Most of the kids were Quentin’s age and appeared to occupy his same general stratum of coolness or lack thereof. But not all. There were a few punks with mohawks or shaved heads, and there was a substantial goth contingent, and one of those super-Jews, a Hasid. A too-tall girl with too-big red-framed glasses beamed goofily at everybody. A few of the younger girls looked like they’d been crying. One kid had no shirt on and green and red tattoos all over his back. Jesus, Quentin thought, whose parents would let them do that? Another was in a motorized wheelchair. Another was missing his left arm. He wore a dark button-down shirt with one sleeve folded up and held closed with a silver clasp.
All the desks were identical, and on each one an ordinary blank blue test booklet was laid out with a very thin, very sharp No. 3 pencil next to it. It was the first thing Quentin had seen here that was familiar. There was one empty seat, toward the back of the room, and he sat down and scooched his chair forward with a deafening screech. He almost thought he saw Julia’s face in among the crowd, but she turned away almost immediately, and anyway there was no time. At the front of the room Dean Fogg cleared his throat primly.
“All right,” he said. “A few preliminaries. There will be silence during the Examination. You are free to look at other students’ papers, but you will find that they appear to you to be blank. Your pencils will not require additional sharpening. If you would like a glass of water, just hold up three fingers above your head, like this.” He demonstrated.
“Do not worry about feeling unprepared for the Examination. There is no way to study for it, though it would be equally true to say that you have been preparing for it your whole lives. There are only two possible grades, Pass and Fail. If you Pass, you will proceed to the second stage of the Examination. If you Fail, and most of you will, you will be returned to your homes with a plausible alibi and very little memory of this entire experience.
“The duration of the test is two and one half hours. Begin.”
The Dean turned to the blackboard and drew a clock face on it. Quentin looked down at the blank booklet on his desk. It was no longer blank. It was filling with questions; the letters literally swam into being on the paper as he watched.
The room filled with a collective rustling of paper, like a flock of birds taking off. Heads bowed in unison. Quentin recognized this motion. It was the motion of a bunch of high-powered type-A test killers getting down to their bloody work.
That was all right. He was one of them.
Quentin hadn’t planned on spending the rest of his afternoon—or morning, or whatever this was—taking a standardized test on an unknown subject, at an unknown educational institution, in some unknown alternate climatic zone where it was still summer. He was supposed to be in Brooklyn freezing his ass off and being interviewed by some random senior citizen, currently deceased. But the logic of his immediate circumstances was overwhelming his other concerns, however well founded they might be. He had never been one to argue with logic.
A lot of the test was calculus, pretty basic stuff for Quentin, who was so mysteriously good at math that his high school had been forced to outsource that part of his education to Brooklyn College. Nothing more hazardous than some fancy differential geometry and a few linear algebra proofs. But there were more exotic questions, too. Some of them seemed totally pointless. One every once in a while. bs go showed him the back of a playing card—not an actual card but a drawing of the back of a playing card, mind you, featuring your standard twin angels riding bicycles—and asked him to guess what card it was. How did that make sense?
Or later on the test gave him a passage from The Tempest then asked him to make up a fake language, and then translate the Shakespeare into the made-up language. He was then asked questions about the grammar and orthography of his made-up language, and then—honestly, what was the point?—questions about the made-up geography and culture and society of the made-up country where his made-up language was so fluently spoken. Then he had to translate the original passage from the fake language back into English, paying particular attention to any resulting distortions in grammar, word choice, and meaning. Seriously. He always gave everything he had on tests, but in this case he wasn’t totally sure what he was supposed to give.
The test also changed as he took it. The reading-comprehension section showed him a paragraph that vanished as he read it, then quizzed him on its contents. Some new kind of computerized paper—hadn’t he read somewhere that somebody was working on that? Digital ink? Amazing resolution, though. He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn’t keep still as he drew it—as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.
Soon he forgot about everything else except putting a satisfactory chunk of his neat handwriting next to one question after another, appeasing whatever perverse demands the test made on him. It was an hour before he even looked up from his desk. His ass hurt. He shifted in his chair. The patches of sunlight from the windows had moved.
Something else had changed, too. When he’d started every single desk had been filled, but now there was a sprinkling of empty ones. He hadn’t noticed anybody leaving. A cold crystal seed of doubt formed in Quentin’s stomach. Jesus, they must have finished already. He wasn’t used to being outclassed in the classroom. The palms of his hands prickled with sweat, and he smeared them along his thighs. Who were these people?
When Quentin flipped to the next page of the test booklet it was blank except for a single word in the center of the page: FIN, in swirly italic type, like at the end of an old movie.
