“Coffee?” she asked.
“Cheese,” Eliot said. “Do we have cheese? I need cheese.”
On cue Peggy Lee wandered through the opening verse of “Is That All There Is?” on the stereo. Which would be worse, Quentin wondered. If Richard was right, and there was an angry moral God, or if Eliot was right, and there was no point at all? If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it? Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out here. There was nothing to hang on to. They couldn’t go on like this forever.
“There’s a Morbière in the kitchen,” he said. “It was supposed go with the theme—you know, the two layers, the morning milking, the night milking . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Janet said. “Fetch, Q. Go on.”
“I’ll go,” Eliot said, but instead of standing up he just rolled weakly off the couch and fell on the floor. His head made an ominously loud bonk as it hit the parquet.
But he was laughing as Quentin and Janet picked him up, Quentin getting his shoulders and Janet taking his feet, all thoughts of cheese extinguished, and maneuvered him out of the dining room and in the direction of his bedroom. On their way out the door Eliot’s head hit the door frame with another loud bonk, and then it was just too absolutely hilarious, and they all started laughing, and they laughed until they were completely useless, and Janet dropped his feet, and Quentin dropped his shoulders, and his head bonked on the floor again, and by this time it was a thousand times more funny than the first two times.
It took Quentin and Janet twenty minutes to get Eliot down the hall to his bedroom, lurching heavily against the walls with their arms around each other as if they were struggling down a flooded steerage-level corridor on the Titanic. The world had become smaller and somehow lighter—nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down? Eliot kept saying he was fine, and Quentin and Janet kept insisting they had to pick him up. Janet announced that she had peed herself, actually literally peed herself, she was laughing so hard. As they passed Richard’s door Eliot began a loud speech on the order of, “I am the mighty Maker, and I now bequeath to you My Holy Power Tools, because I am too fucking drunk to use them anymore, and good luck to you, because when I get up tomorrow they had better be exactly where I left them, exactly, even My . . . no, especially My belt sander, because I am going to be so fucking hungover tomorrow, anybody who fucks with My belt sander is going to get a taste of My belt. And it won’t taste good. At all.”
Finally they heaved him onto his bed and tried to make him drink water and pulled up the covers over his chest. It could have been the sheer domesticity of it—it was as if Eliot were their beloved son, whom they were lovingly tucking in for the night—or maybe it was just boredom, that powerful aphrodisiac, which had never been entirely out of sight even during the party’s best moments, but if he was honest with himself Quentin had known for at least twenty minutes, even as they were wrestling Eliot down the hall, that he was going to take Janet’s dress off as soon as he had half a chance.
Quentin woke up slowly the next morning. So slowly, over such a long time, that he was never really sure he’d been asleep at all. The bed felt unstable and disconcertingly floaty, and it was weird with two other naked people there. They kept bumping into each other and inadvertently touching and pulling away and then feeling self-conscious about having pulled away.
At first, in the first flush of it, he felt no regret about what happened. It was what you were supposed to do. He was living life to the fullest. Getting drunk and giving in to forbidden passions. That was the stuff of life. Wasn’t that the lesson of the foxes? If Alice had any blood in her veins she would have joined them! But no. She had to go to bed early. She was just like Richard. Well, welcome to life in the grown-up magical world, Alice. Magic wasn’t going to solve everything. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that they were all dying, that everything was futile, that the only thing to do was to live and drink and fuck whatever and whomever while you still could? She herself had warned him of that, right there in her parents’ house in Illinois. And she’d been right!
And then after a while it seemed like a debatable thing—you could really make the case both ways, it was a coin-flip. And then it was an unfortunate lapse, an indiscretion, still within the bounds of the forgivable, but definitely a low point. Not a personal best. And then it was a major indiscretion, a bad mistake, and then, in the last act of the strip tease, it revealed itself to be what it truly was: a terrible, really awful, hurtful betrayal. At some point during this slow, incremental fall from grace Quentin became aware of Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, just her back, facing away from where he and Janet and Eliot lay, resting her chin in her hands. Periodically he imagined that it was just a dream, that she hadn’t been there at all. But to be honest he was pretty sure she had. She hadn’t looked like a figment. She’d been fully dressed. She must have been up for a while.
