Page 32 of Katabasis

Three weeks into Alice’s first semester, Professor Grimes had taken her to the faculty club for tea.

Alice was very nervous and excited about this.

She had stayed up late the night before preparing talking points about what classes she’d enjoyed and what she’d struggled with so far, and a seven-point proposal for new projects.

She had never gone out socially with Professor Grimes and she wanted reassurance that he liked her.

But the first question he asked, after he’d ordered them two sultana scones and a pot of Darjeeling, was, “You see that kid?”

Alice glanced out the window, and with a start glimpsed Peter Murdoch wandering past. He wasn’t paying them any attention.

He was just doddering around on the sidewalk, blinking at a sheet of paper.

Alice’s chest tightened. She didn’t have any classes with Peter that term, and she hadn’t spoken to him since that orientation tea, though her heart always beat oddly when she saw him in passing around campus.

He looked lost. He kept glancing up at street signs, then turning round in a circle, like a dog chasing its own tail.

“That’s your competition,” said Professor Grimes. “Your yardstick. The only thought in your head these next five years should be whether you are keeping pace with him.”

Alice glanced back outside at Peter, who now waved apologetically at a honking car as he darted across the street.

Keeping pace , he’d said. Not beating him.

“The world will be much easier for him,” Professor Grimes continued.

“He looks, acts, and speaks like a magician. He does the classical sort of research the Royal Academy favors. His parents are famous. Everyone in our field already knows his name. When he goes in for job interviews, he will know to ask about his colleagues’ children, because firstly he might already know them and secondly he will remind his interviewers of them.

You, on the other hand. You don’t talk like them, you don’t look like them, and your research doesn’t fit what they’re looking for.

You will always have to perform twice as well for half the acclaim. You have no room for mistakes.”

Alice had suspected all this for a while. She’d just never expected anyone to lay it out so bluntly, and she wasn’t prepared for how much it hurt. She stared back into Professor Grimes’s impassive face, and wondered why he’d brought her here at all.

“I don’t say this to discourage you,” said Professor Grimes. “I say this because I’ve been where you are. You and I—we were not so blessed. We have to climb our way up. You’re doing good work, Law. But that’s just it. It’s merely good . I need you to be exceptional.”

“I can be exceptional,” Alice said, for it seemed the only reply she could make.

“Good girl.” Professor Grimes nodded at her untouched cup. “Drink your tea.”

He did this often over the next few years.

Every failure of hers was cast in direct reference to Peter’s success.

You’ve coauthored one paper. Murdoch has coauthored three.

You’ve won a thousand pounds in funding.

Murdoch’s won twice that. You can’t make the same mistakes as Murdoch, he told her.

You don’t have as much room to fail. And she knew he was only being a good advisor, for a good advisor kept you aware of the reality of your situation.

Professor Grimes had come up from humbler origins than she had; he’d come to magick late, he was the first in his family to graduate college, he didn’t know which fork to use either.

From his perspective, surely, he was showing her the keys to the kingdom.

But she couldn’t help but feel a little sting every time he brought it up. As if she’d disappointed him by being born to the wrong sort of parents, with the wrong sort of face, without connections, without a cock. As if he were coaching her to run a race they both knew she’d already lost.

So perhaps she watched Peter more than was good for her.

Her eyes lingered on his shadow every time they were in the same room.

She studied his habits, his mannerisms, the cadence of his speech.

She pondered which traits she could adopt.

She couldn’t get away with his haplessness; no one would afford her that much grace.

And she couldn’t study the way he did, or the way he claimed he did; she could not comprehend dense pages in a single glance.

But maybe she could try to move with his lightness, or at least smile half as often.

She developed a hyperawareness of Peter.

She knew the precise patter of his footsteps.

She always knew if he was in the building—she could spot his scuffed shoes, his broken umbrella, the brown wool coat always hung on the third hook from the left.

She could always tell when people were talking about him; it was comical, really, the way her ears perked at any mention of his name.

She knew his laughter from across the hall.

She would have known it from the other end of the world.

She would come to regret this later, the year everything went south, the year she lost the ability to forget things she should not have heard.

She was napping in the lab that day. She napped in the lab often; no one minded, they just walked around her.

And Alice always had a habit of disappearing into the bench.

She was slight, and she did not snore; if you didn’t look carefully, you might think she was a pile of coats.

She had just awoken when the door opened and Peter walked in, chattering animatedly to someone she didn’t know.

She could have gotten up. It would have been the polite thing to do. But that old impulse, the need to observe Murdoch in every context, made her lie very still.

She tried to make out his interlocutor. It was hard to guess from voice alone; a table blocked her view.

She was never sure thereafter of his identity.

She could only guess, and the guessing was worse.

The guest spoke with an American accent but seemed well-versed in the Cambridge way of magick.

A visiting scholar, then. Someone here for a talk, or just passing through, catching up with colleagues. Possibly Princeton. Probably Harvard.

“—not so bad,” Peter was saying. “I mean he has his fits, everyone knows, but you just learn to read his mood. On the whole he’s been pretty good. Nothing like the rumors.”

“What about the girl?” asked his guest.

Alice would always remember how easily the words slid out of Peter’s mouth. There were words you said to create an effect, words constructed to influence your interlocutor. Then there were words you really believed, had believed all along, words just waiting for the right prod to spill.

“Oh, her,” said Peter. “No, I wouldn’t say she has a problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s like a bird,” said Murdoch. “Hopping where the seed is. Eating right out of his hand.”

“Burrowing in for warmth,” said his guest.

“Warmth,” Peter drawled, the nastiest sound Alice had ever heard Peter make. There was the sound of fists against palms, some unquestionably vulgar gesture. They both laughed.

Peter suggested they go look at the glass suspensions in Helen Murray’s lab, and his guest agreed. The door clicked shut behind them. Their footsteps faded down the hall.

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 advisor. A fragment of hearsay.

She could never state this theory out loud, because it sounded crazy.

But she was certain of it now: she could draw a straight line from that laughter in the lab to her failure to win the Cooke.

Harvard had thrown a Cooke reception in July. The selection committee would have gone. No decisions had been made yet. There would have been wine, and then gossip. Impressions would have solidified. It was very plausible. She was not crazy.

Of course she wanted to be wrong. For months and months she held on to the hope that she was wrong, that it was all in her head, and she was making it all up.

Surely no one else lived like this—burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences.

Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety.

Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.

This marked the difference between them. Alice fretted, and Peter danced on air.

If ever she brought it up, he truly would not remember. And if she tried ever to explain how he had hurt her, then he would think her mad. “You sabotaged my career,” she would tell him. And to this he would say, quite innocently, “What?”

As they picked their way down the ridge it became clear they were not alone.

A caravan of other journeyers—all Shades, all souls who had passed or bypassed Desire—appeared on the rocks around them.

The slope was funneling them all in the same direction.

Alice peered round at the Shades’ faces, trying to imagine what they had done.

It made sense that so many progressed from Lust to Greed, if one trusted Dante’s account of things.

They were both sins of incontinence and desire; only greed was the sin of desire turned against others, a sin committed when one realized that others, too, would do anything it took to get what they wanted.