Page 99 of Katabasis
“Are you blushing?”
She pressed her hands against her cheeks. “I am not.”
“You’ll take the compliment. Even now.” He shoved at her shoulder. “Jesus, he really did a number on us.”
“But it wasn’t all bad,” she said. “He made us good magicians.”He made me perfect. Her tattoo twitched, and even then, she could not bring herself to consider it more a curse than a blessing.
“I don’t know, Law.” Peter pulled his legs to his chest and rested his chin atop his knees. “I’ve been wondering this myself. Whether we really needed Grimes to become who we did. Because, honestly, I think anyone could have made us good magicians. He just convinced us we had to suffer for it. Just had me thinking, even when I was on the bathroom floor, that I wasn’t tough enough. That if I justwantedit enough, I’d be all better.” He snorted. “Stupid.”
“So how...” Alice glanced at Peter’s midriff, then back up at his face. “How are you now?”
“Surgery helped,” said Peter. “I’m in remission.”
“Until?”
He shrugged. “Until I’m not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “So it goes. Doesn’t matter now.”
The decline was very quick afterthat.
Really it was merciful, how rapidly the Escher trap drained their energy. The air got hotter. Their mouths were like sandpaper, their tongues flat, rough stones. They sat side by side, but as time trickled on, their heads and shoulders drooped, like they were toys running out of battery, until they were slumped, Alice lying on Peter’s lap, Peter lying atop her.
Alice was fairly unbothered by it all. Even if she was upset, her mind and body were too numb to register much; it took energy to grieve and she had none anymore. Her ears buzzed in a way that was almost pleasant. She closed her eyes, and thought only of cool rivers, velvety darkness, blanketing waters. Was this so terrible? All she had to do was go to sleep.
She heard the scratch of pencil against paper. She opened her eyes. Peter was scribbling on her notebook.
She lifted her head. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure a way out.”
“We’ve tried everything,” she mumbled. “There’s nothing else.”
“Oh, there’ll be something.”
“How do you know?”
“Because of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.”
“Of what?”
“It’s a theorem in mathematics.” Peter sounded bizarrely chipper. “I learned about it when I was a child. Basically, it says no theory of mathematics can ever be complete, because for any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that the system cannot prove. Math has its limits. There’s always something we don’t know. Some people think Gödel’s theorem proves the existence of God.”
“But it doesn’t prove anything at all.”
“It does, though. It proves there’s always another option. It proves no system is ever closed.”
“Jesus, Peter.” Alice blinked fast, but the dots would not clear from her vision. “That doesn’t prove anything. Sometimes maths is just maths.”
Peter’s pen spun frenetically in his hand. “Well, consider this: In book four ofTheInferno, Dante asks Virgil if any soul that was not saved by Christ had ever been rescued from eternal Limbo. And indeed, Adam and Abel and Noah, among others, had been blessed and raised to Heaven. God broke his rules, just for them.”
“No one takes book fourseriously.”
“I mean, I too have some bones to pick with Dante. But the point is, even Dante’s vision of Hell includes exceptions. The Underworld yields and bends. It is unpredictable—it follows no order but its own. It is just as Borges said—the certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, renders us phantasmal—and yet we arenotphantasmal, not annulled, because nothing is fully written! There is no coherent set of axioms that explains it in full. Just like maths. Ergo, there will be some way out. And I will find it. I must.”
“That isn’t how logic works,” said Alice. “I am sure this proof is missing quite a lot of steps.”
