by Lev Grossman
“Told you we should’ve got Honey Nut,” Plum said.
“Give her time,” he said. “I’ll run out for some fresh fruit. Fresh bread. Maybe that would go down easier.”
“She might be thirsty.”
Right. Quentin got her a pint glass of water. She drank it in one long swallow, then she drank another, gave a colossal belch and stood up.
“Are you all right?” Plum said. “Quentin, why isn’t she talking?”
“Because fuck yourself,” Alice said in a hoarse whisper. She went back upstairs and back to bed.
—
Quentin and Eliot and Plum sat around the kitchen table. The fridge had developed an annoying fault whereby it hummed loudly until somebody got up and gave it a shove, the way one would get a sleeper to stop snoring, whereupon it fell silent for half an hour and then started humming again.
“She should be eating,” Quentin said. He got up. He couldn’t stay sitting down; as soon as he sat he bounced back up. He’d sit down when Alice was better. “She should at least be hungry. Maybe she’s sick, maybe we put her body back together wrong. Maybe she has a perforated liver.”
“She’s probably just full,” Eliot said. “Probably she ate a bunch of people right before we turned her back and she just has to sleep it off.”
Quentin couldn’t even tell if it was funny or not. He didn’t know where the line was anymore. And whatever Eliot said, he’d spent almost as much time at Alice’s bedside as Quentin had.
“She’ll be fine,” Plum said. “Stop fussing. I mean, I was sort of expecting her to be grateful for us having saved her from being a monster, but that’s OK. I don’t need to be thanked.”
“She looks good, anyway. Hasn’t aged a day.”
“I keep wondering what it was like, being a niffin,” Quentin said.
“Probably she doesn’t even remember.”
“I remember everything.”
Alice stood at the foot of the stairs. Her face was puffy from all the sleep. She came in and sat down at the table again, moving more confidently now but still like an alien unaccustomed to Earth’s gravity. She seemed to be waiting for something.
“We got some fruit,” Quentin said. “Apples. Grapes. Some prosciutto.” He’d grabbed whatever looked yummy and reasonably fresh at the fancy market around the corner.
“I would like a double scotch with one large ice cube in it,” Alice said.
Oh.
“Sure. Coming right up.”
She still wasn’t making eye contact with anyone, but it seemed like progress. Maybe it would relax her—help her get past the shock. So long as her liver wasn’t actually perforated.
Quentin took down the bottle, feeling very conscious that he was making things up as he went along. He clunked an ice cube into the glass and poured whiskey over it. The thing was not to be afraid of her. He wanted her to feel loved. Or maybe that was too much, but he wanted her to feel safe.
“Anybody else?” he called from the kitchen.
The silence in the room was stony.
“Right then.”
He poured one for himself too, neat. He was damned if he was going to let his newly resurrected ex-girlfriend have her first drink in seven years alone. Plum and Eliot were both for once at a loss for anything to say. He poured them scotches too, just in case they changed their minds.
Alice slurped her whiskey down thirstily, then she took Plum’s and drank that too. When she was done she stared into the empty tumbler, looking disappointed. Eliot discreetly moved his glass out of her reach. Quentin thought of getting her the bottle, then thought maybe he shouldn’t. She should have more water.
“Do you want—?” he began.
“It hurt,” Alice said. She let out a shuddering breath. “If you want to know. Have you ever wondered, Quentin? Did you ever really try to imagine what it felt like—really try? I remember thinking, maybe it won’t hurt, maybe I’ll get off easy. You never know, maybe magic fire is different. I’ll tell you something: it’s not different. It hurt like a bastard. It hurt approximately as much, I would guess, as being on fire with regular fire would. It’s funny, the worst pain I ever felt till then was getting my finger caught in a folding chair. I guess I’d been lucky.”
At the memory she stopped and looked into her glass again, to make absolutely sure she hadn’t missed anything.
“You’d think your nerves wouldn’t go up that high, but they do. You’d think they’d have an upper limit. Why would it be possible for people to feel so much pain? It’s maladaptive.”
No one had an answer.
“And then it didn’t hurt at all. I can remember when the last bits of me went—it was my toes and the top of my head at the same time—and then the pain was completely gone, and I wanted to cry with relief because it was over. I was just so relieved that my body was gone. It couldn’t hurt me anymore.
“But I didn’t cry, did I? I laughed. And I kept on laughing for seven years. That’s what you’ll never get. You’ll never, never, never get it.” She stared down at the tabletop. “It was all a joke and the joke never got old.”
“But it wasn’t a joke,” Quentin said quietly. “It was the most terrible thing any of us had ever seen. Penny had just gotten his hands bit off, and I lost half my collarbone, and Fen got killed. And then we lost you. It wasn’t a joke.”
“Shutthefuckup!” Alice barked. “You whining little shit! You’ll never understand anything!”
Quentin studied her. The thing was not to be afraid. Or failing that not to look afraid.
