Lev Grossman - The Magicians

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 okay. 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 we 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 thumb-tacked 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.

That first morning they talked and mingled on the roof of the West Tower for what felt like hours, huddling together to cope with all the strangeness. Nobody felt like going back downstairs, even after they got tired of standing and ran out of things to talk about, so they all sat around the edge of the roof with their backs against the stone wall and just stared off into the pale, hazy distance, bathed in the weird, directionless, all-permeating white light reflecting off the snow.

Quentin leaned his back against the cool stone and closed his eyes. He felt Alice put her head on his shoulder. If nothing else, he could hang on to her. Whatever else changed, she was always the same. They rested.

Later, it might have been minutes or hours or days, he opened his eyes. He tried to say something and discovered that he couldn’t talk.

Some of the others were on their feet already. Professor Mayakovsky had appeared at the head of the stairs, his white bathrobe belted over his gut. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve taken the liberty of depriving you of the power of speech,” he said. He tapped his Adam’s apple. “There will be no talking at Brakebills South. It is the hardest thing to adjust to, and I find it eases the transition if I simply prevent you from speaking for your first weeks here. You may vocalize for the purposes of spellcasting, but for no other reason.”

The class stared at him mutely. Mayakovsky seemed to be more comfortable now that nobody could answer back.

“If you will all follow me downstairs, it is time for your first lesson.”

One thing had always confused Quentin about the magic he read about in books: it never seemed especially hard to do. There were lots of furrowed brows and thick books and long white beards and whatnot, but when it came right down to it, you memorized the incantation — or you just read it off the page, if that was too much trouble — you collected the herbs, waved the wand, rubbed the lamp, mixed the potion, said the words — and just like that the forces of the beyond did your bidding. It was like making salad dressing or driving stick or assembling Ikea furniture — just another skill you could learn. It took some time and effort, but compared to doing calculus, say, or playing the oboe — well, there really was no comparison. Any idiot could do magic.

Quentin had been perversely relieved when he learned that there was more to it than that. Talent was part of it — that silent, invisible exertion he felt in his chest every time a spell came out right. But there was also work, hard work, mountains of it. Every spell had to be adjusted and modified in a hundred ways according to the prevailing Circumstances — they adorned the word with a capital letter at Brakebills — under which it was cast. These Circumstances could be just about anything: magic was a complicated, fiddly instrument that had to be calibrated precisely to the context in which it operated. Quentin had committed to memory dozens of pages of closely printed charts and diagrams spelling out the Major Circumstances and how they affected any given enchantment. And then, once you had all that down, there were hundreds of Corollaries and Exceptions to memorize too.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

It was Mayakovsky’s intention to make them memorize all these minutiae, and not only to memorize them but to absorb and internalize them. The very best spellcasters had talent, he told his captive, silent audience, but they also had unusual under-the-hood mental machinery, the delicate but powerful correlating and cross-checking engines necessary to access and manipulate and manage this vast body of information.

That first afternoon Quentin expected a lecture, but instead, when Mayakovsky was done jinxing their larynxes, he showed each of them to what looked like a monk’s cell, a small stone room with a single high, barred window, a single chair, and a single square wooden table. A shelf of magical reference books was bolted to one wall. It had the clean, industrious air of a room that had just been vigorously swept with a birch-twig broom.