Page 8 of Katabasis

“Stop talking. Just breathe.” The gravity of the situation had caught up with her.

Alice remained calm. She had talked undergraduates down from quitting Professor Grimes’s seminars before.

She had, for better or worse, plenty of practice at talking away fear.

“There’s a solid protruding block a few feet up.

You can brace your feet against that and lean forward, which will give your arms a rest. Do you think you can make it just a few more holds? ”

“I can’t let go.” Peter whined again. “My wrists...”

“Do it or you’ll die,” Alice snapped. “ Move , Murdoch. Don’t think, just do it.”

Miraculously, Peter obeyed. His feet found purchase, and he leaned forward against the wall, hands splayed for balance. His chest heaved with exhaustion.

“Very good,” said Alice. “Now, let’s—let’s just take stock, have a reset...”

“My forearms are burning,” Peter gasped.

“You’re using your thumbs too much. Look.” She demonstrated with one hand. “Try hanging from your top four fingers instead. They’ll give you all the traction you need. Hook, don’t pinch.”

Peter spent a long moment breathing against the wall. Alice wondered if he’d heard her at all. But then he reached out with one tentative hand, the other bracing against the wall for balance, and flexed his fingers.

“Okay,” he said. “I think... that makes sense.”

“And if you ever need to rest, get your feet on a good hold, stand up straight, and lean against the wall like you are now. That’ll take some of the pressure off your arms. Do you understand?”

He nodded vigorously, eyes wide.

“Hesitation is your worst enemy. If you see a hold, just swing for it. The longer you dither back and forth, the more you exhaust yourself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Shush, Murdoch, I’m saving your life.” She dusted her hands with a fresh piece of chalk, then passed it down. “Chalk up, you’re sweating.”

Peter obeyed. Up again they went. From this angle Alice could not tell how far they’d come, whether they’d reached the halfway point or not.

All distance and texture were reduced to abstractions, lines on canvas, and all she could see on either side was an endless stretch of jagged white, then sky, or ground.

There was no pacing herself to the finish.

All she could do was ignore the passage of time, and the rapidly approaching limits of her own endurance, and keep throwing one arm up over the next.

A watched distance never shrank. Hands, hands, toes, toes. Hands, hands, toes, toes.

Finally her right hand met a flat, wide surface.

She dared to tilt her head up. That was it—there was no more wall, only sky, she’d made it.

Topping out, they called it at the gym. She took a deep breath and pushed herself over the edge in one massive go.

Then she scampered onto her knees and looked down.

Peter gazed up at her, eyes huge with fright. He was shaking quite badly. She was afraid he might let go, and he was still several feet below her, too far for her to pull him up.

“You’re so close,” she called. “You’re almost there. And it’s flat up here—almost three feet wide—we can rest up here, you’ve just got to finish out.”

He might have said something in response, but she couldn’t tell what. All she heard was a pained wheezing.

“Just look at me,” she said. He raised his head. “There you go.”

He reached with trembling hands for the next hold. Then the next.

“Now move your toes,” she whispered. “Steady now—good, good—now one more.”

He got one hand up to the top. She seized his wrist. He got another hand up, just far enough for her to pull him up and over. One great heave, and then Peter collapsed on top of her with a shout.

They lay still for a long moment, breathing hard. Alice felt something wet against her skin. She tilted her head down and saw Peter’s face crumpled against her neck. He was crying.

“You’re all right,” she murmured. “It’s okay.”

She would have wriggled away, but Peter was still shaking—a bit, Alice thought inappropriately, like a man after sex—and she thought it better to let him have this moment. She laid her head back and closed her eyes, relishing the sweet fatigue that pulsed through her limbs.

Good God. She hadn’t felt this sort of pain in a long time. She’d been exhausted, yes, but this throbbing soreness—this screaming reminder that she’d pushed her body to the limit, and hadn’t broken; indeed, that she had a body that could do what it did—felt good.

She tried to focus on that pleasant burn.

Not Peter’s warmth against her chest. Not the absurdity of Peter lying on top of her, which was somehow, compared to rock climbing in Hell, the most ridiculous thing about this situation.

Not the very weird stir in her gut she felt at his being vulnerable, depending on her, and how very unsatisfying this was despite the fact that she’d wished for so long that Peter might reveal to her any weakness at all.

But all this did was make him seem human, and the more human Peter seemed, the more he baffled her.

At last his sobs subsided. “I’m sorry.” He pulled himself off of her and sat up. “I feel very embarrassed.”

“Don’t be,” Alice murmured, eyes still closed.

