Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try. Peter Murdoch and his bird’s-nest hair, scarecrow limbs balanced atop a rickety bicycle, looked like he’d never tried at anything in his life. He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain.

Alice had witnessed Peter spill chocolate syrup all over the master of the college’s robes at high table with no more rebuke than a shoulder clap and a laugh. When Peter erred it was cute. She had herself once spent all of dinner in the bathroom hyperventilating through her fingers because she’d knocked a bread basket onto the floor.

Peter never crowed or condescended, he was just guilelessly better than, and that made everyone feel so much worse.

She knew this choice would horrify anyone outside the academy. But no one outside the academy could possibly understand. She would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything, so long as she still had her mind, so long as she could still think.

He’d long reached the stage of his career where one left that sort of grunt work to graduate students. Professor Grimes’s days were devoted to profound, deep thinking. He saw above the mountains and clouds to discern the truth, and then he descended to utter pronouncements like Moses coming down Mount Sinai, and then his underlings hammered out the details. He never did his own arithmetic or translations anymore. And he was far above kneeling over tracing lines of chalk, straining his eyes, straining his back.

But she was also angry that afternoon, and resentful, and confused, and such a turbid mess of frustration and fury that the very sound of Professor Grimes’s voice made her flinch. Perceiving his sheer physical proximity—sensing him move,

kneeling in his shadow—made it hard to breathe. In the brief moments that their eyes met, her breath stopped, and she thought she might like to die.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Greeks had named Hell Aornos, “the place that is birdless,” for none could fly over its foul breath. But the air smelled of nothing but dust, and the temperature was just this side of chilly. She’d expected more tortured screaming, sulfur, and brimstone, but it turned out that perhaps the American theologists had been exaggerating. Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.

The paradox—the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.” The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

Come on. You know very well what a heap is. You know it when you see it. It is like porn. And you know that if you shovel giant piles of sand out of the heap, there will come a moment when you can definitely call it not-a-heap.

You thought the world was one way and then it wasn’t. One could become zero. One could become two. A blink of an eye, and the fact of the matter was not. If the world could be fluid for you once, how many more times could you make it dance according to your whims?

Everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall once again.

Hell, she had read, was an inconstant and shifting plane. Its landmarks were conceptual, not fixed. She did not know quite what this meant, but following scholarly convention she

interpreted this as, Hell reveals itself to you in whatever order it so chooses.

Boo.” Belinda shuddered; her hand flew to her neck. Alice was delighted. She wondered at the limits of ghostly mischief—whether, if she wanted to, she might simply haunt the halls of Cambridge forever.

Often he granted it. Lord Yama did not like to suffer the living in his realm; they disturbed the dead, they upset the balance. He was more than happy to shoo them back off to whence they’d come. At least, all the stories promised so. Orpheus had made his way back, for better or worse. Dante ascended with no trouble at all. In all the stories, sojourners in Hell rarely perished there. It was in the world of the living where they met their tragic ends.

They needed time to process their memories, their regrets, their wishes. Some stayed in hopes of reuniting with loved ones before they sought reincarnation together. Some didn’t believe in reincarnation at all. Some waited in the fields forever out of conviction that the great resurrection was coming, and that they need only sink into a stupor and wait for the end times. Others remained out of sheer terror of what the rest of Hell might hold, for an eternity of boredom was better than the punishments they deserved.

He never used to mince words with her. He used to shout, You daft cow, Alice, you’ve missed a line, you’ve fucked it all up. And she would give as good as she got, and point out it was his line he’d skipped, and they would argue furiously, and laugh, and sort out the problem. It used to be they could quarrel, and that quarrelling was fun. It used to be they could speak frankly with each other. But that was a very long time ago.

Only the eyes were uniformly unscarred; staring, pleading, plaintive, curious eyes. Did they spend all eternity like that? Or had they only chosen to present themselves as such for now? The literature on Shades and corporeality was scant and undecided. Some scholars thought Shades were preserved unwillingly as they were in the moment of their death. Others argued Shades had the agency to manifest however they liked. Either way Alice felt it rude to ask.

