Lev Grossman - The Magicians

With that she sat down heavily on a hard leather Roman couch, opened a book, and became absorbed in her vacation reading.

Quentin understood that it was sometimes better to wait out Alice’s black periods than to try to coax her out of them. Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home. So he spent the next hour wandering around what looked remarkably like an upper-middle-class Pompeian household, complete with pornographic frescoes. It was obsessively authentic except for the bathrooms — a concession had obviously been granted on that score. Even dinner, when it arrived, served by a squad of three-foot-tall animated wooden marionettes who made little click-clacking noises as they walked, was revoltingly historical: calf brains, parrot tongues, a roasted moray eel, all peppered beyond the point of edibility, just in case they weren’t inedible to begin with. Fortunately, there was plenty of wine.

They had progressed to the third course, the stuffed and roasted uterus of a sow, when a short, portly, round-faced man suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a well-worn toga the gray of unlaundered bedsheets. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his dark stubble extended well down his neck, and what hair he had left on his head could have used cutting.

“ Ave atque vales! ” he proclaimed. He gave an elaborate, made-up-looking Roman salute, which was essentially the same as a Nazi salute. “Welcome to the domus of Danielus !”

He made a face that implied that it was other people’s fault that the joke wasn’t funny.

“Hi Dad,” Alice said. “Dad, this is my friend Quentin.”

“Hi.” Quentin stood up. He’d been trying to eat reclining, Roman-style, but it was harder than it looked, and he had a stitch in his side. Alice’s father shook his outstretched hand. He seemed to forget he was doing it halfway through, then looked surprised to find a fleshy alien extremity still in his grip.

“Are you really eating that stuff? I had Domino’s an hour ago.”

“We didn’t know there was anything else. Where’s Mom?”

“Who knows?” Alice’s father said. He bugged his eyes out like it was a wacky mystery. “She was working on one of her compositions downstairs, last I saw.”

He jogged the few steps down into the room, sandals slapping the stone tiles, and served himself some wine from a decanter.

“And that was when? November?”

“Don’t ask me. I lose track of time in this damn place.”

“Why don’t you put in some windows, Daddy? It’s so dark in here.”

“Windows?” He bugged out his eyes again; it appeared to be his signature facial expression. “You speak of some barbarian magic of which we noble Romans know nothing!”

“You’ve done an amazing job here,” Quentin piped up, the soul of obsequiousness. “It looks really authentic.”

“Thank you!” Alice’s father drained the goblet and poured himself another, then sat down heavily on a couch, spilling a purple track of wine down the front of his toga in the process. His bare calves were plump and bone white; black bristles stood straight out from them in static astonishment. Quentin wondered how his beautiful Alice could possibly share a single base pair of genetic information with this person.

“It took me three years to put it together,” he said. “Three years. And you know what? I’m already sick of it after two months. I can’t eat the food, there are skid marks on my toga, and I have plantar fasciitis from walking around on these stone floors. What is the point of my life?” He looked at Quentin furiously, as if he actually expected an answer, as if Quentin were concealing it from him. “Would someone tell me that, please? Because I have no idea! None!”

Alice glared at her father like he’d just killed her pet. Quentin stayed perfectly still, as if that meant that Alice’s father, like a dinosaur, couldn’t see him. They all three sat in awkward silence for a long beat. Then he stood up.

“ Gratias —and good night!”

He tossed the train of his toga over his shoulder and strode out of the room. The marionettes’ feet clack-clacked on the stone floor as they mopped up the spilled wine he left behind.

“That’s my dad!” Alice said loudly, and rolled her eyes as if she expected a laugh track to kick in behind her. None did.

In the midst of this domestic wasteland Alice and Quentin established a workable, even comfortable routine for themselves, invaders staking out a safe perimeter deep in hostile territory. It was weirdly liberating to be in the middle of somebody else’s domestic agony — he could see the bad emotional energy radiating out in all directions, sterilizing every available surface with its poisonous particles, but it passed through him harmlessly, like neutrinos. He was like Superman here, he was from off-planet, and that made him immune to any local villainy. But he could see it doing its ruinous work on Alice, and he tried to shield her as best he could. He knew the rules here instinctively, what it meant to have parents who ignored you. The only difference was that his parents did it because they loved each other, Alice’s because they hated each other.

If nothing else the house was quiet and well stocked with Roman-style wine, sweet but perfectly drinkable. It was also reasonably private: he and Alice could share a bedroom without her parents caring or even noticing. And there were the baths: Alice’s dad had excavated huge, cavernous underground Roman baths that they had all to themselves, huge oblong aquifers scooped out of the midwestern tundra. Every morning they would spend a good hour trying to fling each other into the scalding caldarium and the glacial frigidarium , which were equally unbearable, and then soaking naked in the tepidarium .

Over the course of two weeks Quentin glimpsed Alice’s mother exactly once. If anything, she looked even less like Alice than Alice’s father did: she was thin and tall, taller than her husband, with a long, narrow, animated face and a dry bunch of blond-brown hair tied back behind her head. She chattered earnestly to him about the research she was doing on fairy music, which was, she explained, mostly scored for tiny bells and inaudible to human beings. She lectured Quentin for almost an hour, with no prompting on his part, and without once asking him who he was or what exactly he was doing in her house. At one point one of her slight breasts wandered out of the misbuttoned cardigan that she wore with nothing under it; she tucked it back in without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Quentin had the impression that it had been some time since she had spoken to anybody.

“So I’m a little worried about your parents,” Quentin said that afternoon. “I think they might be completely insane.”

They had retreated to Alice’s bedroom, where they lay side by side on her enormous bed in their bathrobes, looking up at the mosaic on the ceiling: Orpheus singing to a ram, an antelope, and an assortment of attentive birds.

“Are they?”

“Alice, I think you know they’re kind of weird.”

“I guess. I mean, I hate them, but they’re my parents. I don’t see them as insane, I see them as sane people who deliberately act like this to torture me. When you say they’re mentally ill, you’re just letting them off the hook. You’re helping them elude prosecution.

“Anyway, I thought you might find them interesting,” she said. “I know how mentally excited you get about anything magical. Well, voila , for your enjoyment, two career magicians.”

He wondered, theoretically, which of them had it worse. Alice’s parents were toxic monsters, but at least you could see it. His own parents were more like vampires or werewolves — they passed for human. He could rave about their atrocities all he wanted, he knew the villagers would never believe him till it was too late.