The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(12)

At night they ordered take-out and played Scrabble and watched movies on the couch, drinking the melony Sonoma Chardonnay that she ordered by the case. At the back of his mind Quentin kept cuing up and replaying scenes from his childhood. His father teaching him to sail on a sandy-bottomed, brown-water lake in New Hampshire. His father picking him up from school after he got sick in gym class. When he was twelve they’d had a full-scale blowout shouting match when his father refused to sign the permission slip for Quentin to go to a chess tournament; it was the first time he’d qualified in the under-fifteens, and he was desperate to make the trip to Tarrytown. It was strange: his father had never seemed comfortable with Quentin’s efforts to stand out academically. You’d think he would’ve been proud.

That first night, after his mom went to bed, Quentin went and sat in his father’s study. It was a boxy, white-walled room that still smelled like new construction. The parquet looked brand new except for the matte circle where the wheels of his father’s desk chair had worn away the finish. He was half drunk on Chardonnay.

He knew what he was looking for: he was looking for a way to stop feeling angry. He was still carrying the anger around and he wanted somewhere he could safely put it down. He sat in his father’s chair and rotated slowly in place, like a lighthouse. He looked at the books, the files, the window, the dead computer screen. Books, files, window, screen. Particles of faint sodium-orange light from the streetlights outside lay on everything like dust.

That was when it occurred to Quentin for the first time that maybe his father hadn’t been his real father. Maybe he wasn’t who he appeared to be. Maybe Quentin’s father had been a magician.

—

The next morning, after his mother left to do a big shop at Whole Foods, Quentin went back to his father’s study. He resumed his post in his father’s chair.

Quentin knew he was a little old to be wrestling with questions like this—probably he should have had them wrapped up by around puberty—but he’d always paid more attention to magical problems than to the personal kind. Maybe that had been a mistake. Your father was supposed to love you, to pass on his power to you, to show you what it was to be a man, and his father hadn’t. He’d been a good person, or good enough, but mostly what he’d showed Quentin was how to move through the universe while disturbing it as little as possible, and how to compile and maintain the world’s most complete collection of Jeff Goldblum movies on Blu-ray, apart, presumably, from Jeff Goldblum’s.

Quentin hadn’t had much luck with father figures. Not Dean Fogg, not Mayakovsky, not Ember the ram god. They hadn’t dispensed a whole lot of paternal wisdom to him over the years. Whatever power and wisdom they had, they hadn’t been eager to share it with him. Maybe they didn’t want to be his father figures. Maybe he hadn’t made an especially appealing son figure.

Quentin tried to imagine what his father should have been like, the father he wished his father had been. Brilliant. Funny. Intense. A bit of a rogue—at times even eccentric—but steady in a crisis. A man of grit and energy, a man who faced the world around him and brought it to heel on his own terms. A magician’s father. A father who would have seen what Quentin had made of himself and been proud.

But Quentin’s father seemed not to have had any power at all, let alone any to share. Quentin’s actual father had had one wife, one son, no hobbies, and probably a case of mild clinical depression which he self-medicated with work. Not everybody led a double life, but Quentin’s father had barely led a single one. How could somebody who seemed so determined to be powerless have a magician for a son?

Unless he hadn’t been powerless, Quentin thought. Unless that wasn’t the whole story. It was starting to sound like a cover story—exactly the kind of cover story a magician would use.

Methodically Quentin examined the study for evidence that his father wasn’t what he seemed to be—that he’d left some legacy for his son that for whatever reason he couldn’t share with him while he was alive. He went through his father’s filing cabinets—there were charms for searching paper documents for keywords, the same way computers searched digital files. He checked for codes or hidden scripts. He got back no results of any significance.

He hadn’t expected any. That was merely due diligence. Now the hunt could begin in earnest.

He examined the light fixtures. He squeezed the couch cushions and pulled up the rugs. He used a spell to peer into the walls and under the floorboards. He looked behind the pictures. He scoured the room to the studs for any trace of hidden magic, but all he found was an old library book with a weak anti-theft charm put on it by somebody else, which in any case didn’t appear to have worked. At least the missing keys turned up in the couch.

He checked the furniture for hollow legs. He riffled through every book on the shelves in case one was underlined or hollowed out. Once in a while he thought he was picking up on something, a secret pattern or a code, but every time he did it dissolved again like fairy gold, back into random noise. What dark magicks could his father have been trafficking in, that he would have kept them this well hidden? That he would have leaned on his son, tried to stop him from drawing attention to himself? What sinister fate had Quentin avoided in Tarrytown? What did it mean that his father kept an old unstrung banjo in one corner? What was with his weird obsession with Jeff Goldblum?

The longer he worked with no result, the more clearly he felt the ghostly presence of his father, his real father, his true father, as if he were in the room with him even now. Quentin booted up the computer and after a half hour of sweaty-palmed cryptomancy and educated guesswork he cracked the password (thelostworld—starring Jeff Goldblum!) and began casing file directories, one after the other.