Page 72 of Katabasis

A small, fidgety Shade guarded the pale doors of Dis. He watched them approach with his chest puffed out; one hand on his hip, one hand clutching a black spear with a carved stone tip. He slammed this spear thrice on the marble as they ascended. “Who dares enter the Great City of the Damned?”

“Bugger off, Parmenides,” said Gradus. “It’s me.”

Parmenides squinted at Alice. “Then who’s this?”

“She’s new,” said Gradus.

“Ooh hoo hoo !” Parmenides’s chuckle scaled up and down several octaves. He leered at Alice. “What are you in for, dear?”

“Don’t answer.” Gradus pushed his way past Parmenides. The doors rumbled open at his touch.

“Murder?” asked Parmenides. “Poisoning? Did you touch a child?”

Gradus waved a hand. “Come along, Alice.”

Alice scurried behind him.

“Trade you a story for a story,” Parmenides called behind them. Alice was afraid he would follow them through, but he only stood on the threshold, brandishing his spear as the doors screeched against the marble floor. “You know where to find me.”

The doors thudded shut.

Inside was darkness, cool and silent. Gradus drifted down a hall to the right.

Alice followed. She heard a crescendoing hubbub of voices, just before Gradus opened a door and they spilled out into a courtyard, open space enclosed by four walls that reminded Alice of abbey cloisters.

Nothing green grew, but the sculptural arrangement of rocks, and the floral mosaic patterns across the tile, suggested a meticulous attempt at upkeep.

The effect was surprisingly pleasant. A tall, twisted white tree stood at its center, and Alice could not tell if it was dead or carved from stone.

Under its branches, clumped in groups of three or four, milled several dozen murmuring Shades.

“Think your professor’s in here?” Gradus asked.

Alice couldn’t be sure. The problem was there were too many Shades who looked like Professor Grimes in this courtyard. She had not expected to end up in a courtyard so full of middle-aged men. Half of them wore glasses, and all were draped in some version of the dark Oxbridge robe.

“Go on!”

“That’s right, go on!”

Quite a lot of the Shades were clustered in a huddle in the far corner of the courtyard.

They were egging on one Shade at the wall, who stood with one hand grasping a thick stack of bound pages, the other resting on what looked like the handle of a library book-drop drawer embedded in the wall.

He kept pulling it open, shuddering as if in panic, and letting it slide closed.

Each time he did, the Shades booed in chorus.

“Let it drop,” they cried. “Let it drop!”

“Suppose it’s not ready,” said the Shade at the wall.

“Not this again.”

“It’s been decades . ”

“If not now, when?”

“All right,” said the Shade. “All right.”

He squeezed his eyes shut—and looked rather silly as he did so, like a child pinching his nose before jumping into a pool—and slid his dissertation into the drawer.

He let go and flinched back. The drawer slammed shut with a resounding metal twang .

Everyone glared expectantly at the drawer, but nothing happened.

Eventually there was a lukewarm smatter of applause.

The Shades continued watching the drawer for a few moments and then dispersed again into their cliques, murmuring in disappointment.

“What happened?” Alice asked.

“Someone’s just submitted a dissertation,” said Gradus.

“Where’s that drawer lead?”

“No one knows. Only whatever goes in that slot can never be retrieved.”

“So when will they get their marks?”

“Marks.” Gradus chuckled. “Imagine, marks. No, they don’t tell you anything unless you’ve passed.

We don’t get revisions. We receive no feedback whatsoever.

We just wait in anticipation forever and ever, until hope turns to panic to disappointment.

If you hear nothing, then you must assume you’ve failed.

Only there’s never confirmation, and timelines here mean nothing, and so it’s up to you when to extinguish your own hope. ”

Under the tree, several Shades bickered over the same question.

“I’m telling you, the Furies aren’t reading them.”

“Well if not the Furies, then who?”

“You must be new here,” scoffed one Shade, and this roused chuckles around the courtyard. “It’s the victims, see, we’ve got to wait for the victims to die, and then they decide if it’s sufficient—”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would the victims hang around?”

“What did Socrates say? Their calls are followed by supplication, as they beg their victims to permit their exit from their river... ”

“Socrates was put to death for being annoying, Socrates’s opinion doesn’t count for anything.”

“Anyhow, who cares about the victims’ opinions? What makes them such moral experts?”

