Page 113 of Katabasis
“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’mtellingyou, 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 thentheydecide 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—”
“Butsuppose,” 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 “WritingBazaar” in the sense thatHarper’s Bazaarmeant “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’sThe 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’stwospaces after each period! Oh, it’sallgot 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.
