Page 44 of Katabasis

“You know what they say. Everyone does their best work when they’re young.

He was big with Russell and all the rest in the fifties, sure.

All the war stuff, fine. OBE, whatever, maybe he did save us all from the Germans.

But it’s been decades since he had a major paper out.

All he does now is rubber-stamp things.”

“That’s not fair,” said Alice.

Elspeth cocked her head. “Oh?”

“He’s made some incredible discoveries since.

” Alice felt a fierce protectiveness then, though rationally she knew Professor Grimes needed no defending on her part.

She knew he had flaws. She only didn’t want to hear it from Elspeth.

It was important to her that Professor Grimes was no one’s demon but her own.

Also, if they were going to criticize him, they ought to have their facts right.

“He’s researching memory and impermanence.

It’s so much better than his early work, it’s really field-defining stuff. ”

Elspeth’s lip curled. “If you say so.”

“It’s just taking longer to publish,” said Alice. “You can’t rush greatness.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Elspeth said drolly. “I mean, how would I know.”

They stood awhile in silence. Alice knew this silence; it was the wary silence common to every time two women encountered each other in academia. They were each sizing the other up. The same questions hung between them. Is that skirt too tight? How did you end up here? And what did it cost you?

Abruptly Elspeth asked, “Did they make you do the self-torturer problem when you had your entrance exams?”

Alice shook her head.

“I guess it’s out of fashion now. Figures.

” Elspeth took a deep drag of her cigarette, then sighed, her whole head clouded by smoke.

She rambled on. “It’s a problem of transitivity and rational decision-making.

The setup is, suppose you have to put on a device that tortures you by degrees of tiny increments, increments so tiny that you don’t even notice them.

You can only turn the dial up; you can’t turn it back down.

Every day you have the option to turn the dial up by one increment, and if you do, you get ten thousand dollars.

So every day, since you won’t notice the change in pain, you should obviously turn the dial up and accept the ten thousand dollars.

Until one day, you’re stricken with unbearable pain, and there’s no going back.

Only even then, it still remains rational to keep turning the dial up, because you won’t notice the change and because the ten thousand dollars is so attractive.

How did we get to this point? What failure of decision-making led us here ? ”

“It’s a ‘frog in a boiling pot’ problem,” said Alice.

“That’s right,” said Elspeth. “There’s a lot of solutions to the self-torturer.

It would be rational to set limits on yourself before you begin, for example.

Or it might be rational to have a friend cut you off.

But Cambridge gives you none of these. It just keeps you turning up the dial.

Up and up and up. You start getting tunnel vision about it all.

All that exists is the payoff and the dial.

Until one day my dial broke.” She shrugged.

“That’s really all there was to it. One day I stopped being able to feel anything at all.

There was no difference between pain and pleasure.

It was all just the same wash. Nothing mattered .

And it was only once I got here, once I was fucking dead , that things took on importance again. ”

“Right,” said Alice. “I think I understand.” She did not.

This numbness Elspeth spoke of—she could believe it, but this was not her problem.

Her problem was that she felt too much, and hurt too much, and she could not forget any of it, or manage to keep the thoughts at bay, and so she had to make it stop.

“I figured you might.” Elspeth’s expression softened, and she looked Alice up and down as if confirming a diagnosis. “You’ve got that look about you.”

“What look?”

“Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?”

Alice hated this misplaced sympathy. She hated whenever anyone looked at her with this much pity, as if she were a trapped rat, drowning in a bucket. She was not a victim, she had made all her choices herself, and she knew perfectly well how to claw to safety.

But Elspeth so clearly wanted to help her.

And the worst part of Alice, the self-serving and nasty part, figured, Why not?

Let Elspeth believe what she wanted. Let her believe that they were the same; victims in the same story.

People liked you better when they thought you needed them.

The girls she met at conferences were like this too.

You made some noises about harassment and condescension and the Plight of Being a Woman, and they’d flutter all around you, instantly on your side.

Wounded attachments. The delirium of shared suffering.

“Cheer up,” said Elspeth. “You’ll be all right. You want to know how I know?”

“How?”

Elspeth shot her a kind smile. “Because you’re looking for a way back up.”

Lord , thought Alice. Kill me. She couldn’t meet Elspeth’s eyes, so she focused on sucking the last dregs of smoke from her cigarette. She didn’t recognize this brand; she had no idea where Elspeth had gotten it, but it was the best thing she’d tasted in Hell. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Anytime, love. Get some sleep.”

Elspeth vanished into the stacks. Alice curled in on her side and rested her cheek against the shelves, listening to Elspeth’s rattling footsteps disappearing up the stairs.

She was cold; the air below deck felt stale and drafty at once.

She tugged Elspeth’s blanket up further over her chin. It smelled of mothballs.

Her own entrance riddle had been the Ever Better Wine Paradox.

Suppose you are gifted a bottle of wine that only gets better with time—there is no upper limit on how delicious it can become.

Suppose also you are an immortal. When is it rational for you to drink the wine?

If you popped the cork, you would be choosing an inferior wine compared to a future possible wine.

But if, applying that logic, you never popped the cork at all, then you were worse off compared to every alternative.

Alice had answered with the argument that only adopting an attitude of accepting a satisfactory, not optimal, outcome could avoid the worst possible outcome.

The principle of choosing the best possible option was, in practice, self-defeating.

You were better off arbitrarily deciding to wait five years, then opening the wine and enjoying whatever you got.

But the lesson there, the nugget of truth within the paradox, was that happiness was comparative, not absolute.

And this meant that if you could just outlast the other guy—if you could hold off even ten minutes before opening the cork—then at least you wouldn’t be the fool who drank the shitty wine.