It was a shame: he probably never even had to know what happened. He could easily have missed it. Though maybe they would have stayed there forever if he had. He stayed up late one night, playing cards with Josh and Eliot. Playing cards with magicians always degenerated into a meta-contest over who was better at warping the odds, so that practically every hand came up four aces against a couple of straight flushes. Quentin was, tentatively, feeling better. They were drinking grappa. The twisted knot of shame and regret in his chest that had been there since the night with Janet was gradually coming undone, or at least scarring over. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either. There was so much right between him and Alice. They could get past this.
Maybe it was time he helped her see that. He knew she wanted to. He’d screwed up, he was sorry, they would get past it. QED. They just needed to get it into perspective. She was probably just waiting for him to say it. He excused himself and headed up the stairs to the third floor, where the master bedroom was. Josh and Eliot gamely rooted him on his way:
“Q! Q! Q! Q!”
When he was almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped. Quentin would have known it anywhere, the sound that Alice made when she was having sex. Now here was a conundrum for his drunken mind to reflect on: she was making it now, but it wasn’t Quentin who was making her make it. He stared down at the burnt-orange natural-weave fibers of the runner that ran down the middle of the stairs. He could not be hearing that sound. It came in through his ears and made spots appear in his vision. His blood fizzed like a science experiment and turned to acid. The acid propagated through his body and made his arms and legs and brain burn. Then it made its way to his heart, like a deadly blood clot that had broken loose and was drifting free, bringing death with it. When it reached his heart, his heart turned white hot.
She was with Penny or Richard, obviously. He had just left Josh and Eliot, and they would never do that to him anyway. He walked stiff-legged back down the stairs and down the hall to Richard’s room and kicked open the door and slapped the light on. Richard was there in bed, alone. He sat bolt upright, blinking in an asinine Victorian nightshirt. Quentin turned off the light and slammed the door shut again.
Janet came out into the hall in pajamas, frowning.
“What’s going on?”
He shouldered roughly past her.
“Hey!” she yelled after him. “That hurt!”
Hurt? What did she know about hurt? He snapped on the lamp in Penny’s room. Penny’s bed was empty. He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he could not do. Or almost. He tried to rip down Penny’s curtains, but they wouldn’t come, even when he hung on them with all his weight. Instead he opened the window and ripped the clothes off the bed and stuffed them out through it. Not bad, but not enough. He spiked the alarm clock, then started pulling books off the shelves.
Penny had a lot of books. It was going to take a while to get them all off the shelves. But that was okay, he had all night, and he had all the energy in the world. Wasn’t even sleepy. It was like he was on speed. Except that after a while it got harder to pull the books off the shelves because Josh and Richard were holding his arms. Quentin thrashed insanely, like a toddler having a tantrum. They dragged him out into the hall.
It was so stupid, really. So obvious. Certainly you couldn’t call it clever. He fucked Janet; she fucks Penny. They should be even now. But he’d been drunk! How did that make them even? He barely knew what he was doing! How did that make them even? And Penny—Jesus. He wished it
had
been Josh.
They confined him to the den, gave him the bottle of grappa and a stack of DVDs and figured he’d knock himself out. Josh stayed there to make sure Quentin didn’t try any magic, as worked up as he was, but he nodded off right away, his round cheek on the hard arm of the couch, like a sleepy apostle.
As for Quentin, sleep didn’t interest him right now. The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building.
Pow,
he hits an awning, but he punches straight through it.
Pow,
he hits another one. And another one. Surely one of them will catch him and sproing him back up, or just fold up and embrace him like a canvas cradle, but it doesn’t, it’s just one flimsy busted awning after another. Down and down and down. After a while he longs to stop, even if it means hitting the sidewalk, but he doesn’t, he just keeps falling, down through awning after awning, deeper and deeper into the pain. Turtles all the way down.
Quentin didn’t bother with the DVDs, just flipped channels on the huge TV and slugged straight from the bottle until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt—not that anybody cared—like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.
He never did fall asleep. The idea came over him around dawn, and he waited as long as he could, but it was just too damn good to keep to himself. He was like a kid on Christmas morning who couldn’t wait for the grown-ups to waken. Santa was here, and he was going to fix everything. At seven thirty, still half drunk, he busted out of the den and went down the hallways banging on doors. What the hell, he even climbed the stairs and kicked open Alice’s door, caught a glimpse of Penny’s bare white plump rump, which he didn’t really need to see. It made him wince and turn away. But it didn’t shut him up.
“Okay!” he was shouting. “People! Get up, get up, get up! It’s time! Today’s the day! People, people, people!”
He sang a verse of James’s stupid middle school song:
In olden times there was a boy
Young and strong and brave-o
He was a cheerleader now, waving his pom-poms, jumping up and down, doing splits on the parquet, shouting as loud as he could.
“We! Are! Going! To!
“Fill!
“O!
“Reeeeeee!”
BOOK III
FILLORY
They held hands in a circle in the living room, packs on their backs. It felt like a dorm stunt, like they were all about to drop acid or sing an a cappella show tune or set some kind of wacky campus record. Anaïs’s face blazed with excitement. She hopped up and down despite the load on her back. None of last night’s drama had registered on her at all. She was the only person in the room who looked happy to be there.
The funny thing was that it had worked. Quentin wouldn’t let it alone, he kept hounding them, and eventually, with surprisingly little resistance, they gave in. Today would be the day. Partly they were afraid of him, with his scary glittering pain-eyes, but partly it was because they had to admit he was right: it was time to go, and they’d just been waiting for somebody, even somebody as obviously drunk and demented as Quentin was, to stand up and call it.
