Page 66 of Katabasis
L ate summer in Cambridge, two weeks to Michaelmas.
The town was birdsong and rippling water and the barest hint of red peeking around the edges of the leaves, and the sun still shone warm enough to make you forget, year after year, the winter rains around the corner.
Everything was new and shiny and full of promise.
Alice Law tripped up to the department in a brand-new pencil skirt and stiff white oxford shirt.
She had ironed both herself that morning in a panic; she thought she’d seen a crease in the mirror on her way out the door.
She could still feel the heat of the iron as she paused before the main entrance, one hand on the door handle, bracing herself for her first meeting with her new advisor.
The night before she had flown her first transcontinental journey, then ridden the late train from King’s Cross to Cambridge station, then dragged her trunk the two miles north to her little room in Audley Cottage.
Everything was new and exciting—the taste of digestives, the bright red telephone boxes, the cars zooming down the road on the right.
When she stepped outside that morning she felt she had traveled across both space and time, down the rabbit hole and into a fantasy of her own making, into a more genteel and colorful world.
She felt that she had jumped through the last hoop. They had finally let her into the club.
She had not yet met Jacob Grimes in person.
She’d watched him present at a few conferences in America but never summoned the nerve to go up and say hello.
Every conversation they’d had since her acceptance had been through the post—Professor Grimes seemed to hate the telephone—through which she’d tried to glean clues about his personality.
He struck her as blunt, casual, and a bit scattered—he’d asked her the same question about her arrival date thrice over two months.
But what else could you expect from the greatest magician in the world?
She steadied herself with a breath, opened the door, and stepped through.
The building was silent. Term would not start until next month; the campus was empty.
Professor Grimes’s office was at the end of the hall.
The door hung slightly ajar. Alice saw, with relief, that someone was sitting behind it. She knocked.
“Come in.”
“Good morning,” she said, and her voice cracked only a little. “I’m—I’m your new advisee. Alice Law.”
“Hello, Alice. Have a seat.” He came around the front of his desk and stood leaning against it, hands clasped before him as he stared down at her.
Afterward, she couldn’t say what he looked like.
It would take several weeks of blinking out of the corner of her eye, registering his profile, his height, the faint beginnings of a stoop.
Professor Grimes was like the sun. She couldn’t look directly at him, she could only sense his presence from the edges. “It’s lovely to meet you.”
“I’m so excited to be here.” She’d rehearsed this statement many times over but could never make the words come out in a way that didn’t seem fawning or stilted.
Now they tumbled out her mouth all out of order, breathless and silly.
“It’s such an honor to be working in your laboratory—I’m so grateful to be here, I can’t wait to get started—”
“You sound nervous, Alice.”
“I—I am.” She swallowed. “Well, of course I am.”
“Don’t be.” He smiled, and for the first time Alice understood what it meant for someone’s eyes to literally twinkle. “You deserve to be here. Yours was the strongest application I’ve read in a long while.”
“Oh.” Alice’s eyelashes fluttered, actually fluttered , and her fingers twisted frantically in her lap.
She had prepared for a litany of questions.
She was waiting for Professor Grimes to realize he’d made a mistake in accepting her; she still felt she had to pass a test. She had no idea how to react to such a compliment. “I don’t know what to say.”
How much a simple word of encouragement could mean to a young and insecure mind.
Professors never knew the impact of their utterances.
They seemed not to realize that a careless comment, the briefest smile, could make or break a student’s day.
Professors, who saw dozens of hopeful faces over the course of a day, forgot always that they were their students’ entire universe.
Though perhaps Professor Grimes did know.
Perhaps this was why he met Alice’s eyes with such deliberation.
Perhaps he knew what it meant to her—fresh from America with all the wrong clothes and mannerisms, terrified she’d tripped her way into a program where she was badly outclassed, and resentful already of the peers who seemed destined for Oxbridge from birth—to hear these words from his mouth.
All it took was those simple words, and Professor Grimes had Alice’s undying loyalty.
“Never let them make you feel like you don’t belong.
” He leaned forward, and his gaze was so intense that Alice felt dizzy.
“Posers in flapping gowns. Junior clerks in the making. Remember that you’re special, Alice Law.
Remember your particular mental signature.
That’s the only thing worth holding on to.
That spark.” He rapped his knuckles against the table.
“Welcome to Cambridge, Alice. We’re going to take apart the world. ”
In the months to come Alice would learn that Professor Grimes, like her, had come up from less-than-illustrious circumstances.
The son of an absent alcoholic who had in his youth squandered his own father’s fortune, Jacob Octavian Grimes spent late nights at the local library reading everything from Bacon to Wittgenstein.
He had inherited that aristocratic curiosity that often skips generations.
His was a mind meant for Mozart and Proust, and he clung to this conviction.
There was no money for schooling past high school, so he joined the army, did his time overseas, and came back with a scholarship to a college in Austin, where he earned a technical degree in agricultural engineering.
And then, through the persistent phone calls of one nearly retired professor who recognized in him a singular mathematical mind, Grimes found himself at Oxford, where he was so badly outclassed that for the first time in his life he longed for home.
They mocked his handwriting, his outdated proofs.
They imitated his drawl. They called him the Texan.
They asked if he wore cowboy hats. He found himself looking up the cost of return fare.
Then he thought more carefully of Lubbock, of stained floors and empty bottles. He remained.
Then there was the war. Jacob Grimes went back into uniform, this time with the War Office’s research division, and by the time things wrapped up he had a British passport and several medals as reward for his achievements.
Perpetual Flasks, instant disinfectants, Lembas Bread that never ran out.
Jacob Grimes had kept the troops alive. There were the failed interrogation trials—all increasingly sadistic versions of the Liar Paradox—but no one spoke anymore about those.
For a brief moment after the war, magicians were celebrities, and Grimes’s face was printed on every newspaper in the country.
The War Office’s Warlock, they called him.
He left the army with the sort of reputation that gives one unlimited research funding.
He was just too late to join the glory of the Vienna Circle, but he rode the cutting edge of all the scientific world’s exploding innovations thereafter.
During the war years everyone was obsessed with the bomb, but afterward there were solid-state physics, the transistor, the computer.
New work in quantum physics was putting Einstein in his grave.
Fred Hoyle coined the “big bang” moniker, and to his dismay, it took off.
Nash proposed his game theory equilibrium in the fifties, and this set off a flurry of research into social paradoxes.
The world was getting faster, more bewildering.
Questions exploded, and Jacob Grimes chased them down each rabbit hole.
When the sixties rolled around, no one remembered Jacob Grimes as anything other than a fixture of the field.
He was synonymous with analytic magick itself.
He set the agenda. He had no beginning and no end; he had simply always been there , an incontrovertible fact of the discipline, a necessary encounter if you wanted to accomplish anything at all.
He had ascended to the hidden world. He brought his advisees with him.
This was the advantage of being a Grimes student.
All the doors were open. You could get an audience with anyone; you could secure funding for anything; you could travel anywhere, and all it took was his assent.
When Alice was under his wing, no one questioned her right to be in the room.
“My student,” he would say, hand stretched toward her.
And suddenly it was like she had a glow upon her.
For the first time, people saw her. She spoke, and people listened.
So despite everything that happened after, Alice would always remember that it was Professor Grimes who believed in her first. He’d plucked her out of obscurity.
He’d seen her file in a stack of applications, held it up to the light, and decided, yes.
Yes she was worth his investment, worth initiating into a world of mystery, worth making her equal to what he was, an intrepid traveler through abstract lands.
His was the first plank in her staircase of belief.
And in a world founded on insincerity and insecurity, that faith was a debt she would always feel she had to repay .