Page 64 of Katabasis

W hy didn’t you ever tell me?” asked Alice.

And Peter gave the only correct answer, which was the true answer, which was just the question flipped. “Why didn’t you ever tell me ?”

All this time, thought Alice. All this time they’d both been drowning, and thinking the other was gloating at them from the shore.

She remembered that set theory paper; remembered how proudly Professor Grimes had spoken about it.

I’m going to revolutionize how they think about categories , he’d told her.

This is the closest we’ve ever come to solving Russell’s Paradox.

They’re going to be shitting their pants. Never once had he mentioned Peter.

She pushed her palm against her cheek. “I can’t believe it.”

Peter stiffened. “Why not?”

“I’m not calling you a liar,” she said. “I believe you, I’m just—I mean, I can’t imagine why he would need to do that. He’s Grimes , for heaven’s sake—he has a million projects going on all the time, he shouldn’t have to steal —”

“You’re doing it again,” said Peter.

“Doing what?”

“Valorizing him. Defending him. You always make him out to be this—this great, larger-than-life genius—”

“Well, because he was —”

“He’s just an asshole, Law.”

“No he isn’t.” Her voice hitched. “Don’t you understand? He can’t have been. Otherwise we let some—some person jerk us around.”

“And it makes it better if he was a genius?”

“Not better. But—worth it.” Alice splayed her hands. “Don’t you know what I mean? If there was some method to the madness, then at least—right?”

Peter stared at her a long while, then sighed. “I do, yeah.”

“And because—well, he just didn’t seem all that bad, do you know what I mean? He wasn’t like the rest. A bad actor.”

“I know,” said Peter.

This was how they’d consoled themselves for years.

At least Professor Grimes wasn’t like those other professors, the toxic ones, the ones who screamed abuses at their lab assistants and called them stupid to their faces, spittle flying out of their mouths.

Wasn’t like the anthropology professors who took their students out on field trips in South America and went mad, hurling cups and plates and putting their students’ lives in danger.

He wasn’t a bully, wasn’t a tyrant. After all, what all those abuses usually boiled down to was insecurity and incompetence, and Professor Grimes was neither.

All he ever did was utter a stern word. He only ever held them to the same exacting standards to which he held himself.

Being upset with Grimes was synonymous with being bad at your job.

And even now, in the pits of Hell, Alice could not shake the conviction that if she had gotten into a tizzy about it, then it was all her own fault.

“And I just thought, if it wasn’t working for me, then that meant there was something wrong with me,” she said. “After all, you were doing just fine.”

“Funny,” said Peter. “That’s how I felt about you.”

They blinked at one another.

“It’s embarrassing in retrospect,” said Peter. “He was so good at pitting us against each other.”

“It felt like that for you, too?”

She had always assumed theirs was a one-sided rivalry.

She was the mess, and Peter Murdoch was the unreachable yardstick; the standard against which she was always measured.

Peter could have done this in his sleep.

He gave Peter the Cooke, after all; meanwhile poor Alice was so hopelessly behind that she needed an illegal, permanent pentagram to keep pace.

“Oh, yes. Every time.” Peter affected a growl.

“‘You haven’t got Alice’s creativity, Alice’s drive.

Alice shows up first and leaves last and she’s the only one between you who will get ahead, she’s got what it takes .

Alice is a true scholar. Alice will leave her mark on history, and you will only ever be a dilettante. ’”

“He didn’t,” said Alice. Hearing this made her feel better in the stupidest way. “There’s no way he said that.”

“Are you blushing?”

She pressed her hands against her cheeks. “I am not.”

“You’ll take the compliment. Even now.” He shoved at her shoulder. “Jesus, he really did a number on us.”

“But it wasn’t all bad,” she said. “He made us good magicians.” He made me perfect . Her tattoo twitched, and even then, she could not bring herself to consider it more a curse than a blessing.

“I don’t know, Law.” Peter pulled his legs to his chest and rested his chin atop his knees.

“I’ve been wondering this myself. Whether we really needed Grimes to become who we did.

Because, honestly, I think anyone could have made us good magicians.

He just convinced us we had to suffer for it.

Just had me thinking, even when I was on the bathroom floor, that I wasn’t tough enough.

That if I just wanted it enough, I’d be all better. ” He snorted. “Stupid.”

