Quentin watched her go, still patting his pockets for the missing coin. For the first time in his life he couldn’t tell if he’d passed or failed.
The whole afternoon went like that: professors parading in through one door and out the other. It was like a dream, a long, rambling dream with no obvious meaning. There was an old man with a shaky head who fumbled in his pants pockets and threw a bunch of frayed, yellowed knotted cords on the table, then stood there with a stopwatch as Quentin untied them. A shy, pretty young woman, who looked like she was barely older than Quentin, asked him to draw a map of the House and the grounds based on what he’d seen since he’d been here. A slick fellow with a huge head and who wouldn’t or couldn’t stop talking challenged him to a weird variant of blitz chess. After a while you couldn’t even take it seriously—it felt like it was his credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red hair and a self-important air released a tiny lizard with iridescent humming-bird wings and huge, alert eyes into the room. The man said nothing, just folded his arms and sat on the edge of the table, which creaked unhappily under his weight.
For lack of a better idea Quentin tried to coax the lizard to land on his finger. It flew down and nipped a tiny chunk out of his forearm, drawing a dot of blood, then zipped away and buzzed against the window like a bumblebee. The fat man silently handed Quentin a Band-Aid, collected his lizard, and left.
Finally the door closed and didn’t open again. Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Apparently the procession had ended, though nobody bothered to say anything to Quentin. At least he had a few minutes to himself. By now the sun was setting. He couldn’t see it from the exam room, but he could see a fountain, and the light reflected in the pool of the fountain was a cool burnt orange. A mist was rising up through the trees. The grounds were deserted.
He rubbed his face with his hands. His head was clearing. It occurred to him, long after it probably should have, to wonder what the hell his parents were thinking. Normally they were pretty indifferent to his comings and goings, but even they had their limits. School had been out for hours now. Maybe they thought his interview had run long, though the chances that they even remembered Quentin was supposed to have had an interview were pretty small. Or if it was summer here, maybe school hadn’t even started yet? The giddy haze he’d been lost in all afternoon was starting to dissipate. He wondered exactly how safe he was here. If this was a dream, he was going to have to wake up pretty soon.
Through the closed door he distinctly heard the sound of somebody crying: a boy, and way too old to be crying in front of other people. A teacher was speaking to him quietly and firmly, but the boy either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. He ignored it, but it was a dangerous, unmanning sound, a sound that clawed away at the outer layers of Quentin’s hard-won teenage sangfroid. Underneath it there was something like fear. The voices faded as the boy was led away. Quentin heard the Dean speaking in icy, clipped tones, trying not to sound angry.
“I’m really not sure I care one way or the other anymore.”
There was an answer, something inaudible.
“If we don’t have a Quorum we’ll simply send them all home and skip a year.” Fogg’s genteel reserve was decaying. “Nothing would make me happier. We can rebuild the observatory. We can turn the school into a nursing home for senile old professors. God knows we have enough of those.”
Inaudible.
“There is a Twentieth, Melanie. We go through this every year, and we will empty every high school and middle school and juvenile detention center till we find him or her or it. And if there isn’t I will happily resign, and it will be your problem, and you’re welcome to it. Right now I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”
The door opened a crack, and for an instant a worried face peered in at him—it was Quentin’s first examiner, the dark-haired European lady with the clever fingers. He opened his mouth to ask about a phone—his cell was down to one useless flickering bar—but the door shut again. How annoying. Was it over? Should he just leave? He made a face to himself. He was all for adventures, God knows, but enough was enough. This one was getting old.
The room was almost dark. He looked around for a light switch, but there wasn’t one; in fact all the time he’d been here he hadn’t seen a single electrical device. No phones, no lights, no clocks. It was a long time since Quentin had had his sandwich and his square of dark chocolate, and he was hungry again. He stood up and went to the window where it was lighter.