“I’m sorry, Alice. We’re all so very, very sorry. But it’s over now, and we want to understand. Try. See if you can explain it to me.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
“You don’t understand, and you will never understand. You never even understood me when I was human, Quentin, because somebody as selfish as you are could never understand anybody. You don’t even understand yourself. So don’t think you can understand me now.”
Eliot opened his mouth to say something but Alice cut him off.
“Don’t defend him! You never had the guts to have a real feeling in your life, you’re so drunk all the time. So shut up and listen to somebody tell you the truth for a change.”
They listened. She looked like Alice—she was Alice—but something wasn’t right.
“Once my body was gone, once I was completely a niffin . . . do you know, I kept thinking of this old toothpaste commercial. I don’t know why I thought of it, but the slogan was ‘that fresh-from-the-dentist feeling.’ And that’s what it felt like, exactly that. All the scum had been scrubbed away. I felt fresh and light and icy-clean. I was pure. I was perfect.
“And all of you were standing around looking so horrified! Do you see what’s funny yet? I remember what I thought then. I didn’t think about Martin or Penny or you or anything. The only thought in my head was at last. At last. I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life without knowing it.
“When I did it, when I cast the spell, I thought maybe I could control the power long enough that I could use it to kill Martin. But once I had the power, once I was a niffin, I didn’t want to control it anymore. I didn’t care, not in the slightest. You’re just lucky I did kill him, very lucky. I never would have lifted a finger to save people like you.
“But I wanted to know if I could do it. When I pulled his head off it was more like a toast, like popping a cork. A toast to my new life! You want to know what it’s like to be a demon? Imagine knowing, always and forever, that you are right, and that everyone and everything else is wrong.”
She smiled at the memory.
“I could just as easily have killed you all. So easily.”
“Why didn’t you?” Quentin honestly wanted to know.
“Why would I?” she spat. “Why would I bother? There was so much
else to do!”
This had gone badly wrong, and he should have seen it coming. Her body was back, but her mind—you don’t spend seven years as a demon without consequences. She was traumatized. Of course she was.
“So you left.”
Keep her talking. Maybe she would talk herself out.
“I left. I went right through the wall. I barely felt it, it was like mist to me. Everything was mist. I went right through the stone into the black earth. I remember I didn’t even close my eyes. It was like swimming in a tropical ocean at night, warm and rich and salty and dark.”
Alice paused there, and she didn’t speak for a full minute. Quentin fetched water for her. She seemed to have lost track of the desire to keep on talking, but then it found her again.
“I liked it in the earth. It was dark and dense. Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That’s not love, that’s hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.
“I swam through the ground for months. It’s full of skeletons. Magical dinosaurs, miles long. There must have been a great age of them. I followed the spine of one for a whole day. Caves, too, and ancient earthworks, and many, many dwarf tunnels. I found a whole underground city once, where the roof had fallen in, a long time ago. It was full of bodies. A hundred thousand dwarfs buried alive.
“Even farther down there are black seas, with no outlets, buried oceans full of eyeless sharks that breed and die in the darkness. There are stars down there too, the understars, burning underground, embedded in the earth, with no one to see them. I might have stayed down there forever. But in the end I broke through to the other side.”
“We know about the Far Side,” Quentin said.
“But you haven’t been there. I know that. I watched you sometimes. I was there at the End of the World, watching from inside the wall, when they turned you away. I followed you there in your little ship, nine fathoms deep, like the spirit in the Ancient Mariner. I watched your friend die on the island. I watched you fuck your girlfriend. I watched you go to Hell.”
“You could have helped us, you know.”
“No, I couldn’t. No, I couldn’t!” Her face was full of a crazy joy. “That’s the thing! And do you know why? Because I didn’t care.”
She stopped and sniffed.
“Funny. I couldn’t smell when I was a niffin.”
But she didn’t laugh.
“Then I went the other way. I let myself rise and float up and out like a balloon, into the outer darkness. I jostled the stars on my way up. I entered the sun, spent a week in its heart, riding it around and around and around. I was indestructible, nothing could touch me, not even that.
“I went farther. Did you ever wonder, Quentin, whether the universe of Fillory is like ours? Whether it goes on and on, and there are other stars and other worlds? There aren’t. Fillory is the only one. I went out there, out past the sun and the moon, out through the last layer of stars—the stars were the only things in all my time as a niffin that I couldn’t pass through—and then nothing. I flew and flew for days, never getting tired, never getting bored, and then I turned around and looked back, and there was Fillory. It looks hilarious from far away, you can’t imagine: a flat whorled disk, in a crowd of stars, balanced on a tottering tower of turtles like in Dr. Seuss. It’s ridiculous. A little toy land, looking for all the world like a piece of spin art, inside a buzzing swarm of white stars. I watched it for a long time. I didn’t know if I would ever go back. It’s the closest thing I ever felt to sadness.”
She fell silent. The fridge buzzed. Eliot got up and shoved it.
“But you did go back,” Quentin said.
