Page 73 of Katabasis
At some point Peter and Michele started debating Michele’s rather dubious theory of personhood, which entailed that people died when they fell asleep, and woke up new versions of themselves that were related to, but were notquite, the person they’d been before. Consciousness can’t take breaks, Michele argued; when you fall asleep that’s it for you.
“But what about dreams?” Peter asked. “Who is having the dreams?”
“A half consciousness,” Michele insisted. “A soul neither living nor dead. An imprint. An eidolon.”
Peter found this absurd, and Belinda found it romantic, and they all had a go at dissecting its implications before the conversation turned abruptly to the question of whether it was all right to have sex with trains, particularly if it violated Aristotle’s teaching that things should be used for their given functions (“Then what about people who use toothbrushes to masturbate?” Michele wanted to know, which made Belinda blush), and then under what particular circumstances onecould, if one wanted, have sex with trains. For whatever reason this hit a vein, and their voices grew louder. At one point Belinda and Michele stood up, shouting over the table.
Alice sat watching, cradling her beer, and she was so happy she could have cried.
Here she belonged. Here she could utter things, could be honest about where her mind had drifted, and they wouldn’t look at her like she was mad. All her life she had bumbled through social contact like the only actor who’d forgotten to look at the script. She had been the weird one, the troubled one, the one no one wanted to sit with. But they were all the weird ones here. And here no one punished you for caring too much, thinking too deeply. Here you could jump down any rabbit hole you liked, and everyone would tunnel down with you.
And no, perhaps their pub debates were not in the field of pure truth that Professor Grimes liked to go on about. Perhaps these were not the discoveries that would change the world for anyone except for people very sexually attracted to trains. But was it not at least training for something similar? To rejoice in the acrobatics of thought—not as Stoics did, which was to manipulate language for mean and personal gain, but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging. What greater pleasure could there be? What else was lifefor?
There was a time when she felt this energy everywhere she went, with everyone she met. She lived the Platonic ideal of the university back then. She was purposefully naïve about it, because a naïve mind, open to childlike wonder, was the happiest mind in a place like Cambridge. She liked to drift across conversations in hall, listening along, absorbing the excitement, asking simple questions, and receiving dazzlingly complex answers. She loved all her interlocutors. The comparative literature scholar meticulously describing E. A. Nida’s translation theory of dynamic equivalence, and its resonance with traditional Chinese translation theory. The paleontologists going on about the complete dinosaur skeleton they’d just found in Surrey, and whether it was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs after all. The dear boys in the maths department cackling with delight over things called knots and manifolds.
Sometimes the shining faith of the scientists rattled her. For here they were making things, changing the world. It was the era of endless discovery. The physicians had made an artificial human heart. The astronomers were peering at the rings of Neptune; the geneticists were eradicating smallpox and stemming hepatitis B; the physicists were working out string theory; the geneticists were decoding human DNA. It seemed the whole world was spinning faster, growing more complex and exciting, and yet the field of magick seemed stuck in the mud, scholars driving themselves down increasingly tiny rabbit holes over minute disagreements rather than exploding the boundaries of what they could do.
She turned once to Professor Grimes, seeking reassurance. It’s all sand, she said; it’s fake, it’s just words, just momentary glimmers of an illusion, what’s the point? And it was one of the rare moments in their relationship that he gave her exactly what she needed. He was a good teacher, after all; he knew how to mesmerize.
“Schopenhauer argued that all art is merely representational and allegorical except for music, which is the closest thing to pure will,” he told her. “But I find in our pentagrams something akin to music. Not in its total abstraction from everyday phenomena, but in its ability to pierce through to the center of them. That shining, cloudless plane of truth on which nothing else matters. It is as Heisenberg said, dear Alice. That modern physics has decided in favor of Plato, that the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but forms, and ideas. And when you have complete mastery of these ideas, when you can hold them in your palm and twist and tease them at will—then you will have stepped closer to God. It will feel meticulous, yes. Petty, fleeting, pedantic. But all the more reason to double your drive, and clutch at every precious wisp of truth you glimpse.” And this sent her away spinning, delirious, enraptured by the hidden world.
It was this simple: Alice loved her work.
