Page 59 of Katabasis
She wanted to ask him what had happened but could not formulate the question in a way that wasn’t childish.Why don’t you like me anymore? Why don’t you want to be my friend?Questions for the playground; pathetic utterances. She would not say them, she would not confirm for him that she was too dull for his attention.
That following term she cycled through every emotion she might have felt toward Peter—disappointment, anger, resentment, longing—a whole slew of one-sided angst. But above all she was confused. All the walls were up. She had been thrown out in the cold. An abyss lay between them, and she did not know how she had caused this.
Then she went to Venice. Then several things happened in Venice, and Alice began to feel everything slipping away from her. That was the start, she had since realized; the moment she learned that when it came to Professor Grimes, she really had no ability to say no.
And then she came back, and everything went wrong, and for the last year, Alice had been unable to pass Peter in the hallway without dropping her gaze.
There was a time when everything was going sideways that Alice tried to fix things. Let the record display she did not give up so easily on love: that she actually did try to sit down, hammer it all out, and understand what was going on. Peter was still avoiding her, so she slipped a note into his pidge instead. She put it right on top of his stack of correspondence, a place where he could not fail to see. It had been a while, she wrote. She was wondering how he was. She wanted to sit down together. Have a cup of tea. Talk.
He saw the note. She knew he did, because the next morning when she checked, the note was gone. Peter knew she had tried. He simply never responded.
If she’d had her perfect memory back then, then she could pick through their interactions—all those late nights, all those smiles—for clues, if not the sheer comfort of reminiscence. But all she had now was icy nods in the hallway; curt greetings; and the flap of his coat, the back of his head, as he hurried out the door.
And then the gossip; the innuendoes, the laughter. Footsteps disappearing down the hall.
That summer, the philosopher Derek Parfit published the very controversialReasons and Persons, and for a while it was all that anyone at Cambridge or Oxford would talk about. Alice read it with great interest. In fact, it helped her sort through much of her confusion.Reasons and Personsargues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime. Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essentialushovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.
Now, Alice did not understand much about moral philosophy, and she was inclined to be skeptical that some thought experiments about tele-transportation could disprove the idea of an immortal soul, but she did find this perspective liberating. It helped her understand that she had never really known Peter, and he had never really known her. She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time. But without those hazy recollections, without the historical fact that she had once giggled helplessly with her head lolling on Peter’s shoulder, she had no significant relationship to the Alice Law who was falling in love with Peter Murdoch at all. And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?
And ifthatwas true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction. And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.
Chapter Fourteen
Alice?”
She stood frozen.
She blinked at her hand. This was not imagined; this configuration was real. She had not meant to act, she was only thinking through her options, she had not finished reasoning, it was only a what-if, it was not what she wanted—
But this was her hand, and it held the green apple.
If she had not grasped it, then who had?
“I didn’t mean to—” Alice flung it back, reached for the red. “Hold on—I choose—”
But the Weaver Girl snapped her fingers, and both apples and table vanished before her. “And that’s the game.”
Peter shouted, “Alice, what thefuck?”
Alice shrank back.Please, she wanted to cry,don’t blame me; I don’t know what I’m doing, I am not even a subject, I am not here. She heard a roaring in her ears. Her hands felt so far away. She tried to focus, but she couldn’t see where they began, where the boundary separated her and the rest of space; where the past ended and the present continued.
“Poor things,” said the Weaver Girl. “You were so confident.”
Peter started forward. “What is wrong with you?”
The Weaver Girl held him back. Silk billowed out between them. Alice felt a pressure at her back; it grew harder, and she stumbled forward. “You—go on. Walk alone into Hell, and see how freedom feels. Andyou...” A tendril flittered around Peter’s face. White bands shot out from the Weaver Girl’s sleeves and wrapped around his arms, ankles, and waist, spinning him around like a spider spins its prey. “I shall keep you.”
“Stop,” Alice managed. “Don’t—”
“Don’t worry, dear. I know what you meant.”
“But that’s not what I—”
“You made your choice.”
More and more silk poured out her sleeves. Peter flailed, shouting, but the silk around his arms and legs tightened until all he could do was wriggle. He strained his neck toward Alice. “Alice,help—”
She fumbled for him. Panic made her focus, and Peter’s form sharpened, the only clear thing in view. Peter—yes—she had to help Peter—
