Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

“I don’t know. I’m just tired.” “But don’t you care about anything?” “I suppose I should.” How could she explain to him this numbness? It wasn’t that Alice didn’t care, it was that she had cared so much, and a thread had snapped. Some fundamental capacity was broken. She felt hurled out of the world of meaning, feeling, attachment. She couldn’t bleed anymore. She was drained already. Scripts were all she had now, and they were enough to keep her walking, but not enough for her heart to start beating.

“Because it’s interesting,” said Gradus. “Pain is interesting, and you can bear anything as long as it’s interesting.” “But how—” “It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time. Time crawls here. You do anything to feel.” He gave a start. “Oh! A direct hit!”

Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all. Oh, God, she thought frantically, why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars . . .

“The greatest among us,” said Gertrude. “Our builders and dreamers. Magicians, architects, and poets among them. All finely attuned to beauty, and convinced that beauty could be torn away from the divine.”

For in a world where none of the rules were stable, why not believe in an apocalyptic reversal of the moral order? Why was that so unlikely? Wasn’t there a perverse beauty to it all? What conviction—to do wrong and stand by it—how much bolder it was than to do right simply because one was afraid.

For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.

In the past year Alice had learned a million and one tricks for distracting her mind from wanting to die. Rituals helped. Keeping herself busy helped. She was not one of the depressives who lay stinking in bed; she could not just lie there, the stillness hurt worse. Moving staved the agony. Laundry day was wonderful because that was at least two hours of guaranteed distraction, of tasks she absolutely needed

to do.

It wrung you out, stretched your mind thin. She did not have a tolerance for repetition. Somewhere buried there was the deep, curious spark that rebelled at boredom, which longed to be productive, or at least engaged with the world. Only that spark was too dulled now to do much more than hurt.

“Praying to what?” “They pray to the act,” said the knob. “They pray to waiting, for the strength to be patient until the end. Until the world turns upside down. Until the Lethe runs dry, and the domain of Lord Yama turns in on itself. For nothing is eternal, not even the order of this universe, and one day the eight courts will fold in on themselves and the meaning of being itself will change. They believe that souls cannot be purified by retribution, or reformation, but only by the fires of time. That the kālavāda, the school of time, holds all answers to the cryptic idiocies of Hell.” This response was so disappointing, Alice nearly wept. “So they’re waiting for nothing.”

What saved Alice was its inertia. There was no real animosity in that forest. The forest had trained so long to feel nothing that it had forgotten how to hate. The forest did not care much about Alice at all except that, like a lazy waking organism, it had identified the source of its discomfort and tried with every degree of movement it had to scratch her away.

Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language. What are doors and windows? “Doors and windows keep you in,”

The desert did not purify or improve her. It taught her nothing—except that the loneliness, the sheer expanse, made her rebuild and reinforce herself, like an insistent castle on shifting sands. One sought structure in the flow. One needed repetition, a pounding sound. I am still here. I think, therefore I am. I am Alice Law, I am a postgraduate at Cambridge, I study analytic magick . . . she really did need to reinforce these things, because the sheer, flat wash threatened to erode her sense of self until she was just swimming in a bath of unstructured memories. Faces here;

feelings there; but what did it all build up to? Who did those recollections make?

Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.

Beneath its matted fur Alice could see the silhouette of the creature it once was; the strain of muscle against bone. What a waste, she thought; all that power, and nowhere to put

it. Its eyes were enormous with panic; its pupils nearly disappeared into the green. Help me, it seemed to want to say; please, help me. “I wish I could,” Alice breathed. “I’m sorry.”

“I am searching for the reason. And if I fear anything at all, it is that this reason does not exist, and that I am trapped in existence by a delusion.”

Alice racked her mind for consolation, and couldn’t find it. In the whole of chthonic literature there was nothing on this fundamental problem, there were only varied and detailed accounts of never-ending despair. No one was much interested in how souls got out of Hell. She could only settle on Dante’s answer, the only possibility of salvation in the entire Inferno. Only one being could harrow Hell. “Suppose you’re rescued by an act of divine grace.” “Don’t be a cunt, Alice.”

