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It was a terrible gruesome accident that killed Professor Jacob Grimes, and from a certain point of view it was her fault, and so for reasons of both moral obligation and self-interest—for without Professor Grimes she had no committee chair, and without a committee chair she could not defend her dissertation, graduate, or apply successfully for a tenure-track job in analytic magick—Alice found it necessary to beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful, Ruler of the Underworld.
Though this was no surprise: academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try.
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.
“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”
What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.
Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.
Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.
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.
Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion.
chthonic
A watched distance never shrank.
autostereogram
syllabaries,
As always, mathematics induced in Alice the acute urge to weep.
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.
“Oh, no, no.” Alice was sorry she had snapped. She was familiar with sights like this, and normally when people had mental breakdowns in the college library you spoke to them in a soft, calming voice and confiscated all the sharp items on the table and sent them off for a biscuit and a nap. “You’re not an idiot.”
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.
But those waters looked impossible to fool with magick. Those eddies looked hungry. They exuded a vicious gravity. They were negative space, irresistible magnets, black holes of thought. Try me, the river seemed to say. I’ll eat your chalk.
entropy.”
When she felt a pale and ethereal shade, a mind that existed without a body. But the crash always came. Alice always broke; always ended up lying in a stupor on the couch watching without processing whatever came on the television in the cottage lounge. Never could she quite achieve that blissful intellectual Zen; that runner’s high of peaceful contemplation. More often she felt bereft; unsatisfied and unsatisfying, trapped in a body that needed. And hungry, so hungry, for a kind of nourishment she could no longer name.
It baffled her that in all the stories, heroes were constantly letting cities collapse so they could rub their bits on someone else. David lost his kingdom for Bathsheba, the Greeks gave it all up over Helen, and the great Dr. Faust, when he had Mephistopheles at his disposal, only wanted to use his newfound powers to seduce Gretchen.
I want that, she remembered thinking. I want that so badly—but what was that? It wasn’t the old need for good grades, or a craving for validation. She was not a child anymore; she had left this pathology behind in college. But it wasn’t just the search for answers, either, or the simple satisfaction of a puzzle solved. It was a primitive thrill, a heady realization of what she could become, what worlds she could unlock, and it was all inextricably bound up in him.
interlocutor.
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. But little impressions spread. Peter never had to think about this, but Alice did; the simmering mass of gossip that underwrote who got positions and power. Academia involved so many hairsplitting decisions between identical candidates, most made ultimately on a whim. The reach of someone’s
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semiotician?”
Deep down she suspected being in love just was two people lying to each other, concealing their violence,
metonymy?
And really that was the happiest Alice had ever felt—how wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.
dilettantes
Consensus was that the Kripkes had gone mad. The narrative was so convenient. Magick, especially of this variety, made one lose their grip on reality. 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. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. You had to know your way back.
proprioception
palimpsestic
“No, right, I’m sure.” Peter nodded. “But if you’re done with research, then what’s the—I mean, have you ever thought through what you might do when you get back up there?” “Of course,” Elspeth said scathingly. “I’m going to sit outside. I’m going to have a cup of tea, Assam, with lots of milk and a swirl of honey. And a cinnamon bun. With raisins.”
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.”
The upshot is, Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”
What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”
It boiled down to one thing: she wanted Grimes to respect her, to like her again, to go back to being her teacher again. But Helen could not help here there. Grimes’s disposition toward her was an immovable fact. She could not change it by wishing.
Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.
rhizomatic
It wasn’t just that she was brilliant. Everyone around him was brilliant; brilliance here was boring. Alice was a challenge. Alice kept him on his toes. Watch out for that one, Professor Grimes told him over tea at the faculty club. She’ll either flame out early, or she’ll win a Nobel.
“I don’t know, Law.” Peter pulled his legs to his chest and rested his chin atop his knees. “I’ve been wondering this myself. Whether we really needed Grimes to become who we did. Because, honestly, I think anyone could have made us good magicians. He just convinced us we had to suffer for it. Just had me thinking, even when I was on the bathroom floor, that I wasn’t tough enough. That if I just wanted it enough, I’d be all better.” He snorted. “Stupid.”
Stupid, ineradicable hope crept back into her chest; stupid, exhausting feeling.
What did she want to say? Alice didn’t know. She didn’t have the words for this pit of feeling, dark and gnawing and delirious. She wanted to hurl herself into his unknown; wanted an intimacy she couldn’t describe. She wanted him alive; near; beside her. The words that came to mind were clumsy and insufficient, but they were all she had. “When we’ve just learned not to hate each other.”
A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.
For whatever reason Lower Hell was full of authors justifying their sins, and from the looks of it, producing many failed drafts.
The whole of his little rib cage trembled with the effort, but this did not disturb his slumber. He did not seem in any hurry to abandon her. Alice supposed life did survive down here after all; kicking and biting and snarling its way through. The indomitable will to live. She lay down next to the cat, curling her own torso around him like a fortress, and wondered where she might find that in herself.
“The bazaar is built to distract,” said Gradus. “This is Lord Yama’s design. There’s a million things to keep a soul from writing, all in the service of making you better at it. Remember that, Alice Law. Hell is a writers’ market.”
calque.
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 . . .
Settle, whispered the forest. Settle, settle— “I can’t,” she gasped. Just try, whispered the forest. Hold your thoughts at arm’s length, and go—empty. An impossible task. They might as well have asked her to retrieve the moon.
