The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [100]
It could have been worse. The view from the back terrace was even grander than the front. An orderly English estate had been hacked out of the rough Cornish countryside by main force, including a flat, still swimming pool that by some landscaper’s artifice had mostly escaped looking anachronistic. Beyond it a perfect Constable vista rolled down and away, green hills and fallow hay fields and pocket villages, all slowly dissolving in the viscous light of a golden English sunset.
Thomas enjoyed the attention. And Poppy—he’d give her this—was a heroically good sport. She had no real stake in how all this turned out, but she pitched right in. She was nothing if not game. Moreover she was better at it than he was, hardened as she was by many tours in the babysitting trenches.
It all finished up, predictably, in Thomas’s bedroom. By ten thirty even Thomas, with his titanically fresh-faced lust for life, couldn’t be coaxed into one more round of Find Fillory. They all sat or sprawled on the rainbow-colored woolly yarn rug in Thomas’s room. It was a huge room, a little kingdom all Thomas’s own. It even had an extra bed in it, in the shape of a space rocket, as if to cruelly emphasize Thomas’s only-childhood, the hilarious sleepovers he wasn’t having. Josh and Julia joined them there. The party raged on beneath them, into the night, having degenerated from a cocktail party into a regular party party.
They should leave, obviously. At this point Thomas had gone from harasser to harassed. Maybe Josh was right, maybe they’d try Stonehenge next. But not before they’d burned this bridge right down to its charred pilings.
So they played other games. They ground out rounds of Animal Snap and rummy and Connect 4. They played board games, Cluedo and Monopoly and Mouse Trap, until Thomas was too tired and they were too drunk to follow the rules. They dug deeper into Thomas’s toy closet, and thus further back into Thomas’s childhood, for games so mathematically simple they were barely games at all, lacking as they did almost any strategic element: War and Snakes and Ladders and Hi Ho! Cherry-O and finally High C’s, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish.
Quentin took a slug of flat, warm gin-and-tonic. It tasted like defeat. This was how the dream died, in a welter of plastic primary-colored board game pieces, upstairs at a bad party. They would keep looking, they would knock on all the first doors they could think of, but for the first time, lying there sprawled on the spare bed, his long legs flat out, with his back against Thomas’s rocketship headboard, Quentin took seriously the possibility that he wasn’t going back after all. Probably hundreds of years had gone by in Fillory anyway. The ruins of Whitespire were dissolving in the rain, white stones softening like sugar cubes under green moss, by a now nameless bay. The tombs of King Eliot and Queen Janet were probably long since overgrown with ivy, twin clock-trees rising from their twin plots. Perhaps he was remembered as a legend, King Quentin the Missing. The Once and Future King, like King Arthur. Except unlike Arthur he wasn’t coming back from Avalon. Just the Once King.
Well, it was a fitting place to end it, in the Chatwins’ house, where everything started. The first door. The really funny thing was that even though he’d hit bottom, he couldn’t honestly say that it was all that bad there. He had his friends, or some of them. They had Josh’s money. They still had magic, and alcohol, and sex, and food. They had everything. He thought of Venice, and the pure green Cornish landscape they’d just driven through. There was so much more to this world than he thought. What the hell did he have to complain about?
Fuck-all was the answer. One day he’d have a house like this too, and a kid like Thomas, who lay fast asleep with the lights on and his arms thrown up over his head, a