Quentin and Alice lay on their backs on a wide, candy-striped daybed by the window, limply holding hands, looking and feeling like they’d just washed ashore on a raft that had been gently, limply deposited by the surf on the beach of a silent deserted island. The lights were off, but milky-white afternoon sunlight filtered into the room through half-closed blinds. The remains of a game of chess, a sloppy, murderous draw, lay on a nearby coffee table.

The apartment was undecorated and barely furnished except for an eclectic collection they’d trucked in as the need arose. They were squatting: a tiresomely complex magical arrangement had allowed them to secure this particular scrap of underutilized Lower East Side real estate while its rightful owners were otherwise occupied.

A deep, thick silence hung in the still air, like stiff white sheets on a clothesline. Nobody spoke, and nobody had spoken for about an hour, and nobody felt the need to speak. They were in lotus-land.

“What time is it?” Alice said finally.

“Two. Past two.” Quentin turned his head to look at the clock. “Two.”

The buzzer rang. Neither of them moved.

“It’s probably Eliot,” Quentin said.

“Are you going over early?”

“Yes. Probably.”

“You didn’t tell me you were going early.”

Quentin sat up slowly, using just his stomach muscles, at the same time extracting his arm from beneath Alice’s head.

“I’m probably going early.”

He buzzed Eliot in. They were going to a party.

It was only two months since graduation, but already Brakebills seemed like a lifetime ago—yet another lifetime, Quentin thought, reflecting world-wearily that at the age of twenty-one he was already on his third or fourth lifetime.

When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words—concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations—but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician’s eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert.

Though like a desert, it did have some stunted, twisted traces of life, if you dug for them. There was a magical culture in New York outside the handful of Brakebills-educated elite who resided there, but it existed on the city’s immigrant margins. The older Physical Kids—a name they had left behind at Brakebills and would never use again—gave Quentin and Alice the outer-borough subway tour. In a windowless second-story café on Queens Boulevard, they watched Kazakhs and Hasidim construe number theory. They ate dumplings with Korean mystics in Flushing and watched modern-day Isis worshippers rehearse Egyptian street hexes in the back of a bodega on Atlantic Avenue. Once they took the ferry across to Staten Island, where they stood around a dazzlingly blue swimming pool sipping gin and tonics at a conclave of Filipino shamans.

But after a few weeks the energy for those educational field trips had all but evaporated. There was just too much to distract them, and nothing particularly urgent to be distracted from. Magic would always be there, and it was hard work, and he’d been doing it for a long time. What Quentin needed to catch up on was life. New York’s magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here—actual drugs! They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city.

Alice didn’t find all this quite as exciting as Quentin did. She had put off the kind of civil service appointment or research apprenticeship that usually ensnared serious-minded Brakebills students so she could stay in New York with Quentin and the others, but inspite of that she showed signs of actual unfeigned academic curiosity, which caused her to spend a good part of every day studying magic instead of, for example, recovering from having gone out the night before. Quentin felt mildly ashamed for not following her example, enough that he even made noises about relaunching his failed lunar expedition, but not so much that he actually did anything about it. (Alice cycled through a sequence of space travel- related nicknames for him—Scotty, Major Tom, Laika—until his lack of progress began to make them more humiliating than funny.) He felt entitled to blow off steam and shake off the Brakebills pixie dust and generally “live.” And Eliot felt that way, too (“Ain’t that why we got livers?” he said in his exaggerated Oregoner accent). It wasn’t a problem. He and Alice were just different people. Isn’t that what made it interesting?

At any rate Quentin felt interesting. He felt fascinating. For the first year after graduation his financial needs were taken care of by an immense secret slush fund, amassed covertly over the centuries through magically augmented investing, that yielded a regular allowance for all newly minted magicians who needed it. After four cloistered years at Brakebills, cash was like a magic all its own: a way of turning one thing into another thing, producing something out of nothing, and he worked that magic all over town. Money people thought he was artsy, artsy people thought he was money, and everybody thought he was clever and good-looking, and he got invited everywhere: charity social events, underground poker clubs, dive bars, rooftop parties, mobile all-night in-limo narcotics binges. He and Eliot passed themselves off as brothers, and their double act was the hit of the season. It was the revenge of the nerds.

