Page 51 of Katabasis
“Oh, dear.” Peter halted.
But Archimedes proceeded with confidence. Alice examined the path, and saw footholds. They weren’t very good, or visible, but they were there. “Keep your knees bent and your arms out for balance,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” In Ithaca she had hiked the slippery paths near the gorges, and even on rainy days it looked worse than it was. You only fell if you were trying. Alas—in Ithaca, they were so often trying.
She supposed it made sense that such a barrier separated the first two courts from the third. Petty pride, insatiable desire—these were self-centered things, and their harms turned inward. But from covetousness sprang plotting; sprang malice toward others. Here, however, to get what you wanted meant making sure others did not get it. Bhishma said in theMahabharatathat from covetousness proceeded sin. Saint Paul warned the church that money was the root of all evil. So here now were the proper schemers; the ones who knew what they were doing, and deserved to pay.
She wished she had thought to bring hiking sticks. She kept tripping against the rocks, and Peter kept catching her, which irked her, because she hated to still find comfort in his presence. It was a horrible paradox; the fact of his intended betrayal on one hand, and the empirical evidence that he was stillPeter, the Peter she remembered, the Peter she liked.
Worse was the fact that Peter would not stop talking. He had decided riddles would be a fun way to pass the time. So far they had done the burnt ropes (you have two ropes that burn down within an hour; armed with a match, how do you measure forty-five minutes?), the Ping-Pong ball (how do you get a Ping-Pong ball out of a pipe?), and the nine weighted balls (using a balancing scale only twice, how do you identify which one of nine balls is slightly heavier than the rest?). Now he kept going on about some story involving fairy worlds. “What goes through the glass green door, Alice?”
“Um. I don’t know. Elves? Children?”
“The moon can pass. The earth cannot. Kittens can pass. Cats cannot. What goes through the glass green door?”
Shut up, Alice wanted to screech.
She could handle all sorts of cruelty. But she would not be made an idiot. Professor Grimes had instilled in her a deep horror of ever being made an idiot.
“Fools can pass,” Peter went on. “But wise men cannot. Geese can pass, but ducks cannot.”
“I don’t—oh, hell, is it something about plurals?”
He shook his head. “A stool can pass. But a table cannot.”
“Just tell me the answer.”
“It’s the double letters.” He looked put out. “Simple. Thought you did languages.”
Alice did not have a diplomatic reply to this, so she trudged on in silence.
Three weeks into Alice’s first semester,Professor Grimes had taken her to the faculty club for tea. Alice was very nervous and excited about this. She had stayed up late the night before preparing talking points about what classes she’d enjoyed and what she’d struggled with so far, and a seven-point proposal for new projects. She had never gone out socially with Professor Grimes and she wanted reassurance that he liked her.
But the first question he asked, after he’d ordered them two sultana scones and a pot of Darjeeling, was, “You see that kid?”
Alice glanced out the window, and with a start glimpsed Peter Murdoch wandering past. He wasn’t paying them any attention. He was just doddering around on the sidewalk, blinking at a sheet of paper. Alice’s chest tightened. She didn’t have any classes with Peter that term, and she hadn’t spoken to him since that orientation tea, though her heart always beat oddly when she saw him in passing around campus. He looked lost. He kept glancing up at street signs, then turning round in a circle, like a dog chasing its own tail.
“That’s your competition,” said Professor Grimes. “Your yardstick. The only thought in your head these next five years should be whether you are keeping pace with him.”
Alice glanced back outside at Peter, who now waved apologetically at a honking car as he darted across the street.
Keeping pace, he’d said. Not beating him.
“The world will be much easier for him,” Professor Grimes continued. “He looks, acts, and speaks like a magician. He does the classical sort of research the Royal Academy favors. His parents are famous. Everyone in our field already knows his name. When he goes in for job interviews, he will know to ask about his colleagues’ children, because firstly he might already know them and secondly he will remind his interviewers of them. You, on the other hand. You don’t talk like them, you don’t look like them, and your research doesn’t fit what they’re looking for. You will always have to perform twice as well for half the acclaim. You have no room for mistakes.”
Alice had suspected all this for a while. She’d just never expected anyone to lay it out so bluntly, and she wasn’t prepared for how much it hurt. She stared back into Professor Grimes’s impassive face, and wondered why he’d brought her here at all.
“I don’t say this to discourage you,” said Professor Grimes. “I say this because I’ve been where you are. You and I—we were not so blessed. We have to climb our way up. You’re doing good work, Law. But that’s just it. It’s merelygood. I need you to be exceptional.”
“I can be exceptional,” Alice said, for it seemed the only reply she could make.
“Good girl.” Professor Grimes nodded at her untouched cup. “Drink your tea.”
He did this often over the next few years. Every failure of hers was cast in direct reference to Peter’s success. You’ve coauthored one paper. Murdoch has coauthored three. You’ve won a thousand pounds in funding. Murdoch’s won twice that. You can’t make the same mistakes as Murdoch, he told her. You don’t have as much room to fail. And she knew he was only being a good advisor, for a good advisor kept you aware of the reality of your situation. Professor Grimes had come up from humbler origins than she had; he’d come to magick late, he was the first in his family to graduate college, he didn’t know which fork to use either. From his perspective, surely, he was showing her the keys to the kingdom.
But she couldn’t help but feel a little sting every time he brought it up. As if she’d disappointed him by being born to the wrong sort of parents, with the wrong sort of face, without connections, without a cock. As if he were coaching her to run a race they both knew she’d already lost.
So perhaps she watched Peter more than was good for her. Her eyes lingered on his shadow every time they were in the same room. She studied his habits, his mannerisms, the cadence of his speech. She pondered which traits she could adopt. She couldn’t get away with his haplessness; no one would afford her that much grace. And she couldn’t study the way he did, or the way he claimed he did; she could not comprehend dense pages in a single glance. But maybe she could try to move with his lightness, or at least smile half as often.
She developed a hyperawareness of Peter. She knew the precise patter of his footsteps. She always knew if he was in the building—she could spot his scuffed shoes, his broken umbrella, the brown wool coat always hung on the third hook from the left. She could always tell when people were talking about him; it was comical, really, the way her ears perked at any mention of his name. She knew his laughter from across the hall. She would have known it from the other end of the world.
