by Lev Grossman
The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn’t like inconsistencies, and she didn’t let go until they were resolved, ever. When she was five she’d wanted to know why Goofy could talk and Pluto couldn’t. How could one dog have another dog for a pet, and one be sentient and the other not? Likewise she wanted to know who the lazy fucker was who wrote her paper on intentional communities for her and used Wikipedia as a source. Granted that the answer, “the nefarious agents of a secret school for wizards in upstate New York,” was not a league-leadingly plausible answer to her question. But it was the answer that fit her memories, and those memories were getting sharper all the time.
And as they got sharper the second Julia grew stronger and stronger, and every bit of strength she gained she took away from the first Julia, who got weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner, to the point where she was practically transparent, and the parasite behind the mask of her face became almost visible.
The funny thing, or rather one of the many funny things in this haha-hilarious story, was that nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that she had less and less to say to James, or that with three weeks to go before the holiday concert she lost first chair in the oboe section of the wolfishly competitive Manhattan Conservatory Extension School Youth Orchestra, thereby forfeiting the juicy solo in Peter and the Wolf (the duck’s theme) to the demonstrably inferior Evelyn Oh, whose rendition of it did, appropriately enough, sound like a quacking fucking duck, as did everything that came out of Evelyn Oh’s quacking fucking Oh-boe.
The second Julia just wasn’t that interested in James, or in playing the oboe, or in school. So uninterested in school was she that she did something really stupid, which was to pretend she’d applied to college when really she hadn’t. She blew off every single one of her applications. Nobody noticed that either. But they’d notice in April, when brilliant overachieving Julia got into zero colleges. Second Julia had planted a ticking time bomb that was going to blow up first Julia’s life.
That was December. By March she and James were hanging by a thread. She’d dyed her hair black and painted her nails black, in order to more accurately resemble the second Julia. James initially found this sexy and goth, and he stepped up his efforts in the sex department, which wasn’t exactly a welcome side effect, but it made a break from talking to him, which was getting harder and harder. They’d never been as good a couple as they looked—he wasn’t a real bona fide nerd, just nerd-friendly, nerd-compatible, and you could only explain your Gödel, Escher, Bach references so many times before it starts to be a problem. Pretty soon he was going to figure out that she wasn’t role-playing a sexy depressed goth chick, she had actually become a sexy depressed goth chick.
And she was enjoying it. She was dipping a toe in the pool of bad behavior and finding the temperature was just right. It was fun being a problem. Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You’re not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls. In her quiet way Second Julia was causing a bit of a fuss, for once in her life, and it felt good.
Then Quentin came to visit. The question of where Quentin had gone to after first semester was one she had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing her mind on, but the mist surrounding it was a familiar mist. She’d seen it before: it was the same mist that surrounded her lost afternoon. His cover story, that he’d left high school early to matriculate at some super-exclusive experimental college, smelled like First Julia stuff to her. Made-up stuff.
She’d always liked Quentin, basically. He was sarcastic and spookily smart and, on some level, basically a kind person who just needed a ton of therapy and maybe some mood-altering drugs. Something to selectively inhibit the voracious reuptake of serotonin that was obviously going on inside his skull 24-7. She felt bad about the fact that he was in love with her and that she found him deeply unsexy, but not that bad. Honestly, he was decent-looking, better-looking than he thought he was, but that moody boy-man Fillory shit cut like zero ice with her, and she was smart enough to know whose problem that was, and it wasn’t hers.
But when he came back in March there was something different about him, something otherworldly and glittery-eyed. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He’d seen things. There was a smell coming off his fingers, the smell you got after they ran the really big Van de Graaff generator at the science museum. This was a man who had handled lightning.
They all went down to the boat launch on the Gowanus Canal, and she smoked cigarette after cigarette and just looked at him. And she knew: He’d gone through to the other side, and she’d been left behind.
She thought she’d seen him there, at the exam at Brakebills, in the hall with the chalk clock, with the glasses of water and the disappearing kids. Now she knew she was right. But it had been very different for him, she realized. When he walked into that room he’d buckled right down and killed that exam, because magic school? That was just the kind of thing he’d been waiting to happen to him his whole life. He practically expected that shit. He’d been wondering when it was going to show up, and when it did he was good and ready for it.
Whereas Julia had been blindsided. She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view, given how unlikely it was that anything as exciting as Brakebills would ever just fall into your lap. So when she got there she had had the presence of mind to step back and make a full appraisal of exactly how weird it all was. She could have handled the math, God knew. She’d been in math classes with Quentin since they were ten years old, and anything he could do she could do just as well, backward and in high heels if necessary.
