Page 56 of Katabasis

Alice sat and accepted a cup.

It was a well-known fact about Helen Murray that she would not entertain work talk until she had gone through the ritual of boiling water in her kettle, measuring out tea leaves, and waiting the full five minutes for it to brew.

Until then you were supposed to make small talk.

This was supposed to be the most humanizing thing about her.

Helen Murray cared about you; she cared how your life was going, what extracurriculars you pursued.

Her advisees loved her for this. Alice hoped, for this reason, that Helen Murray might hear her out.

Helen clinked a spoon around her cup. “Why don’t you tell me what’s happened.”

Haltingly, Alice explained.

When she finished, Helen sat silent for a long while. Then she took off her glasses, looked Alice up and down, and sighed. “Please let’s not be so immature about this.”

“Um. I don’t know what that means.”

“You surprise me, Alice. One would have thought you knew what you were getting into.”

“Getting into?”

“A story as old as time. See Aristotle and Phyllis. Merlin and Morgan le Fay. The boys in our department, they never learn. Hungry beasts. You’re at Cambridge. Didn’t you know?”

Alice could not determine if Helen was joking.

She understood the reference; she, too, had seen that woodcut of naked Phyllis, Alexander’s consort, riding Aristotle like a horse.

It was very funny, and Aristotle looked ridiculous, but Alice could not see how this was useful guidance for her career going forward.

“But it’s not—I mean, the way they treat women, it’s not fair.”

Helen’s lip curled. “Ah, you’re a feminist now!”

This was a pointed barb—the first inklings of a trap, but Alice was too distressed to see what she had walked into.

Helen hosted the annual Women in Magick conference at Cambridge, but Alice had never gone.

No one in her cohort bothered to go. Belinda went once her first year, and came back rolling her eyes— Just a bunch of crones, wishing the men would die .

No, no one in her cohort was a feminist; they eschewed the label, they thought it would only bring them trouble.

“That’s not what I mean,” said Alice. “It’s just—I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course.” Helen set down her cup. “So why did you come to me?”

That much should be obvious , thought Alice. Why did Helen think she was here, and not in the offices of Caspar Stuart, or Aaron Byrne?

“Because we have so much in common?”

This too was a trick question, but Alice took the bait. She thought solidarity was on offer; she could not help but nod.

“No, dear.” Helen folded her arms and leaned forward. “As it happens, we have nothing in common.”

The trap sprang.

“Girls like you despise women like me. Isn’t that so? You think we are wrong to insist on the differences of our sex. You find our activism embarrassing. You think we complain too much.”

The accusation was just, all these things were true. But Alice had always harbored these thoughts as a sneaky conviction. She could not really justify them.

Helen pressed on. “And why wouldn’t you think that?

You’ve never known a locked door. Your mothers were educated, your schools were coed, and so you think the whole world is open to you.

You want to wear slacks, and shirts without bras, and drink all night long with the boys, and you want everyone to treat you just the same. ”

It occurred to Alice that Helen had been waiting a long time to say these words; had banked up this screed, watching her and Belinda and the others in the halls, awaiting the first one to stop by.

This was not about her anymore; it was not even about Grimes; it was about Helen getting her word in, and Alice was merely the audience.

Helen leaned forward. “The difference between women like me and girls like you is that we always understood the battle was never over. Your cohort has chosen to live like the rules don’t apply to you.

And it seems to work. I salute you girls, I support you.

I wish I could have done the same. But you can’t just cry wolf when things don’t go your way.

What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you. ”

“I’m not crying wolf,” Alice said desperately. “I just—I need guidance—”

“You want to change advisors, then? You want to work with me?”

This took Alice by surprise. She had not planned to ask; had not even considered it a solution. And perhaps her face betrayed her thoughts, because Helen laughed. “Of course you don’t. You don’t respect me enough for that. You think I am a—what was it? A spousal hire in a girdle?”

“I didn’t...”

Oh, but Alice had. They’d all said it. They received the gossip first from their advisors and they giggled about it among themselves, told stories at late nights at the pub— does Helen even publish, does anyone take Helen seriously, what will happen when he divorces that cow?

But professors’ ears were much closer to the ground than anyone thought.

Alice should have known this, because she knew Grimes was acutely aware of everything anyone said about him .

“Of course.” Helen found the confirmation in her face. “That’s a no. Then would you like to go to the police?”

“What? No—”

“To file a complaint, then?” Helen was having her fun. “Would you like him reprimanded by the university, compelled to write you an apology? Would all this make you feel better?”

“No—”

Helen threw her hands up. “Then help me understand. What are we doing here, Alice? What do you want ?”

Alice felt so stupid then.

Why didn’t she have any response? Why was this question so hard?

It was as if she’d sat down for an exam, only to find she didn’t comprehend any of the material.

All the contradictions were coming to a head, and she couldn’t synthesize an answer because none of her positions made any sense.

She wanted Grimes’s attention but also his respect.

She adored his power, except when he used it against her.

She wanted no special treatment for her sex, and still she felt wronged, in a way she felt that only women could be wronged.

Helen was right—she could not have it all, could not believe everything she did and still complain.

But still, was there not something wrong here? Was she so wrong to feel hurt?

She tried to sort through the most basic question. What did she want? If she could wave a magic wand to fix this, what outcome would she have?

It boiled down to one thing: she wanted Grimes to respect her, to like her again, to go back to being her teacher again. But Helen could not help here there. Grimes’s disposition toward her was an immovable fact. She could not change it by wishing.