Around nine o’clock the room was full of morning light and Quen tin couldn’t pretend to be asleep anymore. He sat up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he couldn’t remember where his shirt was. He wasn’t wearing anything else either. He would have given anything right then just to have a shirt and some underwear.
With his bare feet on the hardwood floor he felt strangely insubstantial. He couldn’t understand, couldn’t quite believe what he’d done. It just didn’t seem like him. Maybe Fogg was right, maybe magic had inhibited his moral development. Something must have. Maybe that was why he was such a shit. But there had to be a way he could make Alice understand how sorry he was. He dragged a blanket off Eliot’s bed—Janet stirred and complained sleepily, then went back to her dreamless, guiltless sleep—and wrapped it around himself and padded out into the silent apartment. The dinner table was like a shipwreck. The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand. Quentin thought about Professor Mayakovsky, how he’d reversed time, fixed the glass globe, brought the spider back to life. That would be a pretty nice thing to be able to do right about now.
When the elevator doors pinged open, Quentin thought it must be Josh coming back from a successful night with Anaïs. Instead it was Penny, pale and breathing hard from running and so excited he could barely contain himself.
PENNY’S STORY
He had a new mohawk, a proud iridescent green ruff an inch wide and three inches high, like the crest of a centurion’s helmet. He had also gained weight—he looked, oddly, younger and softer than he had at Brakebills: less like a lone Iroquois warrior and more like an overfed white suburban gangsta. But it was still Penny who was catching his breath on the Oriental rug and looking around at everything like a curious, judgmental rabbit. He wore a black leather jacket with chrome spikes on it, faded black jeans, and a grubby white T-shirt. Jesus, Quentin thought. Do they even have punks anymore? He must be the last one in New York.
Penny sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Neither of them spoke. Quentin knew enough to know that Penny would never stoop to petty social pleasantries like saying hello and asking how he’d been and explaining what the hell he was doing here. Just this once Quentin was grateful. He didn’t know if he could face it.
“How’d you get in here?” Quentin croaked. His mouth was parched.
“Your doorman was asleep. You should really fire him.”
“It’s not my doorman.” He cleared his throat laboriously. “You must have cast something.”
“Just Cholmondeley’s Stealth.” Penny gave it the correct English pronunciation: Chumley’s.
“Eliot has a ward on this whole floor. I helped him set it up. Plus you need a key for the elevator.”
“We’ll need to set a new ward. I unpicked it on the way up.”
“Fucking—Okay, first, who’s we? We who?” Quentin said. At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment’s grace to immerse his face in a sinkful of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned. “And second, Penny, Jesus, it took us a whole weekend to put up that ward.”
He did a quick check: Penny was right, the defensive spells around the apartment were gone, so gone that they hadn’t even alerted him when they were going. Quentin couldn’t quite believe it. Penny must have taken down their ward from the outside, on the fly, from a standing start, in no more time than it took him to ride up ten floors in an elevator. Quentin kept his face blank—he didn’t want to give Penny the satisfaction of seeing how impressed he was.
“What about the key?”
Penny dug it out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to Quentin.
“Took it off your doorman.” He shrugged. “Kind of thing you learn on the street.”
Quentin was going to say something about how the “street” in question was probably not a street at all but a way or a lane located in some gated community, and anyway it wasn’t that hard to steal a key from a sleeping doorman when you were rocking Cholmondeley’s Stealth, but it just seemed so unimportant, and the words were just too heavy to get out of his mouth, like they were stone blocks in his stomach that he would have had to physically cough up and regurgitate. Fuck Penny, he was wasting time. He had to talk to Alice.