But she spent too much time looking around, trying to work it through, the implications of it. She didn’t take it at face value the way Quentin did. The uppermost thought in her mind was, why are you all sitting here doing differential geometry and generally jumping through hoops when fundamental laws of thermodynamics and Newtonian physics are being broken left and right all around you? This shit was major. The test was the last of her priorities. It was the least interesting thing in the room. Which she still stood by as the reasonable, intelligent person’s reaction to the situation.
But now Quentin was on the inside, and she was out here chainsmoking on the Gowanus boat dock with her half-orc boyfriend. Quentin had passed the test, and she’d failed. It seemed that reason and intelligence weren’t getting it done anymore. They were cutting, like, zero ice.
It was when Quentin left that day that Julia really fell off a cliff.
* * *
It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.
The shrink they sent her to diagnosed her more specifically with dysthymia, which he defined as an inability to enjoy things that she should be enjoying. Which she recognized the justice of, since she enjoyed nothing, though there was a world of space inside that “should” that a dysthymic semiotician could have argued with, if she had had the energy. Because there was something she did enjoy, or would enjoy, whether or not she should. She just had no access to it. That thing was magic.
The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you’d fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.
She printed out the first verse of a Donne poem and stuck it on her d
oor:
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
Apparently semicolons were the hot new thing in the seventeenth century.
But otherwise it was a pretty good summary of her state of mind. Hydroptic: it meant thirsty. The thirsty earth. The sap had sunk out of the thirsty world, leaving behind a dried husk that weighed nothing, a dead thing that crumbled if you touched it.
Once a week her mother asked her if she’d been raped. Maybe it would have been simpler if she said yes. Her family had never really understood her. They’d always lived in fear of her rapacious intellect. Her sister, a timorous, defiantly unmathematical brunette four years younger, tiptoed around her as if she were a wild animal who would snap rabidly if provoked. No sudden movements. Keep your fingers outside the cage.
As a matter of fact she did consider insanity as a possible diagnosis. She had to. What sane person (ha!) wouldn’t? She definitely looked crazier than she used to. She’d picked up some bad habits, like picking at her cuticles, and not showering, and for that matter not eating or leaving her room for days at a time. Clearly—Doctor Julia explained to herself—she was suffering from some kind of Harry Potter–induced hallucination, with paranoid overtones, most likely schizophrenic in origin.
Except the thing was, doctor, it was all much too orderly. It didn’t have the quality of a hallucination, it was too dry and firm to the touch. For one thing it was her only hallucination. It didn’t spill over into other things. Its borders were stable. And for another thing it wasn’t a hallucination. It fucking happened.
If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.
Julia broke up with James. Or maybe she just stopped answering his calls and greeting him when they passed each other in the hall. One or the other, she forgot which. She did some careful calculations with her GPA, which until that point had been highly robust, and figured she could go to school two days out of five, eke out straight D’s, and still graduate. It was just a matter of careful brinksmanship, and the brink was where Julia lived now.
Meanwhile she continued to see the shrink regularly. He was a perfectly decent sort, nothing if not well-meaning, with a funny stubbly face and reasonable expectations of what he could hope to achieve in life. She didn’t tell him about the secret school for magic that she hadn’t gotten into, though. Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d seen Terminator 2. She wasn’t going out like Sarah Connor.
Every once in a while Julia did feel her conviction slackening. She knew what she knew, but there just wasn’t a lot to go on, day to day, to keep her belief in what happened strong. The best she could hope for was that every couple of weeks Google might pop up a hit on Brakebills, maybe two, but a few minutes later it would be gone again. As if by magic! Apparently she wasn’t the only person out there who had a Google alert on it, and that person was clever enough to scrub the Google cache when the alert went off. But it gave Julia something to chew on.
Then, in April, they made their first wrong move. They really blew it. Blew it wide open. Because seven envelopes arrived in her mailbox: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech. Congratulations, we are pleased to accept you as a member of the class of ha ha ha ha you must be fucking kidding me! She laughed her fucking head off when she saw them. Her parents laughed too. They were laughing with relief. Julia was laughing because it was so goddamned funny. She kept on laughing as she ripped the letters in half, one after the other, and fed them to the recycling bin.
You goddamned idiots, she thought. Too clever for your own good. No wonder you let Quentin in, you’re just like him: you can’t stop outsmarting yourselves. You think you can buy off my life with this? With a bunch of fat envelopes? You are perhaps under the impression that I will accept these in lieu of the magic kingdom that is my rightful inheritance?
Oh my no. Not on your life, mister. This is a standoff, a waiting game, and I’ve got all day. You’re looking for a quick fix to the Julia problem, but no such fix exists. You’d best settle in, my friend, because Julia is playing the long game.
