Page 37 of Katabasis
“I think it’s a treat compared to the dunes, at least.” He zipped up his rucksack and stood. “What do you think’s waiting for you?”
Alice slung on her own rucksack, caught a whiff of her armpits, and winced. “I’d be happy with a hot shower.”
Desire posed an interesting puzzle for Tartarologists, who widely believed that this second court was strangely more lenient than the rest. It was Dante who posited that lust, the sin of “carnal malefactors,” was a lesser sin; a sin of incontinence, weakness of the will, rather than active malice toward others. Those guilty of lust had made reason slave to appetite. Dante’s circle was full of lovers; mutually indulgent sops whose succumbing to their passions hurt no one but themselves. For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.
The sojourner’s accounts supported this theory. The Christian explorer John Bancroft described Desire as a false imitation of paradise wherein punishment lay in temptation. You succumbed, you indulged, and you were never able to leave.For three days I pillowed against breasts and thighs, smoking and drinking among the Lotus Eaters,he wrote.Only through sheer force of will did I leave their sweet company.O they cried for me, those poor women, and I as well at our parting. But they understood I was sworn to my divinemission, and were persuaded to let me go.And then he went on about the breasts and thighs upon which he had pillowed for another several pages.
“He won’t be in there,” said Alice. Professor Grimes had many flaws. Overindulgence in appetite was not one of them; she had never met a more disciplined man. “We’ll be wasting our time.”
“Well, we’ve still got to check.”
“But suppose we get trapped.”
“We won’t,” Peter said cheerfully, trudging off after the impatient Archimedes. “We have extreme moral fortitude.”
All the scholars Alice knew atCambridge were so proud of rejecting their desires. It was the other departments that had sex addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, foodies. But in the Department of Analytic Magick, gross sensual pleasures were looked down upon as a distraction from the life of the mind. Everyone liked to pretend they did not exist outside of their research, that their earthly bodies had no wants at all. No one admitted to watching television. No one kept up with pop culture. No one admitted to their professors that they were going on dates (to admit to being a sexual creature at all was so humiliating!). Those few who were married mentioned their wives and children with great embarrassment, and only to assure skeptics that the wives were managing the children. No one even admitted to liking the taste of food, which perhaps explained why the department only ever catered Yorkshire puddings that tasted of sand.
The only acceptable hobbies were those that honed the mind and body for sustained study in some way. Chess was mandatory. A light rambling was tolerable. Marathons were especially lauded because they demonstrated the discipline and focus of one’s mind. It was rumored that Professor Helen Murray could run for hours at a time listening to nothing but operas she replayed in her head. Yes, leisure for self-improvement was allowed. But pleasure for pleasure’s sake—how useless, how embarrassing.
Professor Grimes was the most fanatic about his asceticism. “To learn is the most godlike thing we can do,” he told them. He had given them this lecture in their first years, back when they were foolish enough to think they could make time for things like sleeping or seeing movies. “Humans, unlike animals, are born with the faculty of reason. This places us above beasts, and near to God. And so as Aristotle says, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element. The life of the mind is all there is. Anything else is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.”
Alice had tried, really tried, to obey his command. To whittle herself down to just the burning core of a mind. She stopped going to the cinema. She stopped reading novels—goodbye, Henry James! She even stopped cooking for herself, since the campus butteries both cost less and took all pleasure out of eating. She could not reach the freakish discipline of Aleco, the postdoc who ran two miles every morning to the department; or of Chloe, the junior hire, who bragged she ate only one meal a day at five in the morning, and otherwise meditated if she felt dizzy. Alice did manage to imitate Harris the fifth-year’s habit of taking icy-cold showers every morning, in hopes that it energized one for the day, though she could not tell if her rush of excitement after the shower was merely due to her relief upon stepping out. There was the question of whether all this was character-building asceticism or simply the demands of poverty, since none of the graduate students made close to a living wage. But nobody liked to talk about that.
There was a period when she did succeed in curing herself of most mundane needs. Some days she would eat only a piece of Lembas bread with coffee for breakfast, and then become so absorbed in her studies that she did not think to eat again until midnight. Sometimes she managed to put off even the Lembas Bread until well after noon. She liked the light, absent feeling she got when her stomach was completely empty and she was running only on air. When she felt a pale and ethereal shade, a mind that existed without a body.
