When Quentin flipped to the next page of the test booklet it was blank except for a single word in the center of the page: FIN, in swirly italic type, like at the end of an old movie.
He sat back in the chair and pressed the heels of his aching hands against his aching eyes. Well, that was two hours of his life he’d never get back. Quentin still hadn’t noticed anybody getting up and walking out, but the room was getting seriously depopulated. There were maybe fifty kids left, and more empty desks than full ones. It was like they were softly and silently slipping out of the room every time he turned his head. The punk with the tattoos and no shirt was still there. He must have finished, or given up, because he was dicking around by ordering more and more glasses of water. His desktop was crowded with glasses. Quentin spent the last twenty minutes staring out the window and practicing a spinning trick with his pencil.
The Dean came in again and addressed the room.
“I’m delighted to inform you all that you will be moving on to the next stage of testing,” he said. “This stage will be conducted on an individual basis by members of the Brakebills faculty. In the meantime, you may enjoy some refreshment and converse among yourselves.”
Quentin counted only twenty-two desks still occupied, maybe a tenth of the original group. Bizarrely, a silent, comically correct butler in white gloves entered and began circulating through the room. He gave each of them a wooden tray with a sandwich—roasted red peppers and very fresh mozza rella on sourdough bread—a lumpy pear, and a thick square of dark, bitter chocolate. He poured each student a glass of something cloudy and fizzy from an individual bottle without a label. It turned out to be grapefruit soda.
Quentin took his lunch and drifted up to the front row, where most of the rest of the test takers were gathering. He felt pathetically relieved to have gotten this far, even though he had no idea why he’d passed and the others had failed, or what he’d get for passing. The butler was patiently loading the clinking, sloshing collection of water glasses from the punk’s desk onto a tray. Quentin looked for Julia, but either she hadn’t made the cut or she’d never been there in the first place.
“They should have capped it,” explained the punk, who said his name was Penny. He had a gentle moony face that was at odds with his otherwise terrifying appearance. “How much water you can ask for. Like maybe five glasses at most. I love finding shit like that, where the system screws itself with its own rules.”
He shrugged.
“Anyway, I was bored. The test told me I was done after twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?” Quentin was torn between admiration and envy. “Jesus Christ, it took me two hours.”
The punk shrugged again and made a face: What the hell do you want me to say?
Among the test takers, camaraderie warred with mistrust. Some of the kids exchanged names and home towns and cautious observations about the test, though the more they compared notes, the more they realized that none of them had taken the same one. They were from all over the country, except for two who turned out to be from the same Inuit reservation in Saskatchewan. They went around the room telling stories about how they’d gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or followed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before. And then green grass and summer heat and somebody to take them up to the exam room.
As soon as lunch was over teachers began poking their heads in and calling out the names of candidates. They went alphabetically, so it was only a couple of minutes before a stern woman in her forties with dark shoulder-length hair summoned Quentin Coldwater. He followed her into a narrow wood-paneled room with tall windows that looked out from a surprisingly great height onto the lawn he’d crossed earlier. Chatter from the adjacent exam room cut off abruptly when the door closed. Two chairs faced each other across a worn, hugely thick wooden table.
Quentin felt giddy, like he was watching the whole thing on TV. It was ridiculous. But he forced himself to pay attention. This was a competition, and he dominated competitions. That was what he did, and he sensed that the stakes of this one were rising. The table was bare except for a deck of cards and a stack of about a dozen coins.
“I understand you like magic tricks, Quentin,” the woman said. She had a very slight accent, European but otherwise unplaceable. Icelandic? “Why don’t you show me some?”
As a matter of fact, Quentin did like magic tricks. His interest in magic had started three years ago, partly inspired by his reading habits but mostly as a way of fattening up his extracurriculars with an activity that wouldn’t force him to actually interact with other people. Quentin had spent hundreds of emotionally arid hours with his iPod on palming coins and shuffling cards and producing fake flowers from skinny plastic canes in a trance of boredom. He watched and rewatched grainy, porn-like instructional videotapes in which middle-aged men demonstrated close-up magic passes in front of backdrops made of bedsheets. Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.
There was a store near Quentin’s house that sold magic supplies, along with junk electronics, dusty board games, pet rocks, and fake vomit. Ricky, the man behind the counter, who had a beard and sideburns but no mustache, like an Amish farmer, grudgingly agreed to give Quentin some tips. It wasn’t long before the student surpassed the master. At seventeen Quen tin knew the Scotch and Soda and the tricky one-handed Charlier cut, and he could juggle the elusive Mills Mess pattern with three balls and sometimes, for short ecstatic flights, with four. He earned a small dividend of popularity at school every time he demonstrated his ability to throw, with a fierce, robotic accuracy, an ordinary playing card sidearm so that from a distance of ten feet it stuck edge-on in one of the flavorless Styrofoamy apples they served in the cafeteria.
Quentin reached for the cards first. He was vain about his shuffling, so he broke out a faro shuffle rather than the standard riffle just in case—fat chance—the woman sitting across from him knew the difference, and how ridiculously hard it was to do a good faro.
He ran through his usual routine, which was already calculated to show off as many different skills as possible: false cuts, false shuffles, lifts, sleights, passes, forces. In between tricks he tossed and waterfalled and avalanched the cards from hand to hand. He had regular patter to go with it, but it sounded clumsy and empty in this quiet, airy, beautiful room, in front of this dignified, handsome older woman. The words trailed off. He performed in silence.
The cards made shushing, snapping noises in the stillness. The woman watched him steadily, obediently choosing a card whenever he asked her to, showing no surprise when he recovered it—against all odds!—from the middle of a thoroughly shuffled deck, or from his shirt pocket, or out of thin air.
