Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

She spoke as if in a dream, half-unaware of the words coming out her own mouth. “I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.” “I know,” said Peter. Such heavy feet. Like dragging rocks. “And I think anything would be easier. Anything at all.”

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.

“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 did not think this was how real relationships worked, at least not from the ones she’d witnessed, but it did sound nice in theory. “Where did you learn that?” “Immanuel Kant.” “Wasn’t Kant a virgin?” “He was a great philosopher! He revolutionized metaphysics!”

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 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 like to find out where the boundary is,” said Elspeth, not unkindly. “You’d like to know when it goes from feeling pretty blue, to thinking you wouldn’t mind if a bus ran you over, to actively stringing a rope together and kicking off a chair. Is that right?”

“They aren’t living lives,” said Elspeth. “They’re just rote functions. Dedicated to a single end.” 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?

Dante had described Wrath as the swamp of the Styx, populated with furious naked souls in the bog, striking at each other and at themselves. Souls simmering such that their rage made the surface bubble. Alice had quivered upon reading this description—“This hymn they gurgle in their gullets / For they cannot get a word out whole”—for it was the first time a poet seemed to understand that wrath was not merely external; was not just a screaming raving tornado of destruction. Sometimes you swallowed it down like a hot coal. Sometimes it only ever burned you, slowly, from the inside out, until you choked. She thought of nights she’d spent awake, tracing over the corners of memories and working herself up into a rage—but it never made her incandescent, righteous; she only stifled herself in her ineffectuality. All this has happened to me, she’d think, and the world is unfair, and still I can’t do a thing about it. I might as well drown.

But she never found the resolve to end things for good. Not because she was afraid of the pain—for at that point she wasn’t sure she could still feel pain—but because of the shame. Because even after everything, despite how numb she’d become, what lingered were the tenets of the academic world, which were so burned into her bones that even in her weakest moments she still felt their echoes. If she died, they would think she had failed.

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.

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.

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