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Everyone Alice knew at Cambridge was constantly on the verge of a breakdown. Everyone but Peter, for whom life was only a lark through the meadow. Peter took the worst news with a blink and a shrug. Professor Grimes would impose the most insane deadlines, and Peter would only laugh. She wondered if this was the consequence of winning every lottery of birth. You refused to think things could go wrong, because they had only ever gone right.
Even the non-Intuitionists practiced what the Intuitionists thought, because why not? You did the work, you drew your spell, and still at the end, you closed your eyes and hoped. When it came down to it magick was a wish, a prayer, and a little, anchoring fiction. So was personhood, for that matter.
So was a coherent subjectivity. And so was the courage to get up every morning and not plan to die.
It was Dante who posited that lust, the sin of “carnal malefactors,” was a lesser sin; a sin of incontinence, weakness of the will, rather than active malice toward others. Those guilty of lust had made reason slave to appetite. Dante’s circle was full of lovers; mutually indulgent sops whose succumbing to their passions hurt no one but themselves. For this reason, many
Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.
The Christian explorer John Bancroft described Desire as a false imitation of paradise wherein punishment lay in temptation. You succumbed, you in...
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Yes, leisure for self-improvement was allowed. But pleasure for pleasure’s sake—how useless, how embarrassing.
And so as Aristotle says, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element. The life of the mind is all there is. Anything else is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.”
The whole place was suffused with an aura of decay. The hallway smelled of something foul and antiseptic both at once, like rubbing alcohol sprayed on rot, and the lights were too dim, crackling with fluorescent hum. Cracks and patches of mold littered the walls, lines of ants ran along the stains, and it was all so foul that Alice was agonized that these Shades could not simply stop, take a look around, and flee the place. Stop it, she wanted to shriek, put it down, get out—but half these Shades did
not even have ears. If she screamed to them, would they hear?
It wasn’t remotely funny anymore—far from the sensational temptations of Bosch’s paintings, the sights in these cells were only sad and sickening. So much of the body was on display—breathy moans and slapping and licking and squelching; bodies pierced by needles, bodies choking on food, on wine; just bodies all around, not even full bodies really but reaching organs; working mouths and darting eyes and grasping hands, abandoned by reason, lost to appetite.
Sex was not a noble desire, it was such an embarrassing capitulation.
There was a kind of genuine longing, Alice knew, but in her view it had so little to do with clumsy machinations of the body, with mashing teeth and sandpaper stubble, rough hands and foul breath. To her they seemed worlds apart, but she had never figured out how to sublimate it, this confused, burning want; this full-body desire she felt most acutely when she looked at—
Was all sex so vulgar? Alice stood frozen, staring as the rhythmic exchange seared into her memory—the sloppy, wet squelching, the pulsing and throbbing of organs enlarged, exaggerated, the only defined feature of Shades who remembered nothing else—and then was superimposed on every other memory she’d ever had, every touch, every moment she had ever come close to another wanting body. All need, compulsion, satisfaction; and it was just bodies in the end, mounds of female flesh served up like pork, Marilyn Monroe’s splayed fingers, Jessica Rabbit, breasts bouncing. Jezebel dressed to the nines,
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and she was drifting back, spilling out. She grasped for the staircase, but it was not there—
She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts. It gave her clues for how to imitate him, to model her life and career after his. She knew she was silly, thinking she could take up space in the world like he did when they presented so differently. But could she not at least remind people who her mentor was? Academic lineage mattered so much in the right circles. And back then all she wanted, with every fiber of her being, was for people to remember she was his echo.
“Very funny. But what do you want, Law?” “Success.” She fiddled with her glass. “I want a job, and a lab of my own, and several books to my name. I want your office and my name on the door,” she added, hoping to make him laugh. But his face was dead serious. “Those are by-products of desire. What do you want?” “That is what I want.”
She trailed her fingers against the sand. It was so hard to say this out loud. She had been so practiced at saying nothing out loud; it was hard, actually, to find and then speak the right words. Her first impulse was to dance around the truth. “Well, I don’t forget things.”
