Page 135 of Katabasis
She had heard of other couples in academia, usually through gossip about their impending breakdown. A pair of professors at Yale were married—she a classicist, he a logician—and they were constantly unhappy, their students and advisees caught in the crossfire of their disputes. The trouble was that she’d left a tenure-track position at Stanford to join him at Yale as his spousal hire, meaning that her tenure was dependent on his; he was a full professor, and she would only ever be a lecturer. He had edited three volumes; she had only published a handful of papers, and rumors proliferated that she’d asked him many times to help her further her career but he had refused on the grounds of nepotism. Supposedly he was also sleeping with his teaching assistant, a sloe-eyed and glossy-haired Radcliffe graduate who pranced around in colorful scarves and thigh-high boots. They all thought she—the wife—should divorce him. But she could not leave the marriage. If they separated, the university might fire her the next day. Why waste her salary? Anyone could teach Introduction to Tragedy.
The Yale case was nothing special. Hear one story and you’d heard them all; the nasty divorce at Cornell, the married teaching assistant at the Sorbonne. The husband was the star. The wife taught undergraduates who didn’t know the title lecturer could only mean “recent hire or spouse,” and then she left to raise their babies.
But here was a woman scholar with prestige, a husband, and a baby. It was remarkable how Nick treated Magnolia. He hardly spoke that afternoon. He introduced his wife—this aspect of their research had been all her doing, he said—and then he left the stage. Throughout the talk Alice kept glancing toward him, wondering when his adoring attention would give way to boredom. But he was utterly infatuated with her. He laughed at all her jokes; he nodded appreciatively whenever she unpacked a particularly tricky theoretical knot. Not once did his eyes leave her face.So this is true love, Alice had thought.I wonder if anyone will ever look at me this way.
And when Magnolia left the stage, she didn’t seem to step out of her role; didn’t transition from star to wife and mother. Rather she was just as vibrant and magnificent as she had been at the lectern, husband and son orbiting her like moons. Magnolia was just who she was at all times. She was, impossibly, all things at once.
You were the best of us, Alice wanted to tell her.You made it all seem possible.But Magnolia was too deep in the waves now; up to her neck, head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape in an expression too like ecstasy. All Alice could do was watch from the sands as mother and son disappeared beneath the surface.
“Good riddance,” said John Gradus.
Once more Alice turned round. Gradus drifted, gloating, over the sands. Could she stand, she would have thrown her arms over his shoulders and kissed him.
“You came,” she said. “Why?”
“An act of grace,” he crowed. “And it wasn’t God, Alice Law. It was me.”
She reached for him, but he, like Magnolia, strode past her toward the waves.
“Gradus...?”
He walked straight into the water. Alice made a distressed noise, but Gradus did not disintegrate. Rather he stepped lightly onto the Lethe’s surface. The waters stilled beneath his feet, held him up as if he were made of marble. Then Alice saw what Gradus saw: a boat growing larger on the horizon. It was a slender, beautiful thing, its body a single, curved stroke of bright autumn wood, and its sails a rippling silken sheen. So it was true; so those Shades were right to hope.
Gradus waded further out to meet the ship. His cloak billowed open and his arms splayed at his sides, as if he was presenting himself in full.
“John Gradus,” Alice called, “who were you?”
He didn’t bristle at this question like he once had. Rather it slid off him like water. He shrugged. “No one, now.” He turned and waved an arm. “Goodbye, Alice Law! May we never meet again!”
“Goodbye,” she cried. “Good luck...”
The boat was very close now. Alice saw a figure standing at the prow; a being clothed all in white, shining so bright against the dark horizon that it hurt Alice’s eyes to look. She had to squint. She could only make out the vaguest outlines as the figure helped Gradus onto the boat and offered him a bowl. Gradus tipped the bowl back and drank lustily, shoulders heaving. Great swaths of memory began peeling out of him then. His grayness was like a fish belly sliced open, spilling all its guts and waste out into the ocean. Alice saw images flickering in that viscera. They confirmed her worst suspicions—a twisting of bodies, a splatter of blood, the shadow of a great, spindly elm. But she did not look too closely. She did not think it mattered anymore.
Then Gradus was not Gradus anymore, but a shimmering glow; immaterial in a wholly different way than Shades. For Shades were imprints, persistent past, but this Spirit-Not-Gradus was undefined future, brilliant in its potential. The Spirit-Not-Gradus turned away and went to sit at the bow, his face turned toward that promised shore.
“Wait—” Alice stretched her own hand out, hoping, against foolish hope, the boat might take her too.
But the figure in the boat seemed to smile, and withdrew its hand. It did so not in cruelty; only in acknowledgment of rules that Alice, too, was expected to know.
The boat pulled away. In its wake, a wave pushed out at Alice, rippling and insistent. Her limbs went limp; she had not the strength to resist it. But it was not the kind to force her underwater. Rather it carried her insistently toward shore, as if the water had arms and was flinging her out. Not you, it said. Not yet. Gently it nudged her away until Alice lay curled on her side on the sand, just out of the river’s reach.
There she lay, dazed and breathing, watching the waves dart up just close enough to say hello.
Eventually she registered the pain in her arm.
She lifted the arm to her face and watched, amazed, as black water seeped in at the edges of her tattoo. She had spent so many nights pinching and rubbing at her skin, worrying at Professor Grimes’s handwriting. She had thought nothing except for cleaving off her own flesh would ever dull those sharp white lines. Yet now the writing fizzled at the edges and frothed wherever the water touched. Little chemical reactions burned all over her skin. It did hurt, but no more than the sting of matches against wet fingertips. Besides, the pain dimmed against the overwhelming relief. She felt a tension disappearing from her skull; a great weight whose presence she had lived with so long, she didn’t notice it anymore except when it released.
She tested her memory. She reached for Linear B, something she never used, a file her mind just wouldn’t throw away, and was delighted to find that she came up empty. She reached for page 52 of theTractatus. She couldn’t see it.
Belatedly she realized she might be in trouble.
There was no getting dry of the water. She was soaked all the way through; clothes sodden, boots waterlogged. She made some effort to wipe her arms dry, but it seemed pointless. The stinging now spread to every bit of exposed skin. When she shifted against the sand, bits of color came away.
Her delight gave way to panic.
She riffled through her thoughts, reaching for and clinging to the things she could not lose.I am Alice Law, I am a magician, and I am here because Peter Murdoch—
Oh please, do not let me forget Peter.