“So how...” Alice glanced at Peter’s midriff, then back up at his face. “How are you now?”

“Surgery helped,” said Peter. “I’m in remission.”

“Until?”

He shrugged. “Until I’m not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “So it goes. Doesn’t matter now.”

The decline was very quick after that.

Really it was merciful, how rapidly the Escher trap drained their energy.

The air got hotter. Their mouths were like sandpaper, their tongues flat, rough stones.

They sat side by side, but as time trickled on, their heads and shoulders drooped, like they were toys running out of battery, until they were slumped, Alice lying on Peter’s lap, Peter lying atop her.

Alice was fairly unbothered by it all. Even if she was upset, her mind and body were too numb to register much; it took energy to grieve and she had none anymore.

Her ears buzzed in a way that was almost pleasant.

She closed her eyes, and thought only of cool rivers, velvety darkness, blanketing waters.

Was this so terrible? All she had to do was go to sleep.

She heard the scratch of pencil against paper. She opened her eyes. Peter was scribbling on her notebook.

She lifted her head. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure a way out.”

“We’ve tried everything,” she mumbled. “There’s nothing else.”

“Oh, there’ll be something.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.”

“Of what?”

“It’s a theorem in mathematics.” Peter sounded bizarrely chipper.

“I learned about it when I was a child. Basically, it says no theory of mathematics can ever be complete, because for any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that the system cannot prove. Math has its limits. There’s always something we don’t know.

Some people think Godel’s theorem proves the existence of God. ”

“But it doesn’t prove anything at all.”

“It does, though. It proves there’s always another option. It proves no system is ever closed.”

“Jesus, Peter.” Alice blinked fast, but the dots would not clear from her vision. “That doesn’t prove anything. Sometimes maths is just maths.”

Peter’s pen spun frenetically in his hand.

“Well, consider this: In book four of The Inferno , Dante asks Virgil if any soul that was not saved by Christ had ever been rescued from eternal Limbo. And indeed, Adam and Abel and Noah, among others, had been blessed and raised to Heaven. God broke his rules, just for them.”

“No one takes book four seriously.”

“I mean, I too have some bones to pick with Dante. But the point is, even Dante’s vision of Hell includes exceptions.

The Underworld yields and bends. It is unpredictable—it follows no order but its own.

It is just as Borges said— the certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, renders us phantasmal —and yet we are not phantasmal, not annulled, because nothing is fully written!

There is no coherent set of axioms that explains it in full.

Just like maths. Ergo, there will be some way out. And I will find it. I must.”

“That isn’t how logic works,” said Alice. “I am sure this proof is missing quite a lot of steps.”

Peter shrugged but said nothing. He only continued writing.

It exhausted her to watch him. How silly this was, she thought.

How silly this all was—not just his scribbling, but the entirety of their efforts.

Their situation in the Escher trap was just a microcosm of their entire lives at Cambridge: endless scribbling in an attempt to prove they could be the golden exception when in truth there was nothing exceptional about them at all; they were only following the scripts laid out for them from the beginning.

And clearly the only thing to do was to get off the wheel, to quit, and refuse playing the game.

Really the only victory here was death. How could she convince him?

She tugged on his sleeve. “Peter.”

He paused. “Yes?”

“We don’t have to be afraid,” she whispered. “It’s just as Elspeth said. We’re living souls in Hell. We won’t go anywhere. We won’t become anything. It’ll just be over—everything, all of it, done.”

“But I don’t want it to be done.”

“Oh, hush.” She patted his knee. “It will be fine, I promise.”

“Don’t say that.”

She only patted him more firmly, as if he were a crying babe, as if he only needed to stop making such a fuss. “It’ll all be silent. It will be all right.”

She was so tired. Her eyesight had gone blurry. She couldn’t see Peter’s face then. She saw his lips moving but heard nothing, and then all she saw was the outline of a shape, growing smaller and smaller in her view, until all receded to black.

Snap.

Her eyes blinked open. Peter’s fingers hovered just under her nose. He snapped again, and she startled awake, ears ringing.

“Wake up,” he said briskly. “I’ve figured it out.”

“Hm?” Alice raised her head. Her whole body felt fuzzy. She didn’t remember when she’d drifted off to sleep, nor could she tell how long she’d been out. The low red sky burned above, just the same as always.