The Magicians (6 page)

Afterward Quentin couldn’t remember much of the rest of that night, except that he spent it there at the school. He was exhausted, and weak, like he’d been drugged. His chest felt hollowed out and empty. He wasn’t even hungry anymore, just desperate to sleep. It was embarrassing, but nobody seemed to mind. Professor Van der Weghe—it turned out that was the dark-haired woman’s name—told him it was perfectly natural to be tired because he had just cast his first Minor Incantation, whatever that was, and that would wear anybody out. She further promised him that matters had been squared with his parents. They wouldn’t be worried. By that point Quentin barely cared, he just wanted to pass out.

He let her half lead, half carry him up approximately ten thousand flights of stairs to a small, neat room containing a very, very soft featherbed with cool white sheets. He lay down on it with his shoes still on. Ms. Van der Weghe took them off for him—it made him feel like a little kid to have somebody untie his shoes for him. She covered him up, and he was asleep before she closed the door.

The next morning it took him a long, confused minute to figure out where he was. He lay in bed, slowly piecing together his memories of the day before. It was a Friday, and by rights he should be in school now. Instead he was waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom wearing yesterday’s clothes. He felt vaguely confused and regretful, like he’d drunk too much at a party with people he didn’t know very well and fallen asleep in the host’s spare bedroom. He even had a trace of what felt like a hangover.

What exactly had happened last night? What had he done? His memories were all wrong. The events were like a dream—they had to be—but they didn’t feel like a dream. And this room wasn’t a dream. A crow cawed loudly outside and immediately stopped, as if it were embarrassed. There was no other sound.

From where he lay he took stock of the room he was in. The walls were curved—the room was in the shape of a section of a circle. The outer wall was stone; the inner was taken up with dark wooden cabinets and cubbies. There was a Victorian-looking writing desk and a dresser and a mirror. His bed was tucked into a wooden alcove. There were small vertical windows all along the outer wall. He had to admit it was a highly satisfactory room. No danger signs yet. Maybe this wasn’t a complete disaster. At any rate it was time to get up. Time to get it over with and find out what was going on.

He got up and padded over to a window. The stone floor was cool on his bare feet. It was early, a misty dawn, and he was very high up, higher than the tops of the highest trees. He had slept for ten hours. He looked down on the green lawn. It was silent and empty. He saw the crow: it drifted by below him on glossy blue-black wings.

 

 

A note on the desk informed him that he would be having breakfast with Dean Fogg at his earliest convenience. Quentin discovered a dormitory-style bathroom on the floor below, with shower stalls and rows of capacious white porcelain sinks and stacks of neatly folded scratchy white institutional towels. He washed up—the water was hot and strong, and he let it blast him till he felt clean and calm. He took a long pent-up acid-yellow piss in the shower and watched it spiral down the drain. It felt deeply weird not to be in school, to be on an adventure somewhere new, however dubious. It felt good. A mental meter in his brain was totting up the damage that his absence would be wreaking at home in Brooklyn; so far it was still within acceptable limits. He made himself as presentable as possible in his day-old, slept-in interview suit and walked downstairs.

The place was completely deserted. He hadn’t expected a formal reception, exactly, but he had to wander around for twenty minutes, through empty hallways and drawing rooms and classrooms and out onto terraces, before the white-gloved butler who’d served him his sandwich yesterday finally found him and deposited him in the Dean’s office, which was surprisingly small and mostly taken up by a presidential desk the size of a panzer tank. The walls were lined with an assortment of books and old-looking brass instruments.

The Dean arrived a minute later wearing a light green linen suit and a yellow tie. He was brusque and peppy and showed no sign of embarrassment, or any other emotion, relating to the scene the night before. He had already had breakfast, Fogg explained, but Quentin would eat while they talked.

“Now.” He clapped his hands on his knees and quirked his eyebrows. “First things first: magic is real. But you’ve probably already gotten that far.”

Quentin said nothing. He kept his face, his whole body, carefully still in his chair. He looked at a spot over Fogg’s shoulder. He was giving nothing away. Certainly it was the simplest possible explanation for what had happened last night. Part of him, the part he trusted least, wanted to leap on this idea like a puppy on a ball. But in light of everything else that had ever happened to him, in his entire life, he checked himself. He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all.

He let Fogg talk.

“To answer your questions of last night, you are at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.” The butler arrived with a tray crowded with covered dishes, which he busily uncovered, like a room-service waiter. “Based on your performance in the Examination yesterday, we’ve decided to offer you a place here. Try the bacon, it’s very good. Local farm, they raise the pigs on cream and walnuts.”

“You want me to go to school here. College.”

“Yes. You’d come here instead of matriculating at a conventional university. If you like it, you can even keep the room you stayed in last night.”

“But I can’t just—” Quentin didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence. “I’m sorry, this is a little confusing. So I would put off college?”

“No, Quentin. You wouldn’t put off college. You would abandon college. Brakebills would be your college.” The Dean had obviously had a lot of practice at this. “There would be no Ivy League for you. You wouldn’t go off to school with the rest of your class. You would never make Phi Beta Kappa or be recruited by a hedge fund or a management consultancy. This isn’t summer school, Quentin. This is”—he pronounced the phrase precisely, eyes wide—“ ‘the whole shebang.’ ”

“So it’s four years—”

“Five, actually.”

