CHAPTER 20
Plum needed a night off. It was early April in Manhattan, and winter break was almost over at Brakebills, but some of her former classmates were still in the city. Knowing they were so close she was overcome by a fit of longing for her old life. She decided to indulge it.
She wasn’t even completely sure if she was still received in polite company, after her dramatic departure from Brakebills, so Plum was relieved when they turned up. The venue was a basement bar on Houston Street with a low ceiling and a lot of busted couches and a decent jukebox; it had survived untouched by the rage for elaborately perfect artisanal cocktails. Most of the old League was there, plus a few extras, including Wharton—their impending entry into the wider world seemed to have brought him and the Leaguers together, to the point where they were all more or less on the same side. Plum got the impression that the League had pretty much gone dormant in her absence anyway.
Well, time to put aside childish things, as the verse sayeth. At least they’d gone out on top.
They drank pints of IPA and attempted observational humor about the civilians or muggles or mundanes or whatever you wanted to call them all around them. They made bets about what people were feeling, and then Holly, who had a knack for it, did a mind-reading to see who was right. She couldn’t get anything too specific, not words, or images, just the emotional tone, but that was usually enough. Bars were a good place for it. Alcohol had a way of making people’s minds more transparent, like oil on paper.
Plum knew they were going to talk about Brakebills, and she knew that it was going to hurt. It was partly what she came for, the pain. She was going to test her new sense of herself as someone who was past all that now, who’d had a taste of life in the real world, even though it was turning out to be something of an acquired taste.
Fortunately the pain, when it came, came in bearable quantities of ache. Hearing news from the candlelit bubble-world of Brakebills helped her mourn for the comparatively simple, hopeful Plum who used to inhabit that world. Tonight would be a wake for that other Plum, the Plum who’d never tried that stupid prank. Rest in peace.
She interrogated them methodically for gossip. They were absolutely teeming with it: with graduation coming the Fifth Years were reverting to a state of nature. Everybody who’d been holding their breath for the past five years was letting it out. Even socially anxious, authority-respecting students had begun conducting risky experiments with sass. The candlelit bubble-world was on a collision course with the hard and rocky rogue planet of reality, and when they hit the bubble would pop.
And it was all happening without Plum. She felt like she’d been born too soon—she was a sickly, withered preemie next to a bunch of healthy pink full-term babies.
Most of them already had postgraduation plans. Darcy was going to work for somebody who was working for a judge in the Wizard’s Court (that word, wizard, being an anachronism that cropped up mostly in legal contexts). Lucy was going to assist some possibly fraudulent but indisputably famous artist who constructed enormous invisible magical sculptures in the sky above the city. Wharton would be doing environmental stuff. Holly was part of a hard-core quasi-vigilante group bent on anticipating and averting violent crime among civilians.
The others were busy planning to give themselves over to pleasure, or if not pleasure then at least sloth. Life was already sorting them into categories, whether they liked it or not. All they could do was stare at each other dumbly across the widening gaps.
Plum found herself sorted into an extra ad hoc subcategory of one. Nobody felt comfortable asking her about life after her career-ending and, from their point of view, essentially life-ending disaster. So she volunteered that she was currently working with ex-Professor Quentin Coldwater on an Absolutely Fascinating Research Project the exact nature of which she couldn’t reveal.
Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip.
“Oh my God,” Darcy said, hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. Tell me you’re not sleeping with him. Lie to me if you have to, I just want to hear the words.”
“I’m not sleeping with him! Jesus, what an idea.” Fortunately Plum didn’t have to pretend to be appalled at the idea. Quentin was like her know-it-all older brother. “Who do you think I am?”
“So you’re just . . . living and working with this mysterious brooding older man twenty-four-seven,” Chelsea said.
“I have the phrase ‘Girl Friday’ in my mind for some reason,” Wharton said.
“Guys. It’s not anything like as intimate as you’re imagining. We live in the same house. I’m assisting him on a project.”
“Because, see, any amount of intimate there would be, you know—” Chelsea wrung her hands frantically. “Squick.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said loyally, raising the flag for the backlash to the backlash. “I mean, come on, guys. He’s only what—forty?”
“He’s thirty,” Plum said.
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell with the, you know, the hair. I just meant that we’re not in Humbert Humbert territory here. Not quite.”
“We are not in any territory at all! God! There is no territory!”
“All right, all right.” Darcy held up her hands: we surrender. For now. “I just wish you’d give us a hint about what you are doing.”
Plum did. She’d had enough. Something in her wanted to rise to the challenge of defending herself, and Quentin too. At some point, she couldn’t have said when, this had gone from Quentin’s weird impulse project to something she cared about too. She wanted it to work.
