Page 23 of Katabasis

This greatly disappointed Alice, who despite herself had hoped for something out of those terrible Orientalist paintings—gilded sofas, hanging grapes, roast boars with apples in their mouths, and lute players in loincloths.

Or even a deranged sight out of a Bosch painting—naked revelers, flowers growing out of buttholes, bodies copulating in giant mussel shells.

Giant strawberries, crowns of cherries. Most of all she wanted to see some food.

Of course it would be imprudent to eat anything—one was never to touch the food of Hell—but after those endless dunes even a facsimile of a feast would have been welcome.

Instead the lobby was all too-bright lights, high-top tables, and randomly arranged couches with suspicious yellow stains.

At the center stood a fountain, from which burbled something thick and purplish brown.

From the ceiling, a musical number played over a faint, staticky crackle—some almost recognizable Dusty Springfield number, something you might close your eyes to and sway to before last call at the pub, a bit too soft to make out clearly either the melody or the lyrics.

In the far corner sat a foosball table, abandoned, though when Alice glanced over the top she saw the little white ball still pinging about, knocking against wooden feet with a will of its own.

Her hand twitched instinctively to try it, to see if she could knock that ball into the goal.

“Oh, hello,” said Peter.

A Shade came shuffling from the corner, bearing a golden goblet in its hands. It seemed to move straight for them. Alice tensed then, suddenly frightened. But it was headed for the fountain.

“Excuse me,” said Alice.

“Hello there,” said Peter. “I wonder if—er, if you’ve seen anyone new pass by? Tall man in black?”

The Shade ignored them both. In silence it filled a goblet from the stream, took a long draft of that thick dark liquid, then shuffled on back to the hallway where it had come. It entered the first room on the right, and the door swung shut behind it.

Alice and Peter followed tentatively. Around the corner loomed an endless hallway resembling a student dormitory, rooms lining either side, uniform and windowless.

Some of the doors were shut. Many were not.

They hung ajar, and Alice and Peter peeked inside them one by one as they strode through.

A single Shade occupied each room. One lay flat on its back, hands wedged inside its pants.

Another smoked a pipe in a room wafting over with tobacco so pungent it sent Alice into a coughing fit as they hurried past. A third sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, sipping slowly from that same kind of golden goblet they’d just seen.

No one glanced up when Alice and Peter peeked in.

No one seemed aware of their surroundings at all.

A few doors down, they heard a loud snuffling noise. A Shade sat hunched over a table in the corner. He held books up close to his nose, and every time he turned the page he sniffed up and down the spine, eyes rolling to the back of his head with pleasure.

“Carry on.” Peter gripped Alice’s wrist and tugged her along the hall.

“What was that?” she hissed. “What was he doing ?”

“You’ve never sniffed a book before?”

“Not like that!”

“Well, it’s very nice,” said Peter. “Something about the binding. It’s like—glue, I don’t know. Wood shavings. I get it.”

Alice muttered, “I would simply have kept that to myself.”

Down the hall was more of the same: Shades upon Shades sitting freely in their cells, repeating singular, rote activities.

Alice looked at every face as they wandered by, scanning for Professor Grimes’s scowl, but all she saw were blank, vaguely satisfied stares.

It became hard to look at, after a while.

All those uniform expressions of complacency.

Some of the Shades seemed to be losing their outlines, their faces smudged and blurry at the edges.

Some Shades seemed not to have eyes. Others had no definition to their mouths, ears, or hands—all senses extraneous to the drive, satisfaction at hand.

They were caught in an endless compulsive loop with themselves, repeating a motion that apparently never gave full satisfaction, or was otherwise so delightful that they just kept doing it, again and again.

The whole place was suffused with an aura of decay.

The hallway smelled of something foul and antiseptic both at once, like rubbing alcohol sprayed on rot, and the lights were too dim, crackling with fluorescent hum.

Cracks and patches of mold littered the walls, lines of ants ran along the stains, and it was all so foul that Alice was agonized that these Shades could not simply stop, take a look around, and flee the place.

