Page 49 of Katabasis
Emboldened, she took a chance. “Say, do you want to get drinks sometime? Talk about our projects?”
“Yes! Tomorrow, the Pick? I’ve got a meeting before—so, five?”
Alice made a note to find out where, and what, the Pick was. “I’ll be there.”
“You’re being very rude!” Belinda materialized on Peter’s arm. “Come here—Jean’s a logician too, he’s been waiting to meet you—”
She dragged him off. Peter glanced over his shoulder and beamed at Alice. There, again, that disturbing thump of her heart. A spoon clinked against a glass, and someone announced it was time to for pre-drinks inside with the faculty. Alice squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head to clear it, and then followed them all through the doors.
As it turned out the Pickmeant the Pickerel Inn, which was just across the bridge from Magdalene College. The next day Alice arrived at five on the dot. She didn’t see Peter, so she took a table near the front where he couldn’t miss her. She felt very self-conscious; she kept glancing at her reflection in the mirror above the bar, tucking her hair behind her ears and checking her teeth for lipstick stains. She almost never wore lipstick, and now she regretted it, but it would only make matters worse to wipe it off. She didn’t know why she felt so nervous; she’d had drinks with plenty of classmates before. Perhaps because they would be working so closely over the next six years—she badly wanted to start off on the right foot. Perhaps because she’d not stopped thinking about his crooked smile all night. (The problem of Peter’s looks was a great puzzle to her. Nothing was symmetrical or classically handsome, so why was his face soabsorbing? Further investigation was required.)
Five minutes passed, then ten. She peered out the window; first hopefully, expecting every new figure on the bridge to take his reedy form; then with sinking, embarrassed hopes. She ordered a half-pint of Cambridge pale ale just to have something to do, and drank most of it much too fast when she started feeling self-conscious about taking up the table. Over the hour her nerves went from humming to frantic to completely shot. Peter never showed.
She learned, over that first semester,that Peter Murdoch almost never showed up where or when he was supposed to. He was late to almost every lecture, absent for mandatory trainings, rarely at the lab when Professor Grimes expected them both. There was no pattern or explanation to this behavior. He would ignore you for weeks and suddenly show up with a beautifully complete research proposal. He would make enthusiastic plans for dinner over afternoon tea and then, hours later, never show.
That first evening, she had waited from five to seven. She had even ordered an entire dinner of fish and chips, sheerly out of guilt for her occupation of the table—before getting up at last. A cluster of rowdy undergraduates came in and took the booth opposite her, and she could not even enjoy her dinner for fear of what they must have thought of her—who is that stood-up, dour-faced postgrad eating dinner all alone? A sudden downpour cracked open just as she walked outside. She had not thought to bring an umbrella, for she wasn’t used to this land of unannounced rains, and she walked home wet and shivering.
She never made that mistake again. From then on, if Peter was even two minutes late, she took that as confirmation he wasn’t coming at all. She was usually right.
She ran through all sorts of theories that first year. Peter had some sort of short-term memory-loss problem—but then why did his lapses never extend to his coursework? Peter was living a double life as a government agent and could not keep track of his lies—but what life would that be, and what spy would choose to pose as a graduate student of all things? Peter had some sort of addiction problem. This suggestion was popular among the rest of the cohort—especially Belinda, who began fretting that Peter was on heroin—but the evidence simply didn’t exist. There were no track marks, no nosebleeds, no bizarre habits or bad breath. He was looking very thin—but then, he had always been very thin. Peter, when he showed up, was never anything but bright, focused, and alert. And so very nice.
Most likely Peter was just that brilliant, arrogant, and absent-minded all at once; a combination of traits that only talented men like him could be, for the world forgave them any number of transgressions so long as they dazzled. For Peter, probably, making a date was the same thing as making small talk; it smoothed things over, and didn’t signify commitment. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t ignoring them on purpose. You couldn’t blame a typhoon for its casual destruction; you couldn’t fault the sun for disappearing the stars. He simply did not notice the consequences of his actions. None of them were worth his attention, and this fact stung more than anything else.
“Peter’s the nicest guy in the world,” Belinda observed once, “who always holds you firm at arm’s length.”