CHAPTER 7
On the way home, Quentin made it his royal business to orbit the Muntjac and check in on everybody once or twice a day. The morning after they left the Outer Island, Quentin’s first stop was Benedict. The ship was racing along under the tropical sun, its every line and sail twangingly taut and perfect, and Quentin was feeling a little silly that he’d had the Muntjac so thoroughly fitted out for what had amounted to a trip around the block. He found Benedict sitting on a stool in his cabin, hunched over his tiny fold-down writing desk. Spread out on it was a hand-drawn naval chart showing a few jagged little islands and peppered with tiny numbers that might have denoted the depths of the ocean. Somebody had gone over the shallow water with a pale blue wash to make it look more watery.
Benedict hadn’t warmed to Quentin any since they’d left the mainland, but Quentin found himself liking him anyway. There was something bracing about the sheer consistency of his contempt for Quentin, who was, after all, Benedict’s king. It took some backbone to stick to that position. And if nothing else Benedict was about the nerdiest person he’d met in Fillory, of a type that didn’t really exist in the real world: he was a map nerd.
“So what have you been up to?” he said.
Benedict shrugged.
“Seasick mostly.”
He hadn’t seen much of Benedict, though he’d tried a couple of times to tutor him on his math. Benedict was conspicuously skillful at doing arithmetic in his head, but Fillorian mathematics weren’t particularly advanced. It was amazing how far he’d gotten on his own.
“What are you working on?”
“Old map,” Benedict said, without looking up. “Like really old. Like two hundred years ago.”
Quentin peered over his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back.
“Is that from the embassy?”
“Like I would do that. It was on the wall. In a frame.”
“It’s just that it has the Outer Island Embassy seal on it.”
“I copied it.”
“You copied the seal too?”
“I copied the map. The seal was on the map.”
It was a gorgeous map. If he was telling the truth, Benedict had genuine talent. It was detailed, precise, without any hesitations or erasures.
“That’s amazing. You have a real gift.”
Benedict flushed at this and worked even more industriously. He found Quentin’s approval and his disapproval equally unbearable.
“How’ve you found the fieldwork? Must be different from what you’re used to.”
“I hate it,” Benedict said. “It’s a fucking mess. Nothing looks like it’s supposed to. There’s no math for it.” His frustration brought him out of his shell a little. “Nothing’s ever correct, ever. There’s no straight lines! I always got that maps are approximations, I just never understood how much they leave out. It’s chaos. I’m never doing this again.”
“That’s it? You’re giving up?”
“Why shouldn’t I? Look at that—” Benedict waved at the wall, in the general direction of the heaving sea. “And now look at this.” He pointed to the map. “This you can make perfect. That—” He shuddered. “It’s just a mess.”
“But the map isn’t real. So sure, maybe it’s perfect, but what’s the point?”
“Maps don’t make you seasick.”
The irony wasn’t lost on Quentin. He’s the one who’d turned the ship around, back toward Whitespire. He looked at the map Benedict was working on. Sur
e enough, one of the little islands toward the edge of the page, almost falling into the margin, had the word After written next to it in tiny calligraphic script.
“After Island.” There it was, right there. Quentin touched it lightly with his finger. He half-expected to get a shock. “Is that on our way?”
“It’s east of here. It’s the complete opposite of on our way.”
“How far?”
“Two days, three days. Like I said, the map is really old. And these are outlying islands.”
Benedict explained, rolling his eyes practically up into his head at Quentin’s ignorance, that the islands farther out in the Eastern Ocean didn’t stay still once they caught on that they’d been mapped. They didn’t like it, and through some kind of tectonic magic they wandered around to make sure the maps didn’t stay too accurate. More chaos.
Benedict whispered some calculations to himself, speed and time, then nimbly, precisely—you wouldn’t think it was possible with those black bangs hanging over his eyes—he drew a perfect freehand circle around After Island in light pencil.
“It has to be somewhere inside this circle.”
Quentin gazed at the little island-dot, lost in the web of curving lines of meridians and parallels. A net that wouldn’t catch him if he fell. It wasn’t Fillory out there. But somewhere in that abyss shone a key, a magic key. He could come back with that in his hand.
An image swam into his mind, an album cover from the 1970s, a painting of an old-fashioned sailing ship on the very edge of a cataract over which the green sea was roaring and pouring. The ship was just beginning to tilt, and the current was strong, but still: a bold tack in a strong wind might just save it. A sharp, barked order from the captain and it would slew around and beat back up against the current to safety.
But then where would the ship go? Back home? Not yet.
“Mind if I borrow this?” he said. “I want to show it to the captain.”