He sat back in the chair and pressed the heels of his aching hands against his aching eyes. Well, that was two hours of his life he’d never get back. Quentin still hadn’t noticed anybody getting up and walking out, but the room was getting seriously depopulated. There were maybe fifty kids left, and more empty desks than full ones. It was like they were softly and silently slipping out of the room every time he turned his head. The punk with the tattoos and no shirt was still there. He must have finished, or given up, because he was dicking around by ordering more and more glasses of water. His desktop was crowded with glasses. Quentin spent the last twenty minutes staring out of the window and practicing a spinning trick with his pencil.
The Dean came in again and addressed the room.
“I’m delighted to inform you all that you will be moving on to the next stage of testing,” he said. “This stage will be conducted on an individual basis by members that at first Quentin didnan always go of the Brakebills faculty. In the meantime, you may enjoy some refreshment and converse among yourselves.”
Quentin counted only twenty-two desks still occupied, maybe a tenth of the original group. Bizarrely, a silent, comically correct butler in white gloves entered and began circulating through the room. He gave each of them a wooden tray with a sandwich—roasted red peppers and very fresh mozzarella on sourdough bread—a lumpy pear, and a thick square of dark, bitter chocolate. He poured each student a glass of something cloudy and fizzy from an individual bottle without a label. It turned out to be grapefruit soda.
Quentin took his lunch and drifted up to the front row, where most of the rest of the test takers were gathering. He felt pathetically relieved to have gotten this far, even though he had no idea why he’d passed and the others had failed, or what he’d get for passing. The butler was patiently loading the clinking, sloshing collection of water glasses from the punk’s desk onto a tray. Quentin looked for Julia, but either she hadn’t made the cut or she’d never been there in the first place.
“They should have capped it,” explained the punk, who said his name was Penny. He had a gentle moony face that was at odds with his otherwise terrifying appearance. “How much water you can ask for. Like maybe five glasses at most. I love finding shit like that, where the system screws itself with its own rules.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I was bored. The test told me I was done after twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?” Quentin was torn between admiration and envy. “Jesus Christ, it took me two hours.”
The punk shrugged again and made a face: What the hell do you want me to say?
Among the test takers, camaraderie warred with mistrust. Some of the kids exchanged names and home towns and cautious observations about the test, though the more they compared notes, the more they realized that none of them had taken the same one. They were from all over the country, except for two who turned out to be from the same Inuit reservation in Saskatchewan. They went around the room telling stories about how they’d gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or followed an inexplicable extra cable in the high-school computer room that led to a server closet that had never been there before. And then green grass and summer heat and somebody to take them up to the exam room.
As soon as lunch was over teachers began poking their heads in and calling out the names of candidates. They went alphabetically, so it was only a couple of minutes before a stern woman in her forties with dark shoulder-length hair summoned Quentin Coldwater. He followed her into a narrow wood-paneled room with tall windows that looked out from a surprisingly great height onto the lawn he’d crossed earlier. Chatter from the adjacent exam room cut off abruptly when the door closed. Two chairs faced each other across a worn, hugely thick wooden table.
Quentin felt giddy, like he was watching the whole thing on TV. It was ridiculous. But he forced himself to pay attention. This was a competition, and he dominated competitions. That was what he did, and he sensed that the stakes of this one were rising. The table was bare except for a deck of cards and a stack of about a dozen coins.
“I understand you like magic tricks, Quentin,” the woman said. She had a very slight accent, European but otherwise unplaceable. Icel wraith, a wisp of warm flesh and thenov oandic? “Why don’t you show me some?”
As a matter of fact, Quentin did like magic tricks. His interest in magic had started three years ago, partly inspired by his reading habits but mostly as a way of fattening up his extracurriculars with an activity that wouldn’t force him to actually interact with other people. Quentin had spent hundreds of emotionally arid hours with his iPod on palming coins and shuffling cards and producing fake flowers from skinny plastic canes in a trance of boredom. He watched and rewatched grainy, porn-like instructional video-tapes in which middle-aged men demonstrated close-up magic passes in front of backdrops made of bedsheets. Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.
There was a store near Quentin’s house that sold magic supplies, along with junk electronics, dusty board games, pet rocks, and fake vomit. Ricky, the man behind the counter, who had a beard and sideburns but no mustache, like an Amish farmer, grudgingly agreed to give Quentin some tips. It wasn’t long before the student surpassed the master. At seventeen Quentin knew the Scotch and Soda and the tricky one-handed Charlier Cut, and he could juggle the elusive Mill’s Mess pattern with three balls and sometimes, for short ecstatic flights, with four. He earned a small dividend of popularity at school every time he demonstrated his ability to throw, with a fierce, robotic accuracy, an ordinary playing card sidearm so that from a distance of ten feet it stuck edge-on in one of the flavorless Styrofoamy apples they served in the cafeteria.
Quentin reached for the cards first. He was vain about his shuffling, so he broke out a faro shuffle rather than the standard riffle just in case—fat chance—the woman sitting across from him knew the difference, and how ridiculously hard it was to do a good faro.