Still, Alice was a professional. She did not let her resentment show, for what was there to resent him for? You couldn’t be mad that someone didn’t rate you.
Over two years, their working relationship reached a comfortable, friendly equilibrium. Peter, when present, was both helpful and hilarious. He made her life in the lab very easy. He did all the grunt work without being asked, he kept his station clean, and he labeled everything with beautiful clarity. And he never sniped at other graduate students behind their back the way that so many in their department did—perhaps because he was so blissfully secure about his position at the top. At times, she truly enjoyed his company—during late hours in the lab, when they were the only two people at the department, when it seemed the whole world was asleep except for them.
But this was the most baffling thing of all. Alice had these memories—they were from before she was tattooed, and so she could not scrutinize them in detail, but she knew they werethere. Her head drooping against his shoulder; his jacket draped around her. His tap-dancing across the lab floor, singing out loud a song she had just started humming. Tossing chalk across the room when one of them had run out; reaching, missing, chalk scattered broken on the floor. And their exhausted, deranged laughter, in the late hours when everything seemed funny; the kind of hysterical, rib-aching laughter that left you unable to breathe.
All this had happened. She had not invented it. She had been there, she knew how it felt to make him laugh.
So she might be forgiven if, once upon a time, she had even once deluded herself into thinking shehadrisen to deserve space in Peter’s inner world. That she could reach through his shell at last and crack open whatever it was he kept hidden from the rest of them.
This was always the temptation with Peter. He could make you feel so important. His proximity drenched you in the sparkle. The full force of his attention was like a drug. He laughed at a joke you’d made, or he followed you around with questions on your work, and you thought,I’ve caught the nature boy. But he always pulled away, and left you wondering what you had done. Had you offended him? Said the wrong thing? Or had you simply not been enough; not been smart enough, or clever enough? Had he just gotten bored, gotten up, and wandered away?
Alice used to torture herself with the wondering, scrutinizing her still-imperfect memory for how she had driven him away and what it might take to summon him back. But there were no answers. She was not at fault. Peter was a wild thing; he would not be approached by anyone. An abyss yawned between him and everyone else. The rest of them were so plodding, mundane, earthbound; and Peter was always flying off to worlds where they could not follow.
So she had simply stopped wondering. It hurt too much. There were no answers; there was only the gulf. All she knew was this: She could coexist with Peter Murdoch. She could even, when she let her guard down, when she was either sleep-deprived or desperate enough, be very fond of and unfortunately attracted to Peter Murdoch. But she would be a fool to think that she knew him.
Chapter Twelve
Alice dreamed.
This was horrible, because in the last year dreaming had become a threat to coherent subjectivity. Dreams were flying-carpet rides through loosely associated memories and Alice simply had too many of them; the routes multiplied infinite, all wish and no repression; in a split second her mind could go from innocent childhood memories to three-headed serpents writhing over crypts, angelic choirs with faces melting away. Freud had argued dreams were the language of the unconscious, and Alice’s dreams were written in fine print. She did not float oblivious through vague images; she saw and felt everything, in harsh minute detail; even as those chunks of memory spliced and layered on each other in dreadful combinations. Not only did she remember every dream with exact detail, she remembered all her daydreams and fantasies too, and so the visions compounded, and new dreams built on previous mad fantasies, and each time she entered a dream the pandemonium had expanded, the demons had copulated and multiplied, and each time upon waking it was harder and harder to reconstitute the real.
That night in Hell she imagined that Professor Grimes, with a horse’s face, abducted her into a series of underground tunnels that he promised led to the lost archives of the Library of Alexandria. She imagined crawling on her hands and knees, scooping up a silvery-white substance that might have been liquid chalk. She imagined wielding a pair of scissors; stabbing fiercely at a horse’s neck until black blood coated her face, and licking at the blood like it was licorice.
She woke to Peter prodding her shoulder. She jolted.
“Shit—sorry.” She was supposed to have been keeping watch. “I don’t know how—must’ve—”
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I woke up early. We’d better get going. Cat’s back, by the way.”
“Hmm?”
She blinked around with bleary eyes. Archimedes sat by the fire looking very satisfied with himself, curled chummily against Peter as if he had never abandoned the two of them to probable death.
