The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

  Knowing his discipline helped too. He’d always considered himself decent at magic, but he’d never had a strong sense of exactly who he was as a magician. Now he did: he was someone who fixed things. He saw that now. Give Quentin a broken object and in his hands it woke up, as if from an unhappy dream, and remembered that it had once been whole. A smashed coffee cup, so utterly hopeless and without power, bestirred itself and regained some of its old gumption. It hadn’t always been this way. No—it had once had a convenient handle. It had once had the power to hang on to a liquid instead of letting it gush through its shattered innards onto the floor.

  And with a little encouragement from Quentin, it would again. God, but he loved doing magic. He’d almost forgotten how satisfying it was, even the little things. Doing magic was like finally finding the words you’d been groping for your whole life. You’d always known what you wanted to say, it was on the tip of your tongue, you almost had it, you knew it a moment ago but somehow forgot it—and then there it was. Casting the spell was like finally finding the words: there, that’s what I meant, that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.

  All he had to do was explain this to his students. As a faculty member he was also expected to conduct independent research, but until he could come up with a problem that was worth researching, teaching was what he did. He did it five days a week, a lecture at nine and then Practical Applications at two.

  At the same time he settled back into the rhythm of life at Brakebills, which wasn’t so different as a professor than it had been as a student. He didn’t have homework anymore, but he had to spend his nights preparing lectures, which was fine because he didn’t have much else to do anyway. He held himself appropriately aloof from his students, and so far the other faculty, appropriately or not, left the new fish to his own devices.

  Little things had changed. Rumor had it that Brakebills had acquired a ghost, and though Fogg hadn’t seen it himself—it wasn’t clear who had—he was bursting with pride about it. Apparently all the old European institutions had them, and in those circles a magic school hadn’t really arrived till it was haunted. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

  Which sounded interesting, but so far the resulting offspring had been either predictably derivative (in fiction) or stunningly boring (nonfiction); hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the most vital. The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren’t breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.

  Quentin could feel himself slipping back into the thick, rich, comforting atmosphere of Brakebills, like a bee drowning in honey. Sometimes he caught himself thinking about what it would be like to stay there forever. And he might have done that if something hadn’t interrupted him: his father died.

  It caught Quentin off guard. It had been a long time since he’d felt close to his father. He didn’t think about him much, or his mother. It had never even occurred to him that his father could die.

  Quentin’s dad had lived an unspectacular life, and he slipped out of the world at sixty-seven with the unshowiness that was his trademark: he died in his sleep of a stroke. He even managed to spare Quentin’s mom the shock of waking up next to a slowly cooling corpse: she was doing an artist’s residency in Provincetown, and his body was discovered by the woman who did the cleaning instead, a stolid, rigorously Catholic Ukrainian who was in every way more spiritually prepared for the experience than Quentin’s mom would have been.

  It happened in mid-October, about six weeks after Quentin came back to Brakebills. Dean Fogg brought him the news, which had been transmitted to him via the school’s one ancient rotary telephone. When Quentin understood what Fogg was telling him he went very cold and very still. It was impossible. It made no sense. It was as if his father had announced that he was going to take up mariachi drumming and march in the Cinco de Mayo parade. His father couldn’t be dead—he wouldn’t be. It just wasn’t like him.

  Fogg seemed nonplussed by his reaction, almost disappointed, as if he were hoping to get a little more drama out of it. Quentin would have given him drama if he knew how, but it wouldn’t come. He didn’t sob or tear his hair or curse the Norns who had snipped his father’s thread too soon. He wanted to but he couldn’t, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t. The feelings were missing; it was like they’d been lost in transit from whatever country feelings come from. Only after Fogg had offered him a week of compassionate leave and then tactfully withdrawn did Quentin begin to thaw out and feel something besides shock and confusion, and when he did what he felt wasn’t grief, it was anger.

  That made even less sense. He didn’t even know who he was angry at or why. What, was he angry at his dad for being dead? At Fogg for telling him? At himself for not grieving like he should?

  When he thought about it Quentin couldn’t remember ever having felt very close to his father, even as a little kid. He’d seen photographs from his childhood that showed boy-Quentin in scenes of ordinary family happiness with his parents, that could have been convincingly presented in family court as evidence that the Coldwater home was a warm and loving one. But Quentin didn’t recognize the child who looked back at him out of those snapshots. He couldn’t remember ever having been that person. He felt like a changeling.

  Quentin took Fogg up on that week of compassionate leave, not so much because he felt like he needed it but because he thought that his mom might need the help. As he packed for the trip to Chesterton, Quentin realized he was gritting his teeth against actual panic. He was worried he wouldn’t be able to feel the emotions people wanted him to feel. He made himself a promise that whatever happened, whatever anybody asked of him, he wouldn’t pretend to feel anything he didn’t really feel. If he could stick to that things couldn’t get too bad.

