Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“I’m sick, I’m not dead,” Eliot snapped. And that was that.

At least one of Eliot’s talents had survived graduation: he was still a tireless seeker-out of obscure and wonderful bottles of wine. He was not yet such a lush that he’d abandoned his snobbishness. He went to tastings and chatted up importers and wine-store owners with a zeal that he mustered for nothing else. Once every few weeks, when he had accumulated a dozen or so bottles of which he was especially proud, Eliot would announce that they were having a dinner party. It was one such dinner party that he and Quentin were preparing for today.

They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. The venue was always Eliot and Janet’s Soho apartment, a vast prewar warren with an implausible profusion of bedrooms, a set ripe for a French farce. Josh was head chef, with Quentin assisting as apprentice chef and kitchen runner. Eliot acted as sommelier, of course. Alice’s contribution was to stop reading long enough to eat.

Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night’s dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. She also confabulated various surreal and sometimes controversial centerpieces. The theme of tonight’s party was Miscegenation, and Janet had promised — over objections aesthetic, moral, and ornithological — to deliver Leda and the Swan staged as a pair of magically animated ice sculptures. They would copulate until they melted.

As with all such evenings, the cleverness of the conceit became annoying somewhere around the middle of the afternoon before the party actually started. Quentin had found a grass skirt at an antique store, which he planned to pair with a tuxedo shirt and jacket, but the skirt was so scratchy that he gave up on it. He couldn’t think of another idea, so he spent the rest of the afternoon brooding and dodging Josh, who had spent the past week researching recipes that included violently disparate ingredients wedded together — sweet and savory, black and white, frozen and molten, Eastern and Western — and was now frantically slamming oven and cabinet doors and making him taste things and sniping at him over the pastry island. Alice arrived at five thirty, and Quentin and Josh both dodged her as well. By the time the party started everybody was drunk and starving and irritable.

But then, as sometimes happens with dinner parties, everything became mysteriously, spontaneously perfect again. The fabric knitted itself back together. The day before, Josh, who by this time had shaved off his beard (“It’s like taking care of a damn pet”), announced that he was bringing a date, which put added pressure on everybody to get their shit together. As the sun set over the Hudson, and sunbeams tinted a delicate rose by their passage through the atmosphere over New Jersey lanced through the apartment’s huge common room, and Eliot handed around Lillet cocktails (Lillet and champagne layered over a velvet hammer of vodka) in chilled martini glasses, and Quentin served miniature sweet-and-sour lobster rolls, everybody suddenly seemed — or maybe they actually were? — wise and funny and good-looking.

Josh had refused to reveal the identity of his date in advance, so when the elevator doors opened — they had the entire floor — Quentin had no idea that he would recognize her: it was the girl from Luxembourg, the curly-haired captain of the European team that had administered the deathblow to his welters career. It turned out (they told the story collaboratively, a set piece they’d evidently been working on) that Josh had bumped into her in a subway station where she was trying to bewitch a vending machine into adding money to her Metrocard. Her name was Anaïs, and she wore a pair of snakeskin pants so ravishing that nobody asked her what if anything they had to do with the theme. She had blond ringlets and a tiny pointy nose, and Josh was obviously besotted with her. So was Quentin. He felt a wild pang of jealousy.

He barely talked to Alice all night anyway, what with ducking in and out of the kitchen warming and plating and serving things. By the time he emerged with the entrées — pork chops dusted with bitter chocolate — it was dark, and Richard was making a speech about magical theory. The wine and the food and the music and the candles were almost enough to make what he was saying seem interesting.

Richard, of course, was the mysterious stranger who turned up with the other former Physical Kids on graduation day. He was a one-time Physical Kid, too, of the generation that preceded Eliot and Josh and Janet, and of them all he was the only one who had actually entered the world of respectable professional wizardry. Richard was tall, with a big head, dark hair, square shoulders, and a big square chin, and he was handsome in a Frankensteinian way. He was friendly enough to Quentin — firm handshake, lots of eye contact with his big, dark eyes. In conversation he liked to address Quentin directly as “Quentin” a lot, which made him feel kind of like they were having a job interview. Richard was employed by the trust that managed the collective financial assets of the magical community, which were vast. He was, in a quiet way, an observant Christian. They were rare among magicians.

Quentin tried to like Richard, since everybody else did, and it would just be simpler. But he was so damn earnest. He wasn’t stupid, but he completely lacked any sense of humor — jokes derailed him, so that the whole conversation had to stop while somebody, usually Janet, explained what everybody else was laughing at, and Richard knitted his thick Vulcan eyebrows in consternation at his companions’ merely human foibles. And Janet, who could usually be counted on to ruthlessly flense anybody who made the mistake of taking anything seriously, Janet waited on Richard hand and foot! It annoyed Quentin to think that she might look up to Richard the same way he had once looked up to the older Physical Kids. He had the definite sense that Janet must have slept with Richard once or twice back at Brakebills. It was entirely possible that they slept together once in a while now.

“Magic,” Richard announced slowly, flushed, “is the tools. Of the Maker.” He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass. “There’s no other way of looking at it. We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house, and then He left.” He rapped the table with one hand to celebrate this triumph of reason. “And when He left, He left His tools lying around in the garage. Then we found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. Now we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic.”

“There are so many things wrong with that I don’t even know where to start,” Quentin distinctly heard himself say.

“So? Start.”

Quentin put down the food he was carrying. He had no idea what he was about to say, but he was happy to be publicly contradicting Richard.

“Okay, well, first of all, there’s a huge scale problem. Nobody’s building universes here. We’re not even building galaxies or solar systems or planets. You need cranes and bulldozers to build a house. If there is a ‘Maker,’ which I frankly don’t see much evidence for, that’s what He had. What we’ve got are hand tools. Black and Decker. I don’t see how you get from there to what you’re talking about.”

“If it’s a question of scale,” Richard said, “I don’t see that as insurmountable. Maybe we’re just not”—he searched in his wine glass for the right metaphor—“we’re not plugging our tools into the right socket. Maybe there’s a much bigger socket—”