Page 78 of Katabasis

She knew very well how hard it was to dull your own mind.

The radio blared at all hours. You could not turn it off.

You smashed it, and it screamed louder. Most times, all you could do was manage the pain.

In the past year Alice had learned a million and one tricks for distracting her mind from wanting to die.

Rituals helped. Keeping herself busy helped.

She was not one of the depressives who lay stinking in bed; she could not just lie there, the stillness hurt worse.

Moving staved the agony. Laundry day was wonderful because that was at least two hours of guaranteed distraction, of tasks she absolutely needed to do.

So too was grading day, when she could take her stack of tests to the pub and lose herself in the rote activity of checking, circling, calculating, and scrawling marks at the top.

The trick, in those days, was to cram her mind with as many thoughts as possible to keep the memories at bay.

At home alone, she read everything within reach.

She did tasks one-handed so she could hold something to her face with the other.

Shampoo bottle instructions. Canned soup nutritional information.

She pored a million times over the newspaper while mindlessly chewing her cereal.

She kept the grainy television set on at all hours in the lounge, and if her housemates were bothered at least they left her alone.

Doctor Who went on trial. Ringo Starr played with toy trains.

This did not dissuade the bad thoughts. They were always playing in the forefront, in bright colors, on full volume.

The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to full volume as well, so that the airwaves canceled each other out, and the cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.

But it all made her so tired. You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another.

It wrung you out, stretched your mind thin.

She did not have a tolerance for repetition.

Somewhere buried there was the deep, curious spark that rebelled at boredom, which longed to be productive, or at least engaged with the world.

Only that spark was too dulled now to do much more than hurt.

She had tried meditation. It was all the rage on campus those days; you couldn’t cross the street without glimpsing a New Age poster promising enlightenment, transcendental out-of-body experiences.

Alice had been desperate; she had tried everything.

She had sat cross-legged on strangers’ carpets and hummed and remained for hours in perfect stillness, chasing that promised calm, trying not to hate everyone in the room, trying to believe the lie.

She tried those methods again now, because she wanted what the forest promised.

She wanted to be good for the knob. She squeezed her eyes shut.

She slowed her breathing. She summoned the image of a candle flame—all the Cambridge yogis had mentioned a candle flame; warm and happy, the fire of life—and focused all her attention on keeping the flickering at the fore, and that heap of broken images dimly in the back.

She couldn’t tell how much time had passed.

Five minutes, ten, twenty, an hour. But then it didn’t matter, did it?

There was no end point, it didn’t count for anything.

She could reach a state of transcendental calm and it would still count for nothing.

When she woke up a hundred years might have passed, and there would still be a hundred years to go, and a hundred more after that.

This bargain was terrible. All that effort, and no reward.

A crystal shattered in her mind. The illusion could not hold; impatience exploded; a million ants crawling over her skin.

“Oh,” she cried, “I can’t stand it, I can’t be here—”

“Yes you can,” said the knob. “Try, try...”

“I’ve tried.”

“Try harder. It will come. You will calm.”

“But how do you know?”

She was aware of how childish she sounded, but at that moment she did feel a childish need for the simplest answers. If only someone would tell her she would be all right. If only someone would show her the way.

“Because you’re not the first.”

The knob creaked back, and Alice followed its gaze down the groves clustered in all corners of the campo: all up the side streets and up the walls, trailing out of windows. Dense forestry crowded the inner streets of the Rebel Citadel for as far as Alice could see.

“They come in agony,” said the knob. “They come with their regrets and confessions. They come in shame, and with a great urge to make things right. They stand in the squares and fret like you are now, until they learn the calm of stony places, and they become part of the grove.”

“And now they’re asleep?” Alice asked.

“Close,” said the knob. “Sleep doesn’t come, not here. But close your eyes, still your mind, and you get something close...”

“But what if I can’t?”

“Then seek the monasteries.”

“The monasteries?”

“Across the way,” said the knob. “In the shade lie the trees. Along the cliffs, the abbeys...”

Alice had thought the citadel was emptied, still.

But where the knob gestured, inside the walls along the cliffs, she saw Shades in congregation.

No great movement, but a kind of stirring; rhythmic, circular.

Souls pacing in place. Souls chanting in unison.

That was the buzzing, she realized; not bees, but psalms.

“Psalms at Terce,” said the knob. “Prayers at Nones, prayers at Vespers. In all other hours, prayers and meditation...”

“Praying to what?”

“They pray to the act,” said the knob. “They pray to waiting, for the strength to be patient until the end. Until the world turns upside down. Until the Lethe runs dry, and the domain of Lord Yama turns in on itself. For nothing is eternal, not even the order of this universe, and one day the eight courts will fold in on themselves and the meaning of being itself will change. They believe that souls cannot be purified by retribution, or reformation, but only by the fires of time. That the kālavāda , the school of time, holds all answers to the cryptic idiocies of Hell.”

This response was so disappointing, Alice nearly wept. “So they’re waiting for nothing.”

“Do they not have good reason to wait?” asked the knob.

“Every religion supplies an origin of the universe. Every tale has a beginning. Every beginning implies an end. The one became a million which will diminish to one again. The fires of Ragnarok will split the earth and birth it anew. Even Father Time is not infinite; even he will be slain.”

“So what?” Alice cried. “They think they’ll survive that ? The apocalypse?”

“Nothing will survive the apocalypse,” said the knob.

“But it takes away the necessity of choice. They do not move on. They do not die. They only wait. They await the turning of the sands. A new world, and a newer world after that. Worlds you could not imagine, with laws utterly unlike our own. Worlds where entropy runs in the other direction, and time proceeds toward order. Worlds where men fly, and birds are tied to the ground. Worlds where chance does not exist, and the future is a solid, steady block. Worlds without pain and suffering, worlds without subjectivity, worlds of beauty, worlds worth dreaming for...”

Perhaps, thought Alice; but this was a game not of millennia, but orders of magnitude even above that. And before that new world came, their world had to die, and everything in it. Nothing here would survive the turning of the sands. These souls would not perceive the future.

It pained her more and more to look at this forest, all this vegetation that had given up and was content now to barely be .

She thought to all the hours she had ever wasted in her life; all the minutes she had watched count down on the clock, waiting for them to go faster.

Whole days she had spent confined to her room like a prisoner, sitting blankly on her chair, anticipating the ritual marks that proved time was going by: meals she didn’t eat; prayers she didn’t attend; the bells at all hours, reminding students it was time to get going.

She’d been so relieved to sleep; so disappointed to wake.

Back then every hour that slipped by her seemed like a tiny victory.

But why had she been so eager for that time to disappear? What was that countdown to ?

At least in the world above she had the slimmest hope that something in her condition might change, that one day she would wake up and feel right again, that a door would open up; a solution would present itself.

Here that countdown led nowhere at all. Change was foreclosed.

Here all events were just little piles in the hourglass; reaching, then collapsing, over and over again.

The garden seemed so dead and cold then. That wasn’t green. Just the memory thereof. Just a cruel imitation.