Page 27 of Katabasis

“But I think more than anything it makes me—well, afraid. Like I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and by not doing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important.

I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through it.

And the payoff’s not as good without the process, somehow.

If I didn’t have to sweat for it, it doesn’t count. ”

“Law, that’s deranged.”

She shrugged. “I’m a Grimes student.”

“Certainly that.” He blinked at the fire. His mouth worked several times as he apparently reconsidered what he wished to say, and Alice braced herself for another moralistic recrimination. “Did Professor Grimes—um, did Grimes ever ask you to do anything else that you thought wasn’t right?”

“This is my only tattoo. He never—”

“No, that’s not what I meant. Um.” He began tugging at the frayed edges of his sleeves. He always did that when anxious, she recalled. But that meant he was anxious. This wasn’t about her, it was about him. “Not just illegal. But something—I don’t know. Things that felt unscrupulous.”

Alice thought of the mice in Venice, their miserable, twitching bodies.

The way they shrieked and scurried when she reached to pluck another one out of the cage.

As if they knew precisely what was happening on that lab table, as if they knew what that chalk would do.

She’d become so good at displacing their spines to give them the quickest, easiest death while chalk burned into their skin; at severing their neural cords before they could fully process the pain.

If she’d ever felt ethical compunctions about it, she’d stopped caring by the end.

You got used to just about anything in a lab. Anyhow, they were only mice.

“No,” she said. “Why? Did he ever ask you?”

Peter kept fretting at his sleeve. He’d worked several threads undone. Alice was about to smack his hand to make him stop when finally he uttered, “He asked me to get him a human colon.”

“What?”

“Not from, like, a living patient.” He flapped his hands in distress. “From a corpse. One of the corpses they use for anatomy lessons.”

“They still do that?”

“Of course, how do you think they practice surgery?”

This seemed to Alice far worse than anything she’d ever done. At least her only victim was herself. “Sounds like you violated some rights.”

“The dead don’t have rights.”

“Well, debatable—but how—why—I mean, what on earth , Peter?”

“I don’t know.” Peter shrugged. “In the scheme of things, it just seemed like such a small deal. Maybe that’s how you thought about your tattoo.

He was—we were working on something—it never went anywhere, but it seemed for a while like it had some potential.

But—well, you know, chalk interacts differently with organic material. We needed a human organ to be sure.”

“You stole a colon.” Alice could not get over this. “A human colon!”

“Well. Three or four.”

“Jesus, Murdoch.”

“I wasn’t going to say no .”

“You could have reported that,” she said. “That’s an ethics violation. You could have taken it to the dean.”

A silence. They looked at each other, and then burst out laughing.

“Was it very difficult?” Alice asked.

“Actually, no. I thought it might be, but I sort of just walked in and—took what I needed. Three people saw me, so I waved, and they just waved back.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I know it’s insane,” said Peter. “I probably shouldn’t have done it. It just never crossed my mind to say no.”

“You know, he used to make me type up all his lecture notes,” said Alice. “He’d dictate, and I’d type. I felt like a secretary. Never crossed my mind to say no, either.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. One time he made me grade sixty undergrad exams in an afternoon because he forgot to do it himself.”

“Well, one time he made me clean up all my chalk dust and weigh it so he could estimate how much money we’d wasted.”

Peter snickered. “One time he threw a fully charged capacitor at my head without warning.”

“Did it hit you?” Alice asked, alarmed.

“Just my hands. I tried to catch it, I didn’t know it was charged. The shock sent me convulsing on the floor, and my hair stood up for hours. I’d never seen him laugh so hard.”

“He never hurled anything at my head.” Alice couldn’t decide if this made her feel superior or jealous.

“It was only just the capacitor,” said Peter. “That one time. The rest was mainly, you know, verbal.”

“Right. You’re not cut out for this. You’re a waste of funding. You don’t seem like you even want to be here.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s fond of that one. One time he said offhand that I was worthless until I learned German.”

“Did you?”

“I bought a phrasebook that afternoon and stayed up all night.” Peter’s voice hitched, and she shot him an alarmed look, before she realized he was breaking up not with sobs but with giggles. “Then I greeted him with ‘ Wie geht’s ’ the next morning, and he—and he looked at me like I’d gone mad.”

“ Lebensmüde ,” said Alice.

“ Sitzfleisch ,” said Peter.

This sent them into hysterics.

“God.” Alice pressed her hands against her face. They came away wet. She was crying from laughter. This had never happened before; she did not know that people actually cried from laughter. “If anyone heard us talking they really would report it all to the dean.”

“Oh, I know! Inappropriate faculty-student relationships. Abuse of power. That sort of thing.”

“I hate that language. It makes it seem like we’re children.”

“Helpless victims.”

“Didn’t know what we were getting into.”

“Eyes wide shut.” Peter glanced sideways at her. “You know, I went to his funeral.”

“ No , really?”

“Not the real one. Not with his family, or anything like that. Just the university memorial service.”

Alice remembered seeing the invitation, staring at it for a very long time, and then ripping it into tiny shreds. “I guess I forgot to go.”

Which was an obvious lie, as she did not forget things, but Peter did not press. “Right, I didn’t see you there.”

“So how was it?”

“It was so odd,” said Peter. “They were giving these eulogies about how kind and magnificent and generous he was—basic stuff, you know, they could have been describing anyone. The master called him a legendary teacher. Helen Murray got up and uttered all these platitudes about what a great mind he was. You know what he used to say about her behind her back?”

“That she was a spousal hire pretending to be a scholar?”

“Well—that too. But also, Thatcher without an ass.”

Alice snickered.

“Anyhow,” said Peter, “the whole time I was thinking, we’re the only ones who knew him.

All of him. The good, the bad, the hilarious, and all the contradictions.

The honest part of him. He was only ever his real self in the lab.

Even at his very worst. Even when he was frustrated, when he was being a bully, all that.

All he cared about was finding the truth.

He wept and prostrated himself before the truth.

And we got to know that part of him. I feel very lucky for that. ”

“God.” Alice dragged her palms down the sides of her face. “What a tyrant.”

“But he was our tyrant.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, we’re in Hell because of him.”

“ For him.”

“Right.”

They looked at each other with the brotherly fondness of foot soldiers, ones who had been on a very long journey, united by their love for a common general.

Alice wondered if the Athenians felt like this, when they stumbled home after the sacking of Troy, when they’d left their wives and children behind for a decade, when they’d only ever done it all for Agamemnon.

They couldn’t say if the battle had been worth it, or even what it was all for.

But surely the trials, the extreme experiences that no one else in the world could understand, had to count for something.

There was a kind of virtue in that ability to withstand extremes.

Proof of character. Something like that.