He switched to the coins. They were fresh new nickels, nicely milled, good crisp edges. He had no props, no cups or folded handkerchiefs, so he stuck to palms and passes, flourishes and catches. The woman watched him in silence for a minute, then reached across the table and touched his arm.
“Do that one again,” she said.
He obediently did that one again. The trick was an old one, the Wandering Nickel, wherein a nickel (actually three nickels) moved mysteriously from hand to hand. He kept showing it to the audience and then cheekily vanishing it again; then he pretended to lose track of it entirely; then he triumphantly produced it again, whereupon it appeared to vanish again straight out of his open palm, in plain sight. It was actually a fairly ordinary, if well-scripted, sequence of steals and drops, with one particularly nervy retention-of-vision vanish.
“Do it again.”
He did it again. She stopped him in the middle.
“This part—there is a mistake.”
“Where?” He frowned. “That’s how you do it.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head.
The woman plucked three nickels from the stack and without an instant of hesitation, or anything in her manner that acknowledged that she was doing something special, performed the Wandering Nickel perfectly. Quen tin couldn’t stop staring at her small, limber brown hands. Her movements were smoother and more precise than any professional’s he’d ever seen.
She stopped in the middle.
“See here, where the second coin must go from hand to hand? You need a reverse pass, holding it like so. Here, come around so you can see.”
He obediently trotted around to her side of the table and stood behind her, trying not to look down her blouse. Her hands were smaller than his, but the nickel vanished between her fingers like a bird into a thicket. She did the move for him slowly, backward and forward, breaking it down.
“That’s what I’m doing,” he said.
“Show me.”
Now she was openly smiling. She grasped his wrist to stop him mid-pass.
“Now. Where is the second coin?”
He held out his hands, palm up. The coin was . . . but there was no coin. It was gone. He turned his hands over, waggled his fingers, looked on the table, in his lap, on the floor. Nothing. It had disappeared. Did she nick it while he wasn’t looking? With those fast hands and that Mona Lisa smile, he couldn’t quite put it past her.
“It is what I thought,” she said, standing up. “Thank you, Quentin, I will send in the next examiner.”
Quentin watched her go, still patting his pockets for the missing coin. For the first time in his life he couldn’t tell if he’d passed or failed.
The whole afternoon went like that: professors parading in through one door and out the other. It was like a dream, a long, rambling dream with no obvious meaning. There was an old man with a shaky head who fumbled in his pants pockets and threw a bunch of frayed, yellowed knotted cords on the table, then stood there with a stopwatch as Quentin untied them. A shy, pretty young woman, who looked like she was barely older than Quentin, asked him to draw a map of the House and the grounds based on what he’d seen since he’d been here. A slick fellow with a huge head and who wouldn’t or couldn’t stop talking challenged him to a weird variant of blitz chess. After a while you couldn’t even take it seriously—it felt like it was his credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red hair and a self-important air released a tiny lizard with iridescent humming-bird wings and huge, alert eyes into the room. The man said nothing, just folded his arms and sat on the edge of the table, which creaked unhappily under his weight.
For lack of a better idea Quentin tried to coax the lizard to land on his finger. It flew down and nipped a tiny chunk out of his forearm, drawing a dot of blood, then zipped away and buzzed against the window like a bumblebee. The fat man silently handed Quentin a Band-Aid, collected his lizard, and left.
Finally the door closed and didn’t open again. Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Apparently the procession had ended, though nobody bothered to say anything to Quentin. At least he had a few minutes to himself. By now the sun was setting. He couldn’t see it from the exam room, but he could see a fountain, and the light reflected in the pool of the fountain was a cool burnt orange. A mist was rising up through the trees. The grounds were deserted.
He rubbed his face with his hands. His head was clearing. It occurred to him, long after it probably should have, to wonder what the hell his parents were thinking. Normally they were pretty indifferent to his comings and goings, but even they had their limits. School had been out for hours now. Maybe they thought his interview had run long, though the chances that they even remembered Quentin was supposed to have had an interview were pretty small. Or if it was summer here, maybe school hadn’t even started yet? The giddy haze he’d been lost in all afternoon was starting to dissipate. He wondered exactly how safe he was here. If this was a dream, he was going to have to wake up pretty soon.
Through the closed door he distinctly heard the sound of somebody crying: a boy, and way too old to be crying in front of other people. A teacher was speaking to him quietly and firmly, but the boy either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. He ignored it, but it was a dangerous, unmanning sound, a sound that clawed away at the outer layers of Quentin’s hard-won teenage sangfroid. Underneath it there was something like fear. The voices faded as the boy was led away. Quentin heard the Dean speaking in icy, clipped tones, trying not to sound angry.
“I’m really not sure I care one way or the other anymore.”
There was an answer, something inaudible.
“If we don’t have a Quorum we’ll simply send them all home and skip a year.” Fogg’s genteel reserve was decaying. “Nothing would make me happier. We can rebuild the observatory. We can turn the school into a nursing home for senile old professors. God knows we have enough of those.”
Inaudible.
“There is a Twentieth, Melanie. We go through this every year, and we will empty every high school and middle school and juvenile detention center till we find him or her or it. And if there isn’t I will happily resign, and it will be your problem, and you’re welcome to it. Right now I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”
The door opened a crack, and for an instant a worried face peered in at him—it was Quentin’s first examiner, the dark-haired European lady with the clever fingers. He opened his mouth to ask about a phone—his cell was down to one useless flickering bar—but the door shut again. How annoying. Was it over? Should he just leave? He made a face to himself. He was all for adventures, God knows, but enough was enough. This one was getting old.