Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction. And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.

“You’d think more often it’d be the man. But it’s always the girl. She’s always afraid. She wants to believe him, but she can’t. He’s let her down too many times in the past. She knows he’ll do it again. And in the end, she has to look out for herself.”

The words rushed out Elspeth’s mouth without pause or punctuation; she seemed unaware she was speaking in full paragraphs. Perhaps a decade of loneliness did that to you.

Nicomachus

The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram.

“Theophrastus,” said Elspeth. “Cute kid. I saw him at a conference hotel once. He was playing with these plastic dinosaurs. Kept banging them together and shouting they needed to reproduce to save their species.” Alice’s chest felt tight. “They didn’t . . .”

“They are not human anymore,” said Elspeth. “They have no sense of compassion or justice. There is no reasoning with them. They have lost all perspective on life and death. There is only knowledge, resources, and the Great Quest.”

There was an awkward silence—not unlike that which descended on a room of scholars who realized they were all interviewing for the same job.

Suicidal depression was just an extreme form of failure, which was a symptom of inadequacy. If you had sufficient force

of will, then obviously you wouldn’t be suicidal. She did not admit this out loud.

he . . .” Her face darkened. “I mean. He was not the reason why. He was not. I refuse to give him that credit. He was just the symptom, you see. It took me many years to realize this. Every time he yelled at me, or picked me apart, or humiliated me in front of other students—this was just the whole symbolic order coming to a head. This is an arbitrary game of egos and narcissists and bullying perceived as strength. And he was the perfect incarnation of the system’s nonsense.”

People liked you better when they thought you needed them.

The delirium of shared suffering.

Alice had answered with the argument that only adopting an attitude of accepting a satisfactory, not optimal, outcome could avoid the worst possible outcome. The

principle of choosing the best possible option was, in practice, self-defeating. You were better off arbitrarily deciding to wait five years, then opening the wine and enjoying whatever you got.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas. She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires to eat and fuck and shit.

That she

was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of m...

To rejoice in the acrobatics of thought—not as Stoics did, which was to manipulate language for mean and personal gain, but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging. What greater pleasure could there be? What else was life for?

“Far from it,” said Elspeth. “This is their repository. The Lethe is all the memories that ever were. The Lethe is infinite. The Lethe is all the colors on the palette mixed into black. The Lethe doesn’t erase, it only absorbs.”

Alice didn’t find this so awful. Why wouldn’t everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She’d like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt—if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it. You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?

Karma is more like—hm. You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you

asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.”

Alice, however, was still convinced by the impossible mean—the idea that there might exist some perfect line between femininity and subjugation, wherein if she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar. The chances this mean existed were vanishingly small, but still Alice

clung to this hope. The whole endeavor of graduate study was clinging to vanishingly small hopes. To be a magician was to be that tortoise racing Achilles; deluding himself, as the runner loomed larger behind him, that space and time would hang still so that he might stay ahead.

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second-wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and

this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women from the conference. Alice was different from them. They were wives in the making, and she was a magician.

It would have made everything so easy, if she’d just given Professor Grimes what he wanted. He’d have satisfied his urges. He’d

have been sated, happy with her, and that might have given her some reprieve. In the tired moments after she might have asked for some guidance on her research proposal. She might have asked him to put in a good word for her when she applied for extra funding that summer. She might even have gotten some pleasure out of it. She was sure that, if she split her mind in two, if she ignored all the parts of her that were screaming, if she sank back into her tipsy stupid buzz, then she could turn it into a fun night that got a bit wild.

There were a lot of things Alice could have said then. But why bother? It all seemed so pointless. All words were ineffectual, signifying nonsense. Belinda stared, waiting, but Alice simply turned on her heel and walked away.

“Girls like you despise women like me. Isn’t that so? You think we are wrong to insist on the differences of our sex. You find our activism embarrassing. You think we complain too much.”

The accusation was just, all these things were true. But Alice had always harbored these thoughts as a sneaky conviction. She could not really justify them.

Helen pressed on. “And why wouldn’t you think that? You’ve never known a locked door. Your mothers were educated, your schools were coed, and so you think the whole world is open to you. You want to wear slacks, and shirts without bras, and drink all night l...

What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”

Why didn’t she have any response? Why was this question so hard? It was as if she’d sat down for an exam, only to find she didn’t comprehend any of the material. All the contradictions were coming to a head, and she couldn’t synthesize an answer because none of her positions made any sense. She wanted Grimes’s attention but also his respect. She adored his power, except when he used it against her. She wanted no special treatment for her sex, and still she felt wronged, in a way she felt that only women could be wronged. Helen was right—she could not have it all, could not believe everything she did and still complain. But still, was there not something wrong here? Was she so wrong to feel hurt?

In fact, all of her wishes were ridiculous. She wanted it all to have never happened. She wanted her mind back. And she wanted to be more than a body, more than mere flesh, a thing to inscribe and observe and maybe fondle when you were bored. She wanted the version she was promised, she wanted a teacher who cared about her, who respected her as a thinker, who did not treat her as a tool.

you cannot survive without believing you are invulnerable. So your only option is the reconstruction of the lie—I am not embodied, this cannot matter, and so it does not matter.

And she suspected that Helen knew, anyhow. Not the details. Only the shape. Helen must have known, because she had seen it all happen before, must have been through it herself, and here she still sat where she was. Her own office. Courtyard window, mahogany desk, tenure.

What did that take? Alice wondered. What cages of beliefs kept Helen going?

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.

argument Socrates could make against suicide in the Phaedo was 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.

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 and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.

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.”

Aristotle’s argument about how any living being, even the most primitive organism, was animated by an idea of the good. Even the plant turned its face toward the sun. Even the tiniest ant sought food; the brainless worm sought soil. It was all so easy for living creatures—all except people, except people like her, who had a knack for seeking only that which made them miserable.

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.

Oh, why was this so hard? Alice wondered desperately. Why couldn’t she ever tell Peter what she thought? Always they had been bodies hurtling just out of one another’s orbit, when all it would have ever taken was an honest word. But that was precisely

what magicians lacked; there were no honest words, only puns and illusions and constructions of reality so convoluted that you couldn’t keep track anymore of what was real and what wasn’t. Everyone was always trying so hard to pretend they were somebody else.

How much a simple word of encouragement could mean to a young and insecure mind.

So despite everything that happened after, Alice would always remember that it was Professor Grimes who believed in her first. He’d plucked her out of obscurity. He’d seen her file in a stack of applications, held it up to the light, and decided, yes. Yes she was worth his investment, worth initiating into a world of mystery, worth making her equal to what he was, an intrepid traveler through abstract lands. His was the first plank in her staircase of belief. And in a world founded on insincerity and insecurity, that faith was a debt she would always feel she had to repay.

No matter how much she drank, however, her tongue still felt like sandpaper. Yet the rest of her felt deliciously light, a feeling she remembered well from lab days; the days she hadn’t eaten, and was deliberately not eating anymore, just to push the boundaries of how little she needed it. She knew not to trust that lightness. It was always the prelude to the crash.