“You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it.”
“I don’t?”
“To become a magician you must do something very different,” the man said. This was clearly his set piece. “You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.
“When a magician casts a spell, he does not first mentally review the Major, Minor, Tertiary, and Quaternary Circumstances. He does not search his soul to determine the phase of the moon, and the nearest body of water, and the last time he wiped his ass. When he wishes to cast a spell, he simply casts it. When he wishes to fly, he simply flies. When he wants the dishes done, they simply are.”
The man muttered something, tapped once resonantly on the table, and the dishes began noisily arranging themselves into stacks as if they were magnetized.
“You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek.” He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake. “We are going to submerge the language of spellcasting deep into who you are, so that you have it always, wherever you are, whenever you need it. Not just when you have studied for a test.
“You are not going on a mystical adventure here, Quentin. This process will be long and painful and humiliating and very, very”—he practically shouted the word—“boring. It is a task best performed in silence and isolation. That is the reason for your presence here. You will not enjoy the time you spend at Brakebills South. I do not encourage you to try.”
Quentin listened to this in silence. He didn’t especially like this man, who had just referred to his penis and whose name he still didn’t know. He put it out of his mind and focused on cramming starch into his depleted body.
“So how do I do that?” Quentin mumbled. “Learn things in my bones? Or whatever?”
“It is very hard. Not everybody does. Not everybody can.”
“Uh-huh. What happens if I can’t?”
“Nothing. You go back to Brakebills. You graduate. You spend your life as a second-ratewood-paneled b gave himv with magician. Many do. Probably you never realize it. Even the fact that you failed is beyond your ability to comprehend.”
Quentin had no intention of letting that happen to him, though it occurred to him that probably nobody actually set out to have that happen to them, and, statistically speaking, it had to happen to somebody. The hash browns no longer tasted quite so scrumptious. He put his fork down.
“Fogg tells me you are good with your hands,” the sandy-haired man said, relenting a little. “Show me.”
Quentin’s fingers were still stiff and sore from having served as wings, but he picked up a sharp knife that looked decently balanced, carefully cleaned it off with a napkin, and held it between the last two fingers in his left hand. He spun it, finger by finger, as far as his thumb; then he tossed it up almost to the ceiling—still spinning, careful to let it pass between two rafters—with the idea that it would fall and bury itself in the table between the third and fourth fingers of his outstretched left hand. This was best done without looking, maintaining eye contact with his audience for maximum effect.
Quentin’s breakfast companion picked up a loaf of bread and stuck it out so that the falling knife speared it. He tossed loaf and knife contemptuously on the table.
“You take stupid risks,” the man said stonily. “Go on and join your friends. I think”—theenk—“you will find them on the roof of the West Tower.” He pointed to a doorway. “We begin in the afternoon.”
Okay, Mr. Funnylaffs, Quentin thought. You’re the boss.
He stood up. The stranger stood up, too, and shuffled off in another direction. He had the air of a disappointed man.
Stone for stone, board for board, Brakebills South was the same house as the House at Brakebills. Which was reassuring, in a way, but it was incongruous to find what looked like an eighteenth-century English country house planted in the middle of a soaring Antarctic wasteland. The roof of the West Tower was broad and round and paved with smooth flagstones, with a stone wall running around the edge. It was open to the elements, but some kind of magical arrangement kept the air warm and humid and protected it from the wind, or mostly. Quentin imagined he could feel a deep chill lurking underneath the warmth somewhere. The air was tepid, but the floor, the furniture, everything he touched was cool and clammy. It was like being in a warm greenhouse in the dead of winter.
As promised, the rest of the Brakebills group was up there, standing around dazed in threes and fours, staring out at the snowpack and talking in low tones, bathed in the eerie, even Antarctic light. They looked different. Their waists were trimmer, and their shoulders and chests were sturdier, huskier. They’d lost fat and packed on muscle during their flight south. Their jaws and cheekbones were sharply defined. Alice looked lovely and gaunt and lost.
“Honk honk honk honk honk honk!” Janet said when she saw Quentin. People laughed, though Quentin had the impression she’d already made that joke a few times.
“Hey, man,” Josh said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Is this place fucked up or what?”
“Doesn’t seem so bad,” Quentin said. “What time is skinny-dipping?”
“I might have been a little off base with that,” Eliot said gloomily, also Alice?”b gave himv with probably not for the first time. “We did all get naked, anyway.”
They were all wearing identical white pajamas. Quentin felt like an inmate in an insane asylum. He wondered if Eliot was missing his secret boyfriend of the moment, whoever it was.
“I ran into Nurse Ratched downstairs,” he said. The pajamas had no pockets, and Quentin kept looking for somewhere to put his hands. “He gave me a speech about how stupid I am and how miserable he’s going to make me.”
“You slept through our little meet ’n’ greet. That’s Professor Mayakovsky.”
“Mayakovsky. Like Dean Mayakovsky?”
“He’s the son,” Eliot said. “I always wondered what happened to him. Now we know.”
The original Mayakovsky had been the most powerful magician in a wave of international faculty brought in during the 1930s and 1940s. Until then Brakebills taught English and American magic almost exclusively, but in the 1930s a vogue for “multicultural” spellcasting had swept the school. Professors were imported at huge expense from around the world, the more remote the better: skirt-wearing shamans from Micronesian dot islands; hunch-shouldered, hookah-puffing wizards from inner-city Cairo coffeehouses; blue-faced Tuareg necromancers from southern Morocco. Legend had it that Mayakovsky senior was recruited from a remote Siberian location, a cluster of frozen Soviet blockhouses where local shamanic traditions had hybridized with sophisticated Muscovite practices brought there by gulag inmates.
“I wonder how badly you have to fuck up to get this assignment,” Josh mused.
“Maybe he wanted it,” Quentin said. “Maybe he likes it here. Dude must be in creepy loner heaven.”
“I think you were right: I think I am going to be the first one to crack,” Eliot said, as if he were having a different conversation. He felt the fluffy stubble on his cheek. “I don’t like it here. This stuff is giving me a rash.” He fingered the material of the Brakebills South pajamas. “I think it might have a stain on it.”
Janet rubbed his arm comfortingly. “You’ll be OK. You survived Oregon. Is this worse than Oregon?”
“Maybe if I ask nicely he’ll turn me back into a goose.”
“Oh my God!” said Alice. “Never again. Do you realize we ate bugs? We ate bugs!”
“What do you mean, never again? How do you think we’re getting back?”
“You know what I liked about being a goose?” Josh said. “Being able to crap wherever I wanted.”
“I’m not going back.” Eliot threw a white pebble out into the white bleakness, where it became invisible before it hit the ground. “I could fly to Australia from here. Or New Zealand—the vineyards there are really coming along. Some nice sheep farmer will adopt me and feed me sauvignon blanc and turn my liver into a wonderful foie gras.”
“Maybe Professor Mayakovsky can turn you into a kiwi bird,” Josh said helpfully.
“Kiwi birds can’t fly.”
“Anyway, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s going to do us a lot of favors,” Alice said.
“He must spend a lot of time alone,” Quentin said. “I wonder if we should feel bad for him.”
Janet snorted.
“Honk honk honk honk honk!”
There was no reliable way to measure time at Brakebills South. There were no clocks, and the sun was a dull white fluorescence permanently thumbtacked a half an inch above the white horizon. It made Quentin think of the Watcherwoman, how she was always trying to stop time. She would have loved this place.