When it was all over, they shuffled out of the auditorium into the old hallway. If they’d had caps, they might have thrown them in the air, but they didn’t. There was a low hum of conversation, a couple of whoops, but that was really it; it was over, there was nothing else. If they hadn’t been graduated last night, they sure were now. They could go anywhere, do anything they wanted. This was it: the big send-off.
Alice and Quentin drifted out a side door and wandered over to a huge spreading oak, swinging their held hands between them. There was no wind. The sunlight was too bright. Quentin’s head throbbed. His parents were in the vicinity, and he’d have to go look for them in a second. Or maybe they could come looking for him for once in their lives. There would be parties tonight, he supposed, but he was already pretty much partied out. He didn’t feel like packing up his things, didn’t feel like going back to Chesterton, or Brooklyn, or anywhere else for that matter. He didn’t feel like staying, and he didn’t feel like going. He stole a glance at Alice. She looked peaked. He performed a mental search for the love he was accustomed to feel for her and found it strangely absent. If there was anything he wanted at that moment it was to be alone. But he wasn’t going to get that.
These were bad thoughts, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the flow, stanch the cerebral hemorrhage. Here he was, a freshly licensed and bonded and accredited magician. He had learned to cast spells, seen the Beast and lived, flown to Antarctica on his own two wings, and returned naked by the sheer force of his magical will. He had an iron demon in his back. Who would ever have thought he could do and have and be all those things and still feel nothing at all? What was he missing? Or was it him? If he wasn’t happy even here, even now, did the flaw lie in him? As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know.
I got my heart’s desire, he thought, and there my troubles began.
“We have our whole lives ahead of us and all I want to do is take a nap,” Alice said.
There was a soft sound behind them. A soap bubble popping, an intake of breath, a wing beat.
Quentin turned around, and they were all there. Josh with a fringe of blond beard that made him look more than ever like a genial smiling abbot. Janet had gotten her nose pierced, and probably other parts of her. Eliot wore sunglasses, which he had never done at Brakebills, and a shirt of amazing, indescribable perfection. There was somebody else with them, too, a stranger: a serious, slightly older man, tall and darkly, bookishly handsome.
“Get your stuff together,” Josh said. He grinned even more widely and spread out his arms like a prophet. “We’re going to take you away from all this.”
BOOK II
MANHATTAN
Two months later it was November. Not Brakebills November, real November—Quentin had to keep reminding himself that they were on regular real-world time now. He lolled his temple against the cold apartment window. Far below he could see a neat little rectangular park where the trees were red and brown. The grass was threadbare, with dirt patches, like a worn-out rug with the canvas backing showing through the woven surface.
Quentin and Alice lay on their backs on a wide, candy-striped daybed by the window, limply holding hands, looking and feeling like they’d just washed ashore on a raft that had been gently, limply deposited by the surf on the beach of a silent deserted island. The lights were off, but milky-white afternoon sunlight filtered into the room through half-closed blinds. The remains of a game of chess, a sloppy, murderous draw, lay on a nearby coffee table.
The apartment was undecorated and barely furnished except for an eclectic collection they’d trucked in as the need arose. They were squatting: a tiresomely complex magical arrangement had allowed them to secure this particular scrap of underutilized Lower East Side real estate while its rightful owners were otherwise occupied.
A deep, thick silence hung in the still air, like stiff white sheets on a clothesline. Nobody spoke, and nobody had spoken for about an hour, and nobody felt the need to speak. They were in lotus-land.
“What time is it?” Alice said finally.
“Two. Past two.” Quentin turned his head to look at the clock. “Two.”
The buzzer rang. Neither of them moved.
“It’s probably Eliot,” Quentin said.
“Are you going over early?”
“Yes. Probably.”
“You didn’t tell me you were going early.”
Quentin sat up slowly, using just his stomach muscles, at the same time extracting his arm from beneath Alice’s head.
“I’m probably going early.”
He buzzed Eliot in. They were going to a party.
It was only two months since graduation, but already Brakebills seemed like a lifetime ago—yet another lifetime, Quentin thought, reflecting world-wearily that at the age of twenty-one he was already on his third or fourth lifetime.
When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words—concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations—but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician’s eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert.
Though like a desert, it did have some stunted, twisted traces of life, if you dug for them. There was a magical culture in New York outside the handful of Brakebills-educated elite who resided there, but it existed on the city’s immigrant margins. The older Physical Kids—a name they had left behind at Brakebills and would never use again—gave Quentin and Alice the outer-borough subway tour. In a windowless second-story café on Queens Boulevard, they watched Kazakhs and Hasidim construe number theory. They ate dumplings with Korean mystics in Flushing and watched modern-day Isis worshippers rehearse Egyptian street hexes in the back of a bodega on Atlantic Avenue. Once they took the ferry across to Staten Island, where they stood around a dazzlingly blue swimming pool sipping gin and tonics at a conclave of Filipino shamans.
But after a few weeks the energy for those educational field trips had all but evaporated. There was just too much to distract them, and nothing particularly urgent to be distracted from. Magic would always be there, and it was hard work, and he’d been doing it for a long time. What Quentin needed to catch up on was life. New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here—actual drugs! They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city.
