The Magicians - Lev Grossman [142]
“Q! Q! Q! Q!”
When he was almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped. Quentin would have known it anywhere, the sound that Alice made when she was having sex. Now here was a conundrum for his drunken mind to reflect on: she was making it now, but it wasn’t Quentin who was making her make it. He stared down at the burnt-orange natural-weave fibers of the runner that ran down the middle of the stairs. He could not be hearing that sound. It came in through his ears and made spots appear in his vision. His blood fizzed like a science experiment and turned to acid. The acid propagated through his body and made his arms and legs and brain burn. Then it made its way to his heart, like a deadly blood clot that had broken loose and was drifting free, bringing death with it. When it reached his heart, his heart turned white hot.
She was with Penny or Richard, obviously. He had just left Josh and Eliot, and they would never do that to him anyway. He walked stiff-legged back down the stairs and down the hall to Richard’s room and kicked open the door and slapped the light on. Richard was there in bed, alone. He sat bolt upright, blinking in an asinine Victorian nightshirt. Quentin turned off the light and slammed the door shut again.
Janet came out into the hall in pajamas, frowning.
“What’s going on?”
He shouldered roughly past her.
“Hey!” she yelled after him. “That hurt!”
Hurt? What did she know about hurt? He snapped on the lamp in Penny’s room. Penny’s bed was empty. He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he could not do. Or almost. He tried to rip down Penny’s curtains, but they wouldn’t come, even when he hung on them with all his weight. Instead he opened the window and ripped the clothes off the bed and stuffed them out through it. Not bad, but not enough. He spiked the alarm clock, then started pulling books off the shelves.
Penny had a lot of books. It was going to take a while to get them all off the shelves. But that was okay, he had all night, and he had all the energy in the world. Wasn’t even sleepy. It was like he was on speed. Except that after a while it got harder to pull the books off the shelves because Josh and Richard were holding his arms. Quentin thrashed insanely, like a toddler having a tantrum. They dragged him out into the hall.
It was so stupid, really. So obvious. Certainly you couldn’t call it clever. He fucked Janet; she fucks Penny. They should be even now. But he’d been drunk! How did that make them even? He barely knew what he was doing! How did that make them even? And Penny—Jesus. He wished it had been Josh.
They confined him to the den, gave him the bottle of grappa and a stack of DVDs and figured he’d knock himself out. Josh stayed there to make sure Quentin didn’t try any magic, as worked up as he was, but he nodded off right away, his round cheek on the hard arm of the couch, like a sleepy apostle.
As for Quentin, sleep didn’t interest him right now. The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building. Pow, he hits an awning, but he punches straight through it. Pow, he hits another one. And another one. Surely one of them will catch him and sproing him back up, or just fold up and embrace him like a canvas cradle, but it doesn’t, it’s just one flimsy busted awning after another. Down and down and down. After a while he longs to stop, even if it means hitting the sidewalk, but he doesn’t, he just keeps falling, down through awning after awning, deeper and deeper into the pain. Turtles