a small fire with matches and starter kindling. Peter parceled out two sticks of Lembas Bread each. Technically one should have been enough for every eight hours, but they both felt they deserved to chew on something for more than several seconds.
“Thank you.” Peter broke the silence. “For earlier. That was—that helped a lot.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You know, I really thought I was going to die.” He shook his head. “Dear God. I’ve never felt so sure I was going to die.”
“I wouldn’t have let you die,” Alice said blithely. The words just rolled off her tongue, since they seemed so obviously the right things to say. Though the moment she heard them out loud, they felt off. Those were easy utterances between loved ones, even between friends—between any two people friendlier than whatever Alice and Peter were right now. There was an implicature of trust. But the problem was, bluntly, that she didn’t know if it was true. She suspected Peter didn’t know either. “Professor Grimes would be very disappointed, for one thing.”