“I’m just so afraid. I think I’ve never been so afraid in my entire life.”

“That’s natural.”

“I think with every move I’m going to fall. Every time I let go I think it’s about to be the end.”

“It takes a lot to fall.” Alice hauled herself up to sitting, then reached out to pat his knee. “Trust your body. You’re not going to fall.”

What she didn’t tell him was how common it was to slip, or how good it felt when you did.

The shock of the release. That split-second moment when you lost all touch with the wall, when all your supports gave.

The subsequent weightlessness. The thump.

Back in Colorado, people were always flinging themselves off the rock wall in various embarrassing positions, just to make their friends laugh.

Sometimes she did it on purpose. She let go when she was nearly at the top of a problem, or let her fingers slide off holds that were designed for beginners.

These pleased her the most. They were so firm; convex so as to catch the curve of your fingers.

It took real effort to slip off those. You had to want to fall.

She was pleased by the tenuousness of it all. How quick the ground would rise if for one moment you stopped paying attention. If you loosed a breath, made your peace, and just. Let. Go. It felt good, knowing how to fall. Feeling out the worst. Knowing that was an option.

She realized this knowledge was not very helpful at the moment, so she kept it to herself.

“Think you can go again?” She glanced over her shoulder, and just then caught Peter looking at her with the oddest expression on his face.

She couldn’t make sense of it. Not wonder, no.

Certainly not desire. But a kind of wide-eyed, open-mouthed vulnerability—a childish openness, really, was the best way she could describe it.

She didn’t like it. It was too familiar.

It recalled a version of her, of them , that no longer was.

It made her feel things —and this was unacceptable, because over the last year Alice and Peter had determined the best way to behave around one another was to pretend they were both invulnerable as stone.

The moment stretched—so long, indeed, Alice had opened her mouth, casting about for anything with which to break the silence. But then it passed. Peter blinked down, rubbed his hands across his thighs, then pivoted on his knees to peer down the other side of the wall. “My God.”

Alice joined him.

She thought at first that she was gazing upon a sea, for her first impression was of roiling, nauseating movement; a steady churn of mass.

I am dreaming , she thought. And then, Oh no, not again .

For this happened sometimes, all the time in fact; when she let her gaze go slack, then all sorts of things started creeping in at the edges, fantastic things: serpents with many heads; wolves devouring the sun.

A friend studying neuroscience had told her once that eyesight was largely memory, that your brain saw a pattern and filled in the rest. Alas, Alice’s memory bank was bursting at the seams. The mix-and-match mechanism was broken, and her brain filled in patterns with the most inappropriate things.

Chalkboards became parking lots. Apple trees became Jesus on the cross.

Often she stood in the checkout line at Sainsbury’s and saw corpses instead of cabbages on the belt.

But this only happened if she did not concentrate.

She was concentrating very hard now, and every time her gaze fell upon a single point, the plane stabilized, and she could make out the contours of a recognizable terrain—mountains and deserts, winding paths, demarcated territories that she hoped numbered eight.

Once she blinked, and she saw what seemed like Cambridge from a bird’s-eye view; bell towers, college courts, old stone department buildings along cobbled roads.

But try as she might she could not sustain her gaze for long.

This was not her fault; the landscape was playing with her.

It was like standing before an autostereogram illusion.

If her eyes shifted focus ever so slightly, then the image transformed.

She saw straight paths morph into winding labyrinths.

She saw a sprawling terrain morph into a radial pattern.

She saw reefs of coral. She saw a shimmering black line that at times seemed to bind the entire plane; but at others, it vanished into a pinprick at the center of a circle, a black hole that pulled everything within it.

Alice tried to focus, to forcefully wrestle Hell into a mappable image. But then she felt an acute pain behind her eyes, and she had to look away.

Peter’s palms were pressed against his temples. Thank God , thought Alice; he sees it too .

“We’re going in there.” His voice was strained.

“Yes.”

He looked wan. “It will swallow us up.”

“No, it won’t.” Alice had no idea what gave her this confidence, except that none of the other sojourner accounts mentioned a carnivalesque fun house terrain. Everyone else had enjoyed a pleasant ramble of the standard Euclidean sort, and it just seemed fair that they should as well.

It was only a problem of perspective, she decided.

The mountains she’d grown up climbing had the same effect.

The scale could be dizzying. You reached the mountain base and craned your neck to find the peaks, and the ground seemed to fall away behind you.

But then you trained your gaze back on the dirt you stood on, and focused on putting one foot in front of another, and before you knew it, you were at the top.

“We only need to get down,” she told Peter. For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional. “I’m sure it’s very nice below. ”