Page 44 of Katabasis
“There’s benefits, of course.” She hesitated, wondering how to untangle the mass of contradictions that was her memory; how to explain that keeping too much in your mind wasn’t necessarily a good thing, that more often it made her jumbled and confused and weighed down with things she wished had never happened. “I feel a bit—less mortal. Less fallible. Most of the time.”
“Sounds nice.”
“But I think more than anything it makes me—well, afraid. Like I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and bynotdoing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important. I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through it. And the payoff’s not as good without the process, somehow. If I didn’t have to sweat for it, it doesn’t count.”
“Law, that’s deranged.”
She shrugged. “I’m a Grimes student.”
“Certainly that.” He blinked at the fire. His mouth worked several times as he apparently reconsidered what he wished to say, and Alice braced herself for another moralistic recrimination. “Did Professor Grimes—um, did Grimes ever ask you to do anything else that you thought wasn’t right?”
“This is my only tattoo. He never—”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Um.” He began tugging at the frayed edges of his sleeves. He always did that when anxious, she recalled. But that meant he was anxious. This wasn’t about her, it was about him. “Not just illegal. But something—I don’t know. Things that felt unscrupulous.”
Alice thought of the mice in Venice, their miserable, twitching bodies. The way they shrieked and scurried when she reached to pluck another one out of the cage. As if they knew precisely what was happening on that lab table, as if they knew what that chalk would do. She’d become so good at displacing their spines to give them the quickest, easiest death while chalk burned into their skin; at severing their neural cords before they could fully process the pain. If she’d ever felt ethical compunctions about it, she’d stopped caring by the end. You got used to just about anything in a lab. Anyhow, they were only mice.
“No,” she said. “Why? Did he ever ask you?”
Peter kept fretting at his sleeve. He’d worked several threads undone. Alice was about to smack his hand to make him stop when finally he uttered, “He asked me to get him a human colon.”
“What?”
“Not from, like, a living patient.” He flapped his hands in distress. “From a corpse. One of the corpses they use for anatomy lessons.”
“They still do that?”
“Of course, how do you think they practice surgery?”
This seemed to Alice far worse than anything she’d ever done. At least her only victim was herself. “Sounds like you violated some rights.”
“The dead don’t have rights.”
“Well, debatable—but how—why—I mean,what on earth, Peter?”
“I don’t know.” Peter shrugged. “In the scheme of things, it just seemed like such a small deal. Maybe that’s how you thought about your tattoo. He was—we were working on something—it never went anywhere, but it seemed for a while like it had some potential. But—well, you know, chalk interacts differently with organic material. We needed a human organ to be sure.”
“You stole a colon.” Alice could not get over this. “A human colon!”
“Well. Three or four.”
“Jesus, Murdoch.”
“I wasn’t going to sayno.”
“You could have reported that,” she said. “That’s an ethics violation. You could have taken it to the dean.”
A silence. They looked at each other, and then burst out laughing.
“Was it very difficult?” Alice asked.
“Actually, no. I thought it might be, but I sort of just walked in and—took what I needed. Three people saw me, so I waved, and they just waved back.”
“Sounds about right.”
“I know it’s insane,” said Peter. “I probably shouldn’t have done it. It just never crossed my mind to say no.”
“You know, he used to make me type up all his lecture notes,” said Alice. “He’d dictate, and I’d type. I felt like a secretary. Never crossed my mind to say no, either.”
