Page 47 of Katabasis

I t was still dark out when Alice awoke.

Peter was gone, his blanket folded and tucked neatly beneath a shelf.

She picked herself up and tiptoed up to the top deck, where she found, with some relief, Elspeth and Peter sitting across from each other on the prow.

They were not speaking; they both sat with their knees drawn up to their chests, staring out over the water.

Archimedes perched atop the railing, tail swishing back and forth like a pendulum.

He, too, had his gaze fixed upon the water, one paw slightly lifted, as if in remembrance of swiping goldfish.

Alice approached, clutching the blanket around her shoulders. Peter ignored her. But Elspeth met her eyes and tilted her head as if to say, Come join .

Alice crossed the deck as quietly as she could and slid down beside Elspeth. The Neurath cut silent across the night, gliding over still waters without so much as a ripple. They might have been sailing through space, floating over nothing at all.

Alice had not grown up around large bodies of water.

As a child she’d meant to go river-tubing with her parents in San Antonio.

They’d gotten lost, and whiled away most of the afternoon turning round and round on highways.

By the time they reached the river the sun was setting and most families had packed up their things to go.

They were debating whether to stay or go when suddenly they heard a sharp cry.

The families at the bank were scurrying frantically about, and eventually it transpired that a little girl had been swept downriver.

The river was shallow, only waist-deep, but moving fast, and it was hard to spot anything in the dimming light.

The shouting grew louder. Alice heard splashes; adults jumping into the water.

Alice’s mother herded them all back to the car.

They never did find out if that little girl had drowned; Alice remembered only driving away with her face pressed to the glass, squinting at the bank, hoping to see a little head emerge.

She had been terrified of swimming since.

She never joined her friends on trips to the beach.

At Cambridge, she lived along the river Cam, which was as tame as a river could be.

Still she feared it; how dark it seemed when she crossed the bridge past midnight, how easily it might swallow anything that came close.

Often of late her mind wandered to the prospect of jumping.

Whether she might splash around. Whether she might just slip to the bottom and disappear.

There was something compelling about water; its ability to absorb, and make nothing and whole both at once.

And the Lethe, by comparison—oh, the great, enveloping Lethe.

Less a river than a wound in space. She realized she had no grasp on how wide the Lethe was, or indeed if its thickness was regular at any point.

None of the maps really knew what to do with the Lethe, its inverted geography.

How far had they drifted into Hell’s uncharted domain?

Without the moon above or any banks in sight they were only three figures on a little boat, sailing on an eternal black plane with no end and no beginning.

Alice felt disembodied. Anything could happen to them.

They might sail along forever. They might vanish without a trace.

“Look.” Peter was peering over the side of the boat, arms outstretched, fingers so close to skimming the water.

“Careful,” said Alice, but he shook his head and insisted, “ Look. ”

She joined him over the railing, and her breath caught at the sight—a glimmering current of light, palimpsestic beneath the black.

People swam in the water. Well—not people, precisely, but flashes of them; faces laughing, crying, arguing, weeping; faint phosphorescent outlines in glowing green ripples.

People and things and places from other lives—a sunny cliff by the seaside, a crooked beach umbrella, a dog barking happily as it bounced closer, ever closer, tongue pink and bright, the fluff atop its head so downy soft that Alice could almost feel it in her palm.

“Memories,” said Elspeth. “Every forgotten thing from every life lived. The fresh ones form a little current, sometimes—you can see them in detail before they dissolve.”

The boat lurched to the left. Suddenly the waters around them began to churn.

Over the railing, Alice saw a fomenting black mass—something with too many eyes and too many teeth.

She shrank away, but Elspeth leaned over the edge and jammed her punting pole in the middle of the mass. “Back! Back, you. Silly things.”

The waters stilled; the boat righted.

“Don’t you worry,” Elspeth assured them. “Just a rogue nightmare. They dissipate easily enough. They’re not coming for us. Sometimes they coalesce, and you get these little whorls of terror. Boltzmann brains, I like to call them.”

“Very funny,” said Peter.

“Where do they all go?” Alice asked. “Do they fade?”

“Far from it,” said Elspeth. “This is their repository. The Lethe is all the memories that ever were. The Lethe is infinite. The Lethe is all the colors on the palette mixed into black. The Lethe doesn’t erase, it only absorbs.”

“Eternal recurrence,” Peter murmured. “Everything that has happened will happen again.”

“Don’t quote Nietzsche on my boat,” said Elspeth.

“Mea culpa.”

Elspeth settled back, arms crossed. “It’s fun to watch, anyhow. Like the television channel of the underworld. It’s always the freshest memories that are clearest. Gives you a picture of what life is like above. Can’t believe how much things have changed. Did they really kill John Lennon?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Sorry.”

“Oh, what a pity.”

Alice leaned over the deck, entranced.

A girl hopped on one foot over a wet sidewalk wriggling with worms. A man wobbled on a bike behind a bus turning into traffic.

A woman juggled boiling pots on a stove.

A boy walked alone by the river Cam, glancing up every now and then to watch the rowers training in the early morning.

Those were not her memories; those faces were not of her loved ones.

They struck a deep nostalgia in her just the same, the nostalgia you got looking inside brightly lit windows along the street at night; peeking into lives you might just have had.

Someone else’s comfort. A warm couch, an old movie humming along on the television.

And then your wife or mother or friend joining you from the kitchen, steaming mugs of hot toddies in both hands.

She found its sight oddly calming. The insides of her head, tossed out onto water—except these images had no associations with her own, they did not spark the deluge, she could just watch them go by; instantiated, then vanishing.

“Careful,” said Elspeth.

Alice realized she was leaning quite far over the railing. She shrank back.

“The Lethe will do that to you,” said Elspeth. “You’ve got to be on guard. Otherwise you dissolve quick, before you know it.”

Would she? Alice wondered. How much protection did Grimes’s tattoo afford?

“I thought the Lethe couldn’t hurt Shades,” said Peter.

“The draft doesn’t, only cleans your memory for rebirth. But unfiltered water, straight from the river—that can destroy you. I’m very careful. Stuck my pinkie in once. Just the tip. I wanted to see if it would hurt, you see.”

“And did you sense it?” asked Peter. “What you were forgetting?”

“Not at all,” said Elspeth. “That’s the most frightening part. You’d never know what you lost. You don’t get to choose.”

“You said that the Kripkes don’t fear the Lethe,” said Alice. “What did you mean by that?”

“They don’t,” said Elspeth. “No, they court it. I’ve even seen them drinking its waters. Just once. They stood at the bank in a line, taking tiny sips from a bowl. It seemed like a ritual for them. Like they’d done it before.”

Peter looked aghast. “Why?”

“Because it hurts to be human, I’m sure,” said Elspeth.

“Hurts to be reminded what you don’t have anymore.

Better to erase yourself bit by bit, until you are only what you need in the present moment.

” She shrugged. “We all do it. Even the living. Only difference is the Kripkes care less about what they’re leaving behind. ”

Peter shuddered. “But that’s not a life anymore.”

“They aren’t living lives,” said Elspeth. “They’re just rote functions. Dedicated to a single end.”

Alice didn’t find this so awful. Why wouldn’t everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain?

She’d like to learn that trick, she thought.

If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them.

Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt—if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it.

You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?

As the sun climbed ponderously onto its ever-low perch, Elspeth steered them toward the coast. “Better to be out deep at nighttime,” she explained. “The Kripkes like to move under the cover of the dark. It gets choppy, though. Days, I prefer to be close to shore.”

“Where are we headed?” asked Peter.

“Wrath,” said Elspeth. “I need a lantern.”