Page 94 of Katabasis
“Socialize,” said his father. “It’s good for your development.”
“But how?”
“Just give it a try.” His father pushed him toward the stairs. “Have fun.”
He did try, and he had enormous fun. Peter had never spent so much time with other children; he had never experienced the joys of hide-and-seek, or playing tag, or pin the tail on the donkey. And even though he was terrible at finding hiding places, and even though he was by far the slowest in the group, everyone cheered at his minor victories; everyone laughed with him, not at him.
For three hours that afternoon Peter felt funny, charming, adored. Everyone was so nice! And he even seemed to keep catching the attention of Jemma Davies, who even Peter knew was widely acknowledged as the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, with great big brown eyes and chestnut hair so smooth it shone.
When it came time for cake and candles, Jemma sat down beside him, placed her little hand upon his, and said in a very prim and grown-up voice, “I’msoglad you’re having us over. Company is good for invalids.”
“Invalids,” repeated Peter.
“Well, you’re very sick, aren’t you?” Jemma squeezed his hand. “I heard your mum telling my mum. That’s why we’ve all come. We’re going to make you feel better.”
She beamed at him. Peter smiled back. But everything tasted like ashes now in his mouth. He feigned a smile through the singing and candle-blowing, through the enormous pile of presents and the endless party games that came after—but the day was ruined, and he could not receive anyone’s goodwill except with suspicion.
At the end of the night, he kissed Jemma Davies on the cheek and told her, “Your charity has been much appreciated.” And then he shut the door.
After the cups and plates had been cleaned and the presents put away, Peter asked his parents if he might be homeschooled through his A-levels. Oh dear, they fretted; had the children been mean, had he been bullied? Not at all, he answered; they were perfectly pleasant, only he just didn’t think he could get much out of socializing with inferior minds. This could not be good for his development.
That night he listened as his parents argued behind closed doors. He’s right, said his father; heisadvanced, there’s no reason to hold him back. But he’s grown cold, said his mother.Inferior minds, what a term, where did he pick that up? We can’t have him growing up thinking he’s better than everyone else.
This was fine, thought Peter. Let them think him cold, rude, antisocial. Growing up with a chronic illness just meant choosing between bad and worse, and Peter had determined that day that no matter what else happened, he was never again to be the object of pity.
By the time Peter was sittinghis A-levels, his doctors had finally settled upon a course of medication that seemed to work better than the others. It was called mercaptopurine, and it interfered with DNA synthesis so that inflamed cells could not easily divide. This had the unfortunate side effect of suppressing the rest of his immune system, which meant that Peter had to wash his hands obsessively and avoid large crowds during the winter flu season. But otherwise he could eat all the same foods, and do all the same things, as everyone else his age. So three weeks after his seventeenth birthday off he went, two trunks in tow, to the same university where his parents had met and fallen in love.
Peter blossomed at Oxford. His coursework enthralled him; his tutors adored him. He tried champagne for the first time. He rode a bicycle for the first time. One week into his first term he attended a public lecture on basic paradoxes in magick and fell in love with the field; its caprice, its unknowability. Before, he had planned on entering maths or physics. But magick, it seemed, was a vast big iceberg of which they had seen only a glimpse of the tip, and it thrilled him to know how much more was left to be discovered. In those years, people were publishing groundbreaking discoveries every day. They’d just started investigations at Carne Abbas. They’d just found chalk deposits at the Agora. They were just now discovering the foundations of magick underwriting the history of the ancient world, and here he was at the center of it. Sometimes he took long walks around the colleges with no aim at all, so giddy with excitement that he could not sleep.
It also became clear to him during this time that he had become what some people might call attractive. It was a marvel he grew up as tall as he did, as he’d spent most of his childhood in the bottom percentiles for his weight. But when puberty knocked it was like some trickster god pulled him by the head and ankles and stretched him out like Silly Putty, until he’d become some unrecognizable assortment of floppy hair and gangly limbs—a concoction that, when you stuffed it into a suit and tie, the boys and girls of Oxford rather liked. His proportions made him good at rowing, and once he started rowing he noticed a whole host of nice new things about his body. His arms grew strong, his chest filled out, and he learned to rub just a small squeeze of gel through his hair so it stood halfway up.
All this to say, Peter got a little silly during those Oxford years.