In fact, all of her wishes were ridiculous.

She wanted it all to have never happened.

She wanted her mind back. And she wanted to be more than a body, more than mere flesh , a thing to inscribe and observe and maybe fondle when you were bored.

She wanted the version she was promised, she wanted a teacher who cared about her, who respected her as a thinker, who did not treat her as a tool.

But all this was a fairy tale. In relentlessly enforcing the glamour, she had closed off her other options. And now she was left in a trap she had constructed for herself.

There is no point , she thought helplessly.

No point in breaking out. It will destroy everything to try.

Stop believing in one postulate, and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

You cannot have a stable Euclidean surface without the parallel postulate; you cannot survive without believing you are invulnerable.

So your only option is the reconstruction of the lie—I am not embodied, this cannot matter, and so it does not matter.

“So you see.” Helen’s expression was not unsympathetic. “It only hurts you to take this further. The best thing you can do for your career now is to forget it ever happened.”

I can’t , Alice wanted to cry. I can’t forget anything.

“Grimes certainly will.” Helen’s mouth twitched. “He’ll be on to the next freshman by Michaelmas, and then it’ll be business as usual with you. And anyhow—as you say, it was only a kiss.”

Not only a kiss , thought Alice. Her tattoo seared white-hot, hot as the day he’d carved it into her skin. But this she could not reveal. She had promised Grimes her silence; she still wanted to be a very good girl.

And she suspected that Helen knew, anyhow.

Not the details. Only the shape. Helen must have known, because she had seen it all happen before, must have been through it herself, and here she still sat where she was.

Her own office. Courtyard window, mahogany desk, tenure.

What did that take? Alice wondered. What cages of beliefs kept Helen going?

Helen was not mocking her. She had laid out the blueprint. Believe the lie—trust the lie—it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

“Thank you,” Alice managed. “This has been very helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” said Helen. “Do finish your tea.”

After that meeting Alice began dreaming of dying.

It wasn’t so much that she made active plans to end her life.

That took too much initiative. More often she would walk along Sidney Street as the buses whizzed by and reflect that it wouldn’t be so bad if one just happened to hit her.

She liked to imagine her bones crunching; her blood splattering across the pavement.

She made a game of wondering what, precisely, would be the acute cause of death—the splintering of her skull into her brain?

That would be best—much worse was the messy, internal splitting that irrevocably broke you but left intact your ability to feel pain, your ability to think and reflect that this was the end.

If she was going to die, she’d like to do it headfirst.

Anyway, dying seemed perfectly acceptable on moral grounds.

The best argument Socrates could make against suicide in the Phaedo was that mortals were like possessions of the gods, and that the gods would be irritated if one of their possessions freed itself from their mortal prison by self-destruction.

The Christian injunction against suicide only seemed to be a reframing of that.

But God’s interests did not seem relevant here.

Probably her friends and family would be upset—her mind wandered vaguely to her parents in Colorado, sobbing as they hung up the telephone—but she could not imagine anyone would miss her that much.

There simply didn’t seem much to go on for.

How could she explain it? What was devastating was not the touch—he had hardly been violent with her.

No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing.

No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.

It was all such a fucking cliché. How could she ever have dared to think it did not apply?

Girl enters into the academy, and the lads get rough.

She felt flung into a well-trod story whose ending was already written, and she had no choice but to follow along, utter her lines, and wait for the curtains to close.

And it felt, during those days, that the easiest thing for her would be to just jump off the stage.

But she never found the resolve to end things for good.

Not because she was afraid of the pain—for at that point she wasn’t sure she could still feel pain—but because of the shame.

Because even after everything, despite how numb she’d become, what lingered were the tenets of the academic world, which were so burned into her bones that even in her weakest moments she still felt their echoes.

If she died, they would think she had failed.

Poor Alice, they would say. Another Grimes student driven mad. And Belinda would cluck her tongue and say in a gossipy tone to the next cohort of bright-eyed candidates, “I’m sure you’ve all heard of Alice too, poor girl—remember the counselor’s office is available if ever you should need to talk.”

Alice could bear any amount of pain. But she could not bear that shame. It still mattered to her, above everything else, that they respect her as a scholar.

So she kept plodding on; showing up to lectures, keeping her hours in the lab, grading papers and drawing pentagrams and filling her brain with all sorts of useless information.

As long as she was in the lab, focused on the work, struggling with translations so difficult that she could think of little else, she could distract her mind enough to keep the memories at bay.

It was when she left the department that the memories rushed back.

She couldn’t sleep; she could only lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling as Professor Grimes’s face loomed in her imagination.

She stopped eating; everything she put in her mouth made her stomach roil.

Her hair started falling out. Her skin turned gray.

People called out to her, people tried to help.

She barely heard them; she did not answer.

She heard a strange buzzing in her ears all the time.

The world felt muted and distorted, as if she were moving underwater.

Still she kept going. She didn’t know what else to do. Her plan, if she could call it that, was simply to be an automaton until the center could no longer hold; until she fell to pieces against her will.

But it was Professor Grimes who shattered first—literally, all his flesh and guts and bones wrenched apart with the centrifugal force of millions of years of stored living-dead chalk energy.

And Alice—who stood stock-still with his brains and skull fragments and blood splattered across her face—could not stop laughing. For a way out had opened up after all. And it seemed the most hilarious thing in the world, in that instant, that it nevertheless led straight to Hell.