But the crash always came. Alice always broke; always ended up lying in a stupor on the couch watching without processing whatever came on the television in the cottage lounge. Never could she quite achieve that blissful intellectual Zen; that runner’s high of peaceful contemplation. More often she felt bereft; unsatisfied and unsatisfying, trapped in a body that needed. And hungry, so hungry, for a kind of nourishment she could no longer name.
It turned out Hell had inclementweather. The storm came on all at once. The sky darkened, the air chilled and thickened. There was a crack of thunder, and then the sky poured down thick sheets of rain. This was bad news for Alice and Peter, who had not thought to pack raincoats.
“No way around?” Peter shouted to Archimedes over the winds.
The cat mewed.
The storm intensified quickly. In minutes they were soaked. The squalls of wind and rain whipped so fiercely around them they had to clamp their hands around their faces just to breathe. Archimedes stopped and refused to go on until Peter scooped him up in his arms and tucked him into his coat. A miserable little huddle, they inched forth. Somewhere in the howling winds Alice thought she heard a weeping, a human voice, or many of them, but that could easily have been the winds themselves, which had risen to a deafening shriek. She could not tell how long they went on like this. She lost all sense of time. The storm stripped her of any thought, any sense. She was just a core, quivering against the squall, inching along.
Yet this, too, was familiar. Alice had survived several English winters now, winters of faulty radiators and broken umbrellas and surprise storms cracking above you just when you thought the skies had no more to give. She had run all over Cambridge in those storms, and she knew that sometimes the struggle was not over indefinitely stretched space, but the simple agony of getting from one building to the next when the rain bashed like a hammer. So she knew to shrink into herself and press along, inch by inch, until at last they passed under Desire’s roof, between the bronze statues that guarded its entry. Not lions, Alice saw. Pigs. The doors swung open. Dripping and shivering, they tumbled inside.
Desire was a student center.
This greatly disappointed Alice, who despite herselfhadhoped for something out of those terrible Orientalist paintings—gilded sofas, hanging grapes, roast boars with apples in their mouths, and lute players in loincloths. Or even a deranged sight out of a Bosch painting—naked revelers, flowers growing out of buttholes, bodies copulating in giant mussel shells. Giant strawberries, crowns of cherries. Most of all she wanted to see some food. Of course it would be imprudent to eat anything—one was never to touch the food of Hell—but after those endless dunes even a facsimile of a feast would have been welcome.
Instead the lobby was all too-bright lights, high-top tables, and randomly arranged couches with suspicious yellow stains. At the center stood a fountain, from which burbled something thick and purplish brown. From the ceiling, a musical number played over a faint, staticky crackle—some almost recognizable Dusty Springfield number, something you might close your eyes to and sway to before last call at the pub, a bit too soft to make out clearly either the melody or the lyrics. In the far corner sat a foosball table, abandoned, though when Alice glanced over the top she saw the little white ball still pinging about, knocking against wooden feet with a will of its own. Her hand twitched instinctively to try it, to see if she could knock that ball into the goal.
“Oh, hello,” said Peter.
A Shade came shuffling from the corner, bearing a golden goblet in its hands. It seemed to move straight for them. Alice tensed then, suddenly frightened. But it was headed for the fountain.
“Excuse me,” said Alice.
“Hello there,” said Peter. “I wonder if—er, if you’ve seen anyone new pass by? Tall man in black?”
The Shade ignored them both. In silence it filled a goblet from the stream, took a long draft of that thick dark liquid, then shuffled on back to the hallway where it had come. It entered the first room on the right, and the door swung shut behind it.
Alice and Peter followed tentatively. Around the corner loomed an endless hallway resembling a student dormitory, rooms lining either side, uniform and windowless. Some of the doors were shut. Many were not. They hung ajar, and Alice and Peter peeked inside them one by one as they strode through. A single Shade occupied each room. One lay flat on its back, hands wedged inside its pants. Another smoked a pipe in a room wafting over with tobacco so pungent it sent Alice into a coughing fit as they hurried past. A third sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, sipping slowly from that same kind of golden goblet they’d just seen. No one glanced up when Alice and Peter peeked in. No one seemed aware of their surroundings at all.
A few doors down, they heard a loud snuffling noise. A Shade sat hunched over a table in the corner. He held books up close to his nose, and every time he turned the page he sniffed up and down the spine, eyes rolling to the back of his head with pleasure.
“Carry on.” Peter gripped Alice’s wrist and tugged her along the hall.