It was only the social world, the institution, that got in the way. Yes, it was aggravating; yes, it was a world of hurt. But unlike Elspeth, she was not ready to give up on it all. Elspeth was wrong. It was not devoid of meaning. There was something still worth fighting for. Alice had located something in that cloud of symbols, a value that was not nonsense, and she believed in it with her entire being. She believed in it still. She only needed to survive the rest.
Chapter Eighteen
It was still dark out when Alice awoke. Peter was gone, his blanket folded and tucked neatly beneath a shelf. She picked herself up and tiptoed up to the top deck, where she found, with some relief, Elspeth and Peter sitting across from each other on the prow. They were not speaking; they both sat with their knees drawn up to their chests, staring out over the water. Archimedes perched atop the railing, tail swishing back and forth like a pendulum. He, too, had his gaze fixed upon the water, one paw slightly lifted, as if in remembrance of swiping goldfish.
Alice approached, clutching the blanket around her shoulders. Peter ignored her. But Elspeth met her eyes and tilted her head as if to say,Come join.
Alice crossed the deck as quietly as she could and slid down beside Elspeth. TheNeurathcut silent across the night, gliding over still waters without so much as a ripple. They might have been sailing through space, floating over nothing at all.
Alice had not grown up around large bodies of water. As a child she’d meant to go river-tubing with her parents in San Antonio. They’d gotten lost, and whiled away most of the afternoon turning round and round on highways. By the time they reached the river the sun was setting and most families had packed up their things to go. They were debating whether to stay or go when suddenly they heard a sharp cry. The families at the bank were scurrying frantically about, and eventually it transpired that a little girl had been swept downriver. The river was shallow, only waist-deep, but moving fast, and it was hard to spot anything in the dimming light. The shouting grew louder. Alice heard splashes; adults jumping into the water. Alice’s mother herded them all back to the car. They never did find out if that little girl had drowned; Alice remembered only driving away with her face pressed to the glass, squinting at the bank, hoping to see a little head emerge.
She had been terrified of swimming since. She never joined her friends on trips to the beach. At Cambridge, she lived along the river Cam, which was as tame as a river could be. Still she feared it; how dark it seemed when she crossed the bridge past midnight, how easily it might swallow anything that came close. Often of late her mind wandered to the prospect of jumping. Whether she might splash around. Whether she might just slip to the bottom and disappear. There was something compelling about water; its ability to absorb, and make nothing and whole both at once.
And the Lethe, by comparison—oh, the great, enveloping Lethe. Less a river than a wound in space. She realized she had no grasp on how wide the Lethe was, or indeed if its thickness was regular at any point. None of the maps really knew what to do with the Lethe, its inverted geography. How far had they drifted into Hell’s uncharted domain? Without the moon above or any banks in sight they were only three figures on a little boat, sailing on an eternal black plane with no end and no beginning. Alice felt disembodied. Anything could happen to them. They might sail along forever. They might vanish without a trace.
“Look.” Peter was peering over the side of the boat, arms outstretched, fingers so close to skimming the water.
“Careful,” said Alice, but he shook his head and insisted, “Look.”
She joined him over the railing, and her breath caught at the sight—a glimmering current of light, palimpsestic beneath the black.
People swam in the water. Well—not people, precisely, but flashes of them; faces laughing, crying, arguing, weeping; faint phosphorescent outlines in glowing green ripples. People and things and places from other lives—a sunny cliff by the seaside, a crooked beach umbrella, a dog barking happily as it bounced closer, ever closer, tongue pink and bright, the fluff atop its head so downy soft that Alice could almost feel it in her palm.
“Memories,” said Elspeth. “Every forgotten thing from every life lived. The fresh ones form a little current, sometimes—you can see them in detail before they dissolve.”
The boat lurched to the left. Suddenly the waters around them began to churn. Over the railing, Alice saw a fomenting black mass—something with too many eyes and too many teeth. She shrank away, but Elspeth leaned over the edge and jammed her punting pole in the middle of the mass. “Back! Back, you. Silly things.”
The waters stilled; the boat righted.
“Don’t you worry,” Elspeth assured them. “Just a rogue nightmare. They dissipate easily enough. They’re not coming for us. Sometimes they coalesce, and you get these little whorls of terror. Boltzmann brains, I like to call them.”
“Very funny,” said Peter.
“Where do they all go?” Alice asked. “Do they fade?”
