Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.

They used to do this in the lab—show each other their wildest ideas, and offer each other proof they weren’t insane. She had missed Peter’s mind. It was like wearing a parachute—she could trust that he’d catch any mistakes she’d made.

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.

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.

All the books were battered and stained to various degrees. Some missed covers; some missed entire chunks in the middle; some appeared to have been dredged from the bottom of the river, dried, and painstakingly rebound with needle and thread. Still they looked and smelled enticing, for all books, like wine, had a readerly aroma that ripened with age, which was why bookstores and libraries smelled so good.

blared at all hours. You could not turn it off. You smashed it, and it screamed louder. Most times, all you could do was manage the pain. 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. So too was grading day, when she could take her stack of tests to the pub and lose herself in the rote activity of checking, circling, calculating, and scrawling marks at the top. The trick, in those days, was to cram her mind with as many thoughts as possible to keep the memories at bay. At home alone, she read everything within reach. She did tasks one-handed so she could hold something to her face with the other. Shampoo bottle instructions. Canned soup nutritional information. She pored a million times over the newspaper while mindlessly chewing her cereal. She kept the grainy television set on at all hours in the lounge, and if her housemates were bothered at least they left her alone. Doctor Who went on trial. Ringo Starr played with toy trains. This did not dissuade the bad thoughts. They were always playing in the forefront, in bright colors, on full volume. The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to f...

What a miracle a person was, she thought. They took up so little space. The difference between presence and absence was not even a square meter of matter. Yet now that Peter was here, the whole world shone brighter.

Peter Murdoch was a book with no ending and all she wanted to do with the rest of her life was to trace her finger down every page.

I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.