“Right, suppose two robbers shoot each other in the head at the same moment.”

“Come on, that’s not what happened to you.”

“Point-blank and the other guy in bed, is more like it was—”

“But suppose ,” insisted the Shade who’d first leveled the objection. “Suppose two robbers shoot each other, and they’re both victims and perpetrators, and no one has the moral high ground. Who’s reading then? Whose forgiveness matters? Who gets to decide?”

There was a hubbub of voices as Shades descended to weigh in on moral agency, forgiveness, and whether you could still be wronged if you did something wrong first. This seemed an old topic in the courtyard, something controversial and divisive and somehow such a familiar argument that all sides had long rehearsed their positions.

Someone shouted about Jesus and unconditional love, and the whole forum groaned.

The Shade who had submitted his dissertation stood hunched and alone at the wall, looking forlorn. Every now and then he traced a finger across the drawer handle, as if he could will it to respond.

“Come on.” Gradus urged Alice toward an exit across the courtyard. “We’ll try the Writing Bazaar first. Then the workshops.”

Alice thought perhaps Gradus meant “Writing Bazaar” in the sense that Harper’s Bazaar meant “bazaar,” which is to say a metaphorical marketplace of ideas.

She expected a conference, perhaps, or a shelf of print journals.

She did not anticipate a bazaar in the fantastic Oriental sense: a chaotic marketplace, stalls and stalls in rows where hawkers yelled their goods and Shades drifted through the rows, buying and bartering.

After the stretching silence of the desert this was all quite overwhelming, and Alice nearly tripped over a Shade squatting by the gate.

The Shade squawked and fell back, toppling stacks of yellowed paper behind her.

“I’m sorry,” gasped Alice. “I didn’t see you—”

The Shade muttered something Alice could not make out.

Though she did not seem to be speaking to Alice.

Rather, she whispered something fiercely at the sheet of paper she clutched in her hands.

Alice realized then that the Shade was reading each page out loud at a crawling pace, stopping every so often to mutter questions about prepositional phrases and object pronouns.

She had beside her a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style , which Alice had not seen since grade school.

“She’s fine,” said Gradus, tugging her along. “She’s just doing copyedits.”

“Copyedits?”

“Lots of Shades believe they can fail for the slightest spelling error. They spend decades combing over their manuscripts before they feel comfortable submitting.”

Alice thought of Professor Grimes, whose eyes slid so quickly over student papers she wondered sometimes if he registered their content at all. “Do the judges even care?”

“No one knows,” said Gradus. “They never explain why they reject dissertations. All we can do is cover our bases as best we can.”

Behind them, the Shade was howling and smacking herself against the temple.

“Stupid,” she cried. “Stupid, stupid—it’s two spaces after each period! Oh, it’s all got to be redone!”

The next stall was completely taken over by pyramids of used books.

The collection was enormous. Elspeth’s library was paltry in comparison.

All the books were battered and stained to various degrees.

Some missed covers; some missed entire chunks in the middle; some appeared to have been dredged from the bottom of the river, dried, and painstakingly rebound with needle and thread.

Still they looked and smelled enticing, for all books, like wine, had a readerly aroma that ripened with age, which was why bookstores and libraries smelled so good.

Alice’s fingers itched with the familiar urge to flip through the volumes.

The hawker perked up when he sensed her attention.

He passed immaterial through the piles and stopped right before her.

“De Quincey?” He held up two volumes, one thick and one slim. “De Sade?”

“None today, thank you,” said Gradus.

“You sure? De Sade’s very fun. If not for remorse, then for titillation.”

Gradus held up a hand as he moved past. “We’re fine.”

“Rousseau, then,” called the hawker. “You’ll like that.”

“What’s he mean?” asked Alice.

“He sells confessional texts,” said Gradus. “Saint Augustine, Saint Patrick, and so on. Lots of folks here think that’s the template.”

“So they read for inspiration?”

“Sure. Or to cheat. People like to copy down all the good bits—the part about souls being rendered in two, the fires of guilt burning you up from the inside, blah blah blah.”

“Or divine salvation,” called the hawker. “New translated edition of Crime and Punishment here now, brand-new, excavated in mint condition from a Derbyshire tomb—”

“No, thank you.” Gradus quickened his pace.

“Does that work?” Alice hurried behind him. “Copying down confessions?”