“—at the end of which I get what? A bachelor’s of magic?” It was actually funny. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” he said to nobody.

“At the end of which you will be a magician, Quentin. It is not the obvious career path, I know. Your guidance counselor would not approve. No one will know what you’re doing here. You would be leaving all that behind. Your friends, whatever career plans you had, everything. You would be losing one world but gaining another. Brakebills would become your world. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.”

Well, no, it wasn’t. Quentin pushed his plate away and crossed his arms. He stalled.

“So, how did you find me?”

“Oh, we have a device for that, a globe.” Fogg indicated a shelf holding a whole menagerie of them: modern globes; blackwater globes; pale lunar globes; glittering midnight-blue celestial globes; dark, smoky, unreadable globes awash with ludicrously inaccurate continents. “It finds young people like yourself who have an aptitude for magic—essentially it senses magic being performed, often inadvertently, by unregistered sorcerers, of which you are one. I suppose it must have picked up that Wandering Nickel trick of yours.

“We have scouts, too,” he added. “Your odd friend Ricky with the whiskers is one.” He touched his jawline where Ricky’s Amish beard was.

“What about that woman I met, with the braids. The paramedic. Was she a scout, too?”

Fogg frowned. “With braids? You saw her?”

“Well, yes. Right before I came here. Didn’t you send her?”

Fogg’s face became studiously empty.

“In a manner of speaking. She’s a special case. Works on an independent basis. Freelance, you might say.”

Quentin’s mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.

“Don’t you want to see my SATs?”

“I have,” Fogg said patiently. “And a lot more than that. But yesterday’s Exam was all we really needed. It’s very comprehensive. Admission here is quite competitive, you know. I doubt there’s a more exclusive school of any kind on the continent. We held six Exams this summer, for twenty places. Only two Passed yesterday, you and another boy, the boy with the tattoos and the hair. Penny, he says his name is. Can’t be his real name.

“This is the only magical school in North America,” Fogg went on, leaning back behind his desk. He almost seemed to be enjoying Quentin’s discomfort. “There’s one in the UK, two on the Continent, four in Asia, and so on. One in New Zealand for some reason. People talk a lot of guff about American magic, but I assure you we are quite up to the international standard. In Zurich they still teach phrenology, if you can believe that.”

Something small but heavy fell off Fogg’s desk with a clunk. He bent to retrieve it: a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching.

“Poor little thing,” he said, petting it with his large hands. “Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it’s alive, but it’s much too heavy to fly.” The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. “It’s always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

“Now.” The Dean leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Should you choose to matriculate here, we’ll do some minor illusion work with your parents. They can’t know about Brakebills, of course, but they’ll think you’ve been accepted to a very prestigious private institute—which isn’t at all far from the truth—and they’ll be very proud. It’s painless and quite effective, as long as you don’t say anything too obvious.

“Oh, and you’ll start right away. The semester begins in two weeks, so you’ll have to skip the rest of your senior year. But I really shouldn’t be telling you all this before we’ve done your paperwork.”

Fogg took out a pen and a fat sheaf of closely handwritten paper that looked like a treaty between two eighteenth-century nation-states.

“Penny signed yesterday,” he said. “Very quick Examination, that boy. What do you say?”

So that was it, that was the sales pitch. Fogg put the papers in front of him and held out the pen. Quentin took it, a fancy-looking metal fountain pen as thick as a cigar. His hand hovered over the page. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to throw everything away? Everything: everybody he knew, James and Julia, whatever college he would have gone to, whatever career he would have had, everything he thought he’d been getting ready for. For this? This bizarre charade, this fever dream, this fancy-dress role-playing game?

He stared out the window. Fogg watched him impassively, just waiting for him to fall for it. If he cared one way or the other, he wasn’t letting on. The little floundering metal bird, having escaped its drawer, butted its head industriously against the wainscoting.

And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin’s chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign. Jesus, what the hell was he thinking? Of course he was going to sign. This was everything he’d always wanted, the break he’d given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

“Okay,” Quentin said evenly. “All right. On one condition: I want to start now. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to go home.”

 

 

They didn’t make him go home. Instead, his things arrived from home in a collection of duffel bags and rolly suitcases, packed by his parents, who had, as Fogg promised, somehow been squared with the idea that their only child was suddenly matriculating in the middle of the semester at a mysterious educational institution they had never visited or even heard of. Quentin slowly unpacked his clothes and his books and put them away in the cabinets and cubbies in the little curved tower room. He didn’t even want to touch them now. They were part of his old self, his old life, the one he was molting away. The only thing missing was the book, the notebook the paramedic gave him. That was nowhere to be found. He’d left it in the exam room on the assumption that he’d be going back there, but when he finally did it was gone. Dean Fogg and the butler pled ignorance.

Sitting there alone in his room, his folded clothes around him on the bed, he thought about James and Julia. God only knew what they were thinking. Did she miss him? Now that he was gone, would she realize she’d had the wrong man all along? He should probably get in touch with them somehow. Though really, what the hell could he say? He wondered what would have happened if James had taken the envelope from the paramedic too. Maybe he would have gotten to take the exam, too. Maybe that was part of the test.