Page 109 of Katabasis
“What kind of music is that?”
“Sort of like... indie punk, rock, that kind of thing? As in, the opposite of Dusty Springfield?”
She could not tell if these names made any sense to John Gradus. He asked, “Do you like them?”
“They’re a little loud,” she said. “But I’m not very adventurous. I just like the Beatles. And Bach.”
“Pretentious,” he said. “The last meal you had?”
“Lembas Bread.”
“No, I mean before.”
“Oh.” Alice rifled through her mind. “Um. Tea and a toastie.”
“What kind?”
“Cheese. Cheddar, I think.”
“Warmed up?”
“No, cold.” She saw the plastic wrapping in her mind, the generic logo. Late-night offerings from a buttery about to close. “It didn’t taste very good.”
“A cold toastie,” he muttered. “All the time in the world, and a cold, congealed toastie.”
He hungered for the tangible, the material. He became resentful when he felt she had wasted her time above. Most of all he was irritated about missed gastronomic opportunities. He seemed unable to understand why Alice did not eat three-course, gourmet meals every day. The answer “I wasn’t hungry” made no sense to him. He got such a beady, famished look while Alice spoke that sometimes she felt uneasy; she felt he was siphoning something from her, though she couldn’t put her finger on what. Living force, it felt like. Perhaps when they were done he would be close to alive, and she would be a rumbling mass of gray. Disturbing as this was, it was this naked exploitation that, in turn, let her take him at his word. It could be this easy. It could be the case he truly was taking her to the gates of Dis.
She glanced sideways at him as they walked, trying to make out the face of her guide. Her own Virgil. She wondered if she could recognize him, if his story was one of the many rumors that haunted the academy. Was he the demonologist who fed his infant daughter to Azazel? The cryptologist who sent his students into Faerie without a lifeline?
Unfortunately Gradus had not put nearly as much effort into maintaining a solid form as Elspeth. If she focused too hard on his eyes, or on his build, his features slipped and morphed as if they could not decide what they used to be. Strangely he took the clearest shape when she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, when her imagination could supply the rest. A straight-backed and bespectacled man, the sort who might carry a briefcase, or who might offer you an umbrella when it rained. A man utterly forgettable. You saw him on the train, or in the university library, or at the bookstore. And then he walked out of your life and you forgot all about him; for shapes like him only existed to fill in the background of your own richer world. Gradus was a man completely without specificity, and Alice suspected he had worked very hard to make this so.
She tried to place him at least geographically or temporally, because then she could at least rack her memory for mention of any horrendous crimes, say, at Yale in the sixties, but Gradus had been so long in the underworld that he made no references to place himself. Sometimes she thought she detected vague Nordic undertones in his speech, but otherwise he had that mysterious mid-Atlantic accent that could belong to a Brit who had spent too much time among Americans, or an American who had spent too much time in England. He was not forthcoming. She tried once simply asking where he was from, and all he said was, “I’d like to see you guess.” If anything he seemed to take delight in messing with her. He would make references to Roosevelt and Churchill, then insinuate he’d personally known Copernicus.
Once a suspicion struck her, and she asked quickly, so as to catch him off guard, “Jacob?”
Professor Grimes had always liked his little tests.
But John Gradus only hmmed and asked, “What’s that?”
No, he couldn’t be Professor Grimes. Professor Grimes hardly cared so much about the world outside his office. He would never have asked her about Talking Heads. Fashions changed; Professor Grimes stayed the same. He lived in a castle in the clouds. All that mattered was his ideas, and how far they could take him.
At least John Gradus gave aswell as he got, so long as she did not inquire much about personal identity. On the topic of Hell he was very forthcoming, if not always helpful. Most of what he said left her with a million more questions. She asked him what those pieces of writing were, and he explained, “Why, dissertations, of course. That much should be obvious.”
“Dissertations about what?”
“Whatever we’re in for.”
“Does everyone write them?”
“We all must write them.”
“Who reads them?”
“Whoever is in charge. The Furies. Lord Yama himself. Who knows? I’ve yet to witness anyone read them, mind, but then it’s a rare dissertation that passes muster. They say to write until you’ve done your best work, and when you’ve done your best work, the ships will come to bring you across the Lethe.”
“What’s the point of them?”
“Entertainment, I’m sure. I certainly enjoy reading others’ drafts. I came upon a whole stack subtitledMy Lolitathe other day. Now, that one was really fun!”