But she could tell she had overestimated the strength of their bond. Gradus was fond of her only when it was amusing to be. And while she considered their time together very special, she was only a fraction of his deep time. In one thousand years he would likely only chuckle at her name.

“Come on,” she panted. Chalk burned her nostrils. She had a wild vision of eating the Kripkes alive; of plucking their heads off their necks and chewing through them whole. “Come on out.”

Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs. Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well. My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me.

He was very light. It would have been so easy to fling him over the ledge, but Alice did not want to hurt him; this was not his fault. She decided she would dump him in the Zeno trap. Time out, go to bed, let the adults have a word.

The lesson had been engraved in her mind ever since: Other bodies are inviolable and you do not touch them without permission. You do not try to hurt or break them. You keep away and they will keep away in turn, see, everyone exists in their little bubble.

So that was all it took. She could not believe the waters could lie so still. The waves had ceased their churning; now the surface was glasslike, deceptive. Several seconds, and a lifetime of hurt just wiped clean, forgotten by the universe. No punishments, no redemption, just nonbeing. Like Nick Kripke had never happened to begin with. You ass, Alice thought. You lucky, lucky ass.

The research alone was brilliant. If Alice had merely read Magnolia’s papers,

that would have been enough to make her fall in love. She had the loveliest prose style. Later the establishment would treat her lyricism as evidence that she lacked methodological rigor, but at the time Alice was amazed by how Magnolia could make the driest strings of logic sing.

Her voice was sonorous, melodic. She carried herself, and all the womanly parts of her—breasts, hips, curves—with a poised confidence. She did not shy from flaunting her beauty. She did not hide it under baggy clothes and bad posture, the way so many women did. She made herself the center of attention. She knew everyone’s eyes fell upon her, for the right reasons or wrong. She seized that attention. It was the subtle ways she moved—smoothed her skirt, flipped her hair over her shoulder. No one could look away.

Alice sat rapt, stunned by this living instantiation of the impossible type.

But here was a woman scholar with prestige, a husband, and a baby. It was remarkable how Nick treated Magnolia. He hardly spoke that afternoon. He introduced his wife—this aspect of their research had been all her doing, he said—and then he left the stage. Throughout the talk Alice kept glancing toward him, wondering when his adoring attention would give way to boredom. But he was utterly infatuated with her. He laughed at all her jokes; he nodded appreciatively whenever she unpacked a particularly tricky theoretical knot. Not once did his eyes leave her face. So this is true love, Alice had thought. I wonder if anyone will ever look at me this way.

Gradus saw: a boat growing larger on the horizon. It was a slender, beautiful thing, its body a single, curved stroke of bright autumn wood, and its sails a rippling silken sheen. So it was true; so those Shades were right to hope.

Then Gradus was not Gradus anymore, but a shimmering glow; immaterial in a wholly different way than Shades. For Shades were imprints, persistent past, but this Spirit-Not-Gradus was undefined future, brilliant in its potential. The Spirit-Not-Gradus turned away and went to sit at the bow, his face turned toward that promised shore.

Plato had argued in Meno for a theory of anamnesis—that souls were immortal, knowledge was innate, and learning just was a process of rediscovering that which you had forgotten. Reason functions to tether a knowledge that was always there. When a slave boy learns geometry he is not making a discovery, he is only recollecting what he once knew. Then what would Plato make of Alice? Did she forget now only the muddled truths that stood in reason’s way? Or was she forgetting all that innate knowledge as well?

There were patches that she had, and patches she knew were gone, and even more patches whose loss she didn’t know to register at all. For a moment she found this prospect terrifying—that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill in the rest.

Alice hesitated, wondering how best to explain. Then she burst into tears. “Oh, dear.” Elspeth fished around in her pocket and handed her a handkerchief, oily and stained. Alice took it and mopped it around her eyes. She was horrified; the tears simply would not stop. She hadn’t meant to cry. She hadn’t even planned to feel sad. But just then it was like a switch flipped and that veneer of dazed indifference shattered, and all the grief she’d been carrying broke through the floodgates.