“Look,” she said, “I know it sounds weird. And I have total respect for everything you guys are doing. I do. Even if you’re just going to get high all the time and make light shows on the ceiling.”
Chelsea gave the double V-for-victory sign.
“Those are your paths, and they’re awesome. I’m just on a different one, and it’s definitely a path, but it’s different because I don’t know where it’s going. What Quentin is doing—look, I don’t want to get into details, but it’s pretty brilliant, and he’s after something real. He’s taking a big risk. I like that. I think one day I might want to do something like that too.”
She finished her beer in silence. Everybody was a little embarrassed that Plum had made a speech that wasn’t self-deprecating or funny. Well, so be it, she thought.
“So . . .” Darcy broke the silence.
“So you want to know what we’re doing? We’re doing magic. And if it comes off it’s going to be a fucking masterpiece.”
That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.
—
It wasn’t completely true. They hadn’t done any magic yet. But they would soon. The elaborate preparations in the fourth-floor room were starting to have an effect. One morning Plum walked in and noticed something funny about one of the windows, a little square one set in the back wall. It looked dark, like something was covering it from the outside, whereas the others were full of Manhattan sunlight. The window wasn’t blocked, but the view had changed. It looked out at somewhere else now, or maybe somewhen else: a silent steel-gray marshland in early evening. Miles of swaying drowned grass, in fading light, stretching out to the horizon.
Plum touched the glass. Where the other windows were cool, it was unseasonably warm.
“Weird. Where the hell is that?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Quentin said.
Plum was enjoying her stint as a sorcerer’s apprentice more than she would have thought. Morale was high. Once she’d learned that Fillory really was real, she’d braced herself for an assault from her depressive streak. The revelation seemed like the kind of thing that would give her depression a scary power and substance. But instead she’d found the news left her unexpectedly light, and free, as if maybe it wasn’t her Chatwin-ness at all but rather the bracing-against-it that had caused her so much trouble over the years.
They spent a long cold day up on the house’s flat, sticky tarpaper roof finishing out the magical security up there. If any passing satellite happened to snap a picture, some truly weird shit was going to turn up on Google Earth.
“So tell me about Alice,” Plum said. She was painting sigils, black paint on black roof. “I mean, more about her.”
This kicked off a long pause from Quentin, and Plum wondered if she’d crossed a line. She knew the basic facts, but he hadn’t been forthcoming with a lot of details, probably because he didn’t want to talk about them. But Plum did. She figured since Alice almost killed her, probably, she had the right to subject Quentin to a little exploratory interrogation. He obviously hadn’t given up on his whole Alice project. It was lying fallow for the moment, but Plum wasn’t fooled.
“What do you want to know?”
“What was she like, what kind of stuff was she into, that kind of thing. I mean, I met her ghost or niffin or whatever, but I didn’t get a good sense of her day-to-day interests.”
Quentin stopped working and stood up and massaged the small of his back.
“Alice was great. She was kind, she was funny, she was weird. She was smart—smarter than me, and a better magician too. She did things I still don’t understand. It was sort of part of who she was—there was a force to her, a power, that I’ve never seen in anybody else.”
“Were you in love with her? I mean, I know you were boyfriend-girlfriend, but.”
“Totally.” He smiled. “Totally in love. But I wasn’t ready for her. She was more grown-up than me, and I had a lot of stuff left to work out. I made some mistakes. I thought some things were important that really weren’t.”
Plum stood up too. She was windburned and tired, and the fabric of the seat of her pants disengaged from the roof in such a way as to suggest that the tarpaper had probably wrecked them.
“I feel like you’re talking around something here.”
“Yeah. Probably it’s that I slept with somebody else.” Ah. Kind of sorry she asked there, but Quentin kept going. “Then she slept with somebody else. It was bad, I almost ruined everything. Then just when I was starting to really figure things out, that was when she died.”
“That sucks. I’m really sorry.”
“It took me a long time to get over it.”
Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships.
“So if you do end up somehow, you know, bringing her back, do you think you’ll be together? I mean are you still in love with her?”
“I don’t really know her anymore, Plum. It was a long time ago. I’m a different person now, or at least I hope I am. We’d have to see.”
“So you’d start over.”
“If she wanted to. Though I feel like we were only just about to get started. We wouldn’t start over, we’d just start.”
Deep orange rays of sunlight meandered past, slowed by the viscous urban air they were passing through, full of floating particulates and toxic emissions. Bubbles popped in Plum’s knees.
“Here’s what I don’t get. If you were so unready, if you had all that stuff left to work out, why do you think she loved you?”
Quentin went back to mixing the smelly reagent he’d been working on before.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never did know.”
“That would be a good one to figure out. Maybe before you bring her back?”
—