The Magicians - Lev Grossman [122]
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Cheese,” Eliot said. “Do we have cheese? I need cheese.”
On cue Peggy Lee wandered through the opening verse of “Is That All There Is?” on the stereo. Which would be worse, Quentin wondered. If Richard was right, and there was an angry moral God, or if Eliot was right, and there was no point at all? If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it? Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out here. There was nothing to hang on to. They couldn’t go on like this forever.
“There’s a Morbière in the kitchen,” he said. “It was supposed go with the theme—you know, the two layers, the morning milking, the night milking . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Janet said. “Fetch, Q. Go on.”
“I’ll go,” Eliot said, but instead of standing up he just rolled weakly off the couch and fell on the floor. His head made an ominously loud bonk as it hit the parquet.
But he was laughing as Quentin and Janet picked him up, Quentin getting his shoulders and Janet taking his feet, all thoughts of cheese extinguished, and maneuvered him out of the dining room and in the direction of his bedroom. On their way out the door Eliot’s head hit the door frame with another loud bonk, and then it was just too absolutely hilarious, and they all started laughing, and they laughed until they were completely useless, and Janet dropped his feet, and Quentin dropped his shoulders, and his head bonked on the floor again, and by this time it was a thousand times more funny than the first two times.
It took Quentin and Janet twenty minutes to get Eliot down the hall to his bedroom, lurching heavily against the walls with their arms around each other as if they were struggling down a flooded steerage-level corridor on the Titanic. The world had become smaller and somehow lighter—nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down? Eliot kept saying he was fine, and Quentin and Janet kept insisting they had to pick him up. Janet announced that she had peed herself, actually literally peed herself, she was laughing so hard. As they passed Richard’s door Eliot began a loud speech on the order of, “I am the mighty Maker, and I now bequeath to you My Holy Power Tools, because I am too fucking drunk to use them anymore, and good luck to you, because when I get up tomorrow they had better be exactly where I left them, exactly, even My . . . no, especially My belt sander, because I am going to be so fucking hungover tomorrow, anybody who fucks with My belt sander is going to get a taste of My belt. And it won’t taste good. At all.”
Finally they heaved him onto his bed and tried to make him drink water and pulled up the covers over his chest. It could have been the sheer domesticity of it—it was as if Eliot were their beloved son, whom they were lovingly tucking in for the night—or maybe it was just boredom, that powerful aphrodisiac, which had never been entirely out of sight even during the party’s best moments, but if he was honest with himself Quentin had known for at least twenty minutes, even as they were wrestling Eliot down the hall, that he was going to take Janet’s dress off as soon as he had half a chance.
Quentin woke up slowly the next morning. So slowly, over such a long time, that he was never really sure he’d been asleep at all. The bed felt unstable and disconcertingly floaty, and it was weird with two other naked people there. They kept bumping into each other and inadvertently touching and pulling away and then feeling self-conscious about having pulled away.
At first, in the first flush of it, he felt no regret about what happened. It was what you were supposed to do. He was living life to the fullest. Getting drunk and giving in to forbidden passions. That was the stuff of life. Wasn’t that the lesson of