Magick was ephemeral. You fooled the world for a breath, and then everything went back to the way it was before.
Alice always knew it’d be her turn under the needle down the line. Professor Grimes had made no pretensions otherwise. She had freely given her fully informed consent
from the beginning, and in her opinion, that made it all fine. It put her in control. And she trusted Professor Grimes to do it safely, to do it well.
She had not realized, until that day, how humans needed to forget to function. Now she could not erase from her mind the million awkward encounters of any given day. Misreading the menu. Spilling her wine. Dropping her wallet, holding up the post office queue. She was already such an anxious personality, and her mind now forced her to relive in excruciating detail every mistake she made with every human being she’d ever met.
I have a great deal of enemies in this department. Any one of them would use this information to destroy me. There cannot even be a rumor. You must be discreet.” Which was a blow, actually, because deep down Alice had been hoping to flaunt it all over the world. In her deepest and silliest fantasies, Professor Grimes touted her around the conference circuit like a vaudeville performer. He would be Grimes the Great; she would be his Dazzling Living Pentagram.
And she didn’t tell him about the flood: the vicious procession of memories, the constant random associations, the immense strain it took to sort out what was relevant and what was not. She did not tell him that her vision had become a roller coaster ride through infinite screens, every television show playing at once. She did not tell him that she had to focus, hard, on a simple tomato before her brain recognized it as tomato, and not apple, not dodgeball, not bloody, beating human heart. She did not tell him how easy it was to lose herself in the wash, how it happened every time she let her
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“I feel a bit—less mortal. Less fallible. Most of the time.” “Sounds nice.” “But I think more than anything it makes me—well, afraid. Like I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and by not doing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important. I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through it. And the payoff’s not as good without the process, somehow. If I didn’t have to sweat for it, it doesn’t count.”
They couldn’t say if the battle had been worth it, or even what it was all for. But surely the trials, the extreme experiences that no one
else in the world could understand, had to count for something. There was a kind of virtue in that ability to withstand extremes. Proof of character. Something like that.
And this was merely a symptom of a world where children did not read but sat drooling before a screen; where artists splattered paint at random and thought themselves Michelangelo’s equal. Theirs was not a world of learned men; it had no attention for sustained inquiry; the people of their age only wanted tabloids, gossip, entertainment. Civilizational collapse, impending apocalypse—they forgot the greatness of their forefathers, they were trapped in pointless little debates; they could not get out, no one knew how to think anymore. At this point in the rant he was always drunk on wine, and
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If Alice. She clamped a palm over her mouth, so Peter would not hear her panicked whine. There was only one possible interpretation for what she was looking at.
Peter intended to trade her soul for Professor Grimes’s. Peter was going to trap her here in Hell.
It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t ignoring them on purpose. You couldn’t blame a typhoon for its casual destruction; you couldn’t fault the sun for disappearing the stars. He simply did not notice the consequences of his actions. None of them were worth his attention, and this fact stung more than anything else. “Peter’s the nicest guy in the world,” Belinda observed once, “who always holds you firm at arm’s length.”
of memory spliced and layered on each other in dreadful combinations. Not only did she remember every dream with exact detail, she remembered all her daydreams and fantasies too, and so the visions compounded, and new dreams built on previous mad fantasies, and each time she entered a dream the pandemonium had expanded, the demons had copulated and multiplied, and each time upon waking it was harder and harder to reconstitute the real.
Petty pride, insatiable desire—these were self-centered things, and their harms turned inward. But from covetousness sprang plotting; sprang malice toward others. Here, however, to get what you wanted meant making sure others did not get it. Bhishma said in the Mahabharata that from covetousness proceeded sin. Saint Paul warned the church that money was the root of all evil. So here now were the proper schemers; the ones who knew what they were doing, and deserved to pay.
His parents are famous. Everyone in our field already knows his name. When he goes in for job interviews, he will know to ask about his colleagues’ children, because firstly he might already know them and secondly he will remind his interviewers of them. You, on the other hand. You don’t talk like them, you don’t look like them, and your research doesn’t fit what they’re looking for. You will always have to perform twice as well for half the acclaim. You have no room for mistakes.”