  And as soon as he saw her Quentin remembered that even if he and his mom weren’t especially close they got along fine. He found her standing by the kitchen island, one hand on the granite countertop, a ballpoint pen next to it—she looked like her mind had wandered off in the middle of making a list. She’d been crying, but her eyes were dry now.

  He put his bag down and they embraced. She’d put on weight; she made a significant armful now. Quentin had the sense that she hadn’t talked to very many people since it happened. He sat down next to her on a stool.

  “The tennis girls will be here in a minute,” she said.

  “That’s good. Good to see them.”

  The tennis girls—Kitsy, Mollie, Roslyn—were his mother’s best friends. It had been a long time since any of them had played tennis, if they ever had, but Quentin knew his mom could count on them.

  “I wasn’t done with the wall treatment in the bathroom.” She sighed. A heavy chunk of ice like a giant tooth hung from the eave outside the kitchen window—it was January in the real world. “I knew he was going to hate it. I keep thinking that if he hadn’t died the wall would have killed him.”

  “Mom. The wall would not have killed him.”

  “I was doing mini–palm trees. I hid it behind that old Japanese screen. I didn’t want him to see till it was too late to do anything about it.” She took off her oversized glasses and rubbed her face with both hands, like a diver taking off her mask after a deep descent. “And now it’s all too late! I don’t know any of his passwords. Can you believe it? I can’t even find his keys! I can’t even get into the basement!”

  He made a mental note to locate those keys later with a spell. He might even be able to come up with the passwords too, though that would be trickier.

  Part of the trouble between Quentin and hi
s parents, he knew, was that they had no idea who he really was, which wasn’t their fault because he’d never told them. Quentin’s mom thought her son was a comfortably but not spectacularly successful investment banker specializing in real estate transactions. She didn’t know that magic was real. Quentin’s father hadn’t known either.

  Quentin could have told them—the information was tightly controlled by magicians, and transgressions were punished sharply, but exceptions could be obtained for parents and spouses (and children over fourteen). But he never had, because it seemed like such a terrible idea. He couldn’t imagine the two worlds touching: his parents’ sedate, orderly marital idyll and the wild, messy, arcane world of magic. It was impossible. They would explode on contact, like matter and antimatter.

  Or he always assumed they would. Now he wondered if that secret, the absence of that confidence, was what had come between them. Maybe he’d underestimated them.

  Quentin and his mother spent his week of leave rattling around the Chesterton McMansion like two dice in a plastic cup—it was a huge house for a middling-successful painter and a textbook editor, bought with money from a Brooklyn brownstone they’d cashed out of at just the right time. There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

  Quentin spent a whole day on the phone with his mother’s credit cards fanned out on the cold kitchen counter in front of him. She watched him with wary surprise. They’d seen so little of each other these past few years that she still thought of him as the shoe-gazing teenager he’d been when he left for Brakebills. She was baffled by this tall, firm, no-longer-teenaged man who presented her with lists of urns to choose from, menus of hors d’oeuvres for the reception, times when town cars would pick her up and drop her off.

  At night they ordered take-out and played Scrabble and watched movies on the couch, drinking the melony Sonoma Chardonnay that she ordered by the case. At the back of his mind Quentin kept cuing up and replaying scenes from his childhood. His father teaching him to sail on a sandy-bottomed, brown-water lake in New Hampshire. His father picking him up from school after he got sick in gym class. When he was twelve they’d had a full-scale blowout shouting match when his father refused to sign the permission slip for Quentin to go to a chess tournament; it was the first time he’d qualified in the under-fifteens, and he was desperate to make the trip to Tarrytown. It was strange: his father had never seemed comfortable with Quentin’s efforts to stand out academically. You’d think he would’ve been proud.

  That first night, after his mom went to bed, Quentin went and sat in his father’s study. It was a boxy, white-walled room that still smelled like new construction. The parquet looked brand new except for the matte circle where the wheels of his father’s desk chair had worn away the finish. He was half drunk on Chardonnay.

  He knew what he was looking for: he was looking for a way to stop feeling angry. He was still carrying the anger around and he wanted somewhere he could safely put it down. He sat in his father’s chair and rotated slowly in place, like a lighthouse. He looked at the books, the files, the window, the dead computer screen. Books, files, window, screen. Particles of faint sodium-orange light from the streetlights outside lay on everything like dust.

  That was when it occurred to Quentin for the first time that maybe his father hadn’t been his real father. Maybe he wasn’t who he appeared to be. Maybe Quentin’s father had been a magician.

  —

  The next morning, after his mother left to do a big shop at Whole Foods, Quentin went back to his father’s study. He resumed his post in his father’s chair.

  Quentin knew he was a little old to be wrestling with questions like this—probably he should have had them wrapped up by around puberty—but he’d always paid more attention to magical problems than to the personal kind. Maybe that had been a mistake. Your father was supposed to love you, to pass on his power to you, to show you what it was to be a man, and his father hadn’t. He’d been a good person, or good enough, but mostly what he’d showed Quentin was how to move through the universe while disturbing it as little as possible, and how to compile and maintain the world’s most complete collection of Jeff Goldblum movies on Blu-ray, apart, presumably, from Jeff Goldblum’s.