Night after night Quentin would return home toward dawn, alone, deposited in front of his building by a solemn solitary cab like a hearse painted yellow, the street awash with blue light—the delicate ultrasound radiance of the embryonic day. Coming down off coke or ecstasy, his body felt strange and heavy, like a golem fashioned from some ultra-dense star-metal that had fallen from the sky and cooled and congealed into human form. He felt so heavy that he could break through the brittle pavement any second, and plunge down into the sewers, unless he placed his feet gently and precisely in the center of each sidewalk square in turn.

Standing alone amid the still, stately mess of their apartment, his heart would brim over with regret. He felt like his life had gone terribly wrong. He shouldn’t have gone out. He should have stayed home with Alice. But he would have been so bored if he’d stayed home! And she would have been bored if she’d come out! What were they going to do? They couldn’t go on like this. He felt so grateful to her for not having seen the excesses he had so eagerly indulged in, the drugs he had ingested, the manic flirting and pawing in which he had engaged.

Then he would take off his clothes, which reeked of cigarette smoke, like a toad shedding its skin, and Alice would stir sleepily in the sheets and sit up, the white sheet slipping down off her heavy breasts. She would lean against him, their backs against the cool white wooden curl of their sleigh bed, not speaking, and they would watch as the dawn came up and a garbage truck moved haltingly down the block, its pneumatic biceps gleaming as it greedily consumed whatever its overalled attendants flung into it, ingesting what the city had expectorated. And Quentin would feel a lofty pity for the garbagemen, and for all the straights and civilians. He wondered what they could possibly have in their uncharmed lives that made them think they were worth living.

She retreated to the bedroom to get dressed. She was still in her nightgown.

“Morning,” Eliot said, although it wasn’t. He loitered just inside the rolling metal freight door, wearing a long overcoat and a sweater that had been expensive before moths got to it.

“Hey,” Quentin said. “Just let me grab my coat.”

“It’s freezing out there. Is Alice coming?”

“I didn’t get that impression. Alice?” He raised his voice. “Alice?”

There was no answer. Eliot had already faded back out into the hall. He didn’t seem to have much patience for Alice lately, as somebody who didn’t share his rigorous dedication to pleasure-seeking. Quentin supposed her unfussy diligence reminded him unpleasantly of the future he was ignoring. Quentin knew it had that effect on him.

He hesitated on the threshold, torn between conflicting loyalties. She would probably be grateful for some quiet time to study.

“I think she’s coming later,” Quentin said. He called in the direction of the bedroom: “Okay! Bye! I’ll see you there!”

There was no answer.

“Bye Mom!” Eliot yelled.

The door closed.

At Brakebills Eliot had started drinking at dinnertime, earlier on weekends, which was fine, because all the upperclassmen drank at dinner, though not all of them bartered their desserts for extra glasses of wine the way Eliot did. In Manhattan, with no professors watching over them, and no classes to be sober for, Eliot was rarely without a glass of something in his hand from one in the afternoon on. Usually it was something relatively innocuous, white wine or Campari or a big dilute tumbler of bourbon and soda clunking with ice. But still. Once when Eliot was nursing a stubborn cold, Quentin remarked lightly that maybe he should consider something more wholesome than a vodka tonic with which to chase his plastic jigger of DayQuil.

“I’m sick, I’m not dead,” Eliot snapped. And that was that.

At least one of Eliot’s talents had survived graduation: he was still a tireless seeker-out of obscure and wonderful bottles of wine. He was not yet such a lush that he’d abandoned his snobbishness. He went to tastings and chatted up importers and wine-store owners with a zeal that he mustered for nothing else. Once every few weeks, when he had accumulated a dozen or so bottles of which he was especially proud, Eliot would announce that they were having a dinner party. It was one such dinner party that he and Quentin were preparing for today.