But by then people had heard Penny’s voice. Richard came shambling in from the kitchen where he’d been cleaning up, already awake and irri tatingly showered and coiffed and groomed and pressed. Soon Janet came out of Eliot’s room, regally swathed in a comforter as if nothing whatsoever unusual had happened the night before. She squeaked when she saw Penny and disappeared into a bathroom.
Quentin realized he would have to get dressed and deal with this. Daylight was here, and with it had come the world of appearances and lies and acting like everything was fine. They were all going to make scrambled eggs and talk about how hungover they were and drink mimosas and Bloody Marys with extra Tabasco and black pepper and act like nothing was wrong, as if Quentin hadn’t just broken Alice’s heart for no better reason than that he was drunk and felt like it. And as unbelievable, as unthinkable as it seemed, they were going to listen to what Penny had to say.
He was a year behind Quentin and Alice, but by the end of his Fourth Year Penny had decided—he explained, once his audience was assembled and dressed and arranged around him in the living room with drinks and plates, standing or lying full length on couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor as their physical and emotional conditions permitted—that Brakebills had taught him everything it was going to teach him, so he dropped out and moved to a small town in Maine, a few miles north of Bar Harbor. The town was called Oslo, a seedy little resort village with a population that shrank by 80 percent in the off-season.
Penny chose Oslo—not even New Oslo, just Oslo, as if they thought they came up with it first—for its total lack of anything that might distract him. He arrived in mid-September and had no trouble renting a small farmhouse on the outskirts of town on a one-lane rural route. His land-lord was a retired schoolteacher who handed him the keys and then fled to his winter home in South Carolina. Penny’s nearest neighbors on either side were a congregationless one-shack Pentecostal church and an out-of-session summer camp for disturbed children. It was perfect. He had found his Walden.
He had everything he needed: silence; solitude; a U-haul trailer packed with an enviable library of magical codices, monographs, chapbooks, reference books, and broadsheets. He had a sturdy desk, a well-lit room, and a window with an unscenic view of an unmown backyard that offered no particular temptation to gaze out at it. He had a manageable, intriguingly dangerous research project that showed every sign of maturing into a genuinely interesting line of inquiry. He was in heaven.
But one afternoon a few weeks after he arrived, as he sat at his desk, his watery blue eyes trailing over words of consummate power written centuries ago with a pen made out of a hippogriff feather, Penny found his mind wandering. His large, usually lineless brow crinkled. Something was sapping his powers of concentration. Was he under attack, maybe by a rival researcher? Who would dare! He rubbed his eyes and shook his head and focused harder. But his attention continued to drift.
It turned out that Penny had discovered in himself a weakness, a flaw he never would have suspected himself of in a thousand years, an age to which, with a few careful modifications that he would look into when he had the time, he had every intention of living. The flaw was this: he was lonely.
The idea was outrageous. It was humiliating. He, Penny, was a stone-cold loner, a desperado. He was the Han Solo of Oslo. He knew and loved this about himself. He had spent four interminable years at Brakebills surrounded by idiots—except for Melanie, as he privately referred to Professor Van der Weghe—and now he was finally free of their incessant bullshit.
But now Penny found himself doing things for no reason. Unproductive things. He stood on a concrete dam near his farmhouse and threw down rocks to break up the thin crust of ice that formed on the outflow pond. He walked the mile and a half to the center of town and played video games in the windowless video arcade back behind the pharmacy, stuffing his mouth with stale gumballs from the gumball machine, alongside the no-hope, dead-eyed teenagers who hung out there and did the exact same thing. He made awkward, inexperienced eyes at the underage clerk at the Book Bin, which actually sold mostly stationery and greeting cards, not books. He confided his troubles to the miserable pod of four buffalo who lived on the buffalo farm out on the Bar Harbor road. He thought about climbing over the fence and petting one of their huge, wedge-shaped heads, but he didn’t quite have the nerve. They were big buffalo, and you never knew what they were thinking.