  Quentin hadn’t had much luck with father figures. Not Dean Fogg, not Mayakovsky, not Ember the ram god. They hadn’t dispensed a whole lot of paternal wisdom to him over the years. Whatever power and wisdom they had, they hadn’t been eager to share it with him. Maybe they didn’t want to be his father figures. Maybe he hadn’t made an especially appealing son figure.

  Quentin tried to imagine what his father should have been like, the father he wished his father had been. Brilliant. Funny. Intense. A bit of a rogue—at times even eccentric—but steady in a crisis. A man of grit and energy, a man who faced the world around him and brought it to heel on his own terms. A magician’s father. A father who would have seen what Quentin had made of himself and been proud.

  But Quentin’s father seemed not to have had any power at all, let alone any to share. Quentin’s actual father had had one wife, one son, no hobbies, and probably a case of mild clinical depression which he self-medicated with work. Not everybody led a double life, but Quentin’s father had barely led a single one. How could somebody who seemed so determined to be powerless have a magician for a son?

  Unless he hadn’t been powerless, Quentin thought. Unless that wasn’t the whole story. It was starting to sound like a cover story—exactly the kind of cover story a magician would use.

  Methodically Quentin examined the study for evidence that his father wasn’t what he seemed to be—that he’d left some legacy for his son that for whatever reason he couldn’t share with him while he was alive. He went through his father’s filing cabinets—there were charms for searching paper documents for keywords, the same way computers searched digital files. He checked for codes or hidden scripts. He got back no results of any significance.

  He hadn’t expected any. That was merely due diligence. Now the hunt could begin in earnest.

  He examined the light fixtures. He squeezed the couch cushions and pulled up the rugs. He used a spell to peer into the walls and under the floorboards. He looked behind the pictures. He scoured the room to the studs for any trace of hidden magic, but all he found was an old library book with a weak anti-theft charm put on it by somebody else, which in any case didn’t appear to have worked. At least the missing keys turned up in the couch.

  He checked the furniture for hollow legs. He riffled through every book on the shelves in case one was underlined or hollowed out. Once in a while he thought he was picking up on something, a secret pattern or a code, but every time he did it dissolved again like fairy gold, back into random noise. What dark magicks could his father have been trafficking in, that he would have kept them this well hidden? That he would have leaned on his son, tried to stop him from drawing attention to himself? What sinister fate had Quentin avoided in Tarrytown? What did it mean that his father kept an old unstrung banjo in one corner? What was with his weird obsession with Jeff Goldblum?

  The longer he worked with no result, the more clearly he felt the ghostly presence of his father, his real father, his true father, as if he were in the room with him even now. Quentin booted up the computer and after a half hour of sweaty-palmed cryptomancy and educated guesswork he cracked the password (thelostworld—starring Jeff Goldblum!) and began casing file directories, one after the other.

  They were almost eerily clean. No diary, no poetry, no mistresses, no Ponzi schemes, nothing that wasn’t what it appeared to be. Not even any porn. Well, not much porn.

  Quentin was no hacker—he’d spent way too much time in the technological blac
k hole of Brakebills to have any serious chops with computers—but he knew some electromagnetic sorcery. He cracked the case and went directly after the silicon, feeling with magical fingertips for anything weird, any walled-off caches of hidden electrons pregnant with meaning. All he could think was, this can’t be it. This cannot be everything. He must have left me something.

  Come on. Help me, Daddy. It was a word he hadn’t said or even thought in twenty years.

  He stopped and sat for a minute, his hands trembling, in the empty house, in the deep cold suburban winter silence. Where is it, Dad? It must be here. I can’t be alone. You must have left me something. This was always how it worked: the distant, withholding father was always guarding a terrible secret, always keeping his son safe from it, able to pass on his legacy of power only in death.

  And then he found it. It was at the back of a closet: a nubbly red plastic carton of index cards scribbled on in pencil, shoved behind a box of obsolete electronics and mysterious cables that were too important-looking to throw away. He set the carton on the desk and flipped through the cards, one by one. Strange names, columns of numbers, pluses and minuses. It went on and on. It was a lot of data. A cipher like this could contain whole worlds of power, if he could break it. And he would. It was left here for him.

  He stared at the cards for it must have been ten minutes before the pattern solved itself all at once. It wasn’t a cipher at all. These were stats from his father’s old fantasy golf league. Quentin pushed the plastic box away from him violently, convulsively. The cards spilled out all over the rug. He left them there.

  There was no mystery to solve. What had come between him and his father wasn’t magic. The terrible truth about Quentin’s father was that he was exactly the person he seemed to be. He wasn’t a magician. He wasn’t even a good person. He was an ordinary man who hadn’t even loved his only son. The hard truth was that Quentin had never really had a father.