Lev Grossman - The Magicians

He took a deep breath, then another. It was like white light flooding through him. He didn’t know he could be this happy. Everything that was weighing him down — Janet, Alice, Penny, everything — was suddenly insubstantial by comparison. If the City was real, then Fillory could be real, too. Last night had been a disaster, an apocalypse, but this was so much more important. It was almost funny now. There was so much joy ahead of them.

He turned to Alice. “This is exactly —”

Her fist caught him smack in his left eye. She hit like a girl, without any weight behind it, but he hadn’t seen it coming to roll with it. The left half of the world flashed white.

He bent over, half blind, the heel of his hand over his eye. She kicked him in the shins, one and then the other, with dismaying accuracy.

“Asshole! You ass hole!”

Alice’s face was pale. Her teeth were chattering.

“You bastard. You fucking coward.”

“Alice,” he managed. “Alice, I’m sorry. But listen… look—” He tried to point at the world around them while also verifying that his cornea was still intact.

“Don’t you fucking speak to me!” She slapped wildly at his head and shoulders with both hands so that he ducked and put up his arms. “Don’t you even dare talk to me, you whore! You fucking whore!”

He staggered a few steps away across the stone, trying to escape, his sopping wet clothes flapping, but she followed him like a swarm of bees. Their voices sounded small and empty in the echoless square.

“Alice! Alice!” His orbital ridge was a ring of fire. “Forget about all that for a second! Just for a second!” She’d still been holding the button in her fist when she clocked him. It must be a lot heavier than it looked. “You don’t understand. It was just… everything—” There was a right way to say this. “I got confused. Life just seemed so empty — I mean out there — it’s like what you said, we have to live while we can. Or that’s what I thought. But it got out of control. It just got out of control.” Why was he talking in clichés? Get to the point. He definitely had one. “We were all just so drunk—”

“Really. Too drunk to fuck?” She had him there. “I could kill you. Do you understand that?” Her face was terrible. There were two white-hot points on her flushed cheeks. “I could burn you to nothing right where you stand. I’m stronger than you. Nothing you could do would stop me.”

“Listen, Alice.” He had to stop her from talking. “I know it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. And I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry. You have to believe me. But it’s so important that you understand!”

“What are you, a child? You got confused? Why didn’t you just end it, Quentin? You obviously lost interest a long time ago. You really are a child, aren’t you? You’re obviously not enough of a man to have a real relationship. You’re not even enough of a man to end a real relationship. Do I have to do absolutely everything for you?

“Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now.”

She stopped at this, shaking her head, lost in a dream of disbelief. Her own words had brought her up short. In the silence the fact that he had cheated on her, and with Janet of all people, hit her all over again, as fully as it had the first time, two hours ago. Quentin could see it: it was like she’d been shot in the stomach.

She held up her hand, palm out, like she was shielding her eyes from his monstrous face. A lock of wet hair was plastered to her cheek. She was gasping for breath. Her lips had gone pale. But they kept moving.

“Was it worth it?” she said. “You always wanted her, you think I didn’t see that? You think I’m stupid? Answer me: Do you think I’m stupid? Just tell me! I really want to know if you think I’m stupid!”

She ran at him and slapped his face. He took the full force of the blow.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid, Alice.” Quentin felt like a boxer who was knocked out standing, out on his feet, crosses for eyes, just wishing to God that he could fall down. She was right, a thousand times right, but if he could just make her see what he saw — if she could only put things in proper perspective. Fucking women. She was walking away now, toward one of the alleys that led to another square, leaving a trail of damp squashing foot prints behind her. “But will you please look around you?” He was begging, trailing after her, his voice ragged with exhaustion. “Will you please acknowledge for a second that something more important than who stuck what body part where is going on around you?”

She wasn’t listening, or maybe she was just determined to say what she was going to say.

“You know,” she said, almost conversationally, crossing into the next square, “I bet you actually thought fucking her was going to make you happy. You just go from one thing to the next, don’t you, and you think it’s going to make you happy. Brakebills didn’t. I didn’t. Did you really think Janet would? It’s just another fantasy, Quentin.”

She stopped and hugged her arms over her midsection, like the pain was a gastric ulcer, and sobbed bitterly. Her wet clothes clung to her; a little pool was forming around her. He wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t dare touch her. The stillness of the square was almost tangible around them. The Fillory books had described them as all exactly identical, but he could see they weren’t, far from it. They shared the same crypto-Italian style, but this one had a colonnade on one side, and the fountain in the center was rectangular, not round like the one they’d come in through. At one end a white marble face vomited water into it.

Footsteps on stone. Quentin thought he would have welcomed any interruption, anything, especially if it was carnivorous and would eat him alive.

“Kind of a reunion, isn’t it?”

Penny came stepping briskly across the flagstones toward them. The gray facade of a stone piazza loomed above them, with heraldic inlays: an anchor and three flames. Penny looked as happy and relaxed as Quentin had ever seen him. He was in his element and glowing with pride. His clothes were dry.

“Sorry. I’ve spent so much time here, but I’ve never had anybody to show it to. You wouldn’t think that would matter, but it does. When I first came through there was a corpse lying right there on the ground. Right over there.”

He pointed like a campus tour guide.

“Human, or close to it, anyway. Maybe Maori, he had a tattoo on his face. He could only have been dead a few days. He must have gotten trapped here — came in, but the pools wouldn’t let him out somehow. I think he died of starvation. The next time I came the body was gone.”

Penny studied their two faces and took in the situation for the first time: Alice’s tears, Quentin’s rapidly darkening black eye, their toxic body language.

“Oh.” His face softened slightly. He made a gesture, and suddenly their clothes were warm and dry and pressed, too. “Look, you have to forget about all that stuff here. This place can be dangerous if you’re not paying attention. I’ll give you an example: Which way would you go to get back to our home square?”

Alice and Quentin looked around obediently, Penny’s reluctant students. In their running fight they had cut an angle through the second square into a third. Or a fourth? Their footprints had already faded. There was an alley on each side of the square, and through each alley you could catch a glimpse of other irregular alleys and fountains and squares, more and more, diminishing to infinity. It was like a trick with mirrors. The sun was hidden, if there even was a sun. Penny was right: they had no idea which one led back to Earth, or even which general direction they’d come from.