They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. The venue was always Eliot and Janet’s Soho apartment, a vast prewar warren with an implausible profusion of bedrooms, a set ripe for a French farce. Josh was head chef, with Quentin assisting as apprentice chef and kitchen runner. Eliot acted as sommelier, of course. Alice’s contribution was to stop reading long enough to eat.

Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night’s dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. She also confabulated various surreal and sometimes controversial cen terpieces. The theme of tonight’s party was Miscegenation, and Janet had promised—over objections aesthetic, moral, and ornithological—to deliver Leda and the Swan staged as a pair of magically animated ice sculptures. They would copulate until they melted.

As with all such evenings, the cleverness of the conceit became annoying somewhere around the middle of the afternoon before the party actually started. Quentin had found a grass skirt at an antique store, which he planned to pair with a tuxedo shirt and jacket, but the skirt was so scratchy that he gave up on it. He couldn’t think of another idea, so he spent the rest of the afternoon brooding and dodging Josh, who had spent the past week researching recipes that included violently disparate ingredients wedded together—sweet and savory, black and white, frozen and molten, Eastern and Western—and was now frantically slamming oven and cabinet doors and making him taste things and sniping at him over the pastry island. Alice arrived at five thirty, and Quentin and Josh both dodged her as well. By the time the party started everybody was drunk and starving and irritable.

But then, as sometimes happens with dinner parties, everything became mysteriously, spontaneously perfect again. The fabric knitted itself back together. The day before, Josh, who by this time had shaved off his beard (“It’s like taking care of a damn pet”), announced that he was bringing a date, which put added pressure on everybody to get their shit together. As the sun set over the Hudson, and sunbeams tinted a delicate rose by their passage through the atmosphere over New Jersey lanced through the apartment’s huge common room, and Eliot handed around Lillet cocktails (Lillet and champagne layered over a velvet hammer of vodka) in chilled martini glasses, and Quentin served miniature sweet-and-sour lobster rolls, everybody suddenly seemed—or maybe they actually were?—wise and funny and good-looking..

Josh had refused to reveal the identity of his date in advance, so when the elevator doors opened—they had the entire floor—Quentin had no idea that he would recognize her: it was the girl from Luxembourg, the curly-haired captain of the European team that had administered the deathblow to his welters career. It turned out (they told the story collaboratively, a set piece they’d evidently been working on) that Josh had bumped into her in a subway station where she was trying to bewitch a vending machine into adding money to her Metrocard. Her name was Anaïs, and she wore a pair of snakeskin pants so ravishing that nobody asked her what if anything they had to do with the theme. She had blond ringlets and a tiny pointy nose, and Josh was obviously besotted with her. So was Quentin. He felt a wild pang of jealousy.

He barely talked to Alice all night anyway, what with ducking in and out of the kitchen warming and plating and serving things. By the time he emerged with the entrées—pork chops dusted with bitter chocolate—it was dark, and Richard was making a speech about magical theory. The wine and the food and the music and the candles were almost enough to make what he was saying seem interesting.

Richard, of course, was the mysterious stranger who turned up with the other former Physical Kids on graduation day. He was a one-time Physical Kid, too, of the generation that preceded Eliot and Josh and Janet, and of them all he was the only one who had actually entered the world of respectable professional wizardry. Richard was tall, with a big head, dark hair, square shoulders, and a big square chin, and he was handsome in a Frankensteinian way. He was friendly enough to Quentin—firm handshake, lots of eye contact with his big, dark eyes. In conversation he liked to address Quentin directly as “Quentin” a lot, which made him feel kind of like they were having a job interview. Richard was employed by the trust that managed the collective financial assets of the magical community, which were vast. He was, in a quiet way, an observant Christian. They were rare among magicians.

Quentin tried to like Richard, since everybody else did, and it would just be simpler. But he was so damn earnest. He wasn’t stupid, but he completely lacked any sense of humor—jokes derailed him, so that the whole conversation had to stop while somebody, usually Janet, explained what everybody else was laughing at, and Richard knitted his thick Vulcan eyebrows in consternation at his companions’ merely human foibles. And Janet, who could usually be counted on to ruthlessly flense anybody who made the mistake of taking anything seriously, Janet waited on Richard hand and foot! It annoyed Quentin to think that she might look up to Richard the same way he had once looked up to the older Physical Kids. He had the definite sense that Janet must have slept with Richard once or twice back at Brakebills. It was entirely possible that they slept together once in a while now.

