Page 90 of Katabasis
“Thank you,” Alice managed. “This has been very helpful.”
“You’re welcome,” said Helen. “Do finish your tea.”
After that meeting Alice began dreamingof dying.
It wasn’t so much that she made active plans to end her life. That took too much initiative. More often she would walk along Sidney Street as the buses whizzed by and reflect that it wouldn’t be so bad if one just happened to hit her. She liked to imagine her bones crunching; her blood splattering across the pavement. She made a game of wondering what, precisely, would be the acute cause of death—the splintering of her skull into her brain? That would be best—much worse was the messy, internal splitting that irrevocably broke you but left intact your ability to feel pain, your ability to think and reflect that this was the end. If she was going to die, she’d like to do it headfirst.
Anyway, dying seemed perfectly acceptable on moral grounds. The best argument Socrates could make against suicide in thePhaedowas that mortals were like possessions of the gods, and that the gods would be irritated if one of their possessions freed itself from their mortal prison by self-destruction. The Christian injunction against suicide only seemed to be a reframing of that. But God’s interests did not seem relevant here. Probably her friends and family would be upset—her mind wandered vaguely to her parents in Colorado, sobbing as they hung up the telephone—but she could not imagine anyone would miss her that much. There simply didn’t seem much to go on for.
How could she explain it? What was devastating was not the touch—he had hardly been violent with her. No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning andbecomingunder him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman. It was all such a fucking cliché. How could she ever have dared to think it did not apply? Girl enters into the academy, and the lads get rough. She felt flung into a well-trod story whose ending was already written, and she had no choice but to follow along, utter her lines, and wait for the curtains to close. And it felt, during those days, that the easiest thing for her would be to just jump off the stage.
But she never found the resolve to end things for good. Not because she was afraid of the pain—for at that point she wasn’t sure she could still feel pain—but because of the shame. Because even after everything, despite how numb she’d become, what lingered were the tenets of the academic world, which were so burned into her bones that even in her weakest moments she still felt their echoes.
If she died, they would think she had failed.
Poor Alice, they would say. Another Grimes student driven mad. And Belinda would cluck her tongue and say in a gossipy tone to the next cohort of bright-eyed candidates, “I’m sure you’ve all heard of Alice too,poorgirl—remember the counselor’s office is available if ever you should need to talk.”
Alice could bear any amount of pain. But she could not bear that shame. It still mattered to her, above everything else, that they respect her as a scholar.
So she kept plodding on; showing up to lectures, keeping her hours in the lab, grading papers and drawing pentagrams and filling her brain with all sorts of useless information. As long as she was in the lab, focused on the work, struggling with translations so difficult that she could think of little else, she could distract her mind enough to keep the memories at bay.
It was when she left the department that the memories rushed back. She couldn’t sleep; she could only lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling as Professor Grimes’s face loomed in her imagination. She stopped eating; everything she put in her mouth made her stomach roil. Her hair started falling out. Her skin turned gray. People called out to her, people tried to help. She barely heard them; she did not answer. She heard a strange buzzing in her ears all the time. The world felt muted and distorted, as if she were moving underwater.
Still she kept going. She didn’t know what else to do. Her plan, if she could call it that, was simply to be an automaton until the center could no longer hold; until she fell to pieces against her will.
But it was Professor Grimes who shattered first—literally, all his flesh and guts and bones wrenched apart with the centrifugal force of millions of years of stored living-dead chalk energy.
And Alice—who stood stock-still with his brains and skull fragments and blood splattered across her face—could not stop laughing. For a way out had opened up after all. And it seemed the most hilarious thing in the world, in that instant, that it nevertheless led straight to Hell.
Chapter Twenty-One
Peter did not speak for a long time after she finished. She was grateful that he didn’t; she would have wilted had he launched into any of the standard responses.I’m so sorry, why didn’t you tell me, I’m horrified that happened to you.Peter did not try to make it better. All he did was witness.
At some point he’d taken her hand. His thumb rubbed again and again over the crevices between her knuckles. An automatic impulse, Alice knew; he could never sit still, he needed something to fiddle with. If it weren’t her hand it would have been a stick of chalk. Still it was the most comforting touch she’d felt in months.
They weren’t back to where they’d started. But it seemed, for the first time since she could remember, that they could be honest with one another.
At last Peter said, “But you were so sure.”
“About what?”
“That he wasn’t in Desire.”
“Desire is for lovers,” said Alice. “That wasn’t love.”
Peter considered this, and then nodded. “So what was your solution?”
“To what?”
“How you would have gotten Professor Grimes out of here alive.” He let go of her hand. “You saw my plan. What was yours?”
Might as well, Alice thought. She dragged her rucksack toward her. “I’m not sure I had one.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I kept telling myself I was here to get him back.” She fished out her notebook. The binding was waterlogged, as were the edges, but the pages still dry and legible. “But you know what? I never really cracked it. I kept telling myself—time’s ticking, you’ve just got to go, you’ll figure the rest out on the way. But this was all I came up with, and I’m not even sure it would work.”
She flipped to the very end of her notebook, to the last things she’d written down before she drew the pentagram to Hell. “Two weeks ago I found the syllabary of the Thessalian witch Erichtho.”