Stop it , she wanted to shriek, put it down, get out —but half these Shades did not even have ears.

If she screamed to them, would they hear?

She and Peter had both long lapsed into silence.

It grew progressively more uncomfortable, looking voyeuristically into these addictions, trying to pretend they were completely unstimulated by anything they saw.

Alice felt exposed and naked. She felt she was being tested, monitored to see if any of these enticements aroused similar interests in herself.

Do you like feet? Do you like dolls? Do you like hard wooden objects?

What did Peter desire? Alice wondered. Probably nothing.

Peter came into this world with a silver spoon in his mouth; Peter had never wanted for anything.

But that was the wrong sense of want . Desire and need were very different, and she wished she knew what Peter craved, what made him weak in the knees, because then at least she would know that Peter had any vulnerabilities at all.

Here, though, Peter’s expression never changed.

He kept such a straight face; he only peered around with clinical, faintly condescending curiosity. Saint Peter could not be tempted.

The objects of lust kept growing to ridiculous proportions.

They saw Shades fellating dogs, licking chalkboards, writhing upon beds of panties; Shades pouring wine in a stupor, Shades shuddering over furls of smoke.

One Shade paced back and forth murmuring Thank you, thank you as staticky machines played tapes of canned applause.

It wasn’t remotely funny anymore—far from the sensational temptations of Bosch’s paintings, the sights in these cells were only sad and sickening.

So much of the body was on display — breathy moans and slapping and licking and squelching; bodies pierced by needles, bodies choking on food, on wine; just bodies all around, not even full bodies really but reaching organs; working mouths and darting eyes and grasping hands, abandoned by reason, lost to appetite.

Why couldn’t they just walk away? Alice couldn’t understand it.

She had never been able to understand this gross, physical desire.

She was familiar with the basic pleasures, yes, but she had never felt such bodily longing that it overwhelmed her mind.

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.

Sex was not a noble desire, it was such an embarrassing capitulation.

There was a kind of genuine longing, Alice knew, but in her view it had so little to do with clumsy machinations of the body, with mashing teeth and sandpaper stubble, rough hands and foul breath.

To her they seemed worlds apart, but she had never figured out how to sublimate it, this confused, burning want; this full-body desire she felt most acutely when she looked at—

“Gosh,” said Peter. “It just keeps going on.”

It was getting harder to keep walking, to keep peeking in; and harder to breathe; and the fluorescent hum and mold and damp were so much that finally Alice could not take it anymore.

“He’s not in here.” She halted. “Let’s go back out, let’s walk around.”

“I thought you wanted to check every court,” said Peter.

“Well, we’ve checked.”

“We’ve only been here an hour—”

“That’s enough to know. He’s not in here.”

“You said that about Pride, too.”

“Well, it’s true.” Alice sniffed. “He’s not here—he’s better than this—”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s all so pathetic!” Her head felt oddly light. She couldn’t understand why her chest was constricting, why it felt so hard to breathe. “It’s base, disgusting—he won’t be here, whatever he’s done, it’s above that—”

“I don’t think so.” Peter’s voice was oddly cold then. “I think there’s every chance he’s here.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You think so highly of him.”

“It’s not a compliment .” Alice folded her arms. “Lust is a sin of incontinence. It’s a weakness of will—I mean, just look around us—and whatever Grimes was, he was not weak of will.”

“Jesus.” There again, that cold tone. It baffled her; she had never seen him like this, and she couldn’t understand why he was so angry. “Sing his praises some more, why don’t you?”

“I’m just scared of wasting time,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. We’ve seen enough, this isn’t like him, and I’m tired of walking through this stupid—”

Peter threw up a hand. Shut up , it said, the universal gesture—and Alice was about to voice her indignation when Peter pointed to a door down the hall.

Faint, muffled noises came from within—shouting?

Screaming? Peter cocked his head, eyebrows raised in a bizarrely suggestive manner.

He lifted a finger to his lips and crept closer, motioning for Alice to follow.

“Don’t.” Alice felt an instinctive dread. “Please, Peter, don’t—”