“Magic,” Richard announced slowly, flushed, “is the tools. Of the Maker.” He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass. “There’s no other way of looking at it. We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house, and then He left.” He rapped the table with one hand to celebrate this triumph of reason. “And when He left, He left His tools lying around in the garage. Then we found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. Now we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic.”

“There are so many things wrong with that I don’t even know where to start,” Quentin distinctly heard himself say.

“So? Start.”

Quentin put down the food he was carrying. He had no idea what he was about to say, but he was happy to be publicly contradicting Richard.

“Okay, well, first of all, there’s a huge scale problem. Nobody’s building universes here. We’re not even building galaxies or solar systems or planets. You need cranes and bulldozers to build a house. If there is a ‘Maker,’ which I frankly don’t see much evidence for, that’s what He had. What we’ve got are hand tools. Black and Decker. I don’t see how you get from there to what you’re talking about.”

“If it’s a question of scale,” Richard said, “I don’t see that as insurmountable. Maybe we’re just not”—he searched in his wine glass for the right metaphor—“we’re not plugging our tools into the right socket. Maybe there’s a much bigger socket—”

“I think if you’re talking about electricity,” Alice put in, “you have to talk about where energy comes from.”

That’s what I should have said, Quentin thought. Alice relished theoretical arguments as much as Richard, and she was much better at them.

“Any heating spell, you’re demonstrably drawing energy from one place and putting it in another. If somebody created the universe, they actually created energy from somewhere. They didn’t just push it around.”

“Fine, but if—”

“Plus, magic just doesn’t feel like a tool,” Alice went on. “Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it’s not. It’s irregular and beautiful. It’s not an artifact, it’s something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.”

She looked radiant in a silky black sheath that she knew he liked. Where had she been all night? He seemed to keep forgetting what a treasure she was.

“I bet it’s alien tech,” Josh said. “Or fourth-dimensional, like, weather or something. From a direction we can’t even see. Or we’re in some kind of really high-tech multiplayer video game.” He snapped his fingers. “So that’s why Eliot’s always humping my corpse.”

“Not necessarily,” Richard finally broke in. He was still processing Alice’s argument. “It’s not necessarily irregular. Or I would argue that it partakes of a higher regularity, a higher order, that we haven’t been allowed to see.”

“Yeah, that’s the answer.” Eliot was visibly drunk. “That’s the answer to everything. God save us from Christian magicians. You sound just like my parents. That is just exactly what my ignorant Christian parents would say. Just, if it doesn’t fit with your theory, well, that’s just because, oh, it actually does, but God is mysterious, so we can’t see it. Because we’re so sinful. That’s so fucking easy.”

He fished around in the remnants of Janet’s centerpiece with a long serving fork. Leda and the Swan were indistinguishable from each other now, two rounded Brancusi forms still gamely humping away as a tide of slush rose up to drown them.

“Well, heck, we oughta call ourselves the Meta-Physical Kids,” Josh said.

“And who the fuck is this ‘Maker’ you’re talking about?” Eliot snarled. He was getting vehement and not listening. “Are you talking about God? Because if you’re talking about God, just say God.”

“All right,” Richard said placidly. “Let’s say God.”

“Is this a moral God? Is He going to punish us for using His holy magic? For being bad little magicians? Is He [“She!” Janet shouted] going to come back and give us a good spanking because we got into the garage and played with Daddy’s power tools?

“Because that is just stupid. It’s just stupid, and it’s ignorant. No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that’s all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares.”

“If He left us His tools, He left them for a reason,” Richard said.

“And I suppose you know what that is.”

“What’s the next wine, Eliot?” Janet asked brightly. She always kept a cool head in difficult moments, maybe because she tended to be so out of control so much of the rest of the time. She looked unusually ravishing tonight, too, in a slinky red tunic that made it to her midthigh, barely, before it gave out. The kind of thing Alice would never wear. Couldn’t, not with her figure.