So they could speak. Their voices were each an echo of the others’; one statement repeated four times in slightly different registers. Alice could not tell if Shades could speak no other way, or if, after decades clustered together and facing down infinity, their personalities had blended and congealed so that they no longer knew themselves as distinct from the others. They descended into excited chatter, communing among themselves in unintelligible clacks and whistles. All Alice could make out was, “Grimes,” “No way,” and “Mother of God!”

Alice thought he was being a bit daft. Of course these Shades were scared. Souls often lingered in Asphodel for years—decades—before trying for reincarnation. Loss of identity was a terrifying prospect. Who were you without your memories, your background, your relationships, your station? What if your lot in the next life was far worse than the life you’d just lived? It didn’t matter that in theory souls enjoyed infinite lives, and infinite chances to experience things good and bad. From the subjective perspective of the soul, reincarnation was no different from death.

“But you’re dead.” This had gone too far; Alice had to intervene. Undergraduates did this often—they worked each other up over the wrong ideas, compared problem sets and confused themselves so much that untangling their thoughts took twice the work. Undergraduates were five blind men and an elephant; were three blind mice leading one another in a circle. “You’re in Hell. That seems the worst state to be in.” “We’re dead magicians,” said the boy with glasses. “That’s different.”

“Oh, leave them to it,” Alice muttered. She felt a spasm of irritation, a lurking unease, and she did not want to think about these undergraduates anymore. Hell was full of minor tragedies. There was no point fretting over this one. “They have eternity to figure it out.”

when she let her gaze go slack, then all sorts of things started creeping in at the edges, fantastic things: serpents with many heads; wolves devouring the sun. A friend studying neuroscience had told her once that eyesight was largely memory, that your brain saw a pattern and filled in the rest. Alas, Alice’s memory bank was bursting at the seams. The mix-and-match mechanism was broken, and her brain filled in patterns with the most inappropriate things. Chalkboards became parking lots. Apple trees became Jesus on the cross. Often she stood in the checkout line at Sainsbury’s and saw corpses instead of cabbages on the belt.

Funny how when something enormous was at stake you refused to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Every day she stared into that empty cubbyhole and tried to convince herself that all her perceptions were wrong; that if she only stared hard enough, a thick purple envelope would materialize amidst the dust. She jumped whenever the phone rang. She eavesdropped on faculty meetings. She was triggered by the very mention of the word “Cooke,” which made conversations about food very difficult. She felt so stupid now. Of course it hadn’t gone to her.

Alice had always struggled to sleep when camping. She didn’t like being out in the open at night, without at least five solid walls separating her and the things that

wanted to eat her. And she should have been even more anxious out here; under Hell’s moonless, starless sky; with who-knows-what lurking in the dunes.

Pascal’s Wager said that you could choose to believe in God or not, but if you bet wrong on God and didn’t live as though he existed, you were missing out on the infinite wonder of Heaven. Similarly, you could choose to believe the job market would work out for you or not, but if you

bet wrong and opted out of the cycle, you were missing out on the infinite miracles of the Life of the Mind.

She filed these words under “platitudes from adults who think they know better than you,” and then she promptly forgot them.

“How do you mean? Everyone cites Orpheus.” “Orpheus was mad with loss,” said Alice. “He was driven solely by longing for Eurydice.” “So?” “So he didn’t care about anything around him. From his perspective of course it was a straight line to wherever Eurydice ended up because that’s how it went in his mind’s eye. That map is worthless. It’s a fantasy of grief.”

“I mean, if the math checks out.” “Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.” “It’s a compliment, Law. I am showing you some disciplinary respect.” “Well, don’t bother,” she said, though she did feel a stupid flutter in her chest. Lab work used to be like this, she thought. Peter’s jabs, her rebuttals; two different methodologies clashing until, always, they settled on some compromise that was closer to the truth. Oh, but this hurt—she had not realized how much she had missed this. “It’s condescending.”

This made sense, in theory. Souls that had passed bureaucratic clearance should not get to wander willy-nilly back into the Fields of Asphodel. It would throw the accounting all out of joint. You couldn’t just decide you didn’t like being punished and nope back out into Limbo. Alice should have anticipated this, but still it frightened her, the fact that their paths were erasing themselves behind them. It made the stakes permanent. Either they succeeded, or they died.