The panes of glass were wiggly with age. Was he the last one left? What was taking so long? The sky was a luminous royal blue dome swarming with huge lazy whorls of stars, van Gogh stars that would have been invisible in Brooklyn, drowned in light pollution. He wondered how far upstate they were, and what had happened to the note he’d been chasing and never found. The book he’d left behind with his backpack in the first exam room; now he wished he’d kept it with him. He imagined his parents making dinner together in the kitchen, something steaming on the stove, his dad singing along to something nightmarishly unhip, two glasses of red wine on the counter. He almost missed them.
With no warning the door banged open and the Dean walked in, talking over his shoulder at somebody behind him.
“—a Candidate? Fine,” he said sarcastically. “Let’s see a Candidate. And bring some Goddamned candles!” He sat down at the table. His shirt was translucent with sweat. It was not impossible that he’d had a drink between now and the last time Quentin had seen him. “Hello, Quentin. Please sit.”
He indicated the other chair. Quentin sat, and Fogg rebuttoned his top button and hastily, irritably whipped a tie out of his pocket.
The dark-haired woman followed Fogg into the room, and after her came the old man with the knots, the fat man with the lizard, then the rest of the dozen or so men and women who had paraded through the room this afternoon. They formed lines along the walls, packed themselves into the corners, craning to look at him, whispering to one another. The punk kid with the tattoos was there, too—he slipped in just as the door was closing, unobserved by the faculty.
“Come on, come on.” The Dean waved them into the room. “We should really do this in the conservatory next year. Pearl, you come around here.” This to the young blond woman who’d made Quentin draw a map.
“Now,” he said when they were all inside. “Quentin. Sit, please.”
Quentin was already sitting. He scooched in his chair a little farther.
Dean Fogg took out of one pocket a fresh pack of cards, the plastic wrap still on them, and from the other he took a stack of nickels, maybe a dollar’s worth, which he put down too emphatically so that they promptly slumped over. They both reached to restack them.
“All right, let’s get to it.” Fogg clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Let’s see some magic!”
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms.
Hadn’t they already done this part? Quentin kept his face studiously calm and unworried, but his mind was in free fall. Slowly he unwrapped the stiff new cards, the plastic crackling deafeningly in the excruciating stillness, and watched from a mental mile away as his hands dutifully riffled and bridged them, riffled and bridged. He searched his brain for a trick he hadn’t already done the first time around. Somebody coughed.
He’d barely started his routine when Fogg stopped him.
“No, no-no-no-no.” Fogg chuckled, not especially kindly. “Not like that. I want to see some
real magic
.”
He knocked twice on the hard tabletop with his knuckles and sat back again. Quentin took a deep breath and searched Fogg’s face for the good humor he’d seen there earlier, but Fogg just watched expectantly. His eyes were a pale milky blue, paler than eyes usually were.
“I don’t really get what you mean,” Quentin said slowly, in the silence, like he’d forgotten his line in the school play and had to ask for it. “What do you mean, real magic?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Fogg shot a hilarious sideways glance at the other teachers. “I don’t know what I mean. You tell me what I mean.”
Quentin shuffled a couple more times, stalling. He didn’t know what to do. He would do anything if they would just tell him what he was supposed to do. This was it, he thought, he was coming to the end. This is what failure feels like. He looked around the room, but every face was either blank or avoiding his gaze. No one was going to help him. He was going back to Brooklyn. Maddeningly, he could feel tears pooling in his eyes. He blinked them away. He so badly wanted not to care, but he was falling backward, sinking down inside himself, and there was nothing there to catch him. This is it, he thought. This was the test he couldn’t pass. It wasn’t really all that surprising. He just wondered how long they were going to let it go on.
“Stop fucking with us, Quentin!” Fogg barked. He snapped his fingers. “Come on. Wake up!”
He reached across the table and grabbed Quentin’s hands roughly. The contact was a shock. His fingers were strong and strangely dry and hot. He was moving Quentin’s fingers, physically forcing them into positions they didn’t want to be in.
“Like this,” he was saying. “Like
this.