Both Richard and Eliot seemed to want to extend the fight by another round, but Eliot, with an effort of will, allowed himself to be diverted.

“An excellent question.” Eliot pressed his hands to his temples. “I am receiving a divine vision from the Almighty Maker of . . . an exquisitely expensive small-batch bourbon . . . which God—or I’m sorry, the Makeress—has commanded me to render unto you forthwith.”

He stood up unsteadily and lurched in the direction of the kitchen.

Quentin found him sitting red-faced and sweating on a stool by an open window. Icy air was pouring in, but Eliot didn’t seem to notice. He stared out unblinking at the city, which receded in perspectival lines of lights fanning out into the blackness. He said nothing. He didn’t move as Quentin helped Richard manage the individual baked Alaskas—the trick, Richard explained, in his well-practiced explaining tone, was to make sure the meringue, an excellent heat insulator, formed a complete seal over the ice-cream core—and Quentin wondered if they’d lost Eliot for the evening. It wouldn’t be the first time he drank himself out of contention. But a few minutes later he rallied and trailed them back into the dining room with a slender, oddly shaped bottle sloshing with amber-colored whiskey.

Things were winding down. Everyone was treading carefully so as not to trigger another outburst from Eliot or another sermon from Richard. Not long afterward Josh left to take Anaïs home, and Richard retired of his own accord, leaving Quentin, Janet, and Eliot to preside woozily over the empty bottles and crumpled napkins. One of the candles had charred a hole in the tablecloth. Where was Alice? Had she gone home? Or crashed in one of the spare rooms? He tried her cell. No answer.

Eliot had dragged a pair of ottomans over to the table. He reclined on them Roman-style, though they were too low, so he had to reach up to get his drink, and all Quentin could see of him was his groping hand. Janet lay down, too, spooned up contentedly behind him.

“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.

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 the foxes? If Alice had any blood in her veins she would have joined them! But no. She had to go to bed early. She was just like Richard. Well, welcome to life in the grown-up magical world, Alice. Magic wasn’t going to solve everything. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see that they were all dying, that everything was futile, that the only thing to do was to live and drink and fuck whatever and whomever while you still could? She herself had warned him of that, right there in her parents’ house in Illinois. And she’d been right!

And then after a while it seemed like a debatable thing—you could really make the case both ways, it was a coin-flip. And then it was an unfortunate lapse, an indiscretion, still within the bounds of the forgivable, but definitely a low point. Not a personal best. And then it was a major indiscretion, a bad mistake, and then, in the last act of the strip tease, it revealed itself to be what it truly was: a terrible, really awful, hurtful betrayal. At some point during this slow, incremental fall from grace Quentin became aware of Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, just her back, facing away from where he and Janet and Eliot lay, resting her chin in her hands. Periodically he imagined that it was just a dream, that she hadn’t been there at all. But to be honest he was pretty sure she had. She hadn’t looked like a figment. She’d been fully dressed. She must have been up for a while.

Around nine o’clock the room was full of morning light and Quen tin couldn’t pretend to be asleep anymore. He sat up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he couldn’t remember where his shirt was. He wasn’t wearing anything else either. He would have given anything right then just to have a shirt and some underwear.

With his bare feet on the hardwood floor he felt strangely insubstantial. He couldn’t understand, couldn’t quite believe what he’d done. It just didn’t seem like him. Maybe Fogg was right, maybe magic had inhibited his moral development. Something must have. Maybe that was why he was such a shit. But there had to be a way he could make Alice understand how sorry he was. He dragged a blanket off Eliot’s bed—Janet stirred and complained sleepily, then went back to her dreamless, guiltless sleep—and wrapped it around himself and padded out into the silent apartment. The dinner table was like a shipwreck. The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand. Quentin thought about Professor Mayakovsky, how he’d reversed time, fixed the glass globe, brought the spider back to life. That would be a pretty nice thing to be able to do right about now.

When the elevator doors pinged open, Quentin thought it must be Josh coming back from a successful night with Anaïs. Instead it was Penny, pale and breathing hard from running and so excited he could barely contain himself.