“I went back. I did whatever I wanted. Once I boiled a lake with everything in it. I chased birds and animals and burned them. Everyone was afraid of me, I was a bluebird of unhappiness. Sometimes they screamed or cried and begged me. Once—”
Alice gasped suddenly, as if something cold had touched her.
“Oh God. I killed a hunter.” A quick, convulsive sob gripped her, almost a cough. “I’d forgotten that till just now. He was going to kill a deer. I didn’t want him to. I burned him to nothing. It took no time at all. He never saw me.”
She was breathing hard, hoarsely, one hand on her chest, like she was trying not to pass out or throw up. Her gaze darted around the room.
“It’s all right now, Alice,” he said softly. “It’s not your fault.”
That seemed to revive her. Alice slapped her palms down on the table. Her expression was angry again.
“It is my fault!” She shrieked it at him, as if he were trying to take away her most precious possession. “I killed him, me! I did that! No one else!”
She put her head down on her arms. Her shoulders were tense.
“I hated him. But I hated everyone. And more than anyone I hated you, Quentin. Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional! Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see dull, stupid, ugly creatures full of emotional garbage. Your feelings are corrupt and contaminated, and half the time you don’t even know what you’re feeling. You’re too stupid and too numb. You love and you hate and you grieve and you don’t even feel it.”
Quentin stayed very still. It wasn’t even that she was wrong. It was true, that’s what people were like. But she’d forgotten that he knew that too, and that once upon a time that was part of what brought them together.
But he didn’t say that. Not yet. She stopped and sat up again.
“I’m having weird cravings. Mangos. Marzipan.” She frowned. “And—what’s it called? Fennel? Then it goes away. It’s been so long since I tasted anything.”
Her voice when she said that last was the closest thing to the old Alice that he’d heard since she woke up.
“I had so much power. So much power. After a while I realized I could let myself slip backward in time. It was easy. If you think about it you’re moving through time all the time, one second forward every second, but you don’t have to. You can just let yourself stop. I could almost do it even now—it’s as if you’re on a rope tow, up a ski slope, and you just let your mittens go slack, let the rope slide through your fingers, and you slow down and stop. There goes the present, rolling on without you, it’s gone, and just like that you’re in the past. It’s a wonderful feeling.
“But you can’t change anything, you can only watch. I watched the Chatwins come to Fillory. I watched people be born and die. I saw Jane Chatwin have sex with a faun!” She snorted with laughter. “I think she was a very lonely person. Sometimes I just watched people read or sleep. It didn’t matter, it was all funny. It never stopped being funny.
“Once I let myself go all the way back, all the way to the beginning of Fillory. The beginning of everything, or this everything anyway. It was as far as you could go. You bumped up against it, like you’d reached the end of your string.
“You couldn’t call it a pretty sight, the dawn of creation. It was more like the corpse of whatever had come before. Just a big desert and a shallow, dead-looking sea. No weather, no wind, just cold. The sun didn’t move. The sunlight was . . . unpleasant. Like an old fluorescent light that a bunch of flies had died in. Looking back now I think the sun and moon must have collided and melted together into one single deformed heavenly body.
“I watched the sea for a long time. You wouldn’t think a body of water that big could be so still. Finally a big old tigress came loping down to the water. Her ears were notched, and she’d lost an eye and it had healed shut. You could see her padding along from a mile away. I thought she must be
a goddess.
“She came down to the edge of the water. She looked at her reflection for a bit, then she went trotting into the water, up to her shoulders. She stopped then, and shuddered, and sneezed once.
“Obviously it was distasteful to her, but she did it anyway. She seemed very brave to me. She kept on going until she was totally submerged. And then nothing. She had drowned herself. I saw her body float up to the surface, on its side, slowly turning in place in the slack tide, and then it sank again for good.
“For a long time after that nothing happened. Then the water kind of gathered itself into a wave, and the wave threw up two big curly shells on the shore. They lay next to each other for a while, and then another wave came and left behind it a sheet of foam. The sand underneath them kind of stirred and shook itself and it sat up, and that was Ember. The foam was His wool. The shells were His horns.
“Ember went trotting down the beach until He found a couple more curly shells, and He nudged them around for a bit till they were next to each other and then stood next to them so that His shadow fell over them, and then the shadow stood up, and that was Umber. They nodded to each other and then went trotting together up into the sky.
“They took turns licking at the big moon-sun in the sky until it split into two things again, and then Ember butted the sun in one direction and got it moving, and Umber butted the moon, and the whole business started again. And that was the beginning of Fillory.
“But mostly I didn’t give a shit about shit like that. Do you know what my favorite parts of the past were? I liked to watch myself sleep with Penny, because it hurt you. And most of all I liked to watch myself burn. I liked to go back to when I died and hide in the walls and watch it happen. Over and over again.”
“Could you see the future?” Eliot asked.
“No,” she said, in the same lightsome, detached tone. It was all the same to her. “Something to do with timelines and information flow, I think.”