Looking back, in a philosophical frame of mind, it occurred to Quentin that he’d always thought this would be a happy day, the happiest day of his life. Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate.
If he wasn’t happy, he did feel unexpectedly liberated. At least he wasn’t hunched over with shame anymore. This was pure emotion, unalloyed with any misgivings or caveats or qualifications. Alice was no longer the alabaster saint here. It was not so hard to meet her eyes across the circle. And was that a flicker of embarrassment he saw in hers? Maybe she was learning a little something about remorse, what that felt like. They were down in the muck together now.
They had spent the morning gathering up and packing the gear and the supplies that were already basically gathered up and packed anyway, and rounding up whoever was in the bathroom or dithering over which shoes or had just wandered off out onto the lawn for no obvious reason. Finally they were all together in the living room in a circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot and looking at each other and saying:
“Okay?”
“Okay?”
“Everybody okay?”
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s do this!”
“Okay!”
“Okay!”
“Let’s—”
And then Penny must have touched the button, because they were all rising up together through clear, cold water.
Quentin was first out of the pool, his pack weighing him down. He was sober now, he was pretty sure, but still angry, angry, angry, and brimming over with self-pity. Let it flow. He didn’t want to touch anybody or have anybody touch him. He liked being in the Neitherlands though. The Neitherlands had a calming effect. Quiet and still. If he could just lie down for a minute, just right here on the old worn stones, just for a minute, maybe he could sleep.
The expensive Persian rug they’d been standing on floated up after them in the water. Somehow it had come through by accident. Had the button mistaken it for their clothing? Funny how these things worked.
Quentin waited while the others straggled out of the fountain one by one. They bunched up at the edge, treading water and hanging on to each other, then heaving their backpacks out and crawling up after them over the stone rim. Janet looked pale. She was stuck in the water, with Josh and Eliot on either side helping her stay afloat. She couldn’t get over the lip of the fountain. Her eyes were unfocused, and her face was chalk.
“I don’t know, I just—” She kept shaking her head and repeating it over and over again: “I don’t know what’s wrong—”
Together they dragged her up out of the water, but there was no strength in her limbs. Her knees buckled and she dropped to all fours, and the weight of her pack tugged her over onto her side on the paving stones. She lay there wet and blinking. It’s not like Quentin had never seen Janet incapacitated before, but this was different.
“I don’t know if I wanna throw up or if I don’t,” she said slowly.
“Something’s wrong,” Alice said. “The City. She’s having an allergic reaction, something like that.”
Her voice was not overburdened with sympathy.
“Is anybody else getting it?” Eliot looked around quickly, assuming command of the operation. “Nobody else, okay. Let’s go to phase two. Let’s hurry.”
“I’m okay, just let me rest. I just—Jesus, don’t you feel it?” Janet looked up helplessly at the others, gulping air. “Doesn’t anybody else feel it?”
Anaïs kneeled down next to her in sisterly solidarity. Alice regarded her inscrutably. Nobody else was affected.
“This is interesting,” Penny said. “Now why doesn’t anybody else—?”
“Hey. Asshole.” Quentin snapped his fingers in Penny’s face. He had no problem with naked hostility right now. He was feeling very uninhibited. “Can’t you see she’s in pain? Phase two, asshole, let’s go.”
He hoped Penny would come after him, maybe they could have a rematch of their little fight club. But Penny just gave Quentin a calm assessing look and turned away. He was taking full advantage of the opportunity to rise above, to be the bigger man, the gracious winner. He rattled a spray can of industrial-orange paint and circled the fountain with it, marking the ground with crosses, then set off in the direction he called palaceward, after the lavish white palazzo on that side of the square. It was no mystery where they were going: the scene in the book was written in Plover’s characteristically clear, unambiguous prose. It had the Chatwins walking three more squares palaceward and then one to the left to get to the fountain that led to Fillory. The rest of the group straggled after him, squelching in their wet clothes. Janet had her arms around Quentin’s and Eliot’s shoulders.
The last jog took them across a stone bridge over a narrow canal. The layout of the city reminded Quentin of a welters board, but writ large. Maybe the game reflected some distant, barely legible rumor of the Neitherlands that had filtered down to Earth.
They halted in a tidy square that was smaller than the one they’d started in, and dominated by a large, dignified stone hall that might have been the mayoral seat of a medieval French village. The clock set at the peak of its facade was frozen at noon, or midnight. The rain was getting heavier. In the center of the square was a round fountain, a figure of Atlas half crushed beneath a bronze globe.
“Okay!” Penny spoke unnecessarily loudly. The big ringmaster. He was nervous, Quentin could see. Not so tough now, loverman. “This is the one they use in the books. So I’m going through to check weather conditions.”
“What do you want, a drum roll?” Janet snapped through clenched teeth. “Go!”
Penny took the white button out of his pocket and gripped it in his fist. Taking a deep breath, he mounted the lip of the pool and stepped off, straight-legged, into the still water. At the last moment he reflexively held his nose with one hand. He dropped into the dark water and disappeared. It had swallowed him up.
There was a long hush. The only sound was Janet’s hoarse panting and the splashing of the fountain. A minute passed. Then Penny’s head broke the surface, sputtering and blowing.
“It worked!” he shouted. “It’s warm! It’s summer! It’s summer there!”
“Was it Fillory?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know!” He dog-paddled over to the lip of the pool, breathing hard. “It’s a forest. Rural. No signs of habitation.”
“Good enough,” Eliot said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m okay,” Janet said.
“No, you’re not. Let’s go, everybody.”
Richard was already going through the packs, tossing out the winter gear, the brand-new parkas and woolly hats and electric socks, in an expensive multicolored heap.