Page 43 of Katabasis
When Alice’s fever subsided and she regained consciousness, Professor Grimes held before her a series of slates inscribed with languages she didn’t know, each for three seconds at a time, then requested she reproduce the script on the blackboard. She copied them all without mistake. Two weeks later he asked her to do it again, this time without showing her the slates, and once again she copied them out perfectly.
The week was a thrill of discovery. If her memory had limits, she had yet to find them. She could sit down with six books in an evening and, as long as she read every line carefully, commit them all to memory. Her mind now functioned as an on-call encyclopedia. She couldn’t suddenly read fluently in French or Arabic, but she could, if she sat long enough, flip through mental dictionaries to compile passably good translations. Entire worlds opened before her. She learned Cyrillic, Hungarian, Nastaliq. She learned Linear B.
Of course it hurt. It never stopped hurting; the pain only migrated from her arm and manifested instead as a constant throbbing at her temples. Her mind felt stretched thin, crammed with things she could never dispense with. She had not realized, until that day, how humans needed to forget to function. Now she could not erase from her mind the million awkward encounters of any given day. Misreading the menu. Spilling her wine. Dropping her wallet, holding up the post office queue. She was already such an anxious personality, and her mind now forced her to relive in excruciating detail every mistake she made with every human being she’d ever met.
But the benefits so clearly outweighed the costs, for what scholar wouldn’t have killed for her perfect recall? It was the age when everyone was getting excited about computing machines, and here Alice had become one. She would adapt; she had no choice.
“Now, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Professor Grimes instructed. “At least not for a long while. This is very important, Alice. It’s not like the war anymore. The Royal Academy are all so conservative now, and if anyone knew, I would lose my certification. I have a great deal of enemies in this department. Any one of them would use this information to destroy me. There cannot even be a rumor. You must be discreet.”
Which was a blow, actually, because deep down Alice had been hoping to flaunt it all over the world. In her deepest and silliest fantasies, Professor Grimes touted her around the conference circuit like a vaudeville performer. He would be Grimes the Great; she would be his Dazzling Living Pentagram.
But they were talking serious magick here, and she wasn’t a little girl. “Of course,” she said, and pulled her sleeve over her arm.
“Very good.” He patted her shoulder. “It’ll be our little secret.”
When they returned from Venice he moved on to other projects. He’d grown bored with testing Alice’s memory after a week. He had confirmed his pentagram worked, and now he could turn his attention to jumping all the little hoops, the years-long process of publishing intermediary proofs before he could do anything useful with this result. Alice was secondary. He stopped checking on the state of her tattoo; by the start of term, he’d stopped mentioning it. Their little secret. And so Alice had to content herself with the mere knowledge that, among all his students, Professor Grimes liked her best. The evidence was written in her skin.
“Did it hurt?” asked Peter.
“Only a little. I did all right.”
She didn’t tell him about the burning. The effect of her tattoo was not unlike how Gothic novels described vampires reborn: all their senses sharper, the world gleaming bright. She remembered waking up to a surge of detail, all etched permanently into her brain at the same time she registered it. Professor Grimes’s face hanging over hers, eager, anxious, a hunger in those sharp, dark eyes she would never forget.
And she didn’t tell him about the flood: the vicious procession of memories, the constant random associations, the immense strain it took to sort out what was relevant and what was not. She did not tell him that her vision had become a roller coaster ride through infinite screens, every television show playing at once. She did not tell him that she had to focus, hard, on a simple tomato before her brain recognized it as tomato, and not apple, not dodgeball, not bloody, beating human heart. She did not tell him how easy it was to lose herself in the wash, how it happened every time she let her attention slip. She did not tell him,I have to rebuild a staircase by the hour to keep in mind who I am, where I am, and what I am doing. He couldn’t help her, after all; he could only pity her, and so she just didn’t see the point.
“I see why you never told anyone.” Peter spoke very slowly. He seemed to be mincing words in his head, carefully choosing euphemisms so as to not offend her. “That—that’s a lot to sort through.”
“It’s really not as bad as it sounds.” Alice’s voice took on a defensive edge. She hadn’t meant to share what happened as if it were some great tragedy. She hated when women in her department complained, as if they hadn’t asked to be there. She hated the way Peter looked at her now; his pity made her squeamish. “I mean—he knew what he was doing. He always knows what he’s doing, he never would have taken the risks otherwise.” This was what she’d told herself in the days leading up to the inscription, as she tried to keep the piled-up bodies of shaved cats frozen in rictus from invading her nightmares. “He was very careful.”
“Did he tell you it was more for your good than his?”
“Of course not.” Alice hated this too, the way people so often assumed that Professor Grimes’s students were infantile cultists who didn’t know any better. “I told you,Iwanted to do it.”
Her vehemence seemed to startle Peter, for he held his hands up in apology. “I was just asking.”
“It’s not like he forced me,” she reiterated.
“Yes, you mentioned...” Peter was blinking quite a lot. “I’m sorry, I’m just wrapping my head around it all. It just seems so—I mean, I can’t believe he put you in that position.”
Good lord, thought Alice.Notthatline.
One time at a conference in New York, a young postdoc from Princeton had engaged Alice in vibrant conversation for nearly thirty minutes about a panel they’d just attended—something that felt validating and comradely, for they were the only two women in the room—before Alice mentioned she worked in Professor Grimes’s lab. The postdoc’s entire demeanor changed then. She shrank back as she looked Alice up and down, eyes crinkled with pity. “Oh dear,” she said. “So you know about the—well, you know.”
Alice knew very well, because this wasn’t her first conference, and she’d heard it all by now. Grimes was evil, Grimes was toxic,blah blah blah. Some contrarian part of her soul was indeed proud to be associated with such a notorious advisor. Everyone else was so boring. Professor Grimes at least had some personality.
Alice had put on her blandest, most innocent smile. “How do you mean?”
The postdoc had chuckled awkwardly. “Surely you know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t, actually—is there something I need to know?”
The postdoc had blinked around the room, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “Uh—I mean—I’m sorry, I just assumed everyone talked. If you don’t—” She stammered over her words then, and this gave Alice some fierce satisfaction. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. That was silly of me.”
“I’d suggest doing less gossiping about people behind their backs, if you haven’t got anything substantial to say.” Alice had felt as if she’d scored some rhetorical victory, though really all she’d done was torpedo a budding friendship. She knew when she flew home she would never hear from this postdoc again, which was a shame, because women in her field were supposed to form alliances whenever they encountered each other. She did not care. Her delight over this burned bridge was probably the wrong response, though all she could perceive in that moment was that the rush of blood to her head felt good. “But thank you.”
It was this same contrarian attitude that made her say coolly to Peter, “I didn’t getput in positions.”
“Fine, fine, I believe you.” Peter, to his credit, quickly moved on. “So do you think it makes you a better scholar? The pentagram, I mean.”
