Page 70 of Katabasis
“Haven’t we all.” Alice asked, in a fit of boldness, “And he drove you to do it?”
“Please, no.” Elspeth snorted. “I hate to give him that much credit for anything.”
“Thenwhy?”
“Well, let’s start with why not. I imagine they told you I gave up because I’m dull. Is that what you heard?”
Alice had indeed formed the impression that perhaps Elspeth had simply lacked talent. It made the rest easier to stomach. For Alice was not talentless, so the same thing couldn’t possibly happen to her. Suicidal depression was just an extreme form of failure, which was a symptom of inadequacy. If you had sufficient force of will, then obviously you wouldn’t be suicidal. She did not admit this out loud.
“They... well, they didn’t say much,” she said. “It was more... um... hush-hush.”
“Figures.” Elspeth huffed. “I’m a genius, you know. I won all the maths and logic medals my first and second years. No one’s ever done that before. I was as poised to succeed as anyone. You must understand.”
It seemed very important to Elspeth that Alice acknowledged she was clever. She nodded vigorously. “Sure.”
“It was the absolute farce of it all,” said Elspeth. “One day it all seemed sosillyto me, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it’s rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You’re a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair’s godson. Once you have a job it doesn’t get better—do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean, what’s the fucking point? I couldn’t keep up the charade, but also I didn’t see the value in anything else, so I just put a stop to it all. I could not care anymore. Meanwhile,he...” Her face darkened. “I mean. He was not the reason why. He was not. I refuse to give him that credit. He was just the symptom, you see. It took me many years to realize this. Every time he yelled at me, or picked me apart, or humiliated me in front of other students—this was just the whole symbolic order coming to a head. This is an arbitrary game of egos and narcissists and bullying perceived as strength. And he was the perfect incarnation of the system’s nonsense.”
“He treated you badly, you mean.”
“He treated me like a dog.” Elspeth’s tone turned brittle. “It seemed a game to him to see how much I would take, before I stopped crawling back. I invested every fiber of my being in his stupid games. And I used to play along, because I thought,Well, at least the rewards are so great. Persistence pays off.And then I realized there were no rewards coming. That it was too late, and there was no way out.”
Aha, thought Alice. Here was the line between them. Therewasa way out. Alice knew, because she’d perfected the game herself. You learned to read his moods. You fawned when he turned on you; groveled when he demanded an apology. It wasn’t so hard, as long as you sacrificed your dignity. Realizing this gave her tremendous relief. She didn’t have to follow down Elspeth’s path. She was tougher. She wanted it more.
“He’s not even that great a magician,” Elspeth went on, waving her cigarette about. “That’s the worst part. It might have been worth something, you know, if he actually was the greatest magician of our time. But he’s just some hack like all the rest.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what they say. Everyone does their best work when they’re young. He was big with Russell and all the rest in the fifties, sure. All the war stuff, fine. OBE, whatever, maybe he did save us all from the Germans. But it’s been decades since he had a major paper out. All he does now is rubber-stamp things.”
“That’s not fair,” said Alice.
Elspeth cocked her head. “Oh?”
“He’s made some incredible discoveries since.” Alice felt a fierce protectiveness then, though rationally she knew Professor Grimes needed no defending on her part. She knew he had flaws. She only didn’t want to hear it from Elspeth. It was important to her that Professor Grimes was no one’s demon but her own. Also, if they were going to criticize him, they ought to have their facts right. “He’s researching memory and impermanence. It’s so much better than his early work, it’s really field-defining stuff.”
Elspeth’s lip curled. “If you say so.”
“It’s just taking longer to publish,” said Alice. “You can’t rush greatness.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Elspeth said drolly. “I mean, how would I know.”
They stood awhile in silence. Alice knew this silence; it was the wary silence common to every time two women encountered each other in academia. They were each sizing the other up. The same questions hung between them.Is that skirt too tight? How did you end up here? And what did it cost you?
Abruptly Elspeth asked, “Did they make you do the self-torturer problem when you had your entrance exams?”
Alice shook her head.
“I guess it’s out of fashion now. Figures.” Elspeth took a deep drag of her cigarette, then sighed, her whole head clouded by smoke. She rambled on. “It’s a problem of transitivity and rational decision-making. The setup is, suppose you have to put on a device that tortures you by degrees of tiny increments, increments so tiny that you don’t even notice them. You can only turn the dial up; you can’t turn it back down. Every day you have the option to turn the dial up by one increment, and if you do, you get ten thousand dollars. So every day, since you won’t notice the change in pain, you should obviously turn the dial up and accept the ten thousand dollars. Until one day, you’re stricken with unbearable pain, and there’s no going back. Only even then, itstillremains rational to keep turning the dial up, because you won’t notice the change and because the ten thousand dollars is so attractive. How did we get to this point? What failure of decision-making led ushere?”
“It’s a ‘frog in a boiling pot’ problem,” said Alice.
“That’s right,” said Elspeth. “There’s a lot of solutions to the self-torturer. It would be rational to set limits on yourself before you begin, for example. Or it might be rational to have a friend cut you off. But Cambridge gives you none of these. It just keeps you turning up the dial. Up and up and up. You start getting tunnel vision about it all. All that exists is the payoff and the dial. Until one day my dial broke.” She shrugged. “That’s really all there was to it. One day I stopped being able to feel anything at all. There was no difference between pain and pleasure. It was all just the same wash. Nothingmattered. And it was only once I got here, once I was fuckingdead, that things took on importance again.”
“Right,” said Alice. “I think I understand.” She did not. This numbness Elspeth spoke of—she could believe it, but this was not her problem. Her problem was that she felt too much, and hurt too much, and she could not forget any of it, or manage to keep the thoughts at bay, and so she had to make it stop.
“I figured you might.” Elspeth’s expression softened, and she looked Alice up and down as if confirming a diagnosis. “You’ve got that look about you.”
“What look?”
