Page 39 of Katabasis
“But there’s something,” he exclaimed. His steps quickened. “There’ssomeone.”
The muffled voices grew louder. Peter ran up to the door and threw it open.
Behind the door was an office. And in the office two shades were locked in torrid embrace, their faces blurred and unclear—all facets to their existence unclear and forgotten, in fact, except for bright, red genitals. Neither took notice of Alice or Peter. One had the other bent over the desk in what looked like a terribly uncomfortable position, but both were going at it with frantic desperation, howling so loud that the sound shook the walls: “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Was all sex so vulgar? Alice stood frozen, staring as the rhythmic exchange seared into her memory—the sloppy, wet squelching, the pulsing and throbbing of organs enlarged, exaggerated, the only defined feature of Shades who remembered nothing else—and then was superimposed on every other memory she’d ever had, every touch, every moment she had ever come close to another wanting body. All need, compulsion, satisfaction; and it was just bodies in the end, mounds of female flesh served up like pork, Marilyn Monroe’s splayed fingers, Jessica Rabbit, breasts bouncing. Jezebel dressed to the nines, leaning out a window, and dogs gnawing at her flesh. DJs laughed and the headlines whizzed. Fucking bunnies, fucking like bunnies, a jackhammer, a sledgehammer, iron into flesh, the needle the chalk and the ink, in and out and in and out, and it all culminated in a grip, a squeeze, a sigh. Alice tried her catechism, tried to reel it all back, but it did not work, the visions kept spiraling out, it was happening again. She felt so far away. Her body was not hers and she was drifting back, spilling out. She grasped for the staircase, but it was not there—
Peter stepped back so quickly he stumbled against Alice.
“Wasn’t him.” He let out a hysterical giggle. “I guess—I thought—”
She reeled back.
“Are you all right?” He reached out to touch her arm, but she smacked him away. Just then she couldn’t stand his presence, any presence. If anyone came near her she would scream.
He reached out again. “You’re breathing all funny.”
She dashed past him back down the corridor. A terrible wrenching roiled her gut. He followed her down the hall. She pressed both hands against the first door to the outside she could find and pushed, spilling back out into the storm. Then the world tilted, and the ground came near, and Peter caught her just as she keeled over and vomited.
“What do you desire most?” ProfessorGrimes had once asked her.
They were sitting at a seaside café in Venice, drunk on victory and Aperol spritzes and baking in the afternoon sun. It was their first afternoon in the city; they’d just arrived from a weeklong hiking expedition through the chalk deposits of the Vena del Gesso with representatives from the Italian Academy of Magick, and now they were tanned and pleasantly exhausted.
Professor Grimes was lapsing into riddles and sophistry, and Alice, buzzed, responded lightly in kind, saying just enough to keep Professor Grimes talking. She loved when he just rambled, effortlessly profound, without an ounce of self-consciousness. She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts. It gave her clues for how to imitate him, to model her life and career after his. She knew she was silly, thinking she could take up space in the world like he did when they presented so differently. But could she not at least remind people who her mentor was? Academic lineage mattered so much in the right circles. And back then all she wanted, with every fiber of her being, was for people to remember she was his echo.
“Nothing,” said Alice, trying to be droll. “I live the life of an aesthete.”
“Very funny. But what do youwant, Law?”
“Success.” She fiddled with her glass. “I want a job, and a lab of my own, and several books to my name. I want your office and my name on the door,” she added, hoping to make him laugh.
But his face was dead serious. “Those are by-products of desire. What do youwant?”
“Thatiswhat I want.”
“No, it’s not.” He reached out and seized her wrist; squeezed it with surprising force. She winced but did not cry out. She was shocked more than hurt; frozen in place like a deer in headlights, all senses trained on whatever he did next. With Professor Grimes, she never knew.
“You’ve got to think about what keeps you up at night,” he said. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?”
She was delirious from the force of his attention, and she so badly wanted to say the right thing. But she hadn’t a clue what that was.
“It’s got to be the work itself,” he said. His eyes were shiny with drink, and uncomfortably intense. She couldn’t keep holding his gaze; she had to blink and look askance. “The pleasure of analysis. You’ve got to love cracking things open to see what they’re made of. These trips and parties are nice, Law, but you can’t enjoy them too much or they’ll distract you. You’ve got to float above it all. You must be fueled by the truth, and the truth alone. It must devour you.”
“Yes,” she wanted to say. “That’s it, that’s how I feel.”
But it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t articulate it as such. She couldn’t come up with a single research question that motivated her as much as he expected it to. In that moment she couldn’t remember why her research, tedious little projects into linguistic puzzles, mattered at all. And even if she weren’t buzzed on prosecco she would never have had the vocabulary to sort through the complex rush of fear and desire that got her up before dawn and kept her late at the lab.
Earlier that week he had given a lecture in front of the Italian Academy of Magick in Rome—a prestigious invitation, a named lecture that happened only every three years, which many scholars from around the world flew out to attend. Alice had watched from the first row, trembling with pride as he held in rapt attention the most discerning audience in the world, as words came out of his mouth in such perfect, articulate paragraphs, ideas hanging in the air like shining beacons. It didn’t matter that she had heard them all before, that she was in fact the one who’d typed them up, organized them into a structure that made any sense. It seemed like she was learning them for the first time, beholding their significance. A world of possibility hung before them, and he was its prophet come down from the mountains, illuminating it all.
I want that, she remembered thinking.I want that so badly—but what wasthat?
It wasn’t the old need for good grades, or a craving for validation. She was not a child anymore; she had left this pathology behind in college. But it wasn’t just the search for answers, either, or the simple satisfaction of a puzzle solved. It was a primitive thrill, a heady realization of what she could become, what worlds she could unlock, and it was all inextricably bound up in him.
“We don’t have to go backin,” said Peter while Alice rinsed the bile from her mouth.
She screwed the lid back onto her Perpetual Flask. “Thank you.”
“You’re right, anyhow. I don’t think he’s in there.”
