Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Every morning Quentin put on a suit and stood on an old elevated subway platform in Brooklyn, raw cement stained with rust by the bits of iron rebar poking out of it. From the uptown end he could just barely see the tiny, hazy, aeruginous spike of the Statue of Liberty out in the bay. In the summertime the thick wooden ties sweated aromatic beads of liquid black tar. Invisible signals caused the tracks to shift and shunt the trains left and right, as if (as if, but not actually) directed by unseen hands. Nearby unidentifiable birds swirled in endless cyclonic circles above a poorly maintained dumpster.

Every morning when the train arrived it was full of young Russian women riding in from Brighton Beach, three-quarters asleep, swaying in unison to the rocking of the car, their lustrous dark hair dyed a hideous unconvincing blond. In the marble lobby of the building where Quentin worked, elevators ingested pods of commuters and then spat them out on their respective floors.

When he left work every day at five, the entire sequence repeated itself in reverse.

As for his weekends, there was no end to the multifarious meaningless entertainments and distractions with which the real world supplied Quentin. Video games; Internet porn; people talking on their cell phones in bodegas about their stepmothers’ medical conditions; weightless supermarket plastic bags snagged in leafless trees; old men sitting on their stoops with no shirts on; the oversize windshield wipers on blue-and-white city buses slinging huge gouts of rainwater back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

It was all he had left, and it would have to be enough. As a magician he had been among the world’s silent royalty, but he had abdicated his throne. He had doffed his crown and left it lying there for the next sucker to put on. Le roi est mort . It was a kind of enchantment in itself, this new life of his, the ultimate enchantment: the enchantment to end all enchantments forever.

One day, having leveled up three different characters in three different computer games, and run through every Web site he could plausibly and even implausibly want to surf, Quentin noticed that his Outlook calendar was telling him that he was supposed to be at a meeting. It had started half an hour ago, and it was on a fairly remote floor of GHS’s corporate monolith, necessitating the use of a different elevator bank. But throwing caution to the wind he decided to attend.

The purpose of this particular meeting, Quentin gathered from some hastily harvested context clues, was a joint post-mortem of the PlaxCo restructuring, which had apparently been triumphantly wrapped up some weeks earlier, though Quentin had somehow missed that crucial detail till now. Also on the agenda was a new, related project, just kicking off, to be conducted by another team consisting of people Quentin had never met before. He found himself sneaking glances at one of them.

It was hard to say what stood out about her, except that she was the only person besides Quentin who never spoke once during the entire meeting. She was some years older than him and not notably attractive or unattractive. Sharp nose, thin mouth, chin-length mousy brown hair, with an air of powerful intelligence held in check by boredom. He wasn’t sure how he knew, maybe it was her fingers, which had a familiar muscular, overdeveloped look. Maybe it was her features, which had a mask-like quality. But there was no question what she was. She was another one like him: a former Brakebillian in deep cover in the real world.

The thick plottens.

Quentin buttonholed a colleague afterward — Dan, Don, Dean, one of those — and found out her name. It was Emily Greenstreet. The one and only and infamous. The girl Alice’s brother had died for.

Quentin’s hands shook as he pressed the elevator buttons. He informed his assistant that he would be taking the rest of the afternoon off. Maybe the rest of the week, too.

But it was too late. Emily Greenstreet must have spotted him, too — maybe it really was the fingers? — because before the day was over he had an e-mail from her. The next morning she left him a voice mail and attempted to remotely insert a lunch date into his Outlook calendar. When he got online she IMed him relentlessly and finally — having gotten his cell phone number off the company’s emergency contact list — she texted him:

Y POSTPONE THE INEVITABLE?

Y not? he thought. But he knew she was right. He didn’t really have a choice. If she wanted to find him, then sooner or later she would. With a sense of defeat he clicked ACCEPT on the lunch invitation. They met the following week at a grandly expensive old-school French restaurant that had been beloved of GHS executives since time immemorial.

It wasn’t as bad as he thought. She was a fast-talking woman, so skinny and with such erect posture that she looked brittle. Seated across from each other, almost alone in a hushed circle of cream tablecloths and glassware and heavy, clinking silverware, they gossiped about work. He hardly knew enough of the names to keep up, but she talked enough for both of them. She told him about her life — nice apartment, Upper East Side, roof deck, cats. They found that they had a funny kind of black humor in common. In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster. Who could possibly know that better than they — the man who watched Alice die, and the woman who’d essentially killed Alice’s brother? When he looked at her he saw himself eight years down the line. It didn’t look all that bad.

And she liked a drink or five, so they had that in common, too. Martini glasses, wine bottles, and whiskey tumblers piled up between them, a miniature metropolis of varicolored glass, while their cell phones and BlackBerries plaintively, futilely tried to attract their attention.

“So tell me,” Emily Greenstreet said, when they’d both imbibed enough to create the illusion of a comfortable, long-standing intimacy between them. “Do you miss it? Doing magic?”

“I can honestly say I never think about it,” he said. “Why? Do you?”

“Miss it, or think about it?” She rolled a lock of her mousy, chin-length hair between two fingers. “Of course I do. Both.”

“Are you ever sorry you left Brakebills?”

She shook her head sharply.

“The only thing I regret is not leaving that place sooner.” She leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods. They’re just kids, Quentin! With all that power! What happened to Charlie and me could happen again to any one of them, any day, any minute. Or worse. Much worse. It’s amazing that place is still standing.” He noticed that she never said “Brakebills,” just “that place.” “I don’t even like living on the same coast with it. There’s practically no safeguards at all. Every one of those kids is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off!

“Somebody needs to get control of that place. Sometimes I think I should blow their cover, get the real government in there, get it properly regulated. The teachers will never do it. The Magician’s Court will never do it.”

She chattered on in that vein. They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking.

Though unlike recovering alcoholics they could and did drink plenty of alcohol. Temporarily revived by a molten affogato , Quentin went to work on a bitter single malt Scotch that tasted like it had been decanted through the stump of an oak tree that had been killed by lightning.

“I never felt safe in that place. Never, not for a minute. Don’t you feel safer out here, Quentin? In the real world?”