The door clicked shut behind them. Their footsteps faded down the hall. They probably did not remember this conversation. This was not cruelty for them. They had not decided, Now, since we are misogynists, let us make fun of a girl! These were just words like water; hear them, laugh, and move on. Probably. Peter was not trying to sabotage her then. He just really did not care.
Surely no one else lived like this—burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences. Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety. Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.
It made sense that so many progressed from Lust to Greed, if one trusted Dante’s account of things. They were both sins of incontinence and desire; only greed was the sin of desire turned against others, a sin committed when one realized that others, too, would do anything it took to get what they wanted.
What if she laid it all out in the open? She had half a mind to do so. Anything to put an end to this torture. I know what you’re doing, she could say—your puppy dog act won’t work on me, fuck you, Murdoch. But then what? Would he confess, apologize? Ludicrous. More likely he, too, would push her over the ledge. He didn’t need her whole, he only needed her alive. The only relevant feature in that spell was the presence of a living soul. And Peter could do anything to her before he dragged her over the finish line.
The Weaver Girl sighed. “Everyone thinks their love is eternal. I like to let them keep believing.” “So let us through,” said Peter. “Love isn’t a crime.” “Indeed it isn’t,” said the Weaver Girl. “I do not inflict punishment, dear boy. I offer a solution.” She clasped her hands together. “I offer you a test. No arduous quest; only the answer to a question. I test your loyalty. If you pass, I build a bridge.” She brought her
“My bridge will lead to any place you wish. Any boundary, any court. The Rebel Citadel, if you wish. Or straight to Lord Yama’s throne. Pass, and I will let you walk this bridge just once, to any place you wish to go.”
Alice did not like this. The Weaver Girl in her simpering giggles reminded her of the heroines from Chinese dramas her mother liked to play when she was a child—scheming, nefarious creatures who were always trying to shove their rivals down
wells. And though she could not fit the Weaver Girl into her schema of Hell, she knew of every tale about bargains and wagers with the divine. Orpheus failed Hades’s challenge. Sisyphus tried to cheat Hades as well, and failed. There had to be a catch, there was always a catch.
“But can’t you pretend?” She stared into his face. Open, beguiling—how long had it taken him to master that hangdog look? How could he possibly look at her like this, intending what he did? But maybe she could pretend too. Maybe she could beat him at his own game. She had one great advantage, after all, which was that Peter didn’t know that she knew the truth. “You want me to pretend that I love you.” “It’s easy,” he said. “Just assume our wills are united.” “What does that mean?” “Well, that we want all the same things. That we want what’s best for each other. That we take one another’s ends
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“Oh my God,” said Peter. “Law. We do not have time to articulate a philosophy of love.” “How else do we decide our dominant strategy, then?” “Just assume we are one person. Your ends are my ends and vice versa. What hurts you hurts me. Our goals are staying together, and pursuing what is best for ourselves as a joint unit.”
Alice’s head hurt. To begin with, she did not in fact have an alternate account of love; but second, even if Peter’s account of love made sense, she could not disentangle it from his possible ulterior motives for offering it. Deep down she suspected being in love just was two people lying to each other, concealing their violence, and so Peter’s proposal was thus misaligned with her priority to look out for herself.
The way he said this—it made her chest hurt. He knew exactly what he was doing, and the worst part was that it was working. She wanted so badly to trust him, to be the object of his love, if only for pretend. Stop it, she wanted to scream. Stop, can’t you see what you’re doing to me?
I hate you, she thought; faintly at first, just testing out the idea. And found, to her surprise, that it latched. It fit. She had not dared to think it before, but it was right, it was just—she was not a dog, she would not be kicked. I hate you, I HATE YOU— “Very good!” The Weaver Girl clapped. Her doubles merged back into one. The curtains shimmered, like a magician drumming up a crowd, and then lifted. There stood Peter, grasping a red apple.
Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime. Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no
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It helped her understand that she had never really known Peter, and he had never really known her. She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time.
And if that was true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and
