Page 37 of Katabasis

Back then they even developed their own shorthand language, an idiotic combination of symbolic logic—which was just funny to utter out loud—and French, which only Alice spoke and which Peter thought sounded funny.

There was a lot of honking, in lieu of actual French.

This language was not at all efficient, but it amused them; it made them feel even more that they existed on a mental plane removed from everyone else, that soon they would disappear into their own symbolic order and never be understood by anyone else again but each other.

Often they descended into incoherent laughter.

Oh, how she loved his laugh. At a certain point past midnight when their minds were addled they would start to giggle at everything, but every now and then Alice said something so absurd it made Peter erupt into helpless, full-body laughter.

It lurched through him, syncopated his breath, made his arms flail, elbows up before his chest like if he didn’t try to hold himself together that laughter would break him into a million pieces.

When Peter laughed it felt like the entire warmth of the sun was turned on her, because she had done it, she had uttered the words that so surprised and delighted him that he couldn’t even breathe.

There was a time when she felt all she ever wanted to do was to make Peter Murdoch laugh.

Just as often, they fell into a happy silence as they worked.

They could go for hours without speaking; they’d developed such a comfortable natural rhythm around each other.

All Alice needed for company was the confident scribble of Peter’s chalk beside her.

She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.

And really that was the happiest Alice had ever felt—how wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

Anyhow.

All this happened before the period when Alice remembered everything, so it was a mere fog to her now.

And even if she could remember, she suspected it would feel absurdly distant no matter what, like a life lived by two entirely different people—younger, happier, more innocent people.

They were not the same people. Distant cousins, maybe. Passing resemblance.

How quickly things could change. The term ended. The project concluded. Professor Grimes gave his presentation in Bruges to a standing ovation, and Alice and Peter no longer had any reason to grind midnights at the lab. And instantly, Peter pulled away.

It took Alice far too long to get the hint.

Fool that she was, she thought their friendship extended outside the lab; that whatever had happened across all those midnight hours would endure.

She thought he’d felt it too. They had no classes together, but she invented reasons to come across him.

She started lingering in the graduate students’ lounge, just in case he came in for a coffee.

Weeknights she would swing by the halal cart hoping she would find him ordering his usual chips and curry.

She had no particular goal in mind. Nothing so concrete as a dinner date.

Nothing so bold. She had not thought that far; the question did not even take form. She only wanted to hear him laugh.

But he was never there.

She could not blame him for this. Their teaching schedules did not overlap.

They shared no lab assignments, nor were they taking any classes together.

There was no reason they ought to spend time together, except that she had enjoyed it, and wanted to do it more.

But he had not promised her his time. He did not owe her anything.

He was busy, they all were, and increasingly so as their responsibilities doubled. She couldn’t begrudge him that.

But even this did not account for the way he behaved when their paths did cross.

When they walked past one another in the hallway—one leaving Grimes’s office, one about to enter—he only nodded.

When they attended the same department functions, they exchanged nothing but bland pleasantries.

Hi, how are you? Fine, yeah, same old, grinding away—great, yeah, good to see you, take care.

She cracked jokes, references meant only for him, but he did not laugh, or did not hear.

On many occasions she lingered at doorways, hoping to walk out with him, but he walked past without seeing her.

It was so humiliating the way she’d lingered, hoping for his attention—like a dog that didn’t know that it had been abandoned, that kept on coming back.

He was not rude to her. In fact he was perfectly polite, wearing that classic Murdoch smile.

He gave her the same kind attentiveness that he would to any stranger.

But this hurt, for she had thought they were anything but.

And when at last the fact of the matter sank in—that Peter did not wish to see her, and did not hold her in special regard—she still could not wrap her mind around it. She could not understand how you could open your mind to someone so completely, for so long, and then slam it shut again.

She wanted to ask him what had happened but could not formulate the question in a way that wasn’t childish.

Why don’t you like me anymore? Why don’t you want to be my friend?

Questions for the playground; pathetic utterances.

She would not say them, she would not confirm for him that she was too dull for his attention.

That following term she cycled through every emotion she might have felt toward Peter—disappointment, anger, resentment, longing—a whole slew of one-sided angst. But above all she was confused.

All the walls were up. She had been thrown out in the cold.

An abyss lay between them, and she did not know how she had caused this.

Then she went to Venice. Then several things happened in Venice, and Alice began to feel everything slipping away from her. That was the start, she had since realized; the moment she learned that when it came to Professor Grimes, she really had no ability to say no.

And then she came back, and everything went wrong, and for the last year, Alice had been unable to pass Peter in the hallway without dropping her gaze.

There was a time when everything was going sideways that Alice tried to fix things.

Let the record display she did not give up so easily on love: that she actually did try to sit down, hammer it all out, and understand what was going on.

Peter was still avoiding her, so she slipped a note into his pidge instead.

She put it right on top of his stack of correspondence, a place where he could not fail to see.

It had been a while, she wrote. She was wondering how he was.

She wanted to sit down together. Have a cup of tea. Talk.

He saw the note. She knew he did, because the next morning when she checked, the note was gone. Peter knew she had tried. He simply never responded.

If she’d had her perfect memory back then, then she could pick through their interactions—all those late nights, all those smiles—for clues, if not the sheer comfort of reminiscence.

But all she had now was icy nods in the hallway; curt greetings; and the flap of his coat, the back of his head, as he hurried out the door.

And then the gossip; the innuendoes, the laughter. Footsteps disappearing down the hall.

That summer, the philosopher Derek Parfit published the very controversial Reasons and Persons , and for a while it was all that anyone at Cambridge or Oxford would talk about.

Alice read it with great interest. In fact, it helped her sort through much of her confusion.

Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime.

Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact.

We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves.

But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essential us hovering like a specter.

We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.

Now, Alice did not understand much about moral philosophy, and she was inclined to be skeptical that some thought experiments about tele-transportation could disprove the idea of an immortal soul, but she did find this perspective liberating.

It helped her understand that she had never really known Peter, and he had never really known her.

She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time.

But without those hazy recollections, without the historical fact that she had once giggled helplessly with her head lolling on Peter’s shoulder, she had no significant relationship to the Alice Law who was falling in love with Peter Murdoch at all.

And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else?

Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others?

Were people then all a series of lies in the end?

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 .