Like
this.
”
“Okay, stop,” Quentin said. He tried to pull away. “Stop.”
But Fogg didn’t stop. The audience shifted uncomfortably, and somebody said something. Fogg kept on working Quentin’s hands with both of his, kneading them. He bent Quentin’s fingers back, stretching them apart so that the webs between his fingers burned. Light seemed to flash between their hands.
“I said, stop it!” Quentin jerked his hands away.
It was surprising how good the anger felt. It was something to grab on to. In the shocked silence that followed he took a deep breath and forced it out through his nose. When it was out he felt like he’d expelled some of his despair with it. He’d had enough of being judged. He’d been sucking it up his whole life, but even he had his limit.
Fogg was talking again, but now Quentin wasn’t even listening. He had begun to recite something under his breath, something familiar. It took him a second to realize that the words he was mouthing weren’t English; they were from the foreign language he had invented earlier that afternoon. It was an obscure language—he’d decided—indigenous to a single tropical archipelago, a languorous hot-weather paradise, a Gauguin painting, blessed with black sand beaches and breadfruit trees and freshwater springs and endowed with an angry, glowing red volcano god and an oral culture rich in obscene expletives. He spoke this language fluently, with no accent, like a native. The words he spoke were not a prayer, exactly. More of an incantation.
Quentin stopped shuffling the cards. There was no going back. Everything snapped into very slow, slow motion, as if the room had filled up with a viscous but perfectly clear liquid in which everyone and everything floated easily and calmly. Everyone and everything except for Quentin, who moved quickly. With two hands together, as if he were releasing a dove, he tossed the deck of cards lightly up to the ceiling. The deck broke apart and scattered in flight, like a meteorite losing cohesion in the atmosphere, and as the cards fluttered back down to earth they stacked themselves on the tabletop. They formed a house of cards. It was a recognizable, if impressionistic, model of the building they were sitting in. The cards fell as if by chance, but each one perfectly, snapping into place magnetically, edge to edge, one after other. The last two, the aces of spades and hearts, leaned up against each other to make the roof over the clock tower.
Now the room was absolutely still. Dean Fogg sat as if he were frozen in place. All the hairs were standing up on Quentin’s arms, but he knew what he was doing. His fingers left almost imperceptible phosphorescent trails behind them in the air. He definitely felt high. He leaned forward and blew lightly on the card house, and it collapsed back down into a neatly stacked deck. He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a Queen—all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn’t exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books. Some were clothed, some were shamelessly naked. Some of them had Julia’s face. Some of them had the lovely paramedic’s.
Dean Fogg watched Quentin intently. Everybody watched him. Watch this: Quentin squared the deck again and with no particular effort ripped it in half and then ripped the halves in half and tossed the resulting confetti at the assembled company, who all flinched except for Fogg.
He stood up. His chair fell over backward.
“Tell me where I am,” Quentin said softly. “Tell me what I’m doing here.”
He picked up the stack of nickels in his fist, only it was no longer a stack of coins, it was the hilt of a bright, burning sword that he drew easily out of the tabletop, as if it had been left there buried up to the hilt.
“Tell me what’s going on here,” Quentin said, louder, to the room. “And if this place isn’t Fillory, then for fuck’s sake will somebody please tell me where the hell I am?”
Quentin let the tip of the sword hover under Fogg’s nose for a slow ten-count, then he reversed his grip and stabbed it down into the wood of the table. The point bit deep into the buttery wood and stuck there.
Fogg didn’t move. The sword waggled in place. Quentin sniffed involuntarily. The last of the light from the window died. It was night.
“Well now,” the Dean said finally. He removed a neatly folded handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead. “I think we can all agree that that was a Pass.”
Somebody—it was the old guy with the knots—put a reassuring hand on Quentin’s back and gently, with surprising strength, drew the sword out of the table and laid it safely on its side. A slow patter of applause arose from the assembled examiners. It quickly turned into an ovation.