At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew.

Living and dying are two sides of the same coin. It makes more sense to conceptualize souls as continuously flowing

from one world to another than to think everything that ever lived is forever accruing in an underworld tomb.

According to Huemer, we have reason to believe that time stretches infinitely into the past and into the future. If time is infinite, the probability that our singular lifetime happens at this very moment, at this very speck on the line, vanishes toward zero. So either time is finite, or we live more lives than one. Huemer argues it is at least plausible that the past is not finite, so we have decent evidence to believe in eternal recurrence. Theologists and religious studies folks do not like this argument for the same reasons they don’t like Pascal’s Wager, which is that it seems to mathematically cheat to conclusions that religions have taken thousands of years to articulate.

eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand.

Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

For all our theories and stories and myths, Lord Yama’s design remains an utter mystery. No one knows for certain what precisely happens in those courts, or why; least of all the Shades within them. If it is a test, no one knows how to pass. If it is mere torture, no one knows how long it will go on for. One cannot anticipate, cheat, or find a shortcut through redemption. We cross the Lethe and reincarnate whenever Hell deems us ready. It happens when it happens. Until then, we get what’s coming.

She riffled through texts, images, treatises, that resided in her mind. Icarus, hurtling from the sky; Arachne, limbs splitting into eight. What was pride? For Augustine, the original sin; for Pope Gregory, the root of all evil. For Plato, the First Court punished those possessed of a timocratic soul—the soul who purported to love justice and honor and beauty, but who cared more about preserving the appearance of such things rather than making the sacrifices necessary to fulfill those things themselves. For Confucius, the Court of Pride housed the

xiaoren, the petty men, who chased the names of things but not their nature. A mismatch between the name and the thing—yes, that was it, the common thread running through all these theories.

And hadn’t he earned his prickle? She recalled that Aristotle distinguished between proper and improper pride. The worthy man could justly boast of his accomplishments, so long as he had actually done them. Professor Grimes could only be charged with behaving as befit his station, which was lofty, and Alice really did not think this was as morally egregious as calling oneself a Marxist.

It was a lesson worth learning. She had not repeated this mistake. Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd—this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

You actually can’t prove modus ponens. But if we don’t have modus ponens, then we might as well be in the Stone Age, because modus ponens is the foundation for everything else . . .”

Western Tartarologists preferred the name Lethe for its etymology. Lethe comes from the Greek lēthē (λήθη), meaning “forgetfulness,” “oblivion.” Lethe also has connections to the Greek alētheia (ἀλήθεια), meaning “truth.” Though what connection truth had to forgetfulness, Alice was not sure. By some accounts, stripping all memories was a way to reveal the most fundamental truth—some ineffable element of the soul that was eternal. By other accounts, the causation was flipped. Truth was the necessary condition to deserving forgetfulness, and therefore reincarnation.

This was no hallucination. Alice was certain. She knew this deity. She’d seen her crop up over centuries of texts. Old Lady Meng Po, guardian of the river, mother of memory. Her task was to distill those violent waters into a fragrant herbal liquor. When souls crossed over it was the lady’s wine they drank; sweet and cooling, eternal relief. The forgetting of rebirth, not of obliteration.

it would be to offload them to the depths; to swirl away and then disseminate forever. She was so tired of the contents of her mind. Her thoughts were so loud; they pounded her skull, it never stopped, it was all too much. For a long time now it had been all too much. Everyone was so afraid of the Lethe—keep away, they said; stay dry—but why didn’t they understand it was mercy? All the stories were wrong—no siren’s call was as alluring as the sea itself, and the quiet dark beyond the shore.

“Gabriel’s Horn,” he said happily. “Also called Torricelli’s Trumpet. It’s a mathematical paradox that bounds a finite volume within an infinite surface area. The plane of Hell is that infinite area, and in configuring us as the volume inside the horn, we could make a finite shortcut . .

“I mean we have no understanding of Hell’s metabolism. Or Hell’s entropy.” He let the silt stream through his fingers. “Possibly its energy flows are all out of whack and it’s eating the chalk, eating its living-dead energy, instead of glitching against it—”