Page 59 of Katabasis

P eter Murdoch never meant to hurt anyone.

He was not like Alice; he didn’t have vicious determination.

Peter did not hold grudges or acknowledge rivals, in part because he was so used to winning by default.

Peter Murdoch was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a stick of chalk in hand.

For him academia was a playground, not a battlefield, and he was just so good at all the games.

Yet this made him dangerous in his own way.

For Peter had gone through life blithely assuming things would just fall in place precisely how he needed them, since in most respects, they always had.

This made him careless. He never thought much of the consequences, or about much in particular except his own research.

And it was only when things went sideways, when things got carried away, when the domino effects of his whims cascaded far beyond anything he’d hoped or intended—only then did he discover how dangerous being careless could be.

Peter was five when his genius became evident.

He was stuck ill at home, and was not getting better as quickly as hoped, and his parents had deemed it necessary to engage a home maths tutor so that Peter would not fall behind.

This tutor—one of his father’s advisees, who would have happily done anything else if not for need of pocket money—took the pedagogically irresponsible approach of feeding him one algebraic exercise at a time while distracted by his own pile of problem sets to grade.

Peter traipsed happily through the problems. And since he was not in a classroom full of children cooing over crayons, and since all his attention wasn’t spent on not drawing attention to himself, he let himself skate through the next lesson, and then the next.

The way Peter saw it, he was only happily solving the next problem as it appeared.

He didn’t notice his tutor’s jaw slackening over the hour.

“He’s astonishing,” the postgrad reported to his father. “He doesn’t belong in year one, you’ve got to get him out of there.”

Peter’s parents—his dad a mathematician, his mum a biologist—were overjoyed by this news; for all academic parents hope and expect to have smart children but don’t dare admit out loud that they want genius children.

But it seemed Peter was in fact a genius, and so they made arrangements for him to be surrounded by tutors all the time, stimulating his brain with advanced studies.

This was a good thing, for otherwise Peter’s childhood would have passed in tedious solitude.

For the other defining trait about Peter was that he was so often sick.

At first it seemed he was a classically persnickety child, always caught up with a round of upset tummy or food poisoning or diarrhea or constipation.

He’ll grow out of it, said his grandparents; some children just like to catch every germ in the air.

By the time he was six, however, it became clear that whatever Peter had was severe and chronic.

Medical research on inflammatory bowel diseases would come quite a long way over the course of Peter’s lifetime.

But in his early childhood, the most that any doctor could tell his family was that his colon seemed to be getting inflamed for no apparent reason, and that he would do best to avoid wheat flour.

This later expanded to include dairy, nuts, and raw vegetables—indeed, Peter spent a lot of time on elimination diets.

They couldn’t tell if any of it helped, only that all-liquid diets—that is, bone broth and apple juice—seemed to improve things when he was at his worst, but only because it meant there was nothing in his bowels left to clear.

At last, after many specialist visits and misdiagnoses, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic inflammatory bowel disease with no known cause and no cure.

Peter and his parents began referring to his condition as the Beast. It helped to personify the disease, for otherwise it was just a mysterious thing that messed with his sense of self.

His own immune system was attacking his own cells for no clear reason.

Easier to think of it as some capricious, alien entity.

Sometimes the Beast left him alone. Sometimes it gnawed relentlessly at his insides.

Sometimes it withdrew for several weeks, just long enough for him to make plans to go to birthday parties and the beach and go hiking, which he’d still never done, before returning with a vengeance.

The Beast was unknowable, unpredictable.

The only constant they knew about the Beast was that it couldn’t ever be vanquished; only kept at bay, hidden from, for brief pockets of time.

Peter grew used to doctor’s visits. Crohn’s had a number of side effects as a consequence of malnutrition.

His eyes were always red and scabby. His teeth were all wrong.

Every now and then a big red rash appeared all over his back, which no number of oatmeal baths would alleviate.

He was chronically underweight, and because the first course of treatment for a Crohn’s flare was immunosuppressants, he was also chronically suffering from whatever seasonal bug was floating around.

There was never a time when Peter was not coughing or sniffling or vomiting; indeed, if ever the rare day came when he appeared in good health, his parents only braced themselves for a vicious flare to come.

Peter took this all in good cheer. He had no siblings nor friends in the neighborhood; he did not have a “normal childhood” as a comparison case.

Poor health was just something he had to deal with.

Otherwise, he had his tutors. He didn’t need sports when he could stretch his mind; he didn’t need the outdoors when he had entire abstract universes unfolding in his imagination, their secrets waiting to be explored.

He loved numbers because they behaved the way they were supposed to, because the rules never changed. The square root of sixty-four never ceased to be eight.

Most of the time, he had such fun that he nearly forgot he was a sick child, shut up in his room, with no friends.

Still, Peter’s parents felt that he needed to spend some time with children his own age.

Therefore on his eighth birthday, during a months-long stretch in which Peter was actually feeling quite well, his parents invited his third-grade class over for a birthday party.

Peter had spent so little time in class that semester that he hardly knew anyone’s names, yet everyone invited turned up to his home, bringing presents and good cheer.

“Look who’s popular,” said his mother.

Peter, venturing out of his bedroom, felt quite overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked.

“Socialize,” said his father. “It’s good for your development.”

“But how?”

“Just give it a try.” His father pushed him toward the stairs. “Have fun.”

He did try, and he had enormous fun. Peter had never spent so much time with other children; he had never experienced the joys of hide-and-seek, or playing tag, or pin the tail on the donkey.

And even though he was terrible at finding hiding places, and even though he was by far the slowest in the group, everyone cheered at his minor victories; everyone laughed with him, not at him.

For three hours that afternoon Peter felt funny, charming, adored.

Everyone was so nice! And he even seemed to keep catching the attention of Jemma Davies, who even Peter knew was widely acknowledged as the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, with great big brown eyes and chestnut hair so smooth it shone.

When it came time for cake and candles, Jemma sat down beside him, placed her little hand upon his, and said in a very prim and grown-up voice, “I’m so glad you’re having us over. Company is good for invalids.”

“Invalids,” repeated Peter.

“Well, you’re very sick, aren’t you?” Jemma squeezed his hand. “I heard your mum telling my mum. That’s why we’ve all come. We’re going to make you feel better.”

She beamed at him. Peter smiled back. But everything tasted like ashes now in his mouth.

He feigned a smile through the singing and candle-blowing, through the enormous pile of presents and the endless party games that came after—but the day was ruined, and he could not receive anyone’s goodwill except with suspicion.

At the end of the night, he kissed Jemma Davies on the cheek and told her, “Your charity has been much appreciated.” And then he shut the door.

After the cups and plates had been cleaned and the presents put away, Peter asked his parents if he might be homeschooled through his A-levels.

Oh dear, they fretted; had the children been mean, had he been bullied?

Not at all, he answered; they were perfectly pleasant, only he just didn’t think he could get much out of socializing with inferior minds.

This could not be good for his development.

That night he listened as his parents argued behind closed doors.

He’s right, said his father; he is advanced, there’s no reason to hold him back.

But he’s grown cold, said his mother. Inferior minds , what a term, where did he pick that up?

We can’t have him growing up thinking he’s better than everyone else.

This was fine, thought Peter. Let them think him cold, rude, antisocial. Growing up with a chronic illness just meant choosing between bad and worse, and Peter had determined that day that no matter what else happened, he was never again to be the object of pity.