She could not find the words. She had no frame of reference to make sense of this, this impossible generosity. It defied every rule she’d been taught about moving within the world, in which favors were like the conservation of matter. A give always entailed a take. “You’re just giving it to me?” “Well, don’t look so put out about it.” “But can you find another one?”

“But I don’t deserve this.” She deserved none of the favors she had received. Peter’s sacrifice, Gradus’s sacrifice, now Elspeth. What am I to you, she wondered, that you would do this for me? Her mind cycled through the possible tropes: relations of dependence or charity; mother to child; elder sister to younger; mentor to mentee; lover to beloved. But none of them fit, none

of them came close to approximating this singular, inexplicable grace.

“Rules are so boring,” said Elspeth. “So is infinity. You can’t knock about a closed system forever; the possibilities run out. I

think, then, sometimes the gods like to play. Just for the hell of it.”

“The citadel’s a waste of time.”

And yet this made perfect sense. Lewis Carroll had theorized this—how else did you conceptualize life and death, the membrane of passage, except as continuity?—but no one believed him. Take a strip of paper, twist it in the middle, and connect the ends. Very good. Now you have a ring, a three-dimensional object you can hold in your hand. But it only has one side. The inside is continuous with the outside. Now do the same thing with a four-sided handkerchief. Twist the edges, line them up, and stitch it all together so that the inside is continuous with the outside. All is

external to the bag, which means all is also internal to the bag, and so the bag holds the world.

Best to keep to the familiar. Despite his bulging eyes and rage-filled grin, something about his image—scowling out at her from temples, behind incense sticks, on grocery store calendars—made her feel safe. She knew King Yama; her parents knew King Yama; all her ancestors knew, and feared, and prayed to, King Yama. She knew his long black beard, his ever-present scowl, his burning eyes and long robe. She had known him all her life.

King Yama was most fair and just. King Yama bore no grudges, and held no antipathy toward the living. Since her childhood she had understood that his scowl was only an appearance; that in truth King Yama was benevolent and compassionate, that he had indeed once been demoted to a lower rank of Hell for his leniency. He was dedicated only to fulfilling his duty, to acting as a judge—and his adherence to rules, she thought, could only count in her favor.

my soul was ripped free from my body, and I was cast violently from that mortal world of base appetites. The body is the enemy, is a hindrance in the soul’s quest for the truth. It is as the Zhuangzi claims: life is a swelling tumor, and death the bursting of a boil. We are slaves to the body! All it provides is distractions—fantasies, desires, illnesses, fears. We are bounded, and death is the ultimate freedom. I never saw it until now.” Professor Grimes’s hands grasped her face, and though she felt nothing solid, the chill took her breath away. “Come on, Law. This isn’t hard.”

Alice could not speak so much as move her mouth into shapes and hope her breath gave them sound. “But I don’t want to die.” “What do you want, then?” “I just want to go home.” Alice had seen what the sole pursuit of knowledge had done to the Kripkes. And she would not repeat that same mistake; to remain here, whittling away until all that mattered was puzzles and abstractions. She had outshone at puzzles and abstractions her entire life, and still she had not learned a single thing about how to live. She did not want to tilt into their world anymore, she only wanted to touch something solid.

Yes, this was right. Was that right?

He’d made these sorts of promises before. Professor Grimes so enjoyed making promises; he tossed them out without a thought. Of course you’ll get that grant. Of course we’ll coauthor that paper. And he never lied; she trusted he never meant to deceive, he was just so busy that he simply forgot. This time, however, she thought he might be telling the truth. Sometimes he did mean it. He could be so generous when he got what he wanted.

But she had witnessed divinity now. The mundane did not compare. Now, in the afterlife, she saw him more clearly than ever; in part because she was no longer so scared of looking, and in part because she saw only what he chose to show. Just an ordinary man, puffing himself up, darting around for any way out of his predicament. Cruel, callous—and so, so full of unjustified assumptions.