His remission was not perfect. The Beast still came every few months, and this meant hospital stays, IV steroids, and bed rest. But no one cared, Peter learned, so long as he didn’ttellanyone what was the matter, so long as he let them fill in the gaps with conjectures of their own. Never once did he say he wasn’t feeling well; he just refused to make excuses at all. He found he could get away with more and more. He could miss days of class. Weeks, even, though he tried not to be excessive. He did try never to stay home unless he was bedridden. No one ever complained; if anything his friends and tutors took it all in stride. Oh, they said; that’s just like Murdoch. Does whatever he wants, what a crazy lad. So over his three years at Oxford, he developed this reputation—an absent, erratic genius.
Perhaps he leaned into it. Perhaps he put on an affectation sometimes—he would talk about solutions to problem sets in a dreamy, indifferent voice as if he hadn’t spent hours working through them, or pretend he hadn’t done the reading when in fact he’d stayed up all night. If ever he had to leave class for the bathroom, he claimed he was going for a smoke. And if ever his hospital stay lasted more than a week, he pretended he’d buggered off to Barcelona or Göttingen—this was sometimes true, since his parents liked to attend conferences and he liked to accompany them—or just stayed home and slept, because he felt like it, because Peter Murdoch didn’t need to attend lectures to ace a class.
He was astonished by how well this worked. No one resented him for his absences; they only got so much more excited when he showed up. Murdoch was a rare presence; his appearance was a blessing. In a world defined by perception, Peter was learning now to construct a most compelling front. Geniuses could be excused any idiosyncrasy. They would forgive an ailing body, Peter determined, so long as they were intimidated by the mind. And oh, what a mind he would become.
When it came time to discusshis future, Peter had decided firmly on a PhD in analytic magick. Maths and physics entertained him, but he was seduced by the slippery unknown; the way grappling with truth in magick felt like trying to clutch sunlight in your palm. Now, this would have made Cambridge the obvious choice, if only his parents did not have such reservations. Aoife and Howard Murdoch had done their doctorates at Oxford, which was in their view the greatest institution on earth. They were also deeply connected in the social circles of British academia, so of course they’d heard the rumors.
“That man is a brute,” said his mother. “Anyhow, won’t you be happier somewhere... more comfortable? Why not stay at Oxford?”
“Or even the New World,” said his father, who still insisted on referring to it as the New World as a bit, though no one ever laughed. “They’re doing quite innovative stuff these days, you’ll have a grand old time. Why muddle your best years away atCambridge?”
What neither of them said out loud:Are you sure you can bear it?
But Peter, since childhood, had operated by two interrelated principles.
First, he was only interested in doing the hardest possible thing. He was Nietzschean in this regard. Not in the weird and antisocial Übermensch way, which so many young men at Oxford had taken to heart. He was Nietzschean in the broader sense that he felt life only had purpose if he was constantly pushing himself past his own limits. He believed only the faculty at Cambridge could help him reach his limits. And he would not waste his time doing anything but his best work.
Second, he hated to ever make exceptions on account of his constitution. Peter had spent his entire life being the sickly Murdoch boy. He’d been informed since childhood, usually by well-meaning and sympathetic teachers, that it was all right if he sat out this game, if he didn’t come on this field trip, if he couldn’t sit his exams, if he didn’t want to run the last lap. Peter had had quite enough of other people feeling sorry for him. He was not interested in merely keeping up with everyone else; in doing what someone without Crohn’s could. He wanted to do what people without Crohn’s couldnot. So when he heard the horror stories—the lab assistants who had quit, the grad students who regularly stormed out of Grimes’s office in tears—Peter took it as a challenge.
Now, perhaps his time at Oxford made him overconfident in his own charm. Perhaps his peers and professors had fawned a bit much; perhaps his ego had grown a touch larger than was good for him. But Peter did not think he was wrong believing that he was something quite special—and that if anyone could ever impress Jacob Grimes, it was him.
Cambridge! Peter loved it instantly; thecobblestone alleys, the winding river, the green and peaceful banks. He’d gotten the clubbing out of his system as an undergraduate—several sticky semesters at Wetherspoons were quite enough—and now he appreciated Cambridge’s quiet. There was always too much going on at Oxford. Cambridge, out in the fens, seemed like the sort of place where you could focus and get things done. The boys angling for Westminster were all studying politics, philosophy, and economics at the other place; here at Cambridge, the scientists came to dream. The Department of Analytic Magick, too, was everything he’d been promised—brilliant faculty, brilliant classmates, and a bottomless budget for chalk. Professor Grimes was exacting and formidable, just as Peter had hoped; under his tutelage Peter felt his mind being honed, a knife scraped sharp against a whetstone.
And there was Alice.
