“Age before beauty.”
“P’s before Q’s.”
It was starting to seem funny. They were a pair of comedy supernumeraries, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Mayakovsky’s gloomy Hamlet. Glean what afflicts him. Quentin found some glasses—he was tired of sharing a bottle with Mayakovsky, though no doubt Antarctic moonshine had powerful sterilizing properties—and they followed him.
He led them through a door Quentin had never seen unlocked before and through his private apartment. Quentin averted his eyes from the many small, unclean garments scattered on the floor.
“Dreenk!” Mayakovsky roared as they walked.
“Thanks,” Quentin said, “but I’m—”
“Dreenk! This is your professor speaking, skraelings!”
“You know,” he said, “I’m a professor now too. Technically speaking. Or I was.”
“I will show you something, Professor Skraeling. Something you will see nowhere else.”
Apparently murderous drinking was the price of admission to Mayakovsky’s inner sanctum, but Quentin was willing to follow any lead no matter how tenuous. He was still wobbly from the trip over, but the moonshine had ignited some smoldering heat source in his stomach, a sour, slow-burning peat fire. Mayakovsky himself didn’t seem particularly drunk, except that his mood had flipped from depressive to manic.
He led them down two flights of stairs, down into the Antarctic rock itself. Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas. Quentin prayed to every god he could think of, living and dead, that this was not a sex thing.
It wasn’t. It was Mayakovsky’s laboratory: a suite of dark, square, windowless workrooms, each one furnished with well-worn benches and tables and studded with silent heavy machinery: a drill press, a band saw, a small forge, a lathe. In contrast with everything else in Mayakovsky’s domain it was all magnificently clean and orderly. The tools and instruments were polished and laid out in straight rows on cloths as if they were for sale. The machinery gleamed a dull matte blue-black. The room was still except for some quiet regular motion in the shadows: a softly swinging pendulum; a spinning top that for some reason didn’t stop; a slowly turning armillary sphere.
The three of them stood looking around in the half-light, the lichen vodka or whatever it was momentarily forgotten. The silence was another level below the regular ambient silence of Antarctica: an absolute sonic vacuum.
“This is lovely,” Plum said.
It was true.
“Beautiful.”
“I know why you do this,” Mayakovsky said.
He didn’t so much answer them as continue a monologue that had been going on in his head.
“You”—he looked at Plum—“you, I don’t know. Maybe you are bored. Maybe you are in love with him?” Plum waved that one off frantically, a full-arm gesture: No, abort, abort. “But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be great wizard. Gandalf maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”
He spoke softly and, for him, gently. He drank, then cleared his throat and spat wetly into a handkerchief, which he stuffed into the pocket of his robe. He’d been living alone for a long time.
Did he? Quentin thought. Want to be a great magician? Was that the truth? Maybe it used to be. Now all he wanted was to be a magician period. He wanted to break an incorporate bond. He wanted Alice back. But truth was seeming pretty relative at this point. Truth was a substance soluble in lichen vodka.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”
“But you will not be great. You are clever, yes—you have good head.”
He reached over and rapped on Quentin’s head with his knuckles.
“Don’t do that.”
But Mayakovsky was unstoppable, a drunk best man hell-bent on giving an inappropriate toast.
“Fine head. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” No point in denying it. He leaned against the cool, oiled metal of a drill press. It felt reassuringly stable, an ally at his back.
“Five hundred,” Plum said generously. She boosted herself up on a table. “Be fair.”
“You will never be great. You know nothing of greatness. You want to see? I will show you greatness.”
He waved his arm expansively at the darkened workbenches, and all through the room metal and glass stirred and glowed and came alive. Engines moved, wheels turned, flames lit.
“This is my museum. Museum of Mayakovsky.”
And he showed them what he’d built in the long Antarctic winters.
Mayakovsky’s workshop wasn’t just a marvel, it was a library of marvels. It was a catalog of answered prayers and impossible dreams and holy grails. Suddenly Mayakovsky was a showman, ushering them grandly from table to table: here was a perpetual motion machine, and a pair of seven-thousand-league boots. He showed them one drop of universal solvent, which no vessel could contain and thus had to be kept magically suspended in midair. He showed them magic beans, and a pen that would write only the truth, and a mouse that aged backward, and a goose that laid eggs in gold, silver, platinum, and iridium. He spun straw into gold and turned the gold into lead.
It was the end of every fairy tale, all the prizes for which knights and princes had fought and died and clever princesses had guessed riddles and kissed frogs. Mayakovsky was right, this was grand magic, this was what a lifetime of solitary practice and toil bought you. Later it was hard for Quentin to remember details—the moonshine bleached them out of his brain cells like an industrial detergent—but he recalled a player piano that would improvise according to your mood, never repeating itself, optimizing the music according to how you responded, becoming more and more beautiful until it was the sound of everything you’d ever wanted to hear.
After a few minutes it was painful—he had to tell Mayakovsky to stop it before he broke down sobbing. Later he couldn’t have hummed the melody to save his life.
“This, Quentin. This is greatness. These are things you will never do. Never understand.”
It was true. Even with the strength he’d gained after his father died, he would never be in Mayakovsky’s league. It cost him nothing to admit it. He just wished that with all his genius Mayakovsky could help them.
But Plum was frowning.
“But I mean so why are you still here?” she said. “In Antarctica? If you’re this great wizard? I don’t get it. I mean, look at all this stuff! You could be famous!”
“I could be.” Mayakovsky said it sourly; the showman was gone. “But why? Why should I care if people know my name? People do not deserve Mayakovsky!”
“So you like being here? Alone like this? I don’t understand.”
