Page 96 of Katabasis
“I will, sir,” said Peter. As if it were so easy; as if he could dismiss it all with sheer force of mind. “You won’t hear about it again.”
He was halfway out the door when Professor Grimes called after him: “Murdoch—a word of advice.”
He halted. “Yes?”
“Try not to feel so sorry for yourself.”
“I—well, I try, Professor.”
“I mean there are great minds who were disabled. Edison, for one. That fellow over in Cosmology.” Peter could not tell whether Professor Grimes was mocking him, or if this was some genuine and horrifying attempt at comfort. Professor Grimes continued, “It is a great liberty, from a certain perspective—to be free of the normal human desires and distractions. I knew a great mathematician once—one Irene Fulmencio. Remarkable woman. We met in Venezuela; she’d never left her hometown. She was crippled by a childhood illness and spent her days in bedridden contemplation. She lived in a world of ideas. She thought of nothing else. She wasableto think of nothing else. Her mind transcended to pure abstraction—her body was an afterthought. It was a great liberation, really.”
Peter was too astonished to explain that his particular illness rather never let him forget how embodied he was.
“Anyhow, hire an undergrad to take down dictation if you really can’t get out of bed.” Professor Grimes turned back to his desk. “Heavens knows you’re paid enough.”
Things got a little better beforethey got worse, as these things tend to do. For a few weeks the steroids seemed to work, and the inflammation went down, during which Peter worked like the devil to make up for lost time. He finished the last of his grading assignments. He gave Belinda a bouquet of thank-you flowers, which earned him a flurry of cheek kisses. He passed his exams with flying colors.
And then, because he had always been an overachiever, and because his best research insights always arrived during such frenzied spells, he developed an algorithm that would change the field of categorization forever.
This may have sounded boring to the casual observer—and, indeed, was boring to most people in magick. Categorization was, however, of immense import to any logician. The question of how to sort and describe the world had bearing on almost every other field. Peter’s innovation was in a subtle variation of Russell’s Paradox, wherein sets themselves were not members of the sets they described—meaning things could be both normal and abnormal, or neither normal or abnormal. This had a whole range of implications for how you might suspend the nature of things, but in the interim, Peter was interested in how you might situate human beings temporarily outside of space and time. Beginner stuff.
“Not bad,” said Professor Grimes, which was the highest praise Peter had ever heard him utter. “Finish your pentagram sketches and we’ll come back next week to test it.”
“Yes, sir.” Peter went home, ate an ill-advised burger, and spent the next twelve hours in the bathroom.
He wept often with frustration over that next week. He knew precisely what he needed to do to finish this paper. He knew the shape of the problem, knew the journey his thoughts needed to take—he simply couldn’t take his mind across. Instead he had to dwell on the number of bowel movements he had in an hour; the calories he’d ingested that day; whether two boxes of Saltine crackers was enough to keep him out of the hospital. He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.
A horrible impulse overtook him then.
He decided he would not get help. Not this time. No doctors, no hospital, no medications, no waiting and watching to see how he responded to various courses of treatment. No steroids, no side effects. He was exhausted by the entire cycle. No, he would not have his mother come up and sit fretfully by his bedside, watching his every movement, flinching every time he moaned, staring at him intently as if she could heal him with the sheer force of her will. It was an outrageous and possibly suicidal commitment but once he conceived it his mind was set. It seemed the only degree of freedom he had left. The universe was unfair, so he would bait the universe.Do your fucking best, he told it.Put me in the ground.
What happened is precisely what any doctor would have expected, which is that Peter rapidly deteriorated.
He could never forget that final night. Lying on the bathroom floor, crying pitifully from the pain, stomach spasming every few minutes like it was tying itself into ever smaller knots. Always he would remember the burn of the bath mat against his face, that mildewed smell of wet feet.So many students have come through these quarters, he thought,and I might be the first to die here. Always he would remember praying, something he had not done for years; kneeling on his hands and knees on the bile-splattered bathroom tiles, uttering half-remembered lines from Mass—Have mercy on me, oh Lord—Christe, eleison—
God don’t let me die I don’t want to die God—
He did not die. The scout came in to clean the next morning and, hearing no response to his knock, decided the room was empty and came on in. Peter was unconscious on the floor. Calls were made; ambulances summoned. Peter awoke in the hospital, hooked up to an IV and steroid drip. His mother had come up from London that afternoon. A doctor came in and explained Peter needed part of his colon removed. The inflammation had grown so severe that recovery was beyond hope; he now had a stricture in his colon, and a colectomy was the only thing that might relieve his symptoms. They would take out the diseased half of his colon and reattach the nondiseased ends together. This was if Peter was lucky. If not, he’d need the whole colon out, and spend the rest of his life carrying around a stoma bag. And even if everything went well, Peter might need the whole colon out anyway—colectomies were only temporary solutions, after all; they did not cure the root disease.
On the bright side there was very little Peter could have done to prevent this. Crohn’s reached this stage sooner or later; drugs stopped working, and inflamed tissue became unusable. He might have gone to the hospital earlier, but it would have made no difference, only accelerated his surgery. So despite his mother’s sullen recriminations, Peter could not blame his stubbornness for this development. Only his flawed biology.
“Still,” said the gastroenterologist. “Next time we recommend coming in before you’re at risk of sepsis.”
Peter did not want to hear any more. He sat through his consultations, eyes glazed over. Do whatever you need, he told his doctors; just wake me up when you’re finished.
Six weeks later Peter returned onshaky feet to the department. He was prepared for some backlash. He had not told anyone he was getting surgery, after all; he’d only disappeared off the face of the earth and assumed he could clean up the mess when he returned. This had always worked for him before. But people were always inevitably upset, miffed; he’d always needed to smooth things over.
Instead, all everyone wanted to talk about was the paper that Professor Grimes was publishing soon inArcana. Had Peter heard? Apparently it was groundbreaking, was going to revolutionize the way we thought about categories. It had to do with Russell’s Paradox; wasn’t that the subject of Peter’s dissertation? They’d circulated drafts at a work in progress presentation last week; here, he could have a copy.
Peter should have known, but still, reading the byline was like taking a slap to the face:
NEW APPLICATIONS OF RUSSELL’S PARADOX
By: Jacob Grimes
Department of Arcane Magick
Cambridge University
