Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“I let you sleep,” he said. “Most of the others are already up.”

“Thanks.” Quentin scooched down the bench to sit across from him. He rummaged through the leftover plates and dishes for a clean fork.

“You are at Brakebills South.” The man’s voice was oddly flat, with a slight Russian accent, and he didn’t look directly at Quentin when he talked. “We are about five hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew in over the Bellingshausen Sea on your way in from Chile, over a region called Ellsworth Land. They call this part of Antarctica Marie Byrd Land. Admiral Byrd named it after his wife.”

He scratched his tousled hair unself-consciously.

“Where’s everybody else?” Quentin asked. There didn’t seem to be any point in being formal, since they were both wearing bathrobes. And the cold hash browns were unbelievably good. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“I gave them the morning.” He waved in no particular direction. “Classes begin in the afternoon.”

Quentin nodded, his mouth full.

“What kind of classes?” he managed.

“What kind of classes,” the man repeated. “Here at Brakebills South you will begin your education in magic. Or I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Professor Fogg?”

Questions like that always confused Quentin, so he resorted to honesty.

“Yes, I did think that.”

“You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think”—his accent made it theenk —“that you have been studying magic.” Medzhik . “You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?”

It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”

“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Magnificent. You are a genius.”

With an effort Quentin decided not to be stung by this. He was still enjoying the Zen afterglow of having been a goose. And the hash browns.

“Thank you.”

“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-rate 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 be 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 honkonk 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 probably not for the first time. “We did all get naked, anyway.”