“Why shouldn’t I like it?” He stuck out his lower lip. He didn’t much care for being psychoanalyzed. “Here I have everything. Outside there is nothing for me. Here I can do my work.”
“But she’s right, it makes no sense.” Quentin found his voice. “You’ve probably solved problems people have been banging their heads against for years. You have to go back and tell everybody.”
“I have to do nothing!” And then more quietly: “Enough. I will never go back. I am done with that.”
Even with his ordinary, averagely brilliant brain Quentin was beginning to understand. He knew a few things about Mayakovsky’s personal history: how he’d had an affair with a student named Emily Greenstreet that ended so disastrously that he’d had to flee to Brakebills South. And Quentin knew something about hiding out from the world, too. He’d done his fair share of it. He’d been so depressed and traumatized after what happened to Alice that he withdrew from the world of magic and swore never to cast a spell again. If he never risked anything more—he reasoned—he could never lose anything more. He could never hurt anybody else.
But it hadn’t lasted. It wouldn’t do. Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out. Eliot and Janet and Julia had come for him, and he’d gone back to Fillory after all. He’d risked again, and won, and lost, and it hurt but he didn’t regret it, not any of it.
“You’re wrong,” Quentin said. “Fine, you’re a genius, but you’re wrong about this. You could go back. It wouldn’t be as bad as you think.”
“Do not tell me what I can do. Do not tell me who I am. When you can do all this, little man, then you can judge me.”
“I’m not judging you. I’m just saying—”
“You—you are not such a mystery.” Mayakovsky jabbed Quentin in the chest with a finger like a dried sausage. “You think I do not know you? They threw you out of that place, that other world you go to. Yes? And you came back to Brakebills. But they would not have you there either! So out you go again!”
Jesus, he must know about Fillory, or at least the Neitherlands. Mayakovsky advanced on Quentin, who gave ground.
“Well, yeah,” Quentin said. “But you’ll notice I’m not hanging around my ice castle brooding about it.”
“No! No! Now you want to be a criminal! But even that is too much! You have to come running to Daddy, begging for help!”
“My dad’s dead.”
Quentin stopped backing up.
“I may be a second-rate magician,” he said, “but at least I’m not a weird recluse who yells at people. I’m out in the world trying to get something done. And I’ll tell you something else, I think you know how to break an incorporate bond. In fact”—oh my God, maybe he actually was a genius—“in fact, I think you’re under one yourself. That’s what’s keeping you here. Isn’t it?”
Mayakovsky had been very well prepared for their visit. Too well, even for him. It was a long shot—but Mayakovsky hesitated, and Quentin knew he was close.
“Tell me how to break it.” He pressed his advantage. “You must have figured it out, even if you’re too scared to do it yourself. Tell me how. Help somebody for a change!”
He’d touched a nerve, because something went cold behind Mayakovsky’s eyes, and he slapped Quentin across the face. Quentin had forgotten how he liked to do that. It stung like hell, though not as much as it would have if he hadn’t already been drunk on lichen vodka. It made his ears ring, but his face was already two-thirds numb.
He was drunk enough that he did something he’d always wanted to do, which was to slap Mayakovsky back. With his grizzly hide it was like slapping a crocodile. Mayakovsky broke out in his sulfurous yellow grin.
“There it is!” he shouted. “Again!”
Quentin slapped him again.
With no warning Mayakovsky threw his thick arms around Quentin in a big Russian bear hug. It was hard to follow the emotional about-face, but Quentin went with it. Why not? Over Mayakovsky’s shoulder he saw Plum watching them round-eyed—she looked like she was trying to teleport herself out of the room through sheer force of will. But fuck it, why shouldn’t two men hug each other in a basement in the middle of Antarctica? He patted Mayakovsky’s back with his free hand. This poor fucking guy.
And Quentin’s father was dead. Who else was he going to hug? This must be what having a family is like, he thought. This must be how people hug their parents. Good old Mayakovsky. They weren’t so different after all.
“I am a dead man, Quentin. This is my grave. I bury myself here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Quentin said. “It’s stupid. You can break the bond. You can come back anytime. Come with us!”
Mayakovsky pulled away. He held Quentin at arm’s length.
“You keep your shit world! You hear me? You keep it! I will stay here. I am done!”
He patted Quentin’s cheek.
“It is over for me. You are a pathetic mediocrity, but you are braver than me. You will not end like Mayakovsky. It is not over for you.”
He held out the bottle. Christ, Quentin thought they’d finally finished it, but there it was, practically full again. He must be refilling it by magic.
Quentin didn’t remember much after that. Later he would have a hazy recollection of Mayakovsky singing and laughing and weeping but it all got mixed up with the lichen-flavored dreams he had after he passed out, and he could never separate the fact from the hallucinations. In his dreams, at least, they sat on the floor of the workroom, passing the bottle around, and Mayakovsky told them about how he’d been there in the Neitherlands too, when the big blue gods returned and tried to take their magic back. How he’d fought them, alongside the dragons, how he’d ridden bareback on the great white dragon of Lake Vostok. How he’d smashed the bell jar over the Neitherlands with lightning and thunder from his own hands.
—
The next morning Quentin woke up in his own bed. Not in Brakebills South, in his own bed back in the Newark Airport Marriott. He had no memory of how he got there. Mayakovsky must have sent them back through a portal after all, the same way he’d sent Quentin back to Brakebills after the race to the South Pole.
Though Jesus, it made him shudder to think of Mayakovsky opening portals in the state they’d been in. Alcohol and portal magic, not a great combination.
When Quentin sat up he immediately wished he had in fact died in a catastrophic teleportation accident. Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you’ve ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.