Alice didn’t find all this quite as exciting as Quentin did. She had put off the kind of civil service appointment or research apprenticeship that usually ensnared serious-minded Brakebills students so she could stay in New York with Quentin and the others, but inspite of that she showed signs of actual unfeigned academic curiosity, which caused her to spend a good part of every day studying magic instead of, for example, recovering from having gone out the night before. Quentin felt mildly ashamed for not following her example, enough that he even made noises about relaunching his failed lunar expedition, but not so much that he actually did anything about it. (Alice cycled through a sequence of space travel- related nicknames for him--Scotty, Major Tom, Laika--until his lack of progress began to make them more humiliating than funny.) He felt entitled to blow off steam and shake off the Brakebills pixie dust and generally “live.” And Eliot felt that way, too (“Ain’t that why we got livers?” he said in his exaggerated Oregoner accent). It wasn’t a problem. He and Alice were just different people. Isn’t that what made it interesting?
At any rate Quentin felt interesting. He felt fascinating. For the first year after graduation his financial needs were taken care of by an immense secret slush fund, amassed covertly over the centuries through magically augmented investing, that yielded a regular allowance for all newly minted magicians who needed it. After four cloistered years at Brakebills, cash was like a magic all its own: a way of turning one thing into another thing, producing something out of nothing, and he worked that magic all over town. Money people thought he was artsy, artsy people thought he was money, and everybody thought he was clever and good-looking, and he got invited everywhere: charity social events, underground poker clubs, dive bars, rooftop parties, mobile all-night in-limo narcotics binges. He and Eliot passed themselves off as brothers, and their double act was the hit of the season. It was the revenge of the nerds.
Night after night Quentin would return home toward dawn, alone, deposited in front of his building by a solemn solitary cab like a hearse painted yellow, the street awash with blue light—the delicate ultrasound radiance of the embryonic day. Coming down off coke or ecstasy, his body felt strange and heavy, like a golem fashioned from some ultra-dense star-metal that had fallen from the sky and cooled and congealed into human form. He felt so heavy that he could break through the brittle pavement any second, and plunge down into the sewers, unless he placed his feet gently and precisely in the center of each sidewalk square in turn.
Standing alone amid the still, stately mess of their apartment, his heart would brim over with regret. He felt like his life had gone terribly wrong. He shouldn’t have gone out. He should have stayed home with Alice. But he would have been so bored if he’d stayed home! And she would have been bored if she’d come out! What were they going to do? They couldn’t go on like this. He felt so grateful to her for not having seen the excesses he had so eagerly indulged in, the drugs he had ingested, the manic flirting and pawing in which he had engaged.
Then he would take off his clothes, which reeked of cigarette smoke, like a toad shedding its skin, and Alice would stir sleepily in the sheets and sit up, the white sheet slipping down off her heavy breasts. She would lean against him, their backs against the cool white wooden curl of their sleigh bed, not speaking, and they would watch as the dawn came up and a garbage truck moved haltingly down the block, its pneumatic biceps gleaming as it greedily consumed whatever its overalled attendants flung into it, ingesting what the city had expectorated. And Quentin would feel a lofty pity for the garbagemen, and for all the straights and civilians. He wondered what they could possibly have in their uncharmed lives that made them think they were worth living.
He heard Eliot try the door, find it locked, and fumble around for his key; Eliot shared an apartment with Janet in Soho, but he was over at Quentin and Alice’s so much that it was easier just to give him his own key. Quentin strolled around the open-plan apartment, half-heartedly straightening up, snapping up condom wrappers and underwear and decaying food and depositing them in the trash. It was a beautiful place in a converted factory, all wide-planked, thickly varnished wood floors and arched warehouse windows, but it had seen more considerate tenants. He’d been surprised to discover when they moved in together that while he was an indifferent housekeeper, Alice was the true slob of the relationship.
She retreated to the bedroom to get dressed. She was still in her nightgown.
“Morning,” Eliot said, although it wasn’t. He loitered just inside the rolling metal freight door, wearing a long overcoat and a sweater that had been expensive before moths got to it.
“Hey,” Quentin said. “Just let me grab my coat.”
“It’s freezing out there. Is Alice coming?”
“I didn’t get that impression. Alice?” He raised his voice. “Alice?”
There was no answer. Eliot had already faded back out into the hall. He didn’t seem to have much patience for Alice lately, as somebody who didn’t share his rigorous dedication to pleasure-seeking. Quentin supposed her unfussy diligence reminded him unpleasantly of the future he was ignoring. Quentin knew it had that effect on him.
He hesitated on the threshold, torn between conflicting loyalties. She would probably be grateful for some quiet time to study.
“I think she’s coming later,” Quentin said. He called in the direction of the bedroom: “Okay! Bye! I’ll see you there!”
There was no answer.
“Bye Mom!” Eliot yelled.
The door closed.
Like everything else, Eliot was different in New York. At Brakebills he had always been supremely aloof and self-sufficient. His personal charm and odd appearance and talent for magic had raised him up and set him apart. But since Quentin had joined him in Manhattan, the balance of power between them had shifted somehow. Eliot hadn’t survived transplantation unscathed; he no longer floated easily above the fray. His humor was more arch and bitter and childish than Quentin remembered. He seemed to be getting younger as Quentin got older. He needed Quentin more, and he resented Quentin for that. He hated to be left out of anything, and he hated to be included in anything. He spent more time than he should have on the roof of his apartment building smoking his Merits and God knows what else—there wasn’t much you couldn’t find if you had the money, and they had the money. He was getting too thin. He was depressed and turned nasty when Quentin tried to jolly him out of it. When annoyed he was fond of saying, “God, it’s amazing I’m not a dipsomaniac” and then correcting himself: “Oh, wait, that’s right . . .” It had been funny the first time. Sort of.